The Education Gadfly Weekly

Almost exactly a year ago I wrote a piece in this space arguing that education reformers had “overplayed our hand, overstated our expertise, and outspent our moral authority by a considerable margin” as the movement morphed from idealism to policymaking over the past two decades. The way to get back on track, I suggested, is to refocus ed reform’s considerable energies on improving classroom practice, rather than continue to make the blithe assumption that schools and districts need only to be properly incentivized or kicked in the britches in order to do right by kids.

So it’s gratifying to see my colleague Mike Petrilli take this idea and run with it in a series of blog posts heralding the “Golden Age of Educational Practice.” The encouraging notes he’s received from state and district-level officials suggests this is a rich vein of ore to be mined. But I’d like to suggest tapping the brakes before rushing headlong into Ed Reform 2.0, to ensure we don’t make the same mistakes that have dulled ed reform’s impact and undermined its credibility—particularly among frontline teachers and administrators, who are invariably tasked with bringing our grand plans to fruition in classrooms.

I obviously agree with Mike that evidence based practices could make a significant difference in improving student outcomes. But there’s a danger that lurks in the hearts of accountability hawks that is not content with merely identifying effective practices, but wants to mandate them.

I was going to suggest trying "educational malpractice" laws--teach little kids how to read using evidence based practices OR GET SUED--but @rpondiscio poo-pooed the idea...

— Michael Petrilli (@MichaelPetrilli) January 10, 2019

I didn’t “poo-poo” this malpractice scheme when Mike raised it in an early draft of one of his recent essays. I begged him to drop it. Bluntly, it doubles down on the worst ed reform impulse, shifting from "Schools and teachers know what to do. If they fail, shut ‘em down" (c. 2002), to "It's their job to figure out what to do. If they don't we'll sue ‘em!” (c. 2019) Mike backed off this idea briefly, then suggested instead that we sue deans of ed schools if they fail to teach evidence-based practices. To an accountability hammer, everything is a nail.

Shifting ed reform’s focus to improving practice is an acknowledgment that underperformance is not a failure of will, but a lack of capacity. It’s a talent-development and human capital-strategy, not an accountability play. Forcing changes in behavior, whether through lawmaking or lawsuit, may win compliance, but it doesn’t advance understanding and sophistication. Teachers need to understand the “why” behind evidence based practice to implement it well and effectively. To that end, let me suggest a few ideas that might shape how to think about classroom practice and education research, and a role for policymakers—not a leading role, but a supporting one. Taken together these might not bring about Mike’s devoutly wished, “Golden Age of Educational Practice.” But they might keep it from blowing up on the launch pad.

1. Ask the right questions

Education research lacks the precision to dictate classroom practice. “What works?” is the wrong question. “The right question is ‘Under what conditions does this work?’” observes Dylan Wiliam. He also notes that education research suffers from “physics envy”—a wish common among social scientists (and policymakers) for the mathematical precision and certainty of “hard science.” Dan Willingham points out an even more critical difference: Physics and other hard sciences “strive to describe the world as it is, and so strive to be value-neutral,” he notes. “Education is an applied science; it is in the business of changing the world, making it more like it ought to be. As such, education is inevitably saturated with values.”

2. Understand and accept trade-offs

A good example the values-laden nature of education research and its application is the new RAND study that found “restorative justice” lowered suspension rates and closed racial disparities in suspension rates, while improving teachers’ perception of school their schools’ environments. However it lowered students’ perception of classroom management and their peers respect for one another. It also had significant downside for test scores, particularly for black students. Let’s assume subsequent studies replicate these findings (never a certainty—another confounding problem for policymakers). So does it “work?” If you’re a devout accountability hawk for whom many things are important, but none more than test scores, you’re likely to say “No.” Parents’ views matter too; they might not support a practice that makes their kids feel less safe in school. But others may argue vehemently that there is no greater priority that breaking the “school-to-prison pipeline” by reducing suspensions and keeping kids persisting in school. A debate about trade-offs and opportunity costs is very different than arguing whether something “works.” Those discussions will and should vary greatly depending on local context. As Willingham notes, the value of quality research is its predictive power. It tells you what’s likely to happen if you pull a lever. It’s silent on whether it’s a good idea, or if the trade-offs are worth it.

