Is the Common Core Just a Distraction?
All of the intense pushing and shoving about the Common Core leaves one simple question: should we care?
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 8th 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
A States’ Rights Insurrection Led by…California?
Three cheers for California’s governor, state superintendent, and state board chair, for applying for a waiver from the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (aka No Child Left Behind) that doesn’t kowtow to Washington.
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.
Charter Benefits Are Proven by the Best Evidence
According to the Global Report Card, more than a third of the 30 school districts with the highest math achievement in the United States are actually charter schools. This is particularly impressive considering that charters constitute about 5% of all schools and about 3% of all public school students. And it is even more amazing considering that some of the highest performing charter schools, like Roxbury Prep in Boston or KIPP Infinity in New York City, serve very disadvantaged students.
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.
Dumbing Down the GPA: It’s the Unsophisticated Bright Kid who Suffers
Just as drones attack from the air, so the attacks on quality education come from above, not below. It is not the under-achieving students in urban centers who perpetuate the ongoing crisis in American education. They are simply doing their best to survive the challenges of family, neighborhood and circumstance. The threats come from the mindless educational potentates who have captured control of the best public schools in the country.
Massachusetts supposedly has the best public schools in the United States, and the best of the best are to be found in the affluent Boston suburbs—Belmont, Lexington and Wellesley, for example.
So when these top-flight schools decide that advanced honors courses in physics and chemistry are to be given the same weight in calculating a student’s official grade point average (GPA) as any other course, including cooking, check-book balancing, and make-up algebra, it becomes ever so clear—once again—that the country’s progressive educators have successfully pushed back the forces of school reform. And it remains no less apparent that these same progressives continue to bash both talent and hard work.
Belmont and Lexington, with Wellesley in hot pursuit, have said that the official GPA shall no longer be boosted if the grades are earned in honors-level courses. That antiquated practice of recognizing that some courses are more demanding than others creates social divides and denies students genuine course choice, it is thought.
Previously, students who wanted a top level GPA were forced to take the most challenging courses the school had to offer. Now a student with a perfect GPA can become valedictorian of the class simply by accumulating a set of A’s in any old class whatsoever.
As usual, it’s a student who tells the truth. “I feel that if you take the harder classes, that should be calculated in your GPA,” the vice president of the Wellesley student council told a Boston Globe reporter.
It is the Wellesley school board that prevaricates. A report from one of its committees told parents that “students who meet the expectation of a course should have a GPA that reflects the grade that they earned.” (As if earning an A in computer science is the same as one in cooking.) To those who ask questions, school officials say that colleges pay no attention to GPAs anyhow—they look at the actual courses taken. If it is not an honors course, the student is penalized by the college admissions office, so the change won’t really make any difference to student chances of getting into a good college. They will need to take the honors courses anyhow.
Left unsaid is the fact that students are being misled when told every course counts the same.
Of course those from sophisticated families will see through the prevarication the education progressives have concocted in the name of social equality. Those who suffer are only the bright kids from the less sophisticated families who foolishly believe what their school district tells them.
All this would be less painful to watch, were it not for the fact that what is happening in the best schools is inevitably going to shape what occurs elsewhere.
-Paul Peterson
Redesigning Schools for Financially Sustainable Excellence: Infographic!
Everybody loves a good infographic (even you wonky researchers – just wait ‘til nobody’s looking), and we hope this one will change how you view education reform efforts.
For word nerds, here’s a summary:
- Our nation is falling behind globally as other nations provide increasingly rigorous and widespread education to their people. No surprises there.
- It’s not hard to see why: In contrast to educationally high-performing nations, ours is not selective about who teaches our children. As a result, schools cannot provide the kind of autonomy that great teachers crave. They just can’t have confidence that most teaching professionals will self- lead the rigor-and-innovation infused school cultures great teachers want and students need.
- But excellent teachers literally make all the difference for kids who rely on school for learning opportunity. The top 20-25 percent produce about a half year more learning progress than solid teachers, on average. A child who starts one year behind can catch up in two years and then become an honors student two years later – if the child has excellent teachers four years running. A student who starts stuck in the middle can become an honors student, and then excel like top international peers, with the same run of excellent teachers. In contrast, students who have good, solid teachers every year, or the usual distribution, end up where they started compared to peers.
- Yet only 25% of classes are taught by excellent teachers, ones who achieve this level of student growth on average and who develop students’ higher-order thinking with similar skill. That means 75% of classrooms, and the students in them, are left out.
- What can be done? How about extending the reach of excellent teachers to more students, effectively putting them in charge of all U.S. classrooms and every student? But how?
Click to Enlarge
If you’ve been following our work on this, you know that we released 20+ school model summaries late last year. Last week, we released 10 detailed school models. These models use job redesign and technology to extend the reach of excellent teachers to more students, for more pay. Many let these same teachers help peers produce excellent results, create collaborative work teams and free teachers’ time for additional planning and professional development. And they’re all designed to work within current budgets – generating cost savings that can be used to pay excellent teachers more and meet other school needs.
