The Education Gadfly Weekly

It’s become a cliché to say “good riddance to 2016,” what with its nasty presidential campaign, tragic world events, and general ill feelings of strife and conflict, here and abroad. Don’t let the door hit you on the way out, Father Time!

Before we close the books on this vexed year, however, it’s important to pause and begin to understand how we got to this place, if only to help us truly leave it behind. Education, as always, has a key role to play. (More on that in a bit.)

“This place” is an America where many of our fellow citizens and communities are hurting badly, and feel little hope for the future. This pain is particularly acute among the white working class, in vast stretches of the deindustrialized heartland. The election returns made that clear, but it can also be measured in shortened life expectancy, the burgeoning opioid epidemic, faltering civic institutions, and much more. As many have pointed out, the suffering endured by Donald Trump’s political base is hardly foreign to other members of our polity—many African Americans, especially—who have long dealt with social and economic challenges in their neighborhoods. But its depth and breadth feel new and more than a little sobering.

At the same time, some of us are living better than ever. Fueled by strong educations, stable families, helpful social networks, and opportunities afforded by a growing global market, the American upper middle class is bigger, wealthier, and healthier than at any time in history. It’s also more diverse and freer than before, thanks to movements that have brought more blacks, immigrants, women, gays, people with disabilities, and others into the economic and social mainstream.

Macro-explanations

Scholars across the ideological spectrum have spent the last few years trying to explain how these “two Americas” came to be. Charles Murray (in Coming Apart), Robert Putnam (Our Kids), Yuval Levin (The Fractured Republic), and J.D. Vance (Hillbilly Elegy) all point to the double-whammy of economic and social fragmentation. Levin, in particular, underscores the contrast between now and the 1950s when the boomers were in school. American industry dominated the globe; strong labor leaders and CEOs hammered out deals that allowed for shared prosperity. The trauma of the Great Depression was in the past, and the euphoria of winning the Second World War and the very real threats posed by the Cold War yielded feelings of national solidarity and patriotism. Families were strong. Churches were well-attended. The future looked bright.

To be sure, that narrative leaves out important details. Many Americans were constrained by laws (Jim Crow) or mores (anti-gay sentiment, limited opportunities for women). But more importantly, the Golden Age couldn’t last. It was inevitable that economic competitors would rise from the ashes of the hot war and challenge our domination. Eventually—by the 1980s—that led to the imperative to make American industry more competitive, dynamic, and efficient—which was good for growth but bad for low-skilled workers. We were, by 1983, “a nation at risk.”  Meanwhile, the civil rights movement and its progeny led to greater social conflict (it wasn’t called a “struggle” for nothing). And the liberation of women from the home led to massive changes in the workforce while also upending traditional family life.

A reinvigorated economy together with greater freedom for many have showered fortune on the well-educated. But for the Other America, it’s been disastrous, accompanied by spreading unemployment, flat wages, social breakdown, and, in many places, despair. Not only does the upper middle class have more money than everyone else, it also has more stable families, stronger civic institutions, and healthier habits—all of which it passes down to its children in the form of social capital, making the gaps bigger still. The working class, meanwhile, struggles to make ends meet with low-paid service-sector jobs, in communities where lasting marriages are rare and drug abuse is rampant. Is it any surprise that Raj Chetty and his colleagues recently found upward mobility to be waning?

Proximate causes

Still and all, America’s “coming apart” has been in the works for decades. So what explains 2016? Not just the victory of Donald Trump, but also the social conflict that we’ve lived through? Why now?

People are angry—about the state of affairs described above, but also about the incompetence of our national leaders, first in invading Iraq (and making the Middle East even more of a mess), and then in enabling the financial crisis of 2007–08 (paving the way for the worst downturn in 70 years). We were still in the middle of national crises in 2004 (Iraq) and 2008 (the Great Recession), but as these receded in recent years, and as it became clear that no one would be held accountable for these calamities, the fuse was set. And, ironically, today’s relative peace and prosperity made it feel safe enough to indulge in a national temper tantrum.  

Technology is a factor, too. For all of its limitless potential, social media served to exaggerate and deepen our conflicts—both by keeping us in our own echo chambers and by encouraging hasty, vicious, often anonymous acrimony across political, racial, and other lines. But that’s not all. The ubiquity of smart phones is another development we’ve yet to wrestle with. It’s impossible to imagine the Black Lives Matter movement without the smartphone videos that turned tragic shootings into emotional calls to action. Those of us in the center or on the right could try—as Heather Mac Donald did in a recent book—to explain that the data indicate that police shootings are extremely rare, and that the overwhelming majority of cops do their jobs well. But a video is worth a thousand think pieces.

