The Education Gadfly Weekly

Stuart Buck and Jay P. Greene
Education Next

It’s hard to tell right now whether vouchers have a future in the nation’s capital, but Stuart Buck and Jay P. Greene are nonetheless bullish on the outlook for vouchers, at least when it comes to serving special education students. In this new Education Next piece, they make the case that special education vouchers are effective, politically palatable, and built on the firm legal basis of the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, the well-liked federal spending channel for special-ed students. The key insight is that IDEA already permits reimbursement for kids with disabilities to attend private schools, but only through a procedural gauntlet that is prohibitively costly: It requires lawyers, appeals, and lots of time and ultimately, most claims are rejected. Direct voucher programs (four states currently have them), though, put the onus on parents to determine whether private schools provide an “appropriate education” for their kids—and provide money up front. According to Buck and Greene, the McKay special-ed voucher program in Florida, for example, gives students options that are, on average, cheaper for the taxpayer and better for students and parents; in addition, it also creates a “rising tide” effect, whereby public schools actually improve their services for fear of losing funding. But mightn’t this pressure public schools to under-diagnose students with disabilities? And are there enough private school spots to fill the apparent demand for McKay-style vouchers? While McKay and other programs benefit from a low profile, major expansion would surely bring these sticky issues to the surface. Read it here.

Eric Isenberg, Steven Glazerman, Martha Bleeker, Amy Johnson, Julieta Lugo-Gil, Mary Grider, Sarah Dolfin, Edward Britton, and Melanie Ali
Mathematica Policy Research
August 2009

This report is the second installment of a three-year Institute of Education Sciences study to investigate the effectiveness of novice teacher induction programs. As induction programs are one of the most common policy interventions intended to address problems of high teacher turnover, poor preparation, and uneven teacher quality, this study is timely. It compares comprehensive induction programs (programs combining orientation and professional development sessions with experienced-teacher mentoring, classroom observations, and assessment-based feedback) with less intensive--and presumably less effective--“business as usual” programs. While the first year of the study compared a treatment group of teachers in comprehensive programs with a control group of teachers in informal programs in 17 districts, the second year divided the treatment group further, offering a subset of teachers a second year of comprehensive induction; this created the ability to investigate the effects of participating in zero, one, or two years of intense induction programming. Last year’s results were not promising; this year’s are equally disappointing. While teachers participating in the “fully loaded” model received significantly more support and intervention, the programs had a neutral, even negative, effect on student achievement. Startlingly, the one-year induction participants reported spending less time with mentors in the second (non-induction) year than did the control group. Teachers who participated for two years continued to report more support and intervention. Yet the two cohorts (those with one or two years of intense induction and those with none) still showed no statistical difference in terms of student test scores or teacher retention rates. While last year we noted that it is exceedingly difficult to detect impacts of intensive programs like these one after only one year, it is undeniable that year two only seems to reinforce last year’s results showing no correlation between comprehensive induction programs and teacher quality.

Paul Hill, Christine Campbell, David Menefee-Libey, Brianna Dusseault, Michael DeArmond, and Betheny Gross
Center on Reinventing Public Education
October 2009

This report from Center on Reinventing Public Education is the next installment in a series on performance management (we reviewed the introductory report here). The authors present initial findings from four districts using portfolio management--New York City, New Orleans, Chicago, and Washington, D.C.--in the hopes that other districts considering the portfolio technique will learn from their experiences; the final report is due in 2011. If you recall, unlike traditional districts, portfolio districts empower schools to make instructional, HR, and budgetary decisions; they foster experimentation among schools rather than insisting on uniformity; and they base school expansion, closure, and funding decisions entirely on performance. The portfolio district continually reconstitutes, closes, opens, and experiments with its schools until, as the authors put it, “no child attends a school in which he or she is not likely to learn.” New York (through the city-wide “autonomy zone”) and New Orleans (through extensive and continuing chartering) have implemented portfolio management full-scale; Chicago and D.C. have adapted only parts of it so far. (In Chicago, portfolio management is only applied to the Renaissance 2010 initiative schools, while DCPS does not oversee a portion of the city's "portfolio" of schools, namely the charters and voucher-receiving schools.) The report outlines precipitating events that fostered their creation (e.g. Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans and mayoral takeover in NYC), and the implications that opening new schools and closing unproductive ones has on district redesign (e.g. the need to develop a stellar human capital strategy, manage competing “old” and “new” cultures among staff, or consider switching to pupil-based funding). But there are many questions left for the final report: Can independent school operators wean themselves off of philanthropy and be self-sustaining? Will alternative sources of teachers and school leaders continue to fill the human capital pipeline? Can portfolio management continue to thrive after a city’s primary reformers have left the scene? All good questions whose answers we look forward to in this series’ next report. Read the full publication here.

