The Education Gadfly Weekly

Last month, I explained why 2016 was “The Year We Came Apart”—both the nation, and the education reform movement. Now, rejuvenated by the holiday break, let me suggest that 2017 can be the year we come back together again.

No Pollyanna, I. On virtually every issue, Americans remained sharply divided. We won’t magically find new middle ground in contentious areas like abortion, Obamacare, taxes, climate change, or much else. Within education reform’s big tent, disagreement is also here to stay. We’ll continue vigorously to debate one another on matters big and small—about the appropriate role of standards and testing; the pros and cons of various approaches to accountability; how much deference to show parents versus oversight agencies when it comes to judging school quality; and on and on.

Nor should we ignore the threat that the Trump presidency may pose to our democratic norms and values. If his authoritarian impulses turn into authoritarian actions—rounding up law-abiding immigrants, discriminating against people on the basis of religion—we must stand up to him and push back.

So the sort of “coming together” I envision is not about glossing over real disagreements or rolling over when faced with a bully. It’s about using democracy to resolve our differences the best we can, while building bridges between the “two Americas” that have come into sharp relief—a liberal, urbanized, mostly coastal, and generally more affluent one, and a conservative, rural and exurban, generally poorer, heartland one. Let me suggest three principles we should all try to adhere to—and what they could mean for education reform in the months ahead.

The first is compassion. Much of 2016’s acrimony came from people of all backgrounds and walks of life who felt disrespected, ignored, left out, or unseen. There’s a whole lot of pain out there, and at least a bit of it could be soothed by acknowledging it in one another. Take the emotional debate over policing in our cities. My analytical brain tells me that shootings by police are extremely rare and only seem more common because of the ubiquity of smartphone videos and the attention drawn by the Black Lives Matter movement. But that misses an important point. When my African-American friends tell me that they feel afraid to walk on the street for fear of getting shot by cops, that’s a reality that deserves understanding and compassion. Likewise, our police officers (and their families) deserve some serious understanding and respect for putting their lives on the line every night, in a job far scarier and more stressful than our own, in situations where good judgment is easily tested.

Feeling people’s pain, Bill Clinton style, won’t solve our problems, but it’s an essential first step to seeing each other’s humanity, so we can move on to tackling the policy issues at hand.

Those of us in education reform can do better at this. Let’s seek to understand the powerlessness that teachers experience when reform mandates trickle down from on high. Let’s truly see the African-American communities that may lose their low-performing yet cherished neighborhood schools—not to mention some needed grown-up jobs—due to harsh accountability policies or competition from charters. Let’s appreciate the view of Tea Party parents, too, families that feel besieged by a popular culture that’s alien to their values and that want some measure of control over what is taught in their children’s schools. Let’s listen to the ambivalence of working-class parents when we preach that college is the only path to status and success in America today.

The second principle—a cousin of compassion—is humility. Rick Hess said it well the other day when he wrote that “reformers, officials, and pundits need to take care not to get too impressed with ourselves. Blathering on panels, testifying to legislatures, writing op-eds, advising governors, and appearing on radio or TV can give one an inflated regard for one’s import or knowledge.” It’s true that teaching kids who live in poverty, running a highly effective school, and turning around a failing district are incredibly tough jobs. “Blathering on panels”—not so much.

I cringe a bit when recalling a younger self, declaring that “we know what we need to do, we just need the political will to do it,” thumping my chest about the moral imperative of “leaving no child behind.” We know some of what to do, sure, but by no means everything. Our schools can’t do it all—not when too many parents struggle to do their part. We won’t close the wide gaps in our society—not overnight, not even in a generation.

That’s not an argument for despair, inaction, or slipping into the comfortable, fatalistic view that the K–12 system can’t really do any good until some sort of large societal revolution takes place. But it does argue for realistic expectations. Individual schools can achieve breakthrough results. But at scale in a big country like ours, progress is inherently incremental. That’s much better than no progress at all, a thought worth bearing in mind in coming months when states publish their draft ESSA accountability plans, which must include multiple targets on achievement, graduation, and much else. Reformers should resist the urge to attack objectives that are less than Utopian—while rejecting those who would settle for the status quo. We might look to states that have made big gains in recent years—Tennessee and Louisiana come to mind—to see what’s achievable. Small steps forward, moving toward but not expecting “transformation” anytime soon, that’s what we should seek.

