Come out upon my seas
Cursed missed opportunities
Am I a part of the cure?
Or am I part of the disease?”
-Coldplay, “Clocks,” A Rush of Blood to the Head, 2002

Dear Deborah,

I am haunted by the title of your post:
“The Testing Obsession Widens the Gap” Could this possibly be true? Is test-based school reform reducing opportunity for America’s neediest children? Is everything for which we school reformers fight actually making things worse? Am I a part of the cure, or am I part of the disease?

###

“It’s OK to ask: ‘What if I’m wrong?’” you wrote last week. So let me ask it. It wouldn’t be the first time. A year ago, for example, I explored the “test score hypothesis“—a line of reasoning, undergirding much of the reform movement, that says that if we can significantly improve low-income students’ math and reading skills, as measured by standardized tests, we can significantly increase their chances of escaping poverty.

Let’s unpack this hypothesis a bit.

As it stands now, children born into poverty come into kindergarten with massive deficits—in terms of vocabulary, content knowledge, and non-cognitive skills. And if they make it to high school graduation 13 years later (and many will not), they will leave, on average, reading and doing math at an 8th-grade level. Of the low-income teens that give higher education a shot, the vast majority of will end up in remedial education and then wash out. More than half of poor children will become poor adults, with poor children of their own. The cycle will repeat. Our hope is that by improving our schools (and, yes, other things too), we can change this narrative.

Let’s imagine that our schools can help the average child born into poverty do somewhat better. Let’s say that with a combination of talented and well-trained teachers, a rich and rigorous curriculum, lots of supports, and strong leadership, we’re able to get poor students, on average, to a 10th-grade level by the time they graduate high school. Suddenly they can attend a community college, or even a four-year university, without starting in remedial education. They are much more likely to graduate, at least with an associate’s degree or a technical credential. Rather than making minimum wage, they will make a living wage.

They are less likely to get pregnant as teens, or end up in prison, or drop out of the workforce. Their children wouldn’t be born poor—they would be born middle class. This would be transformative.

Notice the key assumption built into this “theory of action”: reading and math matter a lot. Getting to the 10th-grade level instead of the 8th-grade level (even as measured by rinky-dinky standardized tests) would make a meaningful difference in real lives. With that assumption in place, it’s not crazy—in fact, it’s perfectly rational—to hold schools accountable for helping their students make progress every year with their reading and math skills. It’s smart to put in place clear, high standards—let’s call them common-core standards—that will delineate the path from poverty to prosperity, that will help schools and teachers focus on the knowledge and skills that matter most, and will get students to true readiness for college and career by the age of 18.

So Deborah, are you ready for the big question, the kicker, the heart of the matter?

How sure are we that it’s literacy and numeracy, and related academic knowledge and skills, that are the most important precursors to success in college, career, and life? What if something else is just as important, or even more important, like “non-cognitive skills” or personal relationships? (Or perhaps the habit of “serious intellectual inquiry,” as you put it?)

And what if our “testing obsession” is crowding these other things out?

These are critical questions, but here’s what gives me solace.

First, the evidence is quite strong that reading and math achievement are critical tickets to the middle class. Look, for example, at the blockbuster study from Raj Chetty, John Friedman, and Jonah Rockoff that examined the impact of teachers on students’ long-term outcomes. AsKevin Carey explained at the time,

If you believe standardized tests are worthless or highly flawed or deeply inadequate or even troublingly limited in accuracy and scope-and many reasonable people believe these things-then you could dismiss or downplay value-added measures of teacher effectiveness, by definition. … But now the CFR study says that teachers who are unusually good at helping students score high on standardized tests today aren’t just unusually good at helping students score high on standardized tests tomorrow. They also have an unusual effect on the likelihood of students going to college, going to a good college, earning a good living, living in a nice place, and saving for retirement. In other words, whatever the limitations of standardized tests may be, test-based value-added scores do, in fact, provide valuable information about the things most people care most about.

Or look at the evidence that E.D. Hirsch cites about the impact of teenagers’ vocabulary on their long-term prospects, such as a 1999 study that shows that “a gain of one standard deviation on the Armed Forces Qualification Test raises one’s annual income by nearly $10,000 (in 2012 dollars).”

Or a brand-new study from the United Kingdom (flagged by Joanne Jacobs ) that finds that “math skills at 7 predict earnings at 42.”

Surely reading and math aren’t all that matters. Paul Tough makes a good case for non-cognitive skills. Others, yourself included, point to the importance of strong personal relationships with mentors. We could name more. But reading and math skills are at least necessary, if not sufficient.

On the other hand, there’s little evidence that the “testing obsession” is systematically getting in the way of good teaching and learning in high-poverty schools. That’s not because an obsession with testing isn’t a problem. It surely is, with its temptations of cheating, narrowing of the curriculum, and the culture of fear that it often perpetuates.

But here’s the rub, Deborah: Studies of high-poverty schools in America have demonstrated for decades that great teaching and learning have always been the exception, not the norm. To believe that testing is making these schools worse, you have to believe that they were once pretty good, or at least better than they are now. I just don’t see it. Do you? Where’s the evidence of that?

Furthermore, think back to Kevin Carey’s comments on the Chetty study. If an obsession with reading and math was crowding out more important tasks, why would students with stronger reading and math gains do better long-term than their peers?

Here’s what your readers need to remember: The choice today is not between 100,000 Central Park Easts or Mission Hills and 100,000 test-prep factories. If it were, I’d pick the Deborah Meier schools in a heartbeat. But let’s face it: There aren’t more than a handful of Deborah Meier schools out there. (The same goes with Don Hirsch schools or Mike Feinberg/Dave Levin schools, or any other brand you want to name.)

The typical high-poverty school is, and has always been, pretty mediocre. That’s not an indictment of the people who work in these schools; the problem is the system. And it’s not unique to education. Any big, bureaucratic government agency is going to struggle to achieve effectiveness, much less excellence. (Think the DMV.) Heck, even most large, private-sector companies are pretty lame, especially ones that don’t face much competition. (Think the electric company.) Layer on top of that all of the distracting demands placed upon schools, the fragmented nature of education governance, and, in some places at least, too few resources, and it would be a miracle if the typical high-poverty public school were good, much less great.

###

So do I think testing and accountability make matters worse? No. In fact, based on the studies cited above, I think they will make matters marginally better. I also think stronger standards and tests (a la common core) will make things better still.

What about you, Deborah? Are you willing to ask “What if I’m wrong?” What if it’s true that reading and math skills are hugely related to opportunities in life, and indeed are malleable? What if “direct instruction,” which you say isn’t needed, really is the most effective method for helping children in poverty develop those skills? What if it’s patently untrue that children learn “vocabulary, grammar, syntax, and spelling … the same way we learn everything else that matters,” as you stated last week, but instead have to be taught systematically? What if the perfect for which you have spent decades championing really is the enemy of the good—and the greater good, for millions of boys and girls throughout America?

Deborah, with all due respect, I ask you to ask yourself: Am I a part of the cure, or am I part of the disease?

-Michael Petrilli

This article originally appeared on the Bridging Differences blog, where Mike Petrilli will be debating Deborah Meier for the next month.

“The Department,” like any hulking, beltway-bound federal agency, can seem like a cold, faceless leviathan—this imposing force, issuing impenetrable regulations from a utilitarian, vaguely Soviet, city block–sized building in the shadow of the Capitol.

But those who interact with it regularly, especially those of us fortunate enough to have worked there, know that it is made up of hundreds and hundreds of very fine people.

During my tenure there, I found both the career staff and the political appointees to be knowledgeable public servants and excellent colleagues. While working for a state department of education, I found the Department’s team to be thoughtful, accessible, and accommodating. And in my loyal-opposition think-tank stints, during which I sometimes find myself poking and prodding the Department, they’ve been patient, respectful, but understandably steely adversaries.

I’m appreciative that they took the time to answer these questions so thoroughly, and I’m flabbergasted that they did so at—in terms of agency timelines—Guinness-Book speed.

What would the U.S. Department of Education (ED) like people to know about the testing consortia?

The consortia are designing the next generation of assessment systems, which include diagnostic or formative assessments, not just end-of-the-year summative assessments. Their systems will assess student achievement of standards, student growth, and whether students are on-track to being college and career ready. These new systems will offer significant improvements directly responsive to the wishes of teachers and other practitioners: they will offer better assessment of critical thinking, through writing and real-world problem solving, and offer more accurate and rapid scoring. The Smarter Balanced consortium’s assessment will also be “computer-adaptive,” meaning that the difficulty of questions will adjust to students’ ability levels as they proceed through the test.

The two consortia are making significant progress developing their assessment systems and are making an effort to be as transparent as possible, going well beyond what is typical in an assessment-development process. They have released a wide variety of information on how they will create the assessments and have invited comment from educators, district practitioners, additional national experts and the public. In addition, both PARCC and Smarter Balanced have released sample items to offer educators and the public an early look and will release additional questions this summer.

When the two consortia roll out their new assessments in the 2014-15 school year, they will be works in progress. We fully expect some schedule adjustments and technical glitches. Assessment 2.0 will need lots of work to get to version 2.1 and 2.2. States and districts will improve implementation as they learn from pilots and field tests. And teachers will play an absolutely critical role in providing the consortia feedback about what works and what doesn’t work.

How important are PARCC and Smarter Balanced to Common Core? Is the fate of the standards tied to the fate of the consortia?

This new generation of assessments—combined with the adoption of internationally benchmarked, college and career-ready standards—is an absolute game-changer for American education. PARCC and Smarter Balanced are tremendously important as a step forward to getting better, more accurate, and more actionable data about what students know and can do. As important as better assessments are, they must work in tandem with high-quality curriculum; meaningful, job-embedded professional development; and all the other pieces that will support educators preparing to teach to these new standards.

Most education observers know the consortia received federal funding several years ago. But the field probably knows less about ED’s interactions with the consortia since. That is, have they been on their own, or has ED been providing technical assistance and advice along the way?

As with all grantees, the Department works to ensure that the grants are on track, that funds are spent appropriately, and that we have actively supported grantee success. See the RTTA Program Review Process for some additional details. In addition, because we recognize the complexity of the consortia’s work, we have held a series of public meetings over the past two years to address particular components of their system—state and local technology needs, automated scoring of assessments, and how to improve the accessibility of assessments for all students, particularly students with disabilities and English learners. While each consortium has created its own technical advisory group, the Department recently created the RTTA Technical Review to help analyze each consortium’s progress and identify areas where additional attention may be necessary.

There have been recent signs of trouble. Alabama just abandoned the consortia (after Utah did so last year). Florida’s chief Tony Bennett said he’s looking for a “Plan B.” A March survey revealed that 65 percent and 70 percent of “education insiders” thought that PARCC and Smarter Balanced, respectively, were on the wrong track. What’s ED’s reaction to these events?

The states are the vital decision-makers here. States have demonstrated remarkable leadership, first through developing and adopting new, higher standards, and then through design and development of the next generation of high-quality assessments. But this is hard work. We are asking an enormous amount of principals and teachers in the next several years. We fully expect that there will be states that choose not to stay on board, and in those that do, we must provide teachers and principals with the resources and professional development they need to make the transition. Further, even if a state opts out of a consortium now, they can re-enter at any time in the future.

Does ED have a message to states contemplating exiting the consortia?

States must make the right decisions for their students and communities. There’s overwhelming agreement that high standards and well-aligned assessments, emphasizing critical thinking and writing, are vital to serving students well. How states get there is entirely up to them.

It’s worth pointing out that when the states developed the Common Core State Standards, they provided some important distinctions from current standards and current state tests. For example, the Common Core emphasizes writing in the English language arts standards. Any assessment aligned to the Common Core needs to similarly emphasize writing, which is a skill children need to be ready for college and the workforce. These and other distinctions mean that assessments that truly measure the Common Core will likely look different from current state tests, necessary as we move from fill-in-the-bubble tests toward more engaging assessments that better mirror good instruction in the classroom.

It seems that ED has leverage because of promises states made when applying for NCLB waivers and accepting stimulus and Race to the Top funding. Would the Department exercise the authority it has in an effort to hold the consortia together, or would the Department stand down and allow each state to make the decision it deems best?

The Department is focused on states developing college- and career-ready standards and aligned high-quality assessments that provide a better, more accurate measure of what students know and can do and whether they graduate high school ready for college or the workforce. We don’t want to see any state go backward. We expect the consortia to develop assessment systems that are markedly better than current assessments and we expect them to be already considering how to continue innovating and improving the systems. We understand that states may choose a different way of measuring whether its students are ready for college and careers and we are working with states such as Minnesota, Virginia, and Utah on their approaches. Again, states need to individually make the best decision for them based on all the relevant facts.

Do you trust that states opting out of the consortia will pick assessments possessing the characteristics the Department wanted to be part of assessments in the Common Core era—e.g., tightly aligning with the new standards, moving beyond “bubble tests,” accurately measuring performance at the ends of the performance distribution, and producing final results quickly?

We expect that all states will continue to improve their assessment systems. This currently includes requirements that state tests are aligned to the standards chosen by the state, provide accurate, valid, and reliable data about student knowledge and skills, and measures higher-order thinking skills. In December 2012 the Department paused our peer review of state assessment systems in order to reconsider whether our criteria and process for evaluating assessments is sufficient to measure whether an assessment system is a high-quality measure of college and career readiness. We will be providing additional detail in the coming months about our process and our criteria. Once complete, all assessment systems, including PARCC, Smarter Balanced, and all other state assessment systems, will be required to demonstrate how they meet the requirements for technical quality, alignment, and other assessment best practices. It is vital students, parents and educators receive reliable and valid information on student achievement of standards, student growth, and whether students are on-track to being college and career ready regardless of what state they reside in.

If states splinter, going their own ways on test and, presumably, cut scores, haven’t we lost much of the rationale for states’ adopting Common Core? Won’t we be left unable to conduct cross-state comparisons, and won’t states still be able to lower the proficiency bar to improve their scores?

Having multiple state assessment systems aligned to common content standards with different cut scores and proficiency standards would make comparison harder (though not impossible), which would be unfortunate. In addition, the public reporting and transparency required under ESEA would continue to be an avenue to identify schools and districts that are doing a good job and identify where states are lagging in what they expect of students. States that have college- and career-ready standards will continue to work with their institutions of higher education to identify what it means to measure college- and career-readiness on state tests. This is important work that PARCC and Smarter Balanced are actively engaged in and something that has been lacking in state assessment systems previously. For states not in either consortium in the future, the connection to higher education will help ensure that states set a rigorous bar for college and career readiness. In addition, the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) will continue to give the nation a “report card” on how students are doing across states.

A reasonable person might ask, “If the private market seems to be producing assessments that meet states’ needs, why did ED spend well more than $300 million to develop tests?” Could you please explain ED’s thinking behind these investments?

In 2010, in direct response to requests from governors and chief state school officers, the Department elected to use a portion of the Race to the Top funds from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) to support the next generation of assessment because the market was not meeting their needs. Current state tests were missing several important opportunities—they often did not measure the full range of what students should know, focusing on easier skills and ignoring hard-to-measure standards, and most states did not include writing in their assessment systems (to name just a few of the issues with the current market of tests).

We have already seen the Race to the Top Assessment program move the field of assessment. Forty-four states and DC, working in two consortia to develop assessments aligned to the Common Core, have pushed the field to react in ways they likely would not have reacted if each state were separately pursuing a new set of assessments. A 2012 study by the RAND Corporation, for example, indicated that most state tests do not assess “deeper learning skills” of cognitively complex tasks. By contrast, an initial study of the consortia by CRESST in 2013 shows promising results for the consortia’s ability to measure students’ ability “mastering and being able to apply core academic content and cognitive strategies related to complex thinking, communication, and problem solving.”

In recent months, concerns about cheating have skyrocketed as a number of cities and states have been forced to address serious allegations. Is ED concerned about test security given that numerous states will be giving the same exams during different test windows?

Yes, the Department is concerned about test security. We don’t think the concerns are any greater with PARCC and Smarter Balanced than with current state tests; though the challenges may change slightly due to the tests being primarily computer-based and the fact that a breach in security could have repercussions beyond a single state. The consortia need to establish security controls and procedures to address these issues, and we expect them to do so as they ramp up toward the field test in spring 2014 and the first operational assessment in the 2014-2015 school year.

It’s worth pointing out that in recent months, critics have claimed that high-stakes tests drive teachers and school administrators to cheat. But that argument confuses correlation with causation. And it also ignores history. There is no excuse for school administrators and teachers tampering with student tests to boost test scores. It is morally indefensible—and it is most damaging to the very students who most desperately need the help of their teachers and school leaders.

We reject the idea that the system makes people cheat. Millions of educators administer tests but very few chose to cheat. In all but a tiny minority of cases, teachers want their children to genuinely learn and grow—not achieve phony gains to make themselves or their schools look good. In places where a district’s culture is rotten, people must speak out. But the vast, vast majority of educators are committed to assessing their students’ progress with complete integrity.

—Andy Smarick

This blog entry first appeared on the Fordham Institute’s Common Core Watch blog

For more, check out Andy Smarick’s interviews with PARCC and Smarter Balanced.

Let’s start with the claim from the editorial board of the Dunn County News in Wisconsin that “Private schools have the right – even under vouchers – to not accept a child, for whatever reason.”  This charge that voucher-accepting private schools can pick and choose which students they do and do not admit is as ubiquitous as it is consistently false.  First, all private schools in the country, whether in voucher programs or not, are prohibited from discriminating in admissions on the basis of race, color, or national origin (42 USC 1981).    Second, Wisconsin Statutes §§119.23(2)(a) and (a)1.a have consistently been interpreted to mean that private schools in the voucher program cannot discriminate against a student with a disability in admission to the school.  In fact, state law explicitly requires “that the private school determines which pupils to accept on a random basis” (§119.23(3)(a)).  A statistical analysis that my research team conducted during our five-year evaluation of the program confirmed that no measure of student disadvantage – not disability status, not test scores, not income, not race – was statistically associated with whether or not an 8^th grade voucher student was or was not admitted to a 9^th grade voucher-receiving private school.  Our evidence is consistent with the expectation that private schools are admitting voucher students at random during that critical transition, as the law requires, and not as the Dunn County editorial board claims.

What of the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) order that the Wisconsin State Department of Public Instruction, which oversees the MPCP, take steps to ensure that the private schools in the program are complying with Title II of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA)?  Private organizations normally are exempt from Title II of ADA but the DOJ argues that the law applies to private schools in the MPCP because the government is contracting with them to provide a public service (the education of K-12 students).  This claim flies in the face of the facts and case-law surrounding the program.  The voucher program does not involve any contracts, of any kind, between any government organization and the participating private schools.  Students need to meet certain eligibility restrictions to participate in the program, as do interested private schools.  Once both are deemed eligible by the state, students choose schools and government funds flow to the private schools based on the choices families have made and consistent with the laws governing the program, not based on any “contract”.  In fact, the Wisconsin State Statute that governs the MPCP, §119.23, is entirely separate from Wisconsin State Statute §119.235 entitled “Contracts with Private Schools and Agencies”.  Nothing could make the point clearer that the MPCP is not a case of government contracting for education services.

In recognition of the reality that the MPCP is not a case of the government contracting, the Wisconsin State Supreme Court ruled twice (Davis v. Grover, 166 Wis.2d 501, 480 N.W.2d 460 (1992); Jackson v. Benson 213 Wis. 2d 1, 570 N.W.2d 407 (1998)) that students who use an MPCP voucher are “parentally placed” and not governmentally placed in their resulting private school.  The U.S. Supreme Court permitted both cases to stand as decided.  When parents place their children in private schools, as they have for hundreds of years, the courts have determined that such placements, even if supported by a government-issued voucher, neither violate the First Amendment (Zelman v. Simmons-Harris, 536 U.S. 639 (2002)) nor render the private schools subject to federal education disability law (34 CFR § 300.130).

Some of the actions that the DOJ is ordering the Wisconsin DPI to take could be viewed as inconsistent with both state law and the goal of non-discrimination in student admissions.  For example, the DOJ has ordered DPI to collect data regarding the “number of students with disabilities enrolled in voucher schools”.  The DPI-issued regulations governing the program currently prohibit private schools from requesting disability-related information on the student application form, both because DPI is not authorized by state law to request that information and to mitigate against the possibility that the private schools would use that disability information to discriminate in admissions.  Thus, DPI can either violate state law in requiring that private schools collect information that could be used to discriminate against students with disabilities or disobey a federal government order.  Tough choice.

The origin of this entire kerfuffle was a DPI press release on March 29, 2011, stating that the private schools in the MPCP “reported about 1.6 percent of choice students have a disability”.  When I asked DPI officials how they got that information, since state law does not authorize either the schools of DPI to ask MPCP students if they have a disability, they responded that they calculated the rate based on the percentage of MPCP students who were given accommodations on the state accountability exam.  It is well-known that only a minority of all students with disabilities are given testing accommodations, so the 1.6 percent rate is clearly both an invalid and unreliable measure of the true student disability rate in MPCP.  As researchers, and not government officials, we were able to collect more reliable information about the rates of student disability in the MPCP and calculate that it is 7.5 to 14.6 percent, with our best estimate being 11.4 percent.

Still, I think the most telling statistic regarding school choice and special education in the MPCP came from State Superintendent Tony Evers when he stated in his “Response to the U.S. DOJ Civil Rights Division Letter of August 17, 2011” that “DPI accepts due process complaints and state complaints related to the equitable services provisions of IDEA…, but has not received any such complaints related to the participation of children with disabilities in the MPCP.”  So, after 22 years of operation and with 25,000 student participants, approximately 11 percent of whom have disabilities, the state agency that oversees the Milwaukee Parental Choice Program has received a grand total of 0 complaints regarding the program’s treatment of students with disabilities.  Far less than a mountain, there isn’t even a molehill here.

-Patrick Wolf

But critics of school choice policies argue that these reforms will lead to increased segregation by race and class as more motivated families move to better schools, leaving the most disadvantaged students behind in the worst public schools. Criticism has often focused on charter schools given the growth in the charter sector in recent years. Nationwide, charter enrollment grew from 1 to 3 percent of all students between 1999-2000 and 2009-10. Charters make up a much larger share of the market in several places, including 11 percent of Arizona students and 37 percent in the District of Columbia.

Charter critics point to reports showing differences in the demographic characteristics of charter school students and their counterparts in traditional public schools as evidence that choice leads to segregation. For example, a 2010 report by UCLA’s Civil Rights Project found that black charter school students were twice as likely to attend schools that enrolled fewer than 10 percent non-minority students as their counterparts in traditional public schools. This type of analysis says little about segregation because it compares charter schools to all schools nationwide, when charter schools tend to be located in areas with large concentrations of minority students. A reanalysis of the data used in the UCLA report found much smaller differences between charter and traditional public schools once more appropriate comparisons were made between the two groups of schools.

But any comparison of the demographics of students in charter and traditional public schools provides at best an incomplete picture of segregation because segregation resulting from school choice policies would occur primarily across schools, not within schools.[1] The existence of charter schools could alter the composition of traditional public schools (by drawing students away from them), thereby compromising comparisons between the two sectors as a source of information about the effect of choice on segregation. However, a RAND study found that, in most states, students tend to transfer between traditional public and charter schools with similar racial compositions.

I provide new evidence on this question based on an analysis of nine years of data from the Common Core of Data, the federal government’s annual census of all public schools. For each of the more than 3,000 counties in the U.S., I calculate an “exposure index” that measures the share of non-minority students at the schools attended by the average under-represented minority student.[2] The average minority student in the U.S. attends a school that is 33 percent non-minority. In other words, the typical minority student attends a majority-minority school. Likewise, the typical student eligible for free or reduced-price lunch (a proxy for economic disadvantage) attends a school where almost two-thirds of students are also eligible for a subsidized lunch.

A naïve examination of the relationship between this measure of (de)segregation and the percentage of students enrolled in charter schools appears to show that the critics are right: more choice is associated with minority students attending less diverse schools. For the 2010-11 school year, a 10-percentage-point increase in charter enrollment is associated with a decline of 16 percentage points in minority students’ exposure to non-minority students. A similar but weaker relationship exists along class lines (as measured by free lunch eligibility).

Of course, this relationship ignores the fact that charters tend to locate in areas that serve large shares of disadvantaged students and members of minority groups. As a result, this simple correlation tells us nothing about whether charters increase segregation or just tend to locate in areas where the schools are already segregated. This is the same methodological flaw that compromised the findings of the UCLA study.

A better approach to the question of whether choice increases segregation is to look at changes over time. Did areas that saw large increases in choice experience larger increases in segregation than areas that saw smaller increases in choice? This kind of analysis does not conclusively measure the causal effect of choice on segregation, but by examining the same locales over time it represents a clear improvement over the cruder approach of comparing different locales at the same point in time. For example, it takes into account any unmeasured factors, such as the degree of residential segregation, to the extent that those factors remain constant over time.

Figure 1 shows the relationship between the change in charter enrollment and the change in minority exposure to non-minority students between 2002-03 and 2010-11.[3] The cloud of points suggests little relationship between these two factors, and a regression analysis confirms that this is the case.[4] There is actually a slight positive (and statistically significant) relationship between choice and diversity, but it is very weak and is not also found in the free-lunch data.

Figure 1. Change in Minority Exposure to Non-Minority Students vs. Change in Charter Enrollment, U.S. Counties, 2002-03 to 2010-11

Click to enlarge

I also used an alternative measure of segregation called a “dissimilarity index” and obtained similar findings: no consistent relationship between changes in charter enrollment and changes in segregation. Finally, I conducted a more sophisticated panel data analysis that uses all nine years of data to estimate the relationship between charter enrollment and segregation using only the changes within counties over time^.[5] Once again, using both the exposure and dissimilarity indices, the results consistently indicated no meaningful relationship between choice and segregation.

The lack of any consistent relationship between charter enrollment and segregation does not eliminate the possibility that such a relationship exists, but suggests that it is unlikely. For there to be a relationship, it would have to be the case that counties where charter enrollment increased experienced an increase in segregation as a result but then adopted policies (or experienced other changes) that counteracted the increase in segregation. In my view, that is not a very plausible explanation for these results.

