The Education Gadfly Weekly

Caitlin Scott and Nancy Kober, School Districts' Perspectives on the Economic Stimulus Package: School Improvement Grants Present Uncertainty and Opportunity, (Washington, D.C.: Center on Education Policy, August 2010).

Way back in the spring, the federal government put its faith (and $3.5 billion in School Improvement Grants) behind four “turnaround models” for the worst-performing schools. The idea, of course, is that with the right interventions, even the most troubled schools can be reborn as good ones. But what if they don’t know how—or even what the models are? That’s the unsettling reality, according to this nationally representative survey of school districts. Over one-third of them were unfamiliar with at least one of the four “endorsed” turnaround models, while fewer than 12 percent had previously implemented even one of those intervention strategies. CEP also looked at the efficacy of past turnaround efforts and—unsurprisingly—found mixed results. But the most successful model is perhaps not what you’d expect: Of the four approaches, only the transformation model, which replaces the principal and provides teachers with increased support, elicited positive results. (Note, however, that this model was undertaken by a scant 6 percent of districts.) But, say the authors, we can’t write off these turnaround models just yet, since the survey was conducted before much of the SIG money reached districts, and before districts began concentrating their efforts on the four turnaround strategies. That a significant portion of districts are woefully undereducated on the SIG models is certainly not promising for their success (nevermind their historic lack of courage to make radical changes). But we’ll have to wait for CEP’s second survey, slated for winter 2010-2011, to find out. We wait, breath duly bated and suspense elevated.

Marie-Andree Somers, William Corrin, Susan Sepanik, Terry Salinger, Jesse Levin, and Courtney Zmach with Edmond Wong, The Enhanced Reading Opportunities Study Final Report: The Impact of Supplemental Literacy Courses for Struggling Ninth-Grade Readers (Washington, D.C.: Institute of Education Sciences, July 2010).

This whopping report asks a single, simple question: Can a supplemental reading class boost achievement for struggling adolescent readers? The answer? Yes, temporarily. Analysts randomly assigned roughly 5,600 students from thirty-four high schools to a control or a treatment group, which would use one of two supplemental reading programs (Reading Apprenticeship Academic Literary or Xtreme Reading), also known as “Enhanced Reading Opportunities” (ERO). Each of the EROs supplanted an elective course, which meant it took place in addition to the student’s regular English class, during the school day (not after school), and either every day for forty-five minutes or every other day for ninety minutes (for a total of 3.75 hours a week). With this intense intervention, students moved, over the course of ninth-grade, from the twenty-third to the twenty-fifth percentile nationally in reading comprehension. (That sounds minor but most reading interventions, especially when tested with the gold-standard methods employed here, have zero effect, so even a two percentile shift is worth noting—though reading in the twenty-fifth percentile is nothing to celebrate.) The ERO program also positively impacted students’ GPAs, the rate at which they earned course credits, and their scores on standardized English and math tests. But when the intervention stopped, so did the students’ reading progress. (In fact, students reverted back to their original scores and GPA levels.) We find, once again, that even a heavy but short-lived dose of intense remediation for struggling readers is no long-term solution to improving adolescent reading—no matter how much money is thrown at the initiative. (In this case, the per-student price tag was about $2,000 per kid.) Though the study is refreshing for its focus on improving high school reading performance (and pertinent in light of ED’s new Striving Readers program), in the end, the results leave much to be desired.

William J. Slotnik, Levers for Change: Pathways for State-to-District Assistance in Underperforming School Districts (Washington, D.C.: Center for American Progress, September 2010).

Over the last thirty years, states have taken on an increasingly large role in district (and subsequently school) interventions (most recently through Race to the Top, School Improvement Grants, and the like). But, according to this CAP paper, this may or may not be such a good idea. That’s because, if history is any guide, state-to-district interventions have repeatedly failed. The main problem, the author explains, is that states tend to compartmentalize their efforts—addressing the financial or organizational aspect of a district, for example, but ignoring the politics. Or pushing districts to fix schools’ achievement, while ignoring gaping budget holes. But where history shows repeated failure, it also teaches lessons for the future. First, states need to address all aspects of an intervention—organizational, political, educational—at once. Second, states need to do all of those things better, by establishing mechanisms for mid-course corrections (organizational), for example, and creating an effective communications strategy (political). For each lever, CAP provides a series of “litmus questions” for a state to find and examine its weaknesses and fix them. The premise of this paper may seem obvious, but with states taking increasingly larger roles in district reform (putting to use the Common Core standards, guiding SIG efforts, etc.), state-to-district interventions need now, more than ever, to be done well. And, this paper offers a blueprint.

