In this study, I investigate whether the opportunity to attend a school other than a student’s assigned neighborhood school reduces criminal activity, especially among disadvantaged youth. Many of the schools chosen by the students were “better” on traditional indicators, such as student test scores and teacher characteristics. All of them, however, were preferred by the applicant over the default option. The analysis therefore sheds light on whether efforts to expand school choice can be an effective crime-prevention strategy, particularly when disadvantaged students can gain access to “better” schools.

We know that criminal offenders often have low levels of education: only 35 percent of inmates in U.S. correctional facilities have earned a high school diploma, compared to 82 percent of the general population. Criminal activity is concentrated among minority males; it begins in early adolescence and peaks when most youth should still be enrolled in secondary school. The schools these young men would attend are typically in high-poverty urban neighborhoods, have high rates of violence and school dropout, and struggle to retain effective teachers. Such schools may be a particularly fertile environment for the onset of criminal behavior. Yet little research has been conducted to determine the effect of school quality on crime.

In this study I explore this question using data from the Charlotte-Mecklenburg (North Carolina) school district (CMS) to measure the impact of school quality on arrest and incarceration rates. I take advantage of the CMS districtwide open-enrollment school-choice plan, which until recently let students choose where they wanted to go to school and employed lotteries to admit students to oversubscribed schools. I compare the criminal activity of students who won the lottery to attend their first-choice school to that of students who lost the lottery.

I find consistent evidence that attending a better school reduces crime among those age 16 and older, across various schools, and for both middle and high school students. The effect is largest for African American males and youth who are at highest risk for criminal involvement. In general, high-risk male youth commit about 50 percent less crime as a result of winning the school-choice lottery. They are also more likely to remain enrolled in school, and they show modest improvements on measures of behavior such as absences and suspensions. Yet there is no detectable impact on test scores for any youth in the sample.

School Choice in CMS

With more than 150,000 students enrolled in 2008–09, Charlotte-Mecklenburg is the 20th largest school district in the nation. The CMS attendance area encompasses all of Mecklenburg County, including Charlotte and several surrounding cities. Overall, CMS is racially and demographically diverse. About 45 percent of the students in CMS middle and high schools in 2003 were African American, less than 10 percent were Hispanic (although the Hispanic population was growing rapidly over this period), and about 50 percent were eligible for free or reduced-price lunches. Individual CMS schools vary widely in demographic composition: CMS high schools in 2003 ranged from less than 10 percent to close to 90 percent nonwhite, and were also dissimilar in average test scores and rates of high school graduation.

From 1971 until 2001, CMS schools were forcibly desegregated under a court order. Students were bused all around the district to preserve racial balance in schools. After several years of legal challenges, the court order was overturned, and CMS was instructed that it could no longer determine student assignments based on race. In December 2001, the CMS school board instituted a policy of districtwide open enrollment for the 2002–03 school year. School boundaries were redrawn as contiguous neighborhood zones, and children who lived in each zone were guaranteed access to their neighborhood school. Under busing, schools were racially balanced, but the surrounding neighborhoods remained highly segregated. Thus the redrawing of school boundaries led to concentrations of minority students in some schools.

The first open-enrollment lottery took place in the spring of 2002. CMS conducted an extensive outreach campaign to ensure that choice was broad-based, and 95 percent of parents submitted at least one preferred school; parents could submit up to three (not including their neighborhood school). Admission for all students from outside the neighborhood zone was subject to grade-specific limits. The lottery process for oversubscribed grades gave preference first to students who previously attended the school and their siblings, then to low-income students applying to schools that previously did not have a majority of low-income students, and finally to students applying to a school within their “choice zone” (which would guarantee them access to district-provided transportation). I study the effects of winning a seat at a preferred school in the 2002 lotteries on student outcomes through 2009, seven years after the lotteries were conducted.

Because nearly all rising 12th graders received their first choice, I restrict my study to students in grades 6 through 11. I also exclude the 5 percent of students who were not enrolled in any CMS school in the previous year. About 60 percent of the remaining students chose (and were automatically admitted to) their neighborhood school. About 75 percent of applicants to nonguaranteed schools were in lottery priority groups in which the probability of admission was either zero or one. Even though these students chose a nonguaranteed school, there is no randomness in whether they were admitted, so I do not use them in the study. The resulting sample consists of 1,891 high-school students (grades 9–11) and 2,320 middle-school students (grades 6–8). Compared to all students in CMS, these students were more likely to be African American and eligible for free lunch; they also had lower test scores and higher rates of absence and out-of-school suspensions (see Figure 1).

Data

Since the mid-1990s, the North Carolina Department of Public Instruction (NCDPI) has required all districts to submit data that include demographic information, attendance rates, and behavioral outcomes, yearly test scores in math and reading for grades 3 through 8, and subject-specific tests for higher grades. I used these data, along with internal CMS files that contain student-identifying information such as name, date of birth, and exact address in every year. This information enabled me to match CMS students to arrest records from the Mecklenburg County Sheriff’s Office, which include all arrests of adults (age 16 and over in North Carolina) that occurred in the county.

I measure crime severity in two ways, both of which are intended to capture the idea that not all crimes are equal. First, I use estimates that economists have developed of the social cost of crimes, which include tangible costs, such as lost productivity and medical care, as well as intangible costs, such as impact on quality of life; these estimates are extremely high for fatal crimes. (The estimated social cost of murder is $4.3 million in 2009 dollars. The next costliest crime is rape, which is estimated at $125,000.) To avoid the results being driven entirely by a few murders, in my main analysis I limit the cost of murder to twice the cost of rape. The second measure of severity weighs crimes by the expected punishment resulting from a successful conviction. Neither measure accounts for justice system costs such as police or prisons.

Methodology

If the school lottery is truly random, the winners and losers will on average have identical observed and unobserved characteristics. With a large enough sample, a simple comparison of outcomes between winners and losers would identify the causal effect of winning the lottery. In reality, CMS conducted many lotteries (for each school and grade). The number of students in each lottery is relatively small, so my analysis combines data from all of the middle-school and all of the high-school lotteries. My results reflect the average difference in outcomes between winners and losers across all of the lotteries conducted at each level.

The result is the “intent-to-treat” effect of winning a lottery; it is an intent because students offered a place in their first-choice school did not always take it (for example, they may have moved out of the district). Students who won the lottery are more than 55 percentage points more likely than losers to attend their first-choice school in the first year, and on average spend an additional 1 to 1.5 years enrolled in that school overall. One can therefore obtain a rough estimate of the effect of actually attending the first-choice school (as a result of winning the lottery) by doubling the results presented below.

I examine the impact of winning the lottery on crime separately for groups of students with different propensities to commit crimes, with a focus on the highest-risk group. Because students with adult arrest records can be tracked all the way back to kindergarten in some cases, I use all of the potential predictors of criminal behavior—test scores, demographics, behavior, and neighborhood characteristics—to calculate an index of crime risk. The students in the top 20 percent of this crime-risk index are disproportionately African American males and eligible for free lunch (see Figure 1a). Their test scores are on average one standard deviation below the North Carolina state average, and they are absent and suspended many more days than the average student (see Figure 1b). Because high-risk students are overwhelmingly male, I exclude females from all of the analyses. The results comprise a final sample of 1,014 high-school students and 1,081 middle-school students.

High-school lottery winners attend schools that are demographically very similar to the schools attended by lottery losers, while middle-school winners attend schools that are less African American and higher income on average. All lottery winners travel farther to attend their first-choice school, but the distance is greater for high school students than for middle school students.

High-school lottery winners in the high-risk group and all middle-school lottery winners experience modest increases in standard measures of school quality. Their peers’ average test scores are about 0.15 standard deviations higher, and the new schools have higher-quality teachers, measured in terms of the fraction of teachers with less than three years’ experience, the fraction that are new to the school that year, the percentage of teachers with an advanced degree, and the share of teachers who attended a “highly competitive” college as defined by the Barron’s rankings. For youth in the high-risk group, the gain as measured by these quality indicators is roughly equivalent to moving from one of the lowest-ranked schools to one around the district average.

Results

I find that winning a lottery for admission to a preferred school at the high school level reduces the total number of felony arrests and the social cost of crime. Among middle school students, winning a school-choice lottery reduces the social cost of crime and the number of days incarcerated. Importantly, I find that these overall reductions in criminal activity are concentrated among students in the highest-risk group. Indeed, I find little impact either positive or negative of winning a school-choice lottery on criminal activity for the 80 percent of students outside of this group.

Consider first the results for high school students in the high-risk group. Among these students, winning admission to a preferred school reduces the average number of felony arrests over the study period from 0.77 to 0.43, a pattern driven largely by a reduction of 0.23 in the average number of arrests for drug felonies (see Figure 2). The average social cost of the crimes committed by high-risk lottery winners (after adjusting the cost of murders downward) is $3,916 lower than for lottery losers, a decrease of more than 35 percent. (Without adjusting for the cost of murder, I estimate the reduction in the social cost of crimes committed by lottery winners at $14,106.) High-risk lottery winners on average commit crimes with a total expected sentence of 35 months, compared to 59 months among lottery losers.

Among high-risk middle-school students, I find no effect of winning a school-choice lottery on the average number of felony arrests. Although the number arrests for violent felonies falls, this is offset by an increase in the number of property arrests. Because violent crimes carry greater social costs, however, winning a school-choice lottery reduces the average social cost of the crimes committed by middle school students by $7,843, or 63 percent. It also reduces the total expected sentence of crimes committed by each student by 31 months (64 percent).

An important limitation of this analysis is that I do not have access to data on juvenile crime. Especially for students in the middle school sample, this could mask big differences in juvenile offending in the early years after the lotteries were conducted. As an alternative, I examine the effect of winning the lottery on school disciplinary outcomes such as absences and suspensions, as well as on test scores. Among the high-risk group, lottery winners are absent slightly less than the lottery losers are. The effect on high school suspensions in 2003 is relatively large, but the other school discipline effects are small and statistically insignificant.

In contrast to the results for crime and disciplinary outcomes, I find no evidence that winning admission to a preferred school leads to test-score gains. But I do find some impacts on enrollment, grade progression, and grade attainment for high-risk youth. For example, high-risk middle-school lottery winners are 18 percentage points more likely than lottery losers to be enrolled in CMS in their 10th-grade year. The effect on 11th-grade enrollment is about half the size (9 percentage points), and there is no impact on persistence into 12th grade.

Despite the impacts on enrollment and progression, there is no detectable increase in high school graduation rates. Because I am limited to CMS administrative data, it is difficult to distinguish dropouts from subsequent GED recipients or transfers who may have graduated elsewhere. Administrative records are particularly problematic for high-risk youth, who sometimes disappear from CMS well before they are old enough to do so legally. The graduation rate is only about 25 percent among high-risk high-school students, and currently only about 10 percent among high-risk middle-school students, although some who are still enrolled may yet graduate. Additionally, a bit less than 10 percent of the high-risk middle-school sample never appears in any high school grade but subsequently appears in the arrest data. Because any intervention aimed at high school students would miss this group altogether, this suggests that high school might be too late for the youth at highest risk of criminal activity.

Explanations and Policy Implications

Overall, I find that winning the lottery to attend a first-choice school has a large impact on crime for high-risk youth. High-risk lottery winners experienced roughly a 50 percent reduction in the measures of criminal activity that weight crimes by their severity.

I consider four possible explanations for the reduction in crime among high-risk lottery winners. The first is incapacitation, which advances that winning the lottery entails longer bus rides to and from school, thus occupying youth during high-crime hours. The second is contagion, in which winning the lottery prevents crime by removing high-risk youth from crime-prone peers or neighborhoods, thereby reducing contemporaneous exposure of high-risk youth to criminogenic influences. These first two explanations would predict a strong initial effect that fades over time. If, for example, drug-market activity is concentrated within a few schools, we might expect large differences in criminality in the high school years that diminish as enrollment in the chosen school ends and lottery winners and losers return to the same neighborhoods. When I examine the effect of winning a school lottery separately at different points in time after the lotteries were conducted, however, I find larger effects in later years. I therefore conclude that there is little support for the incapacitation and contagion explanations since they do not fit the pattern of results over time.

A third possibility is that the reduction in crime comes from the skills students gain by attending a higher-quality school. If the schools attended by lottery winners do a better of job of teaching skills that increase students’ ability to find employment, they will stay enrolled in school longer, delaying the onset of criminality through the peak period of offending behaviors. Moreover, youth with more and better schooling will gain access to more and better opportunities for paid work, making crime less attractive. Based on a back-of-the-envelope calculation of the relationship between enrollment and criminal activity in my sample, I estimate that the effects of winning a school lottery on enrollment could potentially explain about 45 percent of the impact on criminal activity in the high school sample, but only about 10 percent in the middle school sample.

Alternatively, peer networks formed in middle or high school could have a persistent influence on adult criminality without affecting skills directly. In my own data, I find relatively little evidence that the propensity of a student’s peers to engage in criminal activity influences the degree to which he commits violent crimes. This may be due in part to the high rate of early dropout among violent felons. However, having crime-prone peers in middle school substantially increases the likelihood of committing a violent crime, especially for youth in the high-risk group. Based on this relationship, I estimate that changes in peers can explain roughly 9 percent of the impact on violent arrests in the middle school sample.

Regardless of the mechanisms by which admittance to a preferred school influences criminal activity, the fact that these impacts are concentrated among high-risk students has important implications for the design of school-choice programs. It may make sense for oversubscribed schools of choice to give preferential admission to students at greatest risk of criminal activity. To illustrate this point, I use my results to evaluate the consequences of two different types of lotteries: 1) those giving priority to the highest-risk students and 2) a simple lottery similar to those virtually all charter schools nationwide are required to use to admit students when the schools are oversubscribed. The actual CMS lottery system gave preferences to low-income students who applied to schools with a low fraction of low-income students. As a consequence, many poor (and high-crime risk) students were automatically admitted to schools while other students had to win the lottery.

If slots in oversubscribed schools were systematically allocated to the highest-risk students, the social cost of crime would fall by an additional 27 percent relative to the actual CMS assignment mechanism. A more realistic form of targeting is the method actually pursued by CMS, giving preference to low-income students within the lottery system. I estimate that this policy choice lowered the social cost of crime by about 12 percent, relative to a simple charter-style lottery with no preferential treatment. Although this analysis does not consider the possibility that a greater concentration of high-risk students could have adverse effects on other students, it nonetheless highlights the likely beneficial consequences of giving preference to disadvantaged students in the admissions process for oversubscribed schools.

Conclusion

In this study, I find that winning a lottery for admission to the school of choice greatly reduces criminal activity, and that the greatest reduction occurs among youth at the highest risk for committing crimes. The impacts persist beyond the initial years of school enrollment, seven years after the school-choice lottery was held. The findings suggest that schools may be an opportune setting for the prevention of future crime. Many high-risk youth drop out of school at a young age and are incarcerated for serious crimes prior to the age of high school graduation. For these youth, who are on the margins of society, public schools may present the best opportunity for intervention.

The end of busing and the implementation of open enrollment in CMS was a significant policy change. The four neighborhood high schools to which most of the lottery applicants were assigned lost more than 20 percent of their enrollment in a single year. In subsequent years, two of these schools were restructured as magnet schools offering specialized programs in a small school setting. Two middle schools that lost significant numbers of students were subsequently closed. The open enrollment policy thus sent a strong signal of parental demand to CMS that may have resulted in the shutting down or restructuring of low-performing schools. The No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 included a provision that allowed parents to transfer students from “persistently dangerous” public schools, but many states have set the legal threshold so high that very few schools qualify. The results here suggest that, to the extent that low-quality schools are also persistently dangerous, allowing students to leave them might benefit individual students as well as society as a whole.

David J. Deming is assistant professor of education at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. This article is adapted from a study in the November 2011 issue of the Quarterly Journal of Economics.

School Choice Program Found to Reduce Crime and its Related Social Cost Among High-Risk Youth

High-risk middle- and high-school students who transfer to their preferred school are less likely to be arrested and spend less time incarcerated, pointing to impact of school choice

CAMBRIDGE, MA – A new study of the Charlotte-Mecklenburg, North Carolina (CMS) school choice program finds that high-risk male youth who are admitted by lottery to their preferred schools commit fewer crimes and remain in school longer than their peers who seek admittance but do not gain seats in the lottery process.  Lottery-winning middle school students also are 18 percentage points more likely than those who lose the lottery to still be enrolled in school in 10^th grade.

In general, high-risk students commit about 50 percent less crime as a result of winning a school choice lottery.  Among male high school students at high risk of criminal activity, winning admission to a first-choice school reduced felony arrests from 77 to 43 per 100 students over the study period (2002-2009).  The attendant social cost of crimes committed decreased by more than 35 percent.  Among high-risk middle school students, admittance by lottery to a preferred school reduced the average social cost of crimes committed by 63 percent (due chiefly to a reduction in violent crime), and reduced the total expected sentence of crimes committed by 31 months (64 percent).

David J. Deming, assistant professor of education at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, conducted the study and authored an article that will appear in the Spring, 2012 issue of Education Next.  The article, “Does School Choice Reduce Crime?  Evidence from North Carolina,” is now available online at www.educationnext.org.  Considering the impact of gaining admission to a first-choice school on high-risk youth, Deming writes, “The findings suggest that schools may be an opportune setting for the prevention of future crime.”

The study examines the impact of winning a school choice lottery on dropout rates and crime for groups of students with different propensities to commit crimes, using an index of crime risk that includes test scores, demographics, behavior, and neighborhood characteristics to identify the highest-risk group.  The final sample (males only, as they are overwhelmingly at higher risk of criminal activity) included 1,014 high school students and 1,081 middle school students.  The study finds that the overall reductions in criminal activity are concentrated among the top 20 percent of high-risk students, who are disproportionately African American, eligible for free lunch, with more days of absence and suspensions than the average student.

All of the students in the study selected schools to attend that they preferred over the default option, which was their assigned neighborhood school.  High school lottery winners in the high-risk group and all middle school lottery winners transferred to schools featuring modest increases in standard measures of school quality, such as average test scores and higher proportions of teachers with more than 3 years of experience.  For youth in the highest risk group (top 20%), the gain in school quality indicators is “roughly equivalent to moving from one of the lowest-ranked schools to one around the district average.”

After a thirty-year period of court-mandated busing to desegregate schools ended in 2001, CMS implemented a policy of district-wide open enrollment, launched in the 2002-03 school year.  Children who lived in each neighborhood zone were guaranteed access to their neighborhood school.  In cases where schools were oversubscribed, the CMS lottery system gave preferences to low-income students who applied to schools with a low fraction of low-income students.  The author estimates that this policy choice lowered the social cost of crime by about 12 percent, relative to a simple charter-style lottery with no preferential treatment.   If slots in oversubscribed schools were systematically allocated to not only low-income students, but also to students at highest risk of criminal activity, he states, “the social cost of crime would fall by an additional 27 percent” relative to the actual CMS assignment mechanism.

About the Author

David J. Deming is assistant professor of education at the Harvard Graduate School of Education.  He is available to discuss questions about the study at david_deming@gse.harvard.edu.

About Education Next

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

For more information, 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/pepg.

A) give districts money?
B) deny districts funds?
C) subject districts to tight regulations?
D) force districts to compete for federal dollars by promis­ing to improve?
E) tell the truth while insisting parents be given a choice of school?

Policymakers have responded to this, the nation’s most challenging multiple-choice education quiz, with four different wrong answers. Now, with the release of the Koret Task Force report, policymakers have a chance to get it right, as they consider the reauthorization of the federal education law, No Child Left Behind (NCLB).

President Jimmy Carter chose the first answer, swelling the federal share of education spending to an all-time high. Yet according to the National Assessment of Educational Progress, high-school seniors perform no better today in math, reading, or science than they did when Carter held office.

President Ronald Reagan curtailed the share of K–12 education spending paid out of the federal treasury. That did not lift student performance either.

With the passage of NCLB, the George W. Bush administration subjected failing schools to sanctions if test performance did not improve. Notable gains were made, as Eric Hanushek points out in his provocative analysis of the benefits of the school accountability law. But NCLB’s complicated regulations proved to be unworkable and ineffectual.

Now, the Obama administration has sought to boost school improvement through Race to the Top by getting states and districts to compete for some federal dollars with promises to execute needed reforms. Not surprisingly, state and district promises are more easily made than kept.

Four strategies. Four failures. What should the federal government try next?

