The Education Gadfly Weekly

In this study on the potential impact of No Child Left Behind on student achievement and education inequality, analysts John Chubb and Connie Clark bite off a big topic that’s perhaps more than they can chew. First they demonstrate that the nationwide gains on the NAEP exams (in math and reading in grades four and eight) in the NCLB era (2003–11) were over twice as large as those during the pre-NCLB era (1992–2000). (By omitting 2000–03, they avoid NCLB’s transition years—which also happened to be a time of explosive progress in achievement.) Black, Hispanic, and low-income students made particularly large gains. Then Chubb and Clark turn to state-by-state differences and note that progress varied widely—ranging from almost fifty-point gains (in Maryland and D.C.) to nearly no growth or a loss (Iowa and West Virginia). Controlling for socioeconomic status and starting test scores, the analysts find a gap of forty-five scale points between the largest and smallest gainers—showcasing an oft-ignored state-to-state achievement gap, according to Chubb and Clark. From there, they take a qualitative look at ESEA waivers from states that have made lots and little progress on NAEP during the NCLB era. They conclude that being serious about reform—such as implementing tough accountability systems and benchmarking assessments against other measures of college readiness—is what makes the difference. (In fact, the authors posit that the historically high achievers have built these smart reforms into their waiver applications while the low achievers have not—a point that worries Chubb and Clark, as they see a potential for waivers to thus increase the state-to-state achievement gap.) This might be true, though different studies have identified other potential explanations for states’ improvement—which would impact recommendations for future federal accountability provisions. For instance, one by Tom Dee and Brian Jacob used as a control whether states did or did not have accountability systems in place prior to 2002 and found that the accountability provisions of NCLB generated large and statistically significant achievement increases (at least in fourth-grade math), especially among disadvantaged populations. Chubb and Clark conclude with recommendations for federal education policy: Have states either a) adopt the tried-and-true models of top-performing states (and track their implementation to continuously fine-tune best-practice approaches) or b) allow states to create flexible systems but hold them accountable to strong assessments like those of NAEP or, potentially, the Common Core. These are worthy thought experiments, indeed, even if this Ed Sector report doesn’t definitively prove why some states “raced to the top” while others lagged behind.

SOURCE: John Chubb and Constance Clark, The New State Achievement Gap: How Federal Waivers Could Make It Worse—Or Better (Washington, D.C.: Education Sector, June 2013).

When it comes to using data for education policy and reform, two factions emerge: modern Luddites who fear the mechanization of schooling and tech-savvy number crunchers who tend to believe that data will solve all of education’s woes. This book by IT pro Philip Piety deftly weaves between the factions and offers a valuable read for teachers, administrators, and policymakers looking to work productively with educational data without becoming overwhelmed. Piety divides it into three sections. The first lays out the history of the educational-data “movement” and the current debate surrounding value-added measures and testing. The second discusses best practices in and applications of administrative infrastructures—which include data systems about teaching methods and students. For example, the U.S. Department of Education’s State Longitudinal Data Systems (SLDS) program created a powerful research tool and a nexus of information crucial to federal, state, and local policy goals. The third examines how data can be helpful to the “technical core”—that is, students, teachers, materials, and classrooms. Even more helpful, the author showcases how Teach For America and KIPP use metrics innovatively to, among other things, improve instruction.

SOURCE: Philip J. Piety, Assessing the Educational Data Movement (New York, NY: Teachers College, Colombia University, 2013).

