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Field Notes: My Piece of Kafka

By Peter Meyer 09/02/2010 0 Comments

I was sorry not to make Education Next’s top 40 education books of the decade. (The polls are still open; vote for three.) That could be because I haven’t written it yet! Details, details.

If I were to write an education book, it would be called, Don’t Know Whether to Laugh or Cry: Life on the School Board.* Of all the emotions accompanying these events — and school board meetings are more full of emotion than anything else – the feeling of not knowing whether to laugh or cry is one of the more common and consistent ones – for me. I can’t speak for my colleagues. (In fact, I think it is illegal for a member of the board to speak for his or her colleagues. See School Law below.)

We had our Special Meeting this week, ostensibly to decide how to spend $584,579, our tiny district’s piece of the EduJobs pie. This was a big deal here: ten jobs, five percent of the teaching corps. (During our budget debate the previous spring, my suggestion that we could save ten jobs if staff took a salary freeze was soundly defeated. I love the joyful collaboration moments that teacher unions foster.)

There were nearly 40 people in the audience, a few of them laid-off teachers come to see if they would be among the call-backs. The board was given a sheet of paper that listed the ten positions the Superintendent wanted to restore, with salary and benefits. Note: No names (take that! Los Angeles Times.) It ranged from a high school Social Studies Teacher for $47,158 to Psychologist for $65,000. (Note: This is not DC or NYC or LA: median household income around here is $31k. Teachers are among the highest paid people in the county!)

One of the minor dramas here was that the social studies teacher slated to get his job back – this was one of those little secrets board members get to keep, a job perk that is not often talked about — was sitting next to me. Angered over losing that job in May, because of budget cuts (and loving colleagues who wouldn’t freeze their salaries), he had run for school board. He finished, like New Jersey, just out of the money. But wait, it so happened that a sitting board member – not the two who had just won seats, although one of those was an incumbent who lost her seat but won a different one – announced she was quitting. Actually, she had announced that before the election, effective after the election. Are we following this? (Remember my book, Don’t Know Whether to Laugh or Cry, coming out, I hope, in time for Ed Next’s 20^th Anniversary.) So, as I was saying, we, the board, had to appoint a replacement (well, we didn’t have to, but we decided we would) and the only person to apply for the opening was – you guessed it – the angry, laid-off social studies teacher. He was sworn in about a month ago. And this, the EduJobs meeting, was only his second appearance at the table — and he had to recuse himself from voting because he was, thanks to union seniority rules, the person who would be filling the social studies position. And then – I’ll give away the ending – after he was reinstated, he had to resign. I’m not sure if there is Guinness Book entry for shortest term on a school board, but this would probably be on a top-ten list.)

Where was I?

Oh yes, School Law. Section 2:75. “Do board members have a right to inspect personnel records?” School Law, of course, prepared by the state’s School Board Association, is supposed to the Board’s Bible (at 838 pages of small print, it probably is shorter than the Bible, but considering that it is only a summary of school laws…..) (It is rarely consulted, but I made it a minor cause célèbre when… to be continued.)

I then proceeded to read from Section 2:75 (the answer, not surprisingly, was “Yes, but….”) and from my request to see the records of the folks we would be re-hiring, emailed to the Superintendent the previous Friday…

I quit. I mean, I’ll stop now. I invite readers to finish this story — if you’ve been able to follow it — and guess the final vote on the EduJobs resolution. (Hint: there are total of 7 board members, one of whom was absent that night.)

——-

*Alternative title: Shorten Your Life: Join a School Board.

Legal Beat: Should Courts Be Weighing In On the Math Wars?

By Education Next 09/02/2010 0 Comments

“In February 2010, for the first time, a state judge overturned a school district’s choice of a high-school math curriculum,” Josh Dunn writes in a new “legal beat” article posted on the Ed Next website. (The article, “2+2=Litigation,” will appear in the Fall 2010 issue of Ed Next.)

