The Education Gadfly Weekly

Abt Associates
November 2008

It's here. The Final Reading First (RF) Evaluation by the Education Department's very own Institute of Education Sciences (as contracted out to Abt). The headline? Analysts found no statistically significant differences between RF and non-RF schools on student reading comprehension in grades one, two, or three--as evidenced by three years of achievement data. Not good. On a more positive (and unsurprising note), it also found that RF teachers spent significantly more time teaching the five essential components of reading instruction and RF schools did a significantly better job of providing instructional support to teachers (e.g., help for struggling readers, professional development in scientifically based reading instruction, etc). The key to understanding this study is to recall that there are five components of successful early reading as determined by the National Reading Panel: comprehension, phonics (including decoding), vocabulary, oral fluency, and phonemic awareness. It takes all five to learn how to read but this study only studied the first two--and the second of these but for a single year in one grade of the 3-year study. Although Abt found in that one year snapshot that RF did have a positive impact on decoding among first grade students, such last minute antics are not enough to know conclusively. Many in the research community complained (including me) that only measuring comprehension (and decoding, briefly) does not effectively evaluate "reading achievement" (especially with a $6 billion price tag). But excessive cost, contamination, and unrepresentative sample outcries aside (the report claims that statistical differences in instructional practices make the former less likely), the data don't bode well for a program rife with political drama. This study, narrow or not, may administer the coup de grace to this worthy but mortally ill patient. Find it here.

Paul E. Peterson and Daniel Nadler
Education Next
Winter 2009

It's a cliche that things aren't always what they seem. But in the case of alternative teacher certification programs, when they are what they seem, they're pretty stellar-that is, in terms of recruiting minority teachers and boosting student achievement. In the latest issue of Education Next, Harvard's Paul Peterson and Daniel Nadler examine the alternative certification (AC) programs of 47 states (three states do not allow it). They found that in 21-Ohio is not one of them-there were genuine alternative programs, meaning that would-be teachers did not have to take the same number of courses as traditionally certified teachers or they could take a test to demonstrate teaching competency. In those states with genuine AC, over a quarter of teachers chose this route in 2004-05, compared to just five percent in states with symbolic AC. In these latter states, participants had to take the full 30 education credits. The study also measured minority inroads into teaching in relation to alternative certification, and in the 21 states with genuine alternative paths to the classroom, they found minority representation was much higher than in those states with symbolic or no alternative licensure. Finally, Peterson and Nadler also found that genuine AC states posted greater NAEP gains between 2003 and 2007 than did states with symbolic AC, though the researchers were unable to control for other state policies that may have been introduced during the same time.

Bottom Line: If we want to recruit more minority teachers into teaching and likely boost achievement, we'd be wise to lift the barrier-otherwise known as 30 credits of tedious education courses-that keeps them out. Ohio policymakers would do well to pay attention: though 22 percent of the Buckeye State's students are nonwhite, only six percent of its teachers are (see here) and Ohio's NAEP scores inched up, at best, from 2003 to 2007. Read the study here.

Jay Chambers, Larisa Shambaugh, Jesse Levin, Mari Muraki, Lindsay Poland
American Institutes for Research
October 2008

This study examines the implementation of student-based funding (SBF, also known as weighted student funding or WSF) in two neighboring school districts--San Francisco and Oakland--and offers a potpourri of findings. On the one hand, almost every school- and district-level respondent favored SBF over a return to traditional funding policies, despite the larger workload that SBF lays upon them. SBF can also lead to increased demand for transparency and other improvements, and, perhaps best of all, require a culture shift from compliance to innovation. But student-based funding is no panacea. The report stresses that it isn't really even a "reform mechanism for change." After all, implementing SBF policies doesn't address fundamental funding inadequacies or eradicate socioeconomic segregation or solve sundry other problems. SBF adjusts the inputs in a field where outcomes are what really matter. But it's based on a noble and practical premise, and more studies examining what works and what doesn't would be welcomed. As for this one, you can read it here.

Ah, the two faces of Randi Weingarten. Perhaps overcome with election-induced fuzzies, she boldly proclaimed on Monday: "with the exception of vouchers... no issue should be off the table, provided it is good for children and fair to teachers." Reformers, take heart! Maybe it was fate, then, that brought her to say these words in our nation's capital where schools chancellor Michelle Rhee continues to map out strategies for bringing much needed reform to teacher salaries and tenure. With her union negotiations (with an AFT local) at an impasse, Rhee's latest brainstorms include declaring D.C. schools in a "state of emergency." Perhaps worrying that Washington Teachers Union President George Parker will fold, Weingarten and the chancellor were scheduled to meet this week. So does this mean impending détente? Apparently not. Weingarten has declared Rhee's ideas "totally at odds" with those that belong on the AFT's supposed table. Once again, words of reform are followed by actions that stymie it. When Weingarten starts talking out of only one side of her mouth, real reformers will consider taking her overtures seriously.

