The Education Gadfly Weekly

After a tumultuous reception, the Biden administration’s regulations for the federal Charter Schools Program (CSP) were finalized in July. Although the administration backpedaled partway on issues related to community demand and racial integration, its final rules cracked down on so-called “for-profit charters,” in line with the president’s campaign promises. Soon, we’ll learn whether any charters that contract with for-profit management companies received CSP start-up grants, and/or whether states that allow for-profit charters were penalized as a result.

Technically, “for-profit” charter schools are non-profit organizations that contract out some or all of their operations or services to a for-profit firm—meaning the schools themselves are not for-profit.

If that explanation strikes you as technocratic, you’re not alone. Most people fail to make a distinction between whether a school is providing a service directly via its own regular staff or is obtaining it via another entity. One result of that failure to read the fine print is that charter critics and enemies run into few challenges when they erroneously refer to “for-profit schools.”

Such disdain certainly oozes through the dense requirements that CSP applicants must henceforth meet if they choose to work with for-profit management organizations. For starters, they must ensure that goods and services purchased from such an organization are of fair market value, that the school’s governing board is making key programmatic decisions, that members of said board are not selected by the management organization, that the management contract is severable, and on and on.

We’re all for reasonable safeguards to guard against rotten apples in the charter barrel. But note the crucial missing link: The federal regs appear oblivious to whether the functions performed by a for-profit organization have anything to do with school quality. Heavy on inputs, they ignore how for-profit management companies might serve to benefit (or harm) charter students academically. They also fail to make some vital distinctions within the variegated world of schools that work with outside providers.

Fordham’s latest study, For-Profit Charter Schools: An Evaluation of Their Spending and Outcomes, sheds much light on these key points. Using recent data from Ohio, Professor Stéphane Lavertu and Assistant Professor Long Tran of The Ohio State University dig into what is meant by “for-profit” charter schools, how they spend resources differently from other charters, and how they compare in effectiveness to other charters (and to traditional public schools) in academic and nonacademic outcomes.

They find that charter schools can be sorted into three categories: those that mostly manage their own operations (23 percent), those that outsource goods/services to non-profit organizations (26 percent), and those that outsource goods/services to for-profit organizations (51 percent). The latter typically send more of their operating funds to their (for-profit) management organizations than do charter schools with non-profit management organizations.

Further, the roughly half of (Ohio) charter schools that outsource to for-profit management organizations can be further subdivided into those that contract for personnel services (three-fourths) and those that choose to hire their own staff (one-fourth). Because staffing is the largest item in any school budget, the first group sends the bulk of its operating funds to their management organizations. Yet they also spend more in the classroom and less on administration than their counterparts that work with non-profit organizations—even as they also drive heightened rates of chronic absenteeism among the charter sector.

Finally, the study largely replicates what Dr. Lavertu found in an earlier analysis of Ohio charter schools: So-called for-profit and non-profit charter schools both outperform traditional public schools, although non-profits also outperform for-profit charters, particularly in mathematics.

Based on these results, we recommend that policymakers not treat “for-profit charters” as a monolith. Specifically, charters that contract with for-profit organizations for staffing generally perform worse, and those that contract for fewer services perform better, so we should avoid regulating charter schools based on the tax status of their management organizations—and instead focus on their results.

After all, some of those results are quite good—including results of schools with management companies that run core academic functions—and such firms bring much needed capital to the sector. Policymakers should focus on schools’ academic progress with students. On their results, not on our ideology.

That means they should strive for targeted regulations, not inputs-based laundry lists or poor attempts to quantify the involvement of management organizations according to how much of a school’s budget they manage.

We’d argue that these are the wrong types of criteria by which to disqualify participation in a federal program, much less to gauge a successful school. Instead of fretting about the cost of the contract, how much it comprises of the school’s overall funding, and the duration of involvement (among numerous other things), how about taking into consideration the management organization’s track record of success with the service(s) that it provides?