Southern Education Foundation
September 2009

This report from the Southern Education Foundation advocates for a “federal education amendment” to the Constitution as a means of fixing funding and resource disparities in American public education. After trying to explain why American education is failing, it turns to the vast funding and resource disparities (both intra-state and inter-state) among public schools. There are some impressive numbers, to be sure: In Alaska, for example, the highest-revenue district outspends the lowest-revenue district by more than $20,000 per student per year. The report points out that poor and minority students are often stuck in the lower-revenue districts, and it helpfully explains that, despite good intentions, federal Title I funding often exacerbates disparities. Next is a somewhat haphazard argument that funding disparities cause corresponding disparities in “opportunity to learn.” All of this leads SEF to the conclusion that it is time for the federal government to step in with a constitutional amendment. They offer several forms this might take, but the goal of each seems to be to equalize per-student funding across state and district lines. There are two problems here: First is the notion that the failures of American public education can all (or mostly) be attributed to under-funding. This simply isn’t true. There are plenty of well-funded schools and districts that are under-performing because of gross mismanagement, and there are plenty of under-funded charter schools that are outperforming them. This is not to say that resource disparities aren’t an issue, but they certainly aren’t the issue. The second issue is the idea that the way to fix public education is for the federal government to step in. Even granting political feasibility (far from a given, considering the backlash to even modest federal interventions in public education like Race to the Top), a Constitutional amendment would create at least as many problems as it solves; the last thing public education needs is more bureaucracy and more litigation. You can read the paper here.

There’ll probably be more stories like this one: Chicago Public Schools is ending its version of Roland Fryer’s paying-students experiment. A number of cities, Chicago included, started pilot versions of programs that paid low-performing low-income students for good attendance, good behavior, and good grades. Now, Chicago’s Green for Grade$ has fallen victim to the budgetary axe for the 2009-10 school year. There were many reasons to be wary of a program that paid students to do things they should already be doing and it always remained unclear how long the philanthropic support for the program would last. Seems we have our answer. Can’t say we’re too sad to see this initiative go. Now the question is, will the students who used to participate in this program cut the mustard without the green compensation?

“Money No Longer a Motivator for CPS Students,” by Vee L. Harrison, Chicago Talks, October 16, 2009

Here’s an idea to curb the dropout problem: Make it illegal. Heretofore, the legal school-leaving age in many states was 16, two years younger, typically, than that of a graduating senior. But now states are amending their statutes to raise that bar to 18, meaning that nonattendance prior to that age would be truancy--and against the law. In Massachusetts, for example, where this measure is currently being considered, students can currently choose to leave school at 16 and--with the superintendent’s permission for medical reasons or to complete non-wage work at home--as early as age 14. In real terms, that’s like dropping out after eighth grade--and with the district’s blessing. Of course, this kind of measure, which has already been adopted in nineteen other states--many of which only recently--is certainly no cure-all. And it might not have the personal touch of going door-to-door (as they’re doing in LA) or the tough-love feel of urging businesses to not hire high school dropouts (thank you, Texas), but it seems like such common sense that we can only wonder what took so long--and why those 31 other states haven’t done the same.

“Law urged to make teens stay in school,” by James Vaznis, Boston Globe, October 21, 2009

If you haven’t heard the news that the newspaper industry is dying, you must not be reading the newspaper anymore. Which is entirely possible. According to the Pew Research Center, newspaper readership fell 5 percent in just the past year, and advertising revenues are down 23 percent over the past two years. The third quarter of 2008 saw the worst decline in print ad revenue in nearly 40 years, reports the Newspaper Association of America. Several major chains are in bankruptcy, and a few big papers have disappeared entirely. With the economy in deep recession, the situation only looks to grow worse.