As Josh explains in the article, the court considered allegations that the “Discovering” math curriculum, which was adopted by the Seattle school board in May 2009, was unsound and would widen achievement gaps. Judge Julie Spector surprised all sides in the dispute by ruling that the school district behaved capriciously in approving the curriculum.

Josh concludes that while here might be good reasons to reject the curriculum, “such pedagogical disputes are beyond the courts’ proper constitutional role and institutional capacity.”

The article, “2+2=Litigation: New front opens in the math wars,” is available online.

Ed Next editor Marty West interviews Josh Dunn about the article in this week’s podcast, “Math Wars Have Their Day in Court.”

How Middle Schools Hurt Student Achievement

By Martin West 09/01/2010 0 Comments

Today’s Wall Street Journal reports on a new Education Next study showing that, at least in New York City, attending a standalone middle school rather than a K-8 school has a big negative impact on student achievement and attendance rates. Recently I had the chance to interview the study’s lead author, Columbia Business School professor Jonah Rockoff. Here are a few things I took away from our conversation:

1. Can we believe the results? It’s a fair question, as there is no lack of lousy research on middle schools. As it turns out, though, New York is an ideal laboratory in which to study this question – and Rockoff and co-author Benjamin Lockwood know how to take full advantage. First, the grade configurations of the city’s public schools vary widely: some students move to middle schools in grade 6, some do so in grade 7, while still others attend the same school from kindergarten through grade 8. Second, the district’s vaunted data system makes it possible to track the achievement of individual students over time as they move from one type of school to the next (or remain in a K-8 school). Doing so reveals that students experience a drop in achievement (relative to other students remaining in K-8 schools) in the very same year they move into a middle school: in the 6^th grade for students making the K-5 to 6-8 transition, and in the 7^th grade for students moving from K-6 to 7-8 schools.

And Rockoff and Lockwood go one step further: rather than look at the schools students actually attended in the middle school years, the authors assign students to the type of school they would have been expected to attend based on the grades served by the elementary school they attended in grade 3. In order to explain away their findings, one would therefore have to argue that parents who chose elementary schools with different structures differed in some way that caused their child’s achievement to drop in the exact year that they moved to a middle school (not before or after). As the authors put it, “While we cannot definitively rule out the existence of such factors, we do not know of any plausible alternatives that would explain our findings.”

2. Why are NYC middle schools less successful? Here’s where the study’s evidence is less definitive. Standalone middle schools in New York look pretty similar to K-8 schools in terms of spending, class sizes, and academic offerings. The one difference that does seem relevant is the number of students at each grade level. Because most NYC schools are roughly the same size, middle schools have many more students in each grade cohort than K-8 schools. And this difference does appear to account for about 25 percent of the negative effect of attending a middle school. But clearly that leaves a lot of room for other explanations.

3. Would we get the same results elsewhere? Again, it is difficult to say. But there’s no obvious reason why NYC would be unique. At a minimum, it seems safe to conclude that the same patterns would hold in other large urban districts.

As I read the study, I was reminded of the 2009 EdNext-PEPG Survey, which asked Americans to identify and assign grades to their local elementary and middle school. We found that Americans rated their middle school far lower than their elementary school, even taking into account the fact that student proficiency rates tend to be lower in middle school. In fact, the grades parents assigned middle schools were about 40 percent of a letter grade lower than elementary schools with similar student bodies and similar levels of student achievement. Rockoff and Lockwood’s research suggests that parents are onto something – and that the emerging trend toward shuttering middle schools and replacing them with K-8s is an encouraging development.

What do Americans think of the Nation’s Schools? How Widespread is the Support for Charter Schools?

By Paul E. Peterson 08/31/2010 0 Comments

Education Next (Ednext) and Phi Delta Kappan (PDK) both released their annual polls last week. (Disclaimer: I am among those responsible for the Ednext poll). Many of the questions asked are very different in the two polls, so direct comparisons of their findings are limited to only a couple of questions. But when it comes to evaluations of the nation’s schools and assessments of charter schools, they report results that are strikingly similar–despite that Ednext is an online poll (executed by Knowledge Networks), while PDK is a telephone poll (conducted by Gallup).

