The Education Gadfly Weekly

We’ve often questioned whether the local school board remains the best governance model for public education. We’re not sure whether the Chamber of Commerce’s Institute for a Competitive Workforce (ICW) shares such fundamental concerns, but it is certainly interested in improving the school boards we’ve got. Its new report profiles a baker’s dozen highly variable district boards, drawing from these case studies characteristics of successful school boards—and of the other kind. Top-notch boards (determined by whether they are linked to improved student achievement) have: limited and clearly defined responsibilities (limited to core, high-level, and strategic goals); stability (essential for reform, but not an end in itself); effective board training (which can help overcome dysfunction); and positive relationships with superintendents (with both parties proactively communicating). Struggling boards (those marred by infighting, financial issues, and low student achievement) also share some common traits: They are often voted in during “off cycle” elections (with limited voter turnout dominated by interest groups), are highly politicized, and have large (and diverse) constituencies. One treatment for ailing school boards, according to the ICW, is (not surprisingly!) strong business-leader engagement. Take Austin, for example. That city’s Chamber of Commerce, through task forces and published reports, pushed an otherwise complacent AISD board into urgent action. And in Atlanta, the business and civic communities have convened the board of their education PAC (EduPAC Atlanta) each election year to endorse and support their chosen candidates. This ICW report offers an interesting read—and some smart recommendations for districts looking to improve their board dynamics and efficacy. Still, we remain unconvinced that local school boards are the best way to govern our schools in the twenty-first century.

Institute for a Competitive Workforce, School Board Case Studies (Washington, DC: U.S. Chamber of Commerce, May 2012).

Folks today speak of Ray Budde, Ted Kolderie, and Al Shanker as fathers of the charter-school movement. But what of its mother? Ember Reichgott Junge, former Minnesota state senator, authored the nation’s first charter legislation. This personal account takes readers through the complete history of chartering in Minnesota, chronicling passage of the original bill in 1991, the resistance it got from unions, and subsequent amendments to the law. (Originally, there was an eight-school cap on charters in the Land of 10,000 Lakes and only licensed teachers could create and operate schools. Now, there is no charter cap and schools are granted waivers from stifling state laws.) The factual accounts make the book worthwhile but the personal anecdotes laced through the text are what make it compelling. Drawing on this history, Reichgott Junge explains some lessons that can be learned from it—and that apply to modern education-reform efforts that go well beyond charters (e.g., today’s push for digital learning). Among them: Don’t leave accountability to chance; define explicitly the reform and its goals (think of the confused perception many still hold of charter schools—and how this may have been avoided with early, explicit explanation); and avoid legislating on operations or governance (dictating board make-up or specific financial decisions suppresses innovation). There is much work remaining before charters move past their “adolescence” (per Reichgott Junge) and further shape innovation in American public education. This historical account explains how this can happen.

Ember Reichgott Junge, Zero Chance of Passage: The Pioneering Charter School Story (Edina, MN: Beaver’s Pond Press, Inc. 2012).

Rahm Emanuel famously remarked that “you never want a serious crisis to go to waste.” Yet that is exactly what many defenders of the defined-benefit (DB) pension system would prefer to see happen. This tough budgetary time, they argue, is not the moment for dramatic overhauls to the traditional arrangement, such as moving to a defined-contribution (DC), cash-balance, or hybrid plan. Such changes, they assert, would increase costs to the system in the short-term. This brief from the University of Arkansas’s Robert Costrell rebuts that proposition. It is dense and jargon-heavy, but its thesis is spot-on: There will be no greater costs to pension systems overall by switching away from DB plans. Not in the short or long term. (To nerd out for a moment: Costrell makes this case by profiling how various states interact with the reporting requirements of the Government Accounting Standards Board [GASB]—and what their transitions away from DB plans have actually meant for their efforts to pay down unfunded pension liabilities.) But for those seeking ammunition with which to counter-attack the most common defense of an unsustainable system, Costrell’s brief packs quite the punch.