In the midst of a blooming field of research on how to serve high-achieving minority and lower-income youngsters, this report from Education Trust plants a welcome bud. Noting that the sturdiest predictor of college success is the richness of a student’s course of study in high school, and concerned about how few minority and low-income students opt to take challenging Advanced Placement (AP) courses, the authors set out to understand the extent of these inequities—and what can be done to reverse the trend. After determining that 71 percent of all U.S. high schools in 2009–10 had at least one student take an AP examination, providing 91 percent of all students with some AP access, they outlined the extent of the gap: 6 percent of African American students take AP courses, compared with 11.9 percent of white students and 25.1 percent of Asians; similarly, 5.5 percent of low-income students take AP courses, versus 15.6 percent of all other students. The authors go on to recommend a number of actions that district and high school educators can take, from simply expanding awareness among underrepresented student groups to creating a network of supports for students taking advanced courses. But while most of these proposals seem reasonable, the recommendation that schools ensure that their barriers to AP enrollment are not too “rigid” stuck out like a sore green thumb. While there are plenty of qualified and underrepresented students who never enroll and ought to be encouraged to do so, schools ought to ensure that loosening entry requirements does not lead to a watering down the course content—or no flowers will bloom at all.

SOURCE: Christina Theokas and Reid Saaris, Finding America’s Missing AP and IB Students (Washington, D.C.: The Education Trust, June 2013).

Mike and Kathleen catch the whistleblower spirit, giving the goods on NGSS, sparring over ability grouping, and decrying the latest Common Core distraction. Amber goes easy on Ed Sector.

Amber's Research Minute

The New State Achievement Gap: How Federal Waivers Could Make It Worse—Or Better by John Chubb and Constance Clark (Washington, D.C.: Education Sector, June 2013).

Chester E. Finn, Jr. breaks down why Fordham does not support implementation of the NGSS.

To every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven.
- Ecclesiastes 3:1

For more than four years now, we at the Fordham Institute have been arguing for a federal education policy of “Reform Realism”—one that is reform-oriented but also realistic about what Washington can effectively achieve. It’s a compromise position of sorts, putting us between the “Army of the Potomac” (lefty reformers who have never glimpsed a problem that Uncle Sam can’t solve) and the Local Controllers (Tea Party types who want zero federal role in education, thank you ma’am). We further fleshed out our vision two years ago with our ESEA Briefing Book and list of 10 recommendations to imbue that key federal law with Reform Realism.

Halfway through 2013, we find ourselves examining another set of ESEA bills and in the midst of another series of ESEA mark-ups. And after highlighting the ridiculous prescriptiveness of the Senate Democrats’s proposal, I find myself under attack from friends on the left for abandoning Reform Realism and joining the Local Controllers. Have I drunk the Kool-Aid—er, tea?

Granted, it’s harder for me today to find much of anything that I’d want Congress to mandate—or that I wouldn’t want the Department of Education to be able to waive. But I submit that an explicit stance of federal humility is precisely what’s called for at this time—for the causes of reform and realism both. (To every thing there is a season.)

That’s for two main reasons:

1.   A strategic retreat from an overweening federal role will help to protect the Common Core, the jewel in the standards-based-reform crown—and it’s good for other reforms like school choice, too.

2.   Substantively, an aggressive federal role has been discredited—and threatens to discredit the entire reform effort along with it.

Regular readers know I’m bullish on the Common Core. I believe that these rigorous standards have the potential to dramatically improve the quality of instruction in the typical American classroom—to move teachers far beyond the test-prep and bubble-kids obsessions of the No Child Left Behind era. If implemented faithfully (a big "if"), I predict we’ll see significant gains on national and international exams (at least in math and reading) and, over time, a decline in the number of students in remedial college courses. Employers will find more Americans worth hiring for skilled jobs. All of this will be good for our young people, our system of higher education, our economy, and our shared cultural fabric.

To be sure, any set of rigorous standards could set off this positive chain of events, just as Massachusetts’s standards did in the Bay State. But it’s not inevitable, as we have learned from other states with high standards but lackluster achievement (Indiana and California, especially). It all depends—on the quality of the associated tests, the position of the “cut scores,” ancillary efforts to prepare teachers, and more.

