Reviewed by A. Graham Down

I can’t think of enough nice things to say about this book.  It is well-written, entirely logical in its constructively skeptical approach, and captures more powerfully than any other book on education that I have read the unintended consequences of exaggerated expectations.

As David Labaree points out, traditionally, schools have been thought of as instruments of social policy, in spite of the tension between individual and collective advancement. This results, predictably enough, in the relative neglect of the academic aspects of schooling.

I am not surprised by the book’s quality; Labaree comes from a long line of distinguished policy analysts (to whom the book is dedicated) at Stanford.  In Chapter 1 he clearly outlines the architecture of the book, a structure he follows to the letter.

He begins by deftly summarizing the history of American education. He catalogues the successes that relate to its assimilative capacity, emphasizing the schools’ central role in shaping the civic complexion of American society through the adoption of the common school approach, while at the same time noting its limitations.  As Labaree puts it, “Educational consumers show a preference for a school system that provides an edge in the competition for jobs more than one which enriches academic achievement.”

The core of this book explains why the various tides of school reform have failed to make a serious dent in the system that had evolved by the late 1920’s.

In his survey, the author writes that the standards movement of the late 20^th century was the first conscious effort to improve the level of student achievement in the various academic subjects.  (Previous reforms had concentrated on issues of access, governance and accountability.)  Regrettably, Labaree chooses to overlook the best efforts of the Council for Basic Education to the contrary (one of my few quibbles – as a former Executive Director and President of the Council – with the author).

However, he does identify the four necessary pre-requisites to effective change – rhetorical agreement, structural considerations (14,000 school systems in a highly decentralized system), teaching practices in the self-contained classroom (3 million public school teachers in 95,000 schools), and, most important of all, student compliance.  In this context, one cannot help but be reminded of Clemenceau’s famous dictum that “..it is easier to move a graveyard than to change a school curriculum.”   Schools are simply relatively impervious to societal change, organized as they are locally and reflecting the values and aspirations of parents, who are typically more nostalgic than realistic in their vision of education.

Finally, David Labaree deliberately resists the temptation to provide a panacea or anything that even looks like a list of recommendations.  On the contrary, he engages in a set of cautionary suggestions.  Like me, he believes that education in its present form is not susceptible to lasting revolutionary change.  Rather, he is a realist who subscribes to the view that “less is more” when it comes to school reform.  Putting it another way, expectations and outcomes need to become both more realistic and attainable if they are to last.  This book should be required reading for both theorists and practitioners in this field.

-A. Graham Down

More book reviews by Graham Down can be found here.

Behind the Headline
All Together Now?
Education Next | Winter 2011

Tracking is out and differentiated instruction is in in school systems across the country. In the Washington Post, Michael Alison Chandler looks at what it means for teachers (preparing three different math lessons and five different reading lessons each day for a class of 19 students) and students in a school in Montgomery County, Md. In the Winter 2011 issue of Ed Next, Mike Petrilli took a close look at a school that has been praised for its success in differentiating instruction.

Today, a lot has changed. Back in 2005, Gates Foundation officials were, for the first time, seriously considering whether to play an active role in shaping public policy. Race to the Top, the Common Core, Democrats for Education Reform, and StudentsFirst were unimagined. No one would seriously suggest New Orleans, Washington, D.C., or Newark as hotbeds of school reform. Diane Ravitch was still a champion of school choice and accountability, and few had heard of Michelle Rhee, Deborah Gist, Jon Schnur, or Geoffrey Canada. No Child Left Behind was still novel and fairly popular, and not a single state was trying to build teacher evaluation around value-added systems.

Today, the world looks real different. These developments all (for better and worse) owe something to policy-oriented giving. “New sector” philanthropy has helped shift the school reform landscape. For a quick glimpse of what’s happened, just compare the biggest givers in 2010 and those a decade before.

According to the Foundation Center, the five biggest K-12 givers in 2010 were:

1. Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation — $209 million;
2. Walton Family Foundation — $110 million;
3. W.K. Kellogg Foundation — $58 million;
4. Michael and Susan Dell Foundation — $55 million; and
5. Silicon Valley Community Foundation — $35 million

Back in 2000, the Foundation Center reported that they were:

1. Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation–$276 million
2. The Annenberg Foundation–$88 million
3. Walton Family Foundation–$48 million
4. J.A. & Kathryn Albertson Foundation, Inc.–$32 million
5. The Ford Foundation–$25 million

While the Gates Foundation has remained the biggest player over the past decade, the Walton Foundation has substantially upped its investment. Meanwhile, once-influential entities like Annenberg and Ford have declined in import.

All this has profound implications for the way we view education philanthropy. As I write in PDK:

A decade ago, a big frustration for edu-philanthropists was the sense that they would invest in exciting programs or practices, but that these never seemed to deliver lasting improvement. A piloted reading or mentoring program would offer promising results, only to disappoint when scaled. Or a foundation would underwrite professional development or a new curriculum for several years, only to see it die on the vine when outside funding dried up. Or funders would help launch dynamic schools, only to see them fall apart when the charismatic founder left.
Where an earlier generation of donors had chalked up the challenges to problems of implementation or program design, the new philanthropists were much more receptive to the notion that the problem was the inhospitable cultures, systems, and policy environments in which those scale-ups were being attempted. New donors who had made their fortunes in the new economy frequently staffed their foundations with Teach For America alums, MBAs, or other nontraditional educators and focused on problems posed by system rigidity, leadership, and policy. The new givers gravitated towards a strategy that rested on three key insights, all sketched out in The Best of Intentions:

First, University of Arkansas professor Jay Greene’s seminal analysis pointed out that the amount of edu-philanthropy is so small that it’s ridiculous to think that investments in programs or practice will have a noticeable impact. Using various approaches, Greene calculated that all private giving combined amounts to perhaps 1% of total K-12 spending — or, maybe, one penny on the dollar. Consequently, he argued that philanthropy only mattered when it funded “high-leverage investments” (e.g. when it altered policies or practices governing the long-term use of the public funds that account for 99% of school spending).

Second, Don McAdams, founder of the Center for Reform of School Systems, argued that philanthropy typically entails limited dollars in the grand scheme of things, but has an outsized influence because this money is nimble and can be used to drive a state or a district’s reforms, where it’s hugely difficult to redeploy more than a sliver of public funds.

Third, a vital piece of leverage was producing research and supporting advocacy in a manner that would shape policy. Policy analyst Andy Rotherham argued that this kind of investment could be aptly captured by the old adage: “Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day, teach him to fish and you feed him for a lifetime.” Foundation-backed advocacy, research, and proof points that new rules were possible offered a way to alter public policies and priorities.

Back in 2005, I heartily endorsed the policy-centric approach that the contributors had encouraged. I continue to do so today. And I think the results speak to the potential impact of this tack. At the same time, I’ve long wrestled with the repercussions. I’ve worried about foundations being wedded to reformers who tell them what they want to hear, the perils of groupthink, and the disinclination of critics to challenge deep-pocketed funders. And I’ve worried how all of this gets even dicier when foundations are linking arms with the federal government.

I’ve no easy answers, other than the surety that these are questions we need to talk about and openly discuss more frequently, more productively, and with less hostility than has been the norm.

- Rick Hess

This blog entry originally appeared on Rick Hess Straight Up.

Uncle Sam is dreadful at micromanaging what actually happens in schools and classrooms. What he’s best at is setting agendas and driving priorities. Through a combination of jawboning, incentivizing, regulating, mandating, forbidding, spotlighting, and subsidizing, he can significantly influence the overall direction of the K-12 system and catalyze profound changes in it (though the system is so loosely coupled that these changes occur gradually and incompletely).

It’s just as well that such big directional shifts don’t happen very often, because the change, however gradual, can be wrenching. And it isn’t apt to happen much more often in the future, either, because the “federal government” is no single entity. It is, at minimum, three branches, two political parties, 535 members of Congress, innumerable judges, the White House, the Office of Management and Budget, and umpteen executive-branch agencies—a list that only starts with the U.S. Department of Education. Nearly all of these stars must come into rough alignment before anything important begins to change. And that only occurs once in a while, often under extraordinary political or historical circumstances, usually when the country faces a big challenge, crisis, or widespread injustice.

Let’s look at seven examples of federal “agenda setters” in K-12 education, one per decade.

1950s. One could legitimately cite Sputnik and the National Defense Education Act, but the decade’s real game-changer was the Supreme Court’s Brown v. Board of Education decision, striking down government-mandated racial segregation in Southern schools.

1960s. In the name of fostering opportunity, ending poverty, and giving needy kids a boost, President Lyndon B. Johnson launched the modern era of federal aid to K-12 education via the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, or ESEA, and the Economic Opportunity Act, which incorporated such high-profile programs as Head Start, the Job Corps, and the “domestic Peace Corps” known as VISTA.

1970s. Enacted in 1976, and signed (with some public misgivings) by President Gerald R. Ford, the Education for All Handicapped Children Act, now the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, righted another historic wrong by declaring that every youngster with disabilities is entitled to a “free, appropriate public education” in the “least restrictive environment.” Combined with the Rehabilitation Act of 1973, the law meant public schools now had an obligation to educate such children in ways that responded to their needs.

1980s. Though nominally just a commission report, A Nation at Risk (1983) told Americans that we faced a crisis of educational achievement and began to nudge the country through a 90-degree change of course from the “equity” agenda of the previous quarter-century to the “excellence” obsession of recent decades, complete with academic standards, tests, and results-based accountability systems.

1990 ushered in the first-ever state-by-state results on the National Assessment of Educational Progress as well as the first-ever reporting of NAEP results according to newly established performance benchmarks. This dual development opened a new era of awareness of academic achievement in the United States and made possible the first bona fide comparisons of state performance at a time when state-based reform was in the ascendancy and governors craved such comparisons. It also launched what amounted to the first real set of standards by which to determine just “how good is good enough” when it comes to student achievement in various subjects.

2001 brought passage of the No Child Left Behind Act, a momentous reauthorization of the ESEA, declaring not only that every single student should become “proficient” in math and reading, but also that every school in the land would have its performance reported, both school wide and for its student demographic subgroups, and that schools failing to make “adequate yearly progress” would face a cascade of sanctions and interventions. NCLB transformed the federal government from funder to would-be reformer of American public education. In the course of becoming a reformer, Uncle Sam also became a regulator as never before.

And the present decade opened with the Race to the Top, the brainchild of U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, based on the bold hypothesis that sizable grants of federal dollars, disbursed via a competitive process, can induce states to jump through reform policy hoops that they likely would not otherwise have attempted.

Add them up: America desegregated its schools, with respect both to race and handicap. It inaugurated big-time federal aid to K-12 education, initially in the name of equitable opportunity, now more targeted on academic achievement and gap-closing. It devised new ways of assessing, judging, and comparing achievement across the states—and prodded those states to make politically difficult changes to reform a system that wasn’t producing satisfactory results. And in the process, unsurprisingly, Washington evolved from funder and equalizer into enforcer and regulator.

None of this worked as well as ardent advocates had hoped. All brought unintended consequences, pushback, and sizable financial burdens. But American education is a very different enterprise—and for the most part a better enterprise—as a result of these game-changing initiatives from Washington.

What causes some federal initiatives to function, at least for a while, as positive game-changers, while so many others almost immediately become duds? I see four conditions:

First, there needs to be a sizable, pent-up problem in need of a large solution—a lot of accumulated pressure seeking a release valve. That’s a very different thing from a notional seems-like-a-good-idea or scratch-a-minor-itch add-on to a pre-existing portfolio of programs.

Second, the problem needs to be one that affects the whole country (for example, economic competitiveness, social justice, national security), even if the solution focuses mostly on a region (the segregated South) or significant constituency (kids with disabilities).

Third, the solution needs to be something that can be crafted by implements in the federal toolkit, which is basically limited to financial incentives, regulation of state and district practices, research and data, and litigation or the threat thereof. (And, of course, the bully pulpit itself.)

Fourth, and finally, enough political stars must align—and stay aligned long enough to make a difference.

Not all of them need to be aligned, however. (If they were, the problem would likely have been tackled already.) Congress was not about to outlaw racial segregation in 1954, for example, and plenty of prominent educators declared A Nation at Risk wrong in 1983. Lots of states dragged their heels big-time on No Child Left Behind, and any number of psychometricians denounced the NAEP achievement levels.

But there has to be enough oomph of one kind or another—moral, economic, political, judicial, even occasionally (in the case of school segregation) military—behind these kinds of changes for them to overcome resistance and gain real traction. And when that oomph diminishes—whether because of fresh election returns, limited attention span, newfound prosperity, exhaustion, backlash, or whatever—what remains may be a country with its education direction lastingly changed for the better. Or it may be the husk of yet another federal initiative that was promising at the start but grew stale, obsolete, or oppressive. Or both.

-Chester E. Finn, Jr.

This blog entry originally appeared as a commentary in Education Week and is adapted from an essay in the book Carrots, Sticks, and the Bully Pulpit (Harvard Education Press, 2011).

A reader-friendly version of the study, “Great Teaching: Measuring its effects on students’ future earnings,” by Friedman, Chetty and Rockoff, appears in the Summer 2012 edition of Education Next.

Because the study generated a great deal of attention, Education Next asked four experts to comment on the study’s implications for public policy. Here are their responses:

Low-Performing Teachers Have High Costs - By Eric A. Hanushek

Profound Implications for State Policy - By Chris Cerf and Peter Shulman

More Evidence Would Be Welcome - By Dale Ballou

Implications for Policy Are Not So Clear - By Douglas Harris

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.

In December, the organization of conservative state lawmakers adopted two Common Core resolutions in its education committee. One—the subject of the vote tomorrow at the board of directors level—calls on states to back out of the common standards initiative altogether. The second—which has already become ALEC policy—focuses instead on the federal role in the initiative, and tells Uncle Sam to back off.

Here’s the first resolution:

The State Board of Education may not adopt, and the State Department of Education may not implement, the Common Core State Standards developed by the Common Core State Standards Initiative. Any actions taken to adopt or implement the Common Core State Standards as of the effective date of this section are void ab initio. Neither this nor any other statewide education standards may be adopted or implemented without the approval of the Legislature.

And the second:

BE IT RESOLVED, that the {legislative body} vigorously opposes any effort by the federal government to deny the authority of any state to set its own education academic content standards or to attempt to overturn decisions made duly by a state regarding any education standards deemed by the constitutionally-designated authorities in that state to be in the best interest of that state’s children.

So which is the true “conservative” resolution? The one that tells states what to do and demands a one-size-fits-all approach (pulling out of the Common Core)? Or the one that trusts states to make up their own minds—without interference from Washington? If you chose the latter, you will be relieved to know that Mitch Daniels, Bobby Jindal, Chris Christie, Tony Bennett, and Jeb Bush—Common Core supporters all—agree.

-Mike Petrilli

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

Fourteen of the 4th graders at Washington, D.C.’s Hope Community Charter School had chosen the right answer—1/3 and 5/15—on a test written for the school by Boston-based Achievement Network (ANet). But 20 chose the wrong answer, and two didn’t answer at all.

So on a bright November afternoon three weeks after the test, Hope’s math specialist, Christine Madison, and two of the school’s 4th-grade teachers huddled over five pages of test-score data assembled for them by ANet. Hope’s Tolson campus serves 420 youngsters in grades PreK–8, almost all of them African American and two-thirds of them from low-income families. It is one of three D.C. charters that are operated by Virginia-based Imagine Schools and are working with ANet. The city’s charter board calls Hope “mid-performing”—about 40 percent of its elementary-school children and 60 percent of its middle schoolers are considered proficient in math and English.

