The Education Gadfly Weekly

Do students of a feather flock together, or are kids more like chameleons? This new study contends the latter, via evidence suggesting that students whose grades are higher or lower than their friends’ tend to become more like their peers over time. The researchers (members of a partnership between the National Science Foundation and a team of high school students) surveyed 158 teens at New York’s Maine-Endwell High School on the identities of their best friends, friends, and acquaintances, yielding three “social networks”; the authors then tracked all of these individuals’ GPAs over one year to compare their achievement with those in their networks. The results: Students whose peers outperformed them at the start tended to do better by the end of the year, while those whose peers underperformed them were more likely to see their grades slip. This effect was stronger among friends than among acquaintances or, oddly, best friends. The authors theorize that academic habits are “socially contagious” in much the same way as are fashions and fads (though they note that it could simply be, for example, that students “on the way up” tend to seek out and attract higher-performing friends—ditto students who are beginning to slide). Still and all, such findings may have important implications for ed policy. For instance, while lower-performing students may benefit from the company of stronger performers (at least if they become friends), could such mixing wind up harming high performers? We eagerly await more research on this issue. Meanwhile, we’re brushing up on the statistical (and genetic) concept of “regression to the mean.”

SOURCE: Deanna Blansky et al., Spread of Academic Success in a High School Social Network (PLOS ONE, February 2013).

This new report from the Alliance for Excellent Education offers a troubling diagnosis: The thirty-five “NCLB flexibility” waivers granted by the U.S. Department of Education (ED) may have had the unfortunate side effect of allowing states to skirt 2008 regulations that standardized the graduation-rate measurements and held schools accountable for raising those rates. Trivial this is not: Prior to these changes, reported graduation rates were often inflated and always difficult to compare (just like proficiency rates). The 2008 regulations set parameters for consistent, common graduation-rate calculations across schools, districts, and states. Through their ESEA waivers, however, eleven states have re-incorporated “alternative” measures of high school completion (e.g., the GED) in their graduation-rate tracking and reporting, possibly incentivizing schools to “push students towards a GED rather than a standard diploma.” The 2008 policy exposed the low graduation rates of pupil subgroups (minorities, English language learners, low-income students, and students with disabilities) that had previously been masked by averaging the student population; but eleven state waivers contain weak or no strategies for subgroup grad-rate accountability. An intriguing question—not considered here—is whether the 2008 regulation was responsible (at least partially) for the recent uptick in the national graduation rate—and whether the waivers will send that rate tumbling again. The permanent policy question remains: Which aspects of American education should be uniform and which are good candidates for having their uniformities waived?

SOURCE: Daniel H. Bowen and Jay P. Greene, “Does Athletic Success Come at the Expense of Academic Success?” (Journal of Research in Education, volume 22, number 2, Fall 2012).

Balancing budgets in austere times requires hard tradeoffs; for schools (especially those hamstrung by restrictive collective-bargaining agreements), this often means nixing extracurricular and non-academic programs like music, the arts, or after-school athletics. This analysis by Jay Greene and his University of Arkansas colleague Daniel Bowen details how such an approach may be short-sighted. In an analysis of 657 Ohio high schools between 2004–05 and 2008–09, Greene and Bowen find that a school’s percentage of students participating in sports is associated with higher overall student performance and increased graduation rates. Specifically, the analysts find that a 10 percentage point bump in a school’s winning record (for football and boys and girls basketball) is associated with a 1.3 percentage point increase in said school’s graduation rate—and a 0.25 point bump in the percentage of students scoring proficient on the state test. Further, adding one sport to the available options for students (and controlling for multi-sport athletes) raised the graduation rate by 1 percentage point and the proficiency rate by 0.2. When ten additional students signed up for an athletic team, the school’s grad rate also increased by 1.5 percent and its percent proficient by 0.4 points (this all after controlling for school size, student demographics, and per pupil expenditures). While these results are relational, not necessarily causal, district leaders should take heed. Cutting sports programs may inadvertently fray a school’s academic prowess.

SOURCE: Daniel H. Bowen and Jay P. Greene, “Does Athletic Success Come at the Expense of Academic Success?” (Journal of Research in Education, volume 22, number 2, Fall 2012).

Mike and Checker talk about the ethics of prepping kids for gifted tests, charter selectivity, and overpriced congressionally mandated commissions, and Dara gives fresh ammunition to helicopter parents.