Then there are the benefits of “common,” rather than state-by-state, standards. First among them: the creation of a nationwide market of textbooks, digital materials, professional development, teacher training, etc., all built upon the common “platform” of the Common Core. Plus assessments that will help parents know how their kids’ schools are doing—and how the school of choice down the road is doing—not just against the state’s own standards but against those of the country and the world.

I could be wrong, of course. Common Core implementation might be half-hearted or lead to wrong-headed instructional practices. But if we want to let it play out, we have to beat back the political efforts underway to push states to repudiate the standards.

What that means for the federal role is to set strict limits on Uncle Sam’s involvement in standards, testing, and accountability systems—because the cri de coeur of Common Core opponents is that these standards and their companion tests represent a federal effort to micromanage our schools (and the minds of our children) from Washington. Let’s not promote new laws that would make that claim true.

Thus the wisdom of the bills written by Senator Lamar Alexander and Representatives John Kline and Todd Rokita, which explicitly prohibit the Department of Education from getting within 100 miles of the Common Core or anything like it. (Senator Alexander was particularly eloquent this week in explaining that he strongly supports the right of states to adopt the Common Core, but not under pressure from Washington.)

Hence the illogic of Senator Tom Harkin’s approach, endorsed on Wednesday by his committee in a party-line vote, which micromanages state accountability systems in myriad ways. The following are among the most significant:

• Mandating that school ratings consider achievement and growth. (Why not let states use growth alone if they want?)
• Mandating that school ratings consider the progress of English language learners in attaining English proficiency. (What sense does that make for schools with a tiny proportion of ELL students?)
• Mandating that states set performance targets that aim for every school to attain the current “achievement level of the highest-performing 10 percent of schools in the state” (or something equally challenging). (Is this setting up a lot of schools to look bad?)

But it’s not just politics and optics. The last twelve years of hyperactive federal policymaking have gotten a few things right but more things wrong. Take, for instance, the following:

• The command to get “all students” to proficiency encouraged states to keep the definition of “proficiency” exceedingly modest.
• The structure of “Adequate Yearly Progress” encouraged schools to focus on students just below the proficiency bar, rather than students at the middle or top of the achievement spectrum, too.
• The “highly qualified teachers” mandate resulted in a vast paperwork-compliance exercise, while creating new hurdles for alternate route programs (like Teach For America) and charter schools.
• Race to the Top’s enthusiasm for rigorous teacher evaluations led states to adopt “growth measures” in non-tested subjects (like phys ed) that don’t pass the laugh test and are helping to fuel the backlash to testing and accountability writ large. (It’s also impeding principal autonomy in both charter and district schools.)

Proponents of a strong federal role like to claim that we can’t trust the states. But an equally legitimate question is whether we can trust the feds. They’ve been wrong a lot lately.

Reform realism, circa 2013

So how can Washington promote reform without making things on the ground worse? What would a humble federal approach entail? Try these two principles.

1.   “Transparency” rather than “accountability.” It’s true that federal taxpayers spend tens of billions a year on ESEA (and other) programs; they should get something in return. A fair trade is more information about schools, especially their performance and their finances. While the Harkin bill goes overboard in its enthusiasm for new “reporting requirements,” Alexander and Kline/Rokita probably don’t go far enough. On the other hand, the Army of the Potomac needs to give up on its quest to repair inequitable school spending via Title I’s comparability rules—and focus on requiring accurate school-level fiscal data, instead.

2.   Competitions rather than mandates. If Congress cannot help itself and must promote particular reforms, it should do it via competitive grant programs rather than universal mandates and formulas. This isn’t a perfect solution (see Race to the Top and teacher evaluations), but it’s better than the alternative. This is a good bet for new preschool programs (and related regulations); efforts to curb the “school-to-prison” pipeline; and initiatives to encourage a more equitable distribution of effective teachers.

These principles can’t “assure” that states will promote forceful and smart education reforms—though I would posit that no federal mandate can do that. (Repeat after me: The federal government can force states and districts to do things they don’t want to do, but it can’t force them to do those things well.) But the reform movement is better equipped than ever to win political battles at the state and local levels—a better approach than federal rulemaking.