Besides almost certainly forfeiting a Senate seat that the GOP could have taken in November, Delaware’s Republican primary voters yesterday made a colossal mistake when it comes to education policy. Mike Castle is, and for two decades has been, one of American education’s wisest, sagest, and bravest reformers.

I first came to know him in 1989 when, as governor of Delaware—and already a notable education change-agent there—he served as the first GOP governor on the National Assessment Governing Board (NAGB), which I then had the privilege of chairing. He came to Congress in January 1993 and my admiration for him has never flagged. He’s a workhorse, not a showhorse, the kind of pragmatist who actually likes to get things done; and he is capable of reaching across the aisle for that purpose. His fingerprints are on every significant piece of federal education legislation of the past eighteen years. (And that’s not all he’s done in Congress.) He has chaired or served as ranking minority member of the main K-12 subcommittee of the House Education and Labor Committee for as long as I can remember, working with speakers from Newt Gingrich to Nancy Pelosi, with committee chairs from Bill Goodling to George Miller, and with presidents from Bill Clinton through George Bush II to Barack Obama.

There have been one or two issues (e.g., Head Start reform) where I might have held out for more changes than Castle eventually settled for, but, as noted above, he’s a realist who would rather light one candle than curse the darkness. (I’m sometimes guilty of the latter.) He learns from experience. He adapts to changing national needs and priorities (see, for example, his column on STEM education). And he has never failed to put the interests of kids ahead of those of adults.

At seventy-one, he could retire but I hope he doesn’t. He’d be a superb university president, foundation chief, even U.S. secretary of education (if the crazies don’t also wreck the GOP’s chances of replacing Obama in 2012). Delaware and America have been well and honorably served and improved by his distinguished public-service career. Only a party with a death-wish would end it in this fashion.

This piece originally appeared on Fordham’s blog, Flypaper. You can subscribe to Flypaper’s RSS feed here.

In the District of Columbia Public Schools, where I teach social studies, “credit recovery” (CR) is a program of after-school courses for high school students who have failed the same classes during the regular school day. CR enables these pupils to receive credit towards graduation; but the “recovery” courses have distinctly lower standards than the standard kind. As a result, any increase in graduation numbers achieved through this means may well yield a false impression of improved student learning.

The ideas behind credit recovery are nothing new; for decades school systems have offered summer and night programs where students can pass courses while—often—doing less work. Credit recovery is simply the latest incarnation of this approach. And it’s not just taking hold in the nation’s capital; CR programs are being launched all around the country and enrollment is booming. But these efforts haven’t been scrutinized for evidence that students are actually meeting the same standards that “regular” courses would demand of them.

In many public school systems, including DCPS, students who fail key high-school courses such as Algebra I or English 2 are scheduled into double periods to give them additional time to master challenging subject matter. Credit recovery does the opposite; it creates separate credit bearing courses, but with 25 to 40 percent fewer scheduled classroom hours. A typical two-semester course (1.0 Carnegie unit) offered during the regular school day in most DCPS high schools is scheduled for 120 to 135 seat hours. In credit recovery, meanwhile, the total number of teacher-student contact hours is eighty-two to ninety-two hours. (Contact hours are important, especially given that most of the students enrolled in CR courses had deficiencies in prerequisite knowledge from the get-go. For these students, expanded—not constricted—classroom time is critical for success.) Plus, CR courses come with the additional restriction that “there will be no traditional ‘homework’ assigned in Credit Recovery. All assignments will be completed during class time.” (Emphasis mine.)*

In her October 28, 2008 “Chancellors’ Notes,” DCPS Chancellor Michelle Rhee described the expansion of CR from the previous year’s trial run of 200 students in seven high schools to “over 1,400 students…[in] all 16 high schools.” Enrollment was open to all students, grades 9 through 12, including many with no lost credits requiring “recovery.” By the end of that school year, easily more than twice the chancellor’s original estimate of 1,400 students had enrolled in CR. (The actual number of students who received credits under these conditions has not been reported and is difficult to estimate, since many CR teachers reported drop-out rates of more than 50 percent.)

