The Education Gadfly Weekly

Despite lackluster achievement on the latest rounds of PISA, TIMSS, and PIRLS exams—and despite Fordham’s own premonitions of a new “Sputnik moment” for U.S. education—much complacency still surrounds American pupils’ academic prowess. One oft-cited source of false comfort is the gradual uptick in NAEP math and science scores over the past few years. This latest report from the international-education trifecta of Eric Hanushek, Paul Peterson, and Ludgar Woessmann argues for renewed sobriety. It tracks student-achievement growth in forty-nine countries (1995-2009) and forty-one states (1992-2011). Overall, increases in U.S. student achievement are middling, with twenty-four countries making greater gains. Over the fourteen years analyzed, U.S. students advanced about one year of learning, which is less than half of the achievement gains registered in more than twenty nations (including Hong Kong, Germany, the United Kingdom, Poland, and top-improvers Latvia, Chile, and Brazil). What’s most interesting about the report, though, is the analysis of state improvement over time. Maryland made the most progress, with Florida, Delaware, and Massachusetts following closely behind. Iowa, Maine, and Oklahoma, meanwhile, found themselves at the bottom of the pile. If the U.S. as a whole had equaled the progress made by its top-improving states, we would be on par with Germany and the U.K.—and would find ourselves among the top advancers worldwide. There’s much thought-provoking data to cull here and still more trends and patterns to ponder. Among them: Southern states (especially those with ardent education-reform governors in the late 1990s) boasted strong improvement while Midwestern states (which have been reticent to engage in education reform until recently) saw the smallest gains. What’s more, gains could not be linked to increased spending nor explained away by theories that initially low-performing states were simply “catching up”—which accounted for but a quarter of registered improvements. You should have a look.

SOURCE: Eric A. Hanushek, Paul E. Peterson, and Ludgar Woessmann, Achievement Growth: International and U.S. State Trends in Student Performance (Cambridge, MA: Harvard’s Program on Education Policy and Governance and Education Next, July 2012).

Here’s a jarring statistic from analysts Raegen Miller and Marguerite Roza: In 2007-08, states spent $14.8 billion on pay bumps for teachers with master’s degrees, which—time and again—have proven to be entirely unrelated to instructional effectiveness. In perspective, this equates to $217 per pupil—and marks a 72 percent increase since 2003-04, the last time Miller and Roza crunched these numbers. This “master’s bump” affects states differently: Six states (all with powerful teacher unions, including Illinois, New York, and Ohio) allocate $400-plus per-pupil as a reward for this additional credential (in cost-adjusted dollars). Eight (predominantly right-to-work states like Oklahoma, Texas, and Utah) spend under $100. Interestingly, the size of a master’s bump had no statistical relationship with the percentage of teachers acquiring such degrees. Miller and Roza recommend a two-pronged approach to developing a sleeker, more productive teacher-salary structure. First, scrap policies that automatically confer extra pay for master’s degrees (or that require advanced degrees for full licensure). Second, push master’s programs to compete on merit: Use teacher-assessment data to rate their effectiveness and encourage graduate programs centered on performance assessments (like the Relay Graduate School of Education and the Urban Teacher Center) rather than seat-time requirements. Good ideas both—and even more so when budgets are tight.

SOURCE: Raegan Miller and Marguerite Roza, The Sheepskin Effect and Student Achievement: Deemphasizing the Role of Master’s Degrees in Teacher Compensation (Washington, D.C.: Center for American Progress, July 2012).

Mike and Adam dissect StudentsFirst’s take on the Olympics and debate whether the parent trigger is overhyped. Amber wonders what Maryland and Delaware are doing right when it comes to education.

Amber's Research Minute

Achievement Growth: International and U.S. State Trends in Student Performance - Download the PDF

What a difference a decade makes. For all the debate around vouchers and student loans, perhaps the most striking element of Mitt Romney's education agenda is how much it differs from the approach of No Child Left Behind, the defining policy of the George W. Bush years. That does not mean, however, that other Republicans necessarily agree with it. The GOP stance on education, and particularly federal education policy, is clearly shifting. But in any clear direction? And for the better?

To examine those questions, the Fordham Institute will bring together two former GOP education secretaries to discuss the Republican Party's direction on this vital issue.

The flap over quality control, academic fraud, false claims, and shortcuts in the world of credit recovery will not die down until American education (and the elected officials who set its key policies) face up to two realities.