None of the ESEA bills is likely to make its way to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue anytime soon, but the current flurry of activity may still reset the terms of the debate. May the word “humility” be on the minds and lips of members of Congress in the weeks and months ahead.

This week’s Fordham-conferred grade of C on the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS) will be worn as a badge of honor by some misguided souls in the science-education world, but it will be a disappointment to many. We know and regret that. Having carefully reviewed the standards, however, using substantially the same criteria as we previously applied to state science standards—criteria that focus primarily on the content, rigor, and clarity of K–12 expectations for this key subject—the considered judgment of our expert review team is that NGSS is not the cure the country needs for its abysmal performance in science.

Yes, they’re better than the standards that many states are currently using—indeed, at least a little better than half the states and clearly superior to sixteen of them. On the other hand, five states (plus D.C.) earned grades of A or A- from our reviewers. So did the NAEP and TIMSS frameworks. Another seven states earned B’s. Check out the map and table below.

Yes, students and teachers in a bunch of states would be somewhat better off if their curriculum, instruction, and assessments were geared to NGSS rather than their abysmal present standards. But they’d be far better off if they Xeroxed (and faithfully implemented) South Carolina’s excellent science standards or if they constructed new ones around the commendable assessment frameworks of TIMSS and NAEP.

What’s the problem with NGSS? To be fair, it’s better in several important respects than its early drafts (on both of which our reviewers provided extensive feedback and recommendations for improvement.) It handles some topics and issues quite well, even elegantly, particularly in the earlier grades.

We recognize, too, that the drafters faced tough choices in pursuit of their goal of K–12 science standards that are “fewer, clearer, and higher.” The failure to make such choices can lead to “kitchen sink” standards that prove essentially impossible to implement. Our own understanding of good academic standards has benefited from the NGSS (and Common Core) efforts to set priorities, prune, and focus. Plaudits to NGSS and its authors (as well as the National Research Council that developed the framework on which NGSS is based) for facing up to the challenge of deciding what is most important for children to learn.

Still and all, the final NGSS suffer from five significant shortcomings.

1.   Science standards should integrate and balance necessary content with critical “practices” through which students can extend learning and deepen understanding. The NGSS fail to achieve this balance; they too often gloss over or omit entirely the content that students need to make practices both feasible and worthwhile.

2.   While ostensibly aimed at preparing all students to be “college and career ready,” the NGSS omit essential prerequisite content that would lay the groundwork for high school physics and chemistry, much less for college-level science. And the newly released “Appendix K,” which offers suggested “course sequences” for middle and high school, implies that the NGSS include the essential content that IS the foundation for high school physics and chemistry courses. They do not.*  

3.   Too often, the NGSS standards assume that students have mastered essential prerequisite content that was never actually spelled out in earlier grades. Good standards clarify and prioritize what content and skills are essential at each grade level—and build cumulatively so that expectations at every level have been adequately prepared for in earlier levels.

4.   The NGSS incorporate “assessment boundaries” in some standards that are meant to limit the scope of knowledge and skills to be tested on state assessments, but will likely have the unintended effect of limiting curriculum and instruction, particularly for advanced students. What’s more, often the content that is excluded is grade appropriate and part of the necessary foundation for future learning.

5.   NGSS fail to include much math content that is critical to science learning, especially at the high-school level, where it is essential to learning physics and chemistry. The Fordham reviewers note that the standards “seem to assiduously dodge the mathematical demands inherent in the subjects covered”— a missed opportunity as many states prepare to implement higher math standards under the Common Core.

Where do states go from here?

We at Fordham have long favored high-quality, multi-state, even “national” academic standards, so long as they originate with and are voluntary for states. We’re bullish, for example, about the Common Core English language arts and math standards because they are substantively strong and truly state owned.