—

Applicants to the federal Charter Schools Program were barely given a month to complete their applications after the final regulations were issued. It’s hard to grasp how any school leaders could finish such a daunting task in so little time. But, like it or not, charter schools are used to having to prove themselves. Grants are to be announced within days. We’ll be looking to see which state entities, developers, and charter management organizations make the cut—and whether any high-quality for-profit schools are in the mix. Stay tuned!

Since the end of World War II, the world’s population has not only gotten vastly bigger; it has also become vastly more educated. In nearly every country, the total number of years that citizens have attended school has grown faster than the population itself, and the number of college degrees conferred has grown even faster. Although population growth is now slowing almost everywhere (and depopulation is an emerging reality for some countries), the overall pace of educational expansion will remain much faster than natural population growth as far into the future as a demographer’s eye can see.

Education is a crucial component of human capital and, by extension, of national might. A better-educated citizenry means a more productive economy and thus greater military potential. But because the educational explosion of the last seventy years has been uneven—some countries have made greater strides than others, and the pace of progress has varied over time—this dramatic transformation hasn’t just increased the overall size of the global economy. It has also shifted the distribution of economic potential among countries, including great powers.

Comparatively speaking, Western nations, including the United States, have been the biggest losers in this great reshuffling of educational and economic heft, as we detail in a recent report for the American Enterprise Institute. During the Cold War, the United States was the uncontested education superpower; Americans enjoyed the world’s highest levels of educational attainment and, thanks to that and our large population, accounted for far more of the world’s highly educated workforce than any other country. But that epoch is now history. An increasing number of countries are overtaking the United States in educational attainment, when measured by mean years of schooling, and it will soon cede to China its first-place ranking in the raw number of college-educated workers. Sometime in the next two decades, India may also surpass the United States in total numbers of working-age men and women with higher education. Of course, quality of education matters—and the quality of U.S. higher education far exceeds China’s and India’s today, and likely for decades to come. But it is self-deluding happy talk to insist there is no geostrategic significance to America’s steadily declining share of the world’s college graduates.

The long-term educational rise and ultimate ascendance of China and India in higher education head counts should not come as a surprise. Nor should the United States’s long-term relative decline. Indeed, the only way that the United States might have maintained its early postwar educational edge into the twenty-first century would have been as a consequence of catastrophe: global failure to develop, worldwide mortality setbacks, or both.

What should surprise—and dismay—American observers is the remarkably poor educational performance that hastened the United States’s relative deterioration. Growth in the mean years of schooling for Americans in their late twenties is barely a third of what it was in the early postwar era, and growth in the cohort of working-age college graduates has sharply slowed when compared with the early postwar period. Amazingly, college graduation rates for American men in their late twenties flatlined from the mid 1970s to the early years of the twenty-first century—an alarming peacetime performance somehow overlooked by academics and policymakers alike.

This broad educational slowdown has not occurred because Americans are so overeducated that they have hit an attainment ceiling. To the contrary, a growing roster of East Asian and European societies have surpassed the United States in either mean years of schooling or rates of postsecondary training for workers aged twenty-five to thirty-four. Australia, Ireland, South Korea, and Switzerland, among others, have done so, but their small population size has prevented them from challenging the absolute educational dominance of the big five—China, India, Japan, Russia, and the United States. In other words, the U.S. can do better. And although it may not be able to prevent China and India from surpassing its highly educated workforce, it can postpone the date at which this happens—possibly by decades.

The erosion of the United States’s educational edge will eventually weaken the country’s global reach. With a less educated workforce than it could or should have, the United States will have less economic, political, and military heft with which to defend its interests and uphold the economic and security architecture that has defined the postwar order. Eventually, Pax Americana will come under pressure. It is not hard to imagine a progressively less peaceable and more economically insecure international environment in which the United States has much less influence as a result of its stagnating pool of high-skilled labor.