Robert M. Costrell, “GASB Won't Let Me” - A False Objection to Public Pension Reform (Houston, TX: Laura and John Arnold Foundation, May 2012).

In 2009, Fordham fellow Andy Smarick wrote: “School turnaround efforts have consistently fallen short of hopes and expectations.” And we’ve generally agreed. This research from Thomas Dee scuffs up that pristine position, however, at least a little. It examines first-year impacts of the federal School Improvement Grants (SIG) program (background here and here) in California. Dee analyzed data from roughly 2,800 schools situated just above and below the eligibility cut-off for SIG funds (eighty-two of which received SIG awards, averaging roughly $1,500 per pupil)—looking specifically at schools that opted for either of the two most popular models: transformation or turnaround (more on those here). Dee found that SIG reforms raised the scores on California’s Academic Performance Index by an impressive thirty-four scale points over the course of one year (2010-11). Before the interventions, the average SIG-eligible school scored roughly 150 points below the state’s performance target of 800, which implies that SIG closed this gap by 23 percent. (Still, API is a complex metric, and it is not clear what this means for average student-level growth on the California Standards Tests.) Dee found the most improvement in the turnaround schools (where the principal and most of the staff is replaced) and in schools that had been the “lowest-achieving.” That said, CA’s “lack of progress” schools (Title I schools that posted very minimal improvement in the five years before undergoing SIG intervention) were not significantly impacted by the federal program. Dee conducted a number of analyses attempting to refute his findings—including attention to non-random student sorting (might the SIG program attract or repel certain students?). But results held. (Sidebar: Dee also compared SIG’s efficacy to class-size reduction [CSR] initiatives and found that SIG generates about half the achievement gains of CSR at a third of the cost. Of course raising class size is notoriously expensive.) Granted, these are short-term impacts. It’s unclear whether they’ll carry over through years two, three, and beyond, especially as SIG funding runs out. And with an average SIG grant of $1.5 million per school, the well will run dry.

Thomas Dee, School Turnarounds: Evidence from the 2009 Stimulus (Cambridge, MA: National Bureau of Economic Research, April 2012).

Mike and Rick analyze Senator Alexander’s ed-for-Medicaid trade and critique America’s private-public schools. Amber delves into a startling SIG success story.

Amber's Research Minute

School Turnarounds: Evidence from the 2009 Stimulus

While business leaders rue the lack of American workers skilled enough in math and science to meet the needs of an increasingly high-tech economy, the situation may be growing even grimmer. The latest installment of TIMSS showed stagnation in U.S. science achievement, and the 2009 NAEP science assessment found that only 21 percent of American twelfth-graders met the proficiency bar. Yet while the gravity of the problem is clear, the root cause is not. Is our science curriculum lacking? Is it being squeezed out by an emphasis on math and reading? Is there a problem with our pedagogy? Are our teachers ill-prepared? Or are we simply expecting too little of teachers and students alike?

Coinciding with its new review of state science standards, The Thomas B. Fordham Institute will bring together experts with very different perspectives to engage this crucial question: "What's holding back America's science performance?"

Watch the discussion with UVA psychologist Dan Willingham, NCTQ President Kate Walsh, Fordham's Kathleen Porter-Magee, Project Lead the Way's Anne Jones, and Achieve, Inc.'s Stephen Pruitt and join the conversation on Fordham LIVE!

Today marks the fifty-eighth anniversary of the Brown v. Board of Education decision, so it’s fitting that the lead article in this morning’s New York Times is about America’s growing diversity. “Whites Account for Under Half of Births in U.S.,” the headline reads. The story immediately focuses on the issue of schools. “The United States has a spotty record educating minority youth; will older Americans balk at paying to educate a younger generation that looks less like themselves? And while the increasingly diverse young population is a potential engine of growth, will it become a burden if it is not properly educated?” Good questions.

What's the point of an integrated school with segregated classrooms? Photo by woodleywonderworks.

