Brookings scholar Tom Loveless examines tracking and detracking in Massachusetts middle schools, focusing on changes that have occurred and the implications for high-achieving students. Among the findings: detracked schools have fewer advanced students in math than tracked schools and detracking is more popular in schools serving disadvantaged populations.
What are the implications of "tracking," or grouping students into separate classes based on their achievement? Many schools have moved away from this practice and reduced the number of subject-area courses offered in a given grade. In this new Thomas B. Fordham Institute report, Brookings scholar Tom Loveless examines tracking and detracking in Massachusetts middle schools, with particular focus on changes that have occurred over time and their implications for high-achieving students. Among the report's key findings detracked schools have fewer advanced students in mathematics than tracked schools. The report also finds that detracking is more popular in schools serving disadvantaged populations. Read the full report to find out more.
It looks to me as if one of the most acclaimed reforms of today’s education profession—not just in the U.S. but also all over the planet—is one of the least examined in terms of actual implementation and effectiveness. How often and how well do instructors, whose administrators and gurus revere the concept of differentiated instruction, actually carry it out? How well does it work and for which kids under what circumstances? So far as I can tell, nobody really knows.
I’ve been roaming the globe in search of effective strategies for educating high-ability youngsters, particularly kids from disadvantaged circumstances who rarely have parents with the knowledge and means to steer them through the education maze and obtain the kind of schooling (and/or supplementation or acceleration) that will make the most of their above-average capacity to learn.
As expected, I’ve found a wide array of programs and policies intended for “gifted education,” “talent development,” and so forth, each with pluses and minuses.
But almost everywhere, I’ve also encountered some version of this assertion: “We don’t really need to provide special programs, classrooms, or schools for gifted children because we expect every school and teacher to differentiate their instruction so as to meet the unique educational needs of all children within an inclusive, heterogeneous classroom.”
A thoroughly laudable goal, say I, but how realistic is it? How well is it being done? And does it really meet their needs, or is it ultimately a politically acceptable excuse for not doing anything special for high-ability children?
The concept of differentiated instruction seems to arise from five roots:
In response, “regular” teachers are tasked with customizing, tailoring, and individualizing their instruction so that administrators and policy types can declare with straight faces that their classrooms are diverse and inclusive and that every child’s singular education needs are being satisfactorily met.
To equip teachers with such remarkable pedagogical prowess, all manner of courses, books, in-service programs, itinerant experts, and summer workshops are available. (Google “differentiated instruction” and “professional development” together and you will get half a million hits.) Organizations such as the ASCD devote much energy to promoting this approach to education.
In short, it’s quite a big deal.
Unless, it appears, you are actually the teacher of a heterogeneous class that contains children with many different needs, different levels of prior achievement, and different “learning speeds,” at least in whatever subjects you are responsible for teaching them. That teacher, it appears to me, is being given an all-but-impossible assignment, akin to presenting a general-practitioner physician with twenty-three patients who manifest different symptoms, differing degrees of illness, and, upon examination, very different ailments. Some might benefit more from an oncologist, an orthopedist, a cardiologist, or perhaps a dietitian, personal trainer, or podiatrist. It’s unlikely that any given doc will do an outstanding job with all of them. Indeed, the most valuable thing he could do for many would be to refer them to the appropriate specialists.
Much the same can be said about attorneys. The guy who drafts your will is probably not best suited to get you a divorce or defend you in a larceny trial.
But teachers are expected to be all things to (almost) all youngsters. And most of those I talk to about this mandate acknowledge that, while technology and small classes surely help, they do not feel like they’re differentiating all that well.