There is no doubt that the high level of segregation in American society, including in our schools, is an important problem in its own right. The findings reported here indicate that it is unlikely that charter schools—a prominent effort to increase school choice, especially for students from disadvantaged backgrounds—are making the problem worse. But school choice policies come in a variety of flavors which may have different effects on the demographic makeup of schools. There may be examples of poorly designed choice programs that have increased segregation. For example, a choice system that is complicated and difficult to navigate may advantage affluent, educated parents at the expense of other parents.

Conversely, perhaps carefully designed choice policies can play a role in lessening the segregation of schools by race and class. For example, a simple, streamlined process that allows families to choose any school in a large urban district—and uses a fair method for allocating spaces at oversubscribed schools—could be a way to weaken the link between residential and school segregation that has plagued our school system since the end of legally mandated segregation more than 50 years ago.

-Matthew Chingos

This blog entry first appeared on the Brown Center Chalkboard from the Brookings Institution.

After my ominous prediction about the consortia’s fates, Smarter Balanced quickly responded in private. Their counter was both courteous and forceful. I was impressed by the initial case they made, and I’m very glad that they swiftly agreed to participate in this public Q&A.

Could you please briefly describe the process (including the challenges) of creating “next-generation” assessments aligned with new standards via a multi-state consortium?

The process Smarter Balanced is using is very similar to the processes that states have been using for over a decade to create assessments for NCLB accountability. Using a widely regarded conceptual approach called Evidence-Centered Design, and working in partnership with an array of private sector companies, work groups comprising assessment leadership from Smarter Balanced states have developed the various components necessary for a next-generation assessment system. Among the major elements are:

• IT architecture and open-source software to deliver, score and report on assessments
• Content and item specifications and a test blueprint to govern the content and format of the assessment
• Accommodations and accessibility features and policies
• Achievement-level descriptors, college content-readiness policy and plans for standard-setting
• Reporting system design
• Validity testing and psychometric research

This work has benefited immensely from the pooled expertise of state assessment professionals; K12 teachers, higher education faculty and other academic content experts; and staff from a diverse array of private sector firms. While the process that is being used to develop the Smarter Balanced assessment system would be familiar to anyone who has ever built a test, what is unique about Smarter Balanced is the bringing together of a large and diverse array of talent committed to making each element of the system “best in breed.”

What is Smarter Balanced most proud of?

We are proud that we have simultaneously been able to meet three ambitious goals:

1. We have hit all the major project milestones for delivering all three aspects of the assessment system—summative, interim and formative—on-time and on-budget for the 2014-15 academic year.

2. We have done this through a state-led process featuring consensus-based decision-making and the hard work of dedicated K-12 and higher education educators and administrators.

3. We have met our milestones without sacrificing our very high quality standards, and we continue to push the envelope of innovation in test design, including ground-breaking open-source software, innovative items and performance tasks, and new approaches to key processes such as developing achievement level descriptors and standard-setting.

What elements of this project proved more difficult than you expected?

Building an assessment system as large, multi-faceted, and sophisticated as the Smarter Balanced system is challenging, but the test-development process Smarter Balanced is using follows a sequence of steps that is familiar to all experienced assessment professionals. Given the extensive expertise of the Smarter Balanced state leadership and staff, the difficulties we have encountered in test development have not been unforeseen or unmanageable. The greater challenge is responding to the intense—and legitimate—interest of so many diverse parties in this work. State assessment directors expect scrutiny by policy makers, parents, interest groups, and others, but the number and diversity of the interested parties is much greater when working on the scale of a multi-state consortium. Keeping this diverse array of interested parties informed about the complex and often highly technical work of building an assessment system has been more challenging than we originally imagined.

Do states have the devices and bandwidth needed to deliver your online, adaptive assessments?

Some states are ready and are currently assessing students online. Other states are in the process of preparing for the assessments and will be ready when the assessments become operational in 2014-15. Recognizing the need for a transition period, for three years Smarter Balanced will support the use of a paper-and-pencil option for those schools not fully ready right away. Further, the minimum technology specifications that Smarter Balanced released last fall allow for very old operating systems and require only the minimum processors and memory required to run the operating system itself (for example, the summative assessment can be delivered using computers with 233 MHz processors and 128 MB RAM that run Windows XP). Likewise, the file size for individual assessment items will be very small to minimize the network bandwidth necessary to deliver the assessment online. Right now, Smarter Balanced provides a bandwidth checker to allow schools to determine the number of students that can simultaneously take tests and is hosting, in collaboration with PARCC, a “technology readiness tool” that allows schools and districts to assess and track their progress toward readiness.

Smarter Balanced has deployed small-scale trials and a pilot test to incrementally improve its technology system; these efforts have also helped districts better understand the technology and human resource requirements necessary to deploy the online assessments. The Smarter Balanced practice test to be released at the end of May and the Smarter Balanced field tests to be deployed in Spring 2014 will provide additional opportunities for schools to gain experience in deploying the assessments.

In recent months, concerns about cheating have skyrocketed. How can you guarantee test security given that numerous states will be giving the same exams during different test windows?

Actually, under the Smarter Balanced summative assessment design, states will be giving different tests during the same 12-week window at the end of each academic year. In a computer-adaptive assessment, each student’s test is customized based on his/her performance throughout the test. There will be no way for students to copy each other’s answers since each will be looking at a unique question. Further, since the results are captured electronically, it will not be possible for adults to tamper with results once the test administration is completed.

For schools using the paper-and-pencil option, the particular form students receive will depend on their responses to a short “locater test.” Since scoring standards will differ for the various forms, there will be no incentive for teachers to steer students to the less challenging forms.

Beyond elements of the test design that will militate against the risk of cheating, the Smarter Balanced test administration policies will call on states to conform to best practices with regard to independent monitoring and proctoring.

A defining moment on the horizon is when Smarter Balanced attempts to set cut scores and have all member states sign on. Can you help us understand the process you’ll use to reach consensus? How important is it that the cut scores are high and that members agree?

It is essential that the scores accurately reflect student mastery of the Common Core State Standards and that they have a common meaning across Smarter Balanced states. Our member chief state school officers, who will ultimately vote on the cut scores, view rigorous common performance standards as an essential element of realizing the promise of the Common Core State Standards. From its beginning, Smarter Balanced has relied upon a consensus-based process for all its policy decisions. Our experience has been that our states have little difficulty in reaching consensus when we are deliberative and remain open and transparent as policy decisions develop. We don’t expect the standard setting process to be any different.

That said, we acknowledge the challenge in setting performance standards at the scale of a multi-state consortium. Relying entirely on the traditional workshop format typically used for standard setting would make it difficult for each state to feel adequately represented in the process. To address this challenge, we are planning an innovative approach to standard-setting that will take advantage of our online testing platform to allow the participation of as many constituents as interested to review exemplar test items and weigh in on where they think the “cut scores” should be set. This crowd-sourced data, parsed by state and by respondent role (teachers, higher education faculty, parents, etc.) can then inform the comparatively small number of individuals participating in the standard-setting workshop.

How important are the two testing consortia to Common Core? Is the fate of the standards tied to the fate of the consortia?

The Common Core will succeed or fail in the classroom. Effective instruction is at the heart of meeting the high expectations set by the standards. Smarter Balanced is grounded in the notion that putting good information about student performance in the hands of teachers can have a profound impact on instruction and—as a result—on student learning. By accurately assessing the deeper learning required by the standards, and by helping teachers sharpen their own skills in formative, classroom-based assessment through the Digital Library of Formative Tools and Practices, Smarter Balanced can make a positive contribution to the ultimate success of the Common Core.

Are you confident that Smarter Balanced will be able to deliver online, adaptive assessments on time, on budget, and in all promised grades/subjects to all member states in 2014–15?

We are on track to deliver each aspect of our assessment system on time and on budget in 2014-15. To date, our work has been supported through contracts with every one of the country’s large testing companies. We have successfully sought bids and procured multiple contracts consistent with our overall project plan, and we continue to be on schedule. This spring we are pilot testing the first 5,000 items and tasks we have developed with about a million students, engaging more than 5,200 schools drawn from all 21 of our governing states. The pilot test also serves as a beta test for our test delivery software. In addition to testing out our items, performance tasks, and software, the pilot test also gives us an opportunity to evaluate a variety of accessibility features for students with disabilities and English language learners.

How concerned are you by Alabama’s and Utah’s decisions to abandon the testing consortia and Florida chief Tony Bennett’s public statement that he’s looking for a “Plan B?” Are we about to see a mass exodus from the consortia?

We regret that Alabama and Utah chose to leave the consortium; each state did so for particular reasons unrelated to the progress of the Consortium or to design decisions that the member states had reached. While those states have chosen to leave the Consortium, Alaska and the U.S. Virgin Islands have recently joined Smarter Balanced, and many states that initially joined as advisory states have transitioned to governing status, reflecting their commitment to the Consortium.

About how many states do you expect to administer Smart Balanced assessments in all covered grades and subjects in 2014–15? How many states will be participating in Smarter Balanced and PARCC combined?

We have no reason to expect changes among our 21 governing states. Recently, our governing states completed a survey asking them to identify the Smarter Balanced assessments they are most likely to ultimately use. All but one state indicated plans to use the full suite of formative, interim, and summative assessments. The one remaining state plans to implement only the summative assessment.

We also currently have four advisory states; some of those states may choose to select different assessments while others may transition to governing status.

If a state chief called you tomorrow and said, “A trusted vendor is guaranteeing me high-quality, secure assessments below Smarter Balanced costs and without all of the hassles that come along with a 20-state consortium,” what would you tell him/her?

A primary benefit of the Smarter Balanced assessment system is that it is built by states, for states. States in the Consortium have a level of direct decision-making control that they could never hope to achieve with an “off-the-shelf” product. They also are assured of a level of multi-states comparability, both within the Consortium and across PARCC and Smarter Balanced, which is unlikely to be reached with a commercial test. Finally, the transparency of the Smarter Balanced system is antithetical to the competitive nature of commercial test publishing. Examples of that transparency include:

• Our open-source test delivery software
• Our open bank of interim items that are built to the same specifications as the item bank for the secure summative assessment
• The extent to which the documents that guide our work invite public review and are published online
• The full and open disclosure of our plans for research and validity and the results of those studies.

Additionally, Smarter Balanced is developing a distributed, multi-actor system of test delivery, with the Consortium maintaining responsibility only for those aspects that are essential for ensuring continued comparability of results, quality improvements, and state-led governance. Under this system, many of the services that states need to administer the tests and deliver results will come from the vendor community. This system allows states to maintain control over content and quality while outsourcing to the private sector those elements of test delivery system that these companies have mastered.

Finally, the estimated total cost for the Smarter Balanced assessments ($22.50 per student for the summative assessment in both English language arts and math, or $27.30 per student for the full system of formative, interim and summative assessments) is less than the amount that about two-thirds of our member states currently pay for their state assessments. These costs encompass both the services provided by Smarter Balanced in common to all member states and the services that states will either provide directly or procure from vendors in the private sector.

One element dominates the cost: approximately 70 percent of the vendor cost for summative assessments is tied to hand-scoring. Measuring the deeper learning required by the Common Core requires that students write extensively and much of that writing cannot yet be scored by technology. Paying teachers, faculty, and other content experts to score student responses is costly, but it is currently the only effective way to measure important elements of the Common Core. Until automated scoring of writing improves, reducing the cost would require reducing the amount of writing—a step that cannot be taken without compromising fidelity to the standards. Smarter Balanced can include extensive writing and maintain a reasonable cost because our size allows us to take advantage of economies of scale. Off-the-shelf tests that cost substantially less than Smarter Balanced assessments almost certainly will not include as many items and tasks that require students to produce a response rather than simply find a correct answer. We believe this is a significant quality benefit of Smarter Balanced.

Could you please describe Smarter Balanced’s relationship with the U.S. Department of Education? For example, how often do you meet with them, what kinds of technical assistance do they provide, how much do they direct your work, etc.?

Smarter Balanced is funded under a cooperative agreement with the U.S. Department of Education that extends through September 2014. The fiscal agent for the federal grant is the state of Washington. The Department of Education has responsibility for fiduciary and programmatic oversight of the grant. In essence, they need to track that we are doing the things we promised to do and spending funds in accordance with our approved budget. Like any federal grantee, Smarter Balanced must operate within the requirements of its federal grant; however, there is a great deal of latitude built into the grant for state decision-making. For example, the grant stipulates that Smarter Balanced must build an assessment of the Common Core State Standards, but the test blueprint specifying the proportion of test material on various topics is something the states in the Consortium decide.

We meet with program officers at the Department monthly and provide them with quarterly financial and programmatic reports. In addition, once a year we undergo a thorough program review, not unlike the program review that states have always gone through for their Title I grants.

Since the inception of No Child Left Behind, the Department of Education has used a process called “Peer Review” to ensure that all state testing programs adhere to the AERA/NCME/APA Joint Standards for Educational and Psychological Testing. The consortia assessments will be no different with regard to this Peer Review, and we have already been preparing and submitting materials to the Department of Education for that purpose. This level of review is no greater nor less than the technical scrutiny the Department of Education requires of all state tests designed to meet the requirements of federal accountability.

At the conclusion of the federal grant, Smarter Balanced will transition to being an operational assessment system supported by its member states. The consortium does not plan to seek additional funds from the U.S. Department of Education.

Why do you think 70 percent of “education insiders” say Smarter Balanced is on the wrong track?

Smarter Balanced was created by assessment professionals in state education agencies who determined that by pooling their experience and expertise—and by taking advantage of the federal funds offered by the Department of Education and working in partnership with private sector firms—they could build more sophisticated and accurate assessments of student learning than any individual state could offer on its own. For the last two and a half years, this group of technical experts has been busily doing its work, and the result is that Smarter Balanced is on track and on budget.

Assessment experts around the country have expressed nothing but admiration for the work that Smarter Balanced has done (for example, see http://www.cse.ucla.edu/products/reports/R823.pdf). The education insiders who responded to the survey referenced in this question likely aren’t experts in assessment and—because Smarter Balanced is not a Washington, DC-based organization and its leaders are not well known “inside the beltway”—they are not as familiar with the work the Consortium has done. Smarter Balanced is committed to doing more outreach and communication work to better inform all our stakeholders about the progress we have made and the challenges ahead.

Would you please explain your plans for Smarter Balanced’s future governance, leadership, and funding?

In March 2013, the governing states of Smarter Balanced endorsed a sustainability plan that included instructions for the Smarter Balanced executive director to enter into negotiations with the National Center for Research on Evaluation, Standards, and Student Testing (CRESST) at UCLA to serve as a partner and host for the Smarter Balanced Consortium after the completion of the federal grant in September 2014. These negotiations are moving toward an agreement by UCLA to recognize the shared state ownership of the assessment system content and an independent governance structure much like the one that the consortium currently employs. Smarter Balanced will continue to be governed by its member states, with K-12 and higher education representatives and a small executive committee providing day-to-day oversight. Operations will be managed by a small staff under the leadership of an executive director and two deputies. Funding will come primarily from fees paid by states for packages of assessment services, with UCLA/CRESST providing office space and key administrative support in areas such as finance, human resources, legal advice, etc.

What else would you like people to know about Smarter Balanced?

As part of our commitment to transparency—and in order to help teachers, teacher educators, and other interested parties learn about and prepare for the assessments—Smarter Balanced will be releasing a complete set of practice tests for each subject and grade level at the end of May. These practice tests will be freely available on the Smarter Balanced web site (www.SmarterBalanced.org); they will utilize the same software system that is being used for the operational test and will feature many of the tools, accommodations and accessibility features that will be included in the final software package. Everyone interested in seeing first-hand what the assessments will look like is encouraged to visit our web site and challenge themselves by answering the questions in these practice tests.

-Andy Smarick

This blog entry first appeared on the Fordham Institute’s Common Core Watch blog.

—Education Next

The project that Wendy Kopp launched with a 1989 college thesis placed 10,400 teachers in 2012, with plans to expand to 15,000 teachers and 60 sites by 2015. To hit that target, Beard told me, TFA will need revenues of a half billion dollars a year, up from $320 million in 2012. Overseas, entrepreneurs in 26 countries have launched TFA projects under a sister organization called Teach For All; projects in another 18 countries are in the pipeline.

And more changes are ahead?

Kramer, previously TFA’s president, portrays the leadership shift as little more than a change in business cards, formalizing Kopp’s evolution out of TFA’s day-to-day activities and reassigning some of her public duties to himself and Beard, who previously was chief operating officer. The new arrangement puts Kramer in charge of recruiting, training, fundraising, marketing, and administration, while Beard will run the regional operations and become TFA’s public face.

Kopp becomes TFA’s board chair and remains chief executive of Teach For All.

Kramer sees TFA as, yes, a pipeline of teachers into poor and neglected neighborhoods. Its teachers were in 3,200 public schools in 2013 (nationwide, two-thirds of those were district schools), and 57,000 college students applied to become corps members. But Kramer also paints a vision of TFA as an instigator of change, producing alumni that TFA expects—just expects—will become the sort of shake-up-the-beast leaders who will “do something radically different” for the schools.

The beast shaking seems well under way. TFA says 550 alumni are school principals, 100 are system leaders, and 70 hold elective office. Charter operators, education entrepreneurs, and philanthropists increasingly follow TFA into its new neighborhoods, “magnetizing talent,” Kopp calls it. (Indeed, several education entrepreneurs told me they wouldn’t expand their projects into cities where there isn’t a TFA presence because they couldn’t be sure of attracting the talent they need.)

A study by Harvard professor Monica Higgins and co-authors Wendy Robison, Jennie Weiner, and Frederick Hess (“Creating a Corps of Change Agents,” features, Summer 2011) found that of the 49 leading entrepreneurial organizations in education, 14 had at least one top manager who was a TFA alumnus. And Weiner contends that TFA alumni are driving the curriculum at education schools. “They come here wanting to know more about solutions” like charters, school choice, and teacher evaluation, she said. “The [TFA] commitment may end after two years, but there’s a forward momentum” that goes on and on.

I wondered how TFA has managed to keep that forward momentum after almost 24 years. After all, there are plenty of start-ups—in education and everywhere else—that have been slowed by middle-aged paunch. There probably are a lot of reasons, researchers, funders, and TFA’s fellow entrepreneurs told me, but here are four:

Common Vision, Regional Innovation

Josh Anderson is the executive director of the Chicago Teach For America project, which has 500 corps members dispersed in 187 schools and a staff of 64 to support them. Like all TFA executive directors, Anderson must raise his entire operating budget (the schools pay the corps members’ salaries), which is $12.8 million this year. The state and city put up $2.2 million of that, but the biggest share, almost $7 million, comes from individual donors and family foundations.

The Chicago project’s growth is on pace to meet its 2015 goals, he told me, so he has begun setting 2017 targets: 1,000 corps members and a budget “north of $20 million.” Like other executive directors, Anderson also sets his region’s education agenda, and among his plans is an “inspire zone” in seven contiguous neighborhoods. The idea is to concentrate corps teachers in the zone, install corps alumni as principals, and invite in high-performing charter networks to help leverage the impact.

Anderson, who is 31 and a former New York corps member, said it’s “the expectation” that executive directors develop and fund their own plans. “The ideas and vision for what needs to happen in Chicago emanates from Chicago,” he added.

Kopp has written about TFA’s earliest days, when everyone had a vote in every decision, and strategy sessions lasted much of the night. It began abandoning that folly about five years in, she says. Now, half of TFA’s 1,900 staffers are in the regions where TFA is teaching and 80 percent of its revenue comes from fundraising by the regional projects. Executive directors were told to start asking “what it’s going to take for every kid to get an excellent education” in their region, and then go out and do it, Kramer said.

That keeps TFA regions innovative and learning from one another, Jane Hannaway, director of the National Center for Analysis of Longitudinal Data in Education Research, told me. But what keeps it from spinning off into 46 disconnected projects? I asked.

One explanation is a communications network that seems to hum with activity. There are thrice-yearly conferences where executive directors “problem solve” and “transfer knowledge,” Anderson said. There are phone briefings, a newsletter, conference calls, seminars, and an ongoing review of the “negotiables” and the “flexibles” in the TFA model, Elisa Beard said. “We don’t want it to feel like they’re entirely different organizations when we go from one region to another.”

Perhaps the bigger reason, though, is what Alex Hernandez, a partner in the Charter School Growth Fund, called “a superclear mission.” TFA has a concise manifesto that commits it to eliminating educational inequity. That vision is so central to TFA’s culture that it’s “imprinted” on corps members as a set of shared understandings, said Harvard’s Higgins.

“We’re working toward the same thing,” James Curran, the executive director in South Dakota, told me. “We’re just doing it in different ways.”

Data-Driven Improvement

Katie Jaron is TFA’s vice president for leadership development, a job in which she thinks about what would make corps members more effective teachers. In 2011, she asked a large consulting firm to study some school districts and charter management organizations that were known for giving robust support to their teachers.

TFA already provides a coach, called a manager of teacher leadership and development, to every corps member (TFA says 89 percent of its first-year corps members return for a second year, and 63 percent go into education as a career). But the consultants, and internal surveys, told Jaron that there were gaps in TFA’s coaching. So this year Jaron, who is 33 and a Houston corps alumna, launched a pilot project that adds content and classroom-management coaches in Houston and several other cities.

The content coaches offer technical advice on how to teach elementary grades, math and science, and the humanities. The management coaches are each equipped with a walkie-talkie and coach a corps member—who is equipped with an earpiece—through classroom behavior problems as they’re happening.

There’s more: in Jacksonville, executive director Crystal Rountree is piloting a summer training institute for 100 new corps members who will teach in Duval County schools next fall. Typically, TFA assigns its new teachers to one of nine summer training institutes that are spread around the country. Rountree, who is 31 and a former corps member in Atlanta, said that under that system, her new teachers would arrive in Jacksonville with limited understanding of the city and its schools.

So last year, she brought together Duval’s superintendent and board of education, the president of a local university, and others, and said, “Let’s do some thinking about what it would look like” to train TFA teachers locally. The teachers will arrive in their schools weeks earlier; they’ll supplement the district’s summer-school program and they’ll know their students even before school starts. Rountree already is planning weekly dinners for the new teachers with parents, veteran teachers, and city officials.

Still more: in South Dakota, Curran, who is 29 and a former Phoenix corps member, is part of a seven-region pilot project to build an incubator to prepare teachers in rural districts to become principals. It’s being funded with a competitive TFA “innovation grant” that the executive directors collectively applied for out of frustration that there was no infrastructure to develop principals for their schools.

The pilots—there are loads more—and other programmatic decisions “aren’t just hunches,” said Jane Hannaway, whose daughter is a TFA alumna. TFA is “constantly trying to figure out better ways to do things,” she added. (In addition to its internal research, TFA has a five-person team that cooperates with researchers on “dozens” of studies of TFA’s effectiveness and is looking for more, said Raegen Miller, TFA’s vice president for research partnerships.)

Even more compellingly, when the data show that something isn’t working—“and they’re always monitoring—they have the money and wherewithal to scrap it and redesign it,” said Susan Moore Johnson of Harvard’s Graduate School of Education. (Her daughter also is a TFA alumna.)

Based on all that scrutiny, TFA cut the number of corps members that each teaching coach supervises to 30 or fewer, down from 50 a few years ago (in Chicago, Anderson cut it further, to 20 teachers per coach). Corps members now teach “life skills,” like persistence and problem solving, and “access skills,” like note taking and skim reading, that will help students get into college.

“We are one of the most data-driven, matrix-driven organizations I know,” Annis Stubbs, the executive director of the Detroit TFA project told me.

Global Reach

Amy Black is vice president of development for Teach For All, which Kopp co-founded in 2007 after pleas from entrepreneurs in Britain—and then Germany, India, Lithuania, China, Lebanon, the Philippines—to help set up projects in their countries. Black said TFA concluded that the challenges were the same in every country—poor kids don’t have the same access to education as richer kids—and that TFA could “help shorten the learning curve” for those entrepreneurs.

TFA requires the international projects to place teachers in full-time jobs for two years, measure student performance, and be independent of their governments, among other things. But how, what, and whom they teach “are questions every program is answering,” Black said.

That experimentation will accelerate innovation (talk about crowd sourcing!), Harvard’s Monica Higgins and other researchers told me. The overseas projects will force TFA to examine its assumptions about how kids learn, teachers are trained, school systems are set up and funded, and more. “Nothing else is going to push them as much,” Higgins said.

Beyond that, exposure to different cultures will keep TFA “open to new ways of doing things,” which can be a challenge for young companies, Jon Schnur, a co-founder of two education nonprofits, America Achieves and New Leaders for New Schools, told me. “It will keep them learning from educators around the world.”

TFA already is taking lessons in “values leadership” from Teach For India, Black and Kopp both told me—that is, how to instill teachers with a sense of mission and urgency. It’s also watching how the projects in India and Israel recruit teachers, should it decide to expand its own recruiting outside college campuses. Both countries recruit older corps members—Israel because college graduates first must serve in the military, and India because it’s looking for corps members who are mature enough to move into jobs as principals as soon as their teaching commitment is up.

“There’s a ton of leadership literature out there, but the newest, freshest information we’re getting” is from Teach For India, Black said.

Stoking the Leadership Fire

Two years ago, in its annual alumni survey, TFA asked its 28,000 former corps members if they were interested in becoming superintendents or in taking other district-level posts. There was “overwhelming interest,” Andrea Stouder Pursley, vice president of alumni affairs and a former corps teacher in Phoenix, told me. But that interest didn’t correlate with the number of alumni who actually went into district leadership.

So Pursley enlisted another management consultant to figure out why and, beyond that, what kind of skills and preparation a successful superintendent needs. From there, TFA built a part-academic, part-on-the-job fellowship program that will place alumni in district offices for a year beginning this fall. Some 160 alumni applied for 20 spots; 25 districts asked for fellows.