3. Kill education myths

A modest start to improving instructional sophistication is identifying common myths about education and stopping them. A good example of this is “learning styles,” the theory that students have an optimal way of taking in new information, and that instruction is most effective when teachers know each student’s learning style and adapt their instruction to account for it. The evidence base for learning styles isn’t just thin, it’s been as thoroughly debunked as phrenology and astrology. Yet according to some studies, over 90 percent of teachers still believe it. Like a slasher-movie villain, science keeps killing learning styles, but it won’t stay dead. Other common “neuromyths” that need to go: the idea that we use only 10 percent of our brains, and that children tend to be either left-brained (rational) or right-brained (creative). Indulging pseudoscience is not a good look for a field that wants to be taken seriously as a profession.

4. Learn the lessons of cognitive science

Some myths are benign, others have upended schooling entirely. The unquestioned belief in “twenty-first-century skills” holds that it’s more important for kids to learn, practice, and master critical thinking, problem solving, cooperation, and creativity than to study any particular body of knowledge. But cognitive science tells us those cognitive “skills” are not directly teachable or transferable like, say, riding a bike. They are largely “domain specific.” To think critically about topics in science or history, for example, requires knowing a lot about those topics. You can’t train kids to be all-purpose critical thinkers and polymath problem solvers. The same is true of reading comprehension skills and strategies. “Good readers can find the main idea of a text when they know how to decode the words on the page in front of them, and when they have the content knowledge to understand the text they are reading,” notes an exceptional new paper written by David Steiner of Johns Hopkins Institute for Education Policy, and Learning First’s Jacqueline Magee. If teachers don’t understand this—if teacher prep programs don’t emphasize—the inevitable result is “well-meaning but ultimately poor practice…wasting countless hours of instructional time.”

5. Stop demanding bad practice through policy

If there’s a policy play here, it’s not “identify best practices and make them mandatory.” It’s stop functionally demanding bad practice through poorly conceived testing and accountability measures. The best example is reading tests. Smart accountability policy should incentivize the steady, patient investment in content knowledge across the curriculum. That’s where growth in language proficiency and vocabulary come from. But the expectation that schools should put points on the board immediately functionally demands that teachers turn reading instruction into dull and tedious skills-and-strategies sessions in finding the main idea and making inferences. “Language comprehension is a slow-growing plant. Even with a coherent curriculum, the buildup of knowledge and vocabulary is a gradual, multiyear process that occurs at an almost imperceptible rate,” E.D. Hirsch, Jr. has observed. “The results show up later.” Almost nothing in the test-driven education policy we’ve enshrined over the last thirty years accounts for this.

The last point might be the most important, at least for policymakers and others in a position of authority over schools. Accountability isn’t going away, nor should it in a system that runs on public funds. But it won’t do for pundits and policymakers to natter on about evidence-based practice while ignoring the instructional signals our policies send to teachers. Let’s fix that first.

If this era is to become a Golden Age of Educational Practice, we need successful, evidence-based practices—to the extent that they actually exist—to spread far and wide. Many ideas for how to get educators to use such practices are inherently top-down or “supply side” approaches—build tools or products or school models on top of the evidence base, and then market them to schools. Focus a lot on the fidelity of implementation, which also implies engineering solutions that can be implemented in the real world, with real teachers, without making the instructor’s job even harder than today. I will explore all of that in future posts.

But there’s another take on the challenge, one that’s bottom-up and focused on the “demand side.” It’s intuitively appealing, as it builds teacher buy-in from the get-go: It’s about developing a “culture of improvement” in a school or school system.