The final principle is subsidiarity. A Roman Catholic precept, much beloved by Burkean conservatives, it posits that authority should be devolved whenever possible to the lowest level—to those closest to the action. In education, it could be read as an argument for “local control”—but with the important caveat that parents, teachers, and principals, not elected school boards, are closest to the action that matters. They don’t have nearly enough authority today in most places.

This principle is important because it aligns with human nature. People are more bought into a project when they have real say about it. That’s much of the genius behind charter schools, which, when state laws get it right, allow school leaders true autonomy and allow teachers to choose schools that align with their personal philosophies. And it’s the genius behind school choice, which gives parents agency as choosers, consumers, and de facto owners of their children’s schools.

That’s not to say building-level control and parental choice are the only strategies that reformers should embrace. Even most adherents of subsidiarity will acknowledge that there are some benefits to scale and to externally-monitored, results-based accountability. Help and assistance—especially from the state level—will continue to be useful, especially if it is truly a voluntary offering (ahem, curriculum!). But mandates about who should do what and how they must go about it should be kept to an absolute minimum.

Many progressives in the ed-reform world will balk at subsidiarity as common ground, since they tend to reform through the prism of “civil rights.” And civil rights, so goes the thinking, must be aggressively enforced via federal power on grounds that some states and districts can’t be trusted to take rights seriously. Thus their disappointment with the Every Student Succeeds Act’s devolution of power to the state and local levels.

This mindset, in my view, for all its past accomplishments, now points down a dangerous road. For it rests on an assumption of guilt on the part of educators, local officials, and state leaders, as well as overconfidence in the reformers own technocratic ability to interpret patterns in data and identify solutions. In other words, it dispenses with both compassion and humility. Thus, for example, disparities in suspension rates by race are seen as prima facie evidence of discrimination rather than symptoms of social ills that strike some groups in America harder than others.

Being guided by subsidiarity doesn’t imply a surrender of civil rights enforcement. Much to the contrary. It would recognize the need for checks and balances, and would take seriously complaints of actual discrimination—of children penalized more harshly, barred from gifted-and-talented programs, or steered away from Advanced Placement courses—because of their race, gender, etc. But it would examine each case based on its own facts, rather than using the fig leaf of “civil rights” as an excuse for Washington to micromanage America’s 100,000 public schools.

Conservatives should remember, however, that subsidiarity isn’t just about devolving power out of Washington, but out of state capitals, too. Lawmakers wearing red need to be willing to hand authority over to blue mayors, city councils, even school boards, if we’re serious about empowering communities. And if those communities want—for example—to take action to curb suspensions and expulsions in their own cities, they deserve deference.

***

Compassion, humility, and subsidiarity: it doesn’t exactly have the makings of a stirring slogan, like TFA’s “One day all children…” or even “No Child Left Behind.” But it’s a decent formulation for the coming year. Or if you want to keep it to a phrase you’ve already internalized, KIPP’s motto will do the job, too: “Work Hard. Be Nice.”

Let’s get to it.

Dual enrollment is on a roll. Enabling high school students to take college courses for college credit while still enrolled in high school is intended by its advocates to help solve multiple problems that plague American education. These include:

• The boredom of high school students who have completed their requirements for graduation and are coasting as they wait for their diplomas.
• The desire of advanced students to pursue subjects that interest them in greater depth than their high school course offerings allow.
• The need for high school pupils to get a sense of what college classes are actually like.
• The inability of many school systems to afford, on their own, or offer a rich array of advanced courses.
• The yearning by many high school students to get a head start on college, save some time and money when they get there, and perhaps avoid dull entry-level courses.
• The push by policymakers to boost academic performance, get more kids into and through college—and save some tax dollars by minimizing course duplication and, perhaps, student remediation.
• The appetite of colleges themselves to maximize enrollments and revenues, both by teaching some students who haven’t yet matriculated and by recruiting more of those students to enroll via familiarity and course credit.  

Note that almost all of these problems are addressed by the long-established Advanced Placement and International Baccalaureate programs, but they’re seriously rigorous, which means they’re hard for many students, they may depress GPAs, and they’re not guaranteed to yield college credit. Nor are they actually “owned” by the colleges themselves, meaning they don’t boost revenue or recruit students to particular campuses.

No wonder so many postsecondary institutions—especially but not exclusively community colleges—are teaming up with high schools to offer college classes to interested secondary-school pupils. Sometimes the kids trek to the college campus but more often the course is taught at the high school itself.