"Head of Teachers' Union Offers to Talk on Tenure and Merit Pay," by Sam Dillon, New York Times, November 17, 2008

"Fenty, Rhee Look for Ways Around Union," by Bill Turque, Washington Post, November 16, 2008

"Union Chiefs and Rhee Will Meet," by Bill Turque, Washington Post, November 18, 2008

Should the louse, that age-old creepy crawly elementary school pest, keep kids out of school? That's what a few school districts in Ohio are pondering. Some have strict "no nit" policies, insisting that kids can only return when all signs of lice are gone. Others take a more live and let live approach, permitting students to stay in class while being treated for their pesky visitors. The former will prevent the spread of lice while the latter will prevent missed school days. Which is preferable? Lice researcher Shirley Gordon of Florida Atlantic University warns that missing school because of lice can mean kids "stop getting invited to birthday parties and don't get invited to sleepovers anymore." But although "most parents don't want parasites on their children that bite and suck their blood," she explains, "it is not considered a public health threat." Pearls of wisdom indeed, but we're still wondering, how does one become a "lice researcher"?

"Schools wonder if it's worth losing class time over lice," by Jennifer Smith Richards, The Columbus Dispatch, November 12, 2008

New York Times columnist David Brooks began his June 13th piece with a question: "Is Barack Obama really a force for change, or is he just a traditional Democrat with a patina of postpartisan rhetoric?"

The answer, Brooks noted, might be found in Obama's approach to American K-12 education, a policy issue that had rather recently evinced in Democratic Party circles a divide between the status quo, teachers'-union-friendly camp, and those who crave school innovations, reforms, and HR structures that put the interests of kids before those of adults. With which group Obama chose to huddle could signal how he'll govern, generally, as president.

Alas, throughout the 2008 campaign, Obama huddled with ambiguity. His rhetoric about schools was soaring, his actual platforms grounded. He called the provision of first-rate education a national "moral responsibility," one that he pledged to fulfill, yet his major contribution to that end was to propose adding billions of dollars to the federal education-budget without fundamentally reshaping the sclerotic system it funds.

And yet, Obama gave Democratic reformers some cause for hope. In April, for example, he told FOX News Sunday host Chris Wallace, "I think that on issues of education, I've been very clear about the fact--and sometimes I've gotten in trouble with the teachers' union on this--that we should be experimenting with charter schools. We should be experimenting with different ways of compensating teachers."

When Obama reiterated his support for merit pay at the July convention of the National Education Association and was booed for it, he won even more credibility with the reform crowd. Joe Williams, the president of Democrats for Education Reform, wrote on the group's blog that Obama wouldn't "play by the old rules" and wouldn't be "the kind of Democrat who blindly presides over massive systemic educational failure because it keeps the unions happy."

Such hopes, while not dashed, certainly suffered a significant blow with the Obama transition office's recent announcement that Stanford professor Linda Darling-Hammond will head the Education Department policy transition team. Darling of the education-reform crowd Darling-Hammond is not.

She is a darling of teachers' unions and ed schools, however, and a self-defined advocate of progressive education, the tenets of which are not progress. The best educators, Darling-Hammond has said, "engage in a dialectic between the subject and the student" and in so doing, the student "is constantly moved to a broader and more thoughtful place in the curriculum."

Such eye-glazing eduspeak manifests itself in, among other fluffy policies, opposition to traditional testing--i.e., testing that might ask history students, say, to answer specific questions about history that might demonstrate whether students know anything. And indeed, Darling-Hammond, when she was a professor at Teachers College, Columbia, in the early 1990s, worked to move New York 's Regents Exams away from paper-and-pencil tests and toward personalized performance portfolios that she said would give pupils "multiple ways to show their learning." A song-and-dance routine about George Washington instead of an essay, perhaps?

Darling-Hammond is also a crusader for "equity" in education, which is too often code for dumping more money into backward systems. She has been involved in several ill-conceived "adequacy lawsuits," including the thirteen-year saga of Campaign for Fiscal Equity v. New York. In that case, the trial judge found (divined, really) that funding for operations and maintenance of New York State schools deserved an annual bump of a whopping $5.63 billion.