In each of these models, teachers have career opportunities dependent upon their excellence, leadership, and student impact. Advancement allows more pay and greater reach. These school models are part of our effort – now with numerous partners – to create an “Opportunity Culture” for all U.S. teachers and students. And if you wonder what that really means, well now’s the time to open that infographic.
Of course, policy barrier are plentiful, as we wrote here. But many of the barriers to an Opportunity Culture are barriers of the mind and will.
We hope some practical tools will help willing leaders. We will be releasing more soon – career paths, job descriptions, evaluation tools, a short video to engage teachers in school redesign, and more. Learn more at our new website: OpportunityCulture.org.
-Emily Ayscue Hassel and Bryan Hassel
Behind the Headline: Education is the Key to a Healthy Economy
On Top of the News
Education is the Key to a Healthy Economy
Wall Street Journal | 5/1/12
Behind the Headline
Education and Economic Growth
Education Next | Spring 2008
“In addressing our current fiscal and economic woes, too often we neglect a key ingredient of our nation’s economic future—the human capital produced by our K-12 school system. An improved education system would lead to a dramatically different future for the U.S., because educational outcomes strongly affect economic growth and the distribution of income,” write George Schultz and Eric Hanushek in today’s Wall Street Journal. Eric Hanushek researched the impact of student achievement on economic growth in “Education and Economic Growth,” which appeared in the Spring 2008 issue of EdNext.
Have Increased Graduation Rates Artificially Depressed America’s 12th-Grade Performance?
One of the great mysteries of modern-day school reform is why we’re seeing such strong progress (in math at least, especially among our lowest-performing students) at the elementary and middle school levels, but not in high school.
Consider: Nine-year-olds at the 10th percentile posted 12 points of progress between 1990 and 2008 on the long-term National Assessment of Educational Progress—10 of those points between 1999 and 2004 alone. (That’s about a grade level’s worth of gains.) Thirteen-year-olds at the 10th percentile posted 7 points of progress from 1990 and 2008. But seventeen-year-olds at the 10th percentile only gained 3 points. (The story is much the same for the 25th percentile.) The story for reading is more sobering, with big gains at the nine-year-old level, a flattening out in middle school, and actually declines in high school.
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The question is how to interpret these trends. One hypothesis is about fade-out: The improvements at the elementary level are ephemeral, perhaps because the way math or reading is taught doesn’t set students up for future success. In reading, for example, it’s quite likely that a heavy focus on phonics is helping students to decode better—and post better scores as nine-year-olds—but isn’t giving them the vocabulary or content knowledge to keep making progress in middle school. Another hypothesis is that our high schools aren’t as strong as our elementary schools, perhaps because they haven’t been the focus of as much reform and attention.
Let me float a third theory: Could it be that increased graduation rates are driving down twelfth-grade performance? Recent studies have indicated that graduation rates are up significantly over the past decade; that means that we have twelfth-graders in school today who previously would have dropped out. And those students are likely to be very low-achieving. Could they be pulling down the mean? Just like we see with the SAT as more students—and more lower-income students—take the exam?
I’m not a statistician but it seems plausible to me. Number-crunchers out there: What say ye?
-Mike Petrilli
This blog entry originally appeared on the Fordham Institute’s Flypaper blog.
Behind the Headline: New TED-Ed Site Turns YouTube Videos into ‘Flipped’ Lessons
On Top of the News
New TED-Ed Site Turns YouTube Videos into ‘Flipped’ Lessons
Chronicle of Higher Education| 4/25/12
Behind the Headline
The Flipped Classroom
Education Next | Winter 2012
A new website unveiled by TED helps professors create “flipped classrooms” involving educational YouTube videos and interactive lessons. The website, which is both a portal for finding education videos and a tool for flipping them, is the second phase of an education effort called TED-Ed. In the Winter 2012 issue of EdNext, Bill Tucker discussed the merits of flipped instruction, which reorganizes teaching time so that students work through problems with material in class and view recorded lectures on the lesson material at home.
Implications for Policy Are Not So Clear
Commentary on “Great Teaching:Measuring its effects on students’ future earnings” By Raj Chetty, John N. Friedman and Jonah E. Rockoff
Raj Chetty, John Friedman, and Jonah Rockoff have carried out a remarkable study, but I suspect it will be misinterpreted.
The main contribution of their research is quantifying the importance of teaching. Specifically, the authors conclude that students taught by a more effective teacher will collectively earn hundreds of thousands of dollars more over their lifetimes, and that good teachers similarly influence college going and teenage pregnancy. Because each teacher influences thousands of students over a career, this suggests that one excellent teacher could generate enormous social and economic benefits.