ANet coach, Amrutha Nagarajan, coaches 14 schools for the organization.

The ANet data showed that the children generally understood fractions. But they also showed that many youngsters—including some with otherwise good scores—were unsteady at fractional models, or word problems, which are among the 15 math standards that Washington schools are expected to teach their 4th graders.

The fraction lesson, drawn from the class textbook, apparently didn’t work when the teachers first taught it. So at this half-day data-analysis exercise scripted by ANet and overseen by an ANet coach, Madison and the teachers debated why it failed and plotted how to reteach it. How about using an art project, fraction charts, flip-books, team competitions, they mused. How about reteaching the lesson to youngsters grouped by ability? How about reteaching boys and girls differently?

Think about how you taught the lesson the first time, and then do something different, urged Madison, who grew more exuberant with each new idea. “I think I may not have used enough visual aids,” one teacher finally conceded as Madison beamed.

Learning Curve

John Maycock is the founder of Achievement Network, a nonprofit organization that provides data-analysis training and coaching for school leaders and teachers.

Data-driven instruction began its spread across the country about a decade ago, in the footsteps of the No Child Left Behind requirement that schools administer yearly achievement tests. Those tests didn’t help teachers spot and backfill learning gaps, though. Scores came back after everyone had moved on to the next grade, and anyway, the tests were designed to hold schools accountable for the performance of groups: Did enough English-learners pass, enough African Americans? They were not intended to show which students didn’t understand decimals.

By most accounts, a few charter schools began testing their youngsters more frequently, with the idea that teachers could use those interim results to inform their teaching. “If you pay attention to what students learn and what they don’t, you learn how to teach more effectively,” says Paul Bambrick-Santoyo, whose book Driven by Data is a primer on data-driven instruction.

But on the ground, data-driven instruction has encountered problems. Schools complain that interim assessments produced by publishers aren’t always aligned with curricula, pacing guides, or year-end state tests. The assessments are often too easy, handing schools an unhappy surprise when state test results are posted.

Some districts have taken over the job of producing interim tests, but their data offices have the reputation of taking so long to return results that the information is too old to be of much use. (Ben Fenton of New Leaders for New Schools says he has encountered schools that sidestep their districts by photocopying their kids’ answer sheets and grading the assessments themselves.)

Schools that have tried to develop their own assessments have found the job overwhelming. Jermall Wright, principal of southeast Washington’s Leckie Elementary, told me that his leadership team tried it when they decided that the district’s assessments were inadequate. But writing, scoring, and analyzing the tests took so much time that they quickly abandoned the effort.

In any event, few teacher-education schools include data-analysis training, so many teachers don’t know how to read the data, or don’t have the time to use the information to rethink their lesson plans.

By the mid-2000s, “data was starting to become a hot topic,” says John Maycock, who at the time was completing a master’s degree in the school-leadership program at Harvard’s Graduate School of Education. But “teachers were saying they wanted help” understanding and using it, he adds.

“We started to see that just having access to better data was not enough to drive improvement,” says Joe Siedlecki, a program officer at the Michael and Susan Dell Foundation, which has given $1.7 million to ANet.

Maycock’s solution was to found a nonprofit organization that combines rigorous, standards-aligned assessments; data-analysis training and coaching for school leaders and teachers; guided peer review; and networking across schools. Schools join ANet, pay a fee for its services, and commit their teachers and principals to a four-times-a-year cycle of testing and data review. The model goes beyond traditional professional-development models by linking ANet’s work to each school’s data feedback loop: student achievement results inform the guidance ANet provides.

Coaching the Team

School leaders also agree to carve out time for teachers to look at the data together, and to take part in the cycle of meetings and reviews themselves.

Two days after Hope’s data-analysis meeting, I returned to the charter school to listen as its leadership team reviewed the session with ANet coach Amrutha Nagarajan, a 28-year-old Wellesley- and Harvard-educated former banker. Nagarajan came to Washington as a D.C. Teaching Fellow, resisting pressure from her Indian-immigrant parents to pursue a business career, she says, and now coaches 14 schools for ANet.

Hope had administered its second cycle of interim assessments in math and English-language arts on November 8 and 9 after downloading the tests from ANet’s web site. The untimed tests are given every six to eight weeks and typically take youngsters about an hour, Nagarajan told me. The 4th-grade math test asked 34 questions; the 3rd-grade language-arts test included three readings—a folk tale, a poem, and a nonfiction passage—and 20 questions.

The school’s leadership team had the option to view the year’s assessments well beforehand to be sure the school’s lesson plans and pacing would prepare kids for the district’s year-end tests. Hope doesn’t factor the ANet interim test scores into youngsters’ overall grades, and in their contract with ANet, network schools agree not to use the scores to rate their teachers, a move designed to dampen teacher resistance. School leaders also agree to carve out time for teachers to look at the data together, and to take part in the cycle of meetings and reviews themselves.

After the early-November tests, Hope shipped its completed answer sheets to ANet’s Boston office. Within 48 hours of receiving them, ANet posted the results online, and Hope printed out a set for every teacher. The data tell teachers how their students answered each question, of course, but also how each youngster, the class, and the grade scored on questions aligned to each standard, like dividing whole numbers or identifying details in a reading passage.

The data showed that among Hope’s 5th graders, for example, 88 percent appeared to understand how to find the area and perimeter of rectangles and triangles, but only 26 percent could do the same with circles. Among 8th graders, 65 percent could analyze details and draw conclusions from two reading passages—they did better at nonfiction than fiction—but just 52 percent could identify the author’s main purpose in writing the piece.

In their contract with ANet, network schools agree not to use the scores to rate their teachers, a move designed to dampen teacher resistance.

ANet’s coaching script next called for Nagarajan and the leadership team to go over the results—in ANet parlance, this is a pre-data meeting—and set priorities for a professional development day, or data meeting, two days later. They agreed that Hope’s 8th-grade language-arts teachers would concentrate on how better to teach “author’s purpose,” a D.C. learning standard. Its 6th-grade teachers would focus on “drawing conclusions,” its 3rd-grade teachers on “analyzing details,” and so on, through each grade and subject.

The idea, Nagarajan told me, is for teachers to “go deep on one or two standards” by dissecting four or five test questions each at the data meeting. The goal, she added, is for that kind of item analysis to become part of each teacher’s routine as she becomes more comfortable with data.

Nagarajan—whose teaching experience includes a year in Chennai, India, after the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami—remained in the background on data meeting day as Hope’s teachers worked on their reteaching plans. But she and ANet provided a clear structure to keep the school’s improvement plans on track.

During the data meeting, teachers pored over a form called an “item analysis template”—downloaded from the ANet web site—that forced them to think through the test questions that had given their kids the most grief. “What were the misconceptions” that led so many students to choose the wrong answer, the form asked them to consider. What groups of students missed the answer? What did students need to know to get it right?

Next, they worked through a “reteach action plan,” also downloaded from ANet. How was the lesson taught originally, the form asked. How and when would it be retaught, and to whom—the whole class, a small group, individual children?

Nagarajan, meanwhile, pressed Hope’s leadership team to meet deadlines and create what she called “follow-up structures.” When Dr. Chloé Marshall, Hope’s high-energy principal, said her teachers would file their reteaching plans that Friday, Nagarajan asked, “By the end of Friday or the beginning of Friday?” When would they do the reteaching, the next step on the ANet agenda, she asked. Those “reteaches” are supposed to be slipped into a compatible lesson so they don’t derail a teacher’s lesson plans and pacing, and target just those kids who need them.

Nagarajan continued: When would Hope retest—a quick two- or three-question quiz in each class—to make sure the new lesson was effective? When would teachers hold their “reflection meeting,” the last step in the assessment cycle, to look at the new results? “Does that make sense? What do you think?” she pressed the leadership team.

At the postdata-day debrief—more ANet parlance—Nagarajan and the school’s leadership team conceded that the English teachers were still learning how to use the ANet data to break down the broad standards into smaller skills, and to figure out which skills their students were lacking. But they also saw progress: teachers were talking more, sharing strategies, and acknowledging the need to teach differently.

“Some teachers were still challenging the test” by laying the blame on bad questions, Nagarajan said. But many more were “owning the data,” insisted Marshall, making the shift from the-kids-aren’t-learning-it to I’m-not-teaching-it. And with that, the discussion moved on to new teaching strategies, new delivery strategies, resources for new lesson plans, and the team’s goals for Hope’s students.

“The object isn’t to teach kids a process” that leads them to the right answer on a test, “but to visualize a problem and solve it,” Madison said to general agreement. “That’s what will help them in real life.”

Meeting a Need

Many teachers were "owning the data," making the shift from the-kids-aren't-learning-it to I'm-not-teaching-it.

John Maycock, who is now 37 and calls himself ANet’s “chief growth officer,” had managed afterschool centers in San Francisco, where he says he became “hooked forever” on education. But his real interest was “to be part of something entrepreneurial. I wanted to start something that was an expressed need from the schools,” he adds.

In 2004, Maycock and his mentor, Marci Cornell-Feist, assembled leaders from 10 Boston charter schools around the idea for Achievement Network. Cornell-Feist is the founder of the High Bar, which helps charter boards with management and governance issues.

The Boston charters had begun using interim assessments to prepare their kids for the year-end Massachusetts Comprehensive Assessment System, or MCAS. But the interim tests from outside vendors weren’t as rigorous as, or even aligned with, the MCAS. “They weren’t setting up the school leaders and teachers for success,” Maycock says.

The charters told him they needed better assessments, better data, and help understanding how to use the information, he says. They wanted a common assessment so they could compare results among themselves and use the data to identify best practices. And they wanted assessments that would serve as an instructional tool and not another gotcha mechanism to punish teachers.

Maycock raised $200,000 in seed money from a Massachusetts foundation, but also asked the schools each to pitch in $5,000 “to make it count,” he says. Schools now pay on a sliding scale: those like Hope that are in their first year and need intensive coaching pay $30,000. That declines to $14,000 a year once schools have been in the network for a few years and need less coaching.

Seven charter middle schools signed up with ANet in the 2005–06 school year, its first. Massachusetts had released the MCAS questions for the first time, and Maycock separated them by standard and skill, dissected them for rigor, and wrote his own interim assessments that mirrored the state exam.

James Peyser, a partner in NewSchools Venture Fund, which has invested $1.4 million in ANet and holds a seat on its board, says ANet’s assessments are remarkable for their rigor, which he adds are aimed at readying kids for college, not just for the state tests.

Three Boston district schools joined in ANet’s second year after catching wind of it. Maycock formed a second network of charter schools in Washington in 2008, and nine D.C. district schools joined the next year with help from the Dell grant. There are now 74 schools in the D.C. network.

New Orleans, Newark, Chicago, New York City, and Nashville-Memphis have since launched networks. There’s a network of three virtual schools, and a Baltimore network is planned for 2012. ANet says that 250 schools with some 70,000 kids were members of its networks in the 2011–12 school year. The organization has revenues of $9 million this school year, including $6 million in school fees.

Testing has expanded from the initial grades 6 and 7 to cover grades 3 through 8; ANet is piloting interim assessments for 2nd graders and a set of science tests. High school interims are more complicated because of wider course offerings, but they are “on our radar to consider—very much so,” Maycock says.

In 2010, ANet won a competitive $5 million Investing in Innovation (i3) grant from the U.S. Department of Education, which it is using, in part, to fund a large randomized study of its impact.

In its own analysis, ANet says the number of its youngsters who scored proficient or above on state tests last year increased by 7 percentage points in English and 4 percentage points in math in Chicago, and by 5 points in English and 3 points in math in New Orleans. Of the six cities for which it reported scores last year, ANet said four made twice the gains in English as the rest of their respective states, and three made double the state gains in math.

In D.C., about 6,600 youngsters in ANet’s charter and district schools took year-end tests in 2011. ANet says those scoring proficient in English increased by 4.5 percent and in math by 9 percent from the year earlier. That translates into 319 more kids passing the language exam and 662 more passing math, numbers Maycock calls “huge.” In just the D.C. district ANet schools, the increases were smaller—4 percent in English and 6.6 percent in math—but still better than the improvement of less than 2 percent posted by district schools that didn’t partner with ANet.

Network Strength

A learning walk explores peer-group feedback, or how to get teachers to help one another figure out how to reteach a troublesome lesson.

The schools in ANet’s original network were a lot alike: urban with high-need populations. Maycock has recently convinced stronger schools to join each network; in D.C., Janney and Horace Mann Elementary Schools, which are among the district’s highest-performing, white-majority schools, joined a network that is generally minority and struggling. The idea is to get charters and district schools, and stronger and weaker schools—schools that don’t generally cross paths—to share ideas and goad each other to improve.

Network schools have access to each other’s grade-level data, they share ANet coaches, and they’re invited to regular “learning walks,” where one network school models a practice for other network members.

A few days after the data-day review, I visited Powell Elementary, a district school in northeast D.C., for a learning walk on peer-group feedback, or how to get teachers to help one another figure out how to reteach a troublesome lesson. Teachers, data and instructional coaches, and a principal from eight widely different schools attended.

The practice Powell was showing off involved having its teachers present their reteaching plans—developed on data day—to a handful of teachers from other grades and specialties. These “critical friends” ask “clarifying questions” about the plan, and then talk it over among themselves. The presenting teachers can take or leave the suggestions without having to defend their lesson plans.

As I listened, a Powell math teacher modeled the process while the visitors leaned in close and tossed out their own ideas. Consider a math competition, said the dean of an all-boys, entirely African American charter school that seemed to have little in common with Powell: “Kids respond well to that.” Identify the 10 words most commonly used in word problems, said a math specialist from a district school that seemed to mirror Powell’s English-learner enrollment.

“I hadn’t thought about using manipulatives” in the lesson, conceded the Powell teacher as the ideas rolled in—and his kids would benefit from a hands-on lesson that burned up some of their energy, he added. After two hours, with the learning walk long ended, a dozen teachers from around the network were still huddled together, still talking lesson plans.

Powell keeps an ANet data wall in its front lobby and records how many youngsters in each class score proficient or advanced in math and in language arts for each ANet assessment cycle. Powell’s parents attend a data meeting when the results come out each cycle, and “all but three or four” regularly attend, principal Janeece Docal told me.

Powell’s highly public use of the data contrasts with that of Hyde-Addison Elementary, a third-year ANet school in D.C.’s swank Georgetown neighborhood, which uses the ANet data only internally. “We see what you know and what you don’t know. We see what we’ve taught you,” principal Dana Nerenberg told me.

Powell links the data discussion to the kids’ future, Docal explained: good ANet scores translate into good scores on the year-end test, which will land the youngsters in the high school and then the college and then the job of their choice. “Education equals freedom,” she said a dozen times over the afternoon.

How schools use the data “depends on the school’s culture,” says Justin Jones, a former Teach For America corps member and recruiter who heads the D.C. network.

Peyser, at NewSchools Venture Fund, says the goal is to help “change and strengthen school culture toward data” until “it becomes the way they do business.”

June Kronholz is an Education Next contributing editor.

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.

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

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.


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• 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?