Sounds like a win-win, doesn’t it? But hold on a minute. Where’s the quality control? How do we know that these are real college courses? Who decides which students are qualified to enroll in them? (Do they include the same young people who will be directed into remedial English and math when they actually get to college?) Who decides which students who enroll in these courses deserve college credit for passing them? For that matter, who decides what’s “passing”? Who grades students’ work? Is there any external review or is it just the teacher’s judgment? Speaking of which, how do we know the people teaching these courses inside the high schools are college professors—or the equivalent? Most of the time, in fact, we know that they’re regular high-school teachers deputized by the colleges to teach classes on their behalf.

A recent episode in Indiana offers a vivid and sobering example of the challenge of instructor qualifications. The Hoosier State requires its public high schools to offer dual-credit classes—at least two of them. Some 3,000 individuals teach them. In an effort to ensure that those instructors have a full command of the subjects that they’re teaching, a college-accrediting body—the Higher Learning Commission, nee the North Central Association of Colleges and Schools—ruled in 2015 that they must possess master’s degrees or the equivalent in those subjects.

A master’s degree doesn’t seem like a terribly high bar for someone teaching a college course, does it? But it caused panic and palpitations in the ranks of Indiana high schools—and the colleges whose courses they were offering. How, they wondered, could they possibly make these opportunities available to their students—and comply with the law that said they must do so—if their teachers couldn’t meet (or didn’t want to meet) the new requirements? Quoth the head of the Indiana Association of School Principals: “Every—literally every—principal I’ve talked to, and in some cases superintendent, has said we’ll have a very, very limited amount of teachers able to teach dual credit.”

Fast forward to last month: Indiana persuaded the accreditor to grant a five-year reprieve. Hoosier teachers now have until 2022 to comply with the new requirement. One wonders how many of them will retire by then—and how many more reprieves and extensions may follow. One also wonders what’s happened to Teresa Lubbers, now Indiana’s higher-education commissioner. For many years, she was the foremost champion of educational rigor and excellence in the state senate, but now she’s praising this backing away from what seems like a fairly low bar.

Similar stories can be told in way too many other places, where the burgeoning dual-enrollment courses meant to yield college credit are being taught by regular high school teachers, where student performance is being judged by regular high school teachers, and where it doesn’t seem to be in anybody’s short-term interest to insist on rigor. 

On this week's podcast, Mike Petrilli, Alyssa Schwenk, and Brandon Wright discuss how the nation, and education reformers, can come together in 2017. And Amber Northern begins the new year by counting down the five best Research Minutes of 2016.

“We should stop sentimentalizing the traditional public school and open ourselves to a different way of doing public education,” writes Ashley Rogers Berner in her invigorating and highly readable new book, Pluralism and American Public Education: No One Way to School. “There is nothing to fear and much to gain from doing so.”

Berner, the Deputy Director of the Institute for Education Policy at Johns Hopkins, where she is also an assistant professor, traces much our educational malaise to a pair of historical “wrong turns”: the nineteenth century decision to impose a uniform structure on American education, and the abandonment of a traditional academic curricula. As a result of these twin sins, the majority of our children attend geographically determined, state-run schools. And the majority of those aren’t very good.

The book’s strength is its systematic dismantling of the most common arguments against pluralism and the “political arrangement” that privileges state-run schools and entrenches mediocrity, particularly for our neediest students. Only state schools can create good citizens? Wrong. “Longstanding research suggests that private schools, particularly Catholic ones, often provide better civic preparation than public schools,” Berner counters. Private education worsens inequity? Nonsense. Non-public schools have shown more success than traditional public schools in closing achievements gaps. What about the separation of church and state? The Supreme Court has held that when public funding for religious schools is the result of free parental choice, not state coercion, it passes Constitutional muster. Case closed.

Most interestingly of all, it turns out that America’s fondness for a uniform, state-run system of public schools makes us something of an outlier, Berner reports. In a host of countries, the state “either operates a wide array of secular, religious, and pedagogical schools, or it funds all schools but operates only a portion of them,” she writes. These countries’ systems are not intended to be uniform; they are pluralistic by design. Moreover, she argues, the absence of educational pluralism on our shores is, well, un-American. State-sponsored uniformity is not merely problematic for depressing academic outcomes “but also for its incongruity with American principles of freedom,” Berner observes.