The basic notion is simple, if tough to actuate: Rather than start with answers—like a new curriculum, or assessment system, or digital learning program—begin with questions. Develop systems and processes that encourage educators to ask: How can we get better at our craft? How can we solve a specific problem that we are seeing in our own classrooms? And how might we team up with similar schools or systems as we embark upon this quest?

This is the approach popularized by Tony Bryk and his colleagues at the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching. His notion of School Improvement Networks has been embraced by districts far and wide, and is now at the center of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation’s education strategy. It’s got real momentum.

I encourage you to read up on this approach and decide whether you think it holds promise. It seems clear to me that, in schools and systems with a drive to get better, the Bryk model offers a great structure and process for improvement. Because it has educator engagement at its core, it can overcome the buy-in challenge that is the death of so many other reform efforts. And it can lead to local solutions that make sense for a given school’s context, solutions that deal with the inherent nuance and complexity of instructional practices and the evidence that might inform them.

But can it succeed at helping our schools improve, at a national scale, and in a measurable way? I’d love to be proven wrong, but I have three specific concerns.

The first is perhaps easiest to solve: When educators go looking for solutions, sometimes they end up off track. The best example is around early reading. The Carnegie folks often point to the Literacy Collaborative as a fine model of a school improvement network. And yet, as Core Knowledge advocate Lisa Hansel pointed out in a book review several years ago, that Collaborative has embraced practices that early-reading researchers view with deep suspicion, like the use of “leveled texts.” As Hansel cautioned, “you don’t know what you don’t know.” At the least, we need to figure out how to better marry the “bottom up” zeal of “improvement science” with the top-down expertise of the larger research enterprise. Today there’s a disconnect.

The second and much tougher problem with the “culture of improvement” approach is that it assumes that there are lots of schools or systems out there with the drive to get better. We would all hope for that to be the case—that most superintendents and senior central office staff and principals and teachers wake up every day wondering if there’s something they could do to improve their practices, even a little but maybe a lot. But in my experience, that sort of drive is exceedingly rare, not because there’s something wrong with the people in our education system so much as because of the system itself. After 150 years, it’s big, bureaucratic, creaky, hopelessly fragmented, and risk-adverse. People who have spent time inside it have seen young whippersnappers come and go with all their new ideas for improvement and fresh solutions to old problems. Indeed many of those long-timers were once whippersnappers themselves! But they’ve seen The System, time and again, wear down the change agents, sap their energy, and snap their newfangled practices back to the tried and true.

This cycle breeds cynicism and defeatism, if not despair. It leads people to spend their time going through the motions and putting out fires. It does not provide hospitable ground for leaders willing to ask how their schools might get better at getting better.

Which brings us inexorably to the third problem: the political barriers to change within the system itself. Even with great leaders and administrators, even with a cadre of teachers fired up about finding answers to tough problems, even when better approaches can be identified, there remains the challenge of implementing change within a change-adverse system. Improvement networks can’t wish away collective bargaining agreements, or budget limitations, or the residue of district or state policies, or longstanding (and often cozy) relationships between certain vendors (of curriculum, technology, etc.) and district bureaucrats. Overcoming inertia is hard enough; slaying real vested interests is battle royal.

However, there one sizable sector of American K–12 education where I see promise in the “culture of improvement” approach: charter schools. Here we’ve watched a set of high-quality charter management organizations—like KIPP, Success Academy, Uncommon Schools, and IDEA—build a culture that is serious about continuous improvement. None of those networks has a school model today that is the same as it was ten years ago; they all continue to learn and tweak and evolve, even as they remain focused on their mission of helping students make the steep climb out of poverty and into the middle class. And we also have a crop of new charter schools, every year, with the opportunity and mandate to look around for best practices, to learn from the best of the best, to start with a fresh canvas and fill in the picture with answers to the questions that Bryk et al. (myself included) would like all schools to posit.