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

Proponents of later start times, who have received considerable media attention in recent years, argue that many students who have to wake up early for school do not get enough sleep and that beginning the school day at a later time would boost their achievement. A number of school districts have responded by delaying the start of their school day, and a 2005 congressional resolution introduced by Rep. Zoe Lofgren (D-CA) recommended that secondary schools nationwide start at 9:00 or later. Despite this attention, there is little rigorous evidence directly linking school start times and academic performance.

In this study, I use data from Wake County, North Carolina, to examine how start times affect the performance of middle school students on standardized tests. I find that delaying school start times by one hour, from roughly 7:30 to 8:30, increases standardized test scores by at least 2 percentile points in math and 1 percentile point in reading. The effect is largest for students with below-average test scores, suggesting that later start times would narrow gaps in student achievement.

The primary rationale given for start times affecting academic performance is biological. Numerous studies, including those published by Elizabeth Baroni and her colleagues in 2004 and by Fred Danner and Barbara Phillips in 2008, have found that earlier start times may result in fewer hours of sleep, as students may not fully compensate for earlier rising times with earlier bedtimes. Activities such as sports and work, along with family and social schedules, may make it difficult for students to adjust the time they go to bed. In addition, the onset of puberty brings two factors that can make this adjustment particularly difficult for adolescents: an increase in the amount of sleep needed and a change in the natural timing of the sleep cycle. Hormonal changes, in particular, the secretion of melatonin, shift the natural circadian rhythm of adolescents, making it increasingly difficult for them to fall asleep early in the evening. Lack of sleep, in turn, can interfere with learning. A 1996 survey of research studies found substantial evidence that less sleep is associated with a decrease in cognitive performance, both in laboratory settings and through self-reported sleep habits. Researchers have likewise reported a negative correlation between self-reported hours of sleep and school grades among both middle- and high-school students.

I find evidence consistent with this explanation: among middle school students, the impact of start times is greater for older students (who are more likely to have entered adolescence). However, I also find evidence of other potential mechanisms; later start times are associated with reduced television viewing, increased time spent on homework, and fewer absences. Regardless of the precise mechanism at work, my results from Wake County suggest that later start times have the potential to be a more cost-effective method of increasing student achievement than other common educational interventions such as reducing class size.

Wake County

The Wake County Public School System (WCPSS) is the 16th-largest district in the United States, with 146,687 students in all grades for the 2011–12 school year. It encompasses all public schools in Wake County, a mostly urban and suburban county that includes the cities of Raleigh and Wake Forest. Start times for schools in the district are proposed by the transportation department (which also determines bus schedules) and approved by the school board.

Wake County is uniquely suited for this study because there are considerable differences in start times both across schools and for the same schools at different points in time. Since 1995, WCPSS has operated under a three-tiered system. While there are some minor differences in the exact start times, most Tier I schools begin at 7:30, Tier II schools at 8:15, and Tier III at 9:15. Tiers I and II are composed primarily of middle and high schools, and Tier III is composed entirely of elementary schools. Just over half of middle schools begin at 7:30, with substantial numbers of schools beginning at 8:00 and 8:15 as well. The school day at all schools is the same length. But as the student population has grown, the school district has changed the start times for many individual schools in order to maintain a balanced bus schedule, generating differences in start times for the same school in different years.

The only nationally representative dataset that records school start times indicates that, as of 2001, the median middle-school student in the U.S. began school at 8:00. More than one-quarter of students begin school at 8:30 or later, while more than 20 percent begin at 7:45 or earlier. In other words, middle school start times are somewhat earlier in Wake County than in most districts nationwide. The typical Wake County student begins school earlier than more than 90 percent of American middle-school students.

Data and Methods

The data used in this study come from two sources. First, administrative data for every student in North Carolina between 2000 and 2006 were provided by the North Carolina Education Research Data Center. The data contain detailed demographic variables for each student as well as end-of-grade test scores in reading and math. I standardize the raw test scores by assigning each student a percentile score, which indicates performance relative to all North Carolina students who took the test in the same grade and year. The second source of data is the start times for each Wake County public school, which are recorded annually and were provided by the WCPSS transportation department.

About 39 percent of WCPSS students attended magnet schools between 2000 and 2006. Since buses serving magnet schools must cover a larger geographic area, ride times tend to be longer for magnet school students. As a result, almost all magnet schools during the study period began at the earliest start time. Because magnet schools start earlier and enroll students who tend to have higher test scores, I exclude magnet schools from my main analysis. My results are very similar if magnet school students are included.

The data allow me to use several different methods to analyze the effect of start times on student achievement. First, I compare the reading and math scores of students in schools that start earlier to the scores of similar students at later-starting schools. Specifically, I control for the student’s race, limited English status, free or reduced-price lunch eligibility, years of parents’ education, and whether the student is academically gifted or has a learning disability. I also control for the characteristics of the school, including total enrollment, pupil-to-teacher ratio, racial composition, percentage of students eligible for free lunch, and percentage of returning students. This approach compares students with similar characteristics who attend schools that are similar, except for the fact that some schools start earlier and others start later.

The results produced by this first approach could be misleading, however, if middle schools with later start times differ from other schools in unmeasured ways. For example, it could be the case that more-motivated principals lobby the district to receive a later start time and also employ other strategies that boost student achievement. If that were the case, then I might find that schools with later start times have higher test scores, even if start times themselves had no causal effect.

To deal with this potential problem, my second approach focuses on schools that changed their start times during the study period. Fourteen of the district’s middle schools changed their start times, including seven schools that changed their start times by 30 minutes or more. This enables me to compare the test scores of students who attended a particular school to the test scores of students who attended the same school in a different year, when it had an earlier or later start time. For example, this method would compare the test scores of students at a middle school that had a 7:30 start time from 1999 to 2003 to the scores of students at the same school when it had an 8:00 start time from 2004 to 2006. I still control for all of the student and school characteristics mentioned earlier.

As a final check on the accuracy of my results, I perform analyses that compare the achievement of individual students to their own achievement in a different year in which the middle school they attended started at a different time. For example, this method would compare the scores of 7th graders at a school with a 7:30 start time in 2003 to the scores of the same students as 8th graders in 2004, when the school had a start time of 8:00. As this suggests, this method can only be used for the roughly 28 percent of students in my sample whose middle school changed its start time while they were enrolled.

Results

My first method compares students with similar characteristics who attend schools that are similar except for having different start times. The results indicate that a one-hour delay in start time increases standardized test scores on both math and reading tests by roughly 3 percentile points. As noted above, however, these results could be biased by unmeasured differences between early- and late-starting schools (or the students who attend them).

Using my second method, which mitigates this bias by following the same schools over time as they change their start times, I find a 2.2-percentile-point improvement in math scores and a 1.5-point improvement in reading scores associated with a one-hour change in start time.

My second method controls for all school-level characteristics that do not change over time. However, a remaining concern is that the student composition of schools may change. For example, high-achieving students in a school that changed to an earlier start time might transfer to private schools. To address this issue, I estimate the impact of later start times using only data from students who experience a change in start time while remaining in the same school. Among these students, the effect of a one-hour later start time is 1.8 percentile points in math and 1.0 point in reading (see Figure 1).

These estimated effects of changes in start times are large enough to be substantively important. For example, the effect of a one-hour later start time on math scores is roughly 14 percent of the black-white test-score gap, 40 percent of the gap between those eligible and those not eligible for free or reduced-price lunch, and 85 percent of the gain associated with an additional year of parents’ education.

The benefits of a later start time in middle school appear to persist through at least the 10th grade. All students in North Carolina are required to take the High School Comprehensive Test at the end of 10th grade. The comprehensive exam measures growth in reading and math since the end of grade 8 and is similar in format to the end-of-grade tests taken in grades 3–8. Controlling for the start time of their high school, I find that students whose middle school started one hour later when they were in 8th grade continue to score 2 percentile points higher in both math and reading when tested in grade 10.

I also looked separately at the effect of later start times for lower-scoring and higher-scoring students. The results indicate that the effect of a later start time in both math and reading is more than twice as large for students in the bottom third of the test-score distribution than for students in the top third. The larger effect of start times on low-scoring students suggests that delaying school start times may be an especially relevant policy change for school districts trying to meet minimum competency requirements (such as those mandated in the No Child Left Behind Act).

Why Do Start Times Matter?

The typical explanation for why later start times might increase academic achievement is that by starting school later, students will get more sleep. As students enter adolescence, hormonal changes make it difficult for them to compensate for early school start times by going to bed earlier. Because students enter adolescence during their middle-school years, examining the effect of start times as students age allows me to test this theory. If the adolescent hormone explanation is true, the effect of school start times should be larger for older students, who are more likely to have begun puberty.

I therefore separate the students in my sample by years of age and estimate the effect of start time on test scores separately for each group. In both math and reading, the start-time effect is roughly the same for students age 11 and 12, but increases for those age 13 and is largest for students age 14 (see Figure 2). This pattern is consistent with the adolescent hormone theory.

To further investigate how the effect of later start times varies with age, I estimate the effect of start times on upper elementary students (grades 3–5). If adolescent hormones are the mechanism through which start times affect academic performance, preadolescent elementary students should not be affected by early start times. I find that start times in fact had no effect on elementary students. However, elementary schools start much later than middle schools (more than half of elementary schools begin at 9:15, and almost all of the rest begin at 8:15). As a result, it is not clear if there is no effect because start times are not a factor in the academic performance of prepubescent students, or because the schools start much later and only very early start times affect performance.

Of course, increased sleep is not the only possible reason later-starting middle-school students have higher test scores. Students in early-starting schools could be more likely to skip breakfast. Because they also get out of school earlier, they could spend more (or less) time playing sports, watching television, or doing homework. They could be more likely to be absent, tardy, or have behavioral problems in school. Other explanations are possible as well. While my data do not allow me to explore all possible mechanisms, I am able to test several of them.

I find that students who start school one hour later watch 12 fewer minutes of television per day and spend 9 minutes more on homework per week, perhaps because students who start school later spend less time at home alone. Students who start school earlier come home from school earlier and may, as a result, spend more time at home alone and less time at home with their parents. If students watch television when they are home alone and do their homework when their parents are home, this behavior could explain why students who start school later have higher test scores. In other words, it may be that it is not so much early start times that matter but rather early end times.

Previous research tends to find that students in early-starting schools are more likely to be tardy to school and to be absent. In Wake County, students who start school one hour later have 1.3 fewer absences than the typical student—a reduction of about 25 percent. Fewer absences therefore may also explain why later-starting students have higher test scores: students who have an early start time miss more school and could perform worse on standardized tests as a result.

Conclusion

Later school start times have been touted as a way to increase student performance. There has not, however, been much empirical evidence supporting this claim or calculating how large an effect later start times might have. My results indicate that delaying the start times of middle schools that currently open at 7:30 by one hour would increase math and reading scores by 2 to 3 percentile points, an impact that persists into at least the 10th grade.

These results suggest that delaying start times may be a cost-effective method of increasing student performance. Since the effect of later start times is stronger for the lower end of the distribution of test scores, later start times may be particularly effective in meeting accountability standards that require a minimum level of competency.

If elementary students are not affected by later start times, as my data suggest (albeit not definitively), it may be possible to increase test scores for middle school students at no cost by having elementary schools start first. Alternatively, the entire schedule could be shifted later into the day. However, these changes may pose other difficulties due to child-care constraints for younger students and jobs and afterschool activities for older students.

Another option would be to eliminate tiered busing schedules and have all schools begin at the same time. A reasonable estimate of the cost of moving start times later is the additional cost of running a single-tier bus system. The WCPSS Transportation Department estimates that over the 10-year period from 1993 to 2003, using a three-tiered bus system saved roughly $100 million in transportation costs. With approximately 100,000 students per year divided into three tiers, it would cost roughly $150 per student each year to move each student in the two earliest start-time tiers to the latest start time. In comparison, an experimental study of class sizes in Tennessee finds that reducing class size by one-third increases test scores by 4 percentile points in the first year at a cost of $2,151 per student per year (in 1996 dollars). These calculations, while very rough, suggest that delaying the beginning of the school day may produce a comparable improvement in test scores at a fraction of the cost.

Finley Edwards is visiting assistant professor of economics at Colby College.

CONTACT:
Finley Edwards  fedwards@colby.edu Colby College
Janice B. Riddell  (203) 912-8675 janice_riddell@hks.harvard.edu External Relations, Education Next

School Start Times Found to Affect Student Achievement

North Carolina study suggests a one-hour later start time in middle school would reduce achievement gaps

CAMBRIDGE, MA –In recent years, many parents have called for later start times in middle- and high-school, yet there has been little rigorous evidence to date directly linking school start times and academic performance.  A new study finds that delaying middle-school start times by one hour, from roughly 7:30 to 8:30 a.m., would increase standardized math and reading scores by 2 to 3 percentile points.  The effects are more than twice as large for students in the bottom third of test-scorers than for those in the top third, suggesting that later start times may be an especially relevant policy change for districts striving to close achievement gaps.

The study of middle school students in the Wake County, North Carolina public school system (WCPSS), the 16^th-largest public school district in the United States (146,687 current students), was conducted by economist Finley Edwards.  His report, “Do Schools Begin Too Early?  The effect of start times on student achievement,” will appear in the May issue of Education Next and is available online at www.educationnext.org.

The effects of changes in start times “are large enough to be substantively important,” Edwards states.  For example, the effect of a one-hour later start time on math scores is roughly 14 percent of the black-white test-score gap, 40 percent of the gap between those eligible and those not eligible for free or reduced-price lunch, and 85 percent of the gain associated with an additional year of parents’ education.

“Results from Wake County also suggest that later start times have the potential to be a more cost-effective method of increasing student achievement than other common educational interventions such as reducing class size,” notes Edwards.  If all schools started at the same later time, for example, the cost in Wake County for moving each student in the two earlier bus times to a single, later bus schedule would be roughly $150 per student each year.  By comparison, a Tennessee study of class sizes finds that reducing class size by one-third increases per pupil expenditures by $2,151 per student each year (1996 dollars).

The study also finds that later middle school start times are associated with reduced television viewing, increased time spent on homework, and about 25 percent fewer absences.  The benefits of a later start time are seen particularly among students ages 13-14 and appear to persist through at least the 10^th grade.  Students whose middle schools started one hour later when they were in 8^th grade continue to score 2 percentile points higher in both math and reading when tested in grade 10.

The study’s finding that the start-time effects are pronounced beginning at age 13 is consistent with the theory that hormonal changes in adolescence (typically beginning at 13 or 14) make it difficult for students to get enough sleep when school starts early, leading to sleep deficiencies that many studies have found to be associated with a decrease in cognitive performance.

Three methods were used in the research: 1) comparing the reading and math scores of students with similar characteristics (such as race, years of parents’ education, and free or reduced-price lunch status) who attend schools that are similar, except for differing start times;  2) examining the district’s 14 middle schools that changed their start times by 30 minutes or more during the study period (2000-2006), and comparing test scores at the same school for respective grade levels when start times changed;  and 3) analyzing individual student achievement before and after start times changed (e.g., comparing the scores of 7^th graders at a school with a 7:30 start time in 2003 to the scores of the same students as 8^th graders in 2004, when start time was 8:00).

About the Author

Finley Edwards is visiting assistant professor of economics at Colby College.  He can be contacted for interviews at fedwards@colby.edu.