But the presumption that failing schools fail because they lack money is belied by mountains of data. Those who persist in believing that the addition of billions of dollars will make public education more equitable (Darling-Hammond and the teachers'-union leadership are among them) are misguided, perhaps willfully so. Certainly they do not think innovatively about improving schools.

Furthermore, while Darling-Hammond has acknowledged that teacher quality is one of the most important predictors of student success, she remains wedded to the traditional education school. She's been relentless in her criticism of Teach for America because its members threaten the ed-school monopoly by earning their teaching certificates via alternate routes. Reform-minded Democrats see alternative certification programs, such as those used by TFA, as the future of teacher education; Darling-Hammond and her allies see them as a menace.

Whitney Tilson is a Harvard Business School graduate, mutual-fund manager, and Obama supporter and donor who maintains a popular education-blog. He wrote last year, "I think that Linda Darling-Hammond is little more than a thinly disguised shill for the teachers unions and that her ideas, if adopted, would likely result in much higher spending and little or no improvement in our schools. I can suggest 100 far better people for Obama to listen to if he's really serious about education reform."

Back to Brooks's original question: "Is Barack Obama really a force for change, or is he just a traditional Democrat with a patina of postpartisan rhetoric?"

So far, it seems, tradition trumps change.

A version of this piece originally appeared yesterday on National Review Online.

Liam Julian, a former Fordham staffer, is a fellow at Stanford's Hoover Institution and managing editor of Policy Review.

Here's a travesty: the perpetuation of the notorious funding adequacy case Abbott v. Burke. On Monday, the New Jersey Supreme Court decided 5-0 to, in effect, not decide, again, on the fate of this 27-year long effort to enhance the budgets of 31 poor and low performing districts in the Garden State. The 31 were designated "Abbott districts" when the Court forced the state to readjust its education dollars so that they'd get more state money--over 50 percent of state education aid, in fact. (The 2008-2009 budget clocks that figure in at a whopping $4.1 billion. By comparison, K-12 state aid for the whole state-i.e. all 616 districts--is just $7.8 billion.) The idea was to use state funds to equalize per-pupil funding between these districts and their wealthier neighbors. But since that time, demographics within state have shifted, impoverishing some districts while enriching others, making the Abbott system anachronistic. Last winter, Governor Jon Corzine proposed, and the legislature passed, a new formula for doling out these monies to address this problem: the School Funding Reform Act (SFRA). It would tie dollars to the neediest students rather than districts, and in effect reverse the Abbott designation. Unfortunately, those in black robes have decided that the governor will now have to prove that his new formula is "constitutionally adequate" before a court-appointed "special master." Meanwhile, the Abbott districts remain. Robert Holster, superintendent of Passaic, which is one of them, had it exactly right when he commented that, "Abbott is still breathing. It may be an iron lung, but it's still pumping away." Iron lung, indeed.

 "Court rejects Corzine's bid to end N.J. school cases," by Dunstan McNichol, The Star-Ledger, November 18, 2008

"Justices block bid to change Abbott funding," by Dunstan McNichol and John Mooney, The Star-Ledger, November 19, 2008

Education data sorely need a transformation. As commentators, boosters, and sometimes critics of education reform, we have witnessed policymakers struggling to make decisions in the face of incomplete information; school leaders in search of clearer data about the performance of their teachers and pupils; taxpayers and public officials puzzled by why more resources keep pouring into a system from which little more pours out by way of learning; and fellow analysts frustrated by muddy or outdated statistics. The question now, of course, is how to launch such a transformation.

It is true that the data available today are superior to those available in the past. No Child Left Behind has led to important strides in the availability of student achievement data. Emerging technologies are changing how such information is collected and are easing data entry, analysis, and dissemination. And many groups have been pressing for further improvements, such as the Data Quality Campaign doggedly nudging states toward longitudinal databases; the Schools Interoperability Framework Association, enabling seamless data sharing; Greatschools.net and SchoolMatters.com providing parents and policymakers with school-level data; funders such as Gates, Walton, and Broad supporting these and kindred reforms; and, in the public sphere, the U.S. Department of Education and its National Center for Education Statistics, the Council of Chief State School Officers, and numerous forward-thinking states, districts, and schools, collaborating on data reforms.

Yet we still have incredibly far to go. Today's education data systems are exceedingly slow and frequently non-comparable from place to place or level to level, as pre-K information systems typically don't "speak" to the K-12 systems, which in turn don't "speak" to the higher education systems. Some important information (e.g., the cost of teacher benefits) isn't even systematically gathered. Seemingly obvious questions (e.g., where does the money come from and how is it spent) are all but unanswerable. And because most data systems are institution- rather than student-based, they're ill-equipped to "follow" individuals who move from school to school or "graze" their way through college on multiple campuses, and they're also ill-suited to such innovations as charter schools, "virtual" learning, proprietary colleges and part-time students (or faculty).