This is a topic that excites editorialists, who are, of course, members of the journalism profession themselves. Many bemoan the demise of the daily newspaper, arguing that it signals the end to the educated citizen. Others worry that Americans will retreat to ideological safe havens--cable TV channels, Internet sites, and blogs that conform to their strongly held views--which will lead to even greater divisiveness in our politics and culture.

Are these concerns valid when it comes to coverage of education? To find out, I interviewed some of the smartest minds in education journalism, including Richard Lee Colvin of the Hechinger Institute; Richard Whitmire, past president of the National Education Writers Association (EWA); Jim Bencivenga, formerly the education editor of the Christian Science Monitor; Virginia Edwards, the publisher of Education Week; and Elizabeth Green, an editor of the online upstart GothamSchools.

They all agree that the demise of the daily newspaper is bad for the local “conversation” around education. And even if papers survive, already the education beat is being squeezed. Those reporters who remain on the job are asked to cover higher education as well as K-12 schools, meaning they have less time to develop expertise in specific areas. They are pushed to write shorter articles, leaving little space for in-depth reporting. And editors want stories that are hyperlocal, at the school level, not missives about the latest school board policies, or dry accounts of state regulatory actions.

As a result, says Whitmire, decisions go unchallenged. “What is lost is that the superintendent will bring in a new program, and nobody will be there to explain to the community whether similar programs have worked or failed in other places.” Colvin goes even further: “We hear from superintendents that the coverage is worse than ever.” All the reporters seem to want is a “couple of quotes” for a “sensationalist” story. So when it’s time for leaders to make the case for, say, budget cuts, they have no credible vehicle through which to explain their rationale to the broader public, beyond their own communication outlets, and no independent third party to present opposing views in a fair manner.

“The people who will be excluded from the conversation will be people without kids in the schools,” explains Bencivenga. Those with a vested interest--the teachers unions, realtors--will continue to get their message out. But there will be no one to counter these self-serving opinions. As Edwards argues, “An ill-informed public will benefit people who can push an agenda without accountability and public scrutiny.”

The national scene is unlikely to look so bleak, argue the experts. In part that’s because everyone expects a few of the great national papers to survive. But it’s also because of the well-developed community of think tanks, blogs, and trade publications that follow the education issue (such as the Gadfly, of course), which aren’t disappearing anytime soon. “National will always be the easiest to do,” says Whitmire.

But even at that level, there are signs of trouble. Right now a CEO or university president might skim an education editorial or op-ed while flipping through the Wall Street Journal or New York Times. But imagine if such elites stop getting newspapers and only read articles online that are of immediate interest. The larger public that engages in the K-12 education debate could shrink dramatically, to just partisans engaged in the war of ideas around schooling.

Still, nobody expects high-quality education journalism to disappear without a fight. Already new models are starting to emerge. One of the most talked about is Green’s GothamSchools, an online site that follows New York City’s education scene, and also covers national education happenings. An initiative of the nonprofit Open Planning Project, GothamSchools aims to be a “one stop shop in New York City for education news,” according to Green. It covers education the way newspapers used to, with its two reporter/editors showing up at every meeting of the city council and the state assembly that touches on the public schools. But it also dives in to do more in-depth analyses and investigative pieces.

There are similar experiments up and running in Philadelphia, Cleveland, and Chicago. Plus a growing number of cities, such as Minneapolis and San Diego, are home to new online nonprofit newspapers that feature strong education reporting.

Meanwhile, the national players are tweaking their approach. Hechinger is going into the content-production business, with a growing staff that will write original, long-form articles about key education trends. The EWA has a new “public editor,” former Washington Post reporter Linda Perlstein, who helps cub education writers around the country hone their craft and offers high-level feedback to more-seasoned pros. And Education Week is contemplating how it might distribute its content to daily newspapers.

All of these “business models” have promise, but also big question marks. First, they depend on philanthropic support for start-up revenue; with the stock market, and thus endowments, down some 30 percent, it’s not known whether there will be enough grant dollars to go around. Even Education Week, which has attracted foundation support for years, only receives 25 percent of its revenues from such sources and must bring in the rest from subscriptions, advertising, and elsewhere. Second, it’s unclear whether any of these approaches are sustainable once the grant money inevitably runs out.