Education’s role in America’s coming-apart

It’s well known that educational attainment is the new dividing line in America’s politics, as well as in social class. Those with a college degree or higher have, on the whole, prospered. Those without one have, for the most part, not. What’s less clear is whether it’s education itself that sets the contours of our divided country. Nothing magical happens on those campuses. It’s likely that a college education is simply a marker—of people who were lucky to be born into relative affluence and the stable homes that generally accompany it; of individuals with the “soft skills” that allow them to persevere in their educations, but also—when they’re so disposed—in their jobs, even in their marriages.

Had we chosen a while back, like Singapore and Switzerland and many other places, to build a high-quality career and technical education system, more people without college degrees—yet with marketable skills—would also have prospered. It’s hard not to look at Germany, for instance, with its systemic approach to technical education, its robust manufacturing base, and (so far at least) greater social cohesion, and think that perhaps our “bachelor degree or bust” strategy was a big mistake. The number of bachelor degrees has increased a bit, but the size of the “bust” is much, much larger.

In the same vein, what if we had raised academic standards a generation earlier, and persuaded educators, parents, and students alike that harder work would lead to greater opportunities and a better America? What if we had shown the same willingness to demand high expectations every day in the classroom as we do every week on the athletic field?

***

So here we are, in a divided America, and with a divisive President-elect, to usher us into the New Year. It’s hard to find a lot of holiday cheer right at the moment. But here’s one happy thought: What if we’ve reached a nadir? What if 2017 will begin the process of coming back together again? In January, I’ll return with some ideas on how education—and education reform—can be a big part of that essential revival. 

The two most important changes in American education policy over the past several decades have been the expansion of school choice and changes to school accountability. So far, they’ve generally been good for our country and our kids. Yet they’ve largely left Catholic schools behind—and the leaders of Catholic education haven’t tried very hard either to resist these changes or to take advantage of them.

Resistance, mind you, probably would have been futile, although Catholic educators could surely have done more to help shape these changes. But mostly they stood by while change happened. And while those changes were happening in public policy, Catholic schools, overall, seemed like victims of a slow but serious wasting disease.

The statistics are glum. Private school enrollments have declined overall in the past decade, but Catholic school enrollments have declined faster—and started declining earlier. School closures abound. The remaining schools are often located in places where few Catholics live. Many kids attending them, particularly in urban areas, are not themselves Catholic. A lot of Catholic parents no longer feel strongly that their children should attend parochial schools for purposes of religious formation. The economics of the schools have become extremely stressed. Their governance, management, infrastructure, and technology have lagged other sectors. And major national organizations that used to promote Catholic schools seem pretty much to have given up the ghost—perhaps even the Holy Ghost—and accepted decline.

The news isn’t all bad, however, and there are steps that leaders of this sector can take to reverse course. Catholic schools are, for example, doing better in places with bona fide voucher programs. Same with tax credit scholarships and such. So those anxious about the future of this sector ought to push hard to launch and expand such financing arrangements—something that may be easier given the new school-choice and voucher energy that’s visible in the Trump administration.

Private actions have also proliferated in support of Catholic schools. New York City’s Partnership for Inner-City Education is a grand example of this, as is the burgeoning Cristo Rey network. So, too, Seton Education Partners, the Drexel Fund, and various activities associated with Notre Dame’s ACE initiative.

Along with boosting schools with better curricula, leadership, management practices, and cash, the best of these revival efforts also feature newfound transparency about educational outcomes. Transparency can be painful, but it’s necessary in an era of results-based accountability for schools, an era when we look to see how well a school’s pupils are learning and no longer settle for judging schools by their inputs, intentions, or reputation. Private schools of every sort—the pricey independent kind as well as the inner-city, faith-based kind—have lagged way behind public schools in this realm, mostly still relying on tradition, the grapevine, simplistic school-rating schemes and, perhaps, religion to attract families.

New York’s Partnership for Inner-City Education deserves special kudos for its transparency. Its leaders and supporters have managed not only to run better schools than some of their peers, but they’re also much more open about results, even when those results aren’t as strong as everyone wants. They’ve also made explicit comparisons of how their six schools are doing in relation to the district and charter schools of the city and the state.

Bizarrely, however, they can’t compare their school results with other private or Catholic schools in New York because transparency hasn’t reached those sectors. We’ve no idea whether those other schools are making academic gains, running in place, or getting worse. Someone may know, but certainly not the public or even the parents of their students.