Amber's Research Minute

Spread of Academic Success in a High School Social Network by Deanna Blansky, Christina Kavanaugh, Cara Boothroyd, Brianna Benson, Julie Gallagher, John Endress, Hiroki Sayama

Following the release of Fordham's report, School Choice Regulations: Red Tape or Red Herring?, Mike Petrilli and Adam Emerson sat down with John Kirtley of Step Up for Students to talk about when private schools choose to participate in choice programs. While Fordham found that Catholic schools were less likely to be deterred by accountability regulations, Kirtley took a slightly different tack.

Watch to find out more!

Well-intentioned policy can do incalculable harm. Photo by paul goyette

As a college freshman in an introductory sociology class, I was assigned the book There Are No Children Here by Alex Kotlowitz. This story of two young boys trying to survive one of Chicago’s most impoverished and dangerous housing projects is absolutely heart-wrenching.

I won’t forget the book’s emotional grip, but equally influential to my intellectual development was the policy and political back story that explained how the boys’ toxic surroundings came to be.

Nearly two decades later, I’m still chastened by the book’s central lesson: A government policy developed by mostly benevolent leaders hoping to improve the lives of the disadvantaged—in this case, by razing old, low-income, ostensibly decaying neighborhoods in favor of gigantic public-housing skyscrapers—did incalculable harm to those it was designed to help.

This has been on my mind in recent weeks, as the national school-closure conversation has flared. Much of that conversation is familiar, but one assertion made by critics, namely that school closures destabilize entire neighborhoods, raises a question that hasn’t been discussed nearly enough. And though some might wave it away as irrelevant or worse, the lessons of the Kotlowitz book force me to take it seriously:

Can a bad school be good for a neighborhood?

Might there be compelling civic or social reasons for keeping open persistently failing or unsafe inner-city schools?

We know there are reasons to close them. First, school turnarounds seldom work (contra the recent statement from AFT president Randi Weingarten), and closures stop us from continuing to send kids to chronically underperforming schools. (The stickiness of failure is even true in the charter sector.)

Second, closures are a part of a continuous-improvement process known as “portfolio management.” Couple closures with new school launches and replications or expansions and you can move the quality curve to the right. This is the heart of my book, The Urban School System of the Future.

(There was a sophisticated discussion of this matter at the recent Bellwether book event. Kaya Henderson, John White, and Mike Casserly did a nice job of explaining the various forces involved. Emma Brown from the Post captured some the back and forth here.)

Third, as explained by Checker Finn, financial considerations make some closures unavoidable—and the likeliest targets are the district’s lowest performers, both because they’re not serving kids well and because they’ve typically seen their enrollments reduced by, among other things, students leaving in search of better educational options.

The anti-closure camp generally counters with a trio of time-worn and ultimately unpersuasive assertions.

• Their “fix-it-don’t-close-it” case is overwhelmed by empirical evidence.
• Their “closures-are-an-anti-union-strategy” argument can’t explain why reformers are also willing to close non-unionized, low-performing charter schools.
• Their “closures-are-a-civil-rights-violation” argument causes most to reply, “It’s a far greater violation to force low-income African American and Latino children to remain in failing, unsafe schools.”

Hence the camp that favors judicious but firm use of school closures increasingly carries the day.

Yet another argument has been waiting to be made, however—one that stokes the communitarian tendencies of my brand of conservatism. It starts with awareness that good schools are a powerful asset for troubled neighborhoods. Indeed, I’ve argued in many places that the closure of excellent inner-city Catholic schools is terrible for such communities. I’ve made the case that high-performing, high-poverty schools can provide safety, stability, and hope to at-risk kids and their families and that these features have immeasurable value in distressed neighborhoods beset by myriad challenges.

But perhaps my view has been too narrow; maybe I’ve put too much weight on the “high-performing” part. Maybe all urban public schools—perhaps even all schools—deserve a greater degree of deference because of characteristics associated with their “local-ness.”

Every school, even the lowest-performing, is woven into the fabric of its neighborhood—and tugging on that thread affects the entire cloth.

For example, the school could be the major employer of adults in the area.

Even if educationally dysfunctional, the school likely has its share of caring, educated adults who serve as role models and mentors for needy children.

The school may serve as the community hub for social services or civic activities.

Maybe its athletic teams still serve as a source of community pride.

It could be the neighborhood’s last connection to a happier past. Perhaps this school was once the gem of the school system. It might have been the city’s first desegregated school. Maybe, pre-Brown, though segregated, it succeeded academically in breathtaking fashion. Perhaps it’s named after a revered civil-rights leader.

It might have been among the first employers to practice nondiscrimination, paving a pathway to the middle class for countless minority families.

Maybe the neighborhood sees that school as the last thing that is actually theirs. Other families moved away. Businesses shut down. Churches closed their doors. But their school remains.