I find these results plausible, though there are some real limitations. The researchers present convincing evidence that their estimates of teacher contributions to student achievement are valid and do not simply reflect differences in student background. But this type of “selection bias” could influence effects on earnings and other long-term outcomes. So, the most intriguing findings here are also still somewhat tenuous. Given the small size of the effects for each individual student, even a slight bit of selection bias could dramatically alter the estimated benefits of an individual teacher.
Perhaps the more important question is, what do the results mean for policy? Policymakers had already concluded that we need to do more to improve teaching. As a result, schools and districts around the country are now experimenting with a wide range of policies to improve teacher performance measures and use these to make high-stakes decisions such as dismissing low-performing teachers.
And here is the rub. The authors, recognizing the interest in dismissing low performers, conduct a simulation of such a policy and emphasize these results in their summary. But it would be a mistake to interpret even these careful simulation results as evidence about actual policies. The effects of actual policies never play out the way simulations suggest, because policies are rarely implemented as intended and the inevitable secondary effects are hard to predict.
There are substantial legal, political, and organizational problems associated with dismissing low performers. For example, in a simple system, many teachers would be fired unjustifiably as a result of imprecision in the performance measures—a lawsuit waiting to happen. High stakes associated with the tests will inevitably distort student scores and the assignment of students to teachers, worsening the measurement problem. A more elaborate evaluation system can address this measurement problem, but such systems are costly, and those costs are not considered here. Such an approach could also change the makeup of the profession, in both positive and negative ways.
There is good reason to think that dismissing more low-performing teachers would improve student outcomes, but the Chetty study is not designed to tell us much about that, or about any of the various policy alternatives. What it does provide is the best evidence yet that teachers matter a great deal and that we should continue looking hard for ways to improve teaching and learning in schools.
Douglas Harris is associate professor of educational policy studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Return to “Great Teaching” (Summer 2012)
Profound Implications for State Policy
Commentary on “Great Teaching:Measuring its effects on students’ future earnings” By Raj Chetty, John N. Friedman and Jonah E. Rockoff
Over the last decade, research in public education has led us to three conclusions about the teaching profession: teachers are the most important in-school factor in determining student achievement; there is wide variation in teacher effectiveness; and those differences really matter for kids.
These findings should have profound implications for policymakers and practitioners. Now that we have evidence attesting to the enormous contributions of the most effective educators, if we are truly serious about improving student learning and closing the achievement gap, we must think anew about teacher recruitment, placement, evaluation, professional development, retention, and separation.
Raj Chetty, John Friedman, and Jonah Rockoff have helped advance the conversation through their longitudinal study of 2.5 million students over a 20-year span. The correlation between teacher effectiveness (as demonstrated by value-added student growth measures) and student life outcomes (higher salaries, advanced degrees, neighborhoods of residence, and retirement savings) is staggering; it’s not an exaggeration to say that great teachers substantially improve students’ future quality of life and those students’ contributions to the common good. Conversely, traditional education output measures like student course completion, grades, and diplomas have a substantial degree of subjectivity across schools and districts and can potentially provide a misleading account of a student’s college and career readiness.
In New Jersey, we are assessing where our finite resources are best invested. The Chetty study contrasts the opportunity cost of providing retention incentives to effective teachers with that of investments to attract new teachers. Similar cost/benefit questions arise in relation to shaping teacher-placement strategies, developing career ladders, and providing meaningful professional development. To make informed decisions in these areas, we first need to be able to differentiate among our teachers and, ideally, identify strengths to build on and weaknesses to address. That’s why the foundation of our human-capital efforts is a new educator-evaluation framework that’s substantially based on student learning outcomes. If we are able to assess an educator’s effectiveness accurately, we can improve the array of policies and practices that influence our teachers and school leaders. The hallmark of these efforts in our state will not be based on separating ineffective teachers but rather on using evaluation results to target resources toward improving teaching practice.
New Jersey is still in the early innings of this work. Eleven districts, through a pilot initiative, have joined with the state to create the new teacher-evaluation system. This collaboration has helped jump-start this work across the state and shed light on the many significant challenges associated with overhauling the hoary systems in place, such as measuring student achievement in “untested” grades and subjects, ensuring inter-rater agreement and accuracy of teacher practice observations, and ending the long-standing culture of “The Widget Effect.”
The primary takeaway from this critically important research, as the study authors note, is that “finding policies to raise the quality of teaching… is likely to have substantial economic and social benefits in the long run.” We agree with this conclusion, and New Jersey, like other states, must develop such policies over time through a confluence of national and local research, lessons learned from our classrooms, and an unwavering resolve to provide our students with high-quality teachers.
Chris Cerf is acting commissioner of education for the State of New Jersey. Peter Shulman is chief talent officer for the New Jersey Department of Education.
Return to “Great Teaching” (Summer 2012)
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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.
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