Some, of course, manage better than others, and some “inclusive” classrooms aren’t so very diverse. The tendency of many, however—this is evident when I observe classes—is to respond to the mandate in either (or possibly both) of two ways: They may engage in some form of “ability grouping” within the classroom—which may well be what teachers “hear” when someone says “differentiate,” though it’s surely not what the gurus of the field intend. Or, if they stick with full-class instruction, they pitch much of their instruction to kids in the middle 60 percent or so of the achievement/ability/motivation distribution, doing less for pupils who are either lagging far behind or surging ahead. But when policy intervenes to reshape the teacher’s priorities, it is invariably on behalf of the laggards, for they are the beneficiaries of major governmental efforts—such as NCLB and IDEA—to advance the education of youngsters who face difficulties and to reward schools and teachers that accomplish this.
By contrast, in my experience, pretty much the only pressure on teachers to attend to the learning of their quicker, higher-achieving pupils comes from parents—and the pressure-exerting parents are almost always ensconced securely in the middle class.
Worse, high-ability children from disadvantaged circumstances typically attend schools with many other disadvantaged youngsters. The real pressures on such schools and their staffs are to meet student needs that are often ubiquitous and acute in such communities (e.g., health, nutrition, remediation, attendance, language, discipline) rather than to maximize the learning of their high achievers. And, indeed, there’s research evidence that a school’s priorities do tend to align with its most pressing and widespread student needs.
Plenty of teachers strive to do right by all their pupils. But I’ve sat in classrooms and watched as “smart” kids twiddled their thumbs (or acted out) in boredom and frustration while the instructor toiled to get basic concepts into the heads of those who, for whatever reason, were finding it much harder to learn. And when speaking to audiences of teachers, I’ve noted that any suggestion that “differentiated instruction” works better in theory than in reality usually elicits applause or, at minimum, a knowing and somewhat cynical chuckle.
Veteran “gifted educators” whom I respect say things like this: “Many gifted children’s needs can be met in the regular classroom, if grouped with academic peers for part of the day and if under the reign of a very gifted teacher. The likelihood of getting a very gifted teacher is, however, too small.” And, “Talent development happens through an acceleration of a curriculum. Differentiation doesn't typically address the needs of very highly able children.”
Perhaps it can—and there are schools and classrooms that try hard. Yet when a colleague of mine visited one Maryland school that puts meticulous differentiation high among its priorities, he reported back that these arrangements look awfully “rickety, held with lots of duct tape and chewing gum, and subject to collapse without just the right staff and parent support.” (And that’s at the elementary level; all of this grows vastly harder in the upper grades.)
Can this reliance on individual teachers to meet all pupils’ needs possibly be robust enough to bear the enormous policy and professorial weight that’s being placed on it today, particularly for high-ability pupils? Does anybody really know? The research literature appears distressingly thin. So let me invite proponents of differentiated instruction to supply evidence that this strategy is effective, particularly for educating children of high ability, versus approaches that entail separation, augmentation, or acceleration. And, while they’re at it, please also offer data, research, and evaluation evidence that speak to the sorts of questions I posed at the outset: How well is differentiated instruction carried out and by how many teachers? How well does it actually work and for which kids under what circumstances? I’d really like to know, and so, I am sure, would many others.
As anyone in education knows, the Common Core debate has become heavily politicized over the past year. What that means is that the true education issues at stake—for instance, whether the standards for English and math are challenging enough or, conversely, age appropriate—are taking a backseat to arguments over macropolitics and ideology.
Opponents on the right like to label the Common Core as “ObamaCore” and joke that schools were promised, “If you like your curriculum, you can keep your curriculum.”
As a conservative supporter of the Common Core who has racked up thousands of frequent-flier miles traveling to legislative hearings in state capitals nationwide, I find this fear of centralized control a misplaced, even willful false alarm sounded by people with other political agendas. To be sure, I don’t want the federal government meddling in curriculum issues and can point to many examples where Washington regulations—on matters of spending, “highly-qualified teachers,” and student discipline—have done more harm than good. I’m relieved the federal role in the Common Core has been relatively small.
Yet the history of education reform in the United States makes clear that efforts to foist top-down changes on the nation’s schools never get anywhere quickly and never produce real uniformity. Invariably, they’re met, for better or worse, with resistance and confusion—or, to say it more positively, with adaptation and customization.
