The Education Gadfly Weekly

Much research has spotlighted the “dance of the lemons”: the shuffling of mediocre-to-bad teachers from one school to another. But is the same thing happening between grades within schools? This CALDER report by Helen Ladd and Sarah Fuller investigates. Tapping North Carolina’s robust set of data (from 1995 to 2009), Ladd and Fuller examine two research questions: First, are teachers in the upper elementary grades (3-5) of higher quality than those in the lower elementary grades (K-2)? And second, do school-based accountability policies (i.e., No Child Left Behind and North Carolina’s state-level accountability system, known as the ABC system) contribute to these differences by filtering the better teachers into the tested grades and shuffling the lower-quality teachers into those that are untested. The upshot? Teachers in the upper elementary grades do indeed have higher licensure-test scores (the proxy these researchers used for effectiveness, as teachers in lower grades have no value-added scores to analyze). What’s more, the advent of the NCLB accountability era (2003-2009 for this study) increased the gap in teacher quality between the lower to upper grades and the tendency of schools to move teachers of higher quality from the lower to upper grades and vice versa. (Though this same disparity—to a lesser extent—was also seen during the pre-accountability era, 1995-96, and the ABC accountability era, 1997-2002.) From these findings, Ladd and Fuller conclude that accountability policies induce pressure to perform in the tested grades, thereby disadvantaging children in the lower grades. Interesting findings, though the use of licensure-test data is admittedly shaky—great Kindergarten teaching (more so than classroom teaching in the upper elementary grades) relies on patience, warmth, the ability to grow social skills, and a host of other characteristics that are impossible to test on the teacher-licensure exam.

Sarah C. Fuller and Helen F. Ladd, School-Based Accountability and the Distribution of Teacher Quality Among Grades in Elementary School (Washington, D.C.: Center for the Analysis of Longitudinal Data in Education Research, April 2012).

As Common Core implementation heats up, a fiery debate is emerging among reading specialists. It is stoked by the books we assign students who are below grade level—whether we ask them to read “just right” texts (those at a student’s individual reading level) or “grade-appropriate” texts. For years, teachers have been assigning the former, working to ensure that struggling students can read without getting too frustrated. The Common Core now asks teachers to assign grade-appropriate texts (and offer as much scaffolding as needed for below-grade readers). This book from the International Reading Association offers convincing support for this new approach. It argues that our current focus on “just right” books undermines student learning in three ways. First, assigning these texts makes reading too easy. Students will not improve their reading skills if they aren’t challenged and given above-level texts. Second, the “just right” theory overlooks the important role that instruction should play in improving comprehension and building knowledge. Students learn more—and their comprehension improves more dramatically—when they read more challenging and difficult texts with appropriate scaffolding and support from the teacher. Third, the “just right” strategy focuses on teaching skills rather than teaching texts. In isolation, reading skills are pointless. The only way to develop these is to use them while actually struggling through texts. Unfortunately, while the book’s first chapter offers a fantastic framing of this timely and volatile issue, the guidance found in chapters two and three is overly complicated—and may end up undermining the Common Core’s emphasis on improving the quality and rigor of the texts students are reading. Still, kudos to the International Reading Association for breaching the subject.

SOURCE: Douglas Fisher, Nancy Frey, and Diane Lapp, Text Complexity: Raising Rigor in Reading (Newark, DE: International Reading Association, 2012).

Kathleen and Mike wonder how to hold states accountable in twenty-seven different ways and debate whether gender-specific curricula make sense. Amber dives deep into census data on edu-spending.

Amber's Research Minute

Public Education Finances Report - United States Census

One big idea animates virtually all of today’s earnest education reformers: the conviction that great schools can spur social mobility. Voucher supporters, charter advocates, standards nuts, teacher-effectiveness fanatics—we all fundamentally believe that fantastic schools staffed by dedicated educators can help poor kids climb out of poverty and compete with their affluent peers. And then Charles Murray comes along and throws cold water all over the idea.