With this week's release of A Byte at the Apple: Rethinking Education Data for the Post-NCLB Era, we at the Fordham Institute hope to shine a light on these problems and outline creative solutions and alternatives.

Some of the problems seem so basic yet prove so tough to fix. Why can we not easily track the performance of students over time? Why is it so challenging to understand how well a school is educating its students? Daniele Vidoni and Kornelia Kozovska offer examples of education data systems in three other countries. In the United Kingdom, for example, "league tables" provide useful information on school performance, "allowing comparisons based on exam scores and value added (within a region or city)." This information is published regularly by newspapers, and this year Prime Minister Gordon Brown announced his plan to enhance this transparency by enabling parents to use the internet to track the "attendance, behavior, and performance of their children."

Frederick M. Hess and Jon Fullerton also draw data-driven lessons from elsewhere--in this case from business--that could help reformers and policy makers boost educational performance in U.S. schools and districts. How could they better manage themselves? Much of the answer lies in better use of data to inform decisions. Just as companies use "balanced scorecards" and customer satisfaction surveys to track their organizational performance beyond the bottom line, schools must look far beyond achievement data. This will allow them to evaluate such basic necessities as lighted classrooms, efficient bus routes, safe hallways and classrooms, and teacher hiring practices. In other words, schools need "measurement for performance" as well as "measurement of performance," in order to be well-run enterprises that enable rather than hinder effective teachers and dynamic classrooms.

Technology can enhance school practices while generating valuable data, too. Yahoo! Teachers, for example, meant to be a platform for sharing lesson plans, holds great potential for generating data on what works and what is most popular. Likewise, TeacherTube already allows teachers to share and rate videos for instructional purposes. Much more could be quickly learned about which lesson plans and teaching techniques are effective if more of the millions of daily student-teacher interactions could be captured as data--perhaps by the increased use of computers and PDAs as teaching tools.

If the best thinking from outside education were brought to bear within it, a data revolution might follow. Bryan Hassel explains how firms such as credit card providers have long used data mining techniques to understand the tendencies of their customers and assess the profitability of a prospective customer or new product. As Hassel asks, "what if the data inherent of millions of daily teacher interactions could be harnessed to give teachers real insight into whether method X or Y is better?" And what if education leaders could mine that data to ask, "Which of my teachers are doing what is needed to improve their instruction, or which of my district's schools are most in need of an infusion of new leadership"? Good questions, all.

Hassel also draws education applications from the "wisdom of crowds." Amazon book ratings, for example, go beyond "expert" reviews to assist potential readers to choose their purchases with the advice of hundreds of previous readers. Similar "crowd" based reviews exist for restaurants, vacation resorts, consumer electronics, and more. Amazon goes even farther by also providing recommendations based on the shopping patterns of customers with similar preferences.

Perhaps the most interesting use of crowd wisdom is in "prediction markets," where hundreds of people can speculate on the outcome of elections and other events. Hassel explains how Best Buy asked its employees to predict holiday card sales; their collective wisdom proved more accurate than the experts that the company might have otherwise relied upon. For parents and other observers of schools, prediction markets could be harnessed to foresee which schools are poised for improvement and which are in decline; for principals, they could provide new information on the quality of their teachers and staff.

Radical changes in our handling of student achievement data could also foster overdue improvement. For example, Margaret Raymond envisions a "Data Backpack," by which information about a student accompanies him or her throughout his or her education, controlled and populated in part by schools and in part by parents. Already an improvement on the cumbersome data processes currently used in many districts, its greatest power could be its potential to engage parents in their children's education by providing readily accessible information and interactive features, such as "parent discussion boards, informative videos about parenting or child development, immunization and health record keeping, or planning tools to track their child's progress."

Some of these ideas may not make it into widespread classroom use tomorrow. But we're patient. The day after tomorrow is time enough.