The Common Core issue will prove no different. It won’t lead to a single national curriculum or approach to teaching literature or math pedagogy. More likely it will result in a spectrum of diverse approaches as America’s unique brand of federalism kicks into high gear. Implementation of the Common Core, as with any other reform, will vary from state to state, district to district, and school to school. That should ease the minds of apprehensive conservatives. But will it be good for kids?
Last November I found myself sitting in an ornate hearing room in Ohio’s state capitol, waiting for a debate on an anti–Common Core bill to begin. After multiple delays, legislators finally filed in as hundreds of onlookers, most of them with “say no to FedEd” buttons, waited impatiently. Witnesses for the Common Core opposition spoke first—out-of-state experts including Sandra Stotsky and Williamson Evers—and made their case that the standards were not as strong as the advocates claimed. Many of their points were highly academic, though, and a few legislators could be seen yawning. (In their defense, it was pushing 10 p.m.)
But then twelve-year-old Tommy Hunter stepped up to the microphone and stole the show. In a quiet but poised manner, Hunter explained he had loved mathematics—until his district adopted the Common Core. “Common Core is supposed to be more rigorous, but I find it more frustrating and confusing,” Tommy said.
In particular, his district in Worthington, Ohio, had adopted an online textbook, digits, produced by Pearson. “What was so bad is that we couldn’t ask questions when the video was playing if we didn’t understand something,” he told lawmakers. “I liked it a lot more when Mrs. Adesso was able to teach us how to do math problems. She would show us how to do problems on the board and helped us when certain concepts were hard to get.”
His mother, a nurse, followed him and tearfully told the lawmakers she felt she had no choice but to pull him out of public school and homeschool him instead. (She enrolled him in a “virtual charter school” that relies on parents to do most of the direct instruction.)
It was moving testimony, and nobody present could deny that something had gone wrong for Tommy. But was it the Common Core’s fault? Pearson did, in fact, claim that digits was “written entirely to the Common Core State Standards.” But that’s hard to believe, as Pearson published the package just a few months after the final version of the Common Core standards was released.
The episode illustrates the political challenge that supporters face. Anything and everything that goes wrong will be blamed on the Common Core, just as a decade ago every education misfire was blamed on No Child Left Behind. But it also highlights the fragmented, decentralized nature of Common Core implementation. In a system that prizes local control over curricular decisions, 10,000 school boards will be making the most critical calls over Common Core implementation. Will they make good choices?
The evidence to date does not look promising. In October, my think tank, the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, published Common Core in the Schools: A First Look at Reading Assignments. In line with other surveys, it found teachers like the Common Core and believe they are aligning their instruction with the standards. But for the most part, they aren’t really doing so.
For instance, the standards are clear that elementary-school teachers should assign texts that match a student’s grade level, rather than their current reading level. Yet the majority of teachers reported that they continue to assign such “leveled texts” to their charges. Furthermore, the standards encourage teachers to focus on text selection first and building skills second. Yet most teachers continue to do it the other way around, picking a skill to teach and then finding a text to help them accomplish that.
Tim Shanahan, the study’s author and a former president of the International Reading Association, wrote that “these results reveal that many teachers have not yet confronted the new text complexity demands of the Common Core.…Huge shifts in these practices may lie ahead.”
But it’s not just teachers who may be overlooking parts of the Common Core. At Fordham, we are enamored of the declaration that “while the standards make references to some particular forms of content, including mythology, foundational U.S. documents, and Shakespeare, they do not, indeed cannot, enumerate all or even most of the content that students should learn. The standards must therefore be complemented by a well-developed, content-rich curriculum.” Especially at the elementary level, where very little time is spent on science, history or the arts, it’s critical the texts that underlie the reading curriculum are carefully selected so they coherently build students’ rich knowledge of key content-area topics.