About Education Next

Education Next is a scholarly journal published by the Hoover Institution that is committed to looking at hard facts about school reform.  Other sponsoring institutions are the Harvard Program on Education Policy and Governance, part of the Taubman Center for State and Local Government at the Harvard Kennedy School, and the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation.  For more information about Education Next, please visit:  www.educationnext.org.

HT: Jay Greene

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.

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.

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
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.

Birdette Hughey is the 2011 Mississippi Teacher of the Year.

In February 2012, the New York Times took the unusual step of publishing performance ratings for nearly 18,000 New York City teachers based on their students’ test-score gains, commonly called value-added (VA) measures. This action, which followed a similar release of ratings in Los Angeles last year, drew new attention to the growing use of VA analysis as a tool for teacher evaluation. After decades of relying on often-perfunctory classroom observations to assess teacher performance, districts from Washington, D.C., to Los Angeles now evaluate many of their teachers based in part on VA measures and, in some cases, use these measures as a basis for differences in compensation.

Newspapers that publish value added measures no doubt relish the attention they generate, but the bigger question in our view is whether VA should play any role in the evaluation of teachers. Advocates argue that the use of VA measures in decisions regarding teacher selection, retraining, and dismissal will boost student achievement, while critics contend that the measures are a poor indicator of teacher quality and should play little if any role in high-stakes decisions. The Obama administration has thrown its weight squarely behind the advocates, launching a series of programs that encourage states to develop evaluation systems based substantially on VA measures.

The debate over the merits of using value added to evaluate teachers stems primarily from two questions. First, do VA measures work? In other words, do they accurately capture the effects teachers have on their students’ test scores? One concern is that VA measures will incorrectly reward or penalize teachers for the mix of students they get if students are assigned to teachers based on characteristics that VA analysis typically ignores.

Second, do VA measures matter in the long run? For example, do teachers who raise test scores also improve their students’ outcomes in adulthood or are they simply better at teaching to the test? Recent research has shown that high-quality early-childhood education has large impacts on outcomes such as college completion and adult earnings, but no study has identified the long-term impacts of teacher quality as measured by value added.

We address these two questions by analyzing school-district data from grades 3–8 for 2.5 million children, linked to information on their outcomes as young adults and the characteristics of their parents. We find that teacher VA measures both work and matter. First, we find that VA measures accurately predict teachers’ impacts on test scores once we control for the student characteristics that are typically accounted for when creating VA measures. Second, we find that students assigned to high-VA teachers are more likely to attend college, attend higher-quality colleges, earn more, live in higher socioeconomic status (SES) neighborhoods, and save more for retirement. They are also less likely to have children during their teenage years.

Teachers in all grades from 4 to 8 have large impacts on their students’ adult lives. On average, a 1-standard-deviation improvement in teacher value added (equivalent to having a teacher in the 84th percentile rather than one at the median) in a single grade raises a student’s earnings at age 28 by about 1 percent. Replacing a teacher whose value added is in the bottom 5 percent with an average teacher would increase students’ total lifetime incomes by more than $1.4 million for a typical classroom (equivalent to $250,000 in present value). In short, good teachers create substantial economic value, and VA measures are useful in identifying them.

Our findings address the three main critiques of VA measures raised in a recent Phi Delta Kappan article by Stanford education professor Linda Darling-Hammond and her colleagues. We show directly using quasi-experimental tests that standard VA measures are not biased by the students assigned to each teacher. Hence, value-added metrics successfully disentangle teachers’ impacts from the many other influences on student progress. We also show that although VA measures fluctuate across years, they are sufficiently stable that selecting teachers even based on a few years of data would have substantial impacts on student outcomes such as earnings.

Students assigned to high-VA teachers are more likely to attend college, earn more, live in higher socioeconomic status neighborhoods, and save more for retirement.

Data

We draw information from two sources: school-district records on students and teachers, and information on the same students and their parents from administrative data sources such as tax records. The school-district data contain student enrollment history, test scores, and teacher assignments from the administrative records of a large urban school district. These data span the school years 1988–89 through 2008–09 and cover roughly 2.5 million children in grades 3 through 8.

The school-district data include approximately 18 million test scores. Test scores are available for English language arts and math for students in grades 3–8 from the spring of 1989 to 2009. In the early part of the sample period, these tests were specific to the district, but by 2005–06 all tests were statewide, as required under the No Child Left Behind law. In order to calculate results that combine scores from different tests, we standardize test scores by subject, year, and grade. The district data also contain other information on students, such as race or ethnicity, gender, and eligibility for free or reduced-price lunch (a standard measure of poverty).

Our data on students’ adult outcomes include earnings, college attendance, college quality (measured by the earnings of previous graduates of the same college), neighborhood quality (measured by the percentage of college graduates in their zip code), teenage birth rates for females (measured by claiming a dependent born when the woman was still a teenager), and retirement savings (measured by contributions to 401[k] plans). Parent characteristics include household income, marital status, home ownership, 401(k) savings, and mother’s age at child’s birth.

Having spent a single year in the classroom of a teacher with value added that is 1 standard deviation higher increases earnings at age 28 by about 1 percent. If that 1 percent advantage were to remain stable throughout an individual's career, it would add up to about $25,000 in total earnings.

Do Value-Added Measures Work?

Value-added analysis aims to isolate the causal effects teachers have on student achievement by comparing how well their students perform on end-of-year tests relative to similar students taught by other teachers. These comparisons take into account students’ test scores in the prior year as well as their race or ethnicity, gender, age, suspensions and absences in the previous year, whether they repeated a grade, special education status, and limited English status. We also control for teacher experience as well as for class and school characteristics, including class size and the academic performance and demographic characteristics of all students in the relevant classroom and school.

Many other researchers use methods for measuring teacher value added that are similar to ours, so it is not surprising that we obtain similar results. For example, we find that a 1-standard-deviation increase in teacher value added corresponds to increases in student math and English scores of 12 and 8 percent of a standard deviation, respectively. In both subjects, this difference is equivalent to approximately three months of additional instruction.

Can we take this as evidence of teachers’ causal impact on student test scores? Recent studies by economists Thomas Kane, Doug Staiger, and Jesse Rothstein, among others, have reached divergent conclusions about whether VA measures should be interpreted in this way. In particular, critics contend that VA measures are likely to be biased as a result of the way that students are assigned to teachers. For example, some teachers might be consistently assigned students with higher-income parents (which typically cannot be accounted for by school districts when generating VA measures because they do not collect precise data on family income). We implement two new tests to determine whether VA estimates are biased.

Our first test examines whether in fact high-VA teachers tend to be assigned students from more-advantaged families. We calculate an overall measure of parents’ socioeconomic status, combining the parental characteristics listed above. Not surprisingly, parent socioeconomic status is strongly predictive of student test scores, and, looking at simple correlations, we find that less-advantaged students do tend to be assigned to teachers with lower VA measures. However, controlling for the limited set of student characteristics available in school-district databases, such as test scores in the previous grade, is sufficient to account for the assignment of students to teachers based on parent characteristics. That is, if we take two students who have the same 4th-grade test scores, demographics, classroom characteristics, and so forth, the student assigned to a teacher with higher VA in grade 5 does not systematically have different parental income or other characteristics.

This first test shows that any bias in VA estimates due to the omission of parent characteristics that we are able to observe is minimal. The possibility remains, however, that students are assigned to teachers based on unmeasured characteristics unrelated to parent socioeconomic status. For example, principals may consistently assign their most-disruptive students to teachers whom they believe are up to the challenge. Alternatively, principals might assign these same students to their least-effective teachers, whom they are not worried about losing. Our second test seeks to determine the amount of bias introduced by this kind of sorting.

To do so, we exploit the fact that adjacent grades of students within the same school are frequently assigned to teachers with very different levels of value added because of idiosyncrasies in teacher assignments and turnover. During our analysis period, roughly 15 percent of teachers in our data switched to a different grade within the same school from one year to the next, 6 percent of teachers moved to a different school within the same district, and another 6 percent left the district entirely. These year-to-year changes in the teaching staff at a given school generate differences in value added that are unlikely to be related to student characteristics.

To illustrate, suppose a high-VA 4th-grade teacher enters a school at the beginning of a school year. If VA estimates capture teachers’ true impact on their students, students entering grade 4 in that school should have higher year-end test scores than those of the previous cohort. And the size of the change in test scores across these consecutive cohorts should correspond to the change in the average value added across all teachers in the grade. For example, in a school with three equal-sized 4th-grade classrooms, the replacement of a teacher with a VA estimate of 0.05 standard deviations with one with a VA estimate of 0.35 standard deviations should increase average test scores among 4th-grade students by 0.1 standard deviations.

In fact, that is exactly what we find, as shown in Figure 1. To construct this figure, we first define the top 5 percent of teachers as “high VA” and the bottom 5 percent as “low VA.” Figure 1 displays average test scores for cohorts of students in the years before and after a high-VA teacher arrives. We see that end-of-year test scores in the subject and grade taught by that teacher rise immediately by about 4 percent of a standard deviation. This impact on average test scores is commensurate in magnitude with what we would have predicted given the increase in average teacher value added for the students in that grade.

We obtain parallel findings when we examine the departure of high-VA teachers and the entry and exit of low-VA teachers. When a high-VA teacher leaves a given subject-grade-school combination, test scores of subsequent students in that subject, grade, and school fall. Likewise, students benefit from the departure of a low-VA teacher and are harmed by the arrival of a low-VA teacher.

Together, these results provide direct evidence that removing low-VA teachers (bottom 5 percent) and retaining high-VA teachers (top 5 percent) improves the academic achievement of students. But what about the remaining 90 percent of teachers? When we perform a similar analysis for all teachers, we again find that changes in the quality of the teaching staff strongly predict changes in test scores across consecutive cohorts of students in the same school, grade, and subject. Moreover, in middle schools, where students usually learn math and English from different teachers, we confirm that the arrival or departure of math teachers affects math scores but not English scores (and vice versa).

Using these techniques, we can calculate the amount of bias in our VA estimates. We find that the degree of bias is, on average, less than 2 percent. We therefore conclude that standard VA estimates accurately capture the impact that teachers have on their students’ test scores. Although the results could differ in other settings, our method of using natural teacher turnover to evaluate bias in VA estimates can be easily implemented by school districts to evaluate the accuracy of their VA models.

Do Value-Added Measures Matter?

Even though value-added measures accurately gauge teachers’ impacts on test scores, it could still be the case that high-VA teachers simply “teach to the test,” either by narrowing the subject matter in the curriculum or by having students learn test-taking strategies that consistently increase test scores but do not benefit students later in their lives. To address this issue, we measure the relationship between teachers’ value added and their students’ outcomes in adulthood. We compare students who were assigned high-VA vs. low-VA teachers in grades 4–8 and study their outcomes in adulthood.

We find that high-VA teachers raise students’ chances of attending college at age 20 (see Figure 2a). A student assigned to a teacher with a VA 1 standard deviation higher is 0.5 percentage points more likely to attend college at age 20 (an increase of 1.3 percent). Students of higher-VA teachers also attend higher-quality colleges, as measured by the average earnings of previous graduates of those colleges.

A person’s income doesn’t begin to stabilize until their late twenties, so our analysis of earnings focuses on the year when students were 28, the oldest age at which we observe a sufficiently large number of students. We find that having spent a single year in the classroom of a teacher with value added that is 1 standard deviation higher increases earnings at age 28 by $182, or about 1 percent (see Figure 2b). If that 1 percent advantage were to remain stable throughout an individual’s career, it would add up to about $25,000 in total earnings.

In addition to improved earnings, we also find that improvements in teacher value added significantly reduce the likelihood that female students will have a child during their teenage years, increase the socioeconomic status of the neighborhoods in which students live in adulthood, and raise 401(k) retirement savings rates. Moreover, it is likely that improved education would yield benefits that we are not able to measure but have been shown by other studies, such as reduced crime and improved citizenship.

To sum up, our evidence confirms that the students of high-VA teachers benefit not just by scoring higher on math and reading tests at the end of the school year, but also through improved outcomes later in life. The size of these effects may seem small, but recall that they reflect the impact of a higher-VA teacher for a single year and could compound over time to the extent that students are exposed to multiple high-VA teachers. As important, a single high-VA teacher has this effect not only on a single student but rather on an entire classroom—and often on many classrooms of students over the course of a career.

Wanda Booth, Florida's 2011 Charter School Teacher of the Year, works with students. Teachers in all grades have large impacts on their students' adult lives.

Policy Implications

In a recent article (see “Valuing Teachers,” features, Summer 2011), Eric Hanushek argues in favor of dismissing the bottom 5 percent of teachers based on their VA scores. While such a policy would have many costs and benefits that are beyond the scope of our study, we can illustrate the magnitudes implied by our analysis by calculating its impacts on students’ earnings. Our estimates imply that replacing a teacher whose value added is in the bottom 5 percent with an average teacher would increase students’ cumulative lifetime income by a total of $1.4 million per classroom taught. This gain is equivalent to $267,000 in present value at age 12, discounting at a 5 percent interest rate. However, it is important to realize there is uncertainty in VA measures, which are estimates that may be based on only a few classrooms of students, so the gains from removing teachers identified as ineffective based on a limited number of years of data are smaller. We estimate the gains from “deselecting” the bottom 5 percent of teachers to be approximately $135,000 in present value based on one year of data and $190,000 based on three years of data. These benefits, while still large, would have to be weighed against any costs associated with the policy, such as teachers demanding higher pay to compensate them for the risk of dismissal.

We also measure the expected gains from policies that pay higher salaries or bonuses to high-VA teachers in order to increase retention rates. The gains from such policies appear to be only somewhat larger than their costs. Although the benefit from retaining a teacher whose value added is at the 95th percentile after three years is nearly $200,000 per year, most bonus payments end up going to high-VA teachers who would have stayed even without the additional payment. Replacing low-VA teachers is therefore likely to be a more cost-effective strategy to increase teacher quality in the short run than paying to retain high-VA teachers. In the long run, higher salaries could attract more high-VA teachers to the teaching profession, a potentially important benefit that we do not measure here.

While these calculations illustrate the magnitudes of teachers’ impacts on students, they do not by themselves offer a blueprint for the design of optimal teacher evaluations, salaries, or merit-pay policies. Teachers were not evaluated based on test scores in the school district and time period we study. VA measures may not be as useful for identifying teachers with positive long-term impacts on their students if teachers respond to their use in evaluation systems by engaging in practices such as teaching to the test or even outright cheating. In addition, our analysis does not compare value added with other measures of teacher quality, like evaluations based on classroom observation, which might be even better predictors of teachers’ long-term impacts than VA scores.

In summary, our research demonstrates that good teachers are of great value to their students, and that VA measures are a potentially valuable tool for measuring teacher performance. The most important lesson we draw is that finding policies to raise the quality of teaching is likely to yield substantial economic and social benefits.

Raj Chetty is professor of economics at Harvard University. John N. Friedman is assistant professor of public policy at Harvard Kennedy School. Jonah E. Rockoff is associate professor of business at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Business. For further information on the study, see http://obs.rc.fas.harvard.edu/chetty/value_added.html.

Commentary

In light of the widespread attention given to the Chetty, Friedman, and Rockoff research, Education Next asked four experts to comment on the study’s implications for teacher policy.