There’s a bit more sunshine at the national level, thanks to the National Assessment of Educational Progress, which has striven for decades to get a viable sample of private-school students to report their achievement at least in reading and math in grades 4 and 8. Shamefully, NAEP hasn’t had sufficient cooperation from private schools to yield a decent sample since 2003, but enough Catholic schools have been willing to participate that we do have some data for their students across the country as a whole—and the results are promising. In eighth grade, for example, in both reading and math, as recently as 2015, pupils in Catholic schools outperformed their public-school peers by a solid margin—more so in reading than in math. If you look at trendlines, the gains made by Catholic schools over the past decade or so have roughly paralleled those of public schools. More analysis needs to be done here, of course, because the kids aren’t identical and it’s possible that student characteristics and school selection effects rather than instructional effectiveness explain much of the achievement track record. But NAEP has other limits, too. It can’t tell parents (or school shoppers) anything about individual schools or clusters of schools, so it doesn’t solve the private sector’s transparency problem. (Several states with voucher programs have done more by way of obligating voucher-aided schools to participate in state assessments.) 

Increasingly, the coin of the education realm is going to be a school’s educational effectiveness, not its reputation, its price tag, the names of its illustrious alums, or how hard it is to get into. I don’t suggest for a moment that test scores are an adequate gauge of a school’s effectiveness. There are lots more that parents want to know, and not all of it can be quantified. But parents aren’t the only consumers of this kind of information. Teachers and school leaders need to be driven by evidence of what is and isn’t working. So should policymakers and donors. So, too, the high schools and colleges that kids then move into. The large point is to shift our thinking from schools’ reputations and past histories to their present-day effectiveness in producing young people ready to succeed and prosper and be good citizens and parents in twenty-first-century America. 

On this week's podcast, special guest Marc Porter Magee, CEO & Founder of 50CAN, joins Mike Petrilli and Alyssa Schwenk to look back on the year that was.During the Research Minute, David Griffith summarizes Undue Process, a study he coauthored with Victoria McDougald that examines why bad teachers are so difficult to dismiss.

David's Research Minute 

Unlike the Common Core, we at Fordham have never been big fans of the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS), and thus have urged states not to adopt them. But what about efforts to revise them?

Massachusetts did just that with new Science and Technology/Engineering learning standards last spring—adding to, editing, and removing certain NGSS content, while still allowing educators in the state to benefit from existing NGSS-aligned curriculum and instructional resources. A white paper released by the Pioneer Institute earlier this month examines whether those new standards contain rigorous and appropriate content, and how they stack up against NGSS and the state’s earlier 2006 science standards.

Academic standards are learning goals that define what students should know and be able to do by a given grade. They’re intended to drive what gets taught in classrooms. As authors Paul R. Gross (who also authored our NGSS review) and Ze’ev Wurman stress, standards should clearly identify “specific student knowledge or skills—that is, a performance requirement.” Unfortunately, the study finds that Massachusetts’ new science standards fall short of this goal and share several major issues and flaws with the NGSS Standards from which they were adapted. For one, several important science topics are completely omitted, including basic biological development, beginning genetics, and cell biology (the parts of a cell and their functions). Worse, say the reviewers, content that is included is often less coherent and more confusing than that covered in the state’s 2006 standards. (For example, the authors note that the term “modeling” is used over three hundred times in Massachusetts’ new standards, yet “what is intended by this word varies widely and in particular standards is frequently ambiguous.”) In other instances, standards are simply inaccurate or accompanied by overly complex or irrelevant “clarification statements” that are a regression from the state’s simpler, clearer science standards of yore.

Unfortunately, neither change in Bay State science standards was an improvement over what came before, and policymakers would have been better off sitting on their hands for the last decade. This is especially worrisome for students in Massachusetts, who have historically scored among the highest in the nation on National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) science assessments.

SOURCE: Paul R. Gross and Ze’ev Wurman, “‘What Goes Up Must Come Down’: New, Lower K-12 Science Standards for Massachusetts,” Pioneer Institute (December 2016).

This study compares the practices of Michigan charter schools to those of neighboring district schools based on a survey of administrators in both sectors that was conducted in fall 2013. (Note that the study does not consider outcomes, only practices.) The survey was sent to the leaders of every Michigan charter school that was open during the 2012–13 and 2013–14 school years, as well as whichever district schools the plurality of each charter school’s students would have attended based on their neighborhood. Eighty-five percent of charter school leaders and 76 percent of district school leaders responded to the survey, meaning that 435 schools (226 charters and 209 district schools) are represented in the study.