Fortunately, the United States still has good options for coping with loss of educational hegemony. But they all require Washington to take initiative—something it seems unaccustomed to lately. Through more active and imaginative diplomacy, the United States could seek to forge new coalitions or alliances that would add human resource ballast to the liberal order. This might entail patient cultivation of new security partnerships with some of tomorrow’s major centers of highly educated labor: India, Indonesia, Vietnam—maybe even Iran. Other intriguing possibilities include a closer integration of Canada, Mexico, and the United States, which might bring North America’s strategic potential more in line with its tremendous demographic and economic potential.

Meanwhile, the United States could attempt to reverse its ominous educational slowdown. Stagnation in educational attainment is impeding economic growth and likely robbing the United States of trillions of dollars in output each year—a price that will only rise if the United States doesn’t shift course. Part of the problem is that Americans do not want to buy a lot of what U.S. educators want to sell, and it is hard to blame them. The quality of public primary and secondary schooling is woefully uneven, and a high school diploma does not always come with marketable skills. Higher education is increasingly bureaucratized, ideological, and expensive. If Americans treated education as if their future depended on it, they would look for far-reaching overhauls, not marginal changes, and they would look beyond teachers unions and university administrators for better ideas. Revitalizing the country’s human resources—not just educational attainment, but health, workforce participation, and even family—will increasingly be strategic imperatives for the United States.

The coming demographic and educational changes are predictable. But they are not entirely inevitable, and they are unfolding slowly. The United States has time to adapt and address its educational shortcomings before it is too late. To avoid squandering its educational edge and putting its position of global primacy at risk, however, Washington must acknowledge that education is no longer just a domestic policy issue, but a national security issue on which the very future of the United States depends.

Editor’s note: This essay was adapted from a longer essay in Foreign Affairs.

Weeks away from the midterms, education apparatchiks in the nation’s most populous state are ramping up the election mischief by playing politics with what are expected to be dismal results from assessments taken by students last spring. Earlier this month, as reported in EdSource, the California Department of Education (CDE) announced its intent to delay release of test score data from the 2021–22 school year until after November 8. Following media pressure, this week the agency walked back that decision. The original plan would have allowed Governor Gavin Newsom and other elected officials—notably including State Superintendent of Public Instruction Tony Thurmond, who is up for re-election and had the ultimate say on the delay—to duck scrutiny for their role in exacerbating pandemic-related setbacks. CDE’s reversal means that will no longer be the case.

California school districts have already had access to their own test results for over a month, but CDE’s initial refusal to release statewide numbers—a thinly-veiled part of Thurmond’s re-election strategy—and then its melting under the public spotlight, were just the latest in a long line of head-shaking moves. While EdSource should be commended for keeping CDE semi-honest, this wouldn’t be the first time California has engaged in testing tomfoolery. In the spring of 2021, only 24 percent of eligible students took the state exams, after a confusing back-and-forth with the feds that resulted in the assessments being made optional. Regardless of whether nefarious intent was involved this time around, the mixed messages created another round of terrible optics for an agency that has become known for terrible optics.

CDE had attributed its original delay plan to the state board of education and its decision to combine the release of test scores with other metrics (e.g., student attendance, suspension rates, chronic absenteeism) in the California School Dashboard. By releasing all of the performance information simultaneously, the public, according to CDE, would have been less likely to be “misled” by the data. This was risible. There’s no reason why the state cannot publish the test scores separately and as part of the dashboard data, which is what CDE eventually announced it would do—as it has consistently done in the past. Combining everything into the fog machine that is the dashboard would in reality have provided less transparency to the public. This wasn’t a policy argument aimed at illuminating student performance; it was a political argument intended to obscure it.

The political games played with standardized testing in California have been compounded by the federal government, which has spent the last couple of years talking out of both sides of its mouth on ESSA’s assessment and accountability requirements. Even as the Biden administration says states must follow the law, it continues to signal its reluctance to enforce it. That’s the message conveyed in a “Dear Colleague” letter released earlier this month by U.S. Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona. His letter underscores the need to avoid using assessment results “punitively” to chastise teachers on evaluations or to prevent students from graduating or being promoted to the next grade. CDE’s mandarins clearly got the message, taking it a step further to include politicians as another group worthy of being held harmless. The state might have gotten away with it, too, if it hadn’t been for some tenacious and intrepid reporting.