Yet, despite our student population’s diversity, the number of diverse schools, as imagined by Brown, remains limited. Upwards of 40 percent of black and Latino students still attend racially isolated schools (where white pupils represent less than 10 percent of the enrollment). And the average black or Latino student attends a school that is 75-percent minority. Meanwhile, more than four in five white students attend schools that are majority-white—even though whites barely make up 50 percent of our school population. (All of these data are from Gary Orfield’s Civil Rights Project.)

A long Times article over the weekend described in moving terms what this type of racial isolation means for young people. “At Explore, as at many schools in New York City, children trundle from segregated neighborhoods to segregated schools, living a hermetic reality.” One student, Amiyah, tells the reporter: “It’s a bit weird. All my friends are predominantly black, and all the teachers are predominantly white. I think white kids go to different schools. I don’t know. I haven’t seen many white people in a big space before.”

Sure enough, most studies show the benefits of racially and socio-economically mixed schools. Even such luminaries as Eric Hanushek and Caroline Hoxby have found positive peer effects for minority students when they sit in integrated classrooms. Less rigorous research has linked exposure to middle-class students (and their culture) to better life outcomes for poor kids.

The question today, as for the past twenty years or so (when the forcible desegregation movement ran out of steam), is what can be done to better integrate our schools? The Supreme Court no longer allows explicit social engineering by race. And parents have shown—in Wake County, North Carolina and elsewhere—an unwillingness to have their kids forcibly bused to distant schools. (Not that such policies are in line with a free society, anyway.)

But there are at least two reasons for hope. First, contrary to what you might think, the rapid gentrification of many of our great cities is making school integration more feasible than it’s been for decades. As neighborhoods grow more diverse, it’s easier (though not inevitable) for their local schools to become diverse, too. Second, the charter school movement is awakening to the opportunities that charters might play in creating voluntarily integrated schools of choice.

These efforts will struggle, however, with the difficult question of academic diversity. Which brings us to this week’s other solid piece of reporting, this one in the Washington Post, on the topic of differentiated instruction—“in essence, adapting lessons for kids of different abilities within a classroom” rather than tracking or grouping students by ability.

As I wrote in Education Next last year, the wide spread in students’ prior academic achievement is probably the greatest challenge facing teachers today. No classroom is immune. But classes that are racially and socio-economically diverse are likely to have especially large achievement gaps between their high and low performers—creating a nearly impossible instructional task for mere mortals.

Consider a second Hoxby peer-effects study. In 2006, she and Gretchen Weingarth examined the schools in Wake County. For the better part of two decades, that district, in and around Raleigh, had been reassigning lots of kids to different schools every year in order to keep its schools racially and socioeconomically balanced. That created thousands of natural experiments whereby the composition of classrooms changed dramatically but randomly. That, in turn, provided Hoxby and Weingarth an opportunity to investigate the impact of these changes on student achievement.

They found evidence for what they called the “boutique model” of peer effects, “in which students do best when the environment is made to cater to their type.” They wrote: “Our evidence does not suggest that complete segregation of people, by types, is optimal...What our evidence does suggest is that efforts to create interactions between lower and higher types ought to maintain continuity of types.”

Diverse schools may wind up grouping students by achievement level for some subjects and teaching them heterogeneously in subjects like science, social studies, art, music, and P.E.  Photo by Amy.

What that means for classrooms is that it’s okay for them to contain a range of students (say high, medium, and low achievers), as long as that range is not too wide. What’s pernicious is a “bimodal” distribution of students in the same class: just very high and very low achievers, with few in between. Yet that is precisely the kind of distribution many diverse schools find themselves with. On average, upper-middle-class white students from college-educated two-parent families tend to achieve at very high levels and poor minority students from single-parents homes tend to achieve at very low levels. Put these students in the same classroom and you’ve got a real dilemma.