Overall, the results reveal many similarities between the two sectors. For example, district and charter schools offer similar amounts of instructional time, and have similar academic calendars. They’re also equally likely to assign kids to reading classes based on their ability (though charters are slightly more likely to stream in math).

More surprising, principals in both sectors report incorporating a “no excuses” approach to education. For example, 82 percent of charter schools and 67 percent of district schools require that students sign behavioral contracts. Similarly, 81 percent of charters and 71 percent of districts schools require a parent contract.

The two sectors exhibit the clearest differences when it comes to school management and testing. For example, 28 percent of charter schools conduct monthly standardized assessments compared to just 10 percent of district schools. More strikingly, 66 percent of charters offer merit-based bonuses to teachers (versus 16 percent of district schools) and 30 percent offer financial incentives for teaching hard-to-staff subjects (versus 3 percent of district schools). Finally, just 30 percent of charter school principals say they struggle to remove poor teachers compared to 79 percent of district principals. However, charter principals reported spending twice as much time observing inexperienced teachers and almost thrice as much time observing veterans, suggesting they view observations as an important tool even when they aren’t a required component of evaluations.

Compared to their district neighbors, Michigan charters serve slightly more low-income students (69 percent versus 61 percent), more black students (49 versus 34 percent), fewer special education students (10 versus 15 percent), and equal proportions of limited English proficient students (6 percent). In other words, the challenges they face are broadly similar.

Assuming that’s so, one way of interpreting the study’s results is that whatever advantages Michigan charters have over their district counterparts derive not from their ability to “cream” pupils or even “innovate” practices but from something far simpler and more mundane: their ability and willingness to distinguish between high- and low-performing staff and respond accordingly.

Hey, it’s just an idea.

SOURCE: Susan Dynarski, Brian Jacob, and Mahima Mahadevan, “K-8 Choice in Michigan: Practices and Policies within Charter and Traditional Public Schools,” University of Michigan (December 2016).

A new report from the National Council on Teacher Quality (NCTQ) examines the quality of 875 undergraduate preparation programs for elementary teachers. While some gains are visible since NCTQ’s 2014 report, teachers emerging from most of these programs are still ill-prepared to enter the classroom.

Reviewers scrutinized programs in 396 public and 479 private colleges and universities in D.C. and all fifty states, programs enrolling anywhere from a handful of prospective teachers to 1,700. They used an A–F grading system to rank programs based on three criteria: admissions (selection criteria), knowledge (coverage of early reading, math, and other content), and practice (student teaching, with a focus on classroom management). They also analyzed each program’s foundational materials, including syllabi, course textbooks, and observation forms. And they employed additional research, international comparisons, and consultation from experts on teaching practice.

Reviewers find that programs are somewhat more selective than they were in 2014. NCTQ has shown before a correlation between program selectivity and teacher effectiveness. Yet only 26 percent of programs draw most of their applicants from the top-half of the college-bound population (based on the GPA or SAT/ACT score required by the program to enroll). And a measly 13 percent are both selective and demographically diverse, showing that such a combination is worryingly rare.

Likewise, instructional quality was lacking. Only thirty-nine percent of programs improved the quality of their early reading instruction since the earlier report, when gauged on five measures: phonemic awareness, phonics, fluency, vocabulary, and comprehension—all of which NCTQ believes underlie K–5 student learning in other content areas. And math was even worse. Just 13 percent of teacher preparation programs adequately covered topics like geometry, numbers and operations, algebra, and data analysis—areas that research and experts say are necessary for effective math instruction in the elementary grades.

In the realm of classroom management, just 42 percent of programs give quality feedback to teachers. As any current or former teacher knows, successfully managing the classroom is vital for effective educating.

Worst of all was content coverage. Only 5 percent of programs taught future educators all the essential content knowledge in science, geography, history, literature, and composition—a disaster for elementary teachers, whose curricula usually cover all of these core subjects.

The review does not, of course, examine every facet of teacher preparation programs, but it covers the “crucial basic elements” that teachers need to succeed. Through its wide-range of evaluation criteria and in-depth review of coursework, the report presents a solid analysis.

The big takeaway is that teachers are generally not receiving the necessary training and support that they will need to succeed in elementary classrooms. Stakeholders at a school, district and state level—and even high-school seniors—ought therefore use this report to dig deep into the quality of a given teaching preparation program before they sign up and start paying tuition.

SOURCE: “Landscapes in Teacher Prep: Undergraduate Elementary Ed,” NCTQ (December 2016).