We asked Ruth Wattenberg, former editor of the American Federation of Teachers’ American Educator journal, to examine state websites and basal readers from major publishers to find examples of a content-rich elementary curriculum. To say they were scarce is an understatement. “So far, sadly, there is little evidence that the coherent content-rich curriculum called for by CCSS is being put in place,” she writes. “Such a curriculum is not embodied in the new purportedly Common Core aligned textbooks, nor is it (generally) being established by states.”
The problem, it appears, is that the standards are turning into something of a Rorschach test for educators. Many of us like to see the standards as endorsing our own view of effective teaching and learning. So we focus on the parts we like and overlook the parts we don’t. We revise and adapt them to our own priorities and preconceptions. This might help to explain why the standards themselves are so popular. The downside, of course, is that educators might be setting themselves up for a rude awakening when their students face the new Common Core–aligned assessments—and they’ve only been prepared for a fraction of the items.
What can school boards and school-district administrators do to avoid this type of “confirmation bias” and make sure their textbooks, curricula, and instructional materials are truly aligned to the Common Core—particularly when they are trying to make sense of the veracity of sales pitches from some of American education’s richest and most influential forces, the textbook publishers?
The first step is to do a close reading of the text of the standards themselves. The second is to study the excellent publishers’ criteria developed by lead authors of the Common Core at the organization Student Achievement Partners. These criteria provide clear guidance to publishers and their customers about what it means for instructional materials to be aligned to the standards.
Take mathematics, for instance. The standards attempt to reverse the mile-wide, inch-deep nature of the typical U.S. math curriculum, replacing it with a focused, coherent sequence of learning. That automatically means covering less material in each grade level and saving certain topics for later. For example, probability is introduced by the standards in grade 7, so a Common Core–aligned, elementary-level mathematics textbook shouldn’t approach this topic at all. But a seventh-grade textbook had better do so. Applying the publishers’ criteria can help administrators and school boards stay faithful to the spirit of the Common Core—and, most importantly, prepare their students for what comes next.
To repeat: Common Core will not lead to a national curriculum. Local control is alive and well, as it should be. But that’s not to say anything goes in the Common Core era or that changes to teaching and learning aren’t needed.
Some curricular and instructional approaches are truer to research—and more faithful to the Common Core standards—than others. It’s now up to local officials to separate the wheat from the chaff. The success of this initiative, as well as the college and career readiness of America’s students, lies in your hands.
A version of this article first appeared in the School Superintendents Association’s School Administrator magazine.
The Education Department announced that in 2012, public-high-school graduation rates reached an all-time high of 80 percent—and that if states can maintain the speed, we could reach 90 percent by 2020. But before you hop off the treadmill and break out the celebratory donuts, bear in mind that an 80 percent graduation rate still means that one in five kids never crosses the finish line. Also remember that urban areas with greater concentrations of low-income students still have grad rates in the 60–70 percent range. Still, this is positive change all around. Let’s keep up the pace!
In a recent New York Times article, David Leonhardt notes that the “behavior gap” between boys and girls is even bigger than that between the rich and the poor. Entering Kindergarten, girls are more sensitive, persistent, flexible, and independent than their male peers—and the gap only grows as the kids continue through elementary school. In an economy that rewards knowledge and interpersonal skills, and with the United States losing its global lead in middle-class pay, Leonhardt expresses concern that boys’ struggles could mean long-term trouble for the American economy—a sobering thought indeed.
Michelle and Dara may not be mean girls, but they do take a critical eye to funding disparities between charter and traditional public schools, higher-than-ever graduation rates, and whether it really is “teachers versus the public.” Amber wants us all to get along (and exhibit other noncognitive skills).
“Promise and Paradox: Measuring Students’ Non-cognitive Skills and the Impact of Schooling” by Martin R. West, et al., (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Graduate School of Education, February 2014).