Among the other molds TFA has broken, it has “reframed the way to think about alumni relations,” said Jennie Weiner, a postdoctoral fellow at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. Most organizations look to their alumni for what they can give back; TFA looks to its alumni to carry its mission forward.

Kopp says it was TFA’s vision from the start to get its alumni into jobs where they could influence—no, direct—education policy. “We’re not going to solve this problem in the classroom. We want [alumni] out there, pioneering new things we never thought of,” she told me.

That squares with a complaint I heard from Harvard’s Susan Moore Johnson, that TFA’s two-year commitment “isn’t designed to increase the capacity of a school over time.” Corps members come and go, but the school remains woefully the same (indeed, part of the reason for those life-skills and persistence lessons corps members now teach is to help students cope with a weak teacher they may be assigned the next year, or the year after that).

Getting TFA alumni into leadership roles, though, has meant first creating an enormous talent-building infrastructure of graduate-school partnerships, employer internships, an in-house career-counseling center, and an organization to help alumni win elected office. Almost one in 10 TFA staffers now works on alumni development, including a three-person “entrepreneurship team” that helps alumni with their education start-ups and hosts an annual “design camp” for innovators. Last year, 150 showed up to compete for $150,000 in start-up capital. (The big winner: GirlTrek, which encourages African American girls and women to lose weight through walking.)

TFA sets annual goals for the number of alumni it expects to become principals, school-board members, state school chiefs, even congressmen. Kopp wouldn’t share the goals, but told me they “seem like the right intersection between stretch and realism.” An early alumni survey showed that 5 percent of former corps members who were still in education were principals, so Kopp said she figured that 10 percent could make the jump if TFA provided some counseling and support. Within a few years, she said, 12 percent had.

Pushing the Limits

When I asked Elisa Beard, the new co-CEO, what was the greatest constraint on TFA’s growth plans, “leadership capacity” was at the top of her list, a surprise because of TFA’s focus on leadership development. But in early 2013, four TFA regions lacked executive directors, and Beard scrapped plans to open in two new cities in the fall because she hasn’t found qualified executive directors. Her solution is to launch—what else?—a pilot project to develop executive directors.

Kopp also named talent recruitment as “a big potential limitation,” but she meant teacher talent. For all the campus excitement TFA seems to generate, recruiting is a challenge, she said. TFA says that of the 48,000 people who applied in 2012, it accepted only 17 percent, about 8,200, and of those, just 5,800 took up its offer.

TFA’s costs average $40,000 per corps member over three years, including recruiting, pre-service training, in-service coaching, and overheads, and those costs haven’t come down even as TFA has grown. In part, that’s because “there are new ideas every day for things we need to do,” Kopp said (think of those design camps, the summer institute, the coaches). And in part, it’s because some expenses—Kramer named labor law, finance, accounting—don’t lend themselves to scale-up savings, he said. “What it takes to do things right at a bigger scale is more than it costs to do them right at a tiny scale,” he said. “It’s not at the top of my thinking that we have to slash,” he added.

TFA also claims favorable comparisons with other service organizations: it says the Peace Corps spends $78,000 to recruit, train, and support a volunteer for a two-year commitment (the National Peace Corps Association puts the cost at $50,000 a year). VISTA asks localities to pony up $11,000 a year for a community-service volunteer, to which it adds $12,000 in benefits.

Almost three-quarters of TFA’s revenues came from philanthropy in 2011—$194 million, up $40 million from the year before, according to the latest annual report—and Kopp said “it’s actually been powerful” to have to appeal to donors. “It’s forced us to get out in the world and sell this cause.” Funders encourage innovation by asking for results: they’d take their money somewhere else if they lost confidence. Just as important, they become what Kopp called “champions” of education reform.

Those champions no doubt will be watching Kramer and Beard—and those half-billion-dollar plans. I asked Kramer what he worried about as the co-CEO. “Whether or not we fulfill our potential,” he told me without a moment’s pause.

June Kronholz is an Education Next contributing editor and a former Wall Street Journal education reporter, foreign correspondent, and editor.

Teach For America Keeps Forward Momentum After 24 Years

Growth is fueled by a common vision, regional independence, data-driven improvement, and pioneering alumni

CAMBRIDGE, MA—In a new analysis, June Kronholz examines the recipe that has made Teach For America’s nearly quarter century record of growth possible.  Among the key reasons, she finds, are TFA’s accountable, analytical, and adaptable managerial practices.  “Still Teaching for America” will appear in the Summer issue of Education Next and is now available at www.educationnext.org.

TFA placed 10,400 teachers in 2012 and its plans call for expansion to 15,000 teachers by 2015.  Its teachers worked in 3,200 public schools in 2013.  Of the 48,000 applicants for TFA openings in 2012, which included 11 percent of Yale’s graduating class, only 8,200, or 17%, were accepted.  TFA reports that 550 alumni have become school principals, 100 are system leaders, and 70 hold elected offices.  Almost three-quarters of TFA’s revenues came from philanthropy in 2011—$194 million, up $40 million from 2010.  To meet the new goals, including projects in another 18 countries, TFA will need revenues of a half billion dollars a year.

TFA founder, Wendy Kopp, has recently passed the baton to two co-chief executives, Elisa Villanueva Beard and Matt Kramer.  Kopp became TFA’s board chair and is chief executive of Teach For All, a sister organization she co-founded in 2007 to assist entrepreneurs in Britain, Germany, India, China, and other countries.

There are probably a number of reasons for TFA’s growth, say those interviewed, but the success of the organization’s approach depends on a nimble, decentralized managerial structure with some key features.

• State-level TFA executive directors are held accountable for raising their entire operating budgets (schools pay the corps members’ salaries).  Chicago TFA, for example, has 500 corps members in 187 schools, a staff of 64, and an operating budget of $12.8 million.  Kronholz reports that Chicago executive director Josh Anderson already is on pace to meet his 2015 goals and is setting 2017 targets.  He also sets his region’s education agenda; among his plans is an “inspire zone” in seven contiguous neighborhoods, concentrating corps teachers in zones, installing alumni as principals, and inviting in high-performing charter networks to help leverage the impact.

• TFA frequently uses outside consulting organizations to analyze its work and then implements pilot projects to test recommended changes.  In 2011, for example, a firm’s studies and surveys pointed to gaps in TFA’s teacher coaching practices.  TFA launched a pilot project that added content and classroom-management coaches in Houston and several other cities.  It has since cut the number of corps members that each coach oversees from 50 to 30.

• When the data show that something isn’t working, TFA adapts, redesigning its approaches.  It also implements new programs when progress toward goals is too slow.  For example, an annual alumni survey showed a disconnection between members’ interest in becoming superintendents and the numbers moving into such posts.  TFA initiated a part-academic, part on-the-job fellowship to prepare former corps members for district posts; some 160 alumni applied for 20 spots; 25 districts asked for fellows.

Kronholz notes that TFA is sometimes criticized for placing teachers in disadvantaged districts for just a short time (a two-year term is required).  Its managerial practices seem to promote a longer view among many corps members, however.  TFA reports that 63 percent of its teachers go into education as a career.

About the Author

June Kronholz is an Education Next contributing editor and a former Wall Street Journal education reporter, foreign correspondent, and editor.  She is available for interviews.

About Education Next

Education Next is a scholarly journal published by the Hoover Institution that is committed to careful examination of evidence relating to school reform.  Other collaborating institutions are the Program on Education Policy and Governance at Harvard University, part of the Taubman Center for State and Local Government at the Harvard Kennedy School, and the Thomas B. Fordham Institute.  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.

CONTACT:
Matthew M. Chingos mchingos@brookings.edu  Brookings Institution
Paul E. Peterson  ppeterso@gov.harvard.edu  Harvard University
Antonio Wendland  pepg_administrator@hks.harvard.edu  617-495-7976

What Works Clearinghouse Gives Voucher Study Highest Rating

Study Finds School Vouchers Boost College Enrollment for African Americans by 24%

CAMBRIDGE, MA— The What Works Clearinghouse (WWC), an initiative of the U.S. Department of Education’s Institute of Education Sciences, announced today that “The Effects of School Vouchers on College Enrollment: Experimental Evidence from New York City” meets WWC standards without reservations.

The study, conducted by Matthew M. Chingos of the Brookings Institution and Paul E. Peterson, Director of Harvard’s Program on Education Policy and Governance, was singled out as a well-implemented randomized control trial.

The What Works Clearinghouse reviews individual studies and assesses the quality of the research design and technical details about the study’s design and findings. The full WWC evaluation of the study is available here.

“The Effects of School Vouchers on College Enrollment: Experimental Evidence from New York City” is the first-ever experimental study of  college-enrollment outcomes of school voucher programs. It found that the percentage of African American students who enrolled part-time or full-time in college by 2011 was 24 percent higher for those who had won a school voucher lottery while in elementary school, and had used their voucher to attend a private school.

An analysis of the study, “The Impact of School Vouchers on College Enrollment,” will appear in the Summer issue of Education Next and is now available online.

About the Authors
Matthew M. Chingos is a fellow in the Brookings Institution’s Brown Center on Education Policy.  Paul E. Peterson is the Henry Lee Shattuck Professor of Government and director of the Program on Education Policy and Governance at Harvard University and senior fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University.  The authors are available for interviews.

About Education Next
Education Next is a scholarly journal published by the Hoover Institution that is committed to careful examination of evidence relating to school reform.  Other collaborating institutions are the Program on Education Policy and Governance at Harvard University, 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

Today, the What Works Clearinghouse declared the study to be “a well-implemented randomized controlled trial.”  We are grateful for that endorsement, because it should put an end to a line of criticism that has managed to obtain coverage in some portions of the electronic media.

Specifically, a review of our report from the National Education Policy Center purported to raise methodological concerns with our study.  We found their criticisms wanting and responded to them accordingly, but it is in the nature of methodological discussions that a specialized background is generally required in order to assess them.  As a result, even when there clearly is a correct answer in such debates, it will often appear to a journalist or another lay reader to be a “he said, she said” exchange.

This is exactly why the Institute of Education sciences, the research arm of the U.S. Department of Education, created the What Works Clearinghouse (WWC): “to be a central and trusted source of scientific evidence for what works in education.”  The WWC does its best to review studies objectively and to rate the quality of the methodology used, thereby helping policymakers and practitioners sort through the mounds of education research produced in the U.S., much of which is of low quality.

In the full review released today, the WWC found that our report on the effect of school vouchers on college enrollment “meets WWC evidence standards without reservations,” its highest possible rating.

Of course, policy should not turn on the results of any single study, as issues are complex and outcomes can vary over time and place. But policy should be informed by a body of high-quality research, and the U.S. is fortunate to have the WWC as an independent arbiter of quality.

-Matthew Chingos and Paul Peterson

Experts predict the housing market to heat up this summer. But house shopping can be frustrating for parents, who sometimes feel limited in their selection because of the spotty quality of public schools. Houses nearby top quality public schools generally command a premium.

The good news is that parents have new options for patching together a truly superior education plan for their kids, regardless of neighborhood. These ideas require legwork, but they are all becoming affordable possibilities for K-12 students. Here are four suggestions—two that work within the public school system and two outside the system:

First, mix advanced online courses into your child’s schedule. Most states either require districts to allow students to take online courses, or they let districts decide for themselves. To find your state’s policy, click on Digital Learning Now!, select a state, and then click “View State Profile.” That will link you to an overview of how friendly any given state is to online courses. Then check out Keeping Pace, which names specific programs within each state. Furthermore, roughly 20 states have a central website that lists approved courses, such as these: ACCESS (Alabama),  MoVIP (Missouri), IDEAL-NM (New Mexico), NCVPS (North Carolina), TXVSN (Texas), and Wyoming Switchboard Network (Wyoming).

Utah has a particularly helpful policy for parents. It lets districts authorize course providers, which means that parents can work within their districts to get the best courses approved. Many students there are starting to mix a few advanced online courses into their schedules to replace courses that are unavailable or mediocre in the neighborhood school.

Even elementary school children can benefit from targeted online opportunities in places where such opportunities are otherwise missing. Many in the younger set are blending online foreign language, music, or tutoring into their extracurricular (and in some cases, core) activities.

Second, ask your classroom teacher to let your child “prove it or lose it.” A young teen was falling behind in her math class, not to mention starting to despise math. Her father worked out a deal with the teacher whereby the teacher gave the student a calendar with dates for all the unit tests. The student was free to learn the material however she wanted, provided that she still attended class and passed the unit tests when the teacher administered them in class. But she could sit on the side of the classroom and work on her own, and she did not have to complete homework assignments. If she didn’t prove her progress with each unit test, the deal was off.

Excited about her windfall of control, the girl chose an entertaining math software program, for which her father gladly paid, and worked in the corner of the classroom and at night to prepare for each unit test. Her math results, as well as interest in math, soared.

This approach seems like a reasonable compromise. It allows students to find their own learning path, but still complies with standards, testing, attendance requirements, and so forth. If your child is ahead, the prove it/lose it method could also work to allow him or her to continue to advance independently without placing almost any extra work on the classroom teacher.

Third, set up a half-the-work (for you), twice-the-learning (for your child) homeschool. I am homeschooling one of my children for a few months until first grade. Each week I help her set learning goals and then let her choose how to achieve them. Most weekdays she free reads for up to an hour, writes a letter to her pen pal, completes 20 minutes of Dreambox math, and does Piano Marvel. It’s half the work of homeschooling for me, because I rely on the Internet for the backbone of her academics.

Meanwhile, she’s doing 10 hours per week of gymnastics training at the local gymnasium. She is passionate about gymnastics, and the 10 hours is much more than she would have time for if she were still in full-day kindergarten. It’s enough to allow gymnastics to be an area of excellence for her.

As online learning options expand and improve, I suspect more students will find they can master their core learning faster and then devote more time to apprenticeships and areas of excellence.

Fourth, keep your eye out for a micro-school (or start your own!). In theory, online learning will one day dramatically reduce the costs of obtaining an advanced education. As devices, communications tools, online tutorials, and learning science improve, entrepreneurs will find that online learning snaps easily into a brick-and-mortar shell, and we will see the proliferation of very affordable private schools. mSchool, an organization that helps community centers open one-classroom “microSchools,” is one early example. I imagine in the future we’ll see countless parent co-ops start to couple online learning with brick-and-mortar experiences to create a host of independent, blended-learning micro-schools.

Those are a few suggestions for radically enhancing your child’s learning possibilities without paying for a moving truck. For more background, watch Governor Jeb Bush give a national perspective on the rise of learning options in this video. Also, keep your eye out this month for a new Innosight Institute research paper about blended learning, which I have been lucky enough to co-author with Clayton M. Christensen and Michael B. Horn. In it we state that “as the online-learning ecosystem matures and political barriers become untenable, a noisy reshuffling will take place as students who before lived in the wrong zip code find that access to learning opportunities is no longer neighborhood defined.” I’m glad that’s becoming true!

-Heather Clayton Staker

Heather Clayton Staker is a senior research fellow at the Clayton Christensen Institute for Disruptive Innovation.

This blog entry first appeared on the website of the Christensen Institute.

We’re launching with a three-day conversation with the primary players in the nation’s progression toward new, common assessments. Tomorrow, we’ll hear from Smarter Balanced, and Wednesday’s anchor leg will be run by the United States Department of Education.

But today, we have PARCC, the Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Career, one of two consortia of states funded by the federal government to develop “next-generation” assessments aligned with the Common Core State Standards.

Its governing board is comprised of some of the nation’s most prominent state chiefs, and it is supported by Achieve, a national nonprofit known for its “college- and career-ready agenda.” While working for the New Jersey Department of Education, a PARCC member, I got to know and admire its leadership and staff. Those relationships and my participation in various PARCC meetings and activities contributed greatly to my appreciation for the enormous complexity of assessment and the critical role of the testing consortia.

So with no further ado: PARCC.

Could you describe the process (including the many challenges) of creating “next-generation” assessments aligned with new standards via a multi-state consortium?

It is a rigorous process that requires 22 states to work together every day to drive towards consensus about a range of policies and assessment practices that support a positive and strong learning environment for every student. States have made an incredible commitment to this work.

There are thousands of state leaders, local educators and postsecondary leaders, administrators and faculty who are engaged in developing the PARCC assessment system. We are also seeking public input on many of our policies, often receiving thousands of individual comments.

Keeping the project on track requires intense daily focus by the entire PARCC team, especially the lead representatives from our states and local school systems. Hundreds of test-item writers and reviewers composed of SEA staff, teachers, higher education leaders and faculty, and education experts have spent countless hours developing and refining thousands of questions and items across all grade levels.

What is PARCC most proud of?

Below are the milestones that make us most proud:

• The states have full ownership of the development of the test, the quality of the items, the length of the test, the uses and usefulness of the output, etc.

• Developing Educator Leader Cadres — comprised of individual teachers and principals who are helping prepare for the Common Core and new assessments — now have more than 600 members across the states, and are getting bigger each day.

• At every step in the process, states demand a test that is developed with fidelity to the CCSS.

• Spurring collaboration between states that are geographically and politically diverse — from Arizona to New Jersey — is an unprecedented development in American public education.

• Colleges and universities are working overtime alongside their K-12 counterparts to develop assessments that will actually signal college readiness to students, parents and teachers.

• And, that through the consortium, states are able to ensure a higher quality assessment than any individual state could by itself. The power of states working together is going to move and improve the entire testing industry.

What elements of this project proved more difficult than you expected?

Political transitions sometimes result in staffing changes, and that can affect procurement timelines and processes. The good news is: Despite the transitions, the states’ commitment to PARCC remains strong. We are working hard with PARCC states to ensure procurement challenges don’t impede the work and the states’ commitment to PARCC remains strong despite the transitions.

Do states have the devices and bandwidth to deliver your on-line assessments?

States and local school systems are in various states of technology readiness. Some already are conducting online assessments and will be able to easily make the switch to PARCC when the time comes. Others still are making the necessary investments in infrastructure and devices over the next year or so, and many see PARCC as the vehicle to help make the upgrades they’ve wanted all along in order to improve classroom instruction. For school systems that can’t get there in time, we’ll have a backup pencil-and-paper option available.

The reality is for many K-12 students, inside the schoolhouse may be the place where technology is lacking most in their life. Kids play with their parents’ smartphones, play video games, and have computers and tablets at home. If PARCC can be a catalyst for improving student access to new technology, then we are glad to play that role.

How important are the two testing consortia to Common Core? Is the fate of the standards tied to the fate of the consortia?

The strength of the Common Core is found in the standards themselves. The coalition of teachers, higher education, the business community, Republicans, Democrats and others will determine the fate of the standards.

The importance of the consortia is found in their power to move the testing industry and to get comparable data on student achievement across states lines.

The new standards and the new tests obviously are part and parcel of a comprehensive new education system. The survival of one is not contingent on the other, but both parts taken together have the potential to dramatically improve teaching and learning in our states and local school systems. If states drop out of the consortia (for any reason, really), the power of the consortia is also diminished – and states will likely use lower quality tests to assess the CCSS, which undermines the promise of the new standards.

The CCSS without a high quality test is only aspirational. The test makes it actionable.

How confident are you that PARCC will be prepared to deliver online assessments on-time, on-budget, and in all promised grades and subjects to all member states during the 2014–15 school year?

Very confident! PARCC is on-track to deliver high quality computer-based summative assessments for mathematics and ELA/literacy in grades 3-11 in the 2014-15 school year.

About how many states do you expect to administer PARCC assessments in all covered grades and subjects in 2014–15? How many states will be participating in Smarter Balanced and PARCC combined?

PARCC has a total of 19 governing states and three participating states. Smarter Balanced has a similar number of states. Both consortia acknowledge that the numbers are subject to change. Over the past three years, for example, some states have left each consortium and others have joined. In PARCC, our governing states tell us they are in it for the long haul. But we know there are no guarantees. That is why we are working hard to produce the highest-quality assessment that reflects the needs of PARCC states. Maintaining the confidence of our states, and the educators and local school systems that are informing our work, is critical.

If a state chief called you tomorrow and said, “A trusted vendor is guaranteeing me high-quality, secure assessments below PARCC costs and without all of the hassles that comes along with a 20-state consortium,” what would you tell him/her?

The state chiefs have been hearing this sales pitch for years, and they are wise to the ways of the traditional testing industry. In the past, most states just developed specs and handed them off to the vendors and hoped for the best. The consortia assessments are our best chance to move the testing industry towards innovation and quality, to have comparable results across states at all grades, and to have a state-driven product that reflects state interests—not necessarily market interests.

The chiefs who have been a part of PARCC know all these benefits because they’re witnessing how PARCC is being developed. No vendor or individual state can deliver the kind of state-based quality review of items and oversight of vendors the consortium is doing right now. In addition, the value of “strength in numbers” vis-à-vis taking on new rigorous assessments and related policies cannot be underestimated.

Could you please describe your relationship with the U.S. Department of Education since your 2010 formation? For example, how often do you meet, what kinds of technical assistance do they provide, how much do they direct your work, etc.?

First, the states in the consortium created the PARCC proposal and they own the work. As with any grantor/grantee contract, USED monitors our work, but does not interject itself unless the grant terms are not being met. We participate in regular progress check-in calls and meetings, and USED provides technical assistance as needed or when states request it. For example, early in the grant cycle, USED convened technology experts to review both consortia’s development. Similarly, USED hosted a meeting to help inform the consortia’s approach to students with disabilities. Generally speaking, USED’s role is simply to ensure that we are satisfying the commitments we made in the grant proposal. Ultimately, the states have full ownership of this process and the final product that emerges.

Why do you think 65 percent of “education insiders” now say that PARCC is on the wrong track with that number having grown consistently over the last year?

The “education insiders” who matter most are our state chiefs, local educators and local school systems. They tell us they are pleased with our progress, and we will keep pushing forward as planned.

How concerned are you by Alabama’s decision to abandon the testing consortia and Florida chief Tony Bennett’s public statement that he’s looking for a “Plan B?”

Every state needs to make its own decisions. We respect Alabama’s position. But the consortium remains strong.

Our member states’ first choice is a state-developed test like PARCC. Commissioner Bennett in Florida is simply being a responsible chief who is planning for every possible eventuality. Our job is to make sure that PARCC remains “Plan A” for Florida and every other member state. We are on track to deliver the assessment on time, and look forward to working with our member states to implement it.

Would you please explain your plans for PARCC’s future governance, leadership, and funding?

PARCC recently filed paperwork that will move the consortium from being a “project” of the states to being an independent, nonprofit organization still led by the states. This shift will be completed before the end of the grant period in 2014-15. The chiefs who comprise the PARCC Governing Board continue to have decision-making authority for all of the consortium’s policy, operational and strategic decisions.

The Governing Board has some decisions to make on how we will go forward after the grant. Many options are being weighed. We expect more answers in 120 days.

What else would you like people to know about PARCC?

This is a state-driven effort, and, through PARCC, K-12 and postsecondary have come together as never before to ensure students have the opportunity to get ready for and succeed in college and the workforce. PARCC states are REALLY driving the vendors in a way that most states have never done with tests.

Our chiefs, key leaders in the state departments of education and local school systems, postsecondary institutions, and individual educators have made an unprecedented commitment to this work. They see this effort as the best opportunity in history to develop a high-quality assessment system that helps move the needle on student achievement and supports high-quality classroom instruction.

PARCC has been a rallying point for K-12 and higher education to come together as never before to ensure that students are ready for a career, college, and life. From the beginning, state leadership and quality have been the hallmarks of PARCC’s work. Those will continue to be our navigation points, moving forward.

—Andy Smarick

This blog entry first appeared on the Fordham Institute’s Common Core Watch blog

The California Charter Schools Association had named Tavenner Charter Leader of the Year in 2010. Summit’s first charter high school, Summit Prep, launched in 2003, was featured in the film Waiting for Superman (2010). The 400-student school in Redwood City, California—midway between San Francisco and San Jose—was named one of the Top 10 Most Transformative Schools in the country by Newsweek in 2011.

Summit’s second Redwood City high school, Everest, which opened in 2009, had strong test scores and a wait list. Summit was expanding to San Jose in response to parent demand so strong she was opening two new high schools there, Rainier and Tahoma, with 100 9th graders in each.

Dissatisfied, Tavenner decided it was time to radically rethink Summit’s teaching model. Summit partnered with Khan Academy, known for its online lessons and progress-tracking dashboard, to pilot “hybrid” math instruction at the new high schools. Students fill in knowledge gaps and develop math skills online, working at their own level and at their own pace, while also applying math to projects and learning from teachers. The goal is to create “self-directed learners.”

Fast-forward to 2013: Tavenner’s plans include a “Silicon Valley College Ready Corridor” with 14 high-performing, heterogeneous schools in the 50 miles from South San Francisco to San Jose. Two “next generation” schools will open in the fall: a high school in Daly City and a middle/high school in Sunnyvale.

The Summit Prep Model

With Summit Prep and Everest, “we took the factory model high school and did it significantly better,” Tavenner explains. “We made it smaller, more personal, with no tracking, longer hours, more support for kids. We recruited very talented teachers and fully developed them. But it’s still a factory model and kids are moving through that system.”

Summit hires graduates of elite universities to teach a college-prep curriculum that includes six Advanced Placement (AP) courses. About half the Redwood City students are Latino and black. Many come from Spanish-speaking families and start 9th grade with significant gaps in their academic skills and knowledge. Some take a basic skills class in addition to college-prep classes. They can take more time to pass if they need it, says Tavenner. “Algebra I ends when you show competency. It doesn’t necessarily end in June.”

The Redwood City schools also enroll students from white and Asian American families that range from middle class to wealthy. Some are top students who choose Summit for the rigor and the Ivy-educated faculty. Some have learning disabilities.

Students from all backgrounds like the small size—a maximum of 400 students—and the sense of community.

Nearly all graduates are accepted at four-year colleges and universities. The six-year college-graduation rate is expected to be 55 percent for Summit Prep’s first graduating class, nearly the same as the national average for all students. That isn’t good enough for Tavenner. Students who’ve relied on supportive high-school teachers may not be prepared to “drive their own learning” in college, she says. “We need to let kids set goals, make plans, maybe fail in lots of short cycles. Try, fail, learn.”

