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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Key to Quality

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Case for Alpha Authorizers

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

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

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

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

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

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

Build an Education Marketplace

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

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

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

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

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

Advance Performance-Based Accountability

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

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

Share Sustainable Systems

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

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

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

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

Hard Work Ahead

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But it’s not without its drawbacks:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

-Mike Petrilli

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

Behind the Headline
Valuing Teachers
Education Next | Summer 2011

Newark school  leaders, searching for the best way to reduce the number of teachers in order to balance the budget, have raised the possibility of teacher buyouts funded by  the $100 million donation from Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg , reports Samantha Henry of the Associated Press. “If we could fire the 300 or 400 lowest-performing teachers, she wouldn’t have a financial crisis,” Newark Mayor Cory Booker said, speaking of the schools superintendent. In an article that appeared in the Summer 2011 issue of Education Next, Eric Hanushek looked at the impact on the future earnings of students, and the U.S. economy as a whole, of identifying and replacing the lowest-performing teachers.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

-Chester E. Finn, Jr. and Adam Emerson

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

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

If the effort succeeds, the state’s educator-evaluation system—which measures teachers’ impact on student learning—would become a primary component of school personnel policies. Teachers’ unions themselves collaborated with the state education department to create the evaluation system. But the unions oppose tying the evaluations to key staffing decisions. At present, seniority drives layoff and transfer policies in many districts.

Although Massachusetts is often hailed as a leader in public education, underachievement is common among poor and minority students. In a survey of the state’s schools, Stand for Children—the nonprofit leading the ballot-initiative effort—found that quality-blind staffing policies are more common in low-income districts. For example, the survey found that 58 percent of those districts have contract language establishing reverse-seniority layoffs for tenured teachers, compared to only 34 percent of wealthier districts.

Stand for Children made a prudent choice by taking this proposal to the ballot box. After all, the Democratic state legislature wouldn’t have enacted this law on its own. Yet most voters seem to agree that classroom effectiveness should motivate teacher-staffing policies. Ballot-initiative procedures—which are a Progressive Era reform—were designed for situations like this: Through the ballot box, the electorate can circumvent special interest-driven legislatures and directly enact popular laws. In reality, however, special-interest groups can be hugely influential in ballot-initiative campaigns.

The state’s largest teachers’ union, the Massachusetts Teachers Association, is taking a kitchen-sink approach to defeat Stand for Children’s proposal. The union filed a lawsuit earlier this year to prevent voters from even deciding the issue. The lawsuit—which raises three fairly technical claims based on the state’s constitutional requirements for ballot initiatives—alleges that the state attorney general erred by certifying the proposal to appear on this year’s ballot.

Experts predict that the union’s legal challenge will fail. “It strikes me as a Hail Mary lawsuit,” said Leslie Graves of the website Ballotpedia. Similarly, Professor Jonathan Matsusaka, who is president of the Initiative and Referendum Institute at the University of Southern California, said that the union’s claims amount to a “big stretch.”

Even Peter Enrich, a Northeastern University law professor who opposes the initiative on policy grounds, said that the lawsuit is weak. “I understand why the plaintiffs don’t want this question on the ballot,” he said. “But when you look at the claims with an eye to the state constitution, they are reaches.”

The Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court heard oral arguments in the case earlier this month. A decision is expected by mid-July.

If its legal claims are losers, why did the union ever bother filing suit?  Ms. Graves of Ballotpedia has a few explanations. For starters, judges can be unpredictable and so seemingly weak claims sometimes succeed. And it may have been worth rolling the dice when the lawsuit’s costs will amount to little more than the union’s lawyers’ time. In comparison, a full-blown advertising campaign against the initiative could carry a price tag in the millions. Thus, the potential savings may be worth the effort of drafting some papers and making a few court appearances. Finally, lawsuits attract media attention and create public-relations opportunities, which may serve as a cheap way for the union to launch its broader campaign against the proposal.

Teachers’ unions have some advantages going into the campaign. “The electorate is sympathetic to teachers,” said Professor Matsusak, “and teachers have proven to be highly effective politically as a result.” Thus, teachers’ unions may jam local media with ads of educators encouraging voters to oppose the initiative. And this strategy may work: In Oregon, teachers’ unions ran an aggressive campaign to help defeat a 2008 proposal that would have required schools to pay teachers based on merit, not seniority. Similarly, the largest teachers’ union in California spent millions to crush a 2000 proposal that would have created a statewide voucher system.