Why not do what the federal government has always done well? Collect the facts about schools and student performance and let the data speak for themselves. When the original Department of Education was founded in 1867, its main task was to collect school statistics on such fundamentals as student enrollment, dollars spent, and numbers of teachers hired. Gradually, the federal government acquired the capacity to compile a sophisticated battery of information on the state of American education. Indeed, the only reason we know that America’s schools have not improved much over the past 50 years is that the federal government has collected the information.

So why not use the power of the federal government to collect even more specific information on student learning? A giant step in the right direction was taken with NCLB’s original passage. When it is reauthorized, further steps need to be made so that accurate information on knowledge gained each year in each classroom is available to every parent.

And to receive federal dollars, districts must give parents the freedom to use this information to select the school of their choice—traditional public, charter, or private.

That is what the Koret Task Force has recommended. It’s the right answer to the nation’s multiple-choice education quiz.

- Paul E. Peterson

The 2012 election cycle is off and running, with big implications for America’s schools. The Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) awaits reauthorization. The Obama administration is implementing new regulations targeted at for-profit colleges. Standoffs between the GOP-controlled House and the Obama administration have yielded budget brinksmanship, while domestic spending has been squeezed by massive deficits. President Obama, following in the footsteps of the Bush administration, has aggressively championed federal education initiatives like Race to the Top and the Investing in Innovation fund. Meanwhile, the Republican primaries have been marked by candidates’ rejection of an active federal role in education, as several have pledged to “turn out the lights” at the U.S. Department of Education.

In a discussion hosted by Ed Next editor Frederick Hess, the panelists included:

PETER CUNNINGHAM, U.S. Department of Education
KATHERINE HALEY, Office of Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio)
ALYSON KLEIN, Education Week
JOE WILLIAMS, Democrats for Education Reform
DAVID WINSTON, The Winston Group

More information about the event is available on the AEI website.

Washington is at a crossroads on K–12 education policy. Policymakers can 1) continue down the path of top-down accountability; 2) devolve power to states and districts, thereby returning to the status quo of the mid-1990s; or 3) rethink the fundamentals, do something different, and empower parental choice.

The federal government’s involvement in K–12 education has accelerated through the Clinton, Bush, and Obama administrations. The best evidence indicates that this substantially heightened federal role has had only modest impact on student achievement, far short of what had been hoped. It might be that further centralization would yield more benefits, but it is doubtful that more federal control is politically possible, and, in any case, any additional yield is uncertain.

The second option—devolving recently accumulated federal power to the states—underlies recent reauthorization proposals for the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) that allow each state to establish its own accountability system and that require teeth only for the very lowest-performing schools. It is unclear to us how releasing states and school districts from federal accountability and granting them maximum flexibility is anything more than a return to the status quo. It is the regrettable consequence of that approach that motivated increased federal involvement in the first place.

The Koret Task Force at the Hoover Institution (see sidebar, page 16), of which I am a member, believes that an evolved form of the ESEA that retains rigorous accountability is preferable to returning control of public schooling to local public-school monopolies and states, which will fall into old habits all too quickly. But we believe that the best interests of the nation require something other than either a return to the happy days of local school governance or evolutionary improvements to the type of top-down accountability found in No Child Left Behind.

We need a fundamentally new approach.

We propose to reform the nation’s schools on the basis of two principles that have served the nation exceedingly well throughout its history: federalism and choice. The federal structure of our government offers an opportunity to specify the role of Washington strategically, to leverage what it clearly can do best, while allocating to states and locales what they are best suited to do. Our particular view of federalism is disciplined by the laws of economics and empirical experience, a perspective known as fiscal federalism. The second organizing principle is choice. Much has been written and studied regarding choice in education—on charter schools, vouchers, choice among district schools, and much more—but the idea, so powerful in our economy and in other enterprises, including higher education, has rarely been examined in the context of federalism and the appropriate roles of Washington and lower levels of government.

A New Framework

What is fiscal federalism? Fiscal federalism argues that government services are most efficiently delivered if provided closest to the taxpayers or consumers receiving them, and that competition among local governments for residents and taxpayers will improve those services. In the context of public education, the challenge is to identify the areas of constraint for local providers of education services, determine which can be best addressed by state government, and assign the remainder to Washington.

But there is a fundamental flaw in fiscal federalism theory as it applies to education: the ability of taxpaying parents of school-age children to vote with their feet (leave school districts with which they are dissatisfied) is severely constrained for the low-income populations that are most likely to find themselves served by low-performing schools. This lack of geographical mobility for large segments of the population undermines the competitive pressure that low-performing schools and school districts would otherwise expect to face. This leaves those districts vulnerable to the interests of whoever is powerful at the local level, more often than not organizations that represent teachers who are employed by school districts, rather than to the influence of parents and taxpayers.

One way to correct the strong tendency of local school bureaucracies to cater more to adult than student interests is to intervene from above, the course of action taken by Washington over the last 15 years. We argue that this has been only weakly effective while imposing a heavy regulatory burden on schools. We propose instead to create real competition for students and the public funding that accompanies them among the providers of K–12 education services. Considerable research indicates that schools respond to competitive pressure. In a systematic review of 41 empirical studies on this topic through 2002, Columbia University researchers Clive Belfield and Henry Levin found that “a sizable majority report beneficial effects of competition.”

In our proposal, funding must follow students and be weighted to compensate for the extra costs associated with high-need students if schools are to compete for students and if parents are to have real choice. Parents must have the widest possible choice of schools for their children and be armed with good information on the performance of schools. Informed choice that is accompanied by financial consequences for schools will create a marketplace for schooling that will evolve toward greater responsiveness to what parents want, will be more innovative, and will become more productive.

A Role for Washington

The federal government currently funds a wide range of K–12 education initiatives (see Table 1). The task force has identified just four functions that are essential to its role in education: creating and disseminating information on school performance in each classroom and program effectiveness, including information on individual student performance; enforcing civil rights laws; providing financial support to high-need students; and enhancing competition among providers.

Information: The provision of information on the condition of education and on the results of education research is primarily a public service. In such situations, a serious free-rider problem exists: because it is impossible to prevent a class of consumers who have not paid for the information from consuming it, far too little evidence will be produced if it is not supported by an organization with the entire nation’s interests at heart. The free-rider problem is one reason that state and local authorities cannot be entrusted with the task of knowledge production. Furthermore, evidence does not merely need to be produced; it needs to be based on high-quality data. Gathering and auditing data are almost pure public services. Thus, it is easy to justify federal support for research, data gathering, and dissemination of information. Without valid information on the performance of students at each school relative to that of their peers across the country, the entire education enterprise flies blind, leaving parents, teachers, school managers, and policymakers with nothing more than intuition and consensus as the basis for making decisions.

Civil Rights: When state and local actions in education are discriminatory, the federal government should step in to enforce civil rights laws. Acts of unjust discrimination, such as those that would deny a student an educational experience for which the student is qualified based solely on race, gender, disability, or other protected status, are costly to society. Students who fail to be educated may need cash transfers as adults; they might take up crime or engage in other antisocial behaviors. Owing to mobility and society-wide redistribution, we all suffer in these cases. Thus, the federal government, and not merely state and local governments, has an obligation to curb discrimination.

Compensatory Funding: Regardless of whether the underlying cause is disability, lack of English proficiency, or poverty, high-need students are more expensive to educate than other students. Failure to provide additional resources can provide an incentive for other students to move to another school if they are able. The burden that the high-need student produces will thus be disproportionately borne by those who are too immobile to avoid it, most likely other high-need students. The federal government can counteract these inequities through cash transfers. The difficulty is figuring out the right financial supplement and the best mechanism for distributing it.

Title I of the ESEA and the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) are designed to disburse funds to states and school districts for the education of high-need students. Rather than the complicated federal schemes under which funds are currently disbursed to districts, funds should be attached to the student. Individual schools would receive federal funds based on student counts, with a weighting formula to adjust for factors such as the increased burden of educating high-need students and for regional differences in costs. Sometimes called “backpack funding,” weighted funding that follows the student has been shown to direct proportionally more funds to schools that serve needy students than traditional distribution schemes.

Choice and Competition: The federal government can and should restrict education monopolies and support school choice for parents and students. The current system, which relies on residential mobility to drive school districts to improve education services, does not work well enough to improve education outcomes or to ensure equity. Such a system consigns the poor and immobile to inferior schools and leaves the control of schools in the hands of those who benefit most from the status quo. The simple feature of eliminating a default school assignment by the school district—thus requiring every parent to engage in school choice—eliminates socioeconomic differences in the likelihood that parents will shop for schools. Further, if parents could exercise school choice through web-based portals that highlight the important variables of school performance, socioeconomic differences in knowledge could be muted. Here, again, the federal government has a role to play, for example, by funding open competitions for designers and implementers of school-choice portals.

Market-based competition cannot prevail in public education unless the consumers of public education can choose where to be schooled. We propose that as a condition of the receipt of federal funds to support the education of individual students, schools be required to participate in an open enrollment process conducted by a state-sanctioned authority. Such a process would maximize the matches between school and student preferences. Unified open-enrollment systems that encompass as many choices as possible from the regular public, charter, private, and virtual school universes are essential to the expansion of choice and competition in K–12 education. These systems have to be designed so that all schools have the same time frame for applications and admission decisions, and so that they cannot be gamed by either schools or applying families.

The federal government has a legitimate role in overseeing the marketplace for schooling, including the architecture of parental choice systems. It is in the interest of society that the concentration of high-need students not increase in particular schools. Choice systems have to be carefully and explicitly designed to avoid students being sorted by race, economic background, and other conditions. Several options exist for ensuring that schools cannot discriminate against groups of students, including a lottery system (currently required in federal regulations for start-up charter schools), controlled choice (in which algorithms are used to maintain balanced enrollment), and a financial or fee supplement attached to students in protected classes.

Charter Schools

To ensure a supply of schools from which families may choose, states should establish a system for authorizing charter schools that enables the charter sector to expand to meet demand; that provides funding under the same weighted formula that applies to all other publicly supported schools; and that offers charter schools access to capital commensurate with district school funding. Where there are charter schools, they are frequently the only alternative to regular public schools for low- and moderate-income families. Relative to statewide averages, charter schools tend to attract a disproportionate number of students eligible for free or reduced-price lunch as well as minority students, especially African Americans. Initial test scores of students at charter schools are usually well below those of the average public-school student in the state in which the charter school is located.

Research on the effectiveness of charter schools in raising student achievement presents a mixed picture. In general, charter schools that serve low-income and minority students in urban areas are doing a better job than their traditional public-school counterparts in raising student achievement, whereas that is not true of charter schools in suburban areas. Charter schools do require careful oversight through appropriately funded authorizing bodies, equitable funding via a backpack model, and the opportunity to grow based on their ability to attract students. Fulfilling the latter condition means that states that do not allow charter schools, or that arbitrarily cap their growth, or that turn their authorization over to the very school districts with which charters compete should reform their practices. The Obama administration included these conditions in Race to the Top. They should be incorporated into the reauthorization of ESEA.

Cybercharters and Other Choice Schools

Bringing the provision of K–12 education services into the 21st century by unfettering technology as a delivery mechanism will substantially enhance competition and productivity. Unfortunately, virtual courseware and distance learning providers often must make their sales to school districts rather than to individuals. School districts are likely to be reluctant customers because their operations are disrupted by distance learning. The result is that market demand is suppressed and investment in new technologies for K–12 education curtailed.

Much of the anticompetitive force of local school districts is exercised through requirements that link publicly supported education services to geographical constraints. A leading example is restrictions on cybercharter schools, i.e., schools that offer most or all of their instructional programs over the Internet and do not have brick-and-mortar physical locations where students assemble. To the extent that such schools are allowed to operate at all, they typically do so in the context of charter school laws. These laws include conditions such as a minimum number of hours of daily instruction that do not make sense for courses that are delivered over the Internet, can be taken at a student’s own pace, and frequently define completion in terms of mastery rather than seat time. Further, there is currently no provision in any state’s laws or at the federal level for students to attend cybercharter schools that are out of state in the sense of having no physical place of business within a state. States and school districts should be prohibited from establishing policies that unreasonably interfere with the provision of education services by out-of-state or out-of-district providers, including online charter schools and distance learning providers. They should, instead, make enrollment in such schools readily available.

The federal government has a long history of promoting interstate markets through its authority under the U.S. Constitution’s commerce clause. As the judicial interpretation of the commerce clause has evolved over time, it has come to include the federal authority to nullify state or municipal laws whose object is local economic protectionism (the so-called dormant or hidden commerce clause). The dormant commerce clause could be applied to the provision of education services through the Internet, that is, the federal government could take legal action or support legal claims against states and local school districts that restrict or prohibit access to Internet-based education services that are provided outside district or state borders.

In cybereducation, as in many areas of school administration and performance, it is useful to compare K–12 with postsecondary education. In 2006, the most recent year for which national data are available, postsecondary institutions reported more than 12 million separate distance-learning course enrollments. Two-thirds of all postsecondary institutions offered distance learning courses, and there were more than 11,000 individual programs of study that could be completed entirely online. The contrasts with K–12 education are stark; there were only about 1 million distance-learning enrollments in K–12 in 2007.

Cybereducation for postsecondary students is a national rather than a local marketplace. A student can take a distance learning course from the University of Arizona, and the course credit can apply to graduation requirements at a large number of colleges and universities, without geographical restrictions. Further, if the student has qualified for federal student grants or loans, those are attached to the student, i.e., backpacked. The federal government is indifferent to distance learning versus place-based learning and to geographical boundaries in the provision of financial aid to high-need postsecondary students, whereas in K–12, that aid is funneled through local public-service monopolies that hold captive the students in their geographical catchment area. The federal government also recognizes regional and national accrediting bodies for higher education institutions. By simply shifting its policies on K–12 education to match those it has adopted for postsecondary education, the federal government could provide to parents something nearly every parent wants—the right and opportunity to choose where their child is schooled—and create a powerful engine for innovation and productivity.

Although the promise and potential of parental choice is nowhere more evident than in the realm of technology, the arguments for allowing students ready access to cyberschools extend to interdistrict school choice, charter schools, private schools, and vouchers as well. When combined with the availability of good information on school performance to parents and backpack funding, these options could create a dramatically different landscape for schooling than is currently available in the United States.

Moving Forward

The approach we recommend places the federal government in a central role in providing information and compensatory funding and in promoting a competitive and information-rich marketplace for education services. Mechanisms we espouse, such as student-based funding, open enrollment systems, charter schools, and virtual education, are having some success in breaking open the current system, but they require very special circumstances at the state and local level. We understand that our proposals, if adopted, would represent a fundamental shift in the federal government’s role in K–12 education. An attempt to reauthorize ESEA, IDEA, and Head Start to conform to our recommendations may well fail, in part because what we propose will appeal more to some states than to others. There is nothing wrong with such differences. Indeed, the federalism we espouse is built on the advantage that is conferred to citizens by having government policies and services determined as close to home as possible. There is a legislative way forward consistent with our proposal and federalism, one with a rich legislative history and experience of success at the federal level:

Let states opt out of the statutory and regulatory requirements of ESEA, IDEA, Head Start, and other relevant federal laws in exchange for creating a marketplace of informed choice and competition. Some states will find throwing off the federal yoke in exchange for providing maximum education choice for their citizens politically attractive and viable. Those states can serve as the laboratory for the proposals we have put forward. If these initiatives fail to advance student achievement, social equity, and education productivity, and if they lose the support of a state’s electorate, they will be abandoned, and the state will return to the federal fold. If, instead, some states experience the success we think is likely, other states would find the risk of coming onboard manageable and, we think, face escalating demand from their citizens.

The education system clearly has vast consequences for this nation’s economy, society, and world leadership. The federal government has a crucial role to play in protecting and promoting precisely those national interests that lower levels of government cannot. We believe the most promising approach is to move decisionmaking closer to the consumers of K–12 public education by unleashing pent-up demand and empowering parents to choose schools for their children.

Grover J. “Russ” Whitehurst is a member of the Koret Task Force on K-12 Education and director of the Brown Center on Education Policy at the Brookings Institution.

The full report of the Hoover Institution’s Koret Task Force on K-12 Education is available at www.choiceandfederalism.org.

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

CONTACT:
Grover J. “Russ” Whitehurst   gwhitehurst@brookings.edu Brookings Institution
Janice B. Riddell  (203) 912-8675  janice_riddell@hks.harvard.edu External Relations, Education Next

Experts Envision New Federal Role Advancing Equity and Choice in Education

NCLB reauthorization offers possibility for federal redirection, if it focuses on providing parents more accurate information and greater choice rather than requiring top-down compliance

CAMBRIDGE, MA – The Hoover Institution’s Koret Task Force on K-12 Education (KTF) proposes that No Child Left Behind (NCLB), when reauthorized, provide parents with more accurate information and expand their opportunities to choose schools for their children.  Task force member and author, Grover J. Whitehurst, observes, “The federal government has a legitimate role in overseeing the marketplace for schooling.  A new system that is based on expanding parents’ ability to choose schools that are a good match for their children and is explicitly designed to ‘avoid students being sorted by race, economic background, and other conditions’ is in the interest of individual students and their families, and of our society.”  The abridged version of the report, “Let the Dollars Follow the Child:  How the federal government can achieve equity,” is available at www.educationnext.org and will appear in the Spring, 2012, issue of Education Next.

“Washington is at a crossroads on K-12 education policy,” observes the KTF.  Policymakers can either continue on the path of top-down regulation and accountability that has characterized the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) era;  devolve federal power to the states, which would in practice return to the laissez-faire model of the mid-1990s;  or “rethink the fundamentals.”

Two principles “have served the nation exceedingly well throughout its history:  federalism and choice.”  The report holds that “government services are most efficiently delivered if provided closest to the taxpayers or consumers receiving them.”  Equally important is well-informed choice, a powerful principle in our economy and in higher education, but one that is severely constrained in K-12 public education, particularly for low-income populations that are most likely to be assigned to low-performing schools under the nation’s residence-based school system.  The lack of geographic mobility for large segments of the population relieves low-performing school districts from the competitive pressure that research has shown to be a potent motivator for school district improvement. The lack of accurate information on school quality hinders the identification of better schools.

Under current federal policy, funding for the extra costs associated with low-income and high-need students is provided to districts and states chiefly through Title I of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) and the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA).  The KTF proposes to replace the complicated federal guidelines under which funds are currently disbursed with “backpack funding,” weighted funding that follows students as individuals.  Backpack funding, writes Whitehurst, “has been shown to direct proportionally more funds to schools that serve needy students than traditional distribution schemes.”

Backpack funding is the core mechanism by which parental choice in education will be unleashed under the plan.  When funding follows individual students, it will “create real competition for students and the public funding that accompanies them among the providers of K-12 education services.”  As a condition of the receipt of federal funds to support the education of individual students, schools should be required to participate in an open enrollment process conducted by a state-sanctioned authority.  The task force calls for “unified open-enrollment systems” that encompass as many choices as possible from the regular public charter, private, and virtual (online) school universes.”  Well-functioning school choice requires a federal role in gathering and disseminating high-quality data on school performance; ensures that civil rights laws are enforced; distributes funds based on enrollment of high-need students in particular schools; and supports a growing supply of school options through an expanded, equitably funded charter sector and through the unfettered growth of digital learning via application of the U.S. Constitution’s commerce clause.

The proposal to reauthorize ESEA, IDEA, and Head Start to conform to these recommendations will appeal more to some states than to others.  Whitehurst suggests pilot-testing the proposal by allowing states to opt out of the statutory and regulatory requirements of these programs in exchange for creating a marketplace of informed choice and competition.  If it turns out that the electorates in these pioneering states find success with the Koret approach – moving decision-making closer to the consumers of K-12 public education and empowering more parents to choose schools – other states would “find the risk of coming onboard manageable and…face escalating demand from their citizens.”

The full report of the Hoover Institution’s Koret Task Force on K-12 Education is available at www.choiceandfederalism.org.

About the Author

Grover J. “Russ” Whitehurst is a member of the Koret Task Force on K-12 Education at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, and director of the Brown Center on Education Policy at the Brookings Institution.

About Education Next

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

For more information, 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

This would be a big change in a short period. Through most of 2011, the Obama Administration reaped accolades for its intention to allow states to take a new course vis-à-vis the Elementary and Secondary Education act (a.k.a. NCLB). In September, the President got wall-to-wall coverage of the official announcement of his plan to offer waivers to the states to give them “more flexibility to meet high standards.”

