The Education Gadfly Weekly

One important decision facing many voters on Election Day is whether to approve their school districts’ tax requests. These referenda represent a unique intersection between direct democracy and public finance; unlike most tax policies, which are set by legislatures, voters have, in large part, the opportunity to decide their own property-tax rates.

Some citizens will enter the voting booth well-informed about these tax issues, but for others, the question printed on the ballot might be all they know. Voters have busy lives and they may not always carefully follow their district’s finances and tax issues. This means that the ballot itself ought to clearly and fairly present the proposition to voters. In our home state of Ohio, State law prescribes certain standard ballot language, but districts have some discretion in how the proposition is written. County boards of elections and the Secretary of State approve the final language. How does the actual language read? Is it impartial? Can it be easily understood?

Let’s take a look at a couple high-profile ballot issues facing voters in November, using the Buckeye State as an example. First, here is the tax-issue posed to Cincinnati voters:

Shall a levy be imposed by the Cincinnati City School District, County of Hamilton, Ohio, for the purpose of PROVIDING FOR THE EMERGENCY REQUIREMENTS OF THE SCHOOL DISTRICT in the sum of $48,000,000 and a levy of taxes to be made outside of the ten-mill limitation estimated by the county auditor to average seven and ninety-three hundredths (7.93) mills for each one dollar of valuation, which amounts to seventy-nine and three-tenths cents ($0.793) for each one hundred dollars of valuation, for five (5) years, commencing in 2016, first due in calendar year 2017?

As with all property-tax issues, the most complicated terms is “mill”—the amount of the levy and equal to one thousandth of a dollar. None of us, however, go to the supermarket and buy 100 mills worth of groceries; and in the realm of taxes, we’re more accustomed to seeing them expressed as percentages—a 6 percent sales tax, for instance. Because millage rates are so rarely used in everyday life, a voter may find it hard to discern the size of the request. Is 7.93 mills a huge tax hike, or relatively affordable? Unless a voter has done her homework, she probably wouldn’t know. But voters shouldn’t be expected to be tax experts or follow the news to understand the impact on their personal finances. Simpler, less technical language would help the average voter better understand the question. Perhaps the tax could be stated also as percentages or in more realistic dollar terms—for instance, a proposed levy would increase taxes by $100 for a property with a taxable value of $100,000.

Also noticeable in this tax request is the “emergency” language—it is hard to miss when printed in capital letters. While the district is not in fiscal emergency, it is seeking an emergency levy nevertheless. Ohio law permits this type of levy when districts are projecting a financial deficit in future years. But the prominent ballot language could impact the electoral outcome, especially if marginal or undecided voters tip the scales. Perhaps the district is indeed in financial straits, but shouldn’t that case be made independent of the ballot itself? Opponents might argue that district could address the deficit in other ways, such as by renegotiating unaffordable teacher union contracts. Referenda should be presented as neutrally as possible, because we know from surveys that the wording of questions can alter the results. Though allowed, the use of the word “emergency,” which comes with a powerful connotation, is likely to influence voters.

Now let’s turn to the 274-word question facing Columbus voters.

Shall the Columbus City School District be authorized to do the following: 1. Issue bonds for the purpose of improving the safety and security of existing buildings including needed repairs and/or replacement of roofing, plumbing, fire alarms, electrical systems, HVAC, and lighting; equipping classrooms with upgraded technology; acquiring school buses and other vehicles; and other improvements in the principal amount of $125,000,000, to be repaid annually over a maximum period of 30 years, and levy a property tax outside the ten-mill limitation, estimated by the county auditor to average over the bond repayment period 0.84 mill for each one dollar of tax valuation, which amounts to $0.084 for each one hundred dollars of tax valuation, to pay the annual debt charges on the bonds, and to pay debt charges on any notes issued in anticipation of those bonds? 2. Levy an additional property tax to provide funds for the acquisition, construction, enlargement, renovation, and financing of permanent improvements to implement ongoing maintenance, repair and replacement at a rate not exceeding 0.5 mill for each one dollar of tax valuation, which amounts to $0.05 for each one hundred dollars of tax valuation, for a continuing period of time? 3. Levy an additional property tax to pay current operating expenses (including expanding Pre-Kindergarten education; improving the social, emotional, and physical safety of students; expanding career exploration opportunities; reducing class sizes; providing increased support to students with exceptional needs; and enhancing reading and mathematics instruction) at a rate not exceeding 5.58 mills for each one dollar of tax valuation, which amounts to $0.558 for each one hundred dollars of tax valuation, for a continuing period of time?