When rating the nation’s schools, only 18 percent of those surveyed in both polls gave the nation’s schools either an “A” or a “B” and, more than a quarter gave the schools a rating of a “D” or an “F.” In both polls, grades are roughly the same as those reported by Ednext and PDK in 2009. Never before have school ratings fallen to such low levels since the question was first asked back in 1981. One can only wonder whether Americans are losing confidence in the nation’s schools.

To those interested in polling methodology, it is noteworthy that the two polls got the same result when they asked the same question. Many pollsters are debating whether an online poll (used by Ednext) has now become superior to a telephone poll (used by PDK) on the grounds that people don’t answer their phone anymore. My own view is that pollsters have refined their techniques to the point that either approach is pretty good, if the firm does its work carefully (as both Gallup and Knowledge Networks do).

Yet at first glance it appears that PDK finds much more support for charter schools than the Ednext poll does. According to PDK, 68 percent of the public “favor” charter schools, while only 28 percent oppose them, with just 4 percent having no opinion. That is a major increase in support for charter schools since 2005, when, according to PDK, only 49 percent favored charters, and 41 percent stood in opposition.

Ednext finds lower levels of support for charters. Ednext finds 44 percent supporting charters, while the opposition was 19 percent. The remaining portion– 36 percent—said they “neither supported nor opposed charter schools,” a little less than the 41 percent in 2008.

The difference between the results is more apparent than real, however. When posing the question, PDK gives the respondent only a choice of favoring or opposing charters, or saying they “don’t know,” while Ednext allows respondents to choose among five categories: strongly support, somewhat support, neither support nor oppose, somewhat oppose, strongly oppose. By allowing the person to choose “neither to support or oppose” charters, Ednext identifies those who are unsure of their opinion. By forcing respondents to choose between favor and oppose, PDK encourages those without strong convictions to choose one side or the other in order to avoid embarrassing themselves by admitting that they “don’t know.” Thus, Ednext found 36 percent of the respondents “neither supporting or opposing charter schools”, while PDK found only 4 percent saying they did not know.

But among all those having an opinion the two polls yield strikingly similar results: 69 percent of those with opinions in the Ednext poll supported charters, and 71 percent of those with opinions in the PDK poll indicated they favored them. So the two polls essentially agree after all.

But even though in essential agreement, the two polls complement each other. On the one side, Ednext shows that a large portion of the public has no strong opinions about charter schools.

Click to enlarge

But on the other side, the longer-running PDK poll identifies a 20 percentage point shift of opinion in a pro-charter direction over the past 5 years.

Marty West and I discuss the uptick in support for charter schools in 2010 Education Next-PEPG Survey in this video.

The HFT Is All About Professional Growth… Not

By Frederick Hess 08/31/2010 0 Comments

(This post also appears on Rick Hess Straight Up.)

I’m always surprised at how often teacher unions claiming to be agents of professionalism reflexively slash at measures (like responsibility for results and differentiated pay) that are part and parcel of most professions. Even so, it’s not every day that you see a union savaging an effort to promote professional growth as an anti-teacher conspiracy. Welcome to Houston Independent School District, where HISD superintendent Terry Grier is being mauled by the Houston Federation of Teachers… for proposing that principals work with all of their teachers to craft professional growth plans.

Yeah, I’m scratching my head too. What’s got the HFT really worked up is Grier’s proposal for “individual professional development plans.” Grier wrote to teachers last week:

“Last spring, we surveyed you to determine if you are getting the kind of support that you need to do your best work. We asked whether you receive accurate, useful feedback on your performance in the classroom, and whether your professional development is helping you meet the needs of your students. More than 6,000 of you responded, and the answer was a resounding ‘no.’