At this point, free-market libertarians are likely nodding their heads and thinking, “You tell ‘em, Dr. Berner!” Not so fast. While libertarian organizations have been “tireless supporters of school choice,” that support often comes with wariness about state power, she notes. Meaningful diversification of schools could be harmed by “the libertarian resistance to government, period.” Pluralism requires “meaningful government regulation of non-public schools,” but this oversight should be “loose instead of tight, focused on academic standards and performance rather than on school culture,” she argues. “But some will chafe at this.”

This reviewer included. Berner commits a sin of omission in eliding the deleterious effects of muscular accountability on the plural system of schools she rightly valorizes. Berner may indeed be correct to argue that “making educational pluralism the norm as opposed to the exception…requires creating authoritative institutions that have moral ballast.” But when a governmental authority dictates exclusively what is measured and the expected outcomes, it exerts an irresistible influence on classroom practice, fundamentally altering the curriculum and culture. Let a thousand flowers bloom, but first get those reading scores up! In Berner’s defense, this may be a uniquely American problem. “Countries with plural systems do not tend to pit one school sector against another by comparing outcomes in Jewish, Catholic, Montessori, and state schools to assess the merits of each type,” she notes. Quality control, this implies, needn’t be synonymous with competition.

Berner’s thoughtful and persuasive book could not be more perfectly timed or attuned to the moment. As she observes, many districts and states have been moving in the direction of educational pluralism for some time via vouchers, charter schools, tax credits, and education savings accounts. “But cultural expectations die hard,” she writes. With the arrival of the pro-school choice duo of President Trump and Betsy DeVos, his designated Education Secretary, the age of American educational pluralism—if there is ever to be one—may be at hand. Berner’s book could be its bible.

SOURCE: Ashley Rogers Berner, Pluralism and American Public Education: No One Way to School, (Basingstoke, United Kingdom: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016).

There’s much lamenting about how high-quality research tends not to inform classroom practice and how to fix that problem. Enter the What Works Clearinghouse’s (WWC) “Educator’s Practice Guides.” The WWC has produced twenty-two such guides over the last nine years on sundry topics that should interest educators. Their most recent installment is Teaching Secondary Students to Write Effectively. As someone who once taught secondary students how to write (yes, it was a long time ago!), I was keenly interested in what it had to say. Unfortunately, it misses the mark.

First a bit on how the guides are developed: the Institute of Education Sciences (IES) identifies a topic and recruits a panel chair with national expertise in the topic. That chair, working with IES, selects expert panelists, which always includes two practitioners, to co-author the guide. Relevant studies are identified through panelist recommendations and a systematic literature search, and then reviewed against the WWC study design standards, which prioritize random assignment and rigorous quasi-experimental designs. Panelists write the practice guide that boils down takeaways from the culled research. Their findings are subject to peer review to ensure that the cited evidence supports the recommendations.

The panel for Teaching Secondary Students to Write Effectively sifted through 3,700 relevant studies from 1995 through 2015. But most were deemed ineligible for various reasons, leaving just fifty-five that used a randomized control trial or quasi-experimental design—and of those, just fifteen met the WWC criteria.

In the end, this evidence scrub resulted in three recommendations for teaching high school kids how to write—one of which has “strong” evidence (eleven supporting studies), another that has “moderate” evidence (eight studies), and the last with “minimal” evidence (four studies). The “strong” recommendation is to teach appropriate writing strategies using a Model-Practice-Reflect instructional cycle. This includes things like teaching students the process of writing—meaning how to plan, draft, evaluate, revise, and edit—and to teach writing strategies such as using a Venn diagram as a tool for a comparison and contrast essay.

The “moderate” recommendation is to integrate writing and reading to emphasize key writing features. That includes teaching students to model their writing after exemplars and to study an author’s craft. For instance, a student might mimic her writing after a passage in a Hemingway or John Steinbeck novel.

The third recommendation, based on “minimal” evidence, is to use assessments of student writing to inform instruction and feedback, including having the teacher assess the student’s writing strengths, perhaps through a writing prompt, before teaching a new strategy or skill.

There’s nothing wrong with these unsurprising (and uninspiring!) recommendations. Yet they rely more on teaching strategies than on content. In fact, there’s just one fleeting mention in the eighty-nine-page guide that students may no longer need to implement strategies if they can write without them. How about acknowledging that obedience to strategies and processes may hinder rather than promote powerful writing for some students? Moreover, some very sensible counsel is missing—specifically, the recommendation that students should read a lot of content-rich texts. Because good readers make good writers.

SOURCE: Steve Graham et al., “Teaching Secondary Students to Write Effectively,” The Institute of Education Sciences, U.S. Department of Education (November 2016).