Implications for Policy Are Not So Clear - By Douglas Harris
Profound Implications for State Policy - By Chris Cerf and Peter Shulman
More Evidence Would Be Welcome - By Dale Ballou
Low-Performing Teachers Have High Costs - By Eric A. Hanushek

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)

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)

The new study by Raj Chetty, John Friedman, and Jonah Rockoff  asks whether high-value-added teachers (i.e., teachers who raise student test scores) also have positive longer-term impacts on students, as reflected in college attendance, earnings, avoiding teenage pregnancy, and the quality of the neighborhood in which they reside as adults. As a step on the way, the researchers investigate whether such teachers have been properly identified, that is, are the teachers who are producing larger achievement gains from year to year, according to value-added models, actually responsible for those gains? The paper contains valuable evidence indicating that the answer is yes. First, the authors obtain data on family background from federal tax returns not normally available to researchers. This allows them to measure family characteristics (such as parental income) not typically controlled for when teacher value-added is estimated. If introducing such factors reduces the explanatory power of teacher value-added, it is an indication that the value-added estimate was inflated, and that part of what had been attributed to the teacher was in fact due to favorable family circumstances. The study authors find that including such controls does not detract from the explanatory power of estimated value-added.

The authors also investigate whether high-value-added teachers have benefited by being assigned students who would have made greater gains on standardized tests for unobserved reasons (such as family factors that cannot be gleaned even from tax returns). This is normally difficult to do, given the possible influences on the way students are assigned to teachers. The report succeeds by focusing on average test gains in grades within schools where mean value-added within a grade has been affected by the movement of teachers in and out of the grade. What matters for this analysis is not which student was assigned to which teacher within the grade, but how the movement of teachers has altered the quality of teaching in that grade as a whole. It turns out that subsequent gains within these grades are close to those what would be expected from the change in mean teacher value-added. Provided the movement of teachers in and out of a grade has not changed the makeup of students enrolled in that grade, this finding supports the conclusion that measured value-added of teachers is an unbiased predictor of future test-score gains, as there appears to be no other explanation for the resulting improvement in test scores.

When the authors examine the association between teacher value-added and outcomes in young adulthood, however, for the most part they do not undertake the same tests to ensure that these associations are not artifacts of the way students are sorted among teachers. They do not introduce controls from tax returns to see whether the explanatory power of teacher value-added for later earnings, college attendance, and other factors, falls. Nor, with the exception of college attendance, do they test for the influence of unobservable factors in the manner just described.

The omission of such tests undercuts their claim to have demonstrated that high-value-added teachers contribute to better long-term outcomes. Without the same rigorous tests, we cannot be sure that the observed association between teacher value-added and long-term outcomes was not the result of other factors (for example, efforts made by parents with the strongest parenting skills to ensure their children were assigned to the most effective instructors). It is not enough to show that omitted family characteristics have not been confounded with value-added as a predictor of future test-score gains. The factors that shape test performance are not necessarily those that influence future earnings or the avoidance of a teenage pregnancy. Character education and the values parents impart to their offspring are likely to matter for the latter in ways that they do not for cognitive functioning.

In short, the authors provide a persuasive answer to the question: does a high-value-added teacher actually raise subsequent test scores? They have not so far provided equally persuasive evidence answering the question: does a high-value-added teacher improve subsequent life outcomes?

Dale Ballou is associate professor of public policy and education at Vanderbilt University and associate director of the National Center on Performance Incentives.

Return to “Great Teaching” (Summer 2012)

The movie Waiting for Superman chronicles the role of chance in determining the fate of a relatively small number of families trying to enroll their children in oversubscribed charter schools. Raj Chetty, John Friedman, and Jonah Rockoff document the much larger problem of ineffective teachers scattered about a multitude of schools. From the viewpoint of the student, this latter issue may appear to be chance when class assignments are made, and when some get good teachers and others get ineffective ones. From the standpoint of the system, however, it is not chance but mismanagement that allows ineffective teachers to continue harming students.

Chetty et al. have produced new and elegant estimates of how teacher effectiveness relates to long-run student outcomes. As economists are prone to do, they have produced a paper that deals with a long list of technical questions that have absorbed the scientific literature on teacher effectiveness. Their work is thorough, convincing, and scientifically innovative.

The overarching idea of the paper is linking gains from having a high-value-added teacher in grades 4–8 to subsequent long-run outcomes, including college attendance, earnings, and family creation. But, from the outset, they must deal with the two primary challenges leveled at teacher value-added measures based on student test scores. First, are these  estimates biased measures of effectiveness? The answer is no. The wealth of information that Chetty et al. have about families from tax records and some clever analyses effectively rule out the possibility that conventional estimates of value-added based only on school administrative data are misleading. Second, do the effects of good teachers (or bad teachers) quickly fade away? Again, the answer is no. Even as these students leave school and enter into adult careers in their late 20s, the significant trace of their early schooling is quite discernible.

But the warranted attention to this work derives not from its technical aspects but from the policy implications of the results. The fundamental finding is that good teachers have an extraordinarily powerful impact on the future lives of their students. Symmetrically, the researchers show the lasting damage that poor teachers have on the lives of their students. This work sweeps away a variety of attempts to deflect questions about the importance of teacher quality and our ability to identify it. It also brings us back to the question of informed policy.

As the evidence on the importance of teacher quality has grown, policy discussions have actually moved. In the beginning, there were doubts about the impact of teacher quality relative to families, curriculum, or a host of other influences. Those doubts have largely receded and been replaced by questions of how policy should proceed. And here is where the additional evidence presented in the Chetty study comes into play.

Much of the discussion has centered on the political difficulties of reforming the schools by dealing with the problem of the most ineffective teachers. The unions have dug in their heels, resisting any change that does not ensure perfect identification of the worst teachers. Their resistance has resulted in many policymakers simply asserting that it is too politically costly to make active decisions about teacher effectiveness and instead looking to alternatives such as more professional development, better mentoring, or heightened requirements of certification.

Chetty et al.’s evidence shows that bad teachers cost hundreds of thousands of dollars in lost income and productivity each year that they remain in the classroom. These costs are large enough that failing to address them is simply inexcusable. It is time that we develop policies that truly are designed to help our children and not just the adults in schools today.

We have recently seen a number of brave states step out and legislate better evaluations of teachers including, when possible, the use of value-added measures. Coupled with both pay and tenure reforms, these movements show real promise and should be encouraged on a wider scale.

Eric A. Hanushek is senior fellow at the Hoover Institution of Stanford University.

Return to “Great Teaching” (Summer 2012)

Researchers Report Findings Showing Lasting Impacts of Effective Teachers
Teachers who raise test scores have long-term effects on students’ college enrollment and earnings as adults

CAMBRIDGE, MA – A study showing the large impacts that highly skilled teachers have on students’ academic achievement and lifetime earnings is available on the Education Next website, www.educationnext.org.  Researchers Raj Chetty and John N. Friedman of Harvard University and Jonah E. Rockoff of Columbia University analyzed school-district data from grades 3–8 for 2.5 million children, and linked those data to information on student outcomes as young adults.  Their study has received widespread attention since its release as an academic paper in January, 2012.  The article, “Great Teaching:  Measuring its effects on students’ future earnings,” is accompanied by four commentaries from experts on the study’s policy implications.

The Chetty, Friedman, and Rockoff study finds that, on average, a 1 standard deviation improvement in teacher value added (equivalent to having a teacher in the 84^th percentile rather than one at the median) for one year raises a student’s earnings at age 28 by about 1 percent. They estimate that the effect of such a teacher on an entire class of students is more than a $1.4 million increase in cumulative lifetime earnings.

Relative to the median, a teacher at the 84^th percentile increases math and English scores by 12 and 8 percent of a standard deviation, respectively — equivalent to approximately 3 months of additional instruction.  Students of highly skilled teachers are more likely to attend college, attend higher-quality colleges, earn more, live in higher socioeconomic status (SES) neighborhoods, and save more for retirement.  They are also less likely to have children during their teenage years.

The authors address three criticisms of value-added (VA) measures of teacher effectiveness that Stanford University education professor Linda Darling-Hammond and her colleagues present in a recent article:  that VA estimates are inconsistent because they fluctuate over time;  that teachers’ value-added performance is skewed by student assignment, which is non-random; and that value-added ratings can’t disentangle the many influences on student progress.

Chetty and his colleagues show, using quasi-experimental tests, that “standard VA measures are not biased by the students assigned to each teacher.”  Using over 20 years of student achievement data, the researchers found that changes in the quality of the teaching staff “strongly predict changes in test scores across consecutive cohorts of students in the same school, grade, and subject.”  The most pronounced effects were seen in the departure of ineffective teachers (bottom 5 percent) and arrival of highly effective teachers (top 5 percent).  As a result, they conclude that “value-added metrics successfully disentangle teachers’ impacts from the many other influences on student progress.”

In response to the criticism that teacher impacts on student test scores are inconsistent over time, the authors show that “although VA measures fluctuate across years, they are sufficiently stable” that selecting teachers even based on a few years of data would have substantial impacts on student outcomes, such as earnings.

The study’s policy implications are addressed by Douglas Harris of the University of Wisconsin-Madison;  Chris Cerf, acting commissioner of education for the State of New Jersey with Peter Shulman of the New Jersey Department of Education;  Dale Ballou of Vanderbilt University;  and Eric A. Hanushek of Stanford University’s Hoover Institution.  In particular, the discussants point to the importance of finding policies that raise the quality of teaching.  The political difficulties of implementing actual policies that reflect value-added evidence are noted.  Hanushek observes, nonetheless, that the costs of retaining ineffective teachers “are large enough that failing to address them is simply inexcusable.”

About the Authors

Raj Chetty is Professor of Economics at Harvard University.  John N. Friedman is Assistant Professor of Public Policy at Harvard Kennedy School.  Jonah E. Rockoff is Associate Professor of Business at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Business.  For further information on the study, see http://obs.rc.fas.harvard.edu/chetty/value_added.html.  The authors can be reached for interviews via the contact information above.

About Education Next

Education Next is a scholarly journal published by the Hoover Institution that is committed to looking at hard facts about school reform.  Other sponsoring institutions are the Harvard Program on Education Policy and Governance, part of the Taubman Center for State and Local Government at the Harvard Kennedy School, and the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation.  For more information about Education Next, please visit:  www.educationnext.org.

For more information on the Program on Education Policy and Governance contact Antonio Wendland at 617-495-7976, pepg_administrator@hks.harvard.edu, or visit www.hks.harvard.edu/pepg/.

As a policy wonk, I push for high academic expectations for all students. I know that American competitiveness requires excellence in subjects such as math and science that our schools do not teach very well. As a father, however, I find that what matters most to me is that my daughters are happy in school.

In Montgomery County, Maryland, where I live, academic expectations are extremely high. Our school district aims to teach math, for example, in a rigorous way. I appreciate this goal, but to date “increased rigor” has primarily meant that some students skip grade-level math classes and enroll in classes meant for older kids. Basic skills that are taught and reinforced in the grades being skipped are often given short shrift. In 2nd grade, my daughter brought home worksheets on probability before she had any real understanding of the concept, or even a strong foundation in simple division. Her frustration with probability, and consequently math, grew as we substituted times-table drills for play dates. Last year, to my horror, she said that she hated math. This year, which has included an increased focus on math facts and an inspiring teacher, math has become her favorite subject.

With my policy hat on, I know that a teacher’s academic background is critical. As a father, however, I want a teacher who manages a calm, safe, and fun classroom, and who loves children. One of the best teachers my children have had is our regular babysitter, who speaks English as a second language and never graduated from high school.

Of course, there are some gems at our school (thank you, Ms. Bederman, now retired) who are knowledgeable, skilled, passionate about learning, and passionate about children. To a father, Ms. Bederman was a gift from heaven; to a policy wonk she is the Holy Grail. Why can’t we identify and train more of these treasures? Why wasn’t every teacher in our school crowded into Ms. Bederman’s classroom to witness her magic? Why didn’t the principal require every teacher to crowd into her classroom?

As a policy wonk, I believe that student learning flourishes in classrooms that include students with a wide range of abilities and backgrounds. As a father, I want my daughters to appreciate diversity of all types. But I also want them to be surrounded by children who come to school ready and eager to learn. These goals come into conflict when some students are constantly disruptive; the policy wonk must preach patience to the father who wants the class disrupter out.

My daughter’s kindergarten class included a troubled boy who was going through the foster-care placement process. He is exactly the type of child that can benefit most from an excellent education, but he regularly disrupted class. One day, when I was in the classroom, the teacher—talented, but inexperienced—spent more than half of her time trying to keep this boy on task.

I feel for children like him; my company works with schools and districts to improve outcomes for these kids. But I was angry. The other children were clearly uncomfortable. His disruptions reduced learning time for my daughter, and seemed to steal some of her innocence and excitement about school.

The tension between my understanding of good education policy—driven by a deep commitment to equity and the belief that an outstanding education can transform lives, and this country—and what is right for my daughters makes me both a better policy wonk and a better father. The tension also illustrates why school reform is so difficult.

Scott Joftus is the president of the education-consulting firm Cross & Joftus.

On the whole, his piece is lightweight, trying to make a Santa Cruz mountain out of facts known to the ground squirrels swarming the university’s foothills.  (When at the Hoover Institution, located on the Stanford camps, those hills and squirrels are among my favorite companions.)

Auletta worries that Hennessy is too assiduous at harvesting the wealth of Silicon Valley entrepreneurs. Is science and engineering taking over?  Are the liberal arts about to be abandoned?  Are Stanford students too happy?  Where are the demonstrators? As if those are today’s raging issues in higher education!

Auletta rightly questions Hennessey’s effort to build a new, science-oriented campus in New York, but he then turns around and attacks the president for retracting the proposal when doubled crossed by the New York politicians. The idea of a second campus on the East Coast was always a distraction. It poured a hefty share of Stanford’s wealth into bricks-and-mortar thousands of miles from home. Why not take that same pot of gold—or, more exactly, a handful or two out of that pot—and start building a digital university for the ages?

Apparently, that much better idea is now on the agenda. After Hennessy’s New York real estate deal fell through, Hennessey, always better at thinking outside the box than most of his peers, seems to have come to the realization that digital learning could disrupt even the nation’s greatest universities. Stanford is already offering an online high school diploma to any young person the school admits no matter where they live.  That it is placing tight limits on enrollment only makes sense until its model is fully designed and tested.  But once affluent families begin comparing the strength and quality of a Stanford diploma with those offered by many local high schools, there could be a vast demand for its product.

And it may not be just high school that Stanford could reshape.  Auletta tells us that Hennessy’s “experience in Silicon Valley proves that digital disruption is normal, and even desirable…. Students in an online university could take any course whenever they wanted, and wouldn’t have to waste time bicycling to class.”  Apparently, Stanford’s president is mulling all this over during his sabbatical.

Like a good adventure story, Auletta’s tale gets better and better as it goes along and reads best of all at the very end.

- Paul E. Peterson

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

We are informed that  “when possible, people simply prefer to do this in person with a live human being standing in front of them.”

Yglesias concludes that “affluent American parents will continue to foot the bill for their kids to get schooled in person” rather than making use of online learning.

His analysis would be totally persuasive were it not for the fact that  97 percent of all people who do yoga do their exercises at home, either with or without yoga videos.  When possible, people stretch and bend and twist at home, because they do not like other folks staring at them when they are contorting their bodies in a variety of embarrassing ways, especially when their yoga skills are under-developed.  A tiny percentage—no more than 3 percent—prefer to have someone coaxing them along or like to snigger at their less proficient classmates.