But the Massachusetts initiative still has promise. Public-opinion surveys suggest that the proposal—which ties hiring, firing, and transfer decisions to teacher effectiveness, while still giving some consideration to seniority—may be more popular than the merit-pay or school-voucher proposals. Also, Stand for Children recently kicked off an ambitious advertising campaign, which could rival the unions’ own outreach efforts.

However, status-quo bias is another hurdle for the initiative. “Voters hesitate to upset the world as it is, unless they’re confident that the alternative is going to be better,” said Professor Matsusak, who estimates that nationally about 60 percent of initiatives have failed over the past century. Bias against change could be strong in Massachusetts, where the schools are widely considered to be some of the country’s best.

Voters are particularly hesitant to embrace complex initiatives, said Professor Enrich, who considers Stand for Children’s 16-page proposal “awfully complicated.”  Merit-based staffing is a simple idea. But the reality is that few voters will understand the particulars of the initiative on Election Day. And ads against the proposal will likely stir up voters’ fear of the unknown.

Regardless of the outcome, the Massachusetts proposal could offer a way forward for education reform in other states. About half of the 50 states allow for ballot initiatives. If proposals are tailored to public opinion, the ballot box could be a tool to improve this country’s schools in states where legislatures disappoint.

Mark Osmond, who holds a master’s degree in economics and public policy from Columbia University, is a law student at the University of Michigan. He can be reached at mark.a.osmond@gmail.com.

Yet, despite our student population’s diversity, the number of diverse schools, as imagined by Brown, remains limited. Upwards of 40 percent of black and Latino students still attend racially isolated schools (where white pupils represent less than 10 percent of the enrollment). And the average black or Latino student attends a school that is 75-percent minority. Meanwhile, more than four in five white students attend schools that are majority-white—even though whites barely make up 50 percent of our school population. (All of these data are from Gary Orfield’s Civil Rights Project.)

A long Times article from a few days earlier described in moving terms what this type of racial isolation means for young people. “At Explore, as at many schools in New York City, children trundle from segregated neighborhoods to segregated schools, living a hermetic reality.” One student, Amiyah, tells the reporter: “It’s a bit weird. All my friends are predominantly black, and all the teachers are predominantly white. I think white kids go to different schools. I don’t know. I haven’t seen many white people in a big space before.”

Sure enough, most studies show the benefits of racially and socio-economically mixed schools. Even such luminaries as Eric Hanushek and Caroline Hoxby have found positive peer effects for minority students when they sit in integrated classrooms. Less rigorous research has linked exposure to middle-class students (and their culture) to better life outcomes for poor kids.

The question today, as for the past twenty years or so (when the forcible desegregation movement ran out of steam), is what can be done to better integrate our schools? The Supreme Court no longer allows explicit social engineering by race. And parents have shown—in Wake County, North Carolina and elsewhere—an unwillingness to have their kids forcibly bused to distant schools. (Not that such policies are in line with a free society, anyway.)

But there are at least two reasons for hope. First, contrary to what you might think, the rapid gentrification of many of our great cities is making school integration more feasible than it’s been for decades. As neighborhoods grow more diverse, it’s easier (though not inevitable) for their local schools to become diverse, too. Second, the charter school movement is awakening to the opportunities that charters might play in creating voluntarily integrated schools of choice.

These efforts will struggle, however, with the difficult question of academic diversity. Which brings us to last week’s other solid piece of reporting, this one in the Washington Post, on the topic of differentiated instruction—“in essence, adapting lessons for kids of different abilities within a classroom” rather than tracking or grouping students by ability.

As I wrote in Education Next last year, the wide spread in students’ prior academic achievement is probably the greatest challenge facing teachers today. No classroom is immune. But classes that are racially and socio-economically diverse are likely to have especially large achievement gaps between their high and low performers—creating a nearly impossible instructional task for mere mortals.

Consider a second Hoxby peer-effects study. In 2006, she and Gretchen Weingarth examined the schools in Wake County. For the better part of two decades, that district, in and around Raleigh, had been reassigning lots of kids to different schools every year in order to keep its schools racially and socioeconomically balanced. That created thousands of natural experiments whereby the composition of classrooms changed dramatically but randomly. That, in turn, provided Hoxby and Weingarth an opportunity to investigate the impact of these changes on student achievement.

They found evidence for what they called the “boutique model” of peer effects, “in which students do best when the environment is made to cater to their type.” They wrote: “Our evidence does not suggest that complete segregation of people, by types, is optimal…What our evidence does suggest is that efforts to create interactions between lower and higher types ought to maintain continuity of types.”