Moreover, many CR class teachers were assigned courses they were not certified to teach. During the past two school years, students enrolled in different subjects were assigned to one teacher and grouped in a single classroom. In some cases, non-instructional staff members, such as counselors, were assigned to “teach” CR classes. The clear expectation of school officials responsible for these assignments was that students would spend most of their time completing work sheets with little active teacher instruction.

Many students were simultaneously enrolled in two courses, even though one is the pre-requisite for the other, as in math, Spanish, and French. Some students, mainly ELL/ESOL, were enrolled in as many as three English courses at the same time. CR teachers reported a range of direct and indirect pressure by administrators to pass students enrolled in these courses despite failing grades, extensive absences, and late enrollment.

In my experience, CR as practiced in DCPS leads to a decline in actual student learning, teacher morale, and institutional integrity. It certainly mitigates against high standards. When some of our most academically challenged students are offered shortcuts that allow them to receive course credits for only partial content mastery, knowledge and the work ethic on which it is founded are devalued. Like ancient gilded lead coins, each recipient of CR credits is deceived with an inflated sense of achievement, which will burst the moment he or she learns that full college acceptance is conditional upon completion of remedial, non-credit courses. This is, of course, completely consistent with the lamentable pattern of giving kids diplomas that purport to attest to achievement and readiness but actually do nothing of the sort—which is arguably the origin of standards-based reform and external accountability in U.S. education going back to the flurry of high school graduation tests that started in the 1970s.

Simply put, credit recovery, in Washington, D.C. and elsewhere, makes a mockery of local and national efforts to improve our country’s knowledge base.

* This no-homework clause was listed on a 2007 version of the DCPS website as one in a series of bulleted "details" about credit recovery

Erich Martel is a social studies teacher in the District of Columbia Public Schools and serves on the Executive Board of the Washington Teachers Union. He can be reached at [email protected].

2010 College-Bound Seniors Results Underscore Importance of Academic Rigor, Press release, College Board, September 13, 2010.

Some things change, and then there is the SAT, where for the umpteenth year in a row, scores are flat. Average scores for the class of 2010 were 501 in critical reading, 516 in math, and 492 in writing. But the real story here has to do with curriculum. Students who benefit from a core curriculum—defined as at least four years of English, and three each of math, natural science, and history—score significantly higher than those who don’t: roughly fifty points in reading, math, and writing. This boost was only topped by one other: students in honors or AP level classes, which tended to see a higher scores on all three tests even from taking unrelated advanced classes. For example, students who were or had taken AP/honors in the natural sciences scored sixty-seven points higher than average in critical reading. But the point is the same: Skills like reading are best taught—or even only can be taught—in the context of high-quality rigorous content.

Testing, the Chinese Way, by Elisabeth Rosenthal, New York Times, September 11, 2010.

Of all the emotions evoked by the word “test,” pleasurable curiosity is probably not at the top of your list. That’s because you live in America, where testing is condemned for stifling individuality, creativity, and real content knowledge. Move half way around the globe, however, and your perspective would change. That’s what happened to NYT correspondent Elisabeth Rosenthal’s children, who, after attending elementary school in China, where they were regularly tested, found their new no-grades and no-tests progressive (presumably private) American school in New York City unsettling. Or as Rosenthal’s daughter asked after a month sans tests, “How do I know if I get what’s going on in math class?” (Both children are now at a Big Apple specialized public high school where they relish the feedback of frequent testing—and a significant portion of their classmates are Asian.) UNC-Chapel Hill professor Gregory Cizek takes it a step further: “What’s best for kids is frequent testing, where even if they do badly, they can get help and improve and have the satisfaction of doing better,” he explains. Yes, he acknowledges, tests must be age appropriate—three-year-olds can’t spend hours filling in bubbles—and the Chinese system, where university entrance rests on one make-it-or-break-it exam, is a bit extreme. But there is a happy medium, where tests are frequent and helpful, as the Rosenthal kids will attest.

Caitlin Scott and Nancy Kober, School Districts' Perspectives on the Economic Stimulus Package: School Improvement Grants Present Uncertainty and Opportunity, (Washington, D.C.: Center on Education Policy, August 2010).