Summit 2.0

On a sunny Valentine’s Day in 2013, Tavenner, 41, sits in a room in the old elementary school that’s now the temporary site of Rainier and Tahoma. She has no office. She works in shared space at one of Summit’s two Redwood City schools or at the San Jose campus, which is nestled behind National Hispanic University’s newer buildings in a part of town with many immigrant families.

Valentine’s Day is her least favorite day to spend with hormonally excited 14- and 15-year-olds. Still, the drab campus is enlivened by teenagers carrying red and pink balloons and pink-frosted cupcakes. Half the students are on their way to classrooms, while the other half head for a large room where a more personalized learning environment has been created.

In the second year of the experiment, Summit has gone “beyond blended learning” to create what Tavenner calls an “optimized learning environment.”

Two hundred 9th and 10th graders at a time spend two hours a day studying math and brushing up on basic skills. They start at a work station by opening their personal guide, reading e-mail from the math teachers, and setting goals. Students can choose from a “playlist” of online learning resources, seek help at the “tutoring bar,” participate in teacher-led discussions in breakout rooms, or work on group projects, such as designing a water fountain.

When they’re ready, students take an online test to see if they’ve reached their goals. The math team, five teachers and two coaches, keeps students on track.

It’s an experiment in progress, but results are promising, says Tavenner. Next year, San Jose students will spend the whole day in self-directed learning.

A Tough Climb

Summit was started by affluent Silicon Valley parents in the Sequoia Union High School District, which includes some of the wealthiest towns in the U.S. (Atherton, Woodside, and Portola Valley), affluent Menlo Park, middle-class Belmont and San Carlos, blue-collar Redwood City, and low-income East Palo Alto. The high schools compete with excellent private schools.

Sequoia’s leaders and teachers bitterly opposed Summit, but a district in far-off Tuolumne County agreed to charter the new school for a small share of state funding.

From the start, Summit was accused of being an “elitist” school for wealthy whites who didn’t want their kids to mix with Latinos and blacks. The founding parents vowed to recruit students of all colors and income levels. They hired Tavenner, then vice principal of nearby Mountain View High School, to fulfill that promise.

A native of South Lake Tahoe, she earned a bachelor’s degree in psychology and sociology at the University of Southern California and a teaching credential at Loyola Marymount University. After five years of teaching English and journalism at “a classic inner-city dropout factory” near Los Angeles, she was so frustrated that she considered leaving teaching.

By then, she’d married Scott Tavenner, whom she first met when they were 15-year-olds at a summer leadership camp at Stanford. He persuaded her to try teaching at a different sort of school. The couple moved to Mountain View in the heart of Silicon Valley. While he ran an online advertising business, she taught English at Mountain View High, which was trying to close a large achievement gap between its affluent white and Asian American students and its working-class Mexican American minority. Tavenner was intrigued by the school’s decision to open AP classes to all students.

Starting from Scratch

After earning a master’s degree in educational administration and policy analysis at Stanford, Tavenner moved into administration.

Opening up AP wasn’t enough to close the gaps, she realized. “How do we get students to make good choices? How do we inform parents? How do we teach? How do we organize courses?”

She liked the work, but didn’t think the high school would go as far as she wanted. Then she heard about the Summit job, “a chance to start from scratch” with a school that would educate all kids together.

“When you live in Silicon Valley, there’s so much entrepreneurship, it’s hard to resist,” she says.

A new mother at the time—her son is now 10—Tavenner set out to create a new charter school. She went to elementary and middle schools, libraries, and lots of churches in Redwood City to spread the word. She asked new recruits to reach out to their friends. “Every one of those first families I had a relationship with,” she recalls.

Forging a unified school community was a challenge. The school almost started with two parent groups, one for English speakers and one for Spanish speakers. To Tavenner’s relief, parents decided on one group with co-presidents from each community. Meetings are conducted in both languages.

Teaching in a “truly heterogeneous environment is really hard to do and generally not done well,” Tavenner says. It’s always been her goal.

“I want to have as many doors open as possible, including being legitimately ready for success in a four-year college when they graduate. I don’t think our education system does that.”

Although Summit’s enrollment reflected the district’s demographics, the school was accused of creaming the best students. “I took it very personally,” Tavenner says. Dealing with Sequoia was “the hardest thing I’ve ever had to do.”

Battling for Everest

Sequoia took over Summit Prep’s charter in 2006, but the school board denied a charter to Everest.

“Everest is clearly not designed for low-performing students, and in fact Everest focuses selectively on high-achieving, privileged students,” charged Sequoia superintendent Pat Gemma, in a 2008 newspaper commentary. “Everest proposes offering a solely college preparatory curriculum to prepare all its students for enrollment in a four-year college.”

“The superintendent said kids of color won’t want this because it’s college prep,” Tavenner recalls, still fuming. “Teachers said we were an elitist school. It made me become a mama bear. It was a fight, a war zone.”

Summit was “demonstrably unlikely to successfully implement” Everest’s financial plan, concluded district staff. Summit Prep had demonstrably succeeded with the same plan, Tavenner pointed out, in vain. The charter network raises donations to fund start-up costs. When fully enrolled, schools operate on the same state funding as other high schools.

Sequoia trustees also claimed a new charter would draw white students away from two small charter high schools serving East Palo Alto that enrolled blacks, Latinos, and Pacific Islanders, but no whites.

After the state board of education chartered Everest, Sequoia offered a vacant lot in East Palo Alto. Summit filed a lawsuit to force the district to provide facilities, as required by state law. When Sequoia named a new superintendent in 2010, the fighting ended. The charter school now has a “very good” relationship with the district, Tavenner says.

Taming the Wild West

In Summit’s early years, “some people thought charter schools could be ‘stamped out,’” Tavenner says. “It was the Wild, Wild West.”

Now 8 percent of California’s public school students attend the more than 1,000 charter schools statewide. As president of the member council of the California Charter Schools Association, Tavenner believes strongly that ineffective schools should be closed. “It can’t be like traditional schools that perpetually fail,” she says.

But it’s clear that charters are here to stay. And so is Summit.

Hewlett-Packard CEO Meg Whitman, who serves on the board of Summit Public Schools, donated $2.5 million to fund new schools and pledged to match up to $2.5 million in contributions from other high-tech leaders, potentially giving Summit $7.5 million for the Silicon Valley corridor. Attracting high-profile supporters is undoubtedly aided by a strong track record: all four Summit charters exceed state goals on the Academic Performance Index. Summit also has raised an innovation fund to pay for its experiments with “optimized” learning.

While it’s easier to start a charter school than it was 10 years ago, it takes a “solid plan” and “a leadership team with experience in running schools and running a business,” advises Tavenner. “It’s a political process. Do your homework, meet with everyone, be open to feedback.” And perform.

Joanne Jacobs, a former San Jose Mercury News editorial writer and columnist, writes about K–12 education and community colleges at joannejacobs.com and ccspotlight.org. She’s the author of Our School on the early years of a San Jose charter school that prepares Mexican American students for college.

Behind the Headline
Private Schools for the Poor
Education Next |Fall 2005

In poor countries in Africa and South Asia, private schools exist for families of all social classes. As Tina Rosenberg explains on the Opinionator, two new school systems in Kenya and Bangladesh are now making decent education available to the poor on a large scale. James Tooley wrote about private schools for the poor around the world in the Fall 2005 issue of Education Next.

-Education Next

Dear Deborah,

Thanks for inviting me to join you on your blog. Even though we disagree on many issues, I have great respect for you and the work you’ve done in your career.

As I write this, I’m returning from the Education Writers Association annual conference, held this year at Stanford. I spoke on a panel about the “opportunity gap” with professors Sean Reardon and Prudence Carter. Reardon, as you know, recently published a fascinating but sobering study about the growing income achievement gap. (ASCD’s Educational Leadership has an accessible version of the study available online.) And Carter co-edited the new volume, Closing the Opportunity Gap.

What Professor Reardon’s research shows is that, over the last 60 years, the achievement gap between the nation’s poorest and richest students has widened dramatically. That’s true of both test scores and college attainment.

This finding is not surprising for people who have been paying attention, but what is surprising is where the gap lies. It’s not that poor children are falling behind the middle class—they’re not. It’s that the richest students are breaking away from everybody else.

Why is this happening? Here Reardon has to speculate. He considers whether it’s simply the result of America’s growing income inequality, and concludes that yes, that’s part of the story. Rich parents have more time and money to put into their children’s cognitive development because, well, they’re rich. But that doesn’t come close to a full explanation.

He offers a thesis that rich parents are behaving differently today—differently than they used to, and differently than middle-class and low-income parents. Rich parents are obsessed with their children’s social and intellectual development. They are spending dramatically more time parenting. And they are getting and staying married. (Forty percent of U.S. children today are born to single mothers; almost none of the richest children are.)

The first question, Deborah, is whether this behavior of the most affluent parents is even a “problem.” I would argue that rich parents are acting virtuously. I don’t think we want to tell them, “Stop spending so much time with your kids! Stop spending so much money on their cognitive development! Stop providing them the unfair advantage of two engaged parents!”

Still, their behavior creates a conundrum, because it almost certainly will make our society even more inequitable, as their children get a lot more education than everybody else’s and, thus, the best jobs and the related rewards. As Megan McCardle put it, “all the people who are really good at school are marrying the other people who are really good at school, having children who are really, really good at school.” And now that “returns to education” are larger than ever, that means they’re producing children who are really, really likely to be rich themselves.

The alternative approach is to help low-income and middle-class kids catch up. Carter’s book offers some ideas worth trying, especially high-quality preschool for kids in urgent need of it—which, by the way, would be more doable if we stopped spreading the money so thin.

Still, the message that comes through in Professors Reardon’s and Carter’s work—and from others on the left, including Diane Ravitch and Richard Rothstein—is that there’s not much schools can do about these gaps. They are visible before kids even enter kindergarten; they don’t grow much, if at all, while children are in the K-12 system; and they are fundamentally related to our country’s economic and political system. We’ll never make much progress until we get serious about redistributing income, or reviving labor unions, or raising the minimum wage, etc.

And that’s where I disagree. We need to stop having these extreme arguments, between “No excuses!” on one side and “It’s all about poverty!” on the other. Poverty matters immensely. Schools matter immensely. Let’s get on with addressing both.

So Deborah, what could schools be doing that they aren’t already trying? Let me offer one idea. (In the coming month, I’ll suggest others.) It’s simple: Schools could help young children build their vocabularies.

Now, that doesn’t sound so controversial. Who would be against that? And indeed, the early-childhood world is increasingly interested in the topic of vocabulary development, in part because of studies showing that poor students enter kindergarten with an enormous vocabulary deficit. Cities are launching new efforts to teach low-income parents to speak to their babies and toddlers more (and more effectively) in an effort to close this deficit.

But what can preschools and elementary schools do to build vocabulary? It’s not sitting down with kids and making them memorize flash cards. It’s teaching them content. Knowledge. Stuff! History and science, art and music, literature and geography. Yes, to little kids. (You know, the ones who are curious about EVERYTHING. Who can learn a TON just by listening to a good read-aloud story.)

E.D. Hirsch has argued for 30 years that the key to building students’ vocabularies, and thus their ability to read and learn, is content knowledge. Once a child learns to decode, her “comprehension” ability mainly comes down to the store of knowledge she’s got in her head. If she can sound out words but can’t read a passage about dinosaurs, it’s not because she hasn’t been taught “comprehension skills”—it’s probably because she’s never been taught anything about dinosaurs.

Yet our preschools and elementary schools systematically reject this obvious approach because they deem it not “developmentally appropriate.” Furthermore, they say, why teach all those “facts” when kids can just Google them?

The problem is compounded by a lamentable reaction by many high-poverty schools to testing and No Child Left Behind: They delay teaching social studies and science until 4th or 5th grade so they can focus on teaching reading in the early grades. Which is nuts—teaching content is teaching reading.

I could go on and on about this, as the folks at the Core Knowledge blog and the cognitive scientist Dan Willingham often do. Do you follow their work?

Let me end on a hopeful note: I believe that the Common Core State Standards will help fix this problem. The English/language arts standards were heavily influenced by Hirsch’s thinking (which is why he’s endorsed them), as they expect students to engage with rich and challenging texts—both fiction and non-fiction in subjects like history, science, and geography—as early as possible.

If schools want to do well on common-core assessments, they had better start teaching their students knowledge. (Using Hirsch’s Core Knowledge Language Arts program would be an excellent place to start.)

If the common-core standards help to bring back art and music, science and history, civics and literature to our elementary school classrooms, don’t you think it’s worth supporting? Given that there is excellent scientific evidence for the role of vocabulary—and thus, knowledge—in academic success, and given that the knowledge gap is clearly a major contributor to the “opportunity gap,” and given that you have been a long-time advocate for greater equity, won’t you reconsider your position on the common core? I look forward to hearing your thoughts.

-Mike Petrilli

Deborah Meier’s response appears here.

Of course we should have more of all of those—provided they’re accompanied by suitable quality control and customer-information strategies. But why so bleak about parent triggers? Well, Mike explains, they’ll get tangled up in lawsuits—but so does every single one of his preferred options; just this week, for example, the Louisiana supreme court struck down the Bayou State’s new voucher program. Charters get litigated everywhere. So do virtual schools.

Then he says the parent trigger is really a school-turnaround strategy and turnarounds seldom succeed in turning bad schools into good ones. He might try telling that to Arne Duncan, to Congress, and to a throng of states and districts—and philanthropists and nonprofit and for-profit groups—that, for better or worse, have placed enormous hope and many resources in schemes for effecting such turnarounds. No, they’re not very good at it, but most analysts say that school turnarounds generally fail because those involved in them seldom make the wrenching changes—personnel above all—that are most apt to yield something truly different and better. What could be more wrenching than the kind of governance-and-control shift brought about by a successful parent trigger? No, we cannot be confident that the newly empowered parents will then entrust their school to truly competent educators—that remains to be seen. But there’s much about parents that we cannot be confident of, including their capacity to make wise choices among the new school options that Mike puts so much faith in.

Mike’s third argument is that the parent trigger won’t be powerful enough to change the district itself—but then he acknowledges that nothing is powerful enough! Then he half backtracks at the very end and says, well, maybe choice will.

But of course he knows better. Districts only improve if their own leaders are determined to make that happen, and that’s far too rare a situation in American education. They only respond to competition—that is, respond constructively to competition—if they’re well led, not brain-dead, and not completely entangled in their own bureaucratics, contracts, and governance malfunctions. Let’s assume that most bad districts are going to stay bad. Then the job of serious reformers, Mike included, is to give kids every possible exit from them into something better. Helping an entire school to extricate itself from the dysfunctional system is surely one such strategy. Instead of pooh-poohing it, how about we put it on the list of possibilities, wish it well, and do our damnedest to help it succeed as often as possible?

My parent-trigger glass isn’t more than half full. But Mike needs to return to the spigot.

—Chester E. Finn, Jr.

This blog entry first appeared in the Fordham Institute’s Flypaper blog.

Peterson and Matthew Chingos published a study in the Summer 2013 issue of Education Next, “The Impact of School Vouchers on College Enrollment,” that found that African-American students benefited the most from receiving vouchers.

—Education Next

“Parent Trigger” Laws Spark Debate Over Strategies for School Reform

Laws give parents more leverage for demanding school improvement, but will they result in legal battles or better schools?

CAMBRIDGE, MA—Parent trigger laws allow a majority of parents at a low-performing school to vote to convert a school to an independently-run charter school or force major staff changes.  In a forum released today by Education Next, Ben Austin and Michael J. Petrilli discuss the hurdles parent trigger groups face and whether parents really can turn around chronically failing schools.  “Pulling the Parent Trigger” is now available at www.educationnext.org.

Ben Austin, whose Parent Revolution group championed the nation’s first parent trigger law in California in 2010, states that “politicians across the political spectrum find common ground around the simple notion of giving parents power over the education of their own children.”  Without an “organized parent effort applying pressure to the system,” he writes, bureaucratic inertia keeps low-performing schools the same year after year.

Parent trigger laws give parents in disadvantaged neighborhoods more power at the table where decisions are made, Austin notes, as they permit a 51 percent parent majority to force a school turnaround or conversion to a charter school.  In Adelanto, California, for example, the school board recently approved the parents’ petition to convert Desert Trails Elementary School to a charter this fall, managed by a highly qualified, nonprofit charter operator.

Austin argues that the parent trigger is a more effective tool for low-income parents than policies that focus on expanded school choice (including public and private schools).  He notes that low-income parents need improved schools for their children in their neighborhoods, and they often lack the financial resources and/or access to information that wider school choice options require.  He stresses that meaningful change for low-income families rests on public school improvement, the sole focus of parent trigger laws.

Petrilli agrees that strengthening parent power over their children’s education is imperative, but doubts that trigger laws will result in significant improvement in schools, even if parent groups are able to surmount formidable opposition from the education bureaucracy.  The lawsuits and negative publicity that bedeviled the movement in California, for example, show that “successfully pulling the parent trigger is going to be a slow, expensive slog anywhere that school boards choose to resist.”

Even if triggers are successfully pulled, both charter school conversions and school turnarounds are problematic, Petrilli notes.  Public schools that have converted to charters often come to be seen as “faux charters” that gain a few operational freedoms, but not enough to make a difference.  School districts and boards often are indifferent to these converted charters and the schools do not thrive;  districts are also reluctant to embrace turnarounds that they did not want.

A more constructive reform strategy, argues Petrilli, is to continue to expand school choice through new, high-quality options.  With more independent charter schools, growing digital learning options, and the expansion of opportunities for private school choice via taxpayer-funded scholarship programs, the nation will have “lots more excellent options from which parents can choose,” and school choice at scale might “finally force districts to improve.”

About the Authors

Ben Austin is executive director of Parent Revolution and former deputy mayor of Los Angeles.  Michael J. Petrilli is vice president for policy at the Thomas B. Fordham Institute and an executive editor of Education Next.  The authors are available for interviews.

About Education Next

Education Next is a scholarly journal published by the Hoover Institution that is committed to careful examination of evidence relating to school reform.  Other sponsoring institutions are the Program on Education Policy and Governance at Harvard University, part of the Taubman Center for State and Local Government at the Harvard Kennedy School, and the Thomas B. Fordham Institute.  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.

• Empowered Families Can Transform the System, by Ben Austin

• There’s a Better Way to Unlock Parent Power, by Michael J. Petrilli

After years of systemic failure at Desert Trails Elementary, in 2011 parents with children at the school formed an autonomous organization, the Desert Trails Parent Union, and went door-to-door, working alongside other parents, to develop an agenda for change and get the word out about this new legal right they had. Desert Trails parents met with teachers, the principal, and the deputy superintendent of the school system to create a list of objectives for improving the school. At the heart of the list was one simple idea: that all decisions, from staffing to budget to curriculum, should be driven by the best interests of their children.

In response, the defenders of the status quo launched a campaign of lies and intimidation against parents who signed the petition. Parents even uncovered direct evidence of fraud and forgeries.

This past October, a superior court judge concluded a yearlong legal battle, confirming that parents have the right under the parent trigger law to transform their school, while ordering the school district to abide by the parents’ petition. This followed a July court decision that was also in favor of the parents.

Two court decisions, two judges, and two victories for parent power.

In early January, the Adelanto School Board approved the parents’ recommendation for a highly qualified, nonprofit charter-school operator to begin transforming Desert Trails Elementary School in August 2013.

Public Support

Even in this era of partisan gridlock and paralysis, politicians across the political spectrum find common ground around the simple notion of giving parents power over the education of their own children. Last November, former Florida governor Jeb Bush, a Republican, and former Clinton chief of staff John Podesta, a Democrat, shared a Washington, D.C., stage to laud the parent trigger movement for moving the issue of education reform past partisan bickering to focus squarely on the needs of kids trapped in failing schools.

Meanwhile, a 2012 Gallup Poll showed 70 percent of respondents favor parent trigger laws as a long-term education reform solution.

A vocal minority of detractors also spans the political spectrum. Detractors on the right contend that the parent trigger gives parents too little power. They argue that the parent trigger is too difficult, laden with bureaucratic hurdles, limited in its options, and ultimately unscalable.

What these detractors overlook is ongoing work with the California State Board of Education to create a regulatory framework around the parent trigger process that removes unwarranted barriers and codifies the legal steps leading to the successful transformation of a failing school.

When the parent trigger was signed into law in 2010, the president of the California Federation of Teachers famously called it a “lynch mob” law. Major elements of the education establishment still believe parents do not have the formal training or knowledge required to have direct, legitimate power within the public education system, and that parents should step out of the way and let the experts do their jobs.

Yet we need outside pressure from parents. No movement in the history of our country has been able to achieve the scale and transformative change needed in public education without a powerful, informed grassroots movement pushing for it. In the absence of an organized parent effort applying pressure to the system, bureaucratic inertia and skewed political-incentive structures determine how decisions are made. Having passionate, committed people working on the inside on behalf of kids is necessary but not sufficient if the goal is change that puts kids first.

The question, then, centers not on whether we must build a parent movement for change, but rather on the most effective and empowering way to go about it. Empowering parents to levy a direct and immediate impact on the lives of the children in their community is the answer. Therein lies the importance of laws such as the parent trigger, which give parents a government-sanctioned mandate to organize and take control of the educational destiny of their children.

The parent trigger provides parents with options other strategies may not. One of its greatest advantages is enabling parents in socioeconomically disadvantaged communities to generate change at their neighborhood school. With the school-choice alternative, for example, parents wanting the best education for their child often need financial means and knowledge of the educational options to make an informed choice of another school, resources not always available in low-income communities.

Additionally, the parent trigger is focused solely on public education. It is our belief that the work of real and lasting change must take place in our public school system.

Parents enduring a parent trigger campaign are transformed. Some, like the parents at Desert Trails, are forced to endure lengthy legal battles, a process most of them have never experienced. Others, including the parents of 24th Street Elementary School and also Haddon Avenue Elementary in the Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD), find a responsive school district that wants to collaborate with them in changing their school. No matter the intensity of the campaign, it is transformative.

Many of these parents, for the first time in their lives, feel real power, not only over their child’s destiny but over their own as well. These parents, and parents like them, are the key to the future of public education in America. Each parent trigger campaign focuses on changing the conditions of a particular school. In that sense, each campaign is unique. The common thread is empowering parents to make decisions about their child’s education, knowing they have the legal capability to do so.

Parents Want Good Schools

Parents don’t care if a public school is a traditional district school or a charter school; they just want it to be a good school. In California, the parent trigger law gives parents a seat at the decisionmaking table. It empowers parents to transform a failing school through community organizing. According to the law, if 51 percent of parents with children in a school agree to change the direction of the school, the school board must listen.

Parent Revolution created the parent trigger based on our conclusion that the public education system is failing because it’s not designed to succeed. It doesn’t serve the interests of children, because it’s not designed to; it’s designed to serve the interests of powerful adults. The fundamental idea behind the parent trigger is to effect an unapologetic transfer of raw political power from the defenders of the status quo to parents, which is necessary because parents have wholly different incentive structures and a far greater sense of urgency than those who hold the power in the education system.

None of the bold reforms and technocratic fixes of any ideological stripe, no matter how well intentioned, can substitute for empowered parents. When parents organize into independent, autonomous organizations like parent union chapters, they have the power to hold all those within a school district, as well as the school, accountable to serve the interests of their children rather than the interests of adults.

The parent trigger movement is not a substitute for other reforms. It is a necessary precondition for their ultimate and sustained success. Parents can have direct input into teacher evaluation and efforts to improve teacher quality. Parents can participate in decisions regarding the academic programs and recreational opportunities being offered to their children. Importantly, parents become a highly visible and integral part of the daily life of the school, interacting with teachers, students, and administrators in a new way.

As the parent trigger movement grows, it will be important to understand what success looks like. Successful parent empowerment means sustained, organized, and ongoing engagement by parents, whether through parent union chapters or otherwise. Successful outcomes may range from negotiated improvements to ensure safer school conditions or improved special-education policies, to charter conversion or school leadership changes.

Over the coming 12 to 18 months, as successful conversions take place at schools using the parent trigger, we are confident the new school leadership will bring significant improvement in student learning and achievement. In Desert Trails, the parents selected and the school board approved a high-quality nonprofit charter operator with significant, measurable academic success in the other school it operates.

Power to the Parents

In January 2013, more than 150 parents and children from the 24th Street Elementary School in Los Angeles presented their parent trigger petition to the superintendent of the LAUSD. In February, the LAUSD board unanimously approved their petition, allowing the parents to move forward in selecting a new operator for the school. Eight organizations, including the district, are now putting together proposals to transform this chronically failing inner-city school.

Six states have followed California’s lead, enacting parent trigger laws of their own, and more than a dozen states are considering doing the same in 2013.

In the coming weeks and months, parents throughout California and across America will follow in the historic footsteps of the Desert Trails Parent Union. As they organize on behalf of their children, 2013 will become the year of parent power.

This article is part of a forum on parent trigger laws. For another take, please see “There’s a Better Way to Unlock Parent Power,” by Michael Petrilli.

For these reasons and more, it’s worth experimenting with the parent trigger. But I strongly suspect that the experiment will fall flat, at least most of the time, at least when it comes to turning around failing schools and/or forcing significant reform on the part of failing school districts. Three factors come into play here. First, the parent trigger mechanism itself will continue to get bogged down in lawsuits and other blocking tactics, as has been the case to date. Second, if and when the trigger gets pulled, the resulting school turnarounds won’t generally amount to much. And third, empowering parents via the parent trigger (creating a “bargaining chip”) won’t be enough to force larger changes in dysfunctional districts—because nothing will force such change.

The Lawyer Trigger

Parent Revolution has launched parent trigger campaigns in two California schools: McKinley Elementary in Compton and Desert Trails Elementary in Adelanto. (As this article goes to press, Parent Revolution has helped parents pull the trigger in a third school, 24th Street Elementary in the Los Angeles Unified School District, and a fourth campaign is underway.)