From these facts it can be concluded that Americans—both affluent and otherwise—will be insisting that their children take their high school classes online so that they are not bullied or embarrassed in the classroom when they are not as skilled as others.

You may wonder where I got my data. I picked it up from the same place Yglesias got his info—the distant corners of nowhere.

-Paul E. Peterson

In 2005, Education Next sent Mark Zanger, a restaurant critic, to Boston schools to report on the state of school lunches. Read “What’s For Lunch” to get the inside scoop. Ron Haskins wrote about the federal school lunch program in “The School Lunch Lobby: A charmed federal program that no longer just feeds the hungry,” in the same issue.

I will not pretend to be an expert on teaching, but as a school board member I confess to deep and continuous agita over the system’s inability to do the right thing; rather, its amazing ability to deny reality, which is the prime directive for institutional entropy. (It is not just the reality of good research that is ignored, it’s the reality of crumbling schools and generations of untaught children.) I had a veteran teacher pull me aside one day and almost shout, “They keep giving new names to the same tired and unworkable ideas. Why don’t they just let me teach!”

Since reading E.D. Hirsch’s Cultural Literacy, celebrating its 25th year in print, I have watched American educators do somersaults to avoid the obvious need for rigorous, fact-based curricula. In fact, the two denials—the effectiveness of direct instruction and the value of content knowledge—go hand in hand and together probably account for most of the national educational malaise. You name it—Clark et al say it goes under various names, “including discovery learning, problem-based learning, inquiry learning, experiential learning, and constructivist learning”—our educators are locked on to bad ideas and ineffective pedagogies like cruise missiles to their preprogrammed targets. “Each new set of advocates for unguided approaches seemed unaware of, or uninterested in,” write Clark et al, “previous evidence that unguided approaches had not been validated.”

As my friend Barry Garelick writes about the new Brookings report on the effectiveness of instructional materials:

The report makes this common sense observation and recommendation: “There is strong evidence that the choice of instructional materials has large effects on student learning-effects that rival in size those that are associated with differences in teacher effectiveness. But whereas improving teacher quality through changes in the preparation and professional development of teachers and the human resources policies surrounding their employment is challenging, expensive, and time-consuming, making better choices among available instructional materials should be relatively easy, inexpensive, and quick.”

That makes so much sense that it will either be ignored, or the snake oil purveyors who sell Investigations, EM, CMP and the like will claim “We agree! And our products do just that!”

One need not be that cynical about the situation, but willful ignorance is a phrase that often comes to mind when watching such “common sense” prescriptions for change go unheeded. Obviously, those who have been schooled in such notions as discovery learning and are getting paid for using it have little incentive to read the research, much less tell their colleagues about it. And, by the same token, there is no incentive for school boards to change when the money keeps rolling. My colleagues on my school board are education preservers not reformers. Even though their acts serve to reinforce failure, their first instinct is to dig in, to resist change. Why? Well, why not? Over lunch the other day, a board colleague ticked off her list of ideas for creating a good school, including creating a “culture of high expectations.” When I asked, how you go about doing that, she was stumped; rather, she didn’t like the answer, which was to hold teachers and administrators accountable for student performance. She preferred, “It’s the parents.” And so it goes.

Even when angry citizens come to the board, as several did a few weeks ago, their complaints seem to fall on deaf ears.

“We hear all the time, `Don’t rock the boat,’” said one of those complaining parents. “But I can tell you, we are strapped in, and the boat has turned over.” The problem: the kids are drowning, but not the educators.

Complacency is how Hirsch, who tends to see the problem as “bad ideas” rather than “bad people,” explained the problem in an essay two years ago in the New York Review of Books:

The root cause of [the public education] decline, starting in the 1960s, was a by-then-decades-old complacency on the part of school leaders and in the nation at large. By the early twentieth century worries about the stability of the Republic had subsided, and by the 1930s, under the enduring influence of European Romanticism, educational leaders had begun to convert the community-centered school of the nineteenth century to the child- centered school of the twentieth-a process that was complete by 1950. The chief tenet of the child-centered school was that no bookish curriculum was to be set out in advance. Rather, learning was to arise naturally out of activities, projects, and daily experience.

Paying little attention to the results of the “anti-bookish, child-centered viewpoint,” as Hirsch writes, the nation slept while it experienced “a steep decline in twelfth-grade academic achievement between 1962 and 1980, after which, despite vigorous reform efforts, reading and math scores on the federally sponsored National Assessment of Educational Progress have hardly changed.”

And now, as Hirsch warns, we are trying to yoke the child-centered anti-intellectualism to our new testing and accountability fetish. “This contradictory and self-defeating situation,” says Hirsch, has lead to even worse practices:

…drills in how-to skills that will prepare [students] to pass tests. Many of the weekly hours that are assigned to language arts in the early grades are now being devoted to practicing reading strategies such as `questioning the author’ and `finding the main idea.’ [Diane] Ravitch describes in detail a highly touted reform in New York City and San Diego called `balanced literacy,’ which requires students to spend a lot of time practicing such reading strategies but does not prescribe any particular books, poems, and essays to practice them on.

The good news is that we have two trends that are gaining ground on the monster that is our education system:  a renewed appreciation for content (and that is not, as some would have it, a sudden love of “nonfiction”) and the new market mechanisms (i.e. choice) that incentivize innovation and renewal. If we can keep our eyes on the prize of the former, we will sort out the problems of dumbed-down instructional materials and vapid instructional techniques.

As for the latter, David Brooks set out our choices nicely the other day in an essay about our “two economies.”   One economy is that of the free market, which Brooks says has a “creative dynamism” that is both “astounding and a little terrifying. Over the past five years, amid turmoil and uncertainty, American businesses have shed employees, becoming more efficient and more productive. According to The Wall Street Journal on Monday, the revenue per employee at S.&P. 500 companies increased from $378,000 in 2007 to $420,000 in 2011.”

Public education, for the most part, still lives in the second economy: “a large sector… that does not face… global competition.” Its leaders do “try to improve productivity and use new technologies, but they are not compelled by do-or-die pressure, and their pace of change is slower.” Why?  Because there are no widespread threatened layoffs. No guillotine focusing the mind.

Brooks understands the “conflicts between those who live in Economy I and those who live in Economy II” and how “choice-oriented education reforms” might terrify those clinging to their monopoly guarantees as they face the prospect of an education sector “as dynamic, creative and efficient as Economy I.”

Though most of the public education sector still does not see the “urgent need to understand the interplay between the two different sectors,” there are signs that even in education, increasing numbers of leaders of Economy II are finding ways to make our schools not only responsive to good ideas but to the educational needs of their children. And they are not afraid to light fires of accountability—no more teacher tenure, more value-added evaluations—that mimic the incentives that characterize Economy I. Once parents are untethered from the overturned boat, those not wanting to rock it, like my board colleagues, will understand that they better stop worrying about the weather and start doing what’s needed to stay afloat. Shouted the coxswain: Row!

-Peter Meyer

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

The questions addressed by the panel included:

Is digital learning education’s latest fad or its future?
What fundamental changes to the ways we fund, staff, and govern American schools are necessary to fulfill the technology’s potential?
Will policy tweaks suffice or do we need a total system overhaul—and a big change in the reform priorities that can bring this about?
Who will resist—and do their objections have merit?

If you missed the event, you can watch it above or read more about it here.

For more on this topic from Ed Next, please see

“Bright Spots Shine in Blended, Online Learning,” by Michael Horn

“Can Khan Move the Bell Curve to the Right?” by June Kronholz

“The Flipped Classroom,” by Bill Tucker

Greene derides our goal of identifying “best practices,” that is, the policies and practices that have enabled the students in an increasing number of countries to surpass student achievement in the United States.  He seems to suggest that is a fool’s errand, undertaken only by industry gurus like Tom Peters and Jim Collins in the business community.  It is obvious to him that this is a form of “quackery.”  The evidence he offers is that some of the firms that Peters and Collins identified as top performers subsequently failed.

Firms rise and fall.  Only a handful of the firms in the Dow Jones Industrial Average fifty years ago are in it today, and many don’t exist any more.  But that hardly means they were not once great or that firms today have nothing to learn from other firms that are eating their lunch now in the same market they serve.

Quite the contrary.  When the Japanese attacked American manufacturers in the late 1970s, many American firms went out of business in the face of superior manufacturing methods.  Most of those that survived did so, in part, because they took their challengers seriously and studied their methods in detail.  They studied their “best practices.”  They did it with industrial benchmarking, the method we have used.  I would like Jay Greene to explain to all of us why this method, which proved so successful in helping to restore American manufacturing to its leading position in the 1980s, should be derided when it comes to restoring American education to its former world-leading status.

In our book, we point out that the research methods, most valued by American researchers, which involve the random assignment of research subjects to “treatments,” cannot be used when researching entire national education systems, because it is not possible to randomly assign national populations to the national education systems of other countries.  Oh yes they can, says Greene, and he points to the work of Karthik Muralidharan and Michael Kremer.  Well, we engaged Muralidharan to accompany us on our three-week-long benchmarking research in India and I know his work well.  He is best known for his own research in that country, in which he looks at the widespread implementation of a program to provide a form of private schools to the children of impoverished rural farmers.  It turns out that these schools are more effective than the public schools they replace, partly because the teachers in the public schools rarely show up for work and partly because more teachers can be purchased for the same amount of money.  Interesting, but irrelevant to the argument at hand.  No one in his right mind would characterize this program as an entire national education system.  Not for the first time, Greene grossly mischaracterized the evidence in order to make his point.

Greene not only attacks the methods used in the chapters in each country in our book, but he then goes on to announce that the conclusions drawn in the last chapter have almost nothing to do with the preceding chapters.  He offers two pieces of evidence for this outrageous assertion.

One is  Kai-ming Cheng’s observation in his chapter on the Shanghai system in which he describes how a certain number of slots in key schools in Shanghai are set aside for students from outside that schools’ enrollment area who can choose that school if they wish.  But I learned from our own benchmarking in Shanghai that those slots are sold to parents and the poorer their children’s performance in their sending school, the more the receiving school charges.  This system was not designed to facilitate school choice nor was it designed to improve student performance.  It was designed to enable formerly elite schools serving members of the Communist Party to stay afloat as they are decommissioned as key elite schools.  That is why I did not include it in my list of strategies in wide use in countries that are outperforming the United States.

The other piece of evidence that Greene offers for his assertion that my analysis and summary ignored the work of the chapter authors in the book is that I ignored what they had to say about decentralization of decision-making in these systems.  But that is not true.  What I describe is a process that many others have observed.  The top-performing countries have centralized the setting of goals, the setting of standards and the measurement of student achievement, and relaxed their control over the way schools choose to get their students to high standards.  Over time, as they have succeeded in raising the quality of their teaching forces, they have started to relax the degree to which they specify their standards and curriculum, moving from a bureaucratic form of accountability to a more professional form of accountability.  This whole process cannot be accurately described as a process of either centralization or decentralization.  It is much more accurately described as a process of professionalizing the teaching force, a point that is made repeatedly in Surpassing Shanghai.

If Greene was right, and I ignored the chapter authors’ presentation of the facts when writing my analysis and summary, you could reasonably expect that they would be, to say the least, annoyed.  But, in fact, I did what any editor and summarizer could be expected to do: I shared my draft analysis and summary of the chapters with my fellow chapter authors, who seemed, on the whole, quite satisfied that I captured the essence of their findings.

After denouncing the “best practices” identified by the authors of Surpassing Shanghai on the basis of the methods we used, Greene appears to realize that his war on “best practices” has led him to inadvertently attack the kinds of studies done by people whose policy prescriptions he prefers, like Ludger Woessmann and Eric Hanushek, who have done well-regarded statistical analyses of survey data from OECD-PISA and other sources.  We have, by the way, a high regard for these researchers and relied on them in our own work.  So he retreats from his blanket condemnation of “best practices” study methods to exempt quantitative studies.  But, then, to my astonishment, he even announces that case studies are OK if they are “well-constructed.”  This is after directing what he takes to be withering fire at our case studies.  He mentions in particular Charles Glenn’s case studies, describing them as “well constructed,” but never explains what distinguishes “well-constructed” case studies from ours, which—apparently—are not.

So, in the end, all the methods we used meet with Jay Greene’s approval.  It is only our conclusions that are odious.  He is left with a very weak reed indeed to which he then clutches.  The problem with the best practices approach, he says at the end of his review, is that, “by avoiding variation in the dependent variable,” it prevents any scientific identification of causation.  What?  Our aim was to look at the top-performing countries to find out how they are doing it.  If we strip the highfalutin language from Greene’s assertion, he is saying that we cannot possibly figure out what is causing their top performance, because all or most of the factors we think might be causing it might be found in low-performing countries, too, and, if we haven’t looked at them, we have no way of knowing that.

But Jay Greene evidently did not read the introductory chapter of our book, in which we lay out our method, or the concluding chapters, in which we conduct the analysis promised in the first chapter.  The strategy we used was to compare the top performing countries to the United States.  What we found was that the top-performing countries, as different from one another as Finland and Shanghai, Canada and Japan, shared a set of principles that underlie their reform strategies with each other, but not with the United States, and the United States is pursuing a set of strategies bases on principles that are not found in the countries that are doing the best job of education their students.  Greene, you will note, failed to tell his readers that.

Why?  It is not because he does not like our methods.  His colleagues are using the same methods.  It is not because there is “no variation in our dependent variable.”  There is variation in our dependent variable; we are comparing countries in which student achievement (the dependent variable) is high, to one, the United States, in which it is mediocre.

It is because he does not like our results.  We found that the principles of school reform he has been advocating don’t work.  They are not being used in the countries with the top performance, and the country that has been most influenced by his message turns out to be a mediocre performer.  That is a very important finding.  And it is apparently a little difficult to take.

-Marc Tucker

Marc  Tucker is the President and Chief Executive Officer of the National Center on Education and the Economy.

NB: Jay Greene has responded to this response here.

The fundamental problem is that “best practices” analyses lack variation in the dependent variable – they only examine in detail successful organizations or countries – so they can’t link particular practices or policies to success.  To make such a link they would need to observe that the presence or absence of those practices or policies is related to the presence or absence of success.  If they only look at successful organizations, then they can’t know whether they would have been less (or more) successful had they not adopted a particular policy or practice.  They also do not rule out the possibility that others who have adopted the “best practices” do so without success.

But Tucker claims that he didn’t only look at successful countries because “the strategy we used was to compare the top performing countries to the United States.”  Making (mostly implicit) comparisons to the United States does not solve the problem.  Again, without considering a broad spectrum of successful and unsuccessful countries it is impossible to attribute the superior performance of another country to any particular policy or practice.

There are many things that are different between the U.S. and Shanghai, Finland, Japan, Singapore, and Canada.  How can Tucker or anyone know which differences caused the superior performance?  Tucker just picks and chooses the policies and practices he favors, ignoring that his recommendations are not even universally present in the handful of successful places he examines.  And by limiting variation in the dependent variable to exclude places that perform worse than the United States, Tucker is unable to discover whether lower-achieving countries are also employing the practices and policies he recommends, which would debunk his claim of having found the formula for success.