Charters have the operational autonomy to think fresh and implement new ideas, free from the usual constraints. And they have a strong incentive, thanks to real accountability, to get better results. They must perform or die.

Maybe I’m overly pessimistic about traditional districts; perhaps there are thousands out there that can use improvement networks to escape the gravitational forces that make change within their schools so difficult. By all means, readers, please tell me about more places that are already proving me wrong.

At the same time, however, I would urge the Tony Bryks and Melinda Gates’s and other boosters of “improvement science” to focus their efforts on the sector best positioned to take this bottom-up reform to scale: our nation’s charter schools, which continue to show a real commitment to getting better at getting better.

Fordham’s big 2018 study of high school grade inflation illuminated the prevalence and consequences of this practice, and should motivate policymakers to find ways to clean it up. One promising approach could take the form of accrediting organizations, which exist to ensure quality and academic integrity in our schools. As I’ve written before, just as accreditors are well-positioned to crack down on fraudulent practices in the online credit recovery space, they’re also well-suited to discipline schools that use grades to misrepresent what students know. Indeed, they have an obligation to do this, if only for the sake of their own credibility.

Education is a public trust and the public ought to be able to trust the credentials that our schools confer. Grade inflation erodes that trust by signaling to stakeholders—parents, universities, employers, etc.—that students have learned more than they actually have. Schools that have succumbed to this practice lack integrity and, thus, credibility, especially regarding the credentials they award, which are largely acquired by earning passing grades in a sufficient number of courses. If grades cannot be trusted, neither can diplomas.

In Georgia, my home state, in response to a big expose of school systems’ misuse of online credit recovery course to boost their graduation rates, the Georgia Department of Education said that “students who pass a course [are expected to be] proficient in the material.” A reasonable standard: credits represent proficiency! Yet in 2018—when just 39 percent of Georgia students were proficient in math according to the state’s own exams, and 46 percent in science—the high school graduation rate hit a record high of 82 percent.

For better or worse, the state has no legal obligation to require honesty from schools, nor does it have obvious means of monitoring this. Which creates the void that accreditors should fill. The very purpose of accreditation is ensuring that schools—the knowledge and skills they impart, the credentials they award—warrant public trust. Yet I can cite no examples in recent memory, at least in Georgia, where an accreditor has taken action in the case of schools that mislead the public via dishonest course grades, despite that practice being widespread and well-documented.

This must change, and AdvancED—which accredits over 1,000 public school systems worldwide and is the leading accrediting body in the U.S.—could lead the way. The organization’s standards are designed to, among other things, ensure “the establishment of a learning culture built on high expectations for learning.” Grade inflation undermines this principle, and two of the organization’s standards make this vivid:

Standard 2.5: “Educators implement a curriculum that is based on high expectations and prepares learners for their next levels.”

A school that allows students to routinely earn high grades for things like coming to school, participating in class, and finishing assignments—regardless of their actual level of achievement—does not have high expectations. Worse, low standards leave kids ill-prepared for the next level. Students who aren’t proficient in core subjects like math and English when they leave the K–12 system can be expected to struggle in college and beyond.

Georgia has a merit-based HOPE scholarship that provides up to four years of full tuition to residents who attend in-state colleges. Eligibility requires graduating from high school with a GPA of 3.0 or higher, and earning at least that average every year a grantee attends college. Between 2012 and 2016, however, while eligibility among entering college freshmen increased from 52 to 63 percent, over 20 percent dropped out in their first year, and less than 20 percent earned good enough grades to retain the scholarship for all four years.

In recent years, more than a quarter of students from Douglas County, Georgia (where I live), who graduated from high school and attended a public university still required remediation in math. This isn’t surprising considering the district’s 30 percent proficiency rate on state math exams, but it’s surely surprising to parents who for years saw A’s and B’s on their children’s report cards. (Last year, for example, 48 percent of all geometry grades were A’s or B’s, even though just 21 percent of students were proficient in the subject.)