The impulse to obfuscate or gainsay the adverse effects of school closures—California was last in the nation with regard to providing in-person instruction—is spreading to other states. Michigan, for instance, tried to put a positive spin on their subpar results. On the other side of the country, little data can be found so far on how students in New York have fared. Like California, the Empire State has shown a lack of regard for annual testing. Both states have chalked up delays in part to lengthy and complicated quality control processes, but the bureaucratic foot-dragging—months after these exams were administered and with students already assigned to new teachers in new classrooms—evinces an unseriousness among state leaders when it comes to helping students get back on track.

The bad behavior on testing is one of several examples of how some state leaders buckled under the pressure of the events of the past two years, particularly in prioritizing the agendas of adults over those of students. This is all the more relevant heading into an election where voters say education is a top issue. Reforms should include reworking data and reporting systems so that they don’t end up mirroring California’s accountability smokescreen, and timing the release of test scores and state report cards far ahead of election campaigns.

On an encouraging note, there’s a safeguard against this sort of nonsense. Findings from the NAEP long-term trend assessment have already provided an alarming indication of how students were affected by poor decisions made during the pandemic. A state-by-state accounting of academic performance is coming at the end of next month (i.e., before the election, for which the National Assessment Governing Board deserves much credit) in the form of “main NAEP.” Unlike the state assessment results gradually rolling out this fall, NAEP provides state-to-state comparisons and will be an especially important check on state testing data—regardless of the Golden State’s measurement histrionics.

Looking past the shenanigans, a huge question continues to center on the long-term prospects for educational equity and excellence in an era when support for state assessments is waning among key constituencies. There has been an enormous amount of table pounding about standardized tests. Love them or hate them, even the most ardent skeptics of testing have inadvertently used this data to support their arguments. It’s one thing to rebuke California’s elected leaders for their ham-fisted failure to hide the ball on testing to avoid embarrassment, but what sort of funny business will they come up with when there’s no longer any ball to hide?

Do today’s conservatives have an education-reform agenda worth paying attention to? Anything coherent? Anything beyond school choice and lots of it? Anything other than “fie on CRT and let’s not say gay, at least not in grade school.”

Two efforts to answer those questions have popped up on my screen and desk in the past ten days. Neither quite does the job.

The first is only marginally constructive. It’s House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy’s new “Commitment to America” manifesto, carefully timed to land before the mid-term elections, meant to outline a roadmap that a post-election GOP majority in the House would follow, and spanning a swath of policy assertions under four familiar headings—safety, freedom, prosperity, and government accountability.

The “future built on freedom” heading incorporates education, as well as health and “big tech,” but as many commentators have noted, it’s mighty thin on specifics. Its “plan to put student futures first” rests on four pillars: “Advance the Parents’ Bill of Rights; Recover lost learning from school closures; Expand parental choice so more than a million more students can receive the education their parents know is best; [and] Defend fairness by ensuring that only women can compete in women’s sports.” But only the first of those has any detail at all, namely five broad categories in which parents should have “rights.” All are reasonable as far as they go, but they’re mighty nebulous. What, exactly, is safeguarding “parents’ right to be heard?”

In sum, there’s nothing I find objectionable in the education portion of the manifesto, but nothing concrete, either, certainly nothing actionable. It boils down to a set of convictions.

Full stop.

Now let’s go to what might be called the opposite problem, the far-more-constructive 156-page volume newly published by my friends at the American Enterprise Institute titled Sketching a New Conservative Education Agenda.

Here the problem—if that’s what it is—is the efflorescence of ideas, sometimes nebulous, often concrete, covering a staggering array of issues and topics—and periodically colliding with each other. These take the form of forty shortish (two to three pages each) proposals from individual (and pairs of) members of AEI’s loose-knit “conservative education reform network.”