Higher-quality products justify greater investments. Full stop. Unfortunately, when it comes to charter schools, states almost universally reject this logic. A new study out of the University of Arkansas examines the per-pupil funding of charter schools (which outperform traditional public schools, nationally) in the thirty states and D.C. that have substantial charter-school populations and found that charter schools, on average, received a whopping $3,814 per pupil less than traditional public districts in 2011—a 28.4 percent disparity. This means that the average charter school, which enrolls 400 students, receives about $1.5 million less per year than a district school of the same size. Just one state, Tennessee, provided greater per-pupil funding to charter schools (15 bucks more per pupil). Moreover, researchers found that this huge disparity has increased by 55 percent in the last eight years, even as charter-school performance has improved. So whence comes the disparity? It turns out that the major culprit is local government funding: district schools receive an average of $5,230 from local government sources, while charter schools average only $1,780. Local governments are stacking the deck against charters, even though charters do a better job of educating local students. It’s not hard to understand why; charter schools don’t have taxing authority for operational expenses or capital costs, and few school districts have chosen to share their bounty. Local policymakers—mayors, we’re looking at you—might want to reconsider that policy.
Meagan Batdorff, et al., Charter School Funding: Inequality Expands (Fayetteville, AR: Department of Education Reform, University of Arkansas, April 2014).
There’s much interest in how schools can develop students’ non-cognitive skills, such as persistence and interpersonal skills, not just their academic prowess. In this study, Marty West and six other researchers examine the potential of schools to impact the development of four types of non-cognitive qualities: conscientiousness, self-control, grit (persisting through to a long-term goal), and growth mindset (the extent to which a child believes his academic ability can improve with effort, rather than being fixed). Analysts link self-reported survey data from nearly 1,400 eighth-grade students who attended Boston public schools in the spring of 2010–11 to student-level demographic and test-score data. Three key findings emerge: First, they find that all four measures of non-cognitive skills are positively correlated at the student level with achievement gains on standardized tests and with attendance and behavior. For the most part, however, those positive correlations disappear at the school level (the “paradox”). Second, students in overprescribed charter schools who typically post large test-score gains report lower-than-average levels on measures of conscientiousness, self-control, and grit. Analysts hypothesize that this is because many of these charter schools are academically and behaviorally demanding—and thus, these students are apt to rate themselves more critically given the context in which they are educated. Third, the authors find that students’ views on whether their academic ability is malleable or fixed is less likely to be influenced by their surroundings—perhaps because such notions are based on internal beliefs. Analysts close with a smart caution in the end: “In the rush to embrace non-cognitive skills as the missing piece in American education, policymakers may overlook the limitations of extant measures.” So yes, let’s measure a school’s impact on things other than test scores and attendance and graduation rates—but be aware that asking kids to rate themselves might not be the best way to do it.
Martin R. West, et al., “Promise and Paradox: Measuring Students’ Non-cognitive Skills and the Impact of Schooling” (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Graduate School of Education, February 2014).
This AEI policy brief investigates whether involved fathers impact their kids’ chances of success in college—and finds that they surely do. Using data from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health, a 1994–95 study of a nationally representative sample of children in grades 7–12, the author found that children whose fathers are involved in their lives (measured by adolescent-reported data on such activities as receiving homework help, playing a sport, or discussing personal issues) while they attend high school are far more likely to graduate from college—98 percent more likely, in fact. Perhaps the most important (if not surprising) takeaway is that young adults in college-educated homes are more likely to be raised in an intact family with an involved father and are therefore more advantaged than their counterparts in non-college-educated homes. Since this means that most young adults from poor or working-class families are far less likely to receive a college education, a question arises: how can we tackle the fatherhood divide between children from educated and less-educated families? This ultimately highlights a very important problem without an easy solution—and serves as a reminder that it’s never too early to celebrate Father’s Day.
W. Bradford Wilcox, “Dad and the diploma: The difference fathers make for college graduation,” The Home Economics Project (Washington, D.C.: American Enterprise Institute, April 22, 2014).