Way back in the spring, the federal government put its faith (and $3.5 billion in School Improvement Grants) behind four “turnaround models” for the worst-performing schools. The idea, of course, is that with the right interventions, even the most troubled schools can be reborn as good ones. But what if they don’t know how—or even what the models are? That’s the unsettling reality, according to this nationally representative survey of school districts. Over one-third of them were unfamiliar with at least one of the four “endorsed” turnaround models, while fewer than 12 percent had previously implemented even one of those intervention strategies. CEP also looked at the efficacy of past turnaround efforts and—unsurprisingly—found mixed results. But the most successful model is perhaps not what you’d expect: Of the four approaches, only the transformation model, which replaces the principal and provides teachers with increased support, elicited positive results. (Note, however, that this model was undertaken by a scant 6 percent of districts.) But, say the authors, we can’t write off these turnaround models just yet, since the survey was conducted before much of the SIG money reached districts, and before districts began concentrating their efforts on the four turnaround strategies. That a significant portion of districts are woefully undereducated on the SIG models is certainly not promising for their success (nevermind their historic lack of courage to make radical changes). But we’ll have to wait for CEP’s second survey, slated for winter 2010-2011, to find out. We wait, breath duly bated and suspense elevated.

Marie-Andree Somers, William Corrin, Susan Sepanik, Terry Salinger, Jesse Levin, and Courtney Zmach with Edmond Wong, The Enhanced Reading Opportunities Study Final Report: The Impact of Supplemental Literacy Courses for Struggling Ninth-Grade Readers (Washington, D.C.: Institute of Education Sciences, July 2010).

This whopping report asks a single, simple question: Can a supplemental reading class boost achievement for struggling adolescent readers? The answer? Yes, temporarily. Analysts randomly assigned roughly 5,600 students from thirty-four high schools to a control or a treatment group, which would use one of two supplemental reading programs (Reading Apprenticeship Academic Literary or Xtreme Reading), also known as “Enhanced Reading Opportunities” (ERO). Each of the EROs supplanted an elective course, which meant it took place in addition to the student’s regular English class, during the school day (not after school), and either every day for forty-five minutes or every other day for ninety minutes (for a total of 3.75 hours a week). With this intense intervention, students moved, over the course of ninth-grade, from the twenty-third to the twenty-fifth percentile nationally in reading comprehension. (That sounds minor but most reading interventions, especially when tested with the gold-standard methods employed here, have zero effect, so even a two percentile shift is worth noting—though reading in the twenty-fifth percentile is nothing to celebrate.) The ERO program also positively impacted students’ GPAs, the rate at which they earned course credits, and their scores on standardized English and math tests. But when the intervention stopped, so did the students’ reading progress. (In fact, students reverted back to their original scores and GPA levels.) We find, once again, that even a heavy but short-lived dose of intense remediation for struggling readers is no long-term solution to improving adolescent reading—no matter how much money is thrown at the initiative. (In this case, the per-student price tag was about $2,000 per kid.) Though the study is refreshing for its focus on improving high school reading performance (and pertinent in light of ED’s new Striving Readers program), in the end, the results leave much to be desired.

William J. Slotnik, Levers for Change: Pathways for State-to-District Assistance in Underperforming School Districts (Washington, D.C.: Center for American Progress, September 2010).

Over the last thirty years, states have taken on an increasingly large role in district (and subsequently school) interventions (most recently through Race to the Top, School Improvement Grants, and the like). But, according to this CAP paper, this may or may not be such a good idea. That’s because, if history is any guide, state-to-district interventions have repeatedly failed. The main problem, the author explains, is that states tend to compartmentalize their efforts—addressing the financial or organizational aspect of a district, for example, but ignoring the politics. Or pushing districts to fix schools’ achievement, while ignoring gaping budget holes. But where history shows repeated failure, it also teaches lessons for the future. First, states need to address all aspects of an intervention—organizational, political, educational—at once. Second, states need to do all of those things better, by establishing mechanisms for mid-course corrections (organizational), for example, and creating an effective communications strategy (political). For each lever, CAP provides a series of “litmus questions” for a state to find and examine its weaknesses and fix them. The premise of this paper may seem obvious, but with states taking increasingly larger roles in district reform (putting to use the Common Core standards, guiding SIG efforts, etc.), state-to-district interventions need now, more than ever, to be done well. And, this paper offers a blueprint.