Circumstances like this, which are scarcely unique to Douglas County or Georgia, clearly violate Standard 2.5. But there’s more.

Standard 2.10: “Learning progress is reliably assessed and consistently and clearly communicated.”

This standard signals the accreditor’s expectation of accuracy and honesty in the reporting of student learning to stakeholders. Standardized test scores may meet this standard, but surveys indicate that parents trust the judgment of their children’s teachers—in the form of grades—more than they do test scores. So when grades are inflated, they are anything but clear indicators of actual learning.

***

Accreditors have enormous power to correct behavior that undermines public trust. If they took their role seriously and threatened to suspend or publicly put on probation schools that consistently fail either of the two standards cited above, grade inflation would decrease. But they aren’t and it isn’t. That must change.

A 2017 report by Georgetown’s Center on Education and the Workforce found that 30 million “good jobs” nationwide were held by the “middle”—workers who have less than a bachelor’s degree but more than a high school diploma. More than half of states have responded to the demand for this emerging workforce by including a new accountability measure in their ESSA plans: industry credentials, which can include short- and long-term certificates, licensures, badges, and more. But with accountability expectations at stake (not to mention the funds that go with it!), how can we ensure states and schools are incentivizing students to only participate in high-value industry-based credentials?

In response to this question, Education Strategy Group, alongside the Council of Chief State School Officers and Advance CTE, assembled a Career Readiness Expert Workgroup, comprising researchers and state and industry leaders. They focused on, among other things, how states can inspire and support students’ attainment of high-value credentials, incentivize schools and districts to prioritize them, and recognize and emphasize their importance.

Identifying industry-recognized credentials as high value is not enough to ensure student participation, say the report’s authors. States must also eliminate barriers to attainment and establish pathways rewarding students for participation. Promising policies include waiving certain costs like exam fees, increasing access to testing sites, and as Florida does, requiring districts to inform parents and students the value earned (wages, upward mobility, etc.) from industry-recognized credentials. Rewards can include credit hours and accolades for completing career-and-technical-education courses. Tennessee, for instance, gives postsecondary credit for earning certain high-value industry credentials, and in Ohio career and technical education is an alternative path to a high school diploma.

The authors also recommend that states incentivize schools and districts to offer high-value credential opportunities through additional funds, public praise, or boosts on accountability measures. Kansas, for one, offers a fixed sum to schools for each student who graduates with an industry-recognized credential, and Florida does something similar, but bases the additional funding amount on how valuable it deems the credential. Kentucky matches Florida’s approach, but awards schools points on its accountability system instead of more money.

The report’s third recommendation is that states positively recognize the attainment of industry-recognized credentials. They can do this by establishing career and technical education as a formal and respected pathway to career readiness, and by publicly celebrating the earning of credentials, much as they do with diplomas. Virginia sets a good example by separately reporting this in school accountability reports.

Overall, the report is valuable guide for state governments who want to evaluate, identify, and promote high-value credentials. The many state-specific examples will be especially helpful. But policymakers should careful to tailor any reform to their states’ and districts’ unique circumstances.

SOURCE: “Credential Currency: How States Identify and Promote Credentials of Value,” Education Strategy Group (September 2018).

On this week’s podcast, Mike Magee, CEO of Chiefs for Change, and Nina Rees, President and CEO of the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools, join Mike Petrilli and David Griffith to discuss National School Choice Week and the many hopeful developments on the charter schools front nationwide. On the Research Minute, Amber Northern examines whether schools of choice (both traditional and charter) “skim” students they perceive to be easier to educate or avoid those perceived harder to educate.

Amber’s Research Minute

Peter Bergman and Isaac McFarlin, Jr., “Education for All? A Nationwide Audit Study of Schools of Choice,” National Bureau of Economic Research (December 2018).