We heard you and we took action. This summer, we developed a process to ensure that you have regular conversations with your principal or appraiser about your professional goals…Your principal is now accountable for collaborating with you on your individual professional development plan (IPDP). This plan will clearly spell out your goals for the year and how your principal will help you meet them… I want to emphasize in no uncertain terms that the IPDP is not an appraisal document and it is not a “Teacher in Need of Assistance” Plan… All teachers will develop an IPDP in collaboration with their school leaders. The IPDP is designed to provide you with an opportunity to reflect on your professional goals, identify concrete steps you can take to achieve those goals, and ensure that your principal gives you the support you need to be an effective teacher.”

Did the HFT welcome the news that, in light of educator feedback, HISD principals will be working with teachers to support their professional growth? Not so much. Instead, it has blasted out under the headline “Urgent News….” a letter with the instructions, “PASS to all Campus Members or concerned Teachers.” The letter from HFT representative Kimbal Urrutia read:

“Don’t you just love this new bureaucratic speak, ‘conversations’? … I am getting many questions about ‘Conversations’ scheduled with appraisers on the IPDP. Here is my stock answer on why these are being called:

Because Dear One, it is a thinly disguised growth plan for every teacher in the district and they are supposed to be ‘collaborative.’ Put down what you want on it ahead of time, admitting to no weaknesses in your performance. DO NOT let TAKS or EVASS or VALUE ADDED appear in the “assess/impact” column. If they insists [sic] on putting things you do not agree with or direct you to sign that you agree to part of the evaluation being EVASS, TAKS, or Value Added, then sign the applicable line and give them a copy (Keep a copy and send one to us) of the form we sent out…

Many of you have wonderful principals. But they will be directed to attend ‘file reviews’ in the spring and bring all this, and the EVASS scores. They will be directed to recommend non-renewal of teachers based on EVASS (Value added), and then this little document will be added to the file as documentation to support termination. Do you want a document that they can point to and say, ‘See, the teacher even admitted they were weak in this area’[?]“

Hmmm…so much for professional growth. I can only imagine how the HFT would have responded if Grier had suggested, you know, an appraisal. And the AFT wonders why some of us are skeptical of its claims to be a champion of teacher “professionalism?”

Which Are the Top Books of the Decade? Vote Now!

By Education Next 08/30/2010 0 Comments

The first issue of Education Next was published in February 2001. In honor of our 10th anniversary, we are launching a poll to determine the best books of the past decade, as identified by our readers.

To vote, please go to our Ed Next poll page.

The New and Old of Digital Learning

By Mark Bauerlein 08/30/2010 0 Comments

Did you know that students today “learn in at least four ways that are very different than pre-digital era students”? Because of their facility with digital media and the Internet, young people have the capacity to think, inquire, explore, communicate, and participate in ways that make the Old Days—say, pre-1995—look downright backward.

That’s the contention of Connie Yowell, Director of Education Grantmaking at the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, in a piece at the Huffington Post last week.

Here are the four ways:

“1) They can pursue interest-driven learning at a tantalizing pace and to fascinating degrees;
2) They readily collaborate and learn from their peers, across geography and cultures;
3) They are participating and producing in learning, skill-building, and knowledge-sharing, as opposed to just being receptacles for information;
4) They can communicate directly with knowledge-giving institutions and individuals all over the world.”

Yowell gives examples. She notes that

“a student in the Gulf can produce a video or a blog on the environmental crisis there, and publish it to the Internet for the world to see. A classroom of students in Ohio studying apartheid can use Skype to have a video conversation with a classroom of students in South Africa. A youth in Iran can post a blog or use social networking to talk about the aftermath of the Iranian Revolution of 2009 and receive encouraging messages from students all over the world.”