There are definite advantages to “common” standards, including comparability, portability, and some economies of scale. Textbooks, for example, need not be customized to each state’s idiosyncratic standards and shared assessment instruments should be more economical than separate single-state procurements. The tests may be better, too—and yield results that can be compared across state lines, even internationally.

But “common” standards are not inherently superior to the work of individual states—and improved standards can come from multiple directions.

We advise state leaders seeking to improve their science standards to look to—and borrow from—other states that have developed clearer and more rigorous standards, as well as from sound national and international models and frameworks. We’re particularly positive about places like South Carolina and the District of Columbia, both of which are thorough as to content (without falling into the “kitchen sink” temptation) and serious as to rigor but also do a fine job of amalgamating well-thought-out practices with that content. Moreover, they’ve developed strong support materials that, if implemented well, will drive curriculum and assessment development and instruction.

One more key concern: Regardless of the quality of a state’s existing science standards, or the improvements the NGSS (or a different change) might bring, state leaders would be wise to consider whether they presently have the capacity to overhaul science expectations while they are still working to faithfully implement the Common Core standards for English language arts and math. If we’ve learned anything from the Common Core experience, it’s that implementation (including preparation of educators and the public) is vastly more challenging than adoption. It’s fruitless to adopt any new standards until and unless the education system can be serious about putting them into operation across a vast enterprise that stretches from curriculum and textbooks to assessment and accountability regimes, from teacher preparation to graduation expectations, and much more. Even the finest set of standards is but a hollow promise, absent thorough and effective implementation.

 * The NGSS team says it will be releasing another appendix—there are already a dozen!—that will discuss college and career readiness. For now, we must assume that what’s actually in—and missing from—NGSS is intended to yield readiness for advanced study of science, including college-level science.

According to the Times, ability grouping is back, after being unfairly stigmatized in the late 1980s and 1990s by misguided ideologues. We hope it’s true, because such grouping enables teachers to tailor their instruction to individual students appropriately—and can be used to match learning styles as well as achievement levels. (Free speech endures at Fordham, however, and not everyone concurs.)

Following school-board squabbles and the subsequent implementation of a new but compromised governance structure (by which the county executive appoints the district CEO and three school-board members), the Prince George’s County public schools have a new board chairman: NEA Director of Teacher Quality Segun Eubanks. We know and respect Eubanks and wish him the best of luck—but can’t help but smirk. What a classic case of the union sitting on both sides of the negotiating table.

To help close its $304 million budget deficit (brought on in large part by skyrocketing pension costs), the school district of Philadelphia announced that it has pink-slipped 3,783 employees: 676 teachers, 283 counselors, 127 assistant principals, and 1,202 noontime aides—a move that Superintendent Hite called “nothing less than catastrophic.” We hate to say, “I told you so”…

Chester E. Finn, Jr. breaks down why Fordham does not support implementation of the NGSS.

Chester E. Finn, Jr. breaks down why Fordham does not support implementation of the NGSS.