It might be the case, then, that in these and other ways, the school—notwithstanding its persistent low academic achievement—acts as an important strand in the invisible web of social connectivity that helps to hold a community together despite all the malign forces trying to pull it apart.

Those who cleared Chicago’s “slums” to make way for new high-rise public-housing towers didn’t realize that they were severing intricate, generations-old social bonds. This loss of connection, when combined with the ills of concentrated poverty and the inherent flaws of the new building complexes, turned these behemoths into modern-day Trojan Horses: marvelous to behold from the outside (at least when they were new) but with danger lurking inside.

Environmental parallels are numerous: misbegotten projects that cleared eyesore swamps and walls of mangroves to make way for highways, waterfront condos, and more. We found out too late that these “messy” wetlands actually served as massive water filters, flood preventers, wildlife protectors, fish incubators, and much more. Profound environmental degradation was the consequence of well-intentioned, if naïve, attempts at progress.

To be sure, there are enormous differences between these examples and thoughtful, surgical school-closure strategies. Unlike quiet wetlands, failing, dangerous schools do real harm and, if their students move into higher-performing and safer schools, their replacements bear no resemblance to Cabrini-Green.

My point is merely that those pursuing school-closure strategies should be mindful that every school, even the lowest-performing, is woven into the fabric of its neighborhood—and tugging on that thread affects the entire cloth.

That doesn’t mean the scale tips to the “no closures” side. I remain a committed proponent of smart school-replacement strategies and portfolio management.

But it does mean that reformers should acknowledge both sides of the scale and recognize that, when the case for closure prevails, the arguments on the other side haven’t been eliminated; they’ve just been outweighed in a particular case.

That approach, I believe, is the responsible way to go about policymaking generally. And in this case, its effect on policy implementation in cities across the nation would matter: we’d see greater prudence in the process of deliberation, improved communication to stakeholders, and more thoughtful and respectful execution of an undesirable but ultimately necessary decision.

Michael Gove, the British Secretary of State for Education, is a man who reads serious books on education and follows their arguments. In a remarkable recent speech, he mentioned some of the intellectual influences that have caused him to shake up the British education world by insisting that students begin learning facts again. One of those influences was my UVa colleague Daniel Willingham, and he even quoted from my 1996 book. But he said that the greatest intellectual influences on his educational thought were the writings of Antonio Gramsci. So here we have a Tory cabinet minister singing the praises of one of the most revered Communist thinkers of the twentieth century. What gives?

I don’t doubt that Michael Gove might have an impish sense of humor and take pleasure in suggesting to his shadow opponents in the Labour party and in the anti-fact party of educators: “Look, I’m just supporting what the most profound leftist thinker of the twentieth century had to say about education.” But Gove’s main aim was deadly serious. Gramsci was an astonishingly prescient and penetrating thinker whose work is all the more remarkable since it was written under depressing conditions—in prison, where he languished because his writing and journalistic work in the 1920s were so cogent and influential that Mussolini’s fascistic regime seized him in 1927 with the avowed purpose of silencing him. There he remained for eight years, until his ill health brought him to a sanitarium in 1934, thence to a clinic in 1937, where he died. He was allowed to write, but not, of course, to let anyone see his writing. It’s only because his sister-in-law, visiting his clinic room in 1937, smuggled out his thirty-three prison notebooks, unpublished until after the war, that we know some of Gramsci’s profound ideas about society, politics, and education.

He rightly predicted that in the future, most work would entail intellectual work, and that political and economic power would reside with the educated. Especially notable was his critique of progressive education, which became the official educational doctrine of the fascist regime. Despite progressivism’s high claims to “child-centered natural development,” “deep understanding,” and “independent thought,” its anti-bookish tendencies, Gramsci said, were socially retrograde.

“Il bambino non è un gomitolo di lana da sgomitolare, ma la parte del complesso mondo storico su cui l’ambiente e la società esercitano la loro coercizione.”

“The child is not a ball of yarn to be unwound, but part of a complex historical world in which the environment is a society that exercises its own coercions.”

Under progressivism, the children of the rich would continue to possess the knowledge they needed to wield the levers of power (because they would always have multiple opportunities for bookish learning), while the children of the poor would remain in their subordinate poverty.

Hence, what was needed, Gramsci said, was a single “formative school” for all students, rich or poor, that would stress foundational knowledge in literature, science, history, and the arts in a demanding common curriculum. Only in later grades should there be practical trainings in technical and job-related subjects. What Gramsci was in fact proposing was the American Common-School idea of the nineteenth century. And in fact his scuola formativa unica is sometimes translated as “common school.”