The campaigns in McKinley and Desert Trails were characterized predominantly by lawsuits that revolved, first, around the parent signatures on the trigger petitions. In Compton, district officials demanded that signatures be verified in person and with photo identification (reminiscent of the wave of Voter ID laws passed by Republicans in 2011–12). A judge issued a restraining order, ruling that such requirements were illegal. Compton was allowed to cross-check signatures with student records, however, and to reject those that did not match. Compton also wanted to allow parents to rescind their support for the petition, arguing that they weren’t truly aware of what they were signing. These strategies eventually succeeded: the effort fizzled, and Parent Revolution lobbied the state board of education to tighten its regulations in an attempt to prevent such tactics from prevailing the next time around.

The story started out much the same in Adelanto. Parent Revolution organized a trigger petition and obtained signatures from a majority of Desert Trails’ parents. But the school board then allowed parents to rescind their support for the petition (97 did so), causing it to fail. Parent Revolution sued, and a county judge ruled that the board’s action was illegal; it could only verify signatures, not give parents a chance to remove them.

Soon afterward, the Adelanto school board voted to accept the parents’ petition but not their preferred course of action (turning the school into a charter school). So the parents went back to court, and a judge ruled again in their favor.

Finally, the school board (which had experienced significant turnover in the November 2012 elections) agreed to hear a proposal from the parents’ chosen charter operator, which hopes to take over the school in the fall.

While the Adelanto outcome is better than what happened in Compton, the story indicates that successfully pulling the parent trigger is going to be a slow, expensive slog anywhere that school boards choose to resist. Nor should that be surprising. We’ve known forever that when institutions face external threats—via competition or otherwise—they respond first by using their power to crush the opposition and quash the threat.

Macke Raymond, director of Stanford University’s Center for Research on Education Outcomes (CREDO), and an expert on monopolies in the public and private sectors, made this clear at a 2006 forum organized by the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools. “Change is the last thing districts will do,” Raymond said, with regard to competition from new schools. When threatened, Raymond argued, monopolies

…launch a series of wars. First is the war of entry: prohibiting new entrants into the market. They try to set high barriers through law and regulation. In general, the monopolist is dismissive of potential entrants. The second war is of survival—they launch games of irritation. These include delaying tactics, non-responsiveness, and nonpayment. They try to limit the discretion of the new entrants. The public relations strategy is to smear the new opponents, often personally. Third is the war of containment. They will heap on as many costs as possible to wear you down, such as more reporting requirements and cost studies. The public relations battle becomes more aggressive and organized. Fourth is the war of elimination; the biggest indicator is the legal challenge. The opposition forms into coalitions designed to destroy the new entrants. After all of these wars, you will see change. But you have to survive first.

That, I predict, is what the future holds for other communities that want to pull the parent trigger: more lawsuits, more “delaying tactics,” more smearing. But will it be worth it if the parent organizers survive these wars? Probably not. That’s the second problem.

Conversions a Recipe for More Failure

Let’s suppose that parent advocates run this gauntlet and manage to force a turnaround at a given school, as appears to be happening at Desert Trails. What are the chances of success? If the history of charter school conversions and district school turnarounds is any guide, the answer is: very low.

Ever since the beginning of the charter movement 20 years ago, most state charter laws have included a “teacher trigger” of sorts. A majority (or sometimes supermajority) of teachers could vote to turn their district school into a charter. And in the early days many did.

Yet enthusiasm for these charter conversions soon fizzled. Partly that was because they were seen as “faux charters.” Legally, they typically remained part of the school district; often their teachers continued to be covered by the district’s collective-bargaining agreement. They gained a few operational freedoms but not enough to make much of a difference.

School districts—and boards—generally haven’t known what to do with these charter schools. Usually they end up either micromanaging or ignoring them. The latter might sound good to advocates for greater school autonomy, but it has created many problems in terms of charter school quality. In fact, many of the charter sector’s quality headaches stem from school boards that abdicate their responsibilities as charter school authorizers, a role they probably never wanted to play in the first place. Recent research, again from Raymond’s CREDO, demonstrates that charter schools that start out mediocre rarely improve. One could imagine a similar dynamic playing out in charter schools created via the parent trigger.

Of course, the parent trigger can be used for more than just charter school conversions. Turnarounds or “transformations,” in the current lingo, are options, too. But there’s plenty of reason for skepticism on that front. As Andy Smarick wrote in these pages a few years ago (“The Turnaround Fallacy,” features, Winter 2010), “school turnaround efforts have consistently fallen far short of hopes and expectations.”

And most of those turnarounds were initiated, at least somewhat enthusiastically, by district officials. The people in charge of making them succeed wanted them to succeed. How likely is it that school boards and district officials will jump onboard a turnaround process after spending months trying to stop it? Turnarounds are difficult, if not impossible, under the best of circumstances. Turnarounds forced upon districts by angry parents seem destined to fail.

Can the Parent Trigger Change Local Politics?

Some advocates of the parent trigger acknowledge the concerns raised above, but still believe it to be a useful tool in forcing recalcitrant districts to change their ways. As Ben Austin of Parent Revolution has argued elsewhere, “There are parents right now who are organizing at schools around the parent trigger without really the intent to pull the trigger. They are organizing in order to have bargaining leverage, to basically say, ‘look, there are things about our school that we like, but there are things about our school that we are unhappy with and nobody has listened to us until now. Well, I represent 51 percent of the parents. We now have the power, for all intents and purposes, to fire you. So fix these things within x number of days. Otherwise we’re going to fire you.’”

This mirrors the longtime optimism among school choice advocates that the exodus of students and money—the threat of competition leading to hemorrhage leading to downfall—would change power relationships inside school districts. Reform-minded superintendents and board members, in particular, could force intransigent teacher unions to make concessions that would make their district schools more attractive to parents and thereby stem the losses.

Evidence of this happening in the real world, however, is quite thin. Perhaps a few cities have seen major, positive changes because of competition (Washington, D.C., comes to mind). In most, however, district dysfunction, and union intransigence, continues. (Think: Detroit, Kansas City, St. Louis, Chicago, Oakland.) And that’s even after losing tens of thousands of students and hundreds of millions of dollars to charter schools.

It’s hard to imagine, then, that the threat of a parent trigger at a single school is going to force school board members, district bureaucrats, or union officials to the bargaining table. Sure, it could happen. But if Macke Raymond is right, it will be a long time coming.

Conclusion

“Parent power” is a critical component of education reform; there’s little doubt that many of the problems in American education come from the mismatch in power between the workers in the system and its clients. To the degree that the parent trigger helps reformers to organize and empower parents, it should be embraced wholeheartedly.

But as a strategy to change schools or districts, it seems likely to fail. A more constructive approach is the road we’ve been traveling for 20 years now: expanding school choice via new, high-quality options. More independent charter schools. Additional opportunities for private-school choice via taxpayer-funded scholarship programs. Digital learning. And so forth.

Perhaps school choice, at scale, will finally force districts to improve. But even if it doesn’t (as I suspect will be the case in many cities), we will be left with lots more excellent options from which parents—as consumers—can choose. We might even put districts out of business altogether. Now that’s power.

This article is part of a forum on parent trigger laws. For another take, please see “Empowered Families Can Transform the System,” by Ben Austin.

One of the more critical conversations occurred on Sunday to kick off the week. The topic, ironically enough though, was about a meeting that happens rarely in education.

Bror Saxberg, chief learning officer at Kaplan, organized a panel discussion at the AERA meeting about why learning scientists and educational entrepreneurs don’t connect that much. I, along with Dick Clark of USC, Kenneth Koedinger, co-director of the Pittsburgh Science of Learning Center, Michael Moe of GSV Capital , Stacey Childress of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, and Nadya Dabby from the U.S. Department of Education, discussed not only how these conversations don’t happen, but the fundamental reasons why they don’t.

Saxberg and many others have noted that, all too often, products and services in the education market are not informed by what we know about learning. As a result, these new offerings tend to start at ground zero and do not take advantage of what’s become, over the past couple of decades in particular, a sizeable literature about how people learn and how to design optimal learning experiences.

Although learning scientists have far more to learn—and some of the biggest advances I believe will occur in the field instead of the lab given the rise of adaptive learning products—not having products informed by what’s known about learning as a starting point is often a big miss for students. Yet we see it all the time.

To take a notable example, people from the biggest of the massive open online course platforms, Coursera, often talk about how exciting it is that they can do A-B testing to learn what works. With the massive user base they have and the big data they are able to collect, there is indeed a huge potential for breakthroughs. What sort of A-B testing are they doing though? One professor, for example, tested whether showing his face during a lesson led to improved learning. What’s sad about that is that the research to answer these sorts of questions is already well established.

From a higher level, it often seems that the best business plans in education have the least interesting learning science behind them, and the worst business plans in education have the most interesting learning science behind them. On the panel, Koedinger, a co-founder of Carnegie Learning, confirmed the point when he talked about how once he and his team had brought their research-informed product to market, the majority of the market incentives encouraged them not to improve the product along its ability to help students learn.

This points to the first of the three ideas I offered in my opening remarks as to why educational entrepreneurs and learning scientists don’t talk all that much: In public education, the incentives don’t encourage educational entrepreneurs to seek out what’s known from learning science. The products that win in the marketplace aren’t necessarily those that are the best for learning, as the policies in public K-12 education in particular are focused heavily on input-based metrics that encourage compliance, but not student learning growth. As a result, seeking out what’s known about how students learn and improving products accordingly isn’t necessarily rewarded. To change this, we need to fix the demand-side problem. Moving from a policy environment that rewards inputs like seat time to one that values student outcomes in a competency-based learning environment is critical to create smarter demand.

Second, entrepreneurs sometimes suffer from the “We went to school, therefore we are experts” mentality—when in fact, what we think we know about how learning works from our experiences is often incorrect. Because entrepreneurs have this notion, they either think they can extrapolate to solve system-wide problems for which they don’t have a solid understanding of causality or they can utilize a lean startup approach and figure it out on the ground. There is a lot to be said for leveraging a lean startup—or discovery-driven—approach. But in a discovery-driven process, the goal is to identify assumptions, test them and gain knowledge as fast and cheaply as possible. Leveraging good research that has already created a knowledge base does just that. Ignoring it is a mistake.

Finally, researchers have a long way to go to help solve the problem. The catalog of sessions at AERA was the weight of a phonebook. Outside of asking Saxberg what sessions would be useful, I had no hope of navigating it. We need more education research about things that actually matter in the field and are relevant for teachers and students. We need more translation of good research into the popular domain to help people understand more widely what is the good research and what does it say. Today every company seems to have a research study that they bring to districts validating what they do. How to clarify what’s good? And we need faster research that takes advantage of the massive amounts of data we can generate about education through digital learning.

In the panel conversation, the lack of good networks, better use of the emerging edtech incubators, the structure of federal research funding, the lag-time between learning and tangible results, and other things surfaced as additional facets of the problem. In seeking to fix this, I’m curious though: what else have you observed as something that holds this back? Students await the answer.

-Michael Horn

This blog entry first appeared on Forbes.com

I believe there is. Let me introduce the open-source school district.

Imagine the creation of a virtual school district. It wouldn’t have any actual students, teachers, buses, or facilities, but it would have a school board, a superintendent, and a central-office staff. (The superintendent and staff would be paid real salaries and be housed in a real office; the school board would be made up of various “education experts” or maybe “stakeholders” who, like real school board members, would volunteer their time.) It would be given a demographic profile—say, a medium-sized, inner-ring suburban district of 10,000 with a fair amount of racial and socioeconomic diversity. It would inherit the student achievement results, policies, and practices of a typical district. We’d situate it in an actual state, too.

This “school district” would be charged with developing and constantly updating a strategy for improving achievement and otherwise addressing the needs of its fictitious students. The board and superintendent might start by laying out a schedule for the year in which they would look at different key topics every month. Maybe in September, they would tackle a plan for implementing the Common Core. In October, they would look at teacher and principal evaluations. In November, they would consider how to improve students’ non-cognitive skills. And so forth.

The “central office” would have staff working in roles similar to real districts: an assistant superintendent for curriculum and instruction, a chief human-resources person, a budget director, etc. These people might serve a faux district, but they would develop real plans to present to their superintendent and board. And—this is key—they would have tremendous resources to tap in helping them put these plans or policies or budgets together. Namely, they would have a big research budget and/or access to professionals at a think tank like the American Institutes of Research to help them sift through all of the relevant research, ideas, promising practices, and vendor pitches.

Imagine what might happen if such a “school district” took off. First, it would develop policies, procedures, and plans that would be as robust as technocratically possible—aligned with the latest and greatest research and thinking available. These policies, procedures, and plans could then be swiped (or adapted) by real school districts for their own use. Second, it would provide small vendors of excellent products, think tankers with promising ideas, and advocacy groups brimming with sound suggestions with a national platform by which to spread the word. Everyone would know that if you wanted your policy or nostrum or solution to spread, you had to convince the open-source school district that it was worth embracing.

Of course, this would only work if actual school-board members, superintendents, central-office staff, and principals knew about it and found it helpful. It would be critical to get them involved—not just as recipients of the “content” produced by the OSSD but as producers themselves. (This is what makes it “open source.”) They could join digital communities with others in their roles (all of the superintendents or HR managers, etc.) and interact with OSSD staffers as they develop their work products. If practicing educators had an idea or product or policy or practice that worked, they could share it with the virtual educator—and thus, the entire network. They could also watch the school board in action via a live stream or after the fact via video.

I’m convinced that an open-source school district would be a fascinating experiment and would probably produce some excellent materials. It wouldn’t be perfect—every state is different, for instance, so real-live district folks would have to adapt materials and approaches for their own contexts. Furthermore, there would be no way to replicate the true push and pull of local politics with which real districts must contend. (How to come up with a model teacher-union contract, for instance, in the absence of a teacher union?) One could also imagine all manner of lobbying and political pressure being placed on this faux district if its decisions affected the “real” marketplace. Board members and staff would need to be chosen carefully. Everything would need to be totally transparent.

I think those of us in the “idea-generating” business would be sobered by the experience. We would gain a better appreciation of the huge amount of conflicting advice and pressure that school districts and their leaders face. In fact, the most interesting part of the experiment would be seeing how the OSSD handles competing priorities and a policy environment that is anything but coherent. It might help us better understand which state and federal policies are helping districts improve and which are getting in the way.

And (in anticipation of my colleague Andy Smarick’s reaction) yes, this assumes that school districts still have a major role to play for the foreseeable future. While that may not be the case in some of our big cities, I think the familiar structures will endure throughout most of the country and its suburbs and small towns. And it’s the small- to medium-sized districts—which serve nearly half of the nation’s public school students—that could benefit the most from this initiative, as they don’t have the scale to have much central-office capacity.

Think this idea has promise? Do you represent school boards, or superintendents, or central office staff? Or do you have money to give away? Let’s talk.

—Mike Petrilli

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

Big happenings on the urban-schools front. In recent weeks, numerous cities have announced they’re looking for new district leaders. In Boston, the search is on for Carol Johnson’s replacement. New Jersey, having just taken over Camden, is looking for someone to fill the top job. Baltimore’s Andres Alonso just announced his departure. Indy is looking for a new schools supe. Detroit is searching for someone to take over now that the emergency manager has retired. Oakland is in the same place.

So will these cities’ leaders take the same path as their predecessors over the last half century and choose another set of “district fixers,” those who mistakenly believe they can turn this irreparably broken institution into a high-performing organization? (Sadly, probably yes.) Or one or more of these cities could decide to build The Urban School System of the Future and choose leaders dedicated to bringing the failed urban district to an end and replacing it with a true system of schools. (Prayerfully, and this Nashville report, p. 30, gives me hope…)

Common Core as soap opera

So much drama going on with Common Core these days. Lots of states are having renewed conversations about the merits of standards. Checker pens a very strong pro-CCSS piece that explains how they came into being and how they fit into the much longer history of standards. The head of the AFT says we need to slow down on implementation and not yet tie consequences to the new CCSS-aligned assessments. TNTP’s Tim Daly says push ahead.

Distance makes the blogging grow frustrated

Rick Hess, back from a Cage-Busting sabbatical, returns to his blog to set fire to the rain, taking down two research orgs, the secretary, DFER, and Merrow. I’ve been increasingly bothered by the group-think that’s set in across the ed-reform landscape, so I’m thankful Rick is showing that well-informed contrariness has a valuable role to play in our world.

-Andy Smarick

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

Both the New York Times and the Washington Post spilled ink over the phenomenon. Several authors resorted to old-fashioned books to discuss flipping, including the two teachers who allegedly originated the technique (see Flip Your Classroom: Reach Every Student in Every Class Every Day by Jonathan Bergmann and Aaron Sams). None of that tells us anything about the number of teachers who actually flipped their classrooms. No one has offered any firm measure of the practice or, more importantly, assessed its impact on student learning.

In case you missed all the hype, the flipped classroom is a form of blended learning in which students learn online at least part of the time while attending a brick-and-mortar school. Either at home or during a homework period at school, students view lessons and lectures online. Time in the classroom, previously reserved for teacher instruction, is spent on what we used to call homework, with teacher assistance as needed.

How can this improve student learning? Homework and lecture time have merely been switched. Students still learn through a lecture. And many online lectures are primitive videos.

There is some truth in this characterization, but it misses the key insight behind the flipped classroom. If some students don’t understand what is presented in a real-time classroom lecture, it’s too bad for them. The teacher must barrel on to pace the lesson for the class as a whole, which often means going too slow for some and too fast for others.

Moving the delivery of basic content instruction online gives students the opportunity to hit rewind and view again a section they don’t understand or fast-forward through material they have already mastered. Students decide what to watch and when, which, theoretically at least, gives them greater ownership over their learning.

Viewing lectures online may not seem to differ much from the traditional homework reading assignment, but there is at least one critical difference: Classroom time is no longer spent taking in raw content, a largely passive process. Instead, while at school, students do practice problems, discuss issues, or work on specific projects. The classroom becomes an interactive environment that engages students more directly in their education.

In the flipped classroom, the teacher is available to guide students as they apply what they have learned online. One of the drawbacks of traditional homework is that students don’t receive meaningful feedback on their work while they are doing it; they may have no opportunity to relearn concepts they struggled to master. With a teacher present to answer questions and watch over how students are doing, the feedback cycle has greater potential to bolster student learning.

The flipped classroom does not address all the limitations of the brick-and-mortar school. Although in the best flipped-classroom implementations, each student can move at her own pace and view lessons at home that meet her individual needs rather than those of the entire class, most flipped classrooms do not operate this way. As Salman Khan, the media’s personification of the flipped-classroom, observes in The One World Schoolhouse, “Although it makes class time more interactive and lectures more independent, the ‘flipped classroom’ still has students moving together in age-based cohorts at roughly the same pace, with snapshot exams that are used more to label students than address their weaknesses” (see “To YouTube and Beyond,” book reviews, Summer 2013).

This arrangement also doesn’t tackle the root causes of the lack of motivation that persists among many low-achieving students.

Some in the media have suggested that the flipped-classroom approach may only work in upper-income, suburban schools. If low-income students lack access to computers at home or to reliable Internet access, flipping may be a nonstarter in some schools. If students can’t benefit from online instruction at home, then they need to receive instruction in the classroom or risk falling behind. Some fear that in relying on parents to provide technology and support, the flipped-classroom model may exacerbate existing resource inequalities. Schools can make computer labs available during afterschool hours, however, and parental assistance is less critical when watching an online video than when solving homework problems.

What is perhaps most telling is that the “no-excuses” charter schools that serve large numbers of low-income students well—KIPP, Rocketship, Alliance, and Summit among them—are not flipping their classrooms. Even as these schools adopt blended-learning models, the flipped classroom isn’t among them. The models these schools are employing give students more support as they need it and actively guide students to more ownership over their learning. These models also do not rely on students having access to high-speed Internet-connected computers at home; online learning occurs during the school day.

Even if the flipped classroom does prove of some benefit to some low-income students, this change in structure alone is unlikely to produce the vast improvement in student learning our country needs. But that doesn’t mean the innovation is insignificant. The flipped classroom might still have an important indirect impact on the American education system, as one brand of digital learning. The optimal use of digital learning will vary in different contexts and communities. Some people will attend full-time virtual schools, with even the “classroom” experience occurring online; most will attend brick-and-mortar schools that employ some version of digital learning.

Unlike school vouchers for low-income students, charter schools in disadvantaged communities, or bonus pay for teachers in inner-city schools, digital learning is not designed for just one slice of the population. It’s not a policy that parents might support in theory but, because it has no practical impact on them, won’t spend political energy promoting or defending. Rather, if it works as well as its proponents hope, digital learning will gather political support from a wide swath of the American public.

And it may well turn out that the flipped classroom is most effective in private schools or upper-income suburban schools. If that’s how those students make the best use of digital learning, that’s OK. As Khan says, “Blue jeans didn’t become cool until Hollywood started wearing them.” In the world of digital learning, the flipped classroom may just be one good brand.

The Pope Center for Higher Education Policy (which I head) offers a somewhat different solution to the same problem. We believe that the federal government should inject an element of merit into the selection of Pell
grantees. Thus, in a paper on Pell grants, Jenna Ashley Robinson and Duke Cheston recommend that Pell grant recipients have SAT scores of at least 850 (verbal and math) and a high school GPA of at least 2.5 (between a C and a B).

“Not only would this save taxpayer money, it would provide a positive incentive for students to do better in school,” they write. ”Students with very low high school academic performance are unlikely to graduate from college regardless of financial aid.”

The two solutions are similar, of course. As we see it, the advantage of our proposal is that it’s an objective standard that would be easy to enforce. Under Petrilli’s proposal, I would worry (as he does) about colleges
re-naming remedial courses as “regular” courses, something that may already be happening.

The SAT score we recommend, 850, isn’t high. According to the College Board, in order to have a 65 percent chance of getting a B- average in college, students should achieve about 1030 on the math and verbal SATs and earn a B average in high school (taking courses of at least “average” rigor).  Using this benchmark,
only 32 percent of students taking the SATs in 2009 were fully college-ready! On the other hand, to have a chance at a C average in college, they can get by with a 730 score on math and verbal, says the
College Board.

But even getting a C average would be a struggle for these students, and the possibility of failure or dropping is out is all too likely.  Pell grants should be changed to cope with this reality, and Petrilli and the Pope
Center offer promising ways to do it.

-Jane S. Shaw

Behind the Headline
How Can Schools Best Educate Hispanic Students?
Education Next |Spring 2013

Hispanic students have now passed white students as the largest ethnic group in Texas schools, making up almost 51 percent of public school enrollment, the Dallas Morning News reports. The Spring 2013 issue of Education Next includes a forum on how our schools can best educate Hispanic students.

-Education Next

What, you ask, is this all about?

Thirty years after a blue-ribbon panel declared the United States to be “a nation at risk” due to the weak performance and shoddy results of our public education system, one of the two great reforms to have enveloped that system is the setting of explicit academic standards in core subjects, standards that make clear what math youngsters should know by the end of fifth grade, what reading-and-writing skills they must acquire by tenth grade, and so on. (The other great reform: widespread acceptance of school choice.)

Up to now, individual states have set their own academic standards. Some did this well, but according to reviews undertaken by Fordham and others, most stumbled badly, putting forth vague expectations that lack content and rigor and often promote left-wing dogma. And even the good ones differ so much from state to state that school and student performance cannot be compared around the country, much less with other lands.

Public education is indisputably the responsibility of states—embedded deeply in their constitutions—but preparing young Americans to succeed in a mobile society on a shrinking and more competitive planet calls for some commonality of education expectations across the land, expectations that, if met, truly prepare young people for college and good jobs.

Many state leaders understand this and, beginning five years ago, the National Governors Association and the Council of Chief State School Officers (to which most state superintendents belong) launched a foundation-funded project called the Common Core State Standards Initiative, which gave birth to a set of commendably strong standards for English language arts and math from Kindergarten through high school. Our reviewers found them superior to the academic expectations set by three-quarters of states—and essentially on par with the rest.

But would states actually embrace them in place of their own? This was—and remains—totally voluntary, but decisions grew more complicated when the Obama administration started pushing states toward such adoptions by jawboning, hectoring, and luring them with dollars and regulatory waivers.

Whether it was the standards’ intrinsic merit, administration pressure, or the potential advantages of commonality—not just comparability but also cheaper textbooks and tests that need not be tailored to each state’s specifications—forty-five states plus D.C., several territories, and the Pentagon’s school network signed on. (Texas and Virginia are the big exceptions.) The top-priority education initiative in most of those places today is preparing teachers, parents, and others for these demanding standards—and for the likelihood that scores will plummet on the tougher tests now under development.

Then came the backlash. Some arose on the left from foes of testing and teacher groups wary of being evaluated against sterner criteria. Some arose from parents and educators fretful that heavier emphasis on English language arts and math will eclipse music, art, and the rest of a balanced curriculum.

The heavy artillery, however, came from the right. In true tea-party style, the Common Core was presented as a federal plot—worse, an Obama plot, in cahoots with the Gates Foundation, maybe even the United Nations—to take over American schools, end local control, undermine state sovereignty, and abolish school choice. Some decried the Common Core as a lowering of standards because, for example, it doesn’t mandate algebra in eighth grade. (Never mind that few eighth graders study real algebra today.) Others prophesied that Jane Austen and Mark Twain would be replaced by close study of auto-repair manuals. (The list of recommended readings that accompanies the Common Core is excellent—but bad choices by teachers or curriculum directors can subvert any standards.)

Many respected conservatives back the Common Core, including such scarred veterans of the education-reform wars as Jeb Bush, Bill Bennett, Chris Christie, Rod Paige, and Mitch Daniels. They understand that academic standards are just the beginning, describing a destination but not how to get there. They understand, too, that a destination worth reaching beats aimless wandering—and that a big modern country is better off if it knows how all its kids and schools are doing against a rigorous set of common expectations. As good conservatives, they realize that the Common Core in the long run should save dollars, enhance accountability, hasten development of powerful instructional technologies, strengthen American competitiveness, give a boost to the country’s shared civic culture, and (by supplying parents with better information about school performance) advance school choice.