How on earth can a teacher instruct such a group of pupils effectively? If the answer is to keep kids in separate ability groups all day, then why not just create whole classrooms by ability instead? In schools that are not racially and socio-economically diverse—say, high-poverty inner-city schools, or affluent all-white suburban schools—it’s not as difficult an issue. There you can group students by ability without grouping students by race or class.

In diverse schools, however, such grouping will often (stress often, not always) mean re-segregating students by race and/or class. And what’s the point of an integrated school with segregated classrooms? Which brings us back to “differentiated instruction,” and the hope that somehow a teacher can reach kids of all abilities together.

Squaring this circle is the daunting challenge that diverse schools face. Most will probably land on a combination of strategies—grouping students by achievement level for part of the day, maybe for reading and math, while teaching them heterogeneously in subjects like science, social studies, art, music, and P.E. But schools that refuse to group at all—out of an ideological aversion to “sorting”—will struggle to help all their students achieve at high levels. At least that’s what the best research indicates. And if parents—of all races and classes—see that their own kids aren’t getting what they need, you can kiss those diverse schools goodbye.

Last Friday, Achieve released the first draft (of three) of the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS), an attempt to create “common,” multi-state standards for that critical subject. Using a framework developed by the National Research Council (and reviewed fairly favorably by Fordham last fall), experts from twenty-six states worked with Achieve to draft the new standards, said to be “rich in content and practice, arranged in a coherent manner across disciplines and grades to provide all students an internationally-benchmarked science education.” It remains to be seen whether these common standards will avoid the pitfalls that plague too many state standards (Fordham will offer its own feedback to the drafters in a few weeks). "Commonness" alone doesn't guarantee they will be better than the status quo. Still, this is an important step in a multi-year process that, done properly, may significantly alter U.S. science education. The timing is right because, regardless of how the NGSS drafts stack up, something needs to change. Our recent study of state science standards revealed a dismal situation: A majority of states received a D or F grade in the review, with the national average a low C. By this time next year, when the third and final draft of the NGSS is supposed to be ready, states will be able to determine whether they're better or worse than what they have today. For far too many, they could scarcely be worse. Meanwhile, NAEP science scores have barely budged and U.S. results on international science assessments remain middling at best.

“Public Gets Glimpse of Science Standards,” by Erik Robelen, Education Week, May 11, 2012.

Test scores plummeted on Florida’s eighth-grade writing test, prompting education officials to lower the standard for passing and opponents to crow about the futility of "test madness" this week. That reaction is more troubling than the results: Scores dropped because policymakers had raised the bar and the test got tougher. Still, this episode may foreshadow the discomfort and argumentation that many will experience when Common Core standards start causing proficiency rates to fall.

ALEC delayed (again) a final vote on a resolution opposing the Common Core last Friday; perhaps this reprieve will give its education task force members a chance to realize that requiring states not to join a voluntary program isn’t exactly the best way to protect their right to decide such matters for themselves.

In a Wall Street Journal editorial yesterday, Senator Lamar Alexander (R-TN) revived a bold proposition that he had first aired—to President Reagan!—three decades ago, namely, that Uncle Sam take over full funding of the Medicaid program and leave states (and districts) as sole funders of K-12 education, i.e., Uncle Sam butts out. Alexander shows that this would save states billions while also disentangling two very messy policy domains. It was a good idea back then and it’s a good idea today, albeit one that will predictably elicit howls both from federal budget hawks and from those who don’t trust states to run (and pay for) their own schools. Bravo for the Senator for his persistence and perspicacity!

From Colombia to China, low-cost private education is on the rise. According to a feature in the Stanford Social Innovation Review (and other recent stories and scholarship), poor families, often frustrated by the lack of high-quality in public schools, are bypassing government and digging into their own shallow pockets to educate their children. While U.S. public education remains in far better shape than the countries described—we don’t suffer from 20 percent teacher-absenteeism rates, at least!—this is a fascinating glimpse at markets developing to meet the education needs of the neediest.