Yowell offers these observations as patent facts. Her real contention is that schools have failed to keep up with the innovative learning strategies of digital natives. Our schools have “proven highly resistant to change, when it comes to technology and learning,” she claims. Among other things, they are still stuck on the idea of the teacher as “the anointed expert in the classroom.” Indeed, the whole system remains “rooted in late 19^th century ideals mostly driven by industrialization” which “treats children and students as a massive group.” The digital environment, on the other hand, “maximizes individual talents.”

Of course, one could charge Yowell with cherry-picking a few rare instances of young people using digital media for extraordinary intellectual purposes, or with idealizing social networks well beyond their reality. One could also ask why, with so much brilliance happening in digital spaces, we don’t seem to see any impact on test scores. One could also ask how, when asked to study mid-20^th-century anti-communism, digital tools improve upon a student at a desk poring page-by-page over Witness (Whittaker Chambers), issues of Partisan Review, and The Road to Serfdom (Hayek).

But what stands out in this rendition of recent digital breakthroughs in learning is that it relies on some of the most routine progressivist assumptions about learning. Here we have century-old child-centered premises at the root of the techno-pedagogy vision, premises that displace the authority of the teacher and individualize instruction. That’s what Yowell finds most distinctive about digital learning: its empowerment of the students, its conversion of them from ‘receptacles of information’ into ‘participants’ in and ’producers’ of the flow of knowledge. It’s a strange connection between 21^st-century technology and early-20^th-century education ideas. Perhaps Yowell does not realize that the 19^th-century model she disparages is only a couple decades older than the model she acclaims.

Even Its Fans Are Having Second Thoughts About Race to the Top

By Frederick Hess 08/30/2010 0 Comments

(This post also appears on The Enterprise Blog.)

Last Tuesday, Secretary of Education Arne Duncan announced round-two winners in the $4.35 billion Race to the Top (RTT) program. By Tuesday night, there was outrage that admired reform states such as Colorado and Louisiana had lost while head-scratchers such as Hawaii, Maryland, and Ohio won. By Thursday, there was grumbling that some judges had savaged Colorado for failing to attach a copy of Senate Bill 10-191, and that presentation skills had helped determine the results. By Friday, the big story was not the contest but New Jersey Governor Christie’s decision to fire his commissioner of education for misrepresenting what efforts had been made to inform the RTT reviewers about a paperwork error in the application. It all brings to mind something I noted last winter: that RTT was a good idea that could all-too-easily go south.

All of this has pushed even Andy Rotherham, my good friend and an influential Democratic education policy operative, to concede substantial problems with the once-heralded RTT program. Andy writes:

A general consensus has emerged that again there were problems with the scoring. Not the sensational political tampering claims that some people are trying to allege, there is no evidence of that, but rather problems with the process. Those problems are at once more mundane and a lot more far-reaching.

Andy, who is credited with authoring a Brookings white paper that helped inspire RTT, points out that “In the case of Race to the Top, while it wasn’t a disaster, there were enough problems that some people favorably inclined … are now asking if the federal government, with all the political and substantive constraints upon it, can really run a reliable high-stakes competition.” He notes that numerous conflicts of interest made necessary a “sub-optimal” pool of reviewers. He observes that panels which helped states prep for the contest frequently appeared more knowledgeable and incisive than the actual RTT reviewers and that they paid more attention to “the guts of the applications and the connective tissue that really makes plans like this rise or fall.” He continues, “Likewise, the actual reviewer comments and scoring variances … don’t always inspire confidence, to put it gently.”

He concludes that RTT was “constrained by a flawed process” and urges Duncan to convene some kind of commission to dig into the problems and challenges, including, “What are best practices for ensuring reliability among and between reviewers? … Is more training needed, and if so what kind? What else has to change if substantial amounts of federal aid are to be allocated this way?”