Isn't the show over when the fat lady sings? Not for these four chronically failing schools in Miami-Dade. The story goes something like this: four schools that have consistently earned "F's" on Florida's state report card were slated to close at the end of last year. The district had tried myriad fixes: investing millions in the four, installing new leadership teams, and hiring academic deans and subject-area coaches, all to no avail. The latest? The School Board will take over the schools, with Superintendent Alberto Carvalho leading the charge. This would enable Carvalho to change the schools' leadership (again) and hire (more) expert consultants. And this is different from past efforts how? But don't worry, says Carvalho, this great pledge of leadership is just for show; ''The plan [to take control of the schools] is simply the legal requirement should the schools not make the grade. It is not my intention to have to live up to it." Instead, he expects a "miraculous" turnaround by the end of the year. "To me," he explains, "the only logical course of action is to maintain these schools under my direction." Too bad logic is the only thing missing in this kitchen sink.

"4 failing schools in Miami-Dade will stay open," by Kathleen McGrory, Miami Herald, November 15, 2008

Paul E. Peterson and Daniel Nadler
Education Next
Winter 2009

It's a cliche that things aren't always what they seem. But in the case of alternative teacher certification programs, when they are what they seem, they're pretty stellar-that is, in terms of recruiting minority teachers and boosting student achievement. In the latest issue of Education Next, Harvard's Paul Peterson and Daniel Nadler examine the alternative certification (AC) programs of 47 states (three states do not allow it). They found that in 21-Ohio is not one of them-there were genuine alternative programs, meaning that would-be teachers did not have to take the same number of courses as traditionally certified teachers or they could take a test to demonstrate teaching competency. In those states with genuine AC, over a quarter of teachers chose this route in 2004-05, compared to just five percent in states with symbolic AC. In these latter states, participants had to take the full 30 education credits. The study also measured minority inroads into teaching in relation to alternative certification, and in the 21 states with genuine alternative paths to the classroom, they found minority representation was much higher than in those states with symbolic or no alternative licensure. Finally, Peterson and Nadler also found that genuine AC states posted greater NAEP gains between 2003 and 2007 than did states with symbolic AC, though the researchers were unable to control for other state policies that may have been introduced during the same time.

Bottom Line: If we want to recruit more minority teachers into teaching and likely boost achievement, we'd be wise to lift the barrier-otherwise known as 30 credits of tedious education courses-that keeps them out. Ohio policymakers would do well to pay attention: though 22 percent of the Buckeye State's students are nonwhite, only six percent of its teachers are (see here) and Ohio's NAEP scores inched up, at best, from 2003 to 2007. Read the study here.

Abt Associates
November 2008

It's here. The Final Reading First (RF) Evaluation by the Education Department's very own Institute of Education Sciences (as contracted out to Abt). The headline? Analysts found no statistically significant differences between RF and non-RF schools on student reading comprehension in grades one, two, or three--as evidenced by three years of achievement data. Not good. On a more positive (and unsurprising note), it also found that RF teachers spent significantly more time teaching the five essential components of reading instruction and RF schools did a significantly better job of providing instructional support to teachers (e.g., help for struggling readers, professional development in scientifically based reading instruction, etc). The key to understanding this study is to recall that there are five components of successful early reading as determined by the National Reading Panel: comprehension, phonics (including decoding), vocabulary, oral fluency, and phonemic awareness. It takes all five to learn how to read but this study only studied the first two--and the second of these but for a single year in one grade of the 3-year study. Although Abt found in that one year snapshot that RF did have a positive impact on decoding among first grade students, such last minute antics are not enough to know conclusively. Many in the research community complained (including me) that only measuring comprehension (and decoding, briefly) does not effectively evaluate "reading achievement" (especially with a $6 billion price tag). But excessive cost, contamination, and unrepresentative sample outcries aside (the report claims that statistical differences in instructional practices make the former less likely), the data don't bode well for a program rife with political drama. This study, narrow or not, may administer the coup de grace to this worthy but mortally ill patient. Find it here.

Jay Chambers, Larisa Shambaugh, Jesse Levin, Mari Muraki, Lindsay Poland
American Institutes for Research
October 2008

This study examines the implementation of student-based funding (SBF, also known as weighted student funding or WSF) in two neighboring school districts--San Francisco and Oakland--and offers a potpourri of findings. On the one hand, almost every school- and district-level respondent favored SBF over a return to traditional funding policies, despite the larger workload that SBF lays upon them. SBF can also lead to increased demand for transparency and other improvements, and, perhaps best of all, require a culture shift from compliance to innovation. But student-based funding is no panacea. The report stresses that it isn't really even a "reform mechanism for change." After all, implementing SBF policies doesn't address fundamental funding inadequacies or eradicate socioeconomic segregation or solve sundry other problems. SBF adjusts the inputs in a field where outcomes are what really matter. But it's based on a noble and practical premise, and more studies examining what works and what doesn't would be welcomed. As for this one, you can read it here.