Education Week published an important look at the education advocacy landscape on Monday, giving much-merited exposure to organizations working at the state and local level to drive reform (although, where’s the love for 50CAN and PIE-Net?). It’s heartening to see the ongoing efforts to overhaul education outside the Beltway and blogosphere.

Charter school supporters will have reason to celebrate after reading the Department of Education’s new clarification of the ESEA waiver process, which affirms the autonomy of charter schools while maintaining the need for them to be accountable. While the Gadfly remains suspicious of the waiver process’s constitutionality in general, in this instance, at least, the feds are overreaching responsibly.

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The National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) is indisputably the country’s most valuable tool for tracking student achievement over time, and it’s become ever more valuable as it has added subjects (nine of them now), boosted its frequency (at least in reading and math), reported results at the state level (and, for twenty pioneering cities, at the local level, too), and persevered with a trio of “achievement levels” (basic, proficient, advanced) that today are the closest thing we have to national academic standards.

Should the NAEP be more than a thermometer for the nation's academic progress? Photo by Joe Seggolia

But NAEP only reports how our kids (and subgroups of kids, political jurisdictions, etc.) are doing. It doesn’t explain why. And in an era when achievement is barely ticking upward, despite America’s forceful efforts to reform the system so that it will soar, it’s no surprise that NAEP’s governing board, vigorously chaired nowadays by former Massachusetts Education Commissioner (and Fordham trustee) David Driscoll, wants this well-regarded assessment apparatus to become more useful in diagnosing what is and isn’t working and why.

One route to enhanced utility is to deepen and widen the “background questions” that NAEP asks of students, teachers, and principals in conjunction with the assessment. There are scads of these, varied (to some extent) by subject and grade level. (You can find the entire set of questionnaires and can see some examples [eighth graders, reading] at the NAEP website.) Today, however, the data arising from such questions are mainly used to probe deeper into the test results by revealing interesting relationships and tantalizing correlations. Turn, for example, to the new science report card and look at pages ten and eleven for examples of insights gleaned from teacher and student questionnaires.

Wanting to make NAEP more useful at the policy level, the Governing Board assembled a six-member panel to examine the uses of background questions. Chaired by former Deputy Education Secretary Marshall (Mike) Smith, its forty-two-page report was submitted to NAGB on March 2. (If you’re pressed for time, an executive summary is available, too.)

The panel’s main message is that NAGB should make its background questions more extensive and then use them more creatively to interpret the achievement data:

NAEP should restore and improve upon its earlier practice of making much greater use of background data, but do so in a more sound and research-supported way. With proper attention, these data could provide rich insights into a wide range of important issues about the nature and quality of American primary and secondary education including:

• Describing the resources available to support learning (opportunity-to-learn) for students with differing home backgrounds and over time.

• Tracking progress in implementing key instructional, curricular, and technological changes and educational policy initiatives, such as the Common Core standards.

• Monitoring student motivation and out-of-school learning as research-based factors affecting student achievement.

• Benchmarking high-performing states and urban districts and those with high achievement growth to identify factors that differentiate high-performers from lower-performers on NAEP.

This domestic effort would parallel the extensive reporting of background variables in PISA (Program for International Student Assessment) and TIMSS (Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study) that have become starting points for U.S. international benchmarking analyses to describe the characteristics of high-performing and low-performing education systems.

NAEP only reports how our kids (and subgroups of kids, political jurisdictions, etc.) are doing. It doesn’t explain why.

NAGB recently solicited feedback and comment on these recommendations, and what’s come back to them has been mixed, even contentious. Says former Commissioner of Education Statistics Mark Schneider, for example, based on both his professional judgment and at least one painful bout during his time in government, "They will make statements that will inevitably push the boundaries, and you will end up with questionable reports.”

Former IES Director Russ Whitehurst and current Commissioner of Education Statistics Jack Buckley have also expressed misgivings about the thrust of the panel’s report.