Keep in mind, the change we’re making is not lowering standards; we’re saying we’re going to give you more flexibility to meet high standards. We’re going to let states, schools and teachers come up with innovative ways to give our children the skills they need to compete for the jobs of the future. Because what works in Rhode Island may not be the same thing that works in Tennessee—but every student should have the same opportunity to learn and grow, no matter what state they live in.

Set aside the debate about the conditions he attached to those standards. Set aside the small matter of Constitutionality and separation of powers. On the issue of flexibility itself, virtually everyone seemed to be in agreement (at least in theory): The 10-year-old law is broken and it’s time to fix it. In particular, Adequate Yearly Progress needs to go the way of the dinosaurs and be replaced by something very different. Even on Capitol Hill, for all the misgivings about Duncan’s unilateralism, there was broad consensus that states should be given much greater leeway to design next-generation accountability systems. (Leeway that both Republican and Democratic governors asked for in an NGA policy statement released last week.)

The idea of flexibility is so popular, in fact, that the President reiterated it in his State of the Union address:

Let’s offer schools a deal. Give them the resources to keep good teachers on the job, and reward the best ones. And in return, grant schools flexibility: to teach with creativity and passion; to stop teaching to the test; and to replace teachers who just aren’t helping kids learn. That’s a bargain worth making.

So far so good. It certainly appeared from the rhetoric that the Administration would make every effort to approve reasonable proposals from states, including the 11 that applied in November for the first round of waivers (the round for which results are now imminent). The era of “Washington knows best” in education would come to an end.

But no. Thanks to excellent reporting by Associated Press correspondent Christine Armario, we now have access to letters the U.S. Department of Education sent to these states in December. Which document that federal micromanagement is still the order of the day.

Consider the missive sent to Massachusetts—the first-place finisher in the Race to the Top, the state with the highest achievement in the land, the one that has seen dramatic gains across all subgroups of students, a strong supporter (for better or worse) of the Common Core standards. One might assume that the Bay State would be given the benefit of the doubt. But no.

Here’s an excerpt from the Department’s response to the Massachusetts waiver request:

Please address concerns identified by peers regarding subgroup accountability, including:

• • Without sufficient safeguards to ensure attention and action when an individual subgroup is struggling over a number of years, the use of the “high needs” combined subgroup could lead to individual subgroups not meeting their goals even when the “high needs” combined subgroup is moving forward, and therefore undermine the goal of improved achievement for all students.
  • Massachusetts’s current n-size for subgroups is too high and should be reduced.
  • Schools with high English Learner populations may not be receiving appropriate, targeted interventions.

And another:

• • Please address concern that without differentiating schools within Level 2, there are insufficient incentives to improve achievement for all groups of students. In particular, please address the concern that annual measurable objectives (AMOs) are not used along with other measures to provide incentives and supports to other Title I schools that are not making progress in improving student achievement and narrowing achievement gaps.

(That’s just the tip of the iceberg; read the whole thing yourself.)

All of these issues can be debated ad nauseum by policy wonks. For example, when creating an A to F rating system, what should qualify a school for an A? Strong achievement? Strong growth over time? If the school misses an achievement or growth target for one subgroup (say, special education kids) should that disqualify it for an A? What if all subgroups are doing well but there’s still a big achievement gap?

Whatever your view on these arcane matters, the real issue at stake is whether the feds, or the states, should make such calls. How can the President promise a state like Massachusetts “flexibility to meet high standards” and then second-guess its attempt to rationalize its accountability system?

So how will this go down?

• The Department of Education will announce that most of the 11 states that applied were approved for flexibility. At first, this will lead to a Kumbaya moment.
• Upon closer inspection, observers will notice that the amount of flexibility granted on accountability is tiny. Approved plans will amount to minor changes away from the AYP system we’ve got today.
• The number of states planning to apply for waivers by February 21 will drop precipitously, as they realize that it’s just not worth the effort.
• All of this will embolden members of Congress to talk (again) about the urgency of fixing No Child Left Behind for real (though nothing will come of it this year).

-Mike Petrilli

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

The problem of the textbook in American pre-collegiate education–how it is used, the vagaries associated with the adoption process, the superficiality of most textbooks–is by no means new.  As Beverlee Jobrack points out, many of the issues were adroitly addressed by Harriet Tyson-Bernstein in her Conspiracy of Good Intentions: America’s Textbook Fiasco (1988).  Commendably, Ms. Joback’s approach, in addition to dealing in depth with these issues, is even more comprehensive, paying considerable attention to the importance of curriculum, arguably the most neglected facet of current school reform efforts.

As far back as 1963, when Richard Hofstadter wrote his famous book, Anti-Intellectualism in American Life, concern was raised about the low levels of academic achievement, caused, it was felt, by the overemphasis on students’ social development, characteristic of the Progressive Era in American education.  Nevertheless, the tradition of emphasizing governance issues, access, teacher quality (recruitment, retention and renewal) – important as these issues are – has tended to divert public attention from what it is that society can reasonably expect our students to know when they graduate from high school.  As a spokesperson from the American Federation of Teachers put it, “A curriculum sets forth the body of knowledge and skills our children need to know to grow into economically productive and socially responsible citizens.”

The power of Tyranny of the Textbook is the author’s ability to connect the textbook issue to every facet of student learning.  She explains how textbook publishers have, in effect, usurped the whole arena of what students should know, engaging in an unholy alliance with test makers neutralizing the influence of even the best teachers in the process.  Parallel, but not necessarily integrated with this, has been the development of a whole set of core academic standards.  These have largely failed to bolster academic achievement because of the chasm between the content of the standards and the content of the textbook.

However, for all of the author’s ability to use her insights garnered from years of experience in the textbook world, none is more salient than her instinct for appreciating the centrality of curriculum and subject matter content in the learning process.

To quote directly from her book: “A curriculum is not a set of standards, nor is it a set of lessons, although it includes both….A curriculum is not a teaching method, but incorporates different teaching methods to teach concepts in an organized way.  A curriculum is a set of daily lesson plans, activities, supporting resources and assessments organized in a way to develop student skills and understandings in a subject area.”  What better description can be found to describe an ideal curriculum!  As such, I recommend this book without reservation.

-A. Graham Down

More book reviews by Graham Down are available here.

Still, the chatter in various social media about the announcement extend two faulty themes that needlessly limit educational technology discussions.

The first misguided frame, expressed by Core Knowledge’s Robert Pondiscio in USA Today, is whether technology, in this case digital textbooks, is a “magic bullet.” Pondiscio is right: Of course it’s not and anybody who claims so is foolish. But debating this point gets us nowhere.

What’s most important to understand about the digital textbook effort is that it’s an opportunity to open up a large amount of existing public money that has been locked into use by a very small and closed set of publishers. Opening up classrooms to new technologies in no way guarantees that textbooks or digital instructional materials will be better. But, it does provide the opportunity to shift power to educators, offering the possibility for not only more customization by teachers, but also access to a greater array of better materials. And, smaller publishers, including those who offer free content, such as Core Knowledge, may finally have a chance to enter classrooms based on the strength of their content, rather than their distribution and sales teams.

The second faulty frame is the conspiratorial suspicion of nefarious intent: any technology initiative is just a cover for private profit-seeking. But let’s be serious. We wouldn’t be having this discussion around school modernization. Construction companies make a lot of money on educational projects. We understand though, that this is a reason to exercise strong oversight of public funds. It’s not a reason to oppose modernizing crumbling facilities.

In reality, opposition to digital textbooks cements corporate control of instructional materials. This is about technology-driven industry change. Again, our K-12 schools already spend billions each year on textbooks — almost all purchased from the same small set of publishers. New companies are surely aiming at these dollars, just as Google, Facebook, and Craigslist have siphoned off newspaper ad revenues. And, this industry change also opens the doors for open educational resources (OER) that can be freely shared and modified. This is the real battle, between new and old ways of doing business, open and closed, as seen in the recent debate over SOPA. If there’s a critique here, it’s that there was little sign of the OER community in either the FCC’s announcement or the “Digital Textbook Collaborative” that it convened.

Two more things you may have missed:

• TASC continued its Digital Learning Beyond School effort with a white paper and video that makes the case for using technology to help community educators and teachers engage students in learning anywhere at any time.
• My favorite article from yesterday’s coverage describes a collaboration between the University of Utah and Google that is helping kids with autism spectrum disorders to shine. (h/t @mcleod)

-Bill Tucker

Rick Hess: What do you see as the agenda for Ohio school reform unfolding in 2012?
Bob Sommers: It will be a smaller agenda because we moved 13 out of 15 major reforms we wanted last year. And, frankly, the system has to implement some things. But one big push this year will be around data quality. The P-20 data pipeline is not very exciting, but we have got to get better data from pre-kindergarten all the way through to the workforce. And get greater clarity around how the system is working. How many kids are kindergarten-ready? Who’s doing a good job and who isn’t? How many kids are reading by the end of third grade? Out of college, are they getting employed? Are they making good wages? Are they living in Ohio? Are they being good citizens? So, that’s a big one. It’s greater transparency around performance and cost-effectiveness. Along with that one is improving school report cards. Right now, we have a convoluted report card system that can label a school with a fifty percent rate of failure as “honors with distinction.” That just doesn’t work. We need a much more understandable report card.

RH: Last year, what were the two or three most significant reforms that passed?
BS: We completely removed the cap on charters. We quadrupled vouchers. We got the school ranking system developed. School rankings, I would put up there in the top two. We now rank all the schools and school districts. And that has really changed the conversations. You now get people asking, “What do you mean my elementary in my wealthy school district is 1,100th out of 4,000 schools? I thought it was the best school in America.”

RH: How big a deal was the defeat on Question Two [the referendum which overturned Ohio collective bargaining reform] last November?
BS: The people spoke on the issue of collective bargaining rights. They didn’t appreciate collective bargaining being attacked. So the people spoke. From an education standpoint, though, there were very few things that we were looking for in changes in employment, compensation, and teacher relationships that we didn’t get [in separate legislation]. We eliminated seniority pretty much up and down the line. We got options in for performance-based pay. We got a teacher evaluation system that includes student achievement.

You know, politics is like farming. You can’t harvest unless you sell and cultivate. And we just didn’t do a good enough job of explaining to the public the problem that we tried to solve. The public didn’t see the problem that we saw…We knew we had to have more flexibility to manage costs. Teachers have a right to collective bargaining over their wages and hours, but they shouldn’t be able to bargain class sizes and which curriculum.

RH: What are a couple of key lessons that you take from the defeat on Question 2? And how might those inform the reform effort this year?
BS: We’re going to make sure we do a lot better job of explaining the problem we’re trying to solve. And to make sure that the public actually sees the problem the same way that we do. That’s the big lesson. You’ve got to go out. You’ve got to cultivate the fields….And so, a lot of our reforms are around that transparency. Making sure people are crystal clear where they are. And given huge latitude for the local levels to solve those problems that they all know what the problems are. And they can get them fixed.

RH: Is the Governor planning on reintroducing any elements from Senate Bill 5 [the collective bargaining bill] this year?
BS: No, I don’t expect so. The Governor is aggressive. But he’s also very respectful to the people. It’s the people’s government. And that’s not a company answer. That’s a genuine John Kasich answer. He pushes hard. He pushed to do the things, you know, to balance an eight billion dollar hole in the budget. He’s made some really tough reforms. He doesn’t mind taking a beating. But when it’s clear that the public doesn’t want something, then that’s the way it is.

RH: How have the politics of school reform changed in Ohio over the past year? What’s different this year than from where you were a year ago?
BS: I think it’s the classic “The more reform you get done, the harder the status quo pushes back.” The people that don’t get it, they fight back. They’re not bad people, but they’re just traditionalists…You make major changes. It takes time to implement. And so, there’s a pressure to slow down. When you have a lot of the things that we have done in the way of teacher evaluation, the up and coming changes in assessments, the Common Core, closing poor-performing schools–there are just a whole lot of things that take time to implement.

RH: Where is the Governor and where are the Republicans in the legislature on the Common Core at this point?
BS: I can’t speak necessarily for the legislature as a whole. But, I know the Governor is very supportive of Common Core. [State superintendent] Stan Heffner is very supportive of Common Core…Now, Ohio historically has had better than average standards. So, it isn’t as dramatic a change as it would be for some states. But we’re still going to go through some significant updates.

RH: And what’s the status of Race to the Top implementation right now?
BS: If you believe the feds, we’re like number two or three in the country in the quality of engagement. And I think it’s true. The disappointing thing–and the Governor talks about this all the time–he says, “Only half our schools are on board. What happened to the other half?”
When you look at Race to the Top, and you look at the Kasich administration’s reform agenda, you can’t tell them apart. You just can’t. And so at the half [of schools] that [aren't on board with Race to the Top], it’s the case that the unions wouldn’t agree, or that the school board wouldn’t agree, or the administration didn’t care, or whatever. But now, because of the Governor’s legislation, they’re going to have to implement all of the reforms anyway, just without the extra Race to the Top money.

RH: Have you felt like the Race to the Top implementation has made it easier to push the Governor’s agenda?
BS: There were times when somebody would say [of the Governor Kasich's agenda], “It’s those terrible right wing Republicans [who are pushing these ideas]!” And I don’t think Obama would have appreciated being called a right wing conservative. So yes, it was, it was valuable.

RH: As far as implementing the reforms, what are the key challenges?
BS: Number one, educators think the world is a non-competitive, fair place. And it isn’t. And if we’re going to have our kids ready, they need to recognize that effort doesn’t matter, results do. So, that’s the first thing. There’s also a lack of clarity in the education community of how important it is to be aggressive in preparing kids for life. Number three is that school and district leaders get stuck in tradition. There are a million things that there are absolutely no laws against. But people think there are.

RH: What’s an example?
BS: Blended learning. It’s a pretty phenomenal approach that has a lot of promise. People say, “Well, we can’t do that. It’s against the law.” But we’ve been doing it in the state of Ohio since 2003. There are no laws against it. It’s just a lack of willingness to go beyond tradition. I think school boards are more obstructionists than visionaries. The other thing is a lack of focus on performance and cost effectiveness. You’ve got to get better performance at a lower price…And oddly enough, it’s rarely the law that’s the problem. And it’s rarely cash. But that’s what everybody complains about. But I don’t think those are the problems.

RH: Ohio is famous for its uneven charter school sector. How big a concern in this?
BS:People aren’t willing to take on [some of the bad operators] for any number of political reasons. But last year we put in place some of the toughest school closure laws in the country. And we’re starting to close schools. We do have a problem with sponsor quality. In Michigan, where I operated before, you have universities serving as sponsors, and a university has a reputation to uphold that goes beyond the charter schools. So, they really want the charter schools that they sponsor to be good quality because they’re an extension of their larger image. In Ohio, we don’t have that. The sponsor network is pretty weak. So, that’s a huge problem, but I do think we’ve made great progress in correcting that.

RH: Last question. You’ve been working in K-12 a long time, and in a lot of roles. What surprised you most about tackling K-12 improvement from Columbus?
BS: The thing that surprised me shouldn’t have been a surprise. After all, I spent 15 years with the Department of Ed and so should have known it. But I’ve been away for a long time. It’s that state level reform cannot be on the aggressive leading edge simply because you’re moving a whole state. Aggressive leading edge reform only occurs at the school, school district, or charter level. And that’s part of the reason I’m going back there. I’d much prefer to be on the extreme edge of reform. And I think that’s maybe as it should be. It’s one thing to have an individual school try an extreme reform and fail. It’s another one to do that on an entire state. The speed with which reform is possible at a state level is slower than I had hoped.

-Frederick Hess

This blog entry originally appeared on Rick Hess Straight Up.

It’s vintage Jennings, perceptive about both what has happened and why and how it has (and hasn’t) worked, then incurably and relentlessly over-ambitious—in a classic, big-government, big-spending, liberal sort of way—about what federal policy should do tomorrow.

As to the past, and oversimplifying some points that he makes more subtly,

• Equity-based reform didn’t get very far because it amounted to add-on programs, suffered from limited funding, and failed to “generally improve the broader educational system.”
• School choice pleases parents but doesn’t raise achievement much, “an interesting case of convictions trumping evidence.”
• Standards-based reform has had more traction but has “gone astray”: too much testing, too much labeling, not enough real alteration in the quality of what’s taught and learned.

None of that is wrong. But his prescription for the future comes across as wishful thinking even if you’re disposed to agree with it. (I’m not.) Jennings favors a federal law declaring that “no child in the United States will be denied equal educational opportunity in elementary and secondary education through the lack of a challenging curriculum, well-prepared and effective teachers, and the funding to pay for that education.”

This would, of course, have the effect of transferring the responsibility for educating (and financing the education of) 55 million kids to Washington. I guess one might term this a “governance reform” but I don’t think it’s going to happen or that it would work well if it did. (Jack has done just about everything during the course of his long career EXCEPT work in the executive branch. If he had, he might harbor fewer illusions about its capacity in the realm of education.)

It’s notable, too, that he continues after all these years to put his faith in Uncle Sam to fix what ails American education. There’s no mention here of changes in the delivery system (e.g. technology), the system’s efficiency/productivity, or its structures and governance (except as noted above). He also downplays the value of “outsiders” (e.g. governors, mayors) as agents of change in K-12 education.

It is said that if your only tool is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. Much as I respect and admire Jack Jennings, in spite of all his experience in this field, his main tool remains federal legislation, which I’ve come to believe is almost always wielded clumsily in pursuit of nails that either won’t budge at all or end up bent.

-Chester E. Finn, Jr.

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

Behind the Headline
Fueling the Engine
Education Next | Summer 2010

The flow of venture capital into the K-12 education market has exploded over the past year, reaching its highest level in a decade, reports Katie Ash in Education Week. Rick Hess wrote about the funding challenges facing education entrepreneurs in the Summer 2010 issue of Ed Next.

An amazing story from Erik Robelen at Education Week begins…

Overriding the governor’s veto, New Hampshire’s Republican-led legislature has enacted a new law that requires school districts to give parents the opportunity to seek alternatives to any course materials they find objectionable. The measure, approved this month, calls on all districts in the state to establish a policy for such exceptions, but sets two key conditions. First, the district must approve of the substitute materials for the particular child, and second, the parents must pay for them. Although at least a few states, including New Hampshire, already have laws giving parents some explicit recourse in particular subjects, such as sex education, this policy appears to be more expansive in its potential reach.

Robelen quotes Fordham’s curriculum guru, Kathleen Porter-Magee, leaning toward parents: “I don’t think it’s crazy to say parents should have a say in what their kids are learning, especially when it affects issues about their faith and belief system,” Ms. Porter-Magee said. “The problem is that the bill is written so broadly.”

This is certainly not the first shot fired in what will be a prolonged battle to decentralize education, but it surely brings the fight to the curriculum trenches.

***

Teachers really really do count. Kudos to Nicholas Kristoff of the New York Times for appreciating the stakes of the debate over the Chetty-Friedman-Rockoff study called The Long-term Impact of Teachers.

Kristoff called it, “a landmark new research paper [that] underscores that the difference between a strong teacher and a weak teacher lasts a lifetime.”

For those of us who have seen teachers in action—the good, the bad, and the ugly—the research confirms what we all know. It is now up to our policymakers, as it has always been, to provide us a system of governance that gives us great teachers.

Here are a few things that I think we need to do:

• Revitalize teacher education, including eliminating regressive certification laws.
• Get meaningful teacher evaluation rubrics, with significant attention to student learning outcomes.
• Abandon Last In First Out rules for teacher retention as well as kissin’ cousins like transfer rights within a district.
• Give principals the duty – and autonomy – to create a school environment that encourages excellence and collaboration—and compensates good teachers accordingly.

It is not enough to sing the praises of great teachers. Our policymakers must do the heavy lifting that will train them and retain them.

***

Michelle Rhee is pretty smart. Though this video by a DC group of parents and teachers is unabashedly anti-Michelle Rhee (“the sad legacy under Rhee”) and meant to “contradict her simplisms,” it did lead me to this exchange between Rhee and Ida Lieszkovszky for State Impact Ohio:

Q:  One of our listeners wants to know what impact on a student’s success or failure in school does their home environment and socio-economic status have? Or do you think that a student’s success or failure in school is entirely the teacher’s responsibility?
A:  A kid’s success in school is not entirely contingent upon any one factor; it’s actually both. When you have the home and the family working in concert with the school and the teacher, that’s the best-case scenario, when everyone’s on the same page. And so we should try to do everything we can to try to incent and encourage more parental and familial involvement in schools. Can teachers overcome all of the ills of society? Absolutely not. Can they make a big dent in the potential life outcomes of kids if we’ve got great teachers in the classroom? One hundred percent.