Can fantastic schools staffed by dedicated educators actually help poor kids climb out of poverty and compete with their affluent peers?

This was my reaction last month when Murray visited the Fordham Institute to talk about his latest book, Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010. Among his many interesting and provocative comments about the rise of a “new upper class”—one inhabited by the winners of America’s meritocracy—he made this rather disturbing statement: “The better the meritocracy, the faster social mobility will decline.” Checker Finn, our president and moderator, did a double-take. “Say it again?” So Murray did. “The better the meritocracy, the more efficiently you identify and reward talent, the faster that social mobility will decline over time.”

As it turns out, this wasn’t the first time Murray has made that argument. An earlier version can be found in his controversial book, The Bell Curve, written with Richard Hernnstein, and then restated in a 2010 Washington Post op-ed:

The more efficiently a society identifies the most able young people of both sexes, sends them to the best colleges, unleashes them into an economy that is tailor-made for people with their abilities and lets proximity take its course, the sooner a New Elite—the "cognitive elite" that Herrnstein and I described—becomes a class unto itself. It is by no means a closed club, as Barack Obama's example proves. But the credentials for admission are increasingly held by the children of those who are already members. An elite that passes only money to the next generation is evanescent ("Shirtsleeves to shirtsleeves in three generations," as the adage has it). An elite that also passes on ability is more tenacious, and the chasm between it and the rest of society widens.

Which is why, Murray argues, that the children of the New Elite dominate the campuses of top-tier universities.

The student bodies of the elite colleges are still drawn overwhelmingly from the upper middle class. According to sociologist Joseph Soares's book "The Power of Privilege: Yale and America's Elite Colleges," about four out of five students in the top tier of colleges have parents whose income, education and occupations put them in the top quarter of American families, according to Soares's measure of socioeconomic status. Only about one out of 20 such students come from the bottom half of families.

The discomfiting explanation is that despite need-blind admissions policies, the stellar applicants still hail overwhelmingly from the upper middle class and above. Students who have a parent with a college degree accounted for only 55 percent of SAT-takers this year but got 87 percent of all the verbal and math scores above 700, according to unpublished data provided to me by the College Board. This is not a function of SAT prep courses available to the affluent—such coaching buys only a few dozen points—but of the ability of these students to do well in a challenging academic setting.

Read that again. Just one in 20 students at top universities comes from the bottom half of the socio-economic strata. The number coming from the bottom quintile—children growing up in poverty—is even smaller—miniscule really. Are we reformers kidding ourselves when we think that better schools will catapult low-income children into the ranks of this New Elite?

Are we reformers kidding ourselves when we think that better schools will catapult low-income children into the ranks of this New Elite?

Our argument, as it goes, is that we’ve never really tried. Because of low expectations, mediocre teachers, a lack of options, ill-designed curricula—name your poison—poor kids have never had a chance to see their talents flourish. Put them into the right educational environment, surround them with supportive adults, and (if you’re of the broader/bolder persuasion) provide them with all kinds of social supports too, and we’ll see our elite college campuses—gateways to the new Upper Class—democratize before our eyes.

But this assumes that academic ability—whether defined as intelligence, or non-cognitive skills and character traits, or whatever else—is randomly distributed across the population. Which, Murray argues, was probably once true but is no longer. Because of the ferocious sorting of the meritocratic machine, talented people have been finding and marrying one another, and giving birth to a super-class of highly gifted children. (Murray said at our event that it “doesn’t matter” whether these gifts are bequeathed by nature or nurture. What matters is the strong link between the talents of parents and the talents of their offspring.) And, as David Brooks pointed out today, after years of bedtime stories, trips to the zoo, vocabulary-packed conversations, and other “enrichment” activities, these children enter school miles ahead of the rest of their peers—including the poor kids that are the focus of so many education reforms.