The volume most definitely demonstrates, as editors Max Eden and Hayley Sanon write in their conclusion, that conservatives suffer from no shortage of ideas when it comes to education—in this case mainly K–12, but with college issues (such as free speech) also represented. I’ve got a piece in there myself (about civics), as do Mike Petrilli and several others with current or previous Fordham connections.

It’s a grand buffet, actually, including both familiar ideas (easing teacher certification) and a host of novel ones, a few of them (e.g., “public-private microschooling” and “hybrid homeschooling”) arising from the ashes of Covid-induced school shutdowns.

The buffet table is loosely organized into three sections, dubbed “educational innovations,” “civic and philanthropic leadership,” and “policy ideas,” and so long as you’re not looking for a prix fixe meal with a chef-determined menu, you can graze happily here, filling your plate with interesting ideas, some almost mainstream, others downright exotic.

The collection as a whole indeed attests (as Rick Hess writes in its introduction) to “AEI’s fierce commitment to the competition of ideas,” and it most definitely displays the creativity and fertility of the right half of the ed-wonk world.

Sometime, however, we would surely benefit from an updated and coherent ed-reform platform that conservatives might gather on. It can’t be as ephemeral as what Kevin McCarthy produced the other day. But neither, in the end, can it be forty separate ideas, however fine many of them are.

SOURCES: “Commitment to America,” by Kevin McCarthy, September 2022; and “Sketching a New Conservative Education Agenda,” edited by Max Eden and Hayley Sanon, American Enterprise Institute, September 2022.

For years, millions of U.S. students have taken the NWEA MAP Growth assessment. Data from these computer-adaptive assessments—which cover math, reading, language usage, and science—can help teachers determine which students need remediation or other supports and in which topic areas. This has been particularly important in the wake of Covid education disruptions beginning in spring 2020, which sent achievement levels plummeting; the need for supports to remediate that epic learning loss continues today. A new analysis, conducted by the organizations involved in its implementation, looks at an ambitious effort to boost MAP achievement.

Starting in 2018, NWEA teamed up with online education provider Khan Academy to develop a tool to help increase student achievement on MAP Growth’s mathematics assessments. Called MAP Accelerator, it uses previous achievement data to create supplemental content customized for each student. It is geared toward helping students build skills up to mastery level using a combination of video instruction and intensive practice lessons with detailed performance feedback, gradually moving students on to higher and harder content.

MAP Accelerator was rolled out to NWEA-participating schools in fall 2020, coincidentally just when evidence of Covid-related learning loss was beginning to surface. Ninety-nine districts participated. Analysts reviewed data from more than 181,000 students in grades three through eight who utilized the tool in 2020–21. There was a roughly even split between males and females; 34 percent were White, 12 percent were Black, 5 percent were Asian, and a noteworthy 35 percent were Hispanic. The authors make clear that this is not a nationally-representative sample and wasn’t intended to be, as the MAP Accelerator is marketed as a support for traditionally-underserved students. Fifty-two percent of students in the study sample attended schools where the majority of students are eligible for free or reduced-price lunch.

The analysts use a quasi-experimental, pre-test post-test design. Random assignment was not possible, so analysts instead broke students into four groups: no usage, less than fifteen minutes of usage per week, fifteen to thirty minutes of usage per week, and more than thirty minutes of usage per week. They utilize “judicious” statistical controls to help mitigate confounding variables and look at outcomes of other non-math MAP Growth assessments to attempt to identify and control for selection bias.

Only 5 percent of students used MAP Accelerator at the recommended dosage of thirty or more minutes per week. Most students (45 percent) fell into the less than fifteen minutes per week category. A whopping 41 percent did not use the tool at all. Students in the highest-usage group spent, on average, about three twenty-minute sessions per week over twenty-four weeks. While all groups showed growth in test scores from fall 2020 to spring 2021 (based on whatever their pandemic-impacted starting point was), the highest-usage group registered growth that was 0.26 standard deviations higher on average than similar students who used the platform for less than fifteen minutes per week. This general trend was consistently observed regardless of student race and ethnicity, gender, and school eligibility for free or reduced-price lunch.