In sum, Gramsci favored the kind of knowledge-based schooling that Michael Gove is proposing. He would also favor the Common Core State Standards in the United States, so long as these were implemented as a specific knowledge-based curriculum, and were freed from the anti-intellectual and socially retrograde effects of what Gramsci disdainfully called “teoria dello sgomitolamento”—“the unravelling theory,” best translated as “constructivism”—the anti-broad knowledge, anti-guided learning theory that still dominates many teacher training schools in the United States.

E. D. Hirsch, Jr., is the founder and chairman of the Core Knowledge Foundation and professor emeritus of education and humanities at the University of Virginia. He is the author of several acclaimed books on education issues, including the best-seller Cultural Literacy.

This post originally appeared in slightly different form on the Core Knowledge blog.

In a futile effort to counter the influence of test-preparation companies, New York City’s education department changed part of the test it administers to four-year-olds to determine whether or not they are gifted and talented. For parents who cannot afford to send their child to one of the city’s myriad private schools, a coveted and scarce seat in a public school gifted program is the best start they could give to their children. While many lament the unjust advantage that students with access to test-prep programs obtain, the true tragedy is the dearth of suitable options for all of the gifted children. For more, listen to this week’s Gadfly Show.

Eliciting a keen sense of deja vu, this year's AP Report to the Nation—College Board's tracking of AP course-taking patterns and exam pass rates—offers the same three takeaways as last year's report: Participation rates in the AP are fast on the rise (up 2 percentage points since last year and 14 since last decade). So are AP exam passing rates: up 1.5 percentage points since 2011 and 7 points since 2002. Still, minority involvement flounders, with less than a third of "qualified" Latinos and African American (as decided by PSAT scores) enrolling in an AP course. Expect further unpacking of what these numbers may mean for Common Core implementation, college-remediation courses, and more next week.

The congressionally mandated Equity and Excellence Commission issued a call for both equity and excellence in American public schools (back to the future?). On Tuesday, the group presented its “blueprint” for achieving such an end: early-childhood education should be expanded, all kids should have a high-quality teacher, and school funding should be made more equal. Patent office: Fear not, no one from this commission will be knocking on your door.

In yet another insightful Brown Center Chalkboard post, Russ Whitehurst peeled back the Obama Administration’s misleading rhetoric on “universal pre-K” to reveal a surprisingly tasty fruit. The president’s actual plan will target lower-income families, approach quality in a data- and assessment-driven way, and link program funding to a “rigorous curriculum.” Still, Whitehurst points out several areas that need improvement or elaboration: The plan is silent on the role of parental choice, for example, and—impractically—states that pre-K teachers must be paid “comparably to K–12 staff.”

Storm clouds of teacher dissatisfaction have been brewing since 2009, according to the annual MetLife Survey of the American Teacher. The latest edition, released today, sounds a thunderclap of frustration: Only 39 percent of teachers are "extremely satisfied" with their jobs—down 5 percentage points from last year alone. Principals report feeling worn down, too, with three out of four reporting that their jobs have become "too complex." Whether due to budget cuts (as Van Roekel has surmised), new accountability provisions and other reforms (Randi called that one), or something else, reformers should prepare for a brewing tempest—lest all we built be knocked back down.

Colorado lawmaker (and uber-reformer) Mike Johnston has proposed a new funding system for his state—which hasn’t changed its school-finance arrangements in two decades—that owes much to Rhode Island’s three-step model. Among other things, it would replace the October 1st student count with an average over four days throughout the year, provide state matching funds for smaller districts that pass local tax levies, and offer additional funding for special- and gifted-education programs. And, recognizing the state’s recent unfunded education reforms, the bill includes $600 per student for districts to spend at will.

Last week, Reuters alleged that some stand-alone charter schools build obstacles into their application processes in order to deter unfit students. Certain practices strike Gadfly as particularly insidious, such as making applications available for only a few hours a year and unlawfully requiring that students present Social Security cards and birth certificates. Charter officials are right to promise a crack-down. Nevertheless, there is something to be said for allowing schools to specialize; we’d welcome laws that would explicitly enable charters to be selective so schools wouldn’t go about their business in such slippery ways.

Following the release of Fordham's report, School Choice Regulations: Red Tape or Red Herring?, Mike Petrilli and Adam Emerson sat down with John Kirtley of Step Up for Students to talk about when private schools choose to participate in choice programs. While Fordham found that Catholic schools were less likely to be deterred by accountability regulations, Kirtley took a slightly different tack.