In this study on the potential impact of No Child Left Behind on student achievement and education inequality, analysts John Chubb and Connie Clark bite off a big topic that’s perhaps more than they can chew. First they demonstrate that the nationwide gains on the NAEP exams (in math and reading in grades four and eight) in the NCLB era (2003–11) were over twice as large as those during the pre-NCLB era (1992–2000). (By omitting 2000–03, they avoid NCLB’s transition years—which also happened to be a time of explosive progress in achievement.) Black, Hispanic, and low-income students made particularly large gains. Then Chubb and Clark turn to state-by-state differences and note that progress varied widely—ranging from almost fifty-point gains (in Maryland and D.C.) to nearly no growth or a loss (Iowa and West Virginia). Controlling for socioeconomic status and starting test scores, the analysts find a gap of forty-five scale points between the largest and smallest gainers—showcasing an oft-ignored state-to-state achievement gap, according to Chubb and Clark. From there, they take a qualitative look at ESEA waivers from states that have made lots and little progress on NAEP during the NCLB era. They conclude that being serious about reform—such as implementing tough accountability systems and benchmarking assessments against other measures of college readiness—is what makes the difference. (In fact, the authors posit that the historically high achievers have built these smart reforms into their waiver applications while the low achievers have not—a point that worries Chubb and Clark, as they see a potential for waivers to thus increase the state-to-state achievement gap.) This might be true, though different studies have identified other potential explanations for states’ improvement—which would impact recommendations for future federal accountability provisions. For instance, one by Tom Dee and Brian Jacob used as a control whether states did or did not have accountability systems in place prior to 2002 and found that the accountability provisions of NCLB generated large and statistically significant achievement increases (at least in fourth-grade math), especially among disadvantaged populations. Chubb and Clark conclude with recommendations for federal education policy: Have states either a) adopt the tried-and-true models of top-performing states (and track their implementation to continuously fine-tune best-practice approaches) or b) allow states to create flexible systems but hold them accountable to strong assessments like those of NAEP or, potentially, the Common Core. These are worthy thought experiments, indeed, even if this Ed Sector report doesn’t definitively prove why some states “raced to the top” while others lagged behind.

SOURCE: John Chubb and Constance Clark, The New State Achievement Gap: How Federal Waivers Could Make It Worse—Or Better (Washington, D.C.: Education Sector, June 2013).

When it comes to using data for education policy and reform, two factions emerge: modern Luddites who fear the mechanization of schooling and tech-savvy number crunchers who tend to believe that data will solve all of education’s woes. This book by IT pro Philip Piety deftly weaves between the factions and offers a valuable read for teachers, administrators, and policymakers looking to work productively with educational data without becoming overwhelmed. Piety divides it into three sections. The first lays out the history of the educational-data “movement” and the current debate surrounding value-added measures and testing. The second discusses best practices in and applications of administrative infrastructures—which include data systems about teaching methods and students. For example, the U.S. Department of Education’s State Longitudinal Data Systems (SLDS) program created a powerful research tool and a nexus of information crucial to federal, state, and local policy goals. The third examines how data can be helpful to the “technical core”—that is, students, teachers, materials, and classrooms. Even more helpful, the author showcases how Teach For America and KIPP use metrics innovatively to, among other things, improve instruction.

SOURCE: Philip J. Piety, Assessing the Educational Data Movement (New York, NY: Teachers College, Colombia University, 2013).

In the midst of a blooming field of research on how to serve high-achieving minority and lower-income youngsters, this report from Education Trust plants a welcome bud. Noting that the sturdiest predictor of college success is the richness of a student’s course of study in high school, and concerned about how few minority and low-income students opt to take challenging Advanced Placement (AP) courses, the authors set out to understand the extent of these inequities—and what can be done to reverse the trend. After determining that 71 percent of all U.S. high schools in 2009–10 had at least one student take an AP examination, providing 91 percent of all students with some AP access, they outlined the extent of the gap: 6 percent of African American students take AP courses, compared with 11.9 percent of white students and 25.1 percent of Asians; similarly, 5.5 percent of low-income students take AP courses, versus 15.6 percent of all other students. The authors go on to recommend a number of actions that district and high school educators can take, from simply expanding awareness among underrepresented student groups to creating a network of supports for students taking advanced courses. But while most of these proposals seem reasonable, the recommendation that schools ensure that their barriers to AP enrollment are not too “rigid” stuck out like a sore green thumb. While there are plenty of qualified and underrepresented students who never enroll and ought to be encouraged to do so, schools ought to ensure that loosening entry requirements does not lead to a watering down the course content—or no flowers will bloom at all.

SOURCE: Christina Theokas and Reid Saaris, Finding America’s Missing AP and IB Students (Washington, D.C.: The Education Trust, June 2013).