As have I. While the panel’s advice includes meritorious suggestions for improving the quality, validity, and consistency of NAEP background questions, for NAEP or NAGB to wander into student motivation and the efficacy of touchy policy innovations is to tread on very dangerous ground.

Over the past quarter century, every time that NAEP has strayed in the direction of “explaining” or “evaluating” rather than simply reporting, it has gotten into deep doo-doo, and this will surely happen with even greater force in the “tea party” era. NAEP is a thermometer, not a diagnostician. The temperature chart needs to be accurate, of course, and other factors that may influence it need to be described with as much precision as can be mustered (e.g., race, gender, socio-economic status). But look what happened in 2006 when Schneider unveiled an “evaluation” of charter-school performance using NAEP data. Big mistake, as he immediately recognized. (He notes that this was a project he inherited, not one he initiated!)

The same sort of backlash will occur with greater force and damage today when things have become so politicized and issues like the Common Core have become so controversial.

There will also be challenges involving privacy and objections to NAEP poking into issues that are “none of the government’s business.”

What a mistake it would be to risk turning NAEP into a completely different kind of instrument.

Indeed, it was less than a decade ago that NAGB retreated from what had been a more-ambitious set of background questions. And there was a reason for this pull-back. Particularly as the assessment’s administration became more frequent, the ever-lengthening list of background questions was becoming burdensome. It was also becoming intrusive and people grumped to Congress that NAEP was invading their privacy. As a consequence, the No Child Left Behind act, while adding a great deal to NAEP’s responsibilities and role in monitoring achievement results, also barred it from asking about "personal or family beliefs and attitudes." Congress further insisted that all questions be "secular, neutral, and nonideological."

It’s hard to picture the current Congress welcoming a more aggressive posture by NAEP on background questions and harder still to see Congressmen applauding the use of “neutral” NAEP data to track and evaluate the impact of such touchy “policy initiatives” as the Common Core standards. Indeed, I’m pretty sure NAGB would get its hand slapped. What’s more, that kind of extra work costs money and the administration’s budget request for NAEP for FY 2013 is $5 million less than was sought (and appropriated) for 2012 ($129.6 million). Thus the thermometer may already be in some jeopardy. What a mistake it would be to risk turning it into a completely different kind of instrument.

The National Assessment’s one crucial role over the next decade is to be a trustworthy thermometer. Emulating PISA and the OECD (with their dubious, controversial, and ill-supported policy pronouncements) would gravely jeopardize the integrity, respect, and acceptance of NAEP as “the nation’s report card”—neutral, trustworthy, nonpartisan, etc. Someday, perhaps, it can be more daring. Today, however, the country needs it to keep playing its present role.

The College Board has grown somnolent and secretive in recent years, raking in huge sums (though it's officially nonprofit) from fees paid to take its well-known tests (APs and SATs above all, as well as sundry other services, such as an online system for matching kids with colleges), while neglecting its social mission, playing little role in the ed-reform wars, and blocking outside researchers from its trove of valuable data. (It much prefers to spin the test results itself.) Enter David Coleman, one of the brighter (and younger) stars in the ed-reform firmament, a major author (and booster) of the Common Core standards, and a passionate, energetic, strong-willed, and persuasive fellow. In October, he'll take the helm of the College Board and, because he can be counted upon to do what he says he's going to do, we can anticipate that "over the next few years, the main thing on the College Board’s agenda is to deliver its social mission. The College Board is not just about measuring and testing, but designing high-quality curriculum.” A worthy change, a smart and timely move, a swell use of the College Board's vast resources, and, potentially, a hefty boost to America's quest to see that its educators have the wherewithal to teach things worth learning. The College Board already contains the means of determining whether the kids have learned it—and considerable capacity to incentivize them to do so.

“Backer of Common Core School Curriculum Is Chosen to Lead College Board,” by Tamar Lewin, New York Times, May 16, 2012.