I’m far from being the only one who is aware of the problems with Tucker’s method of “selection on the dependent variable.”  Virtually every introductory text on research design warns readers not to do as Tucker and other best practices enthusiasts do when they focus only on successful organizations or countries.  For example, Gary King, Robert Keohane, and Sidney Verba, in their classic Designing Social Inquiry, make the point emphatically:

That brings us to a basic and obvious rule: selection should allow for the possibility of at least some variation on the dependent variable. This point seems so obvious that we would think it hardly needs to be mentioned. How can we explain variations on a dependent variable if it does not vary? Unfortunately, the literature is full of work that makes just this mistake of failing to let the dependent variable vary…. The cases of extreme selection bias—where there is by design no variation on the dependent variable—are easy to deal with: avoid them! We will not learn about causal effects from them.

In my review I recommend analyses of international policies and practices done by Eric Hanushek, Ludger Woessmann, Martin West, Michael Kremer, Karthik Muralidharan and Charles Glenn because, unlike Tucker and other “best practices” gurus,  they avoid the error of selection on the dependent variable by considering the full range of outcomes, not just focusing on successful places.

Tucker is apparently unable to understand the difference between what he and these reputable researchers do when he mistakenly declares:

Greene appears to realize that his war on “best practices” has led him to inadvertently attack the kinds of studies done by people whose policy prescriptions he prefers, like Ludger Woessmann and Eric Hanushek, who have done well-regarded statistical analyses of survey data from OECD-PISA and other sources…. So, in the end, all the methods we used meet with Jay Greene’s approval.  It is only our conclusions that are odious.

Tucker’s inability to understand the difference and his dismissal of the selection on dependent variable criticism as “highfalutin language” is just plain embarrassing.  It’s not so much embarrassing for him, since he appears to be proud in his ignorance, as it is embarrassing for the Gates Foundation that pays for his work and the supporters of Common Core who rely on Tucker as one of their principal architects and advocates.

There is a cynical habit in the education policy world to fund and promote analyses that people know or should know to be faulty as long as those analyses advance their cause.  Shaming those who engage in this cynical practice by revealing the obvious flaws in Tucker’s work was the purpose of my review.  I fear that it will not end the use of “best practices” in education, but I hope it will exact a price for those who engage in such hucksterism.

-Jay Greene

Is digital learning education’s latest fad or its future? What fundamental changes to the ways we fund, staff, and govern American schools are necessary to fulfill the technology’s potential? Will policy tweaks suffice or do we need a total system overhaul—and a big change in the reform priorities that can bring this about? Who will resist—and do their objections have merit? Fordham is bringing together experts on all aspects of education policy—from governance to finance to human capital—to examine how policymakers can make digital learning a transformative tool to improve American education…and weigh the dangers that lie ahead.

More information on the events and the panelists can be found here.

Most other distinctions are grayer today, involving degrees of difference about things like teacher evaluations, “common core” standards, and just how much discretion Washington should return to states.

Short of plain goofiness (as in “abolish the Department of Education”), vouchers are where bright lines get drawn. The conventional explanation is that Democrats don’t dare cross this threshold lest the teacher unions (already antsy about charters, merit pay, test-based accountability, etc.) forsake their traditional party—or simply sit on their hands come campaign season and election day, while Republicans tend to take the side of parents and don’t much care what the unions—or other parts of the education establishment—think or do.

It feels and acts like a political line—witness the political football known as the D.C. voucher program—yet not so many years ago this was primarily a split over platform language, and party positioning because vouchers were all but nonexistent. (For ages, Milwaukee, Cleveland, and a few wee towns in northern New England were the only places you could actually find any.)

That’s changed—and continues to. A few weeks back, one could already point to Indiana and Ohio, both with statewide programs. The D.C. program is back, at least for now. Louisiana moved the other day. And then there are kissing-cousin programs like tax credit scholarships in Arizona, Florida, Pennsylvania, and beyond.

Vouchers and their cousins are real today, thanks partly to political realignments, partly to the Zelman decision (which took the Establishment Clause issue off the table as far as the feds are concerned), and partly to mounting dismay over the performance of public schools, as well as the meager returns from other education reforms of the past two decades.

As vouchers have become real, however, the political picture has grown more complex. Eight newish factors are worth noting:

First, while the U.S. constitution is no longer a deal-breaker, some thirty-eight states have sundry provisions in their own constitutions that make it difficult or impossible to aid private schools and/or religious institutions and/or any sort of education program that isn’t “free and uniform.” (This is what killed the Florida “opportunity scholarship program” in that state’s Supreme Court in 2006.) Hence there’s a practical limit to how far vouchers can really spread.

Second, as religion has loomed larger as a political issue, evangelicals (most often Republicans) are keener and keener for it to play a role in public policy, including religious education and church-affiliated schools, while secularists (more apt to be Democrats) are even more resistant to public support for such schools.

Third, other features of private schools—that have nothing to do with unions—also cause palpitations among liberals (most often Democrats), such as selectivity in the admissions office (and the risk of “exclusion” of poor or disabled or minority or other “diverse” kids). Such anxieties may not cause them to keep their own daughters and sons out of such schools but a double standard often comes into play where “public policy” is concerned.

Fourth, even as the pro-voucher team has picked up a handful (but only that) of influential Democrats, a lot of state and local Republicans have grown somewhat equivocal about school choice—charters, vouchers, inter-district transfers, and more. Their own suburban constituents, whether enrolled in public or private schools, are averse to welcoming many of those kids into their classrooms, and their proud suburban school systems don’t much want to lose their own pupils, either.

Fifth, what was for decades the strongest lobby in favor of vouchers (and tuition tax credits and more), namely the Roman Catholic Church, is today neither nearly as strong as it once was nor nearly as committed to revitalizing its own schools. It seems to have lost most of the wind from its sails.

Sixth, private schools in general are queasy about government entanglements and rules, worried about “accountability” requirements, alarmed at the prospect of forfeiting their distinctiveness, fretful about losing control of their standards and admission processes, leery of disclosing comparable data on their own educational effectiveness, and, sometimes, legitimately unsure that they really can do a good job with those kids. Nor has American private education shown much entrepreneurial inclination to grow to accommodate greater demand.

Seventh, with state and local budgets tight, the claim that vouchers save taxpayer money over the long run is met with incredulity by school systems that can only see revenue disappearing along with headcount. And the argument that vouchers will be a needless and, for the taxpayer, costly windfall for middle-class families whose children already attend private schools is not easy to refute. (Of course, a carefully designed program may aid only “new” students.)

Eighth, and finally, the word “private” has grown even more suspect in American education circles today than it was yesterday. “Privatization” has sometimes gone badly. Some private operators of charter schools are greedy, self-absorbed, and uninterested in educational quality. (Likewise for private SES providers and such.) Early evaluations have yielded mixed results for privately operated “cyber schools.” Private school (and college) tuitions keep rising without evidence of improved results. And in era of transparency and accountability, the reluctance of private educational institutions to disclose key information about themselves, their students, their academic gains, and their finances—even to private organizations such as GreatSchools.net—has made them at least slightly suspect. (Why are they so secretive?)

I’m still heartily in favor of more vouchers, provided that the program is structured with an eye toward serving the neediest kids first and making participating schools reasonably accountable for their results. I do expect the momentum in this direction to continue. But I don’t expect it to accelerate. And that’s not just because of hostility from Messrs. Obama and Duncan.

-Chester E. Finn, Jr.

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

The program took effect only in July 2011, and the Utah legislature is still tinkering with the specifics of the law, so it is too soon to draw firm conclusions.  However, early signs indicate that choices between online and brick-and-mortar courses will be limited to offerings within the student’s home school district.  Statewide competition may well be more the exception than the rule.

The program is designed to grow at a measured pace.  In the current school year, students may take 2 of their 8 credits online, with that number increasing by one each year until, in 2016-17, students may take three-fourths of their coursework online.  Such measured step-taking is not to be faulted, as it takes time to develop high-quality content and to put systems in place.  Still, it will be at least 5 years before the full impact of the Utah initiative can be assessed.

Keep in mind that digital learning is still but a speck on the public school horizon.  As of October 2011, nearly 550,000 pupils were enrolled in public schools in Utah.  But only one percent of that number–less than 6,000 students—has received credit for courses taken from the state-run Utah Electronic High School.  A harbinger of what may happen under the new program, course-taking at Electronic High has been hampered by state rules. To be eligible, students must be homeschoolers or seeking credit recovery (for courses which they failed or from which they withdrew)—unless guidance counselors at their home schools agree to include online courses in their education plan.

In principle, the new law opens the door to many more statewide providers in addition to Electronic High.  But in the first year of its operation, fewer than 200 students were enrolled in an online course offered by a provider outside their home districts.  Applications from close to one hundred additional students were rejected, mainly on the grounds that the online course had already begun or the student was trying to speed up their high school graduation by adding courses to the eight regarded as full-time load.

While any high school student is eligible to take two courses online, students enrolled in online courses may not earn more credits than those earned by students who take a full course load at a district school—unless they plan to graduate early according to their plan of study, which must be approved by the student’s guidance counselor. That is an unduly restrictive rule.  One of the most promising features of online education is that it can allow students to move forward at their own pace, not in lock-step with all the other students.  By expecting courses to start at the beginning of the school year, and by not allowing students to enroll in extra courses, Utah has placed an unnecessary barrier on the innovation. And by making district-paid guidance counselors the gatekeepers to digital education, the state has set up a barrier to student choice, even though the law says that guidance counselors cannot restrict the student’s selection of online courses.

Funding levels also seem to be designed more for the purpose of protecting school district revenues than encouraging the creation of exciting courses. Per pupil funding at Utah district schools is hardly generous—just short of $8,000 a year (as compared to a national average that runs close to $12,000 annually).  State funding for students attending charter schools is just 70 percent of the district level—less than $5700 per pupil annually. Online courses have been funded at about the charter school level—$726 per full-year course or $363 per term.  But if an amendment recently passed by the state legislature is signed into law by the governor, only language arts, math and science courses will be funded close to this level (at $350 per term).

Lighter-weight courses—health, fitness for life, computer literacy, financial literacy, and driver’s education—will be funded at $200 per term. That would be reasonable if academic courses were funded at a higher rate and the same rule were applied to brick-and-mortar schools.   But when funding for lightweight digital courses is tightened to the extreme, it removes the ballast that digital providers need to mount the poorly funded heavyweight courses. The point is non-trivial, as lightweight courses are among the most popular online options. Many students see little point in wasting their time in classrooms, day after day, just to learn how to balance their checkbook or take care of their acne.  The highly regarded Florida Virtual School relies on the revenue from such courses to provide expensive, high-quality academic courses. That option is being taken off the table in Utah.

It is nice that districts will receive about 25 percent of the revenue for courses that are being offered online instead of at their schools, as they have fixed costs that are ongoing regardless of whether a student takes 6 or 8 courses from them.  And one understands that states, strapped for cash, must search for ways to save their dollars.  But starving the digital baby is hardly the way to motivate the design of high-quality courses.

The demand for online learning is surely higher than indicated by the fact that only 200 students completed an online course outside their district in the first year of the new program. Within school districts themselves, online course enrollments are already over 5,000, a sign that students are being channeled into home-district offerings.  If this trend continues, local districts will be offering online courses to their own students—and hardly anyone else. A statewide market needs statewide promotion of alternatives.  But the risk is great that districts will implicitly sign a no-raid pact by not advertising their wares outside their own district. That way each district captures its traditional share of the revenue. It will take an energetic student or parent to secure that out-of-district placement, if guidance counselors, while obeying the letter of the law, nonetheless steer students toward the home-grown option.

One can only speculate at this early stage.  But there seems to be a shadow falling between the Utah rhetoric and the Utah reality.  On the surface, the Utah digital legislation is pathbreaking.  It seems to create multiple new choices for students and families.  But if online learning is going to be of the district, by the district, and for the district, the innovation is unlikely to be transformative.

-Paul E. Peterson

…curtail teacher tenure protection, tie instructors’ compensation and superintendents’ job security to student performance; shift hiring and firing power from school boards to superintendents; create new paths to open charter schools; and establish a statewide program that uses the public-school financing formula to pay private-school tuition for certain low-income students.

It was anything but a cakewalk for the Jindal reform package, as teachers descended on the Capitol to fight the bills and Democrats charged the second-term Republican governor with strong-arm tactics reminiscent of former political tough guys Huey Long and Edwin Edwards. “I make no apologies for having a sense of urgency,” said Jindal. “I was elected to help lead our state. I was not elected just to hold an office.”

Even Diane Ravitch made a trip to Louisiana to cheer-lead the anti-reform troops. As she recounts on her Bridging Differences blog, headlined “Bobby Jindal v. Public Education,” the Louisiana governor is…

….in a race to the bottom with other Republican governors to see who can move fastest to destroy the underpinnings of public education and to instill fear in the hearts of teachers. It’s hard to say which of them is worst: Jindal, Scott Walker of Wisconsin, Mitch Daniels of Indiana, Rick Scott of Florida, John Kasich of Ohio, or …. There are so many contenders for the title, it’s hard to name them all. They all seem to be working from the same playbook: Remove any professionalism and sense of security from teachers; expand privatization as rapidly as possible, through charters and vouchers; intensify reliance on high-stakes tests to evaluate teachers and schools; tighten the regulations on public schools while deregulating the privately managed charter schools. Keep up the attack on many fronts, to confuse the supporters of public education.

Thankfully, an increasing number of parents and voters are not fooled by the rhetoric. And, tellingly, Ravitch leaves off the list of bad guy governors Andrew Cuomo of New York, a Democrat, who has proven himself a champion of education reform. Though there have been many fits-and-starts in the reform movement over the last decade, despite Ravitch’s attempt to portray it as a right-wing conspiracy, one of the more noticeable themes has been that movement’s bipartisanship.  Love it or hate it, No Child Left Behind was a bold cross-the-aisle reform hug and there has been a long line of Democratic education reformers, from Indianapolis mayor Bart Peterson and Chicago mayor Richard Daley, to Democrats for Education Reform to Chris Cerf, the New Jersey education chief who worked in the Clinton administration, to President Obama and Arne Duncan. Adding Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa to the list and, as Lyndsey Layton reported last month in the Washington Post, you have “several Democratic mayors in cities across the country—Chicago, Cleveland, Newark and Boston, among them—who are challenging teachers unions in ways that seemed inconceivable just a decade ago.

There is much to work out on the implementation front in Louisiana (and the AP is reporting many battles to come over vouchers), but Jindal’s new superintendent, a Teach for America veteran who cut his reform teeth under Joel Klein in New York (see my story on White here), is well-prepped for the challenge.

Says White,

This is a momentous day for the families of Louisiana…. All students deserve a fair chance in life, and that begins with the opportunity to attend a high-quality school. These policy changes are aligned with that central belief, and Gov. Jindal and state lawmakers have demonstrated a clear commitment to prioritize the educational rights of Louisiana’s next generation above all else.
Congratulations to Louisiana.

-Peter Meyer

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

Behind the Headline
The Newsroom’s View of Education Reform
Education Next | Summer 2012

In the Wall Street Journal, Stephanie Banchero looks at Louisiana’s newly minted statewide voucher program and at the growth of vouchers nationwide. In an Ed Next article that was posted last week, Mike Petrilli wondered why the national media was ignoring school vouchers.

This Fordham Foundation documentary  provides a look at the challenges and successes of a rural Appalachian charter school in southeast Ohio, the Sciotoville Community School.