All of this is terrific and I’d regard it as gratifying if Andy and other Democratic reformers hadn’t pooh-poohed these same questions as a paranoid attack when I raised them last winter. At the time, I wrote:

RTT lacks even modest safeguards because the administration has moved forward with a lack of attention to several crucial elements. The degree to which political appointees were involved in hand-picking reviewers is not clear. Reviewers selected by Education Department officials have been ceaselessly bombarded through the media with clear signals as to which states those same officials think should win. And despite the fact that they are working with novel criteria that include many obvious tensions, it’s not clear how reviewers are supposed to translate thousands of pages of narrative and vague promises into the intricate point system Education Department established.

Back then, I offered a list of questions for Secretary Duncan to answer in order “to alleviate these concerns.” Those questions were roundly dismissed as irrelevant or persnickety by administration supporters. Some of those questions included:

•    What criteria were used to select reviewers?
•    What constituted a conflict of interest in selecting reviewers?
•    What kinds of instructions were given to reviewers?
•    How much weight are the reviewers supposed to accord to the boldness of promises the states make versus the credibility of those promises?
•    What will constitute states failing to deliver what they promised? What are the consequences?
•    What are the “finalists” expected to say during their dog-and-pony show visit that they haven’t already said in the tens of thousands of words in their applications?

Might’ve been nice if would-be reformers had sorted through these questions before we gave away $4 billion, rather than after.

Did the Education Next Reader Poll Predict the Race to the Top Winners?

By Paul E. Peterson 08/27/2010 0 Comments

We did a bit better than chance, it seems.

There were 19 finalists, 10 winners. So chances of any of the finalists winning were a bit better than a bet on a black square at the roulette wheel, as that bet has a tad bit less than 50-50 chance. In the RttT gamble, the odds for the finalists were a bit better than 50-50.

So if our poll picked did no better than picking winners by chance, the top eleven picks should have included only 6 of the 10 winners. As it turns out, we got 7 correct. In other words, if the odds-makers in Las Vegas were giving even money across the board, you could have won some G-notes had you used the Ednext poll to pick the winners.

Further, according to Education Next editor, Frederick Hess, two of the poll’s top 11, Colorado and Louisiana, “should” have won, which after all was the question folks were asked to answer.

Here are the results for the top eleven (share of votes won by a given state in parentheses):

Rhode Island (41.42)
Louisiana (5.72)
Kentucky (5.45)
District of Columbia (5.18)
Florida (5.18)
Massachusetts (4.9)
California (3.81)
New York (3.81)
Colorado (3.54)
North Carolina (3.00)
Georgia (2.72)

Nine out of Ten RttT Winners are Blue States

By Paul E. Peterson 08/26/2010 1 Comment

At the end of round one of the RttT contest, it appeared as if politics was irrelevant. The focus was on which states had a good reform strategy. Only two winners were identified. One Red State (Tennessee)–that had voted for John McCain– and one Blue State (Delaware)–that had voted for Barack Obama—shared the honors.

Round two tells a different story. Congratulations must be given to the state of Georgia, for it was the only Red State winner. The other 9 winners were all colored blue on election night back in November 2008.

In a brilliant—and soon-to-be published–article in the American Political Science Review, University of Chicago political scientists William Howell and Christopher Berry show conclusively that presidents hand out money to states loyal to their party more often than otherwise, all other things being equal. The study is based on presidents past, not on the current administration, but RttT suggests the Obama Administration is no different from its predecessors.

Of course, it will be explained that rules were followed, nonpartisan experts rated the submissions, and the White House exercised no control whatsoever over the outcome. But politics can affect the rules that are constructed and the experts that are chosen. When the numbers result in a Blue State: Red State ratio of 9:1, one suspects, with even more than 90 percent confidence, that RttT is as much or more a partisan boondoggle as an education reform strategy.

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About the Blog

The Ed Next blog aims to provide lively commentary on education news and research and to bring evidence to bear on current education policy debates.

Our bloggers include editors at Education Next magazine and others who have written for the magazine. Education Next is a quarterly journal of opinion and research about education policy published by the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, and additionally sponsored by the Program on Education Policy and Governance at Harvard University and the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation.

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