• Universal “college and career readiness,” unless far more carefully defined and monitored than anyone has done so far, is just as fraud-inducing a K-12 goal as “universal proficiency by 2014” was for No Child Left Behind. A noble objective indeed, but so hard to attain—in a land where high school diplomas signify scant “readiness” and more than a quarter of young people drop out before getting them—that today’s push for both universality and readiness impels a lot of folks to cut corners.



Arne Duncan visits an example of the original credit-recovery program: summer school.  Photo by U.S. Department of Education.

• At day’s end, there are just three ways of awarding “credit” for work done in (or out) of school (and conferring diplomas or equivalency certificates based on that credit): “seat time” as traditionally measured in Carnegie units; the judgment of classroom teachers; or “demonstrated mastery” based on credible external assessments. Most versions of “credit recovery” do none of these things well.

“Credit recovery” isn’t new, though in the old days nobody used that phrase. When I was young, kids who flunked courses that they needed to graduate were sent to summer school to “make up” what they hadn’t learned during the regular year. Kids who failed to get promoted from one grade to the next were told to repeat the former. These were, in fact, forms of “credit recovery” and they honored both the American principle of second chances and the schools’ insistence that certain academic standards be met by their pupils. Mostly, though, it was the teachers’ job to determine whether Billy and Bridget met those standards. Numerical and letter grades given by classroom instructors were the main metrics and courses passed (and how well) and grades completed were what those metrics tabulated.

The G.E.D. has been around for a long time, too, meant as a second chance for dropouts and others who just never got around to completing a regular high school diploma “on schedule.” The theory behind it is that if you can demonstrate on exams that you know and can do the “equivalent” of what you would have had to do for a regular diploma, you deserve a certificate that should be accepted—by colleges and employers, as well as census takers—as equivalent to such a diploma.

The G.E.D. is supposedly based on “mastery” rather than seat time. Unfortunately, much research has shown that G.E.D. holders don’t fare much better in the real world than dropouts, suggesting that its standards are too low and/or that colleges and employers don’t view it as truly equivalent.

The G.E.D. isn’t popular with school systems, either, as their performance and reputation hinge ever more on actual “graduation rates.”

Which brings us to modern “credit recovery,” often managed by districts (and “dropout recovery” charter schools) and often relying on technology more than face-to-face instruction by flesh-and-blood teachers. (The online version is cheaper and more flexible as to time and location, as well as more anonymous; hence it is arguably less embarrassing for the young person who dropped out, flunked the course, or neglected to take it the first time around.)

Today’s credit recovery is still intended to provide second chances for individuals who faltered the first time through, sometimes for reasons within their control (laziness, distractions, apathy, etc.) and sometimes due to factors outside it (illness, family crises, etc.). Today, however, the second-chance rationale is overshadowed by three more considerations: our obsession with “graduation rates,” our fixation on “universal college and career readiness,” and our unwillingness to acknowledge that anybody might actually be a “failure” (and pay the price).

Many credit-recovery programs rely on online learning, leading to accusations of 'Googling to graduation."   Photo by Collin Knopp-Schwyn.

The operational problem with credit recovery is how to determine when credit actually deserves to be deemed “successfully recovered”—on the basis of what evidence? It could be “seat time,” Carnegie-style, but that’s not a very good metric in a time of standards-based results-fixated education, and isn’t very practical outside the traditional brick-and-mortar school-year system. It could be teacher judgment, but many students don’t have much direct contact with real teachers and the for-profit firms that deliver many of the online programs have powerful commercial incentives to declare that credit has been earned. (Real teachers face such pressures, too, from districts, from federal and state policies, and maybe from their own egos.)

The third option for gauging the credit-worthiness of a student’s work is the external assessment, à la the G.E.D. But who sets the passing score and determines whether the exam-taker meets it? Once again, school districts, private firms, and even states face powerful incentives (as with “proficiency” under NCLB) to set their standards at levels that lots of young people will meet, whether or not that has anything to do with “mastery.” In today’s America, those incentives are stronger than the impulse to demand bona fide “readiness” for colleges and careers.

The Common Core and its new assessments may alter this balance of power (though only for two subjects). Rigorous, high-quality, statewide (or multistate) “end-of-course” exams could do likewise. We must hope so. However, while a lot of attention is being given to how such tests will work in the “regular” school context, not much has yet been paid to how they’ll function in the world of credit-recovery. The temptation, of course, will be to cut plenty of slack for young people in that world, a sort of end-run around the standards that kids in regular schools and courses will be expected to meet.