While business leaders rue the lack of American workers skilled enough in math and science to meet the needs of an increasingly high-tech economy, the situation may be growing even grimmer. The latest installment of TIMSS showed stagnation in U.S. science achievement, and the 2009 NAEP science assessment found that only 21 percent of American twelfth-graders met the proficiency bar. Yet while the gravity of the problem is clear, the root cause is not. Is our science curriculum lacking? Is it being squeezed out by an emphasis on math and reading? Is there a problem with our pedagogy? Are our teachers ill-prepared? Or are we simply expecting too little of teachers and students alike?

Coinciding with its new review of state science standards, The Thomas B. Fordham Institute will bring together experts with very different perspectives to engage this crucial question: "What's holding back America's science performance?"

Watch the discussion with UVA psychologist Dan Willingham, NCTQ President Kate Walsh, Fordham's Kathleen Porter-Magee, Project Lead the Way's Anne Jones, and Achieve, Inc.'s Stephen Pruitt and join the conversation on Fordham LIVE!

While business leaders rue the lack of American workers skilled enough in math and science to meet the needs of an increasingly high-tech economy, the situation may be growing even grimmer. The latest installment of TIMSS showed stagnation in U.S. science achievement, and the 2009 NAEP science assessment found that only 21 percent of American twelfth-graders met the proficiency bar. Yet while the gravity of the problem is clear, the root cause is not. Is our science curriculum lacking? Is it being squeezed out by an emphasis on math and reading? Is there a problem with our pedagogy? Are our teachers ill-prepared? Or are we simply expecting too little of teachers and students alike?

Coinciding with its new review of state science standards, The Thomas B. Fordham Institute will bring together experts with very different perspectives to engage this crucial question: "What's holding back America's science performance?"

Watch the discussion with UVA psychologist Dan Willingham, NCTQ President Kate Walsh, Fordham's Kathleen Porter-Magee, Project Lead the Way's Anne Jones, and Achieve, Inc.'s Stephen Pruitt and join the conversation on Fordham LIVE!

We’ve often questioned whether the local school board remains the best governance model for public education. We’re not sure whether the Chamber of Commerce’s Institute for a Competitive Workforce (ICW) shares such fundamental concerns, but it is certainly interested in improving the school boards we’ve got. Its new report profiles a baker’s dozen highly variable district boards, drawing from these case studies characteristics of successful school boards—and of the other kind. Top-notch boards (determined by whether they are linked to improved student achievement) have: limited and clearly defined responsibilities (limited to core, high-level, and strategic goals); stability (essential for reform, but not an end in itself); effective board training (which can help overcome dysfunction); and positive relationships with superintendents (with both parties proactively communicating). Struggling boards (those marred by infighting, financial issues, and low student achievement) also share some common traits: They are often voted in during “off cycle” elections (with limited voter turnout dominated by interest groups), are highly politicized, and have large (and diverse) constituencies. One treatment for ailing school boards, according to the ICW, is (not surprisingly!) strong business-leader engagement. Take Austin, for example. That city’s Chamber of Commerce, through task forces and published reports, pushed an otherwise complacent AISD board into urgent action. And in Atlanta, the business and civic communities have convened the board of their education PAC (EduPAC Atlanta) each election year to endorse and support their chosen candidates. This ICW report offers an interesting read—and some smart recommendations for districts looking to improve their board dynamics and efficacy. Still, we remain unconvinced that local school boards are the best way to govern our schools in the twenty-first century.

Institute for a Competitive Workforce, School Board Case Studies (Washington, DC: U.S. Chamber of Commerce, May 2012).