Seems a very un-simplistic statement about a complicated issue.

***

A curriculum tussle in Tucson. And, finally, another curriculum tussle pitting local interests and state authorities. According to this Associated Press report, “Arizona’s schools chief ordered that a portion of a Tucson school district’s state money be cut off after he issued a decision Friday that the district’s ethnic studies program violated state law.”

Apparently, Tucson’s sin was to create a Mexican-American Studies program, which an administrative law judge, supporting the state’s Superintendent of Public Instruction John Huppenthal, ruled against because the classes were designed for one ethnic group and, according to the AP, “promot[ed] racial resentment and advocat[ed] ethnic solidarity instead of treating students as individuals.”

The case poses existential governance questions, but they are nothing new. As someone once said about America, “E pluribus unum,” which, roughly translated, means, let the fight continue.

-Peter Meyer

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

Call this the test score hypothesis. It explains reformers’ enthusiasm for test-based accountability; for “college and career-ready standards”; for teacher evaluations based, in significant part, on student outcomes; for “data-based instruction”; and for much of the rest of the modern-day reform agenda. After all, if reading, math, and science knowledge and skills are so directly linked to the life chances of individual kids, and of the livelihood of the country as a whole, why not get the education system focused like a laser on them?

But is this hypothesis correct? Is stronger academic performance related to better life outcomes for kids and better economic outcomes for nations?

In a word: yes. As Kevin Carey noted recently, the big Chetty et al study didn’t just demonstrate the importance of teacher effectiveness. It also offered strong support for the Test Score Hypothesis.

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.

Then there’s the international evidence. As Eric Hanushek has been arguing vociferously for years, there’s a direct link between academic achievement (as measured by math and science tests) and a country’s economic growth.

The level of cognitive skills of a nation’s students has a large effect on its subsequent economic growth rate. Increasing the average number of years of schooling attained by the labor force boosts the economy only when increased levels of school attainment also boost cognitive skills. In other words, it is not enough simply to spend more time in school; something has to be learned there.

Hanushek further argues that the only way to solve our country’s long term fiscal challenge is to grow our way out of it. If we could indeed boost the cognitive skills of our students, even by a little, our structural deficit would go away.

So student achievement matters a lot. But does it matter the most? It’s hard to make the case anymore that test scores are irrelevant. But what remains unknown is whether reading, math, and science are the most important things that schools could be teaching. As Dana Goldstein noted back in December,

I’ve been struck again and again by the newness of the idea that schooling is primarily a matter of academic achievement…. It is only really since “A Nation at Risk” that we’ve had a national dialogue about academic excellence for every child. This is a much-needed development in American culture, but its discontents are numerous: A lack of attention paid to the civic, social, and artistic benefits of schooling, and the ways in which children are (ideally) shaped as moral, cultured, socially-responsible people by their teachers and school communities. 

We might all want schools to walk and chew gum at the same time—to boost “academic achievement” while also developing “moral, cultured, socially-responsible people.” But our policies—especially school-level accountability and test-based teacher evaluations—focus on academic achievement alone.

The nagging question then—the “known unknown”—is whether other stuff matters more—both to kids’ life chances and to the country’s economic success. What if, for instance, “social and emotional intelligence”—knowing how to relate to others—is more important than many reformers have been willing to acknowledge? What if these interpersonal skills are what help lift poor kids out of poverty and enable economies to succeed? Or other “soft skills” and attributes like grit, perseverance, industriousness, the ability to delay gratification, and so forth?

In that case, is it smart to push Head Start centers to focus overwhelmingly on pre-literacy and pre-numeracy skills (as many of us have)? Is it wise to cut time for recess, to trim extracurriculars, or to push for the maximum amount of homework, to be completed by solitary would-be scholars? Does it make sense to ask teachers to obsess about student achievement over everything else?

The private school sector, which many reformers admire, is not so conflicted. Every high-end school boasts about its commitment to the “whole child,” to kids’ intellectual, emotional, social, and physical development. These schools would never consider their graduates to be well-educated without an appreciation for the arts, participation in sports, a commitment to community service, and the development of strong character. And judging by the admissions policies of the nation’s great universities, our elite higher education institutions hold this holistic view, too. Are these non-academic attributes just “extras”—luxuries that schools serving poor or working class kids just can’t afford? Or are they as essential as academics, for everyone?

Reading, math, and science matter a lot, but they are almost certainly not enough. That is why we must tread carefully when designing next-generation school accountability and teacher evaluation systems. If we accidentally create incentives for schools and teachers to focus solely on academic achievement and ignore the rest, we could be making our children and our nation less competitive, not more so. Let us proceed with care.

-Mike Petrilli

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

Behind the Headline
The Case for Special EducationVouchers
Education Next | Winter 2010

Former State Assemblyman Michael Benjamin makes the case for special ed vouchers in New York City in an op-ed appearing in today’s Post. Jay Greene and Stuart Buck explained how special ed vouchers work and dispelled myths about the vouchers in an article appearing in the Winter 2010 issue of Ed Next.

Just under 18 months ago, the U.S. Department of Education awarded over $330 million to two state consortia, PARCC and Smarter/Balanced, representing 45 states and the District of Columbia, to design and implement new student assessment systems. Two smaller state consortia, Dynamic Learning Maps (DLM) and the National Center and State Collaborative (NCSC), received an additional $67 million to develop new assessments for students with significant cognitive disabilities. The new assessments, offered mostly online, will replace the current state tests given to millions of students each year in reading and math. At the time, Secretary of Education Duncan called these initiatives an “absolute game-changer” and pledged tests of “critical thinking skills and complex student learning that are not just fill-in-the-bubble tests of basic skills.” In short, it’s an all-out effort to significantly improve one of the weakest — and most despised — aspects of our nation’s current educational system.

But, while it’s easy to think of the consortia as “building tests,” the more apt description is that they are attempting to re-invent, with heavy use of technology, the entire process of assessment. They are developing new types of assessment questions to go beyond multiple choice in conjunction with new methods to deliver, administer, score, and report on these assessments. They will delve deeply into professional development. And, together, they are also adopting common performance standards so that proficiency, which now means different things in different states, is a consistent standard across states.

Officially, the new assessments, including formative and interim tools, will not launch until the 2014-15 school year. In reality, though, most of the work needs to be fully-baked for field-testing in the 2013-14 time frame. That means the real work will take place over the next 18 months. This timeline will increasingly drive both decision-making and expenditures. Even though the consortia have generous grants, doing something quickly, for the first time, and in collaboration across many diverse states costs much more.

Many schools and districts, but not all, will struggle to develop the raw capacity – hardware, software, bandwidth, and tech support – to deliver online testing. Since it takes time for budgeting and procurement, districts want to know right now what the “requirements” are going to be. Yet, there’s a chicken/egg situation because the consortia don’t yet know the content/item types, so they can’t say whether to prepare for bandwidth-hogging simulations, graphics, etc.

At the same time, we have a limited sense of schools’ and districts’ actual capacity. When pushed, they may find a way: As one official at a recent State Education Technology Directors Association (SETDA) event noted, in his state districts and schools felt like they were being pushed off the cliff when online testing was implemented, but in reality, the cliff was only a couple of feet high. While the consortia are developing a “readiness tool” to assess the state of technology down to a school level, they’ll soon have to make a guess as to how ambitious the tech specs will be and that will then become a major constraint to development. And, that guess will have to be made in 2012 about 2015 technology. (iPads were not even around when the Department announced the grant competition.) Lower tech requirements will make schools’/districts’ lives easier, but may limit amount of innovation in item types, data collection, etc. Too far towards the other extreme increases the capacity problem.

From an instructional technology and content standpoint, the enormous scope means that the process by which the consortia do their work may have large implications. For example, if the consortia specify that you must have a device with at least a 13” screen size, good luck selling a 10” iPad tablet. More importantly on the back-end, decisions about the underlying technology architecture and standards for data/content transport will also have implications for both the vendor marketplace and integration of all sorts of other data systems (reporting, analytics, student information systems, formative assessments, content repositories, learning management systems, etc.). In other words, the consortia have the potential to exert a fair-amount of market power in a market that is currently dysfunctional. Whether the consortia choose to wield that power, and whether they do it as a force for good, remains to be seen. Ideally, this will all be done with a keen eye towards interoperability, openness, and extensibility, a system design principle where the implementation takes into consideration future growth. But, designing with the future in mind may take more time, could cost more, and often entails risk – presenting a dilemma for high-stakes development on a tight timeline.

The consortia provide a real opportunity to both understand and upgrade schools’/districts’ technology capacity. As a technology director told me, “they’ll buy for the testing mandate.” Yet, whether this capacity will have dual-use for instruction remains to be seen. Schools could get just enough bandwidth to support testing, but have to shut down any other uses for multiple weeks throughout the year. They could also decide to acquire “secure” computer labs, but isolate these from day-to-day classroom instruction. On the good side, one of the hopes of the new assessments is that they will point instruction to more cognitively challenging and beneficial methods. To the extent that these are technology-based, students must have access not just for testing, but also for instruction.

This may all seem to be too far in the weeds to pay attention. But like it or not, how we measure matters. The next generation of assessments will go a long way towards determining whether digital learning actually fulfills its immense promise. And this may be the best chance to get it right.

UPDATE: Smarter/Balanced and PARCC release statement announcing the new technology readiness tool.

- Bill Tucker

In the Spring 2012 issue of Ed Next, June June Kronholz looks at two school districts working with Khan Academy to boost math achievement.

To become proficient at dividing a one-place number into a three-place number, a girl with blue-painted fingernails wrote in her math journal.

To become proficient in multiplying decimals, wrote a dark-haired boy. To become proficient at subtracting one four-place number from another. To become proficient in arithmetic word problems. To complete an exercise in the properties of numbers, like (4 + 9) + 5 = ? + (9 + 5).

No two youngsters seemed to have quite the same math goals because, of course, no two youngsters are quite alike when it comes to learning. That’s why Los Altos is betting the future on an online math program from Khan Academy, and why scores of other schools and districts are clamoring to include Khan Academy in their math curriculum.

For the next 45 minutes, Julian met individually with his 5th graders to refine their goals. (In November, Julian left Los Altos to become assistant principal in the Milpitas Unified School District.) Everyone else logged onto the free Khan Academy web site and called up the “module,” or math concept, that fit their goals. Some watched short video lectures embedded in the module; others worked their way through sets of practice problems. I noticed that one youngster had completed 23 modules five weeks into the school year, one had finished 30, and another was working on his 45th.

As youngsters completed one lesson, an online “knowledge map” helped them plot their next step: finish the module on adding decimals, for example, and the map suggests moving next to place values, or to rounding whole numbers, or to any of four other options.

Julian, meanwhile, tracked everyone’s progress on a computer dashboard that offers him mounds of data and alerts him when someone needs his attention. He showed me, for example, the data for a child who had been working that day on multiplying decimals. The child had watched the Khan video before answering the 1st practice problem correctly, needed a “hint” from the program on the 3rd question, got the 7th wrong after struggling with it for 350 seconds—the problem was 69.0 x 0.524—and got the 18th correct in under a minute.

But just as powerful are the data kids have on themselves. The Covington youngsters regularly pulled up an array of charts that showed them which math concepts they had mastered and which they were working on, needed to review, or were stumbling over.

The classroom buzzed with activity, and amazingly, all the buzz was about math.

Salman Khan (on left) and the team at the Khan Academy.

Khan’s Rise

By now, more than 1 million people have watched the online video in which Salman Khan—a charming MIT math whiz, Harvard Business School graduate, and former Boston hedge-fund analyst—explains how he began tutoring his New Orleans cousins in math by posting short lessons for them on YouTube. Other people began watching the lessons and sending Khan adulatory notes (“First time I smiled doing a derivative,” wrote one) or thanking him for explaining fractions to an autistic son.

Khan quit the hedge fund, moved to Silicon Valley, and in 2009, with funding from a constellation of technology stars (Bill Gates’s children were using the videos), launched the nonprofit Khan Academy. A year later, Mark Goines, a member of the Los Altos school board and a legendary Silicon Valley investor, introduced Khan to the district’s new superintendent. Los Altos already ranked among the best-performing districts in the state, but it had set itself a goal of improving individual achievement, and “capturing data at a granular level” on each student was proving difficult, Goines told me.

A few weeks later, in November 2010, Los Altos agreed to pilot Khan Academy with two classes of 5th graders and two classes of 7th graders and provide Khan with feedback to refine the web site and tools. By summer 2011, some 250 school districts, charter schools, and independent schools were asking to be part of the pilot—Khan chose only a dozen—and have Khan staff work with them to integrate the videos, data dashboard, and other tools into their curriculum.

Salman Khan’s short videos remain the centerpiece of Khan Academy (there already are 2,576 of them and counting). In each one, Khan’s voice describes a discrete math concept, such as solving a quadratic by factoring or interpreting inequalities, while only his hand-scribbled formulas appear on-screen. Khan’s idea was that youngsters would watch the videos at home and work on problems in class, essentially “flipping” the classroom (see “The Flipped Classroom,” What Next, Winter 2012). But teachers told me that youngsters also are using the videos as a just-in-time solution when they’re stumped on a problem in class, or to move ahead when they feel ready.

The data that the web site churns out and the site’s gaming features seem to be the real learning motivators. Youngsters become “proficient” in a concept by answering a “streak” of 10 consecutive computer-generated questions: miss one and the computer sends you back to the start. Youngsters earn “energy points” for correct answers, and badges for accomplishments as diverse as working speedily (that’s a meteorite badge) or becoming proficient in the Pythagorean theorem (that’s a moon badge).

Ted Mitchell, president of the NewSchools Venture Fund and a Khan Academy board member, told me that Khan developers “were blown away by how important” the games and badges seem to be in giving kids a sense of accomplishment and progress. Even older kids, for whom badges are ho-hum, “are instantly motivated” when they complete a streak, and the program acknowledges their accomplishment, says Brian Greenberg, who until recently was chief academic officer of Envision Schools. “What’s brilliant about Khan Academy is the instant feedback,” Greenberg told me.

Envision runs four charters in Northern California, including one that piloted Khan Academy with a small program for remedial-algebra students last summer.

Los Altos has extended the Khan Academy program to all of its 5th and 6th grade classes, and to its 7th graders who were achieving at grade level and below.

The Teaching Curve

From Covington Elementary, I dropped in on Courtney Cadwell’s 7th-grade pre-algebra class at Egan Junior High. She, like Julian, piloted Khan Academy last year. Based on that first-year success, Los Altos extended the program to all of its 5th- and 6th-grade classes, and to its 7th graders who were achieving at grade level and below.

Cadwell, a 17-year teacher who was wearing University of Texas orange for her alma mater, calls Khan just “one resource we use.” The previous night, she had assigned worksheet homework; she began the class with a textbook lesson. Math projects ringed the classroom, a reminder that Khan Academy doesn’t include project-based lessons. That night’s homework included a reading on the origin of zero: Cadwell, among others I spoke with, said Khan’s weakness is that it “is not great at helping kids conceptualize math.”

Khan’s strength became clear a few minutes later when the students opened their laptops. Cadwell strolled the room with an iPad in hand, tracking the youngsters as they moved through problems and modules, and intervening with a quick one-on-one when the data identified a student who was stumped. “I’m getting data in real time about each student instead of assuming the entire class needs intervention,” she explained afterward. Khan “lets me use my class time more wisely.”

It also means that teachers have to figure out new ways to work. “Teachers have to be willing to escape from the role of standing in front of the class” and flexible enough to group kids based on need, said Julian, who was a math coach in New York for 20 years and retains his big-city bustle.

As I watched Julian, Cadwell, and later Ruth Negash at Oakland’s Envision Academy of Arts and Technology, they seemed to be always on the move—meeting individually with children, tutoring small groups, and occasionally addressing the whole class. “I actually work harder” with Khan Academy, Julian said. “I’m up and around more, meeting with kids more.” That gives time back to students and, as Cadwell said, makes them “take ownership of their learning” by setting their own goals.

It also means a new level of classroom collaboration: youngsters can look at each other’s data and identify “coaches” among their classmates. Julian urged his 5th graders to ask the Khan program for a hint, watch a video, or ask a coach for help before coming to him. “Show him how to do it, don’t walk around the class giving answers,” he admonished would-be coaches. Pretty soon, a girl in a pink T-shirt turned to a girl in purple for coaching, and the two worked meticulously at solving 1.94 x 5.52.

The Khan Academy provides data in real time about each student, resulting in more efficient class time management for teachers.

Making It Work in Oakland

Los Altos is an affluent, tech-savvy community; I next wanted to see how Khan Academy could work in an inner-city classroom. So two days later, I visited Envision Academy, a downtown Oakland charter school, and Ruth Negash, an intense 4th-year teacher with wild, curly hair and two education degrees from San Francisco State University.

In 2011, Negash taught two summer-school classes of 9th, 10th, and 11th graders who had failed Algebra I. One randomly assigned class used Khan Academy; the other was a traditional math class. The results were promising enough that Negash now is using Khan in all of her 9th-grade algebra classes.

On the day I visited, Negash started both of her classes with a minilecture on linear equations, and then had her students solve for x in 7x + 4 = 18. The classes quickly became fidgety, first as Negash explained the problem, and then as youngsters finished at different speeds. Negash had to urge them to “respect the community of learning.”

But that changed a few minutes later when the youngsters opened their computers—I had noticed the same change in Cadwell’s class—and worked on Khan Academy for the next 75 minutes. I heard an occasional groan of exasperation. “They threw a trick question at me and sent me back to the beginning,” one boy moaned when his streak was broken. But the energy now was directed toward everyone’s screen.

Although everyone in Negash’s classes had taken, and presumably passed, algebra in 8th grade, their math competence ranged from marginal to impressive. In both periods, three or four youngsters claimed a table in the hallway, where they worked silently at lessons on quadrilaterals and complementary and supplementary angles, typical geometry exercises. But other students struggled with addition and subtraction, and one quarter don’t know their multiplication tables, Negash told me. (To keep those youngsters from falling even further behind, she gives them a reference sheet with the multiplication tables on it.) Negash told both classes to work on the Khan module on solving for a variable—a continuation of her minilecture—but Khan’s online prompts were urging most youngsters to first review lessons on lower-level skills.

Some of these youngsters simply “feel safer” doing arithmetic and will move on when they’ve experienced some math “success,” Negash predicted. Other educators had similar takes: Khan “takes away a lot of the fear about math” by letting kids backfill their gaps and then move ahead at their own pace, said Sandra McGonagle, the principal of Santa Rita Elementary in Los Altos, which also is using Khan Academy in its 5th and 6th grades.

“You don’t have to worry about getting something wrong in front of the whole class,” one of Julian’s 5th graders, the girl with blue nail polish, told me.

But in Negash’s classes, the wide range of math abilities is clearly a challenge. Negash sat with one low-performing student for much of the first-period class and with three others in the second period, hoping to encourage some of that “success.” Meanwhile, other students were calling for her help. Two boys were stumped by “adjacent” in a word problem; language issues crop up “every day,” Negash said.

When Negash finally had a moment to consult her Khan dashboard at the end of second-period class, she saw that one youngster had spent 62 minutes solidly working on math, but another had spent only 14 minutes. “It’s hard to figure out a different plan for 25 kids every day,” she sighed.

Gia Truong, superintendent of Envision Schools, said Khan Academy developers had urged her to let Negash’s students “start where they were” in math and move forward. But that’s creating a conflict when some kids are so far behind, she told me: “If you do that, you might never get to the algebra standards” that California students must pass in order to graduate.

“You’re in the new paradigm, but the grading standards are in the old paradigm,” she added.

Getting to Results

Test results at both Los Altos and Envision—the only two pilots to have any results so far—suggest that Khan Academy is working. Los Altos says that among the 7th graders who used the program in 2010–11—all remedial students—41 percent scored “proficient” or “advanced” on the California Standards Test compared to 23 percent the year before. Among 5th graders, 96 percent using Khan were proficient or advanced compared to 91 percent in the rest of the district.

At Envision’s summer-school program, the youngsters in the Khan Academy class spent only half their time on algebra—the rest of their time was on lower-level math skills—and yet still slightly outscored the traditional class, which spent all of its time on algebra.

Both districts are quick to say that it’s far too early to claim success: there were only 115 youngsters in the Los Altos pilot and just 20 at Envision. “It’s enough to say this is promising; it’s not enough to say this is the future,” former Envision Schools officer Brian Greenberg said.