Watch to find out more!

Following the release of Fordham's report, School Choice Regulations: Red Tape or Red Herring?, Mike Petrilli and Adam Emerson sat down with John Kirtley of Step Up for Students to talk about when private schools choose to participate in choice programs. While Fordham found that Catholic schools were less likely to be deterred by accountability regulations, Kirtley took a slightly different tack.

Watch to find out more!

Do students of a feather flock together, or are kids more like chameleons? This new study contends the latter, via evidence suggesting that students whose grades are higher or lower than their friends’ tend to become more like their peers over time. The researchers (members of a partnership between the National Science Foundation and a team of high school students) surveyed 158 teens at New York’s Maine-Endwell High School on the identities of their best friends, friends, and acquaintances, yielding three “social networks”; the authors then tracked all of these individuals’ GPAs over one year to compare their achievement with those in their networks. The results: Students whose peers outperformed them at the start tended to do better by the end of the year, while those whose peers underperformed them were more likely to see their grades slip. This effect was stronger among friends than among acquaintances or, oddly, best friends. The authors theorize that academic habits are “socially contagious” in much the same way as are fashions and fads (though they note that it could simply be, for example, that students “on the way up” tend to seek out and attract higher-performing friends—ditto students who are beginning to slide). Still and all, such findings may have important implications for ed policy. For instance, while lower-performing students may benefit from the company of stronger performers (at least if they become friends), could such mixing wind up harming high performers? We eagerly await more research on this issue. Meanwhile, we’re brushing up on the statistical (and genetic) concept of “regression to the mean.”

SOURCE: Deanna Blansky et al., Spread of Academic Success in a High School Social Network (PLOS ONE, February 2013).

This new report from the Alliance for Excellent Education offers a troubling diagnosis: The thirty-five “NCLB flexibility” waivers granted by the U.S. Department of Education (ED) may have had the unfortunate side effect of allowing states to skirt 2008 regulations that standardized the graduation-rate measurements and held schools accountable for raising those rates. Trivial this is not: Prior to these changes, reported graduation rates were often inflated and always difficult to compare (just like proficiency rates). The 2008 regulations set parameters for consistent, common graduation-rate calculations across schools, districts, and states. Through their ESEA waivers, however, eleven states have re-incorporated “alternative” measures of high school completion (e.g., the GED) in their graduation-rate tracking and reporting, possibly incentivizing schools to “push students towards a GED rather than a standard diploma.” The 2008 policy exposed the low graduation rates of pupil subgroups (minorities, English language learners, low-income students, and students with disabilities) that had previously been masked by averaging the student population; but eleven state waivers contain weak or no strategies for subgroup grad-rate accountability. An intriguing question—not considered here—is whether the 2008 regulation was responsible (at least partially) for the recent uptick in the national graduation rate—and whether the waivers will send that rate tumbling again. The permanent policy question remains: Which aspects of American education should be uniform and which are good candidates for having their uniformities waived?

SOURCE: Daniel H. Bowen and Jay P. Greene, “Does Athletic Success Come at the Expense of Academic Success?” (Journal of Research in Education, volume 22, number 2, Fall 2012).

Balancing budgets in austere times requires hard tradeoffs; for schools (especially those hamstrung by restrictive collective-bargaining agreements), this often means nixing extracurricular and non-academic programs like music, the arts, or after-school athletics. This analysis by Jay Greene and his University of Arkansas colleague Daniel Bowen details how such an approach may be short-sighted. In an analysis of 657 Ohio high schools between 2004–05 and 2008–09, Greene and Bowen find that a school’s percentage of students participating in sports is associated with higher overall student performance and increased graduation rates. Specifically, the analysts find that a 10 percentage point bump in a school’s winning record (for football and boys and girls basketball) is associated with a 1.3 percentage point increase in said school’s graduation rate—and a 0.25 point bump in the percentage of students scoring proficient on the state test. Further, adding one sport to the available options for students (and controlling for multi-sport athletes) raised the graduation rate by 1 percentage point and the proficiency rate by 0.2. When ten additional students signed up for an athletic team, the school’s grad rate also increased by 1.5 percent and its percent proficient by 0.4 points (this all after controlling for school size, student demographics, and per pupil expenditures). While these results are relational, not necessarily causal, district leaders should take heed. Cutting sports programs may inadvertently fray a school’s academic prowess.

SOURCE: Daniel H. Bowen and Jay P. Greene, “Does Athletic Success Come at the Expense of Academic Success?” (Journal of Research in Education, volume 22, number 2, Fall 2012).