That would, however, be a bad thing, not just for the integrity of the education system and America’s international competitiveness but also for the young people themselves. Today’s foremost objection to “credit recovery” is not the second-chance opportunity but the painful reality that getting credit in this fashion does not denote true mastery and that colleges and employers won’t honor it any more than the G.E.D., maybe less. This feeds right into the least forgivable part of today’s unemployment problem: the hundreds of thousands of actual jobs going unfilled because employers cannot find people with the requisite skills to fill them!

What good does it really do society—or the young person himself—when the education system declares that he has “recovered” enough “credit” to deserve a credential that is described as evidence of college/career readiness when in the real world none of that is true?

The solution lies in more high-quality external exams with rigorous passing standards that denote bona fide readiness. But developing, administering, and scoring such assessments isn’t cheap. And if the standards are indeed rigorous, many of today’s credit-recovery programs will turn out not to have recovered much credit for young people who genuinely need it.

Louisiana broke new ground this week with a sensible plan for holding “voucher schools” accountable. State Superintendent John White will put into practice a “sliding scale” of accountability (an idea we first floated three years ago): Private schools enrolling large numbers of publicly funded students will be held to greater public transparency and results-linked accountability than schools enrolling just a handful. Specifically, private schools that enroll an average of ten voucher students per grade or more than forty in grades that are tested will be assessed points under a scoring system similar to one administered to public schools. A lower score could keep a school from enrolling students in the program, and it could, over time, trigger a quality review by the state Department of Education. Transparency around student-achievement results can be found in the voucher programs of other states (including Wisconsin, Indiana, and Ohio), but only Louisiana will have the authority to banish from the program schools that show consistently poor performance. This is a common-sense policy that can make vouchers more politically sustainable—and work better for kids, to boot.

A version of this analysis appeared on the Choice Words blog.

RELATED ARTICLE: “Plan for holding private schools accountable in voucher program wins board approval,” by Andrew Vanacore, The Times Picayune, July 24, 2012

The introduction to the Common Core English language arts standards explains that the standards cannot possibly “enumerate all or even most of the content that students should learn,” and need to be “complemented by a well-developed, content-rich curriculum.” That last bit recently caused the City Journal’s Sol Stern to applaud the return of content-based curriculum to American education, from whence it has been AWOL for most of the past half century. And where it firmly belongs: Results from a three-year pilot study in New York City indicate that shifting from process- and skills-driven reading programs to E.D. Hirsch’s Core Knowledge content-based curriculum did wonders for student learning. Reading-achievement gains at schools that implemented Core Knowledge were five times greater than in “demographically similar” schools that continued to employ a more conventional literacy program. Still, proponents of content-driven curricula would do well to keep the champagne on ice because, while the standards hint at this important restoration, they alone can’t deliver on it. Instead, it will be up to state and district leaders and teachers to wade through the morass of new and updated curriculum materials and select those that put the focus squarely on content over process. Only time will tell whether the few phrases in the new multistate standards that link to a content-rich curriculum will be enough to drive the instructional changes our students so desperately need.

A version of this analysis appeared on the Common Core Watch blog.

RELATED ARTICLE: Sol Stern, "The Curriculum Reformation,” City Journal, 22, no. 3 (2012)

The good guys won the latest round of the interminable saga of the Adelanto parent-trigger case when a California judge endorsed the validity of signatures gathered in support of converting the school to a charter. The battle is far from over, of course, but we may yet see a parent trigger work before the movie glamorizing it opens.

Even Ohio Governor John Kasich, as vocal an opponent of taxation as Gadfly’s ever met, recently expressed support for a school levy that will (with luck) fund Cleveland’s promising school-reform plan. There’s plenty of reason for skepticism over never-ending calls for more education spending in America, but in Cleveland’s case the governor is right to join the mayor in asking voters to pony up.

A Whiteboard Advisors survey finds that nearly half of education “insiders” doubt that Common Core-aligned assessments will be ready to roll out on time in 2014-2015. Here’s hoping the consortia tasked with producing those tests prove the experts wrong.

Jay Mathews writes that it's a "perilous time" for D.C. schools, due to the  scandal surrounding Mayor Vincent Gray. The situation in Washington should remind advocates for mayoral control just how much damage can be done to reforms (and the credibility of that alternative education-governance model) when a lousy leader takes (or steals!) the reins.

The Newark Star-Ledger’s editorial board endorsed dropping the “acting” from New Jersey Education Commissioner Chris Cerf’s title this morning, citing his record over the past two years as a “devoted and talented” schools chief. It’s a long-overdue honor—withheld due to truly ridiculous Garden State political squabbles—that Mr. Cerf has more than earned.