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

A couple of headlines from the meta-analysis are worth spotlighting here.

First, the work shines some questions on Benjamin Bloom’s analysis from a couple decades ago that suggested that well-designed human tutoring could deliver around a whopping 2 standard deviations worth of learning performance. VanLehn’s paper suggests that the effect size seems to be more around 0.79 than 2 standard deviations—still, nothing at which to scoff.

Second, as Saxberg details, VanLehn does some important work in splitting up the types of tutoring research by “grain size”: answer-based tutors, step-based tutors, substep-based tutors, and human tutoring, as well as by the type of student behavior, which ranges from passive to active to constructive and finally interactive.  Stunningly, the typical answer-based tutoring systems average an effect size of around 0.35 standard deviations, and all three of the step-based, substep-based, and human tutoring cluster around an effect size of 0.75 standard deviations. In other words, some machine-based tutoring is approaching the effect size of real human tutoring—and there is less variation than one might expect as the grain size of tutoring becomes finer. This finding is a startling observation.

Saxberg makes some great points on the cautions and potential of this research, as well as the questions we should be continuing to ask. I just want to talk briefly about this from the angle of disruptive innovation and think about how we might implement these tutoring solutions at scale.

As Saxberg writes, great human tutoring is wonderful if you can get it, but simply isn’t practical at scale. We know that the vast majority of learners that could benefit from tutoring simply don’t have access to any at all (some have suggested this number approaches 80 percent of students). This means that there is a lot of nonconsumption in the tutoring space to launch disruptive innovations that utilize the power of machine tutoring at a much lower price point in a manner far more accessible and convenient than are human tutors to millions or even billions around the world. The wrong tactic for entrepreneurs debuting these solutions is to compete head on against existing solutions where the performance won’t be as good. They should instead focus on where the advantages of convenience, accessibility, simplicity, and affordability are valued and more important than absolute efficacy.

By competing against nonconsumption where this is the case, for those who suggest that the machine-based tutoring isn’t as good as the best that’s out there, that will be the answer to the wrong question, as it will be way better than the alternative—nothing at all. And as the research illustrates, it’s a good deal better than that even at this point.

What’s predictable about technology is that it improves constantly year over year, so what at one point isn’t good enough for most, over time will actually overshoot what many need from it. The lessons from disruptive innovation suggest that these technologies may never be as good as the absolute best human tutor (for example, the raw capacity of vacuum tubes still outpaces that of transistors, which disrupted the vacuum tubes in the consumer electronics market), but they will be plenty close. And as they improve, the machine-based tutoring technologies will become good enough for those who could or would have paid full price or changed up their schedule to connect with a human tutor, such that machine-based tutoring may well be the norm for many of us as a prime mode of learning in the future.

In some ways, the Khan Academy and other start-ups are packing in some elements of these machine-based tutoring systems as they evolve and grow, such that this revolution is really already under way.

When I was writing Disrupting Class: How Disruptive Innovation Will Change the Way the World Learns, I often wondered whether the subtitle should be “For every child, a tutor.” As the research shows, that vision may not be so far-fetched.

-Michael Horn

This post originally appeared on Forbes.com.

Folks are genuinely looking for opportunities to make peace and not war….  And I think that’s terrific. But someone has to make war.

Who better to lead the troops than Joel Klein, Michelle Rhee, and Eva Moskowitz, three of the most aggressive education reformers of the last decade, or, if you prefer, as Phillips has it, “some of the most well-known and polarizing figures in public education.”

A triumvirate of kumbaya they are not.

And what they have now done is form a group that intends to raise $10 million annually for the next five years to lobby the New York State legislature to protect the reform initiatives launched by Klein and his mayoral boss Michael Bloomberg in New York City, promote reform throughout the state, and, as Phillips writes,

…neutralize the might of the teachers’ unions, whose money, endorsements and get-out-the-vote efforts have swung many close elections.

Bloomberg’s third (and this time final) term expires at the end of next year. Says Phillips,

[T]he campaign is beginning while advocates of reform have an ally in the mayor. But their eyes are focused on 2014, when a new mayor—most likely one who is more sympathetic to the teachers’ union than Mr. Bloomberg has been—enters office.

In fact, the law to renew mayoral control over Gotham’s schools expires in 2015 and may pose an interesting early challenge for the group: What if, as Phillips suggests, the new mayor is not a friend of education reform?

The group, StudentsFirstNY (no webpage yet) has a bunch of hedge-funders and venture capitalists (not named by Phillips) involved and will be lead by Micah Lasher, the barely 30-year-old “magical wunderkind lobbyist,” as Gotham Schools dubbed him a couple of years ago, when Bloomberg sent him to Albany as the city’s lobbyist.

Let the games—er, battles—begin.

-Peter Meyer

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

In American public education today, however, that equation is sorely unbalanced. A school principal in 2012 is accountable for student achievement, for discipline, for curriculum and instruction, and for leading (and supervising) the staff team, not to mention attracting students, satisfying parents, and collaborating with innumerable other agencies and organizations.

Yet that same principal controls only a tiny part of his school’s budget, has scant say over who teaches there, practically no authority when it comes to calendar or schedule, and minimal leverage over the curriculum itself. Instead of deploying all available school assets in ways that would do the most good for the most kids, the principal is required to follow dozens or hundreds of rules, program requirements, spending procedures, discipline codes, contract clauses, and regulations emanating from at least three levels of government–none of which strives to coordinate with any of the others.

In short, we give our school heads the responsibility of CEO’s but the authority of middle-level bureaucrats.

That cannot work well and most of the time does not, save for the occasional super-hero principal who must act like a maverick — breaking or ignoring most of the rules — in order to cope with an inherently absurd imbalance.

To top it off, today’s school principals get paid barely more than the senior teachers in their schools, though they typically work year-round versus the classic 180-day, 9-month teacher contract.

No wonder principals are retiring in droves. No wonder many of our ablest young educators –such as those emerging from the Teach for America program — shun the principal’s office, at least in district-operated schools. (Many gravitate to the charter-school sector, where principals have far greater authority.) No wonder entrepreneurs, risk-takers, and change agents seldom last long as principals, or that many of those who do endure are people content in middle-manager roles.

This situation grows worse with every passing year, as federal, state, and district programs multiply and become more rule-bound — by, for example, “special education” and “No Child Left Behind”; judges issue more rulings that bind the principal’s hands; union contracts lengthen and become more restrictive; funding levels off; and teacher layoffs become unavoidable, resulting in even less discretionary money at the building level and, because of seniority and tenure rules, less say over who works there.

The underlying causes are threefold.

First, a dysfunctional and archaic governance structure for public education that pays homage to “local control” yet turns into bureaucratic management of dozens or hundreds of schools from burgeoning “central offices,” rather than vesting any real control at the level closest to teachers, students, and parents. Setting policy for that system, typically, is an elected school board that itself has grown dysfunctional, particularly in urban America, as adult interest groups manipulate who serves on it. Atop all this sit state and federal agencies — multiple agencies at each level — as well as (in many states) county or regional administrative units.

Second, we’ve layered so many responsibilities on our schools that the teaching and learning of basic skills and essential knowledge has all but vanished under efforts to rectify injustice, foster diversity, provide multiple services to kids with varying needs, prevent drug abuse, adolescent pregnancy and obesity, forge character, keep children off the streets, ensure physical fitness, and observe a near-infinity of special events, holidays, and interest-group enthusiasm.

Third, every time something goes wrong anywhere, a blizzard of new rules and procedures descends upon the school’s obligations, lest that mishap recur anywhere else. Whether it’s bullying or a playground accident, an unwanted intruder or a disgruntled parent, a kid who doesn’t get into a particular course or a library book that offends someone, the checklists, regulations, and prohibitions multiply.

What’s a principal to do? If his or her state (like Florida or California) has a universal class-size limit, he or she cannot even rearrange student and teacher assignments to make the best use of the school’s instructional team. If a state tenure law or district union contract insists that, in a layoff situation, the newest teachers must be let go first, he or she will have no say over who ends up teaching in his school. (Never mind that the reduction in instructional force doesn’t obviate the class size limit!) If a district policy (or court order) says no student can be suspended or expelled regardless of the offense, simply maintaining order within the school may prove impossible. (In the opposite case, a “zero tolerance” law may leave the principal with no discretion even for a first offender who didn’t mean any harm. Remember those six-year-olds who bring TOY weapons for “show and tell”?)

This gigantic mismatch between responsibility and authority has no discrete remedy. What’s needed is a radical simplification, replacing rules with responsibility on the part of the people running our schools. If we don’t give principals the authority to do their jobs, we are going to have few competent leaders for our schools, which means we’re not going to have many effective schools or well-educated children tomorrow.

-Chester E. Finn, Jr.

This essay was originally published by TheAtlantic.com as part of its “America the Fixable” series.

NBC has concentrated on initiatives favored by self-styled education reformers. The network has been particularly generous to the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, which has poured hundreds of millions of dollars into promoting teacher merit pay proposals and privately run charter schools – an agenda strongly opposed by many public school teachers, labor unions and educators.

During its first “Education Nation” summit in 2010, for example, “NBC Nightly News” aired a profile of a Gates Foundation initiative, “Measures of Effective Teaching,” which seeks to create a database of effective teaching methods. The reporter was former NBC anchorman Tom Brokaw. During the second summit last fall, Brokaw showed up on “Today” with Melinda Gates to discuss the same Gates initiative. Turning from reporter to advocate, Brokaw told host Natalie Morales, “So what Bill and Melinda have done, and it’s a great credit to them, and it’s a great gift to this country, is that they have taken the kind of episodic values that we know about teaching and they’ve put them together in a way that everyone can learn from them. So that’s a big, big step.”

And Farhi’s not wrong; the media has indeed been obsessed with the teacher effectiveness agenda. That’s one finding of my own analysis of education reporting that I just published in Education Next. My team and I coded all of the national education stories published in 2011 in the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, USA Today, and Associated Press. And sure enough, teacher-related policies were covered more than any other topic.

But can you really blame the reporters? As former Secretary of Education Rod Paige once explained to me, journalists are in the “conflict business,” and there was a ton of conflict around teacher policies (LIFO, teacher evaluations, tenure, etc.) in 2011. (Remember Madison and Columbus?)

Farhi and I also agree about the downer tone of much reporting. Results from the various NAEP exams were big drivers of education coverage in 2011 too—and the presentation was overwhelmingly negative, even though many groups of students made historic gains. Cheating by teachers was another major story—and we all know how uplifting that one is.

Where I disagree with Farhi, however, is in lumping all reforms together. Consider school vouchers. The Wall Street Journal’s editorial page may have declared 2011 the “year of school choice,” but its news side dedicated exactly zero articles to the topic. And it wasn’t alone; only the A.P. published a story (just one) on the wave of voucher and tax credit bills enacted by Republican legislatures and governors last year. This wasn’t important enough a development to find space in the Times or Washington Post?

So Farhi could have been more precise: Journalists (especially broadcast journalists) are enamored with policies put forward by lefty reformers. And with the mainstream media’s liberal leanings, this makes sense. And goes to show, once again, that the most interesting fights in education reform today are intramural battles among the progressive elite.

See my full Education Next article here.

-Mike Petrilli

This blog entry also appears on the Fordham Institute’s Flypaper blog.

Even though the Miami New Times article was just a re-hash of an article they had run during the summer before, critics of special ed vouchers seized upon the piece as proof of the need to stop the rapid expansion of that type of program to other states, impose heavy regulations on Florida’s program to ensure that nothing bad could ever happen, or just shut down special ed programs because only public provision of services to disabled students could be trusted.

Diane Ravitch, in her usual scholarly and measured way, responded to the article by tweeting “Legalized child abuse in Florida?” Sara Mead, Andy Rotherham, and Ed Sector all circulated the New Times piece as proof of their earlier criticisms of McKay.  When I attempted to put the scandal in perspective relative to misconduct and incompetence that is all too common in traditional public schools, Sara Mead clucked that I was like a child trying to excuse misbehavior by crying “he did it first!”

Well, I wonder if a story out of Alabama might help put things in perspective without sounding like an unreasonable child.  It’s a story about a boy named Jose Salinas, or Little Joe, who has cerebral palsy.  His mother wondered why he was acting unusually and repeatedly claiming that he couldn’t go to school because he wasn’t feeling well.  So, she decided to attached a secret audio recording device to his wheelchair to find out what was going on at school.

Here is what she discovered:

“You drooled on the paper,” teacher’s aide Drew Faircloth could be heard saying impatiently. “That’s disgusting.”

“Keep your mouth closed and don’t drool on my paper,” teacher Alicia Brown said on the tape. “I do not want to touch your drool. Do you understand that? Obviously, you don’t.”

Over the three days of recordings, Salinas said Jose received about 20 minutes of actual instruction and spent almost the entire day sitting in silence with no one speaking to him.

“I could not believe someone would treat a child that way, much less a special needs child,” Melisha Salinas told ABCNews.com. “The anger in his voices … and the thing he was getting angry about, [Jose] just can’t help.”

“Why is my paper wet?” Brown demanded. “Look at me and answer. That’s not an answer. That’s not even a word.”

“Do you seen anybody else at this table drooling? Then, stop,” she said. “You have got drool all over your face and it is gross.”

Little Joe’s mom took the recording to school officials who suspended the teachers with pay.  But within days the teachers were back working in the school, although no longer assigned to Little Joe.  Angry parents protested the return of the teachers, who were then once again placed on administrative leave with pay.

Houston County Schools superintendent Tim Pitchford helped explain:

“I made a poor decision and re-assigned them back to school,” he said. “It was the wrong decision and I accept full responsibility.”

Alabama state law does not allow superintendents to fire teachers on the spot, Pitchford said. He has to make a recommendation to the board, which makes the final decision.

“From day one, it was obvious where this was going to end with the employees,” he said. “We knew where this process was going to end, but the process does not allow it to be immediate.”

Salinas was shocked to hear the teacher and aide were back at school.

“They were back at the school and my children were there so I got them out of school and so did several angry parents,” Salinas said. “I just lost all hope. Nobody was listening to me.”

Of course, if Alabama had a special ed voucher program, like McKay, Mrs. Salinas would not have had to secretly record misconduct, prove it to school officials, and then organize a protest to ensure that those teachers were not still in the school with her son.  She could have just followed her good mother’s perception that things were going very badly and switched her child to another school with the same amount of public funding.  How many Little Joe’s are out there without having their mistreatment recorded or protests organized?

Of course, examples of misconduct in traditional public schools is no more proof of the merits of McKay-like programs than examples of misconduct are proof of the need to regulate or eliminate special ed vouchers.  For more systematic evidence on the merits of McKay, readers may wish to read the article that Marcus Winters and I published in Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis, the leading AERA empirical journal, which finds that McKay competition increases student achievement for disabled students who remain in traditional public schools and lowers the rate at which students are newly identified as disabled.

But some people prefer mindless tweets over systematic evidence.  And somehow I don’t expect Diane Ravitch, Sara Mead, or Andy Rotherham now to tweet that Little Joe proves the wisdom of McKay or that traditional public schools are equivalent to child abuse.  They prefer to be selective in the anecdotes they tweet.

-Jay P. Greene

In the video, leaders from Rocketship and School of One discuss the advantages of digital learning while sharing their concerns about California laws and union regulations that have limited the role of online learning.

More about the book is available here.

HT: Joanne Jacobs

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.