They also recognize, however, that the Common Core is voluntary and that states unserious about implementing it are better off not pretending to embrace it.

Some day, we’ll know whether schools and students in the Common Core states do better than those in places that opt to go it alone. It’s hard to imagine that they’ll do worse.

Education reform is hard. Admiral Rickover once compared it to “moving a graveyard.” Standards-setting is just part of it—and common standards aren’t inherently better. (Newly released standards for science appear to have serious shortcomings.) But when a group of state leaders, many of them Republicans, can come together to set expectations for the curricular core that surpass what most of them set on their own, conservatives ought to applaud, not lash out.

-Chester E. Finn, Jr.

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

I love this thing—great data on a critically important part of our field. If you’re interested in chartering, school-level accountability, or The Urban School System of the Future, you definitely want to check it out.

Almost a decade ago, NACSA produced the equivalent of industry standards—the stuff a high-quality authorizer ought to do. These relate to assessing charter applications, monitoring school performance, helping grow high-performers, revoking the charters of low-performers, etc.

This report assesses authorizers against what NACSA deems the 12 “essential practices” of the industry.

Overall, authorizers’ scores improved over last year’s, and large authorizers (those with 10+ schools) scored better than small ones.

Continuing a long-term trend, authorizers are increasingly picky shoppers—they approve far fewer applications than they did back in the day. The average approval rate is now 33 percent.

But many authorizers are still falling short on the back end of accountability: 34 percent of authorizers lack a clear, established policy to close underperforming schools.

Some of the report’s most interesting findings relate to the different types of authorizers (there are six kinds nowadays). The vast majority (more than 90 percent) are local school districts, but they generally authorize few schools apiece; their portfolios combine for only 53 percent of all charters.

Districts score lower than non-district authorizers overall, and their policies are far less friendly to replication than non-district authorizers, meaning they are less likely to help great charters create more high-quality seats.

I strongly oppose permitting districts—especially failing urban districts—to authorize charters. In fact, I believe giving districts the power to authorize was the biggest charter-policy mistake made during this sector’s two decades of existence.

Why?

Charter laws broke the district’s monopoly over public school operation. But some state laws only allowed districts to authorize. This regrettably continued the district-centered era of public schooling; that is, in a geographic area, every public school must either be run or authorized by the district.

Fortunately, most states have since created non-district authorizers, but this legacy mistake continues to this day in a number of places, for example, Baltimore.

The major other problem is that giving districts authorizing power blurs the essential line between these two very different functions: running schools and overseeing others running schools.

We should see districts as school operators only. Authorizing—that is, umpiring, not playing, not coaching—is much, much different work. Districts are built to run schools; they are not designed to oversee from arms-length others doing so. In fact, many of their policies, habits, beliefs, and practices run counter to the essential charter bargain of freedom for tough accountability. And many district authorizers remain hostile to charters to this very day.

(Think I’m being too pessimistic about charter-district relations? How about Chicago’s district—the only charter authorizer for the nation’s third-largest city—which recently declared that buildings no longer needed by the district are off-limits to charters for 40 years.)

The report’s findings on other types of authorizers are really quite interesting. They have much to teach policymakers and practitioners. How are independent charter boards, like the one in Washington, D.C., doing? What about Indy’s mayor’s office or nonprofits?

Read the report and find out!

Two other thoughts: New research demonstrates that charters that struggle early on seldom improve significantly. It might be the case that NACSA’s (and the charter community’s) support for five-year contracts needs reassessing.

Second, as we move to a sector-agnostic approach in urban schooling and rely on a continuous improvement process based on new starts, expansions, and closures, we must develop rigorous, transparent systems for these activities. Successfully managing a portfolio of schools demands it.

It is troubling that many authorizers still don’t have high-quality practices in place for this work. We should prioritize improvement in these areas.

-Andy Smarick

This blog entry first appeared on the Fordham Institute’s Choice Words blog.

In a new Public Impact policy brief, A Better Blend: A Vision for Boosting Student Outcomes with Digital Learning, which we co-authored with Joe Ableidinger and Jiye Grace Han, we explain how schools can use blended learning to drive improvements in the quality of digital instruction, transform teaching into a highly paid, opportunity-rich career that extends the reach of excellent teachers to all students and teaching peers, and improve student learning at large scale. We call this a “better blend”: combining high-quality digital learning and excellent teaching.

The Promise of Blended Learning …

The potential of blended learning to improve student achievement arises from two benefits of blended models that build on each other. One is the power of digital instruction to personalize learning. The other is the capacity of blended models to let schools reach more students with excellent teachers who ensure that students achieve ambitious, personally fulfilling goals.

… Is Not a Guarantee

Technology in our classrooms is nothing new. At various points in the past century, leaders have hyped new technologies in schools, which have generally failed to meet the lofty expectations. Even blended models and other recent digital-learning initiatives have yielded mixed results. And other promising, recent reforms have shown that a lack of focus on teacher quality typically leads to disappointment.

Today’s blended models will likely fall short as well, unless they include excellent teachers playing instructional and team leadership roles that maximize technology’s impact in tandem with their own.

How Schools and Policymakers Can Create a Better Blend, Right Now

For a better blend of technology and teachers, schools must first focus on implementation to combine excellent technology and teaching. It would be easy to move toward blended learning while leaving students’ access to great teachers exactly as it is today. Instead, schools should shift to blended learning while enhancing teaching effectiveness, through:

• Selectivity: Hiring selectively based on indicators predictive of outstanding teaching
• Reach: Extending the reach of excellent teachers to more students, directly and through team leadership
• Freed Time: Scheduling to give teachers time to collaborate, develop, and analyze student learning data during school hours
• Accountability: Giving excellent teachers credit and accountability for the growth of all students under their purview, including those taught by the teachers on teams that they lead
• Authority: Vesting excellent teachers with control of the digital content they use, allowing them to continuously drive improvements in instructional materials in ways never possible previously
• Rewards: Investing savings in paying teachers far more for achieving excellence with more students, making stronger recruitment and enhanced selectivity possible.

Then, to achieve excellent learning at scale, state policymakers must change state policy to enable and incentivize a better blend in large numbers of schools, through:

• Funding that is flexible and weighted by student need, so that schools may invest in the people and technology that best advance their students’ learning
• People policies that let schools hire, develop, deploy, pay, advance, and retain excellent teachers and collaborative teaching teams to reach every student with excellent teachers
• Accountability, using increasingly better measures, that drives teaching and technology excellence and improvement, so that excellent teachers and their teams get credit for using blended learning to help more students, and schools have powerful incentives for a better blend
• Technology and student data that are available for all students, allowing differentiated instruction for all students without regard to their economic circumstances
• Timing and scalability, including implementing a better blend from the start in new and turnaround-attempt schools—when schools often have more freedoms to implement new staffing models that do not over-rely on the limited supply of outstanding school leaders. This also includes helping new schools develop systems for scale, and giving excellent new schools incentives to grow.

Digital learning may be life-changing for students and career-boosting for teachers, but only if schools and policymakers commit to a better blend.

–Bryan Hassel and Emily Ayscue Hassel

This blog post first appeared at EdTech Digest.

Andy Rotherham, of Bellwether Education Partners; Neal McCluskey, of the Cato Institute; Chester E. Finn, Jr. of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute; Rick Hess, of American Enterprise Institute; Patricia Levesque, of the Foundation for Excellence in Education; and Jay Greene, of the University of Arkasas, each took a moment to share their thoughts on the Common Core and how it will effect education in America.

— Education Next

For some context, when No Child Left Behind required every state to adopt standards, create assessments aligned to those assessments, and build an accountability and reporting system, it gave states 44 months to do all of those things (from January 2002 to September 2005). Half the states already had standards and testing systems up and running, but many were starting basically from scratch, and the rest needed to make revisions. For comparison, the Common Core standards are new and more rigorous than existing standards, but they’re only one component of the full accountability apparatus, and all the states that have adopted the standards are relying on either one of the two assessment consortia or ACT to create assessments for them.

The Common Core standards were released in final form in June 2010. It is now almost May 2013, so states, districts, teachers, preparation programs, parents, unions, and students have had about 35 months with the final standards. The new standards won’t actually have consequences for schools and teachers in most states until 2014-15. If we assume the school year starts in September 2014, that will have been 51 months since the standards were adopted. Again, NCLB left 44 months to do everything; the Common Core allows 51 months to implement standards alone. If this isn’t enough time, what would be?

Weingarten also said that the federal government has not provided funds “specifically targeted to prepare teachers” for the Common Core. This is really just a sly way of saying Congress hasn’t dedicated a specific funding stream to support the implementation of the Common Core. Meanwhile, it provides $2.5 billion to support professional development that can be used to “improve the knowledge of teachers and principals and, in appropriate cases, paraprofessionals, concerning effective instructional strategies, methods, and skills, and use of challenging State academic content standards and student academic achievement standards, and State assessments, to improve teaching practices and student academic achievement.” In other words, Congress has provided, and continues to provide, districts with money to support the implementation of state standards such as the Common Core.

None of this mentions the work of the AFT, National Education Association, national foundations, teacher preparation institutions, assessment consortia (Smarter Balanced and PARCC), or other groups with a stake in the successful implementation of the Common Core. The next time you read a proposal about halting the Common Core, keep in mind all the time and money that’s already been spent.

—Chad Aldeman

Chad Aldeman is a senior policy analyst at Bellwether Education Partners.

This blog entry originally appeared on The Quick and The Ed.

The TED Talks Education one-hour program brings together a diverse group of teachers and education advocates delivering short, high-impact talks on the theme of teaching and learning. These original TED Talks are given by thought leaders including Geoffrey Canada, Bill Gates, Rita F. Pierson and Sir Ken Robinson.

In the talk featured here, Rita Pierson calls on teachers to build better relationships with their students.

—Education Next

Policies that fund phantom students take several forms:

• protections against declining enrollment

• hold-harmless provisions for districts competing with charters

• small district subsidies

• minimum categorical allocations.

In each case, affected districts receive funds in excess of what they would receive if only the students on their rolls were funded. An obvious downside is that these policies cause less funding to be available for all other districts. But such allocations also insulate district leaders from having to make tough (and often productivity-enhancing) changes in the way they serve the students they have. Policies intended to “protect” districts weaken the incentives that should drive change and adaptation as enrollments fluctuate.

The Economics of Enrollment

While state policymakers often try to base funding allocations to districts on “costs,” the fact is that costs and revenues are interdependent. It is true that a district with more funds per pupil than its neighbors can afford to offer more or better services (in the form of extracurriculars, smaller classes, and individualized learning time, for example). It is also the case that the cost of delivering the same services as neighboring districts can increase with revenues, often as the result of concessions extracted by employees as part of the collective bargaining process. Each year, districts are under pressure from constituents and employee organizations to match expenditures to available revenues. If expenditures are projected to be higher than revenues, the district, to avoid running a deficit, will need to reduce spending. But if revenues are projected to come in significantly higher than expenditures, districts will also have a hard time squirreling away the surplus. As one of us has noted in these pages (see “Mounting Debt,” forum, Winter 2004), a surplus may suggest to employee unions that a raise is due and to parents that class sizes should shrink. There is immense political pressure for surpluses to be quickly soaked up, often in a manner that raises the per-pupil cost of services without fundamentally changing their delivery.

This adjustment works as revenues rise but not so well as they fall. In times of shrinking enrollment, districts can suddenly find themselves with unsupportable cost structures. Many a district leader has found that raising salaries and reducing class sizes is quite a bit more palatable politically than vice versa.

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Consider a 10,000-student district that has an enrollment increase of 200 students from one year to the next. The district receives $10,571 in state and local funds per student enrolled, the national average in 2010. As Table 1 illustrates, insofar as state and local revenues are generated on a per-student basis, the school district will receive roughly $2.1 million in additional revenues for the new students.

Direct costs are unlikely to increase as dramatically. Even assuming that the additional students are all placed into newly created classes with new teachers making the average national salary, the additional costs are likely to be much less than the additional revenues. Assuming that no new schools are built to house these students, the district will have a large surplus to spend on other things, such as new district-wide programs, class-size reductions, and employee raises.

Now consider what happens in the same district when enrollment shrinks by 200 pupils and state and local funding declines accordingly. Assume the district reduces its teaching force by 10 teachers and no longer pays for these students’ supplies. It could reduce its expenses by about $910,000, but it is losing more than $2.1 million in revenue. If the $1.2 million surplus from prior growth is indeed being spent across the district, it will need to make general budget reductions or “cuts due to declining enrollment.” With their tendency to spend all that they have, districts create financial asymmetry around enrollment growth and decline.

A similar mind-set has dominated the thinking on small districts, namely that services should be delivered in small districts in much the same way as in large districts. Small districts, the argument goes, still require a full-time librarian, counselor, nurse, physical-education teacher, and so on, and thus some minimum level of fixed costs is unavoidable.

As a result, the discourse around enrollment loss and small district expenses often focuses on high “fixed costs.” This reflects a misunderstanding of what costs are fixed. Few in other industries consider personnel costs (which constitute the majority of district expenditures) fixed. Administrations could shrink, pay raises could slow, and schools could be closed if enrollment declines. In the case of small districts, many services could be purchased in smaller increments with part-time staff or by contracting with service providers (e.g., for online learning).

It does seem to be the case, however, that people feel worse about losing something they had than not gaining something they would like. As a result, declines in enrollment can be painful. And so state lawmakers have enacted phantom student-funding policies to help districts cope.

The annual cost of phantom student funding varies by the types of policies in place across different states. Table 2 highlights provisions in several states and computes their value as the portion of total state education funding to represent the relative scale of these policies. While the dollars at stake are obviously not a major driver of state education expenditures, they are significant, especially during times of tight budgets. At a time when districts may not be receiving funds to cover cost growth, however, even 1 percent of the state’s total spending is meaningful.

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Protections against Declining Enrollment

As the 2012–13 school year opened, districts in Tucson, Cleveland, Newark, Philadelphia, and elsewhere were facing steep enrollment declines and a corresponding dip in revenues. Five years before, Baltimore, Seattle, and Portland, Oregon, topped the list of districts in fiscal chaos brought on by falling enrollment.

Enrollment shifts are certainly part of the landscape, and at any given time just as many or more districts may be facing enrollment drops as are seeing enrollment gains. But each time enrollment falls, district leaders seem to be caught off guard, forced to dip into reserves, pare down extracurriculars, and make out-of-cycle pleas for rescue funding in order to avert salary freezes, seniority-based layoffs, or school closures.

And so it goes. States attempt to ease the pain by jumping in with extra funds. In California, core funding for students (known as the Revenue Limit) is made to districts on the basis of average daily attendance (ADA). When district enrollment declines year over year, the allocation is made on the basis of the previous year’s average daily attendance. While this provides districts with only a one-year reprieve, the amount spent is substantial. According to the Public Policy Institute of California, in 2005–06 the total cost of this protection was $402 million or about $111 per student in declining-enrollment districts. Taken together, the 89,234 phantom students funded last year by California’s declining-enrollment provision would have been California’s third-largest district, larger than Long Beach, Fresno, or San Francisco.

Massachusetts distributes state aid to districts on the basis of a complex formula that considers enrollment, student need, and local ability to pay. However, the state legislature usually inserts into the budget a “hold harmless” provision that does not allow total state aid to any district to go down, essentially ignoring the careful rationale behind the state’s own formula. Extra payments to select districts are projected to total $180 million in FY13, more than 3 percent of total state education spending. Districts that are overpaid have no incentive to attract new students, as their state aid would not go up, and, in fact, would be better off on a per-pupil basis if some of their current students left. In other states, protection policies take the form of one-off allocations made to large city districts as students disappear. Pennsylvania, for instance, funds the Pittsburgh and Philadelphia districts according to a different formula than it does all other districts in the state. The effect is to grandfather them in under a higher expenditure structure than their current enrollments warrant.

Holding Harmless Districts Competing with Charters

Buried deep in numerous state charter laws are promises to districts, often made during charter law negotiations, that they will be protected financially when they lose students to charters. Called double funding in some states, these provisions work much like the declining-enrollment protections. The state funds students attending charter schools while still funding districts as though those students had remained.

In Connecticut, districts receive revenues based on the enrollments of students living in their region, regardless of whether those students attend the district schools or attend charters (or technical schools). According to researchers Bryan Hassel and Daniela Doyle, double funding students in 2008 cost Connecticut $186 million.

In Massachusetts, charter school students take with them the per-pupil net school spending (state and local) from their sending districts. To soften the blow to sending-district finances, Massachusetts provides a partial tuition reimbursement for up to six years after the district starts paying charter school tuition. When a district incurs new tuition costs, the state reimburses the district for 100 percent of the cost in the first year and 25 percent of the tuition cost for the next five years. Thus, the state essentially provides districts with 225 percent of a year’s tuition for each full-time equivalent student lost!

These allocations could create a disincentive to improve services in an effort to retain more students. When students leave a district to attend a charter school, the district may see an increase in per-student revenues.

Subsidies for Small Districts

Although some small districts may have lower salaries and transportation costs than larger districts, and opportunities for creative and cost-effective service delivery certainly exist, it is often assumed that larger districts necessarily enjoy economies of scale from which small districts cannot benefit. The result is that smaller districts in many states receive more funds per pupil than do their larger counterparts.

According to a 2010 Education Week report, 29 states have an explicit “weight” in their state allocation formula to account for district size. Others fund some items (e.g., staff or programs) in “one per district” amounts such that when the costs of those items are divided by the lower enrollment of smaller districts, per-pupil price tags are quite high.

These small-district subsidies add up. In Washington State and New Mexico, districts with student enrollments between 100 and 1,200 spend $104 million and $69 million more, respectively, in total public funds than if they were spending the statewide average per pupil in these districts. In Maine, the largest districts spend, on average, $8,033 per pupil compared to $11,027 for the smallest districts. This subsidy amounts to $9 million in total, enough to educate almost 40 percent more students than the small districts serve. In California, districts with fewer than 100 students receive, on average, more than $18,000 per enrolled student, or more than twice as much as districts that enroll at least 1,000 students.

Not all states have bought into the need for small-district subsidies. As Figure 1 indicates, the extent to which small districts (here defined as having 200 to 1,200 students) receive extra funds varies enormously. In states like California and Georgia, smaller districts receive a subsidy of 15 percent or more of the average per-pupil spending levels in their larger-district peers. Minnesota and Wisconsin, in contrast, have small districts that operate at funding levels on par with their larger peers.

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Even if large districts do enjoy important economies of scale, small-district subsidies discourage merging or sharing services across districts, both potential means for gaining such economies. Charter schools (essentially single-school districts) have learned this lesson and often share purchasing, specialized services, or back-office functions. Even larger districts often share services across areas such as special education provision or vocational education.

Small-district subsidies also reinforce the assumption that there is one best method to deliver schooling: a traditional school building with a principal, a nurse, on-site teachers in all subjects including specialty courses, and so forth. This mind-set has prompted advocacy groups like the Rural School and Community Trust to seek both small-district subsidies and protection against loss of enrollment to charters. In contrast, some small and geographically isolated districts have found that with digital learning technology, they are able to provide students with better course options and at a per-pupil cost that provides for parity with other districts.

Minimum Allotments for Categorical Allocations

Formula minimums for categorical allocations create a fourth type of phantom funding. Forty-nine states target funds to specific programs or types of students, including bilingual education, nutritional programs, drug awareness, and dropout prevention. In some cases, the targeted allocation distributes a fixed-dollar amount for each eligible student (say, each bilingual education student) and then includes a minimum allocation for districts with very low numbers of the targeted population. Under such a policy, a district with only a handful of bilingual education students might receive a vastly inflated spending level for each of them.

Formula minimums usually have their origin in politics. Those proposing legislation for categorical allocations know that before understanding its justification, many legislators will flip through the bill to see how much money is at stake for their district: the minimums are included to entice legislators to vote in approval.

The result can be windfalls for districts that don’t have significant numbers of students who qualify for the funding. In previous work, one of us found that Washington State’s 2004 compensatory allocation formula ensured that affluent Bellevue School District, in which only 18 percent of students qualify for free or reduced-price lunch, receives $1,371 per poor student in state compensatory funds, while large urban districts received less than half of that for each of their impoverished students (see Figure 2).

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The Hidden Costs of Phantom Funding

Declining enrollment, increasing competition, and small size all create financial challenges for school districts. If districts do not adapt by restructuring service delivery, they could go bankrupt. Perhaps funding phantom students is a reasonable state policy response.

We see three primary arguments against the funding of phantom students: First, by continuing to fund phantom students, states ensure that districts won’t restructure expenditures for smaller enrollments. If the district has a large professional development department, or too many kindergarten teachers, those positions may stay on the district payrolls because the extra state monies make it possible. A 2010 study of declining-enrollment districts by Pacey Economics Group found that, while districts face real challenges reducing transportation costs, they do have flexibility on “other categories such as other supporting operations and maintenance, instructional salaries and benefits, food service, and administration.” In other words, they can reduce costs when they have to.

Second, funding phantom students delivers the message that school districts should continue delivering education the way they have for the last century. If, indeed, we have found the “one best system,” this is all to the good. If we have not (which our relative international performance might suggest), or even if we are not sure, this system discourages needed experimentation.

Finally, and perhaps most importantly, funding phantom students diverts public funding from other uses. Proponents of protections from declining enrollment or small schools rightly note the challenges of downsizing. In deciding whether to protect declining-enrollment districts, however, policymakers should consider alternative uses for that money. Clearly, the funds could be distributed more evenly across all schools, used for early childhood services or for augmenting children’s health care, or aimed at improving postsecondary options for students from lower-income families.

How States Can End Phantom Funding

Ending the funding of phantom students will not be easy politically or from an organizational standpoint. Even so, there are numerous actions states can take to prepare districts and the public for thinking about schooling and education funding differently and effect a fair transition.

Encourage districts to structure allocations in per-student terms. Education funding policy should address the misalignment between what drives revenues and what drives expenditures. On the revenue side, most funds are tied to student counts. For San Francisco, for example, a reduction in one student equates to a loss of $5,000 in state money.

The expenditure side is a different story. A loss of one student doesn’t automatically trigger any change in the budget. Districts have staffed their schools by estimating how many classes they’ll need and made sure each school has a counselor, a nurse, a parent coordinator, and so on. When a handful of students leave, these same line items cost more in per-pupil terms. Districts consolidate classes where they can, but then imagine that their only option is to pull some staff from the schools and eliminate programs.

Fluctuations in enrollment are inevitable. Knowing this, districts should create more nimble fiscal systems, in which expenditures (like revenues) are tied directly to enrollment. This means reconfiguring budgets so that allocations for schools and services are on a per-student basis. Each school would receive a specified dollar amount for each student so that its allocation automatically rises and falls with enrollment. School districts in Houston, Denver, and Oakland already allocate funds to schools in this manner.

Individual programs, too, might be funded in the same way. A program to create college awareness, for instance, might receive $100 per eligible student each year, instead of an allocation of some fixed number of staff. This kind of expenditure structure is currently being implemented for central departments in the Baltimore City Schools.

In this model, total spending on district schools and services automatically drifts up and down with enrollment, thereby better matching revenue trends. Within each school, incremental changes can be made on a yearly basis to reflect trends in the size of the student body. The more allocations that districts base on enrollment (not only to schools, but also to departments, services, operations, administration, and other district functions), the more protected the district is from sudden deficits stemming from shifts in the student population.

This kind of allocation model also protects programs from wholesale elimination with a drop in enrollment. College awareness services, for example, may need to be redefined when student counts drop, perhaps by rethinking delivery, or relying on part-time staff, but the program doesn’t go away. For each program or service, as enrollments decrease (or increase, for that matter), the per-pupil allocations stay the same. Where middle-school science was a priority, it is still a priority. Where parent engagement is thought to be important, the need may be met in a different manner than assigning a full-time staff person to each school to lead the effort.

It is true that as districts shrink, some district services will miss out on economies of scale. At this point, the department may need to provide the service jointly with another district or contract out for the service on a per-pupil basis. But rather than having district leaders make those cuts from the top, adjusting to current enrollment becomes the responsibility of each school and program manager. That’s where adaptation and adoption of innovations can happen. Leaders of a high-cost speech therapy program, for example, are driven to explore technologies that enable remote speech therapy and decrease staffing costs. In this model of budget management, adaptation happens within each department as it seeks to hold per-pupil costs steady amidst enrollment changes.

Restructure true fixed costs: unfunded liabilities. In education, costs are often assumed to be fixed that actually are not. While it is certainly easier to reduce a teaching position than to merge a school or restructure administrative operations and services, most operational and personnel costs of school districts are variable and could be structured to vary more directly with enrollment and revenues.

Yet there is a critical exception haunting many districts. Lifetime health benefits and defined-benefit pensions, sometimes guaranteed decades ago, have created ongoing costs for districts that are unconnected to revenues and enrollment and cannot be easily reduced. As of 2009, the Los Angeles Unified School District, a shrinking district, had an unfunded actuarial accrued liability of $10.3 billion for employees’ future post-employment health-care costs, more than 200 percent of the active payroll. In 2011, the district paid $240 million in health and medical benefits for retirees and their dependents. Note that this cost relates only to the number of retirees, not the number of current students or employees. Thus, as the district shrinks, the per-student cost will continue to increase.

One answer to this challenge might simply be “Too bad!” Districts entered agreements to fund these benefits and did not set any money aside—they made their own bed. This is not quite fair. Those who entered the agreements generally did so years ago, and the administrators, voters, and union leaders that allowed this are all long gone. Indeed, one wonders whether knowing that the payment on these promises was going to be someone else’s problem rendered them easier to make. Today, in any case, payments are coming due.