Folks today speak of Ray Budde, Ted Kolderie, and Al Shanker as fathers of the charter-school movement. But what of its mother? Ember Reichgott Junge, former Minnesota state senator, authored the nation’s first charter legislation. This personal account takes readers through the complete history of chartering in Minnesota, chronicling passage of the original bill in 1991, the resistance it got from unions, and subsequent amendments to the law. (Originally, there was an eight-school cap on charters in the Land of 10,000 Lakes and only licensed teachers could create and operate schools. Now, there is no charter cap and schools are granted waivers from stifling state laws.) The factual accounts make the book worthwhile but the personal anecdotes laced through the text are what make it compelling. Drawing on this history, Reichgott Junge explains some lessons that can be learned from it—and that apply to modern education-reform efforts that go well beyond charters (e.g., today’s push for digital learning). Among them: Don’t leave accountability to chance; define explicitly the reform and its goals (think of the confused perception many still hold of charter schools—and how this may have been avoided with early, explicit explanation); and avoid legislating on operations or governance (dictating board make-up or specific financial decisions suppresses innovation). There is much work remaining before charters move past their “adolescence” (per Reichgott Junge) and further shape innovation in American public education. This historical account explains how this can happen.

Ember Reichgott Junge, Zero Chance of Passage: The Pioneering Charter School Story (Edina, MN: Beaver’s Pond Press, Inc. 2012).

Rahm Emanuel famously remarked that “you never want a serious crisis to go to waste.” Yet that is exactly what many defenders of the defined-benefit (DB) pension system would prefer to see happen. This tough budgetary time, they argue, is not the moment for dramatic overhauls to the traditional arrangement, such as moving to a defined-contribution (DC), cash-balance, or hybrid plan. Such changes, they assert, would increase costs to the system in the short-term. This brief from the University of Arkansas’s Robert Costrell rebuts that proposition. It is dense and jargon-heavy, but its thesis is spot-on: There will be no greater costs to pension systems overall by switching away from DB plans. Not in the short or long term. (To nerd out for a moment: Costrell makes this case by profiling how various states interact with the reporting requirements of the Government Accounting Standards Board [GASB]—and what their transitions away from DB plans have actually meant for their efforts to pay down unfunded pension liabilities.) But for those seeking ammunition with which to counter-attack the most common defense of an unsustainable system, Costrell’s brief packs quite the punch.

Robert M. Costrell, “GASB Won't Let Me” - A False Objection to Public Pension Reform (Houston, TX: Laura and John Arnold Foundation, May 2012).

In 2009, Fordham fellow Andy Smarick wrote: “School turnaround efforts have consistently fallen short of hopes and expectations.” And we’ve generally agreed. This research from Thomas Dee scuffs up that pristine position, however, at least a little. It examines first-year impacts of the federal School Improvement Grants (SIG) program (background here and here) in California. Dee analyzed data from roughly 2,800 schools situated just above and below the eligibility cut-off for SIG funds (eighty-two of which received SIG awards, averaging roughly $1,500 per pupil)—looking specifically at schools that opted for either of the two most popular models: transformation or turnaround (more on those here). Dee found that SIG reforms raised the scores on California’s Academic Performance Index by an impressive thirty-four scale points over the course of one year (2010-11). Before the interventions, the average SIG-eligible school scored roughly 150 points below the state’s performance target of 800, which implies that SIG closed this gap by 23 percent. (Still, API is a complex metric, and it is not clear what this means for average student-level growth on the California Standards Tests.) Dee found the most improvement in the turnaround schools (where the principal and most of the staff is replaced) and in schools that had been the “lowest-achieving.” That said, CA’s “lack of progress” schools (Title I schools that posted very minimal improvement in the five years before undergoing SIG intervention) were not significantly impacted by the federal program. Dee conducted a number of analyses attempting to refute his findings—including attention to non-random student sorting (might the SIG program attract or repel certain students?). But results held. (Sidebar: Dee also compared SIG’s efficacy to class-size reduction [CSR] initiatives and found that SIG generates about half the achievement gains of CSR at a third of the cost. Of course raising class size is notoriously expensive.) Granted, these are short-term impacts. It’s unclear whether they’ll carry over through years two, three, and beyond, especially as SIG funding runs out. And with an average SIG grant of $1.5 million per school, the well will run dry.

Thomas Dee, School Turnarounds: Evidence from the 2009 Stimulus (Cambridge, MA: National Bureau of Economic Research, April 2012).