Of course, as Murray says, this phenomenon plays out in terms of group averages. If we live in a meritocracy where intelligence and other talents lead to success,* then the children of the highly successful (the Elite) will, on average, be more talented than the children of the somewhat successful, who will, on average, be more talented that the children of the not successful (i.e., the children of the poor). On average.

Understandably, we don’t much like to discuss this possibility. It gives cover to educators who look at a classroom of low-income children and diminish their expectations—thinking that “these kids” aren’t capable of much, educators who don’t buy the mantra that “all children can learn.” But would we be shocked to find that the average intelligence level of such a classroom is lower than a classroom in an elite, affluent suburb?

Yes, intelligence is malleable, not innate. Yes, an exceptional school/teacher/curriculum may boost that average intelligence level. But can those factors boost it enough to overcome the disparities Murray describes? If not, what can educators do?

I see two possible strategies. The first is to be fanatical about identifying talented children from low-income (and middle-income) communities and then provide the challenge and support to launch them into the New Elite via top-tier universities. Murray, for one, thinks this is already happening. “If you are a really smart kid in a backwater town in Mississippi—I don’t care if you’re white or black—this has never been a better time for you,” he said at our event. “It’s never been easier for you, no matter how poor your family is, to get a full ride to a really good college if you’re really, if you’ve got a lot of talent. We’ve gotten really, really good at identifying talent wherever it is and I’m delighted about that.”

He may well be right. It’s true that many communities have various “talent search” initiatives, scholarship programs for poor kids to attend elite private schools and top colleges, science fairs, spelling bees, selective magnet schools, and other approaches for ferreting out these diamonds in the rough. (Some of the best charter schools might be playing this role too, though they don’t want to admit it.) Still, I worry that, in the current policy environment, most schools serving poor kids have little incentive to offer gifted-and-talented programs and other mechanisms whereby to boost the prospects of poor but brilliant kids. (Online learning could be a big help here.)

The second strategy is to be more realistic about the kind of social mobility we hope to spur. Getting a big chunk of America’s poor kids into the New Elite in one generation might be a fool’s errand—our meritocracy has put them at too great a disadvantage. But getting them into working -class or middle-class jobs isn’t so impossible. Here’s a question for the KIPPs and YES Preps of the world: Would you be happy if, ten years from now, your middle schoolers were working as cops, firefighters, teachers, plumbers, electricians, and nurses? This would be a huge accomplishment, it seems to me, as most poor kids will go on to work in low-paid service jobs a decade hence. It may not make for as inspiring a Hollywood story, but it’s a crucial version of social mobility all the same.

Maybe Murray’s wrong. I sort of hope that he is. But we should be talking about these issues all the same.

 * The Left sees the same social sorting as Murray but concludes that our meritocracy isn’t efficient, it’s rigged. See, for example, Christopher Hayes’ The Twilight of the Elites, as excerpted in this Nation article.

Would Henry V have benefitted from an all-boys school? David Brooks, in his critique of the American school scene, doesn’t look to single-gender schools to re-engage children like the rambunctious and adversarial Prince Hal, but officials at the U.S. Department of Education surely had boys like him in mind when they relaxed restrictions on single-sex public education six years ago.

Perhaps Prince Hal could've used an all-boys school. Photo by Kevin Rawlings.

Those revised Title IX regulations allowed single-sex education to flourish. Nearly 400 public schools nationwide currently offer single-gender classrooms (ten years ago, there were only a dozen) and another 116 schools exist to serve either all boys or all girls. The freedom to establish these schools comes with a sensible caveat: The option must be voluntary for families. An Associated Press report last week radiated more heat than light on this growth, but it reminded us of the move to engage children like Henry with the methods Brooks says may be more effective for some boys than others: competition over cooperation; boot camps over friendship circles.

Leonard Sax, the founder and chief executive of the National Association for Single Sex Public Education, contends that some boys need to embrace Spartacus before they can learn to love Jane Eyre. That position, of course, has its detractors, and chief among Sax’s antagonists is Diane Halpern, former president of the American Psychological Association. Halpern and other researchers last fall argued that Sax has led many educators to deepen the gender divide with groundless claims. She called on the Education Department to rescind its changes to Title IX, reminding officials that their own review in 2005 on the merits of single-sex education was “equivocal.”