So should education reformers try hard to help solve these problems? Would the further diminishment of the newspaper be bad for the cause of change? That’s not quite clear, either. On the one hand, newspaper editorial pages have generally been friendly to supporters of greater accountability, transparency, and parental choice. They have been particularly bullish on charter schools. And to be sure, the organized interests of the status quo--particularly the powerful teachers unions--will always find a way to get their message out to core audiences. They would only profit from a world without the fourth estate playing referee.

On the other hand, reporters have never been particularly astute at covering “change,” particularly the variety that causes pain for adults. In this way, the media have not been very friendly to reformers. Colvin puts it best: “Journalists never get out front of reform. They are always the trailing entity. Anyone whose ox is gored by reform is going to be outspoken and resist it. Journalists must understand that there’s always pain and disruption in great change. But they rarely frame it that way.”

Now that it’s the journalists who face pain and disruption, the question is whether they will get out in front of the changes happening in their own industry. No doubt you can follow this developing story in a local newspaper--if you still subscribe to one.

This piece originally appeared in the fall 2009 volume of Education Next.

It’s no broom-bedecked cover, but TIME coverage is still TIME coverage. In his recent article for that magazine, Gilbert Cruz reports that America's urban Catholic schools are facing a serious identity crisis--not to mention financial catastrophe. (That’s not news to Gadfly readers, of course.) Cruz says that these schools serve a socially important niche, but a growing number of poor students who can’t afford the full cost of tuition and the majority of teachers being of the salaried lay version mean they have an out-of-date business model. According to John Eriksen, superintendent of Catholic schools in Paterson, New Jersey, the church and Catholic schools have a hard time wrapping their respective heads around the idea of education provision as a business. Further, he explains, "a much more effective mantra than 'We're poor, give us money,' is 'We serve the poor. Invest in us, and we'll provide a good return on your investment.'" Amen to that.

“Looking for Solutions to the Catholic-School Crisis,” by Gilbert Cruz, TIME Magazine, October 12, 2009

Eric Isenberg, Steven Glazerman, Martha Bleeker, Amy Johnson, Julieta Lugo-Gil, Mary Grider, Sarah Dolfin, Edward Britton, and Melanie Ali
Mathematica Policy Research
August 2009

This report is the second installment of a three-year Institute of Education Sciences study to investigate the effectiveness of novice teacher induction programs. As induction programs are one of the most common policy interventions intended to address problems of high teacher turnover, poor preparation, and uneven teacher quality, this study is timely. It compares comprehensive induction programs (programs combining orientation and professional development sessions with experienced-teacher mentoring, classroom observations, and assessment-based feedback) with less intensive--and presumably less effective--“business as usual” programs. While the first year of the study compared a treatment group of teachers in comprehensive programs with a control group of teachers in informal programs in 17 districts, the second year divided the treatment group further, offering a subset of teachers a second year of comprehensive induction; this created the ability to investigate the effects of participating in zero, one, or two years of intense induction programming. Last year’s results were not promising; this year’s are equally disappointing. While teachers participating in the “fully loaded” model received significantly more support and intervention, the programs had a neutral, even negative, effect on student achievement. Startlingly, the one-year induction participants reported spending less time with mentors in the second (non-induction) year than did the control group. Teachers who participated for two years continued to report more support and intervention. Yet the two cohorts (those with one or two years of intense induction and those with none) still showed no statistical difference in terms of student test scores or teacher retention rates. While last year we noted that it is exceedingly difficult to detect impacts of intensive programs like these one after only one year, it is undeniable that year two only seems to reinforce last year’s results showing no correlation between comprehensive induction programs and teacher quality.