Most observers of the Khan experiment agree that the measure of success must be student achievement. Otherwise, “I’m not very sympathetic,” said Michael Horn of Innosight Institute. As teaching is increasingly differentiated, however, schools may need a different kind of assessment. California’s year-end test can tell which 5th graders meet the state’s math standards; it can’t tell if some of those 5th graders have progressed to trigonometry or pre-calculus, as two Los Altos kids did last year.

But several experts also suggested measuring Khan’s impact by also looking at changes in the distribution of test scores. Khan Academy isn’t likely to close the learning gap because some kids, freed from the teach-to-the-middle plod of the usual classroom, gallop ahead. But Khan would be a success if low-performing kids move ahead too and “shift the bell curve to the right,” said the NewSchool Venture Fund’s Ted Mitchell.

Some other Khan watchers gave a surprisingly strong endorsement to such measures as student engagement and self-confidence, and to soft skills like goal setting and teamwork. “I don’t look at it as just based on the data,” said Mark Goines, the Los Altos school board member whose high-tech background (he helped develop and run TurboTax for Intuit, Inc.) suggests a fine reading of the data. “The kids seem to be happy about learning. That makes me excited,” he said.

What about increasing class size, I asked: Should Khan’s success be measured in part on its ability to increase teacher productivity? In elementary schools, where students generally spend the day with one teacher, increasing class size because of Khan would mean bigger classes in every other subject, too. And Goines, who said he has viewed “hundreds” of online programs, cautioned that there aren’t any comparable products in other subjects, especially in writing.

A fear among advocates of online learning is that slow learners will be abandoned in front of a computer, and a large classroom increases those chances. “It would then become a babysitting tool,” said McGonagle, Santa Rita’s principal.

At Envision Academy in Oakland, teachers say Khan takes away a lot of the fear about math by letting kids backfill their gaps and move forward at their own pace.

Blending Khan

Finally, I asked for “takeaways” from the Khan Academy experience. Greenberg told me that it’s more important that teachers be “nimble” and “entrepreneurial” than that they be tech wizards. All three teachers said they felt comfortable with technology, but that, more importantly, they were risk-takers. Even before she began piloting Khan Academy, Cadwell asked her PTA to buy classroom laptops for the youngsters in her remedial math class. “I figured if I could get them onto some practice sites, I’d figure things out from there,” she said.

Santa Rita’s McGonagle said it was “crucial” to have pilot teachers like Cadwell who can act as avatars for the rest of the district as it expands its blended learning. Cadwell is mentoring other Los Altos teachers this year. They “don’t need training as much as they need time” with the program, she told me (the data are fairly easy to use, but she and Julian asked Khan’s engineers for so much of it that both say they don’t always use it all).

The schools, meanwhile, are holding rollout meetings for parents and are urging parents to join the web site, where they can see the same data as the teachers, including whether little Bobby is really working on math up in his bedroom as he says he is. “It’s not just training the teachers; it’s training the community,” Goines said.

That training shouldn’t end with just learning to manipulate the data, though. It also means learning how teachers can use their time differently, how to work with youngsters who have different abilities, and how to blend Khan into the curriculum, not substitute for it, everyone told me. Cadwell and Negash said that they find gaps in the Khan curriculum, and that it isn’t completely aligned with either California or core-curriculum standards, although Khan is adding lessons to fill the holes.

“You can’t just put a kid down in front of a computer,” Goines said, although the kids I saw in Julian’s, Cadwell’s, and Negash’s classes sure seemed to enjoy it.

June Kronholz is an Education Next contributing editor.

Behind the Headline
Skewed Perspective
Education Next | Winter 2005

The National Council on Teacher Quality has filed a lawsuit against the University of Wisconsin for failing to provide access to course syllabi for teacher preparation courses.  The NCTQ has sent open records requests to universities across the country for a review of teacher preparation programs that it is conducting in partnership with U.S. News and World Report. David Steiner evaluated course syllabi from required courses at ed schools  for an article that appeared in Ed Next in 2005.

“[Y]ou simply cannot fix America’s schools by `scaling’ charter schools. It won’t work. Charters schools offer proof of the concept that great teaching is a huge difference-maker, but charters can only absorb a tiny fraction of the nation’s 50 million public schoolchildren. Real reform has to go beyond charters – and it has to include the unions. That’s what Brill figured out.”

Wrong. Like many education establishmentarians, Nocera makes the mistake of confusing pedagogy and governance. The former—e.g. great teaching—is a hard nut to crack and Nocera is right to suggest, as does Brill, that there perhaps aren’t enough great teachers in the pipeline (or in charter schools) to educate all 50 million public school students.

But there is certainly no such impediment to `scaling’ charters. Every public school in America could be a charter school tomorrow if policymakers would allow it. Would that “fix” America’s schools? Not necessarily. But it would help.

The other problem with the scaling argument is that it assumes that big is beautiful—that no matter how successful you are, if you can’t replicate your methods of success, then your model won’t be useful to the American public school system. That is true only if you assume a governance structure like the one we now have: a system managed from above. The monolith that we now call public education is dominated by special interests, including unions, that are able to dictate education policy by keeping their hands on a few levers of control (mainly on Capitol Hill and in state capitals).

It is not so much that “reform has to go beyond charters” as it is that real reform must embrace choice—choice at the individual level. In fact, scaling up is really about scaling down.

The new MDRC study of New York City’s small schools seems to make the point perfectly. To quote from the document,

During the past decade, New York City undertook a district-wide high school reform that is perhaps unprecedented in its scope, scale, and pace. Between fall 2002 and fall 2008, the school district closed 23 large failing high schools (with graduation rates below 45 percent), opened 216 new small high schools (with different missions, structures, and student selection criteria), and implemented a centralized high school admissions process that assigns over 90 percent of the roughly 80,000 incoming ninth-graders each year based on their school preferences.

At the heart of this reform are 123 small, academically nonselective, public high schools. Each with approximately 100 students per grade in grades 9 through 12, these schools were created to serve some of the district’s most disadvantaged students and are located mainly in neighborhoods where large failing high schools had been closed. MDRC researchers call them “small schools of choice” (SSCs) because of their small size and the fact that they do not screen students based on their academic backgrounds.

And, according to MDRC, these schools worked. Graduation rates were nearly 10 points higher in the small schools. And the positive effects were spread out to all subgroups, including minorities and the poor.

“Are these small schools perfect?” writes Joe Williams in a New York Post op-ed. “Of course not. In fact, the MDRC report adds to the growing evidence that, while New York City is graduating students at a higher rate than a decade ago, most of these kids are still not ready for college…. Bloomberg and his would-be successors should read the MRDC report from the vantage point of those whose job it is to drive change.”

Williams is right to call out “those whose job it is to drive change.” But that change, as the dramatic restructuring of the system that MDRC studied in New York City shows, must be bold. And it suggests that the question we must ask is “How do you `scale up’ small?”

- Peter Meyer

This post was originally published on the Fordham Institute’s Board’s Eye View

Behind the Headline
Obama’s NCLB Waivers: Are they necessary or illegal?
Education Next | Summer 2011

In the Richmond Times- Dispatch, Andy Rotherham and Angela Ciolfi critique the NCLB waiver application submitted by Virginia, complaining that it would fail to hold schools accountable for narrowing the achievement gap. In the Winter 2012 issue of Ed Next, Rotherham and Martha Derthick debate whether President Obama was right to offer states conditional waivers releasing them from some requirements of NCLB.

Or so they say, until push comes to shove. And then many of the players discover that they don’t like flexibility after all. They want to change federal policy in theory but not in reality.

It’s not just the President’s bizarre State of the Union request that states raise their compulsory attendance age to 18. (Perhaps that would help to trim the dropout rate, though the studies suggesting so rely on 40-year-old data.) I’m assuming that he was merely using the bully pulpit to promote a pet idea, not suggesting a new federal mandate.

No, I’m referring to the Army of the Potomac’s reaction to John Kline’s ESEA proposal and to Chairman Tom Harkin’s and Rep. George Miller’s response to the waiver requests put forward by several states.

In both cases, we hear somber leaders express concern that the moves will “undermine the core American value of equality of opportunity in education” and move away from “the critically important gains for our students’ civil rights and educational equity that NCLB achieved.”

So what’s the beef? See this from Harkin’s and Miller’s letter to Arne Duncan about the waiver requests:

In its analysis of the eleven waiver applications, the Center on Education Policy found that nine state applicants will base almost all accountability decisions on the achievement of only two students groups; i.e., all students and a “disadvantaged” student group or “super subgroup.” We fear that putting students with disabilities, English language learners and minority students into one “super subgroup” will mask the individual needs of these distinct student subgroups and will prevent schools from tailoring interventions appropriately. Therefore, we urge you to consider each applicant’s subgroup performance measures as significant and coherent components of overall accountability and require applicants to articulate meaningful and effective interventions for schools that are low performing or have subgroups that fail to progress.”

There’s a name for what Harkin and Miller are calling for: the Adequate Yearly Progress system. This is exactly what we’ve got now! So they seem to be saying: “We favor flexibility, as long as nothing really changes.”

There are two debates going on here. One is over the policy specifics; for example, are “super subgroups” a good idea? The second is over power and control: Who should get to decide if super subgroups are a reasonable way forward? If your answer to the second question is “Uncle Sam” then you’re not really a proponent of state flexibility after all. Lefty reformers, civil rights groups, Chairman Harkin, and Representative Miller: I’m talking about you.

-Mike Petrilli

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

The longer, more informative, and more alarming of the articles was an extensive account of why Apple’s iPhones are now made in China rather than the U.S. The short version is that “the flexibility, diligence and industrial skills of foreign workers have so outpaced their American counterparts that ‘Made in the U.S.A.’ is no longer a viable option for most Apple products.”

Flexibility, diligence, and industrial skills. Hold that thought.

The second article previewed the President’s speech which, as predicted, focused heavily on the U.S. economy and ways to boost it. His proposals do, in fact, include some education and job-training initiatives, as well as macro-economic policies, several of them noted in the speech itself. But mostly what Mr. Obama did was trot out a bunch of government programs and rattle on about ways by which Uncle Sam should enhance the “fairness” of the U.S. economy, particularly its income distribution. (He used the words “fair,” “fairness,” or “unfair” eight times.) He didn’t talk about its efficiency, productivity, or industriousness. And his only reference to “hard work” was historical. Simply put, although the President spoke of restoring millions of manufacturing jobs to U.S. shores, it’s hard to picture Apple (or similar firms) responding, since the steps he has in mind to attract them are federal spending and tax programs and have little to do with the “diligence” of American workers, only a bit to do with “flexibility,” and a bit more to do with “skills.”

He deserves some credit on the skills front—a word he used five times. Instead of calling for everyone to complete college, for example, he called on community colleges and private firms—duly mustered and disciplined by Uncle Sam, of course!—to equip two million people with usable, job-related skills.

He addressed K-12 education, too, but only on the “compulsory attendance” and “teacher quality” fronts—and while the latter hinted at merit pay and nodded at schools having the flexibility to “replace” instructors “who just aren’t helping kids learn”—mostly what he did was urge more money for schools-as-we-know-them and those who teach in their classrooms.

As for “flexibility” and “diligence,” qualities important to Apple and myriad other firms—and qualities they’re apparently finding abroad—you didn’t hear anything about those in the State of the Union. My ear heard the opposite, actually, for all the talk about federal programs and tax policies enhancing “fairness” will exacerbate our nanny-state tendencies, our habit of assuming that government will provide and that we need not redouble our efforts to provide for ourselves. Instead, the President signaled that we should resent those who are better provided-for—and look to Washington to tug the levers of “fairness.”

Tuesday’s address was, in this regard, a reprise of Mr. Obama’s widely noted remarks in Osawatomie, Kansas last month. Here’s an excerpt. (You can find the whole speech at the White House website.) He began by recalling the values of what Tom Brokaw termed “the greatest generation” before fast-forwarding to the present.

Today, we’re still home to the world’s most productive workers. We’re still home to the world’s most innovative companies. But for most Americans, the basic bargain that made this country great has eroded. Long before the recession hit, hard work stopped paying off for too many people.

Read that last sentence again: “Hard work stopped paying off for too many people.”

What lesson were his listeners supposed to draw? Seems pretty clear to me: under the current rules, there’s no point in working hard. It doesn’t “pay off.”

Then read Charles Murray’s fine essay in Saturday’s Wall Street Journal (derived from a forthcoming book): “The New American Divide.” Murray contends that “the American way of life” has decayed and what he calls “the new lower class” (pretty much what we used to call the “working class”) has lost the value of “industriousness.”

Now put them together. Murray says that core value has badly eroded. The President says it no longer “pays off”—and the government must do something to foster “fairness.” And Apple says it has moved production to China because Americans lack “diligence.”

What has any of this to do with our schools? Could K-12 education contribute significantly to a revival of industriousness in the U.S. population? Could it lead our young people to believe—and act on the belief—that hard work does pay off? I believe so, even if Mr. Obama didn’t mention it, but to do this our teachers and policymakers will need to reverse now-widespread practices and beliefs. They will, to begin, have to reward rather than discourage hard work and actual achievement. They will have to make kids work harder than most are accustomed to doing. They will even have to foster competition and honor winners—while helping others to boost their own performance.

Today, as has been widely noted, U.S. schools and educators discourage competition in favor of “collaboration” (which has its place, albeit a limited one). They have short days and years and don’t assign much homework. They resist singling anyone out as better than others; hence the animus toward valedictorians and such. They generally engage in social promotion lest youngsters “fall behind their peers.”(Observe what a big deal it is when a state insists that children must be able, say, to read by the end of third grade in order to move on to fourth.) They inflate grades. They lower “proficiency” cut scores. And in the name of self-esteem-building they praise everybody all the time no matter whether the fruits of a student’s efforts are worth praising or not.

Stanford’s Carol Dweck and UVa’s Dan Willingham are leaders within a growing band of serious education scholars who have determined that the opposite is closer to the truth: unearned praise and unwarranted self-esteem are bad for kids. Instead, teachers should praise and reward students for genuine accomplishment—and the harder kids work and the more they learn and accomplish the more praise (and reward) they earn.

Will that make them more “diligent” and “industrious”? Maybe. It might also boost their knowledge and skills. It may even make the U.S. more competitive—and grow the economy by making firms likelier to locate jobs in this country. In the long run, it will boost opportunity and maybe even “fairness” within our economy. It won’t be enough to reverse what Charles Murray views as a vast deterioration of the civic culture in general. But I’ll wager that it would do more good than another federal program—or a war of resentment over income distribution.

-Chester E. Finn, Jr.

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

Behind the Headline
School Inflation
Education Next | Fall 2004

A new MDRC study finds that students attending small high schools (with fewer than 100 students per grade) were more likely to graduate than students who attended larger schools.  In an article that appeared in Ed Next in 2004, Chris Berry traced the decline and rebirth of small schools in America and looked at the impact of smaller schools on students’ future earnings over the course of the 20^th century, as the movement to consolidate small schools into larger schools grew.

Behind the Headline
Valuing Teachers
Education Next | Summer 2011

In his State of the Union address last night, President Obama discussed the impact good teachers can have on their students’ future productivity, stating “We know a good teacher can increase the lifetime income of a classroom by over $250,000.” In the Summer 2011 issue of Education Next, Eric Hanushek analyzed the impact of good teachers on the lifetime incomes of their students.

In the first round, the state supreme court in 2004 struck down a statewide voucher program enacted by the legislature for the benefit of students in low-performing districts. The plaintiffs alleged, and the court narrowly concurred, that the program violated a provision of the state constitution that school boards “shall have control of instruction in the public schools of their respective districts.” The court held that to require school districts to turn over some locally raised money to private schools, as the law did, offended that provision.

This seemed to suggest that a program adopted by a local school board might survive, and a test recently emerged. Suburban areas with high-performing school districts have shown little support for vouchers, so it was surprising to have the first locally enacted voucher program come from Douglas County, a Denver suburb with one of the highest median incomes in the country. School choice advocates, however, had targeted the district in school board elections. As a result, the normally nonpartisan elections turned partisan in 2009, when the Republican Party endorsed a slate of four candidates and handily defeated candidates endorsed by the teachers union.

Those efforts bore fruit in March 2011 when Douglas County’s school board unanimously approved the Pilot Choice Scholarship Program. Through this plan, any student who had been enrolled in district schools for at least one year could apply for a voucher of approximately $4,600, equal to 75 percent of state per-pupil funding, to attend a “partner” private school, with the school district keeping the other 25 percent. Religious schools would not have to waive admission requirements to participate, but would have to offer an exemption for voucher students who wished to be excused from religious services. Of the 19 initial partner schools, 14 were sectarian. The school board capped the program at 500 students but expected it to expand. As the third-largest district in the state, Douglas County serves more than 61,000 students.

The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), along with Americans United for Separation of Church and State, sued, citing a host of constitutional offenses, including violating the ban on support for private schools and churches (the state’s Blaine Amendment), the ban on religious tests, the guarantee of religious freedom, the uniformity requirement in the education clause, the prohibition on support for private institutions, and, for good measure, the guarantee of local control. After a three-day hearing in August, state district court judge Michael Martinez granted the ACLU’s request for a permanent injunction. Clearly alarmed by the religious instruction that would occur at religious schools—“not only is the risk of religion intruding into the secular educational function great, that risk is inevitable and unavoidable due to the very structure of the Scholarship Program”—Judge Martinez accepted nearly all of the ACLU’s claims.

Voucher supporters lined up to assist Douglas County in defending the program. The Daniels Fund, a well-regarded and influential foundation in the Rocky Mountain region, pledged $530,000 for legal expenses. In addition, the libertarian Institute for Justice filed an appeal on behalf of several families whose children were granted vouchers.

While the ACLU obviously has a grab bag of provisions at its disposal going forward, one risk is its reliance on the state Blaine Amendment. If state courts rule that the amendment requires that religious students and institutions be treated differently than secular ones, as Martinez’s ruling seems to imply, it could potentially raise a federal challenge under both the First and Fourteenth Amendments as a violation of free exercise and equal protection. The most promising outcome for Douglas County would be for Mickey Mouse to meet the U.S. Constitution.

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

Yes, answers Roland Fryer in an amazing study released this month.  Based on earlier work, he identified 5 features of charter schools that helped them produce strong results: “increased time, better human capital, more student-level differentiation, frequent use of data to inform instruction, and a culture of high expectations.”  Fryer then somehow convinced the superintendent and school board in Houston to pursue these five reforms in a serious way in 9 struggling traditional public schools. (CORRECTION — the Houston folks report that they were eager to pursue some promising reforms and required no convincing.  They should be commended for that.) Here, in brief, is what they did:

To increase time on task, the school day was lengthened one hour and the school year was lengthened ten days. This amounts to 21 percent more school than students in these schools obtained in the year pre-treatment and roughly the same as successful charter schools in New York City. In addition, students were strongly encouraged and even incentivized to attend classes on Saturday. In an effort to significantly alter the human capital in the nine schools, 100 percent of principals, 30 percent of other administrators, and 52 percent of teachers were removed and replaced with individuals who possessed the values and beliefs consistent with an achievement-driven mantra and, wherever possible, a demonstrated record of achievement. To enhance student-level differentiation, we supplied all sixth and ninth graders with a math tutor in a two-on-one setting and provided an extra dose of reading or math instruction to students in other grades who had previously performed below grade level. This model was adapted from the MATCH school in Boston – a charter school that largely adheres to the methods described in Dobbie and Fryer (2011b). In order to help teachers use interim data on student performance to guide and inform instructional practice, we required schools to administer interim assessments every three to four weeks and provided schools with three cumulative benchmarks assessments, as well as assistance in analyzing and presenting student performance on these assessments. Finally, to instill a culture of high expectations and college access for all students, we started by setting clear expectations for school leadership. Schools were provided with a rubric for the school and classroom environment and were expected to implement school-parent-student contracts. Specific student performance goals were set for each school and the principal was held accountable for these goals.

And the result:

In the grade/subject areas in which we implemented all five policies described in Dobbie and Fryer (2011b) – sixth and ninth grade math – the increase in student achievement is dramatic. Relative to students who attended comparison schools, sixth grade math scores increased 0.484σ (.097) in one year. In seventh and eighth grades, the treatment effect in math is 0.125σ (.065) and is statistically significant. A very similar pattern emerges in high school math: large effects in ninth grade and a more modest but statistically significant effect in tenth and eleventh grade, which suggest that two-on-one tutoring is particularly effective. The results in reading exhibit a different pattern. If anything, the reading scores demonstrate a slight decrease in middle school, though not statistically significant, and a modest increase in high school. Impacts on attendance – which are positive and statistically insignificant – are difficult to interpret given the longer school day and longer school year.