What that means for classrooms is that it’s okay for them to contain a range of students (say high, medium, and low achievers), as long as that range is not too wide. What’s pernicious is a “bimodal” distribution of students in the same class: just very high and very low achievers, with few in between. Yet that is precisely the kind of distribution many diverse schools find themselves with. On average, upper-middle-class white students from college-educated two-parent families tend to achieve at very high levels and poor minority students from single-parents homes tend to achieve at very low levels. Put these students in the same classroom and you’ve got a real dilemma.

How on earth can a teacher instruct such a group of pupils effectively? If the answer is to keep kids in separate ability groups all day, then why not just create whole classrooms by ability instead? In schools that are not racially and socio-economically diverse—say, high-poverty inner-city schools, or affluent all-white suburban schools—it’s not as difficult an issue. There you can group students by ability without grouping students by race or class.

In diverse schools, however, such grouping will often (stress often, not always) mean re-segregating students by race and/or class. And what’s the point of an integrated school with segregated classrooms? Which brings us back to “differentiated instruction,” and the hope that somehow a teacher can reach kids of all abilities together.

Squaring this circle is the daunting challenge that diverse schools face. Most will probably land on a combination of strategies—grouping students by achievement level for part of the day, maybe for reading and math, while teaching them heterogeneously in subjects like science, social studies, art, music, and P.E. But schools that refuse to group at all—out of an ideological aversion to “sorting”—will struggle to help all their students achieve at high levels. At least that’s what the best research indicates. And if parents—of all races and classes—see that their own kids aren’t getting what they need, you can kiss those diverse schools goodbye.

-Mike Petrilli

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

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

Integration worked, so why have we rejected it? wonders David Kirp in an op-ed that appeared in Sunday’s New York Times. “If we’re serious about improving educational opportunities, we need to revisit the abandoned policy of school integration,” he concludes.  In the Fall 2010 issue of Education Next, Susan Eaton of Harvard Law School and Steven Rivkin of Amherst College debated the state of the desegregation movement and research on the impact of economic and racial segregation on student achievement.

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.  For example, in a large-scale methodologically rigorous evaluation of the differential impact of four leading mathematics curricula, second-grade students taught using Saxon Math scored on average 0.17 standard deviations higher in mathematics than students taught using Scott Foresman-Addison Wesley Mathematics.  By way of comparison, the difference in the impact on student achievement of a teacher at the 75^th percentile of effectiveness compared to an average teacher is only 0.11 to 0.15 standard deviations.  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.

Administrators are prevented from making better choices of instructional materials by the lack of evidence on the effectiveness of the materials currently in use.  The vast majority of materials either have no studies of their effectiveness or have no studies that meet reasonable standards of evidence.  Not only is little information available on the effectiveness of most instructional materials, there is also very little systematic information on which materials are being used in which schools.  In every state except one, it is impossible to find out what materials districts are currently using without contacting the districts one at a time to ask.

This scandalous lack of information will only become more troubling as two major policy initiatives—the Common Core standards and efforts to improve teacher effectiveness—are implemented.  Publishers of instructional materials are lining up to declare the alignment of their materials with the Common Core standards using the most superficial of definitions.  The Common Core standards will only have a chance of raising student achievement if they are implemented with high-quality materials, but there is currently no basis to measure the quality of materials.  Efforts to improve teacher effectiveness will also fall short if they focus solely on the selection and retention of teachers and ignore the instructional tools that teachers are given to practice their craft.

In our Brookings Institution report, we show how this problem can be fixed by states with support from the federal government, non-profit organizations, and private philanthropy.  First, state education agencies should collect data from districts on the instructional materials in use in their schools.  The collection of comprehensive and accurate data will require states to survey districts, and in some cases districts may need to survey their schools.  In the near term, many states can quickly glean useful information by requesting purchasing reports from their districts’ finance offices.  Building on these initial efforts, states should look to initiate future efforts to survey teachers, albeit on a more limited basis.

The federal government’s National Center for Education Statistics should aid states in this effort by developing data collection templates for them to use through its Common Education Data Standards (CEDS), and providing guidance on how states can use and share data on instructional materials.  The most recent version of CEDS contains 679 data elements for K–12 education, none of which relate to instructional materials in use.

Organizations with an interest in education reform should support this effort.  For example, the National Governors Association (NGA) and Council of Chief State School Officers (CCSSO) have put their reputations on the line by sponsoring the Common Core State Standards Initiative.  Research based on current and past state standards indicates that this initiative is unlikely to have much of an effect on student achievement in and of itself.  The NGA and CCSSO should put their considerable weight behind the effort to improve the collection of information on instructional materials in order to create an environment in which states, districts, and schools will be able to choose the materials most likely to help students master the content laid out in the Common Core standards.