A possible way out of this mess is for states to execute a grand bargain. States could assume existing liabilities from school districts, effectively spreading the costs across all current providers. Simultaneously, though, states should adopt strict requirements that, from this point forward, districts (and other providers) must fully fund all employee benefits in the year that those benefits are accrued.

Limit districts’ short-term ability to make long-term commitments. States should also take additional steps to regulate the ability of districts to make financial commitments they may not be able to fulfill. Several states require districts to show that they will remain fiscally solvent for one or a few years, and some require this as part of collective bargaining agreements. While this is a step in the right direction, districts are required only to show solvency under one set of reasonable assumptions. Instead, districts should be required to consider multiple scenarios and build revenue contingencies into agreements.

Defined-benefit and pension programs could be replaced with defined-contribution programs (a change already taking place in some locales). Tenure systems might be modified to allow for more fiscal flexibility, perhaps by including provisions for declining enrollment, or limiting the portion of the staff that can be tenured. However, it is unlikely that any of this can happen without states providing political cover.

Limit state restrictions on how certain funds can be used. Some state funding policies explicitly assume certain school structures: a specific number of students are expected to be in front of teachers within schools that have principals within districts that each have a superintendent. As a result, small schools or districts cannot leverage distance learning or rethink service delivery to maximize student learning and minimize cost. The state essentially requires these smaller schools and districts to have high per-pupil cost structures.

Supporting more adaptive district budgets won’t be easy, as traditional budgeting practices are deeply rooted in district habits and in local politics. School board members facing reelection may be encouraged to make promises that wreak fiscal havoc in years to come. State legislators will be reluctant to make changes that result in fewer dollars going to their districts. But the benefits of moving to more nimble expenditure structures with multiyear budgets that plan for contingencies are real, not only in terms of long-term fiscal stability, but also in that priorities can be articulated in district spending patterns. Under these conditions, district leaders will be better able to seek out and adopt promising solutions to their cost challenges as scale changes.

Marguerite Roza is director of the Edunomics Lab at Georgetown University and senior research affiliate at the Center on Reinventing Public Education at the University of Washington. Jon Fullerton is executive director of the Center for Education Policy Research at Harvard University.

School Funding Practices Keep Dollars in Districts for “Phantom Students”

Protection clauses and hold-harmless provisions discourage districts from adapting to make the best use of funds when enrollments decline

CAMBRIDGE, MA—Members of the general public might conclude that declining student enrollment results in lower school budgets.  In many cases they would be wrong, report Marguerite Roza and Jon Fullerton in a new analysis of widespread school funding practices that disconnect revenues from school enrollments.  “Funding Phantom Students:  State policies insulate districts from making tough decisions” will appear in the Summer issue of Education Next and is now available online at www.educationnext.org.

The authors examine four common practices that allow public funds to flow to schools for students who have left the district.  These include:  “protection” clauses against declining enrollment;  hold-harmless provisions for districts competing with charter schools;  subsidies to small districts;  and minimum categorical allocations.  “In each case,” the authors write, “affected districts receive funds in excess of what they would receive if only the students on their rolls were funded.”  Among examples of such practices are:

• California funds districts on the basis of average daily attendance (ADA) but uses the previous year’s ADA as the basis for funding.  According to the Public Policy Institute of California, the total cost of this protection in 2005-06 was $402 million, or enough “phantom students” to comprise the state’s third-largest district.

• Massachusetts regularly inserts a “hold harmless” provision into the budget that does not allow state aid to operating districts to go down, regardless of enrollment changes.  The state also provides partial tuition reimbursement to districts that lose students to charter schools for six years, essentially providing districts with 225% of a year’s tuition for each full-time equivalent student lost.

• Connecticut districts receive revenues based on the enrollments of students living in their region, regardless of whether students attend a district’s schools or switch to charters or technical schools.  Double funding students cost the state $186 million in 2008.

Policies intended to protect districts from the effects of shifting enrollments “weaken the incentives that should drive change and adaptation as enrollments fluctuate,” observe Roza and Fullerton.  School district administrators tend to focus on high “fixed costs” involved in running schools and they refer to personnel salary and benefits as their largest fixed cost.  “Few in other industries consider personnel costs fixed,” observe the authors, and in fact, “administrations could shrink, pay raises could slow, and schools could be closed if enrollment declines.”

Roza and Fullerton outline several policy options that states could take to encourage greater efficiency in the use of public dollars.  These include:

• Fund schools on the basis of a specified dollar amount for each student so that its allocation automatically rises and falls with enrollment.

• Limit districts’ practice of making long-term commitments that they may not be able to fulfill by, for example, encouraging them to shift to defined-contribution pension programs and modifying tenure systems to allow for staffing adaptations.

• Limit state restrictions on use of funds requiring a certain number of students to be in class with a certain number of teachers.  Encourage development of online learning capacity and rethink service delivery to maximize student learning and minimize cost.

Adopting more nimble expenditure structures, write Roza and Fullerton, will increase district leaders’ ability “to seek out and adopt promising solutions to their cost challenges as scale changes.”

About the Authors

Marguerite Roza is director of the Fiscal Analytics Unit at Georgetown University and senior research affiliate at the Center on Reinventing Public Education at the University of Washington.  Jon Fullerton is executive director of the Center for Education Policy Research at Harvard University.  The authors are available for interviews.

About Education Next

Education Next is a scholarly journal published by the Hoover Institution that is committed to careful examination of evidence relating to school reform.  Other collaborating institutions are the Program on Education Policy and Governance at Harvard University, part of the Taubman Center for State and Local Government at the Harvard Kennedy School, and the Thomas B. Fordham Institute.  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.

Worthy though some of these efforts may be, none reveals the crux of the problem: A huge proportion of this $40 billion annual federal investment is flowing to people who simply aren’t prepared to do college-level work. And this is perverting higher education’s mission, suppressing completion rates and warping the country’s K-12 system.

About two-thirds of low-income community-college students — and one-third of poor students at four-year colleges — need remedial (aka “developmental”) education, according to Complete College America, a nonprofit group. But it’s not working: Less than 10 percent of students who start in remedial education graduate from community college within three years, and just 35 percent of remedial students earn a four-year degree within six years.

What if the government decreed that three years hence, students would only be eligible for Pell aid if enrolled in credit-bearing college courses, thus disqualifying remedial education for support?

One could foresee various possible outcomes. Let’s start with the positive. Ambitious, low-income high-school students would know that if they want to attend college at public expense (probably their only option), they would first need to become “college-ready.” This would provide a clear sign and incentives for them to work hard, take college-prep classes and raise their reading and math skills to the appropriate level.

Better Preparation

To be considered successful, the high schools serving these young people would need to get their college-bound students to a college-ready level, not just get them to graduation. They might offer more college-prep courses, especially for those pupils with the most promise, and make sure the teachers are up to the task.

Likewise, state officials concerned about college completion would be prodded to ensure that their high schools produce college-ready graduates, maybe boosting graduation standards accordingly. Better yet, they might start to include college matriculation and graduation rates in their high-school accountability systems.

As for colleges, without a federal funding stream for remedial education, many would decide to become more selective, only admitting students who are ready for credit-bearing courses.

This would probably raise the academic tenor of the institution, for students and professors alike. And with fewer students using Pell aid, we could afford to make each grant more generous, removing financial barriers that force well-prepared low-income students to leave before graduation, or not to come at all.

In sum, disqualifying the use of Pell grants for remedial education would substantially reduce the gap between the number of students entering higher education and the number completing degrees.

Yes, there are obvious downsides. Most significantly, many students wouldn’t be able to afford remedial education and thus would never go to college in the first place. Millions of potential Pell recipients — many of them minorities — might be discouraged from even entering the higher-education pipeline. Such an outcome seems unfair and cuts against the American tradition of open access, as well as second and third chances.

Then again, it’s not so certain that these individuals are better off trying college in the first place. Most don’t make it to graduation.

Job Training

Many would be more successful in job-training programs that don’t require college-level work (or would be better off simply gaining skills on the job). Georgetown University’s Center on Education and the Workforce estimates that more than a third of jobs today only require a high-school diploma or less. While these jobs won’t make young people rich, they will keep them out of the grip of poverty, and can propel them to new opportunities.

Furthermore, it isn’t fair to spend scarce dollars on students who aren’t prepared for college; those dollars could instead be used by needy students who are ready. It would be better to place our bets on low-income individuals who are most likely to succeed by boosting the maximum value of a Pell grant. (At $5,500 a year, it’s worth much less today than when Congress created the program decades ago.)

Perhaps the greatest risk is that colleges would respond to the new rules in a perverse manner: by giving credit for courses that used to be considered “remedial.” This would be the path of least resistance. Everyone could keep doing what they were doing before, with a wink and a nod, but would further dilute the value of a college degree.

It’s hard to know how many institutions would be willing to disregard academic integrity in such a way; one could imagine it being a lamentably large number. It would be incumbent on government agencies and watchdog groups to shame colleges that attempt to take this route.

On balance, withdrawing Pell subsidies from remedial courses appears promising enough to try. Congress should require the Education Department to create a demonstration program in which colleges and universities volunteer to eliminate their remedial courses and, in return, their qualified low-income students become eligible for more-generous Pell-grant money, thus reducing their own financial-aid obligation.

Perhaps offer the deal to an entire state. Study what happens. My guess is that it would have a salutary effect on the K-12 system, on higher education and on college-completion rates. Let’s find out.

-Mike Petrilli

This blog entry first appeared on Bloomberg View.

They do two things really, really well. First, they take part in on-the-ground, let’s-solve-this-problem human-capital activities. In partner cities across the nation, they train and certify teachers, develop and implement new evaluation systems, help administrators improve observations, and much more.

Chances are, if you’re hearing about interesting, innovative teacher or leader work in an urban area, TNTP is involved.

The second is that they put out these superb little reports. They’re always short and punchy, visually pleasing, terribly informative, and, in one way or another, unexpected. Teacher Evaluation 2.0 was a valuable how-to guide for discriminating policymakers, The Irreplaceables was a teacher-retention wake-up call, and, of course, The Widget Effect was a game-changer.

The organization is at its influential-powerful best when it combines its smarts and muscle—when it can use its research and analysis to inform the field and then help implement the change. For example, TNTP’s findings on the appalling state of teacher evaluations helped shape the Race to the Top application, precipitated a wave of state-level statutory changes, and kicked off some of TNTP’s most meaningful partnerships with states and districts.

Leap Year, the organization’s latest offering, follows in this fine research-meets-practice tradition.

It looks under the hood of the first year of teaching. The conventional wisdom holds that all teachers are lousy out of the gates, so we treat the rookie season, says the report, “like a warm-up lap.”

But there’s much more to this story.

Using its “Assessment of Classroom Effectiveness” (ACE) tool, a multiple-measures evaluation system designed specifically for new teachers, TNTP assessed new educators via observations, student surveys, growth data, and principal ratings.

Among the lessons learned: Not all teachers struggle from the start; in fact, nearly 25 percent score in the top two categories (out of five) in their first observation.

Similarly, while most teachers improve throughout their first year (.2 points on a five-point scale for each observation), many do not. One-quarter of those later denied certification started off poorly and actually got worse over the year.

In fact, just like a charter school’s early performance can accurately predict its later performance, a teacher’s first-year performance tells us a great deal about his/her ability to improve. Teachers who received certification after their first year had an average score of 3.14 on their first observations; those denied certification scored around 2.50, on average, on that first observation.

In fact, writes the report, “Teachers who are performing poorly in their first year rarely show dramatic improvement in their second year.” This includes even those teachers who—thought to have potential despite early struggles—were given a second year (an “extension plan”) to earn certification.

“After more than a year in the classroom, not a single extension-plan teacher earned an observation score in the (top two) categories.”

There are plenty more fascinating tidbits throughout the report; you’ll learn about training and norming observers, using student surveys, adjusting for the inflation of principal ratings, and cultivating early skill sets in teachers.

But probably my favorite new fact relates to improving observations. It turns out that more observations aren’t the key; more observers are. “When assessing tradeoffs between adding observers and adding observations, the evidence is fairly clear—adding observers gives the greater boost to reliability. Giving teachers three different observers, instead of the same observer for each round, significantly increases the reliability of observations.”

The only complaint I had with the report is actually a complaint about an element of the underlying system, specifically, the names of the five rating categories—in order: “Ineffective, Minimally Effective, Developing, Proficient, and Skillful.”

Give 100 reasonable people those names and ask them the best, second-best, etc., I would happily gamble that less than half would choose this exact order.

Complaining about the discrepancy between a classification title and its content may seem like semantics, but it’s more than that. We have such troubled evaluation systems, I believe, partly because we still don’t have honest conversations about effectiveness. By muddying what’s meant with these indecipherable category names, we contribute to the problem.

But this is a minor matter when compared to the serious strengths of the report.

What’s most exciting is that, unlike evaluation and tenure reform, which required new laws in most states, most state departments of education can singlehandedly (or with their state boards) alter certification rules through regulation.

That means an enterprising state chief could swiftly turn this report’s findings into policy. Don’t approve prep programs graduating candidates unprepared for that critical first year; make sure early professional development builds foundational skills; prioritize additional observers over additional observations; and make permanent certification contingent on proof of success.

I’m all but certain a number of states will take this report’s lessons to heart, and once again it will be said that TNTP influenced for the better our educator policies and practices.

-Andy Smarick

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

In this installment of the Education Next book club, host Mike Petrilli talks with Michelle Rhee about becoming Michelle Rhee, what she’s learned over these last tumultuous years, and what she thinks the future holds for education reform in America.

Additional installments of the Ed Next Book Club podcast can be heard here.

—Education Next

The America Achieves study reveals in an alternate way an international achievement gap that my colleagues and I have been identifying over the past three years (see “Teaching Math to the Talented,” features, Winter 2011; “Are U.S. Students Ready to Compete?” features, Fall 2011; “Is the U.S. Catching Up?” features, Fall 2012). In those papers, we report that the most talented U.S. students dreadfully lag peers abroad in math, that the percentage of U.S. students who are proficient is seriously lagging, and that the rate of improvement in the United States is no better than average. We develop the implications in a book the Brookings Institution will release this summer under the title Endangering Prosperity: A Global View of the American School.

Both our studies and the one America Achieves has just released rely on the Program for International Assessment (PISA), a series of surveys of student achievement in math, science, and reading administered to 15-year-olds in most countries of the industrialized world. America Achieves’ contribution is to group students by social and educational “advantage” into four quarters, using an index based on such items as a poverty indicator, educational environment at home, and quality of peer group at school. The organization then focuses its analysis on students in the second and third quarter—those just above and below the median student. By this device, analysts can discover whether the education problem in the United States disappears if one ignores, statistically, the most disadvantaged students.

America Achieves has not chosen the perfect analytical strategy. For one thing, it assumes the distribution of social advantage is identical in all countries, when it can hardly be the case that the same percentage of Swiss and Dutch children are socially disadvantaged as children in Poland and Hungary. A direct measure of family social background would be better than one that mixes in such factors as books in the home and the quality of peers at school. These educational considerations cannot be called “social” without twisting words out of their ordinary meaning.

But the study is solid enough to embarrass the group of teachers union leaders and liberal academics that calls itself the Broader, Bolder Approach to school reform (see “Neither Broad Nor Bold,” check the facts, Summer 2012). According to this influential group, the way to fix education in America is to eliminate poverty in America. If Broader, Bolder’s analysis were correct, then students who are not in the lowest quarter of the social spectrum should be doing just as well as similarly situated peers abroad.

That simply is not happening, as the America Achieves study demonstrates. Even if we ignore disadvantaged students both in the United States and abroad, U.S. performance ranks low in both math and science, and, to a lesser extent, in reading.

Also embarrassed by the America Achieves study is the lefty labor Economic Policy Institute in Washington, D.C., which recently released a sophomoric study (see my January 16, 2013, post on the Education Next blog) that tried to use the PISA data to attribute educational deficiencies to the U.S. social structure, not its school system.

The America Achieves results show that there is only one way to alter the international achievement gap in education: fix how students are learning. That suggestion sounds like a truism. It would be, were it not for the organized forces that insist on disputing the obvious.

— Paul E. Peterson

Behind the Headline
The Turnaround Fallacy
Education Next |Winter 2010

While the Obama Administration is investing billions of dollars in efforts to turn around failing schools, many experts note that turnaround efforts almost never work, and that starting new schools may be a better investment. Andy Smarick, who is featured prominently in this morning’s USA Today story, first wrote about this topic in the Winter 2010 issue of Ed Next, where he laid out the case against school turnarounds.

-Education Next

—Education Next

For eons, the plot was the same: the district owns and operates all public schools in a geographic area. The subplot, at least in urban America, was that most of those schools weren’t delivering on the promise of public education.

Chartering, which crept on stage in 1991, subtly but importantly showed that entities besides districts could run public schools—and often run them better. Soon thereafter, Michigan and Massachusetts, adding dimension to the character, showed that non-district entities could also authorize (approve, monitor, renew, close) public schools.

The district’s monopoly grip on public education was broken.

Over the past two decades, chartered schools got more and more stage time, breaking into nearly every state and growing to capture larger market shares in America’s cities: 10, 15, 20, 30 percent in some areas.

Then the plot added a new twist, as state departments of education were empowered to take over individual schools and even entire districts.

This didn’t go so well. State agencies didn’t know what to do with the schools and districts they took over. Low performance continued, and this character embarrassingly slunk offstage, at least in most performances.

But this role wasn’t a total loss. It provided more evidence that public schools could be operated, monitored, and governed in various ways.

We’ve not reached the end of the play yet (and may never), but so far the high point was swift post-Katrina expansion of Louisiana’s Recovery School District. This state-controlled body has the authority to take over low-performing schools and their facilities and close them, run them, or hand their operations to someone else. But it’s not the state education department. It’s a specialized entity, a sort of virtual district, answerable to the state.

Now the dominant force in New Orleans, with a hand in schools educating four of every five kids in the Crescent City, the RSD has been instrumental in fundamentally—and hopefully forever—changing our understanding of the delivery of public schooling.

No one is better positioned to understand and explain the arc of this story, reveal its complications, pick out its nuances, and suggest its possibilities than Nelson Smith. The original executive director of the D.C. Public Charter School Board, former president of the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools, current senior advisor to the National Association of Charter School Authorizers, and much more, Smith understands chartering and school governance inside and out.

So when a new character bounds onto the stage and you need an expert critic at your side to help make sense of it all, Nelson’s your guy.

This is why Fordham asked him to write the story of Tennessee’s relatively new Achievement School District (ASD), a semi-clone of the RSD. In this excellent short paper, Smith offers a combination of history, reporting, and analysis; it is straightforward, sober, but quite hopeful.

The reader walks away understanding not just the ASD’s struggles, vulnerabilities, and potential, but also its context. This is invaluable to those interested in dramatically improving urban schooling, but especially for those, like me, who are convinced that the traditional urban district structure should’ve been banished from the theater a long time ago.

The paper takes us through the history of structural school-improvement strategies, then describes the genesis of the ASD. Created in the Race-to-the-Top-application era to convince federal proposal-scorers that Tennessee was serious about its failing schools, the ASD was charged with, well, doing exactly that.

With powers similar to Louisiana’s RSD but different in important ways, Tennessee’s ASD can take over schools and run them or team up with third-party operators.

If you want details on how schools are made eligible for takeover or how they exit ASD control, you’ll get them.

More interesting to me, though, was learning how Chris Barbic—former superstar charter-network leader and first and current ASD head—shaped the new body through imaginative approaches to growth, operator recruitment, school matching, community engagement, human capital, and more. I’m a big Barbic fan, so I’m probably biased, but his success in landing superb school operators, expanding his portfolio slowly, and avoiding unnecessary fights is quite impressive.

At this point, I’m of the mind that the ASD/RSD model, though it is a giant leap in our evolving understanding of public school governance and operation, is not the long-term solution for what city kids need. Such bodies are designed to have a statewide reach, and their control of schools is meant to be temporary. I believe we need a new school-delivery and governance model that is city-specific and city-driven and that such a system should replace the district, not work around it. The RSD, in practice, is close to that, but the ongoing battle over local recapture of taken-over schools will continue until the district is permanently decommissioned.

But these are arguments at the margins. The RSD is infinitely superior to the failed urban district and, though the ASD is still the understudy, thanks to Barbic’s tutelage, we may soon see its name in lights.

-Andy Smarick

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

We didn’t know for certain how well the design processes would go. We chose these districts because they had leaders who showed real commitment to expanding the impact and authority of already-excellent teachers and a burning passion to help disadvantaged students. But would that be enough?

We shared design process principles, which include teacher involvement in design decisions. We shared five Reach Extension Principles for the new school models they would craft or tailor to their needs; they call for reaching more students with excellent teachers in charge of their learning, for more pay, within budget, while boosting development opportunities for all teachers and clarifying authority/credit for great teachers.

But we didn’t know how school teams would respond. Could they make design decisions that gained administrators’ support? How would the many good, solid teachers in these schools who were not on the design teams respond to their peers’ design choices? Would the teams craft roles that appealed to excellent teaching peers for recruiting purposes? All of these schools are high-poverty, and these teachers are no strangers to repeated “school improvement” efforts that can easily provoke skepticism.

On all fronts, these school teams exceeded our expectations.

Teachers took the lead in most schools, and in others they worked collaboratively with administrators to make decisions about what reach models to adopt and flesh out the design details. One school came up with its own model, a “time-time swap” (a variation on a time-technology swap described here), in which paraprofessionals supervise some student learning time at school—not unusual except that it will be scheduled to enable teachers to reach more students and collaborate in teams. Nearly all the school teams chose to combine several models to reach more students with great teachers, add team collaboration time, and let excellent teachers lead and develop their peers.

When team members presented their plans to other teachers in the schools (using variations of materials about teacher careers and the Opportunity Culture vision), they got a positive response. Any backlash we feared was apparently quelled by the designs these teams chose: They focused as much on developing excellence among peers as reaching more students with excellence directly.

Charlotte, the first site to recruit for these roles, received 708 applications for 26 positions in its four pilot schools. Is it any wonder? Teachers in reach roles can earn anywhere from about $4,500 to $23,000 more next year for helping more students and leading peers—all within budget, so the money won’t disappear when a grant ends. Nashville likewise is receiving strong interest in its recruiting. (Some positions in schools are being filled with teachers already on board—these schools chose to have all apply alongside the external candidates.)

The ultimate test will be how many more students these teachers can help make outstanding progress, not just in the first year, but in subsequent years as more teachers on new teams break through to excellence with the help of their outstanding peers. We know that they will likely need to keep improving their reach models. And they will be learning how to work in schools that take down the walls between teachers with an explicit purpose of achieving excellence for all students and staff.

Meanwhile, we’re really excited for the teachers and students in these schools. It’s what our Opportunity Culture work is all about—hope for achieving extraordinary things, with sustainable school models led by proven, excellent teachers to back it up.

—Bryan Hassel and Emily Ayscue Hassel

Teacher Preparation Programs Face More Scrutiny as Common Core Era Begins

New analysis points to the importance of training and transparent assessments of teacher preparation programs as keys to improving quality

CAMBRIDGE, MA—Teacher education has faced increasing criticism in recent years, sparked by uneven student achievement across the U.S.  In a new analysis, Kate Walsh, president of the National Council on Teacher Quality (NCTQ), examines the extent to which teacher education has moved away from the rigors of specific training in favor of ambiguous personal and social goals that leave new teachers unprepared.  “21^st-Century Teacher Education: Ed schools don’t give teachers the tools they need” will appear in the Summer issue of Education Next and is now available online at www.educationnext.org.

Walsh writes that neither the general public nor most policymakers are aware that today’s education schools tend to deemphasize practical training for the classroom.  In a 2006 volume of essays published by the American Educational Research Association (AERA), for example, training is described as a “technical transmission activity” and an “oversimplification of teaching and learning, ignoring its dynamic, social and moral aspects.”  In early reading as in other subjects, education schools have largely ignored teaching methods developed over years of research and practice, Walsh notes.

The widespread adoption of Common Core State Standards (CCSS) makes improvement in teacher training urgent.  Walsh emphasizes that better consumer education—informing aspiring teachers and school districts about the quality of programs across the nation—can play a key role in motivating institutions to “change in the direction of effective training.”  NCTQ is currently examining and rating the essential elements of teacher preparation programs based on measurable, objective criteria.  These include:

• The fundamental requirements of each teacher preparation program—admissions standards, content area course requirements, and the alignment of elementary teachers’ reading and mathematics curricula with the Common Core standards;

• The process used to determine that teacher candidates are ready for the classroom; the importance given to high quality student teaching programs that prepare teachers to manage a classroom, develop assessments, employ data to improve instruction, write a lesson plan, and differentiate instruction;

• The degree to which programs track outcomes, including evaluations and student achievement data that reflect the effectiveness of an institution’s graduates.

Changes in states’ policies also are needed to spur improvement in teacher preparation, Walsh notes.  Examples include:

• Require, as Illinois has done, that teacher preparation programs admit only students in the top half of their class, to encourage an improvement in candidate quality;

• Place teacher candidates with mentor teachers of demonstrated effectiveness, as Indiana and Tennessee require;

• Make funding of teacher preparation programs at public institutions contingent on meeting key outcomes, as 10 states do for public institutions as a whole;

• Cap the number of teaching licenses in areas of oversupply, such as elementary education, and lower tuition for high-need areas such as special education and STEM fields;

• Make on-the-ground inspections of teacher education programs rigorous and public, as the United Kingdom does, for example, and include former Pre-K-12 school leaders and teachers among the inspectors.

Strategies such as these, Walsh writes, “establish an important and unambiguous principle:  teacher education exists to serve the needs of Pre-K — 12 schools and public financial support should depend on its ability to do so.”

About the Author

Kate Walsh has served as president of the National Council on Teacher Quality since 2003.

She is available for interviews.

About Education Next

Education Next is a scholarly journal published by the Hoover Institution that is committed to careful examination of evidence relating to school reform.  Other sponsoring institutions are the Program on Education Policy and Governance at Harvard University, part of the Taubman Center for State and Local Government at the Harvard Kennedy School, and the Thomas B. Fordham Institute.  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.