Southern Education Foundation
September 2009

This report from the Southern Education Foundation advocates for a “federal education amendment” to the Constitution as a means of fixing funding and resource disparities in American public education. After trying to explain why American education is failing, it turns to the vast funding and resource disparities (both intra-state and inter-state) among public schools. There are some impressive numbers, to be sure: In Alaska, for example, the highest-revenue district outspends the lowest-revenue district by more than $20,000 per student per year. The report points out that poor and minority students are often stuck in the lower-revenue districts, and it helpfully explains that, despite good intentions, federal Title I funding often exacerbates disparities. Next is a somewhat haphazard argument that funding disparities cause corresponding disparities in “opportunity to learn.” All of this leads SEF to the conclusion that it is time for the federal government to step in with a constitutional amendment. They offer several forms this might take, but the goal of each seems to be to equalize per-student funding across state and district lines. There are two problems here: First is the notion that the failures of American public education can all (or mostly) be attributed to under-funding. This simply isn’t true. There are plenty of well-funded schools and districts that are under-performing because of gross mismanagement, and there are plenty of under-funded charter schools that are outperforming them. This is not to say that resource disparities aren’t an issue, but they certainly aren’t the issue. The second issue is the idea that the way to fix public education is for the federal government to step in. Even granting political feasibility (far from a given, considering the backlash to even modest federal interventions in public education like Race to the Top), a Constitutional amendment would create at least as many problems as it solves; the last thing public education needs is more bureaucracy and more litigation. You can read the paper here.

Stuart Buck and Jay P. Greene
Education Next

It’s hard to tell right now whether vouchers have a future in the nation’s capital, but Stuart Buck and Jay P. Greene are nonetheless bullish on the outlook for vouchers, at least when it comes to serving special education students. In this new Education Next piece, they make the case that special education vouchers are effective, politically palatable, and built on the firm legal basis of the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, the well-liked federal spending channel for special-ed students. The key insight is that IDEA already permits reimbursement for kids with disabilities to attend private schools, but only through a procedural gauntlet that is prohibitively costly: It requires lawyers, appeals, and lots of time and ultimately, most claims are rejected. Direct voucher programs (four states currently have them), though, put the onus on parents to determine whether private schools provide an “appropriate education” for their kids—and provide money up front. According to Buck and Greene, the McKay special-ed voucher program in Florida, for example, gives students options that are, on average, cheaper for the taxpayer and better for students and parents; in addition, it also creates a “rising tide” effect, whereby public schools actually improve their services for fear of losing funding. But mightn’t this pressure public schools to under-diagnose students with disabilities? And are there enough private school spots to fill the apparent demand for McKay-style vouchers? While McKay and other programs benefit from a low profile, major expansion would surely bring these sticky issues to the surface. Read it here.

Paul Hill, Christine Campbell, David Menefee-Libey, Brianna Dusseault, Michael DeArmond, and Betheny Gross
Center on Reinventing Public Education
October 2009

This report from Center on Reinventing Public Education is the next installment in a series on performance management (we reviewed the introductory report here). The authors present initial findings from four districts using portfolio management--New York City, New Orleans, Chicago, and Washington, D.C.--in the hopes that other districts considering the portfolio technique will learn from their experiences; the final report is due in 2011. If you recall, unlike traditional districts, portfolio districts empower schools to make instructional, HR, and budgetary decisions; they foster experimentation among schools rather than insisting on uniformity; and they base school expansion, closure, and funding decisions entirely on performance. The portfolio district continually reconstitutes, closes, opens, and experiments with its schools until, as the authors put it, “no child attends a school in which he or she is not likely to learn.” New York (through the city-wide “autonomy zone”) and New Orleans (through extensive and continuing chartering) have implemented portfolio management full-scale; Chicago and D.C. have adapted only parts of it so far. (In Chicago, portfolio management is only applied to the Renaissance 2010 initiative schools, while DCPS does not oversee a portion of the city's "portfolio" of schools, namely the charters and voucher-receiving schools.) The report outlines precipitating events that fostered their creation (e.g. Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans and mayoral takeover in NYC), and the implications that opening new schools and closing unproductive ones has on district redesign (e.g. the need to develop a stellar human capital strategy, manage competing “old” and “new” cultures among staff, or consider switching to pupil-based funding). But there are many questions left for the final report: Can independent school operators wean themselves off of philanthropy and be self-sustaining? Will alternative sources of teachers and school leaders continue to fill the human capital pipeline? Can portfolio management continue to thrive after a city’s primary reformers have left the scene? All good questions whose answers we look forward to in this series’ next report. Read the full publication here.