Halpern, however, has engaged in her own selective review of the literature. The department examined the early implementation of its regulatory changes in 2008 and found that, while results were mixed, “the findings suggest some support for the premise that single-sex schooling can be helpful.”

More specifically:

• The department’s researchers observed more positive academic and behavioral interactions between teachers and students in single-sex schools;


• Students in single-sex schools showed a greater sense of community and were less likely to disrupt class;


• Teachers believed single-sex education effectively eliminated the distractions to learning in both sexes, and, at least in high school, behavior problems were less serious; and


• Parents and students cited the same benefits teachers identified and implied they chose a single-sex school for those reasons.

Halpern and her colleagues may want us all to learn and play together, but their case is paternalistic. They say that single-sex education is “not a choice public schools should embrace,” yet it’s the parent who’s making the choice; these schools are flourishing because there’s demand for them. We can, and should, further study the outcomes of these schools and hold them accountable for student learning just as we would for any public school. Halpern, along with the ACLU, may have states and school districts in their sights, but they’re sidestepping (or dismissing) the fact that parents want this option. Should it only be available to families who can afford a private education? Halpern is silent on this question.

Brooks’ point is that our cultural ideal of the American school may be causing boys, in particular, to disengage from school altogether. Maybe all it takes to re-engage them is a school of their own.

The Obama administration passed the halfway mark last Friday in its ongoing effort to dismantle the most vexing accountability requirements of the No Child Left Behind Act, one waiver at a time. By exempting Wisconsin and Washington from the ever-unattainable goal of reaching near-universal math and reading proficiency by 2014, the Department of Education brings the grand total of liberated states to twenty-six, with ten more (plus D.C.) eagerly awaiting word on their applications from Arne Duncan. Yet despite its importance in reshaping the federal role in education, the waiver program defies easy labels. Forget EduJobs or Race to the Top: ESEA flexibility is likely the Obama administration’s greatest contribution to education policy, but it may also prove to be a political liability in this fall’s election. Despite being driven by a Democratic administration in Washington, it’s welcomed by many Republican governors relieved to escape requirements dictated from D.C. It’s at once a necessity given congressional gridlock but also illegal given its end-run around the legislature. It purports to offer flexibility but in many ways ratchets up federal rulemaking. Unless Congress can make any headway in reauthorization, however, the real legacy of the waiver policy won’t be reshaping accountability (and teacher evaluation and standards, etc.) in dozens of states—it will be shifting the federal role in education from the Capitol to the White House.

“‘No Child’ Law Whittled Down by White House,” by Motoko Rich, New York Times, July 6, 2012

While art, music, and history tend to get the headlines when they’re pushed out in favor of more math and reading instruction, the CDC reports that physical education is being cut nationwide too, despite a genuine obesity epidemic. When there’s still plenty of fat to be found in education budgets, savings gleaned from narrowing the curriculum carry too high a cost.

While charter schools may soon enroll more students than district schools in D.C., charter growth in surrounding areas remains mired by suburban complacency and fears over lost funding for district schools. All of which misses the point: Even if the suburban schools are great (a shaky assumption), why wouldn’t students benefit from a broader range of options and schools competing for their attendance?

The Texas GOP has been catching flak (and appropriately so) for adding opposition to “critical thinking” skills to its 2012 platform because they have the “purpose of challenging the student’s fixed beliefs and undermining parental authority.” There are plenty of sound pedagogical reasons to oppose weak curricula focused on hard-to-define and harder-to-apply “critical thinking” skills: With any luck we can focus on those rather than the nonsense emanating from the Lone Star State.