Strikingly, both the magnitude of the increase in math and the muted effect for reading are consistent with the results of successful charter schools. Taking the treatment effects at face value, treatment schools in Houston would rank third out of twelve in math and fifth out of twelve in reading among charter schools in NYC with statistically significant positive results in the sample analyzed in Dobbie and Fryer (2011b).

Using data from the National Student Clearinghouse, we investigate treatment effects on two college outcomes: whether a student enrolled in any college (extensive margin) and whether they chose a four-year college, conditional on enrolling in any college (intensive margin). Calculated at the mean, students are 6.2 percentage points less likely to attend college, though the effect is not statistically significant. Conditional on attending college, however, treatment students are 17.7 percentage points more likely to enroll in a four-year institution, relative to a mean of 46% in comparison schools – a 40% increase.

Traditional public schools can get results like a KIPP school without having to actually become KIPP schools. They just have to imitate a few of the key features employed by KIPP and other successful charter schools. This is incredibly encouraging news. It means that traditional public schools are really capable of making significant progress if only they become more open to learning from successful charter schools. They can make that progress without having to cure poverty and all other social ills (although I’m sure that would be nice too).

Of course, there are serious concerns about bringing these reforms to scale, which Fryer considers in his conclusion. He dismisses union opposition as a serious obstacle based on the fact that the unionized school system in Denver is pursuing a similar reform strategy. I’m not so easily convinced that unions nationwide will jump aboard a plan that involves huge turnover in staffing and significantly more hours and days per year. Cost is another barrier to bringing this reform strategy to scale, but he notes that the marginal cost is only $1,837 per student and the rate of return on that investment would be roughly 20%.

But the most serious concerns seem to be fidelity to implementation and shortages of quality labor. We could all be heart surgeons if we just did what heart surgeons do. But there are only so many people capable of doing that work and not every office building can be re-organized as a hospital. Then again, successful teaching isn’t exactly heart surgery (although it can be just about as important), so perhaps there is real hope of bringing this to scale. We won’t know until we try it in more places with more schools.

- Jay Greene

Behind the Headline
Academic Value of Non-Academics
Education Next | Winter 2012

A school district in Texas that has failed to make AYP for 3 years has decided to suspend its athletic programs in an effort to turn around student performance and attendance rates. In an article that appears in the Winter 2012 issue of Ed Next, June Kronholz examines the link between afterschool activities and graduating from high school, going to college, and becoming a responsible citizen.

Behind the Headline:
All A Twitter About Education
Education Next | Fall 2011

An article in the Washington Post looks at how a growing number of teachers are using Twitter to improve their craft by reaching beyond the boundaries of their schools to connect with colleagues across the country and around the world. An article in the Fall 2011 issue of Ed Next included a ranking of the top 25 educator tweeters, as ranked by Klout scores.

We shall see tomorrow night, but this is already looking to be the Year of the Education Governor. With NCLB being pummeled from left and right and Race to the Top in suspended inanimation, the feds seem unusually quiet, if not on the run.

In an essay this morning in The Hill, Juan Williams, who is hosting a new video documentary about how Chicago mayor Rahm Emanuel is “risking his political life by fighting the city’s teachers’ union to improve schools,” says “there is little urgency [about education reform] in the halls of Congress.”

And New York Times education columnist Michael Winerip, also this morning, calls attention to the incredibly difficult work of figuring out how to evaluate the 175,000 teachers in New York State, 79 percent of the state’s total teacher population, who will be subject to the new RTTT-driven rules. He points out that the state education department, its budget slashed by 40 percent in the last few years, won’t be able to do much, according to state commissioner John King, except “provide guidance and models.” Concludes Winerip, “the ultimate responsibility for monitoring would be left to principals, superintendents and school boards.”

Kathleen explored the implementation challenges for the Common Core last week, remaining cautiously optimistic that “states are taking CCSS implementation seriously and that they are working to reorient their education systems to the new standards.”

The point seems to be that, ready or not, education reform is coming back to the states.

I’ve covered Andrew Cuomo’s bold moves in New York. And RiShawn Biddle is of the opinion that governors can make a difference: “No matter what happens, Cuomo is showing, as outgoing colleague Mitch Daniels has done in Indiana, that governors without direct oversight of education can actually foster and sustain reform.”

Here is a quick list of links to some of what the nation’s governors are saying about education:

• Louisiana. Bobby Jindal is shaking things up in the Bayou State. See Biddle’s essay referenced above and his State of the State address here. (Also, here.)

• Virginia. Governor Bob McDonnell released his education agenda (press release /Washington Post), including proposals for earlier school start dates and ending tenure. Valerie Strauss blogged her opposition.

• New Jersey. Chris Christie says that he can increase education spending while simultaneously reducing taxes in the Garden State. (Also, see here.)

• Florida. Rick Scott called for $1 billion more in education funds in his State of the State address.

• Kansas. Governor Sam Brownback proposed giving high schools $1,000 credit for every student who earns a technical education certificate.

• Colorado. It looks like the Rockies will take on teacher tenure reform.

• California. In his State of the State address, former “Governor Moonbeam” Jerry Brown, facing a huge budget deficit, called for reducing standardized testing and the federal and state role in local education.

• Wisconsin. Scott Walker proposed ed reforms focused on teacher evaluation and improving literacy skills, but his attentions may be turned to winning a recall vote.

It promises to be an exciting year.

- Peter Meyer

This post was originally published on the Fordham Institute’s Board’s Eye View

We’ve already released the list of the most-read articles on the Education Next website in 2011. Today we bring you the 20 most-read blog entries from 2011. Happy reading!

20. Florida’s Class Size Amendment: Did It Help Students Learn?
by Paul E. Peterson

Paul Peterson summarizes a study of the impact of a class size reduction amendment in Florida.  The study found no detectable benefit from mandated class size reduction–either for students in general or for any student subgroup, racial, ethnic, or level of disadvantage.  Telling schools they must reduce class size—which is very expensive–yields no benefit, the study concludes.

19. The Case for Paying Most Teachers the Same
by Michael Petrilli

In professions like law and medicine, new hires get paid significantly less at the start, then pay rises rapidly–as soon as employees boost their effectiveness and productivity from on-the-job experience. In education, on the other hand, pay rises slowly, even though teachers’ effectiveness plateaus after as little as two (and no more than five) years on the job. So maybe we should pay young teachers more, and older teachers less, than we do now, argues Mike Petrilli. In other words, we should make their pay more alike.

18. Jeb Bush, Melinda Gates, Sal Khan and the Coming Digital Learning Battle
by Paul E. Peterson

Paul Peterson warns that we can expect a strenuous, highly politicized debate over the way in which digital learning should be provided:  “blended” learning that takes place within public school classrooms under the tutelage of a highly qualified teacher vs. “online” learning in which students are offered a choice of providers that include not only the blended classroom but also those who offer products exclusively online. “School districts and teacher unions can be expected to fight publicly funded online learning that offers students a choice of taking courses outside their local district school.”

17. The Education School Masters Degree Factory
by Paul E. Peterson

Paul Peterson describes a study finding that teachers in Florida with an M. A. degree were no more effective, on average, than teachers who lacked such a degree. He notes “One of the most straightforward ways school districts can obtain cost savings without harming students is to eliminate extra pay for teachers who earn a master’s degree.”

16. Is the Charter School Movement Stuck in a Rut?
by Chester E. Finn Jr.

“As the U.S. charter fleet sails past the 5,000-school and two-decade markers, there is reason to worry that it’s getting complacent, unimaginative, and self-interested,” wrote Chester Finn. “This wouldn’t be the first “reform movement” in the history of education to turn into an ideologically rigid, pull-up-the-gangplank-now-that-we’re-aboard sort of vested interest. But it would still be a great pity.”

15. Ed Next: Poll Top Books of the Decade
by Education Next

To mark Education Next’s 10^th anniversary, we asked readers to help us identify the best books of the past decade. We selected 41 books as contenders and asked readers to vote for the top three. In January 2011, we announced the results: Diane Ravitch’s Death and Life of the Great American School System came in first, E.D. Hirsch’s The Knowledge Deficit came in second, and Linda Darling-Hammond’s The Flat World and Education came in third.

14. The Enormous Economic Returns to a Good Teacher
by Eric Hanushek

Eric Hanushek explains a new report that calculates the value of a good (and a bad) teacher by tracing the economic ramifications of differences in student achievement.  “A teacher at the 85^th percentile … with a class of 20 students generates over $400,000 in economic benefits, compared to an average teacher, for each year that she gets such achievement gains.”

13. No Matter How Hard You Try, You Cannot Deny US Math Performance is Terrible
by Paul E. Peterson

Paul Peterson defends a study he authored with Eric Hanushek and Ludger Woessman that found that the United States ranked 31st in the world at bringing 15 year olds up to an advanced level of math achievement.

12. Khan Academy Not Overhyped, Just Missing a Key Ingredient – Excellent Live Teachers
by Bryan Hassel and Emily Ayscue Hassel

Bryan Hassel and Emily Ayscue Hassel note that most of the hype about the Khan Academy is ignoring its potential to enable the best in-person teachers to reach more students with personalized instruction. “This dual power of technology –both to extend reach of super-instructors boundlessly (no more low-value homework and large-group time) AND to allow reorganization of great on-site teacher time – is worth hyping.”

11. Steve Jobs on Education
by Jay P. Greene

After Steve Jobs died in October, Jay Greene reviewed selected remarks from Jobs on education, including his criticism of teachers unions and his support for vouchers.

10. With a Math Proficiency Rate of 32 Percent, U.S. Ranks Number 32
by Paul E. Peterson

Paul Peterson reports on the results of a new study examining the performance of U.S. students in mathematics compared to students in other countries. That information is obtained by comparing student performance on NAEP math and reading tests with the performance of students from across the world on similar examinations.  Only thirty-two percent of U.S. students in the class of 2011 were proficient in mathematics when they were in 8^th grade, placing the United States in 32nd place among the 65 nations of the world that participated in PISA.

9. Nobody Deserves Tenure
by Checker E. Finn Jr.

Chester Finn traces the history of tenure and explains why it makes no sense for K-12 teachers to have it. “it didn’t come down from Mount Sinai—and there are plenty of other ways to safeguard public employees from wrongful dismissal besides guaranteeing them lifetime jobs.”

8. Teacher Accountability: The Next Front in the School Reform Wars
by Michael Petrilli

Mike Petrilli argues that school reformers should focus on teacher tenure reform rather than choice and accountability “After twenty years it’s become clear that choice and accountability are necessary but not sufficient to create the conditions for high-performing systems. They were too indirect; now it’s time to tackle teacher tenure and evaluations head-on. And that means fighting the unions in committee rooms in state capitals.”

7. The Best Books of the Past Decade According to Ed Next Readers
by Paul E. Peterson

In January 2011, after we announced the results of our “Best Books of the Decade” poll, Paul Peterson reflected on the results. Readers had been invited to vote for the three best education policy books of the past decade from a list of 41 books. Over 4000 votes were cast. Diane Ravitch’s The Death and Life of the Great American School System won the poll by a wide margin, pulling in 22 % of the total.

6. E.D. Hirsch, Cultural Literacy and American Democracy
by Marci Kanstoroom

Marci Kanstoroom commented on the announcement that Core Knowledge would align its curriculum with the Common Core standards, and considered the claim by E.D. Hirsch that the standards have the potential to revolutionize reading instruction by embracing the idea that language mastery requires knowledge of history, science, music and fine arts. In a new book, Hirsch explicitly connected the idea of cultural literacy with the civic role of schools.

5. Why Digital Learning will Liberate Teachers
by Michael B. Horn

Michael Horn detailed the many different ways the growth of digital learning will benefit teachers. “The bottom line? Digital learning should liberate teachers’ lives by making the opportunities for success far more frequent, and the opportunities for teachers to pursue what they like and their passions about the teaching profession far more possible.”

4. Is Anybody Up for Defending the Common Core Math Standards?
by Frederick Hess

After trying without success to find an author for an Ed Next article defending the Common Core math standards, Rick Hess took his assignment to the blog, wondering why nobody involved with the standards was willing to make the case for their rigor and quality. “The notion that Common Core proponents needn’t make their case is an affront to democratic values,” he wrote.

3. Are Wisconsin Schools Better than Those in Texas?
by Paul E. Peterson

While debates raged last spring about the prospect of deep spending cuts (and limitations on collective bargaining rights) in Wisconsin, Paul Peterson took aim at a column by Paul Krugman in the New York Times that argued that low-spending Texas has rotten schools. Peterson responded to Krugman by pointing to data showing that if you look at the test scores of each ethnic group separately, Texas’ schools are doing better than Wisconsin’s.

2. Compared to Other Countries, Does the United States Really Do That Badly in Math?
by Eric Hanushek and Paul Peterson

Paul Peterson and Eric Hanushek investigated why U.S. students scored in the bottom half of countries in math on PISA but in the top 10 in math on TIMSS. They found that many industrialized countries that participated in PISA did not participate in TIMSS, which also includes many countries from the developing world.

1. Eighth-Grade Students Learn More Through Direct Instruction
by Paul E. Peterson

Paul Peterson described a study that found that students learned more math and science when their teachers spent more time on lecture-style instruction and less time working on problems.

The topic of collaboration between districts and charter schools inevitably leads to Cold War imagery. Are we talking about appeasement? Détente? Trust but verify?

Like the ideal of world peace, it’s easy to agree about cooperation—moving from a “battleground” to “common ground,” as one Gates Foundation official put it. But how can we ensure that cooperation doesn’t turn into an excuse to co-opt the charter school movement?

The key, it seems to me, is for charters to come to the negotiating table as equal powers.

To be sure, some enlightened superintendents and school boards will welcome charter school engagement for all the right reasons. But local politics being what they are, let’s not take goodwill as a given. Through a prism of Realpolitik (!), the key to making partnerships work is even strength on either side.

What that implies is that long-lasting charter-district collaborations are only likely to work in locales where charter schools boast serious market share and significant political power. So before charter schools sit down to hammer out a deal, they should:

• Get to scale. If districts are losing twenty or thirty percent of their students (and funding) to charters, that’s enough to change political dynamics. Much less than that, and districts (and unions) can mostly look the other way.
• Build a political base. This is largely connected to my first point; charter school parents, if organized, can be a powerful voting bloc. But other actions are key, too. The first is to put well-connected people on charter school boards—people willing to go to bat for the movement. And the second is to make sure that local charter schools—or at least some of them—serve the children of the affluent. These parents are particularly effective at playing political hardball.
• Focus on quality. Bad charter schools have little to offer school districts. They don’t have innovations to share, best practices to teach, or techniques to replicate. Great charter schools, however, can be important resources. By showing what’s possible, they can put pressure on unions to remove barriers that keep district schools from following suit. They can share hard-earned lessons. And in some states, at least, they can lend their high test scores to districts’ performance metrics. (Ohio law allows for this, for example.)

Until these three conditions are met, charter schools will always play David to the district Goliath. Collaboration is great, but only when the local charter school movement is ready for it.

- Michael Petrilli

This post was originally published on the Fordham Institute’s Flypaper Blog

It is, indeed, a modern platitude that “we must do something to improve Americans’ knowledge of civics and government.”

But there is a problem in civics education, a sort of dividing line, about which there is far less agreement across society. On one side, we find an emphasis on infusing kids with basic knowledge about government, an understanding of the merits (as well as the shortcomings) of American democracy, and a sense of what can still be called patriotism: the belief that this country and its values need to be defended. (Stanford’s Bill Damon does a terrific job of elaborating on this viewpoint in his recent book, Failing Liberty 101.)

On the other side, we find much greater emphasis on civic participation and activism, on voluntarism and “service learning,” and on what is often termed “collective decision making” (or problem solving) and “democratic engagement,” which often boils down into the communitarian view that issues facing society are best dealt with through group action, by people joining hands and working together rather than through the political process.

I will admit, after watching the antics of Congress, many state legislatures, and the current GOP presidential candidates, that American society would benefit from more “working together” than our elected officials have displayed of late. (And I keep recalling the late David Broder’s remark that the death of Ted Kennedy marked the passing of the last of the Senate’s great “deal makers,” willing to compromise and work across party lines to accomplish something worthwhile, even if it wasn’t everything that either party wanted.)

Still and all, schools have a special responsibility to the young people in their care, which is to be exceptionally careful about providing lessons and activities of a political nature or enlisting them in adult causes, however worthy some may deem them. And Uncle Sam has a special responsibility not to “take sides” in the big debate—or, if it does, to come down on the side of patriotism. Unfortunately, a new report out of the U.S. Department of Education, one that appears to enjoy Arne Duncan’s strong personal backing, suggests that the executive branch is tilting toward the other side.

One is reminded, without pleasure, the ruckus that President Obama stirred up with his first back-to-school address in 2009—and the controversial “lesson plan” that the Education Department prepared to accompany it.

The “democratic engagement” faction within civics education has recently re-energized—even without Mr. Duncan’s help—and is pressing hard on schools to push kids into activism. You can see a vivid example of this in a recent publication called (cutely) A Crucible Moment and billed as “a national call to action.” Although it’s primarily aimed at colleges and universities, its authors make plain that its message is meant for primary and secondary schools, too. (Those authors, however, include absolutely nobody from the K-12 world.)

The publication sets forth a quintet of “essential actions,” among which I find three at least a bit troublesome, particularly when applied to compulsory public education of impressionable children rather than the voluntary education of young adults:

• “Advance a contemporary, comprehensive framework for civic learning—embracing U.S. and global interdependence—that includes historic and modern understandings of democratic values, capacities to engage diverse perspectives and people, and commitment to collective civic problem solving.”Global interdependence? Collective civic problem solving?
• “Capitalize upon the interdependent responsibilities of K–12 and higher education to foster progressively higher levels of civic knowledge, skills, examined values, and action as expectations for every student.” Values examined by whom? What sort of “action”?
• “Expand the number of robust, generative civic partnerships and alliances, locally, nationally, and globally to address common problems, empower people to act, strengthen communities and nations, and generate new frontiers of knowledge.” What exactly are “generative civic partnerships” and who in particular is supposed to be “empowered” to do what?

Are you with me so far? But you may be thinking that this is all kind of academic and irrelevant, isn’t it, just one more pious commission report?

Well, it would be, but for one big attention-getter: Uncle Sam putting his thumb on this side of the civics-education scale.

Check out the Education Department’s brand-new official publication, Advancing Civic Learning and Engagement in Democracy: A Road Map and Call to Action. Although this thirty-pager comes out of the Department’s postsecondary wing and is, once again, meant mostly for higher education, it, too, makes no real age-specific distinctions and explicitly urges the nation’s K-12 schools to, for example, “both expand and transform their approach to civic learning and democratic engagement, rather than engage in tinkering at the margins. At no school, college, or university should students graduate with less civic literacy and engagement than when they arrived.”

Duncan himself made a pretty big deal of this at a recent White House conference where he remarked that “Unlike traditional civic education, civic learning and democratic engagement 2.0 is more ambitious and participatory than in the past. To paraphrase Justice O’Connor, the new generation of civic education initiatives move beyond your ‘grandmother’s civics’ to what has been labeled ‘action civics.’”

Hmm, “action civics”?

To be sure, most of what the Department proposes to do itself in this realm is consistent either with longstanding federal practice (e.g. research, data) or with ingrained Obama-administration priorities (e.g. “public-private partnerships”). But there are policy hints that go farther, such as suggesting that the forthcoming ESEA/NCLB reauthorization should include a program to “assist states, local education agencies, and nonprofits in developing implementing, evaluating, and replicating evidence-based programs that contribute to a well-rounded education—including civics, government, economics, and history. Other disciplines included in the program could incorporate evidence-based civic learning and democratic engagement approaches—such as service-learning.”

Read that last bit again and ask yourself if this is really a proper federal role in K-12 education, keeping in mind that the kids to be affected probably cannot even name the mayor of their town or the governor of their state, nor have much idea what political parties are and how legislation gets passed (or not).

It’s well and good for the Education Department to seek a broadening of the K-12 curriculum and an overdue consolidation of too many discipline-specific curriculum-related programs into a single block grant. It’s not acceptable, however, for them to push “action civics” on our nation’s schools.