States facing severe budgetary pressures may be reluctant to undertake new data collection efforts.  Philanthropic organizations such as the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and the Lumina Foundation for Education could have a major impact by providing the start-up funding needed to collect data on instructional materials and support the research that would put those data to use.

In 1955, educational psychologist Lee J. Cronbach wrote that “The sheer absence of trustworthy fact regarding the text-in-use is amazing.”  It is more than a half-century later and we still don’t know.  How can we tolerate ignorance on something that is as critical to student learning as instructional materials?

Matthew M. Chingos and Grover J. (Russ) Whitehurst, who are research director and director of the Brown Center on Education Policy at the Brookings Institution, are the authors of Choosing Blindly: Instructional Materials, Teacher Effectiveness, and the Common Core.

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

What Are the ERAOs?

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

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

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

The ERAO Playbook

Marc Porter Magee, president and founder of 50CAN

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

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

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

A Coordinated Movement?

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

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

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

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

ERAO Victories

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

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

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

Democratic Divides

Joe Williams, executive director of Democrats for Education Reform

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

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

The Need for a “RFER”

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

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

Winning Battles or the War?

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

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

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

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

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

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/.

Filing in 2008, the plaintiffs in Lynch alleged that Alabama underfunds education in violation of Title VI of the Civil Rights Act, which forbids racial discrimination in federally assisted programs, and the Fourteenth Amendment’s Equal Protection Clause. Essentially putting Alabama’s history on trial, the suit maintained that racist motivations color every aspect of the state’s school-funding system. While most litigants contend that school finance relies too much on local property taxes, the plaintiffs in Lynch argued that localities should be able to rely more on property taxes. Alabama raises only 5 percent of its school revenue from property taxes, with the rest coming from income and sales taxes.

According to the plaintiffs, Alabama’s constitution of 1901, and amendments in the 1970s and 1980s, placed racially motivated limits on property taxes that prevent poor, primarily black communities from raising sufficient revenue to adequately fund education. In addition to capping the millage rate, the state created differential assessments for different categories of property. This meant, for example, that forested land, which comprises 70 percent of the state, was taxed at a significantly lower rate than other property. The plaintiffs asked the court to eliminate all limitations on property tax rates and all differential assessments.

The state contended that its constitution, as amended in the era of civil rights, is not racially motivated and that the current tax regime does not unfairly burden black students. It also argued that if granted, the plaintiffs’ remedy would all but destroy the real estate market and lead to economic “calamity.” Alabama’s forest industry, taking a keen interest in the case, said that taxes on forested land would increase 1,000 percent without differential assessments.

After a trial in 2011, district court judge Lynwood Smith issued a sprawling 854-page opinion that agreed that Alabama inadequately funds education but nevertheless concluded that “like it or not,” because of Supreme Court precedent, Alabama’s property-tax system is constitutional. In Rodriguez, Smith said, the Court “faced similar facts” and found no constitutional violation. Even though the 1901 constitution was a “misbegotten spawn” obviously “perverted by a virulent, racially discriminatory intent,” he concluded that amendments from the 1970s and 1980s modifying the offending portions of the constitution were not obviously motivated by racial animus. Smith also asserted that the funding system does not have a racially discriminatory effect, pointing out that “Alabama’s black students actually fare better in terms of yield per-mill per-student than do white students.” As a result, the plaintiffs had proved only that there are disparities but not “along racial lines.”

Smith went out of his way to show displeasure at having to rule against the plaintiffs. Alabama’s education system, he said, is hamstrung by “two unfortunate realities”: “mankind’s self-serving nature” and “Supreme Court jurisprudence.” Because of the first, a majority of the state’s voters are unwilling to vote for services that do not directly benefit them, leaving rural black and white students to suffer. As to the second, he argued that the “Court’s rulings on education since the 1970s mirror its decisions [such as Plessy v. Ferguson] from the late nineteenth century” and have “allowed unequal and inadequate school funding to evolve.”

Such tendentious moralizing aside, Smith’s opinion indicates that Rodriguez poses a high, but perhaps not insurmountable, hurdle for school-finance advocates in lower federal courts. A less-conflicted judge confronting similar facts might find a way to side with the plaintiffs. But the Supreme Court, which has expressed increasing skepticism about the desirability of judicial oversight of schools, seems unlikely to overturn well-established precedent and thrust lower courts into the quagmire of school funding and tax policy.

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

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.