While there was little evidence of self-selection bias, some evidence of other confounding variables was detected. Adjusting for these pointed to a large and statistically significant boost in math achievement based directly on the amount of accelerator usage (e.g., practice on geometry led directly to an increase in achievement on the geometry assessment). Impacts were significantly lower for students hailing from districts with greater than 20 percent English language learners. The analysts note that findings for poverty level and English learner status were at the school level rather than at the student level, rendering them less accurate.

We must be careful not to read more into these data than is here. First and foremost, this is not a randomized control trial. But equally important, would even the non-causal outcomes observed have looked the same in a normal school year? All of the students involved had been impacted by the pivot to remote learning in spring 2020, and most had seen their math achievement plummet as a result. We have no data on which students in this study had returned to in-person learning by the fall or spring, nor which students had access to broadband internet and connected devices.

All we can safely conclude is that concentrated practice with the MAP Accelerator appeared to increase achievement on MAP math assessments beyond what would have been expected without their use. But this is good enough news for now. Heaven knows we’re very clear about the problem; we need more data on possible solutions, and this one looks very promising so far.

SOURCE: Kodi Weatherholtz, Phillip Grimaldi, and Kelli Millwood Hill, “Use of MAP Accelerator associated with better-than-projected gains in MAP Growth scores,” Khan Academy and NWEA (August 2022).

On this week’s Education Gadfly Show podcast, Mike Petrilli and David Griffith are joined by Stéphane Lavertu and Long Tran, both professors at the John Glenn College of Public Affairs at the Ohio State University and the authors of Fordham’s new report, For-Profit Charter ­­Schools: An evaluation of their spending and outcomes. They discuss findings from their new study and broader issues of so-called “for-profit” charter schools. Then, on the Research Minute, Amber­­­ Northern reviews an ambitious study that examines closure and restructuring rates in district, charter, and private schools nationwide.

Recommended content:

• Fordham’s new study: Stéphane Lavertu and Long Tran, “ For-Profit Charter Schools: An evaluation of their spending and outcomes,” Thomas B. Fordham Institute (September 2022).
• The study that Amber reviewed on the Research Minute: Douglas N. Harris and Valentina Martinez-Pabon, “Extreme Measures: A National Descriptive Analysis of Closure and Restructuring of Traditional Public, Charter, and Private Schools,” Education Finance and Policy (2022).

Feedback Welcome!

Have ideas on our podcast? Send them to our podcast producers Nathaniel Grossman and Lilly Sibel at [email protected] and [email protected]

Cheers

• Adding work requirements to federal aid programs helped cut child poverty by 59 percent since 1993. —American Enterprise Institute
• Cheverus High Schools becomes the first religious school to participate in Maine’s tuition assistance program after the Supreme Court’s decision in Carson v. Makin earlier this year. —Washington Post
• Louisiana State Superintendent of Education Cade Brumley proposes that summer school be mandatory for all K–4 students who are not yet reading at grade level. —NOLA.com
• The universal expansion of the Arizona Empowerment Scholarship Account program makes the state a nationwide leader in school choice, but opponents threaten to roll back recent victories. —Christian Science Monitor

Jeers

• A New York Times columnist paints an overly-rosy picture of learning loss in America. —David Wallace-Wells
• A college tuition assistance program in Kalamazoo, Michigan, is one of many social interventions that show positive effects for girls but not for boys. —National Affairs

• Refugees from Ukraine are enrolling in Polish schools, where “schools and citizens are stretching resources to help them adjust.” —Wall Street Journal
• A new study suggests that students taught by Black and White graduates of historically Black colleges and universities achieve higher scores in math. —The Hechinger Report
• “K-12 issues and candidates shaping the midterms.” —Education Week