What a difference a decade makes. For all the debate around vouchers and student loans, perhaps the most striking element of Mitt Romney's education agenda is how much it differs from the approach of No Child Left Behind, the defining policy of the George W. Bush years. That does not mean, however, that other Republicans necessarily agree with it. The GOP stance on education, and particularly federal education policy, is clearly shifting. But in any clear direction? And for the better?

To examine those questions, the Fordham Institute will bring together two former GOP education secretaries to discuss the Republican Party's direction on this vital issue.

What a difference a decade makes. For all the debate around vouchers and student loans, perhaps the most striking element of Mitt Romney's education agenda is how much it differs from the approach of No Child Left Behind, the defining policy of the George W. Bush years. That does not mean, however, that other Republicans necessarily agree with it. The GOP stance on education, and particularly federal education policy, is clearly shifting. But in any clear direction? And for the better?

To examine those questions, the Fordham Institute will bring together two former GOP education secretaries to discuss the Republican Party's direction on this vital issue.

Despite lackluster achievement on the latest rounds of PISA, TIMSS, and PIRLS exams—and despite Fordham’s own premonitions of a new “Sputnik moment” for U.S. education—much complacency still surrounds American pupils’ academic prowess. One oft-cited source of false comfort is the gradual uptick in NAEP math and science scores over the past few years. This latest report from the international-education trifecta of Eric Hanushek, Paul Peterson, and Ludgar Woessmann argues for renewed sobriety. It tracks student-achievement growth in forty-nine countries (1995-2009) and forty-one states (1992-2011). Overall, increases in U.S. student achievement are middling, with twenty-four countries making greater gains. Over the fourteen years analyzed, U.S. students advanced about one year of learning, which is less than half of the achievement gains registered in more than twenty nations (including Hong Kong, Germany, the United Kingdom, Poland, and top-improvers Latvia, Chile, and Brazil). What’s most interesting about the report, though, is the analysis of state improvement over time. Maryland made the most progress, with Florida, Delaware, and Massachusetts following closely behind. Iowa, Maine, and Oklahoma, meanwhile, found themselves at the bottom of the pile. If the U.S. as a whole had equaled the progress made by its top-improving states, we would be on par with Germany and the U.K.—and would find ourselves among the top advancers worldwide. There’s much thought-provoking data to cull here and still more trends and patterns to ponder. Among them: Southern states (especially those with ardent education-reform governors in the late 1990s) boasted strong improvement while Midwestern states (which have been reticent to engage in education reform until recently) saw the smallest gains. What’s more, gains could not be linked to increased spending nor explained away by theories that initially low-performing states were simply “catching up”—which accounted for but a quarter of registered improvements. You should have a look.

SOURCE: Eric A. Hanushek, Paul E. Peterson, and Ludgar Woessmann, Achievement Growth: International and U.S. State Trends in Student Performance (Cambridge, MA: Harvard’s Program on Education Policy and Governance and Education Next, July 2012).

Here’s a jarring statistic from analysts Raegen Miller and Marguerite Roza: In 2007-08, states spent $14.8 billion on pay bumps for teachers with master’s degrees, which—time and again—have proven to be entirely unrelated to instructional effectiveness. In perspective, this equates to $217 per pupil—and marks a 72 percent increase since 2003-04, the last time Miller and Roza crunched these numbers. This “master’s bump” affects states differently: Six states (all with powerful teacher unions, including Illinois, New York, and Ohio) allocate $400-plus per-pupil as a reward for this additional credential (in cost-adjusted dollars). Eight (predominantly right-to-work states like Oklahoma, Texas, and Utah) spend under $100. Interestingly, the size of a master’s bump had no statistical relationship with the percentage of teachers acquiring such degrees. Miller and Roza recommend a two-pronged approach to developing a sleeker, more productive teacher-salary structure. First, scrap policies that automatically confer extra pay for master’s degrees (or that require advanced degrees for full licensure). Second, push master’s programs to compete on merit: Use teacher-assessment data to rate their effectiveness and encourage graduate programs centered on performance assessments (like the Relay Graduate School of Education and the Urban Teacher Center) rather than seat-time requirements. Good ideas both—and even more so when budgets are tight.

SOURCE: Raegan Miller and Marguerite Roza, The Sheepskin Effect and Student Achievement: Deemphasizing the Role of Master’s Degrees in Teacher Compensation (Washington, D.C.: Center for American Progress, July 2012).