Over the last few decades, criticism of teacher preparation has shifted away from a largely academic debate to the troubling performance of American students. Shocked by teacher education’s refusal to train teachers to use scientifically based reading methods, Reid Lyon, who headed a 30-year study at the National Institutes of Health of how people best learn to read, once stated, “If there was any piece of legislation that I could pass it would be to blow up colleges of education.” The suggestion was repeated in a 2009 speech by Craig Barrett, the former chair of Intel Corporation, who had been working to improve math and science education. Arne Duncan, the Obama administration’s secretary of education, having previously served as schools superintendent in Chicago, one of the nation’s most troubled school districts, gave back-to-back speeches early in his tenure decrying the state of the field: “By almost any standard, many if not most of the nation’s 1,450 schools, colleges, and departments of education are doing a mediocre job of preparing teachers for the realities of the 21st-century classroom,” and “America’s university-based teacher preparation programs need revolutionary change, not evolutionary thinking.”

An occasional insider has joined the fray. Arthur Levine, former dean of what many consider to be the preeminent teacher-preparation program, Teachers College, Columbia University, has been savage in his criticism: “Teacher education is the Dodge City of the education world. Like the fabled Wild West town, it is unruly and disordered,” he wrote in 2006. He then swiftly abandoned his involvement with traditional teacher preparation altogether, starting up his own alternative pathway to teaching, the Woodrow Wilson fellowships. At the time, his remarks were viewed as mutinous by many of his colleagues, particularly his view that the primary accrediting body for teacher education, the National Council for Accreditation of Teacher Education (NCATE), ought to be scrapped. Several years later, insiders conceded that Levine had been right. Accreditation is now being revamped under a new name, the Council for the Accreditation of Educator Preparation (CAEP).

The Perspective of Teacher Educators

Almost all teacher educators acknowledge that the field has deep problems, but their concern has seldom been about the issues raised by external critics such as lack of selectivity, an imbalance between content and pedagogy, or the lack of value delivered. These differences aren’t always recognized because the insider critiques often sound a lot like the external critiques. In reality, insiders are more concerned about the chaos in the field.

The core of insider complaints is not that the profession is marching in the wrong direction,  as some believe, but that too many of its foot soldiers are out of step, inadequately provisioned, and carrying the wrong weapons. This disarray is not surprising, given that the training takes place at 1,450 higher-education institutions in the United States, each of which houses anywhere from three to seven teacher-preparation programs. Fewer than half of these institutions have earned national accreditation—an anomaly not found in other professions—leaving the rest answerable to no one.

The most revealing insight into what teacher educators believe to be wrong or right about the field is a lengthy 2006 volume published by the American Educational Research Association (AERA), Studying Teacher Education. It contains contributions from 15 prominent deans and education professors and was intended to provide “balanced, thorough, and unapologetically honest descriptions of the state of research on particular topics in teacher education.” It lives up to that billing. First, the volume demonstrates the paucity of credible research that would support the current practices of traditional teacher education, across all of its many functions, including foundations courses, arts and sciences courses, field experiences, and pedagogical approaches, as well as how current practice prepares candidates to teach diverse populations and special education students. More intriguing, however, is the contributors’ examination of the dramatic evolution of the mission of teacher education over the last 50 years, in ways that have certainly been poorly understood by anyone outside the profession.

Studying Teacher Education explains the disconnect between what teacher educators believe is the right way to prepare a new teacher and the unhappy K–12 schools on the receiving end of that effort. It happens that the job of teacher educators is not to train the next generation of teachers but to prepare them.

Far beyond Semantics

Though those two terms—train and prepare—appear to be interchangeable, they are not. This word choice is a deliberate one on the part of teacher education (“training” is never used) and signals a significant shift in the field over the last three or four decades. While few would disagree that new teachers generally get very little practical training before they enter the classroom, the reasons are profoundly misunderstood. It is not, as many have assumed, because of ideological resistance to various teaching methods. And it is not that teacher educators don’t understand the realities of the 21st-century classroom and need to come down from their ivory tower.

It is because training a teacher is viewed (if the AERA volume is accurate in its summation) as “an oversimplification of teaching and learning, ignoring its dynamic, social and moral aspects.” This evolution from a training purpose to a preparation purpose started in the 1970s and is described in detail by the AERA volume co-editor and Boston College education professor Marilyn Cochran-Smith, who dismisses training as a “technical transmission activity.”

In 2012, the Thomas B. Fordham Institute surveyed teacher educators, finding substantial evidence that most teacher educators do not see their role, at least not their primary role, to be a trainer of teachers. For example, just 37 percent responded that it was an “absolutely essential” feature of their job to develop “teachers who maintain discipline and order in the classroom.”

The Philosophy behind Teacher Formation

Harking back perhaps to teacher education’s 19th-century ecclesiastical origins, its mission has shifted away from the medical model of training doctors to professional formation. The function of teacher education is to launch the candidate on a lifelong path of learning, distinct from knowing, as actual knowledge is perceived as too fluid to be achievable. In the course of a teacher’s preparation, prejudices and errant assumptions must be confronted and expunged, with particular emphasis on those related to race, class, language, and culture. This improbable feat, not unlike the transformation of Pinocchio from puppet to real boy, is accomplished as candidates reveal their feelings and attitudes through abundant in-class dialogue and by keeping a journal. From these activities is born each teacher’s unique philosophy of teaching and learning.

There is also a strong social-justice component to teacher education, with teachers cast as “activists committed to diminishing the inequities of American society.” That vision of a teacher is seen by a considerable fraction of teacher educators (although not all) as more important than preparing a teacher to be an effective instructor. This view of a teacher’s role as transformational is not wrong, as teachers often serve as the means by which children overcome challenges inherent in their backgrounds. But it is one that is often taken to absurd extremes in practice. For example, a textbook used in a math course for elementary school teachers is entitled Social Justice through Mathematics, which explains why the view is so often disparaged.

Find Your Own Method

Nowhere is the chasm between the two visions of teacher education—training versus formation—clearer than in the demise of the traditional methods course. The public, and policymakers who require such courses in regulations governing teacher education, may assume that when a teacher takes a methods course, it is to learn the best methods for teaching certain subject matter. That view, we are told in the AERA volume, is for the most part an anachronism. The current view, state professors Renee T. Clift and Patricia Brady, is that “A methods course is seldom defined as a class that transmits information about methods of instruction and ends with a final exam. [They] are seen as complex sites in which instructors work simultaneously with prospective teachers on beliefs, teaching practices and creation of identities—their students’ and their own.”

The statement reveals just how far afield teacher education has traveled from its training purposes. It is hard not to suspect that the ambiguity in such language as the “creation of identities” is purposeful, because if a class fails to meet such objectives, no one would be the wiser.

The shift away from training to formation has had one immediate and indisputable outcome: the onus of a teacher’s training has shifted from the teacher educators to the teacher candidates. What remains of the teacher educator’s purpose is only to build the “capacity” of the candidate to be able to make seasoned professional judgments. Figuring out what actually to do falls entirely on the candidate.

Here is the guidance provided to student teachers at a large public university in New York:

In addition to establishing the norm for your level, you must, after determining your year-end goals, break down all that you will teach into manageable lessons. While so much of this is something you learn on the job, a great measure of it must be inside you, or you must be able to find it in a resource. This means that if you do not know the content of a grade level, or if you do not know how to prepare a lesson plan, or if you do not know how to do whatever is expected of you, it is your responsibility to find out how to do these things. Your university preparation is not intended to address every conceivable aspect of teaching.

Do not be surprised if your Cooperating Teacher is helpful but suggests you find out the “how to” on your own. Your Cooperating Teacher knows the value of owning your way into your teaching style.

As this frank (and substantively representative) example indicates, teacher candidates who are typically 21 or 22 years of age are asked to carry quite a heavy burden. The new teacher is effectively denied the wisdom, experience, and solid research that might make all the difference when confronting a classroom of students for the first time.

Nowhere is the abdication of training truer or more harmful than in the course work elementary teacher candidates take in reading instruction. It is commonly assumed that teacher educators opt not to train candidates in scientifically based reading instruction, instead “training” them in “whole language” methods. Actually, no such training occurs, as whole language methods require no training. Whole language is not an instructional method that a teacher might learn to apply, but merely a theory (flawed at that) based on the premise that learning to read is a “natural” process. It is no coincidence then that the whole-language approach tracks nicely with a philosophy of teacher education in which technical training is disparaged.

The National Council on Teacher Quality (NCTQ) has reviewed hundreds of syllabi from reading programs at more than 800 institutions across the country. What these programs most often teach is not to adopt the whole language approach but that the candidate should develop her own approach to teaching reading, based on exposure to various philosophies and approaches, none more valid than any other.

Academic Freedom’s Downside

The vilification of the training model of teacher education has been compounded by the principle of academic freedom run amok. The way that academic freedom is supposed to work is that individual professors are given license to decide what topics to teach, but not when evidentiary support for those topics is lacking.

Academic freedom only works if a field is willing to police itself on what constitutes acceptable content, which has yet to occur in the field of teacher education. Further, though case law surrounding academic freedom issues has clearly established that higher-education leadership can still require a professor to teach certain topics, overly expansive faculty contracts have led to a different outcome. Most faculty contracts contain language modeled on the American Association of University Professors’ (AAUP) Statement of Principles on Academic Freedom and Tenure. Contractual promises are legally binding, and AAUP’s policy on academic freedom holds that professors should have complete freedom to teach any topic, other than those that “suggest disciplinary incompetence.” Ideas are wrong only if they are rejected by an academic field, not if they lack experimental support. In other words, unless a faculty were to meet and decide what topics can or cannot be taught, individual professors are left to teach what they want.

What Should Teachers Learn?

In recent years, the primary focus of states has been, What should students learn? One result has been the Common Core State Standards (CCSS), which have at this writing been adopted by 45 states and the District of Columbia. The CCSS make all the more pressing the need to train teachers to teach differently than they themselves were likely taught. Absolutely essential is the effective training of all candidates in necessary pedagogical tools and techniques before they enter the classroom:

• Early reading. We have the specific knowledge that would allow all but a small percentage of children to read. If we applied that knowledge systematically, we could reduce reading failure from some 30 percent to less than 5 percent.

• The Common Core and mathematics. As part of their own training, elementary teachers will have had to develop a fluid and conceptual understanding of numbers systems in all of their representations, something that we estimate is not currently happening in 75 percent of teacher education programs.

• The Common Core and English language arts. Teachers will have to adopt new protocols that consider a host of factors, including the careful selection of appropriately complex texts (with as much attention to nonfiction as to fiction), the delivery of a lesson, appropriate classroom activities, as well as the assignments that students are given. Ideally, new teachers should have practiced these protocols before they enter the classroom for the first time.

• Classroom management. Experience isn’t the only way to acquire classroom management skills; there are specific skills and techniques that can be taught and practiced to mastery. Behaviorists have contributed much of this research, but most of teacher education holds this body of work in disdain. The result is that teacher candidates are deprived of useful knowledge such as the clear principle that students need to hear a lot more praise than criticism if we are to maximize their engagement. Us eful guidance can also be gleaned from the practices of effective teachers, for example, the 49 techniques recently set down by Doug Lemov in Teach Like a Champion: 49 Techniques That Put Students on the Path to College, a book that serves as the antithesis of what most institutions espouse.

• Cognitive psychology. Understanding how individuals acquire expertise and how memory works would be tremendously helpful for new teachers, but such topics are largely absent in the current preparation model.

• Assessment. Assessment is playing an increasingly important role (in ways both good and bad), and teachers need to understand that role. NCTQ’s study of this issue found that few schools are providing the most basic instruction on assessment.

Moving the Higher Ed Mountain

The challenge then is to find ways to motivate institutions to change in the direction of effective training. This is a battle that will be fought on many fronts, but the critical change must come in the incentives that drive the market for new teachers. Applying a variety of metrics to program performance will create the information consumers need to make different decisions.

Currently, consumers of teacher education, both aspiring teachers and school districts, do not know which institutions are doing a great job and which are not. The binary and quite opaque approach of accrediting bodies, in which an institution earns a thumbs-up or -down, does not provide information that consumers can easily access or use. In any marketplace, consumers will be drawn to higher-quality products if they can determine key product features. This is true even of those aspiring teachers who are inclined to choose an institution within 50 miles of where they went to high school. One reason teachers may stay so close to home is that there is no objective measure of program quality or performance that might provide an incentive to relocate. That need not be the case. NCTQ is rating the quality of individual teacher-preparation programs using a set of measurable, objective standards that reflect what public school educators view as important attributes in new teachers.

The NCTQ Teacher Prep Review, slated for initial release in June 2013,  is rating teacher-preparation programs across the country. By examining the fundamental requirements of each program—admissions standards, course requirements, coverage of essential content, preparation in the CCSS, how the student teaching program operates, instruction in classroom management and lesson planning, and how teacher candidates are judged ready for the classroom—the Review will capture the information that any consumer of these programs would want to see, including aspiring teachers and school districts looking to hire the best teachers. The Review also looks at the degree to which programs track outcomes in an effort to improve their programs and whether there are student achievement data that reflect the average effectiveness of an institution’s graduates.

The goal for the review is to draw more “customers” toward the best teacher-prep programs and away from weaker programs, igniting reforms in the field that have long been sought but so far remain elusive. (See the NCTQ website, nctq.org, for more information.)

Engaging the consumers of teacher-preparation programs, in particular, aspiring teachers and school districts, offers certain advantages. For one, change would not depend on policymakers making the tough calls that the powerful higher-education lobby works hard to prevent. Across the country, only 8 out of 1,450 institutions were most recently identified by their states as low performing. Even these are likely to spend only a few years under the threat of probation before being returned to healthy status. It seems implausible that policymakers will take on the field’s dysfunction in the depth that is likely required.

For example, contrary to expectations that Louisiana would use the definitive data it has been collecting from its value-added examination of teacher-preparation programs for over a decade, it has yet to withhold approval from any program, believing instead that programs will choose to improve on their own without the state’s interference. It has only held one program accountable for its consistently low performance by reducing the number of new teacher candidates that the institution could admit. This is a sensible response, but one that should likely be applied to a lot more programs than simply the single worst.

Many states are moving in the same direction as Louisiana, employing value-added data, but none have yet figured out how to make their findings transparent and accessible to the public. There are also some statistical problems that will preclude all but the larger programs from ever being reliably rated. As a strategy unto itself, value added has limitations, but it could be a key component in any set of performance metrics. More promising is the possibility of tracing teacher evaluation ratings back to the institution, particularly in states that have embraced more rigorous evaluation systems.

Good Policymaking Still Has a Role

Policymakers can make a big difference to the quality of teacher preparation. Here’s how:

• Raise admissions standards. As Illinois has recently done, states should require that programs admit only students in the top half of their class.

• Make student teaching meaningful. Teacher candidates need to learn from the best. States should follow Indiana and Tennessee’s lead and require that student teachers are only placed with mentor teachers of demonstrated effectiveness.

• Use performance-based funding. Ten states make funding to public institutions of higher education contingent on meeting key outcomes. None has yet used this tool to improve teacher preparation programs; it’s time to try.

• Align teacher supply with what schools actually need. Programs routinely produce twice as many elementary teachers as will be hired. States should cap the number of licenses in areas of oversupply and lower tuition for high-need areas such as special education and STEM fields.

• Inspection.Take a page from the playbook of the United Kingdom and establish high-stakes, on-the-ground inspections of institutions. Unlike current on-site visits conducted by states and accrediting agencies, these would be much more public and would be done by trained former Pre-K–12  school leaders and teachers. Aspiring teachers in the U.K. review the results of these inspections, and policymakers actually limit slots at poor performing programs.

All of these strategies establish an important and unambiguous principle: teacher education exists to serve the needs of Pre-K–12 schools and public financial support should depend on its ability to do so.

Kate Walsh has served as president of the National Council on Teacher Quality since 2003.

Change the incentives and watch schools embrace change, I would have argued. Hold superintendents, principals, and teachers to account for raising test scores. Subject them to real competition. Then voila: They would spend night and day looking for promising innovations to improve achievement and better serve families.

Well, we know how that’s turned out. We’ve put a lot of those incentives in place, and schools (and educators) still don’t seem to embrace good ideas, even the non-controversial, inexpensive kind. Take, for instance, the following:

*Bring “departmentalization” to elementary schools by asking strong math teachers to teach math and strong reading teachers to teach reading. Don’t ask anybody to do both.

*Maintain a robust science and social studies program in elementary schools. E.D. Hirsch and others have demonstrated for decades that the best way to raise reading scores is to make sure students build a strong vocabulary and a strong knowledge base; elsewise, they won’t comprehend what they’re reading. Yet schools nationwide have pushed aside science and social studies to make room for mega-ELA blocks.

*Extend the “reach” of excellent teachers via larger class sizes (with greater pay), new roles for master teachers, or technology. (Public Impact is chock-full of revenue-neutral ideas on this front.)

To be fair, there has been some good news lately, most notably Tom Loveless’s recent finding that ability grouping, after being shunned in the 1980s and 90s, is back in vogue. Since this is a commonsense way to “differentiate instruction” and help all students get the classroom challenges that they need and that will do them the most good, I would count it as a win. (Loveless speculates that NCLB-style accountability might have prodded schools to use this approach, since it works. Incentives!)

Still, on the whole, the picture isn’t pretty. What gives? Surely some economists would argue that the incentives we’ve put in place to date aren’t strong enough. Even now, few educators lose their jobs if test scores don’t rise. Principals and teachers don’t generally stand to make much more money if they achieve breakthrough results (or attract gobs more customers). And competition, at least in most cities, is still quite limited.

All true. But there could be something simpler at work: Perhaps many educators have never even encountered these ideas. Principals and teachers are so busy with the day-to-day struggle of their jobs—and now with new demands brought on by Common Core, new evaluation systems, and more—that they just keep their heads down and try to survive. They don’t have the time—or take the time—to read journals or blogs, to look for new innovations, to talk to colleagues, or to wonder about better ways of doing things. In this view, we have an “innovation-dissemination” (or “research-to-practice”) challenge.

I’ll admit, that sounds like a bit of a cop-out, especially for principals. The leader of any organization knows that part of his or her job is to look for better ways to do things and to stay current on trends in the field. We should expect no less from our school leaders, and those without an innate curiosity and drive for continuous improvement should be screened out of the profession.

But these principals do face an avalanche of information and advocacy from the government, from think tanks, and especially from vendors. Sifting through it all and turning the best bits and pieces into a coherent approach is no easy task. (And this has been a problem forever.)

Could we make that task more manageable? Could we help principals and superintendents to separate the wheat from the chaff in terms of the ideas that come across their desks on a given day? Stay tuned for my thoughts on that. In the meantime, I’d love to hear yours.

-Mike Petrilli

This first appeared on the Fordham Institute’s Flypaper blog.

—Education Next

I expect that PARCC and Smarter Balanced (the two federally subsidized consortia of states that are developing new assessments meant to be aligned with Common Core standards) will fade away, eclipsed and supplanted by long-established yet fleet-footed testing firms that already possess the infrastructure, relationships, and durability that give them huge advantages in the competition for state and district business.

In particular, I predict (as does Andy Smarick) that the new ACT-Aspire assessment system, which is supposed to be ready for use in 2014 (a full year earlier than either of the consortium products) and which some states are considering as their new assessment vehicle, will be joined by kindred products to be developed and marketed by the College Board. And the two of them will dominate the market for new Common Core assessments.

One straw in the wind: Alabama’s announcement last week that it is foreswearing both consortia and will use the ACT assessment system. And, of course, both Kentucky and New York have already concocted and deployed their own versions of Common Core assessments—possibly but not necessarily interim models.

Although the College Board and ACT have traditionally focused on the high-school-to-college transition, both also have experience earlier in the K–12 sequence. ACT Explore is aimed at eighth and ninth graders, ACT Engage goes down to sixth grade, and ACT “WorkKeys” is a significant player in determining career-readiness. The College Board’s Pre-SAT test is typically taken in tenth grade. Its “Readiness Pathway” assessment program reaches down to eighth grade, and its “Springboard” program to sixth—with “alignment” guides already prepared for Common Core standards in both English language arts and math for grades six through twelve.

So it’s not too big a stretch for either organization to dip deeper into the K–12 curriculum and assessment business, and it’s no stretch at all for their chief test-administration partners—Pearson in the case of ACT, ETS for the College Board. Each has ample experience in devising and administering tests from the early grades onward. (In fact, Pearson already has pre-K assessments.)

At least as importantly, these organizations know how to give tests to millions of people. They have the infrastructure and the test security. They have the systems for scoring and reporting. Perhaps above all, they have the relationships and the trust of thousands of school systems, dozens of states, and millions of parents.Plenty of states already use ACT products as part of their existing assessment systems. And both organizations are long established, well led, deep-pocketed, and pretty sure to be around a decade or two from now.

As yet, the new consortia have none of those things. They’re struggling with organizational structures, governance, post-federal financing, test-development agonies, uncertain costs, conflicting views of “cut scores,” and all manner of other puzzles.

Those would be significant challenges were there no competition, but ACT has made no secret of its intention to seek states’ Common Core assessment contracts—and Alabama may turn out to be the first of many to sign up. The College Board hasn’t (to my knowledge) announced itself yet, but testing insiders know that it’s lately been on a hiring binge—even luring key assessment developers from ACT—that surely points in this direction.

Will the ACT and College Board versions of Common Core assessments be true “next-generation” tests that probe deeper understanding and more sophisticated (“higher-order”) skills in more revealing ways? Will they be “adaptive” (via computer or otherwise) to kids at different levels of achievement or will they, like most of today’s tests (see discussion here at the seventeen-minute point), do a weak job of differentiating performance at the top and at the bottom of their range of difficulty? I do not know. But I do know that all of these accoutrements carry dollar costs that state assessment budgets may not be able to bear—and veteran testing firms are accustomed to cutting their cloth to fit the wearer’s dimensions.

I assume that scores and scales on the new assessments will be comparable across states (as are current ACT and SAT scores), but individual states will likely set their own “cut points” for purposes of grade-to-grade promotion and high school graduation. That’s tricky, however, if you’re serious about bona fide “career and college readiness,” which is a meaningless concept if it differs by state; what’s more, the new standards aren’t really worth the bother unless “proficiency” levels for every grade cumulate to a desired end-point by senior year. (I predict that, as with consortium-developed assessments, the ACT and College Board folks will recommend grade-specific proficiency scores that do cumulate in the intended way, but individual states will decide for themselves what signifies readiness for promotion and graduation.)

If I’m right that ACT and College Board scarf up much state business, there won’t be a lot left for the consortia—and they may founder. That would, of course, represent a considerable waste of federal dollars. On the other hand, it would remove from the Common Core debate (at least until NCLB-reauthorization time, if that day ever comes) the specter of Arne Duncan and Barack Obama clutching those standards to the federal bosom.

Besides, the consortia could remain useful, even if they don’t do assessments themselves. Neither ACT nor the College Board will want to alienate the many state leaders who have been earnestly advancing the consortium work, and these groups could readily convert into advisory and coordinating bodies that help member states implement and make sense out of the results on the new tests—and advise test developers and standard-setters alike on how their products work in the real world.

Time will tell. I might be jumping to premature prediction—and you may interpret these entrails differently than I do. Letters to the editor are cordially invited.

-Chester E. Finn, Jr.

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

First, great teaching will matter more, not less, in the digital age. As we’ve written here and here, digital learning has the potential to level the educational playing field on learning the basics. As digital content gets better and better, students around the globe will be able to learn basic content and practice skills through this new medium.

In that flat world, what will differentiate outcomes is how motivated students are to undertake the work of learning; how well they tackle the inevitable barriers to achievement, including social and emotional challenges; and whether they move beyond the basics and engage in the higher-order learning that’s increasingly important for college, careers, and life. And how well that happens for students will depend on what it’s always hinged on: the effectiveness of the adults in their lives. For most students—and for nearly all whose parents struggled in school—the adults who tip the balance are teachers.

Second, digital learning has the potential to extend the reach of the nation’s excellent teachers to far more students than they can teach today. By adopting new school models that change teachers’ roles and use digital learning to save teachers’ time, schools can put great teachers in charge of more students’ learning and turbocharge the development and performance of all teachers working in teams. And they can pay teachers more, sustainably, for reaching more students. Like it has in other professions, technology can give teachers unprecedented career advancement and earning opportunities while boosting performance.

This won’t happen automatically. Schools could just replace teachers with laptops. They could use savings from digital learning for something other than paying teachers more. They could use saved time for something other than helping more students and developing excellent teaching teams. But if they do, the nation will miss out on the enormous opportunity created by digital learning: the opportunity to give all students access to excellent teachers, while transforming teaching into a high-paying, high-impact profession.

-Bryan Hassel and Emily Ayscue Hassel

I’m not interested in rehashing all of the usual debates. I do want to point out that there’s public, and then there’s “public.” In other words, some of the people expressing indignation, I suspect, may send their children to “public” schools that are much more “private” than most private schools. And starting in September, I will be one of those parents (as anyone who has read my book knows already).

Yes, it’s true: Wood Acres Elementary, in Bethesda, Maryland, is a “private public school”—a term that Janie Scull and I coined in a 2010 report for the Fordham Institute. These are “public” schools that serve virtually no poor students. They are open to anyone—anyone who can afford to live in their catchment zones, that is.

We found 2,800 such schools in America back then; I suspect the numbers haven’t changed much since.

But here’s what you might want to consider: New York City, where Haimson lives, has exactly zero such schools. Nashville, Tennessee, where Rhee’s daughters live, has exactly zero. The greater Washington, D.C., area, where many of us policy wonks live, has about seventy.

So before we “public school parents” cast the first stone, let’s get serious. Public schools can be just as exclusive—often more exclusive—than private schools. Government funding does not bestow upon such schools or their clients any higher moral position.

Capiche?

-Mike Petrilli

This blog entry first appeared on Flypaper.