-Chester E. Finn Jr

This post was originally published in the Fordham Institute’s Education Gadfly Weekly

Behind the Headline
The Flipped Classroom
Education Next | Winter 2012

Today on CNN, a principal from Clinton Township, Michigan discussed his school’s use of the flipped classroom to boost the achievement of failing students. In the Winter 2012 issue of EdNext, Bill Tucker discussed the merits of this method, which reorganizes teaching time so that students work through problems with material in class and view recorded lectures on the lesson material at home.

Watch Greg Green discuss what is happening in his schools in the interview below.

A blog post by Mr Green on this topic is also available here.

Behind the Headline
In Low-Income Schools, Parents Want Teachers Who Teach
Education Next | Summer 2007

Since teacher effectiveness varies greatly within schools, even good schools, parents need to do more than just pick good schools for their kids; they should do whatever they can to get good teachers for their kids. So argues Andy Rotherham in a new article on Time.com. A study published in Ed Next found that well-off parents would choose different kinds of teachers for their kids than poor parents. “Parents in high-poverty schools strongly value a teacher’s ability to raise student achievement and appear indifferent to student satisfaction. In wealthier schools the results are reversed: parents most value a teacher’s ability to keep students happy,” the study concluded.

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

The Chetty study shows that over a ten year period, the payoff for the students of a very effective teacher amounts to a total of $2.5 million. The harm done by a very ineffective teacher is the same. So if we could replace a terrible teacher with a great one, it would be worth $5 million total for all those kids affected by the switch.  And losing a great teacher, only to hire a bad one, would cost the same.   That’s convincing evidence for those who want to limit the tenure of non-performing teachers while giving the excellent ones their just reward.

But unions want to protect teacher tenure and pay all teachers the same, regardless of effectiveness.  So denying the Chetty study is absolutely crucial.

Though he lacks the necessary econometric skills, Michael Winerip takes up the assignment, claiming the data on teacher effectiveness, which comes from student testing during the 1990s, is too old to tell us anything.

But to ascertain the impact of teaching on student earnings that occur much later in life, it is of course necessary to look at those educated in the 1990s.   Those students have now finished high school (or not), gone to college (or not), and entered the work force (or not).  For today’s students, no one has that information–for the obvious reason that they are still too young.

Aha! says Mr. Winerip. That is the fatal flaw. Back in the 1990s, when students took standardized tests, No Child Left Behind did not exist, so “whether those results are applicable to our post-2004 high-stakes world, we cannot tell.”

If we are to buy this argument, the data will always be too old to tell us anything.  To learn what works we have to wait twenty years, and when that data is available, it will be just too old.

But is it?  Why should we assume that the tests taken back in the 1990s were more accurate than the post-NCLB tests given in 2005, when both teachers and students took them more seriously.  Student performance is more accurately measured when students take a test seriously and when teachers make sure the students understand the testing procedures to be followed. All that is more likely when tests count for something.

So if Chetty and his colleagues could identify large impacts of effective teaching using data from the 1990s, his successors will probably find even larger impacts from more accurate information gathered in the first decade of the 21^st century.

Of course, I cannot prove that, but it is certainly more likely than Winerip’s counter-hypothesis.  While he admits the 1990s tests were accurate, he claims tests today no longer are.  Only if Winerip is willing to make the astounding claim that most teachers today are cheating deliberately and systematically does that assertion hold. Otherwise, we can characterize his argument in one word:  Silly.

- Paul Peterson

When former governors Jeb Bush and Bob Wise strode to the stage at the 2011 Excellence in Action National Summit on Education Reform in San Francisco last October, Sal Khan had just shown the 750 attendees his vision of the digital future.

Khan is the former hedge-fund analyst turned education rock star who started Khan Academy, a nonprofit that reaches millions through its free online lessons and assessments. Tools like these, said Khan, can catapult education from its time-based roots toward a competency-based model in which students progress upon actual learning—mastery—instead of seat time.

At the same conference a year earlier, the two former governors, cochairs of Digital Learning Now!, released “10 Elements of High Quality Digital Learning.” This year, Bush and Wise said they had evaluated each of the 50 states against the elements and explained the assessment methodology they had used: states were judged against 72 individual metrics. (Disclosure: I was one of many who provided feedback on how different states ranked on the criteria and serve as a “digital luminary” for the Digital Learning Now! effort.) Rather than announce where the states fell in the ranking, the governors gave the crowd a preview of their “Roadmap for Reform,” a guide to help states navigate different paths toward changing their online education policies (see sidebar).

With the road map in place, one might assume that moving into the future will be a straightforward exercise: the pieces are all there and model legislation is forthcoming, so state policymakers just have to enact the 10 Elements.

Of course, things are never so simple, and many questions remain.

Some questions reflect legitimate disagreement over Digital Learning Now!’s recommendations, even among those who agree with its broad vision. An obvious flash point will be the idea that states require students to take at least one college- or career-prep course online to earn a high school diploma.

One argument in favor of the requirement is that the outcome from taking an online course—gaining the skills to succeed in a digital environment and perhaps become more self-driven—is valuable in a world in which postsecondary education and workforce training are increasingly done online. Yet some see this as yet another input-based requirement in a system already overburdened with mandates, and in conflict with the spirit of digital learning: if the experience is so important or compelling, won’t students naturally flock to online learning, particularly given Digital Learning Now!’s recommendation that dollars follow students to the online course of their choice?

Another consideration is that elementary-school students don’t take courses—at least in the sense that high-school and middle-school students do—and so ensuring that elementary-school students have access to online learning at the course level seems to miss some fundamental principle. According to the state report cards, though, several states have achieved their goals at the elementary-school level, which only raises more questions.

Many of the pieces that Digital Learning Now! casts as critical to the endeavor are not yet in place, and therefore no one actually knows how they will work in practice. For example, Digital Learning Now! has hitched its wagon to the enactment of the Common Core standards and accompanying next-generation assessments that should be in place by 2014. Whether these assessments will facilitate a competency-based learning environment unburdened by time—or lock in today’s system—is yet to be seen. States may abandon the digital effort when they see the up-front costs of implementing an online assessment system. And if they do, what will that mean for a plan that rests on paying for achievement instead of seat time? Valid, reliable, authentic, on-demand, and independent assessments are critical to moving to a system based on student learning outcomes. What about those courses that don’t fall under the Common Core? Does an outcome-based funding system require extending the Common Core to all subject areas, or will states create unique standards for subject areas other than math and English? Could entrepreneurs develop competency badges for their students that the public would recognize as legitimate? How would such competency measures be accredited?

A number of operational challenges need to be worked out as well. Utah, for example, passed in the spring of 2011 Senate Bill 65, based on the 10 Elements of High Quality Digital Learning. Utah state senator Howard Stephenson declared that the bill ends the “tyranny of time and place” in education by allowing dollars to follow high school students to their online course of choice. The legislation calls for the state to withhold 50 percent of the provider’s fee until the student successfully completes the course.

Not surprisingly, the devil has been in the details. Crafting a viable funding model for online courses that makes sense for districts and providers alike has not been easy. Even more challenging is helping schools and districts transition to a world in which students still need some of the services they provide but take most of their courses online. How does funding work in this model? How do schools create the flexible schedules and offer the critical services—many of which may be nonacademic—to accommodate students’ varying needs? How do they transition to this service—or community center—model?

A related set of issues plagues the funding model from the state’s fiscal perspective. If students progress based on competency instead of cohort, the state should presumably reward schools and providers that help students progress faster. And Digital Learning Now! suggests that it should reward those providers that help students make the most growth. Set aside for a moment the demands on state data systems created by an outcome-based system that rewards growth and the fact that these systems are not in place today. If this policy were in place, the state would be on the hook for paying for a student who masters, say, 20 half-semester courses in a given year, rather than a more conventional 12 or 14. How will states deal with this fiscal uncertainty? Holding back students seems like a poor choice, as does punishing schools that can educate students faster with less revenue.

And what if a student masters the high school curriculum by the time she is 15, as many students undoubtedly could? Does she go to college? Does she take time off? Or does she stay in high school with her friends but take college courses? If so, who pays?

Suggesting that a road map document could tackle such complexity isn’t fair. But a glimpse into the exciting— and uncertain—future presented by Digital Learning Now! does raise many legitimate questions. That’s no reason to delay implementing its recommendations though; innovation is never perfect right out of the box. Iteration in practice is critical. With the “Roadmap” coming on the heels of Khan’s conference presentation, surely some in the audience wondered whether innovations yet to come might even clear away many of the familiar roadblocks.

Michael Horn is cofounder and executive director of education at Innosight Institute.

Behind the Headline
Fraud in the Lunchroom?
Education Next | Winter 2010

Senator Dick Durbin is asking the U.S. Department of Agriculture to do more to verify eligibility for the federal free and reduced price school lunch program after an investigation in Chicago found evidence of dozens of falsified applications. In an article that appeared in the Winter 2010 issue of Ed Next, David Bass called attention to the fact that the federal school lunch program does not do a good job of verifying student eligibility for the program, which has consequences beyond providing meals for hungry children.

HT: Alexander Russo

Behind the Headline
Home Schooling Goes Mainstream
Education Next | Winter 2009

Tim Tebow and his four siblings were home-schooled from kindergarten through high school by their parents, who were pioneers in the home-schooling movement, notes Valerie Strauss on her Answer Sheet blog at the Washington Post. In the Winter 2009 issue of Ed Next, Milton Gaither wrote about how home schooling has become mainstream.

To a large extent, much of the story of American education over these last fifty years is a story of the failure to understand the complexity of our country’s relationship to race and the deep consequences of integration.  As Jefferson said of slavery, “[W]e have the wolf by the ear, and we can neither hold him, nor safely let him go. Justice is in one scale, and self-preservation in the other.”**

Unfortunately, on the ground, in classrooms all over the country, the interplay between justice and self-preservation has not had happy results for African Americans.

I once asked another friend of mine, an African American, who grew up in a small northern town, whether, given the choice, he would send his children to an all-black school that scored high on the state tests or to an integrated school with low test scores. And he said, “the integrated school.”  He voted for self-preservation; he knew that the white kids, though less educated, would grow up to run the town and he wanted his children to know them.

These are some of the Hobbesian choices we have forced on African-Americans since the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision.  The outcomes for African Americans have been modest at best; catastrophic at worst.  Not just because of Brown, but because the integration that Brown demanded coincided with what has been a prolonged period of educational deterioration.

And this is why I am fond of quoting Martin Luther King’s cautionary words, from 1959, about Brown:

I favor integration on buses and in all areas of public accommodation and travel….  I am for equality. However, I think integration in our public schools is different. In that setting, you are dealing with one of the most important assets of an individual — the mind. White people view black people as inferior. A large percentage of them have a very low opinion of our race. People with such a low view of the black race cannot be given free rein and put in charge of the intellectual care and development of our boys and girls.

When I first read those words, in a 2004 New York Times book review by Samuel Freedman, it was a Eureka moment – to know that the great civil rights leader appreciated not just the significance of an education but the dangers of partnering with an education system that was still very much a white-run institution.  The facile assumption on the part of far too many integrationists is that all blacks needed to do was rub elbows with whites to get a good education.  To put it succinctly, King was right to be suspicious.

It was E.D. Hirsch who first articulated the pedagogical dangers of this short-sighted notion in his 1987 classic, Cultural Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know. Though he is one of the most misunderstood of our modern education theorists (most educators I know claim to have read him; few have), one of his great insights was the importance of the difference between a conservative education and the radical or liberal political outcomes that can flow from it.  As he wrote early in CL:

The claim that universal cultural literacy would have the effect of preserving the political and social status quo is paradoxical because in fact the traditional forms of literate culture are precisely the most effective instruments for political and social change.

This is one of the core findings of Hirsch’s impressive body of research these last twenty-five years.  And in those early pages of CL Hirsch proceeded with a wonderfully counterintuitive reading of The Black Panther, “a radical and revolutionary newspaper if ever this country had one.”  Indeed, after offering long excerpts from the paper, including a section from the Black Panther Party platform that quotes verbatim from the Declaration of Independence, though without attribution, Hirsch writes,

The writers for the The Black Panther had clearly received a rigorous traditional education in American history, in the Declaration of Independence, the Pledge of Allegiance to the Flag, the Gettysburg Address, and the Bible, to mention only some of the direct quotations and allusions in these passages. They also received rigorous traditional instruction in reading, writing, and spelling. I have not found a single misspelled word in the many pages of radical sentiment I have examined in that newspaper.

One can find many allusions to classic American and ancient texts in King’s own writing, testament to the “good” education he received.

Many years before I met Hirsch (for a Life magazine story I wrote in 1991), I stumbled upon a collection of essays by Richard Stern, a professor of English at the University of Chicago. (Pity the person who had to be in the same department as Saul Bellow.)  The collection was titled, The Books in Fred Hampton’s Apartment, after a short and brilliant essay on page 70 that recounted Stern’s visit to the Black Panther leader’s apartment just after he was gunned down by Chicago police in a predawn raid in December of 1969.  “Violent death does not make for good housekeeping,” Stern writes, “nor do lawyers, pathologists, tourists, and guides, but it was clear that this apartment had never been an idyllic place to either live or die.”   But Stern spotted the books, “scattered here and there in the apartment, some open, as if reading had been interrupted and were to be resumed the next day,” and noted, “to a bookish man the books changed almost everything.”  Stern writes,

The books in the Monroe Street apartment spoke of self-improvement, of purposive learning, of curiosity. Here are the titles I wrote down: Introduction to Embryology; Chabod, Machiavelli and the Renaissance; James T. Farrell, The Face of Time; Hannah Arendt, Imperialism (a paperback selection from The Origins of Totalitarianism); Black Rage; Ashley Montague, The Direction of Human Development; Linus Pauling, No More War; Vertebrates; Calculus; Struik, The Origins of American Science; American Political Dictionary….

The list – and Hampton’s violent end – puts a sad exclamation mark on Hirsch’s sanguine observation about the Panthers and education.  But it also spoke volumes about King’s prescient observation about the perils of turning young black minds over to a system that was not only racist (overtly and covertly) but already in the throes of a new, anti-academic wave, one that would throw several generations of African-American youth under the school bus.

About the same period, and not far from where Hampton died, a group of black activists, under the leadership of the Reverend Arthur M. Brazier, was organizing around much the same premise: self-determination.  In his 1969 book, Black Self-Determination: The Story of the Woodlawn Organization Brazier writes,

History has shown that black people cannot rely on the moral integrity of organized white society to give power to black people voluntarily. It must be wrested from that society.

I was lucky enough to meet Brazier in 2010, not long before he died, at a thrilling Harlem Children’s Zone conclave in Manhattan, an event crowded with African-Americans, including members of a presidential administration led by a man who had, finally, wrested power from that white society.  It was enough to see the gleam in Brazier’s eye to know of his pride. And I was also honored that that introduction came from Charles Payne, professor of social work at the University of Chicago and author of So Much Reform, So Little Change: The Persistence of Failure in Urban Schools. Payne’s book is brilliant and should be read by all education policymakers, but today, in honor of Martin Luther King, I want to call attention to the Epilogue (as I have done before), where Payne tells the story of William J. Moore, “grandson of a fugitive slave,” who opened a “first class elementary school” in West Cape May, New Jersey, for the black “yard men, delivery ‘boys’, dockhands, truck drivers, casual laborers, and factory workers” who serviced the white tourists of Cape May.   This was the late 19^th century and Moore ran his school for 53 years, a school his father attended. As Payne writes,

When I was a boy, I thought all Black men recited poetry and prose. When my father got together with his boyhood friends, it was not at all unusual for someone to start reciting Shakespeare and for someone else to follow that with some quatrains from the Rubaiyat, which might be followed by bits of Paul Laurence Dunbar or James Weldon Johnson.

As Payne concludes,

Mr. Moore and his school were a kind of counternarrative, daily giving the lie to the narrative of Black intellectual inferiority.  At first glance, the issues of contemporary urban education seem far removed from the world of William Moore and his children. I’m not sure that’s really true, though. The search for prescriptions can be dangerous if we let it, but I don’t know that all our work has given us a better model for educating children from the social margins than William Moore seems to have had in 1895. Give them teaching that is determined, energetic, and engaging. Hold them to high standards. Expose them to as much as you can, most especially the arts. Root the school in the community and take advantage of the culture the children bring with them…. Recognize the reality of race, poverty, and other social barriers, but make children understand that barriers don’t have to limit their lives….  Above all, no matter where in the social structure children are coming from, act as if their possibilities are boundless.

Unfortunately, too much of the story of school integration for blacks has been what King predicted: a feast of junk food served up by educators who have too little respect for the black race, much less “the mind” of their children.  It is one of the least-mentioned tragedies of King’s assassination – that he could not live to join the education reform movement and help stamp out the fires of mediocrity that have burned almost out of control these last 50 years.

In his Times review Samuel Freedman quotes W.E.B. Du Bois, writing in The Journal of Negro Education in 1935:

[T]he Negro needs neither segregated schools nor mixed schools. What he needs is Education.

As Don Hirsch told me when I asked how his famously content-rich curriculum would deal with students’ self-esteem challenges, he smiled, “The best way to teach children self esteem is by teaching them something.”

The best way to honor Martin Luther King would be to commit ourselves to delivering that rigorous, comprehensive, and, ultimately liberating education.  Indeed, it would be the best way to let freedom ring for future generations.

-Peter Meyer

This also appears on Board’s Eye View.

———–

*Said Helms in a 1963 television interview: ”The Negro cannot count forever on the kind of restraint that has thus far left him free to clog the streets, disrupt traffic and commerce and interfere with other men’s rights.” See Kevin Sack, the New York Times.

**For those who have never seen this quote before, it may need some explanation. In short, the founders, as we know, lived in a slaveholding culture and many, like Jefferson, were themselves slaveholders. They live with the Hobbesian choice: to win freedom from England or throw the young country into a potentially catastrophic fight over slavery, one of the key economic bulwarks of the South. The proof of the rightness of Jefferson’s comment came when Lincoln let go of the wolf’s ear and the nation was thrown into the bloody catastrophe of the Civil War.

Peterson, director of the Program on Education Policy and Governance at Harvard and Executive Editor of Education Next (of which I am a contributing editor), uses the Mac the Knife reference to suggest that loyalties can be bought “for a pittance.” In this case, it’s the National Education Association (NEA), which can, Peterson argues,

…collect multi-millions of dollars through a check-off system that generates revenues directly from teacher paychecks (unless a teacher specifically objects),” and, a la the villain of Mac the Knife, “invest in the work of less-advantaged non-profits that ostensibly have entirely different agendas. Even a little bit of money can produce a valuable ally somewhere down the line.

It’s a short essay, but is packed with evidence (from the Education Intelligence Agency) of NEA’s multi-tentacled reach, from a $250,000 grant to the Great Lakes Center for Education Research and Practice (“which has migrated to the University of Colorado at Boulder, which received another quarter million in direct funding,” says Peterson) to $100,000 for Media Matters, “a group that attacks conservative groups and commentators” and $35,000 for “the anti-accountability group,” FairTest.

“The list goes on and on,” says Peterson, who suggests keeping it handy “if one wants to understand the interstices of the debate over school reform.”

What is also problematic about all this is that the list doesn’t even include the millions given directly to legislators and other policymakers. And therein is an existential problem that, despite the lull in the fighting in Wisconsin and Ohio, lurks in the background of most of the debates about unions: they use public money to influence public officials to write laws that give them even more money. As Fred Siegel of the Manhattan Institute told the New York Times last year (see my “Unions on the Run” post),

Public unions have had no natural adversary; they give politicians political support and get good contracts back…It’s uniquely dysfunctional.

Thus, as a public union, the NEA (so too the American Federation of Teachers), is, essentially, spreading around tax dollars, money over which the taxpayer has no control, an income redistribution effort that could easily be mistaken for a kickback or, in states where union membership and dues are not voluntary, a not-so-hidden and not-so-representative tax.

And it’s not just lobbying for higher pay that is the problem. As Terry Moe writes in his new book,Special Interest: Teachers Unions and America’s Public Schools,

On the surface, it might seem that the teachers unions would play a limited role in public education: fighting for better pay and working conditions for their members, but otherwise having little impact on the structure and performance of the public schools more generally. Yet, nothing could be further from the truth. The teachers unions have more influence of the public schools than any other group in American society.

Indeed, the battle about whether teacher quality is important to education outcomes is an important one. And teachers need a voice in the debate. But it should not be a voice amplified with funds from the public purse and used to silence other voices.

- Peter Meyer

This post also appears on Board’s Eye View.