News flash: Sequestration would stink for schools, according to a pair of reports by the NEA and AASA. (Although not everyone would shed tears if the teaching force was trimmed significantly, as the union projects will happen if Congress can’t make a budget deal.) Still, Gadfly was encouraged that 54 percent of the districts AASA surveyed budgeted for federal cuts—perhaps districts will find ways to thrive with the “new normal” of education spending after all.

The Center for American Progress reports that many kids find their classes too easy, this week’s reminder of how much rides on effective implementation of the more-rigorous Common Core standards in coming years.

For decades, most students went to great lengths to avoid summer school, but now districts nationwide are taking on summer-learning loss by offering programs that blend education and recreation. A fine stop gap, sure, but why not simply rearrange the year to prevent such unnecessarily long breaks in the first place?

Much research has spotlighted the “dance of the lemons”: the shuffling of mediocre-to-bad teachers from one school to another. But is the same thing happening between grades within schools? This CALDER report by Helen Ladd and Sarah Fuller investigates. Tapping North Carolina’s robust set of data (from 1995 to 2009), Ladd and Fuller examine two research questions: First, are teachers in the upper elementary grades (3-5) of higher quality than those in the lower elementary grades (K-2)? And second, do school-based accountability policies (i.e., No Child Left Behind and North Carolina’s state-level accountability system, known as the ABC system) contribute to these differences by filtering the better teachers into the tested grades and shuffling the lower-quality teachers into those that are untested. The upshot? Teachers in the upper elementary grades do indeed have higher licensure-test scores (the proxy these researchers used for effectiveness, as teachers in lower grades have no value-added scores to analyze). What’s more, the advent of the NCLB accountability era (2003-2009 for this study) increased the gap in teacher quality between the lower to upper grades and the tendency of schools to move teachers of higher quality from the lower to upper grades and vice versa. (Though this same disparity—to a lesser extent—was also seen during the pre-accountability era, 1995-96, and the ABC accountability era, 1997-2002.) From these findings, Ladd and Fuller conclude that accountability policies induce pressure to perform in the tested grades, thereby disadvantaging children in the lower grades. Interesting findings, though the use of licensure-test data is admittedly shaky—great Kindergarten teaching (more so than classroom teaching in the upper elementary grades) relies on patience, warmth, the ability to grow social skills, and a host of other characteristics that are impossible to test on the teacher-licensure exam.

Sarah C. Fuller and Helen F. Ladd, School-Based Accountability and the Distribution of Teacher Quality Among Grades in Elementary School (Washington, D.C.: Center for the Analysis of Longitudinal Data in Education Research, April 2012).

As Common Core implementation heats up, a fiery debate is emerging among reading specialists. It is stoked by the books we assign students who are below grade level—whether we ask them to read “just right” texts (those at a student’s individual reading level) or “grade-appropriate” texts. For years, teachers have been assigning the former, working to ensure that struggling students can read without getting too frustrated. The Common Core now asks teachers to assign grade-appropriate texts (and offer as much scaffolding as needed for below-grade readers). This book from the International Reading Association offers convincing support for this new approach. It argues that our current focus on “just right” books undermines student learning in three ways. First, assigning these texts makes reading too easy. Students will not improve their reading skills if they aren’t challenged and given above-level texts. Second, the “just right” theory overlooks the important role that instruction should play in improving comprehension and building knowledge. Students learn more—and their comprehension improves more dramatically—when they read more challenging and difficult texts with appropriate scaffolding and support from the teacher. Third, the “just right” strategy focuses on teaching skills rather than teaching texts. In isolation, reading skills are pointless. The only way to develop these is to use them while actually struggling through texts. Unfortunately, while the book’s first chapter offers a fantastic framing of this timely and volatile issue, the guidance found in chapters two and three is overly complicated—and may end up undermining the Common Core’s emphasis on improving the quality and rigor of the texts students are reading. Still, kudos to the International Reading Association for breaching the subject.

SOURCE: Douglas Fisher, Nancy Frey, and Diane Lapp, Text Complexity: Raising Rigor in Reading (Newark, DE: International Reading Association, 2012).