Several of the articles take readers inside classrooms to see how some much-vaunted policies and innovations (e.g. differentiated instruction, blended learning) are working in practice. Several other top articles look at how the performance of U.S. students compares to that of students in other countries. Quite a few relate to teacher effectiveness and compensation. Only two of the top twenty articles focus on technology and learning.

Which Ed Next authors penned the most articles in our top 20 list? Eric Hanushek leads the pack with 4, followed closely by Ludger Woessman with 3 articles. Paul Peterson, Mike Petrilli, June Kronholz, and Michael Podgursky all wrote 2 articles in the top 20.

While most of the articles on our list were published in 2011, some are oldies that generated new interest this year (including two articles from our archives about teacher pensions and other benefits).

Here are the top 20 articles for 2011:

20. “Gender Gap: Are boys being shortchanged in K-12 schooling?”
by Richard Whitmire and Susan McGee Bailey
In this forum, two experts consider whether, after years of concern that girls were being shortchanged in male-dominated schools, boys are now the ones in peril.

19. “Merit Pay International: Countries with performance pay for teachers score higher on PISA tests,”
by Ludger Woessman
This study finds that student achievement is significantly higher in countries that make use of teacher performance pay than in countries that do not use it.

18. “The Turnaround Fallacy: Stop trying to fix failing schools. Close them and start fresh,”
by Andy Smarick
This article reviews the evidence on school turnaround efforts and concludes that they are not the solution for the nation’s failing schools.

17. “Academic Value of Non-Academics: The case for keeping extracurriculars,”
by June Kronholz
This article looks at links between student involvement in afterschool activities and academic achievement.

16. “An Effective Teacher in Every Classroom: A lofty goal, but how to do it?”
by Kati Haycock and Eric Hanushek
In this forum, two experts debate the best ways to identify effective teachers and to increase the number of effective teachers in high-poverty schools and communities.

15. “Teacher Retirement Benefits: Even in economically tough times, costs are higher than ever,”
by Robert Costrell and Michael Podgursky
This study documents the growing gap between high employer pension costs for public school teachers and lower employer pension costs for private sector managers and professionals.

14. “Are U.S. Students Ready to Compete? The latest on each state’s international standing,”
by Paul Peterson, Ludger Woessman, Eric Hanushek, and Carlos Xabel Lastra-Anadon
This study found that U.S. students rank 32nd among industrialized nations in proficiency in math and 17th in reading.

13. “Fringe Benefits: There is more to teacher compensation than a teacher’s salary,”
by Michael Podgursky
This article examines the ways in which simple comparisons between teacher salaries and salaries of other kinds of workers can be misleading.

12. “Challenging the Gifted: Nuclear chemistry and Sartre draw the best and brightest to Reno,”
by June Kronholz
This feature story takes readers inside the Davidson Academy, a public school in Nevada for highly-gifted students.

11. “Sage on the Stage: Is lecturing really all that bad?”
by Guido Schwerdt and Amelie Wupperman
This study finds that students score higher on standardized tests in math and science when their teachers spend more class time on lecture-style presentations and less time on group problem-solving activities.

10. “When the Best is Mediocre: Developed countries far outperform our most affluent suburbs,”
by Jay Greene and Josh McGee
The first-ever comparison of math performance in virtually every school district in the United States finds that even the most elite suburban school districts produce results that are mediocre when compared to those of international peers.

9. “The Flipped Classroom: Online instruction at home frees class time for learning,”
by Bill Tucker
This article traces the development of “flipped instruction,” in which students view video-taped lessons or access online material at home and then use class time to work through problems and engage in collaborative learning with their teachers.

8. “Valuing Teachers: How much is a good teacher worth?”
by Eric Hanushek
This analysis considers the economic impact of replacing ineffective teachers with effective ones, and estimates the gains to U.S. gross domestic product that would result from boosting academic performance.

7. “Time for School? When the snow falls, test scores also drop,”
by Dave Marcotte and Benjamin Hansen
This article examines the evidence that expanding instructional time is as effective as other commonly discussed educational interventions intended to boost learning

6. “Creating a Corps of Change Agents: What explains the success of Teach for America?”
by Monica Higgins, Wendy Robison, Jennie Weiner, and Frederick Hess
This study examined the work histories of people leading entrepreneurial organizations in education and found that Teach for America alumni were heavily overrepresented.

5. “Teaching Math to the Talented: Which countries—and states—are producing high-achieving students?”
by Eric Hanushek, Paul Peterson, and Ludger Woessman
This study compares the percentage of U.S. students with advanced skills in math to percentages of similarly high achievers in other countries, and finds that 30 of the 56 other countries participating in PISA have more students scoring at an advanced level.

4. “All Together Now: Educating high and low achievers in the same classroom,”
by Mike Petrilli
This feature shows how one school is making differentiated instruction work–challenging every child while avoiding segregating classrooms.

3. “All A-Twitter about Education: Improving our schools in 140 characters or less,”
by Mike Petrilli
This article looked at the role Twitter was playing in education policy debates and ranked the top 25 education policy/media tweeters and the top 25 educator tweeters based on their Klout scores.

2. “Future Schools: Blending face-to-face and online learning,”
by Jonathan Schorr and Deborah McGriff
This feature, an early article on blended learning, profiled several charter schools using the hybrid approach.

1. “Evaluating Teacher Effectiveness: Can classroom observations identify practices that raise achievement?”
by Tom Kane, Amy Wooten, John Tyler, and Eric Taylor
This study of Cincinnati’s teacher evaluation system finds that the teachers who receive high ratings from trained evaluators who observe them are also more effective at promoting gains in student test scores.

Congratulations to all of our authors, and stay tuned — next Friday we’ll post the top 20 blog entries from 2011.

-Education Next

But while there are significant differences among the players, a clear path toward a workable, maybe even bipartisan, package is still visible. In short: all roads lead to Lamar. Not only does the Alexander package represent smart policy, it also serves as a sort of mid-point between the Senate bill that passed out of committee and the House GOP bill that is likely to do the same. Let’s tackle the five big issues:

• Requirements for standards and tests. The Administration and the Senate (including supporters of both the Harkin-Enzi and Alexander measures) want states to adopt standards that indicate college and career readiness; the House Republicans don’t. The real issue at stake is not just differing views of big, pushy Uncle Sam but also the new Common Core standards initiative, and whether federal policy should encourage (or even coerce) states to participate. The House GOP bill comes out swinging, stating that “the Secretary shall not attempt to influence, incentivize, or coerce state participation” in any work on common standards or tests. On the other hand, the same bill also says states must develop accountability systems that “ensure that all public school students graduate from high school prepared for postsecondary education or the workforce without the need for remediation.” That amounts to college and career readiness, right? Proponents of the Common Core should simply swallow their pride, and accept the House language. It doesn’t really matter, anyway; with forty-six states already on board, those of us who support the Common Core should have a very quiet victory party and then move on to hoping that at least one of the two test-building consortia devises a workable assessment system. Where the House GOP gets it wrong is in scrapping the requirement that states test students in science. Reducing transparency around science achievement isn’t a smart way to promote flexibility or cost savings; current law is fine on that point. Indeed, the more Washington substitutes transparency for regulation, the more data it should insist be transparent—and more it should want those data to span as much of the curriculum as possible, not just reading and math.
• Federal mandates around state accountability systems. No Child Left Behind famously required states to adopt the “Adequate Yearly Progress” measure for identifying failing schools. Today, nobody wants to keep AYP; the question is how much leeway to give states when creating their next-generation systems. The Administration’s waiver policy allows states to propose radically different approaches—but they must still consider subgroup performance and must set annual targets for all schools (and groups) to hit. Harkin-Enzi concurs on subgroups but leaves out the annual targets; instead, states must expect schools to make “continuous progress.” (For that alleged crime by the Senators, many reformers and civil rights groups cried bloody murder.) Alexander goes a step further, leaving it to the states to figure out how to “differentiate” among schools, though they still must consider the performance of “categories” of students. And the House GOP goes the farthest by prohibiting the Department of Education from dictating the contours of state accountability systems at all (though still requiring states to evaluate schools based on the performance of subgroups). Alexander’s language represents a reasonable middle ground, and it’s not bad. States must establish “a system of identifying and differentiating among all public elementary schools and secondary schools in the State based on student academic achievement and any other factors determined appropriate by the State [that] also takes into account achievement gaps…and overall performance of all students and of each category of students.” That gives the states clear guidance and plenty of room for flexibility, but maintains the focus on the performance of disadvantaged students. Next?
• Federally mandated interventions in failing schools. Here there’s more agreement than may meet the eye. Nobody wants to continue NCLB’s notorious (and ineffectual)“cascade of sanctions” for faltering schools:  choice for kids in schools “in need of improvement”; supplemental services for kids stuck in schools in “corrective action”; more stringent demands for those in need of “restructuring.” And nobody wants to force states to intervene in schools that are merely mediocre. (Which isn’t to say states should leave them be, especially if their students have no viable alternatives. Remember, this is about federal policy.) The question is whether states—to keep receiving federal dollars—must do something about really awful schools at the bottom. The final Harkin-Enzi bill includes a compromise with Lamar Alexander to offer states and districts a wider range of options for intervening in their five percent worst schools. (That range is wider than Senator Harkin—or the Administration—may have preferred.) The House GOP bill, on the other hand, merely asks states to develop a “system for school improvement for low-performing” Title I schools and to make sure districts “implement interventions in such schools that are designed to address such schools’ weaknesses.” Personally, I like the House approach, since the Federal government doesn’t have the expertise or capacity to enforce a system of sanctions anyway. But that also means this is another symbolic debate; it doesn’t really matter what Congress writes into law, since it will be impossible to implement. So adopting the compromise Senate language wouldn’t be the end of the world.
• Teacher effectiveness. There is a bundle of questions in play here: Should Congress scrap the “highly qualified teachers” mandate? Should it replace it with a tougher requirement that states and/or districts develop rigorous teacher evaluation systems? Should it mandate the “equitable distribution of teachers”? Should it require such an equitable distribution within districts by tweaking Title I’s “comparability” rule? On most of these issues, the House GOP plan is (predictably) less demanding than the Senate. Unlike Harkin-Enzi, it would scrap the HQT mandate while eliminating any federal efforts to redistribute teachers (via “comparability” or otherwise).  Alexander’s plan does the same. On teacher evaluations—a genuine surprise–however, the House would require them (at either the state or district level), while the Senate would simply provide competitive funds for such systems. This might be the toughest area around which to forge common ground. The unions will fight to eliminate the evaluation mandate, and few “local control” Republicans will push back, I suspect. So expect it to get tossed. The HQT mandate is an abomination, beloved by nobody, so I’m hopeful that it will get killed. But conservatives will probably have to cede some ground on the “inequitable distribution” policies. A good first step would be to require states to collect and make public data on the distribution of effective teachers—though without a teacher evaluation mandate, it’s hard to understand how that would work. What’s most doable, then, would be a new requirement for districts to report actual spending, school by school, and include the real cost of teachers’ salaries and benefits in those data.
• Spending. It always comes down to money in the end. The House GOP bill explicitly limits the growth in out-year spending on ESEA programs to the rate of inflation; the Senate is silent on the issue. Furthermore, the House wants to scrap the law’s longstanding “maintenance of effort” requirements, which penalize districts for cutting their own expenditures. Expect the House to lose on the out-year spending issue (which is another symbolic fight; Congressional appropriators will make these decisions every year anyway). But dropping maintenance of effort is a good idea, especially in the New Normal of tight budgets. (In the real world, after all the compromising is done, MOE is more likely to be loosened than jettisoned entirely.)

This truly is not rocket science; with a little presidential leadership and goodwill from both parties, a deal could be hammered out quickly. We haven’t had much of any of that in recent months, however—an issue voters might raise come November.

-Mike Petrilli

This blog entry also appears on Flypaper.

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

More about the book is available here.

HT: Joanne Jacobs

Behind the Headline
The Future of No Child Left Behind
Education Next | Summer 2009

George W. Bush spoke with Andy Rotherham about the impact of No Child Left Behind and what should happen next in an interview for Time. “The President has to take the lead and say, Wait a minute, No Child Left Behind has worked. Let’s not weaken it,” says Bush. In Summer 2009, Diane Ravitch and John Chubb debated the future of NCLB in an Ed Next forum.

Robert keyed in on a recent study in the journal Pediatrics that links “toxic stress” in early childhood to “to a host of bad life outcomes including poor mental and physical health, and cognitive impairment.” Among the bad things caused by such stress are those affecting learning capacities. It is an insight which, Robert argues,

[S]hould have a profound impact on educators and education policymakers.  At the very least, understanding the language and concept of exposure to toxic stress should inform the increasingly acrimonious, dead-end debate about accountability and resources aimed at the lowest-performing schools and students.

No one can quibble with the obvious – that a child’s environment has an impact on his/her learning capacity– and it should be equally obvious that the more research the better to “inform” the education policy debate. But here’s the rub: translating studies like the one in Pediatrics into policy ain’t easy.

It’s not a new rub, of course, and much of the acrimonious debate that bothers Pondiscio is about that translation. What does this look like in the trenches, where teachers teach and principals lead? Or policymakers make policy?

By coincidence, part of the answer came when another friend and colleague, James Baldwin, a superintendent of one of New York’s 37 Boards of Cooperative Educational Services (BOCES) , wrote an essay in a local paper that carries the environmental question foursquare into the policy realm. After saying that “[t]he struggles of poor children carry serious social, economic and political implications,” he gets right to the policy question:

There is no equity in New York’s system for public education funding. Data recently published by the Statewide School Finance Consortium demonstrates that wealthy districts in the State are often receiving more aid per capita than similarly sized poorer districts. There is no equity when residents living in poorer areas pay higher rates of taxes for a less robust educational program and when the range of annual expenditures per student exceeds $50,000/year in wealthy districts and is a fraction of that in poorer districts.

Case closed?

Hardly.

As Rick Hess writes in the introduction to one of his more must-read collections of expert essays (When Research Matters: How Scholarship Influences Education Policy, Harvard Press, 2008),

One frequent but ultimately unfruitful line of thought begins with the presumption that the primary goal for those concerned about the research-policy nexus is to keep politics from coloring the interpretation or use of research….The reality, of course, is that expertise and research are contested terrains in a democratic nation.

While Pondiscio may be right in hoping that the toxic stress study will have a “profound impact” on policymakers, it remains a long and arduous road – mined with a million ideologies – to get to a consensus on what to do. In fact, one of the more important governance questions is whether there needs to be a consensus.

Same with Baldwin’s suggestion that the funding equity fix “is not necessarily about spending more and more money” but about “deploying the resources we have more equitably and with greater return on our investment in the form of student achievement.” Nothing wrong with that.

Part of translating good research into good policy is, as Chris Cerf of New Jersey has said, making sure that we make the educational interests of children the political interests of politicians. That’s not easy. But it is, as Hess suggests, a necessary part of the democratic process; a process that includes a range of activities, from ivory tower research to grassroots mobilization.

One of the important questions for me is where the governing action should be located. Capitol Hill? K Street? State legislatures?  Regional alliances? School districts? Boards of education? Schools?

A few weeks ago Checker suggested that “we need to focus laser-like on the barriers that keep us from making major-league gains” in education improvement. He lists eight such barriers, from “archaic governance” structures to “dysfunctional” school finance systems.  His eighth and final barrier:

[O]ur preoccupation with “at risk” populations and with achievement gaps defined as the distance between demographic groups has led to the benign neglect of millions of kids, including but not limited to gifted students and high-achieving learners.”

There is still far too much mischaracterization of the “no excuses” school reformers for my tastes– and no doubt Checker will receive some pushback on this one (see Michael Goldstein). But we have to recognize that politics is the authoritative allocation of scarce resources and thus seek a method of prioritizing and distributing those resources in the most equitable, efficient, and democratic manner possible.

-Peter Meyer

This post also appears on Board’s Eye View.

Since the National Education Association (NEA) can collect multi-millions of dollars through a check-off system that generates revenues directly from teacher paychecks (unless a teacher specifically objects), the NEA, a la Peachum, can invest in the work of less-advantaged non-profits that ostensibly have entirely different agendas.  Even a little bit of money can produce a valuable ally somewhere down the line.

During the 2010-11 fiscal year, the NEA invested $18.8 million dollars in a bewildering array of grateful non-profit groups and organizations, the Education Intelligence Agency tells us.

Some of the money goes to ostensibly independent research groups, such as a $250,000 grant to the Great Lakes Center for Education Research and Practice (which has migrated to the University of Colorado at Boulder, which received another quarter million in direct funding), a $255,000 grant to the Economic Policy Institute, a reliably pro-labor “think tank,” and a $50,000 award to Phi Delta Kappa, which publishes a journal highly protective of union interests.

Research groups connected to the Democratic mainstream also collect money from the NEA.  The Center for American Progress was given $25,000 and the Center for Tax and Budget Accountability was awarded $20,000.

Even tiny research outfits can get something:  the Global Institute for Language and Literacy Development got $18,000, while the Employee Benefit Research Institute was awarded $7,500, and Media Matters, a group that attacks conservative groups and commentators, was treated to a $100,000 gift. The anti-accountability group, FairTest, bagged $35,000.

And some money goes to those who have the potential to write stories about unions.  The Education Writers Association, for example, received a grant of $11,500.

Groups representing the interests of education schools are another NEA favorite, strengthening the symbiotic relationship between schools of education and teacher unions.  Grants were given to the National Council for Accreditation of Teacher Education ($400,373) and the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards ($10,000)

NEA also likes to help out pillars of the education establishment.  The Council of Chief State School Offices received $50,417; the Council of State Governments got $19,750; the Education Commission of the States was awarded $60,000; the National Parent Teachers Association was given $6,250; the Central Intercollegiate Athletic Association captured $50,000; and the Edward M. Kennedy Institute for the United States Senate was awarded $200,000.

A wide array of civil rights and minority groups appreciate the help they receive from the NEA, including the NAACP ($25,000), Congressional Black Caucus Foundation ($170,000), the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund ($10,000), the Gay, Lesbian and Straight Education Network ($7,500), the National Women’s Law Center ($10,000),  Rainbow PUSH Coalition ($5,000), People for the American Way ($128,000), National Association of Latino Elected and Appointed Officials Education Fund ($12,500), National Black Caucus of State Legislators ($5,500), National Association for Multicultural Education ($5,000), National Association for Equal Opportunity in Higher Education ($17,500), and something called the Hip Hop Caucus Education Fund ($10,000). No wonder it’s nearly impossible to get a civil rights coalition to take on the teacher unions.

Even Republicans can cash in.  The Ripon Society, a liberal-leaning faction within the party, got $10,000.

The list goes on and on, as you can see by checking out the link given above. The recipients, big and small, help to build a broad, diverse coalition that can be called upon by a teacher union when help is needed.  Keeping the document handy may prove helpful if one wants to understand the interstices of the debate over school reform.  As “Deep Throat” advised, “Follow the money.”  Even a little money can go a long ways.  If you don’t believe me, ask Mrs. Peachum.

-Paul Peterson

The market is plenty motivated to create disruptive products and services to serve the public education system, but today’s policies and regulations don’t incentivize and reward those products and services that best serve students. As a result, philanthropic dollars are critical to help create the correct conditions such that those products that are efficacious and serve a higher end—student learning—are the ones that gain share.

As we’ve argued, public policy should reward those providers that best deliver student outcomes—and punish those providers that do not serve the public good.

There is one area, however, where I think philanthropic dollars should probably fund products and services, which is in the category of assessments. If we’re going to have a system that pays providers on how students do on outcome measures, we need robust assessments that are authentic and that people trust. The political incentives—for a variety of reasons—to create high-quality assessments aren’t particularly strong, so having philanthropists invest dollars to create these assessments and continue to push innovation is critical.

This is why yesterday’s announcement that The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation will award a $100,000 prize to the designers of software that can reliably automate essay grading for state tests to drive testing of deeper learning is so important. Open Education Solutions and The Common Pool designed and will be managing the competition.

The Hewlett Foundation’s leadership in creating better assessments to measure critical reasoning and writing is a big step forward—and its use of Kaggle, a platform for predictive modeling competitions, to host the competition is clever.

According to the press release, “The automated scoring competition intends to solve the longstanding problem of high cost and low turnaround of current testing deeper learning such as student essays. The goal is to shift testing away from standardized bubble tests to tests that evaluate critical thinking, problem solving and other 21st century skills.”

In addition, the competition is being conducted with the support of the two state testing consortia that are currently designing the next-generation assessments for the Common Core. Having this buy-in and collaboration gives the competition serious validity and the potential to have real impact.

-Michael Horn