I won’t repeat the point about millage, but let me make three additional observations. First and most obviously, this is impenetrable language and a complicated request: The district is seeking approval for a tax package that includes not only debt financing but also funding for capital improvements and day-to-day operations. This puts a daunting burden on voters who must either gather the requisite information beforehand, or spend serious time in the booth reading and understanding it.

Second, consider how different Columbus’s tax request is compared to Cincinnati’s. Columbus is seeking a fixed rate levy at a maximum 0.5 mills for permanent improvements and 5.58 mills for operations. In contrast, Cincinnati is seeking a fixed sum levy generating $48 million per year, where the tax rate could vary (note the “estimated” rate). Also there is no set time in which Columbus’s tax would expire, while Cincinnati’s would sunset after five years. This illustrates how varied Ohio’s different property-tax types are, adding more complexity to what voters must know in order to make an informed decision. Other states have similarly complicated property tax codes which can include different tax treatments depending on the type of property, various levy types, and so forth.

Third, note how the 5.58 mill request lists several specific purposes of the levy, such as expanded pre-K, reduced class sizes, and other initiatives. Other district tax requests don’t include such specific lists and could be thought of as more neutral. Does enumerating a handful of likable programs improve the chances of passage? It’s hard to know, of course, but they do seem to frame the tax in a more favorable light.

One could argue that voters are responsible for being educated before they enter the booth, and the question itself doesn’t matter. To be fair, local media usually cover school tax issues—albeit much less than top-of-the-ticket races—and I suspect a fair number of voters come modestly well-informed. But we also know that some voters might not be quite as well prepared. That means the ballot words matter and, if the examples of Cincinnati and Columbus are any indication, the language for property tax referenda could be made more understandable and fair.

I am not suggesting that direct democracy is an inappropriate way of setting tax policy. Other taxing arrangements, of course, have their own set of challenges. But if voters are to be tasked with setting property tax rates, the referenda should be presented as clear, simple, and unbiased propositions. As economist John Cochrane has argued, one imperative of modern governing is to “bring a reasonable simplicity to our public life.” Reasonable simplicity in tax referenda language seems to be warranted.

It’s now a fairly well established fact that under No Child Left Behind, and to some extent during the years leading up to it, instructional time spent on reading in schools grew—at the expense of social studies and science (and probably the arts).

There was a certain logic at work. In most states, accountability was based mainly on reading and math tests—not science, history or geography tests. And the reading standards on which the tests were based were typically free of subject-matter content—focusing instead on such generic reading “skills” as syntax, finding the main idea, and identifying author’s point of view. From the perspective of teachers and administrators, focusing precious instructional time on these generic reading comprehension skills rather than the subject matter would seem to make sense.

Unfortunately, as anyone who is familiar with E.D. Hirsch’s work knows, this approach is counterproductive because reading comprehension depends hugely on the background knowledge that the reader brings to the text. Knowledge builds vocabulary, and when the reader doesn’t understand the words in a text, comprehension suffers. More broadly, background knowledge lets us tap into our existing knowledge to make sense of the words we read. To use an example often used by Hirsch: Imagine a Brit, with full fluency in English but no familiarity with baseball, trying to understand this simple sentence, Jones sacrificed and knocked in a run. Or, for a more school-y example, consider this: A young reader sounding out the word Ant-arc-ti-ca will have a light bulb go on if she has learned about that icy planet; another reader may be able to sound it out but won’t have a clue what it is if she hasn’t learned anything about geography or science. It will be a whole lot easier for the first child to answer questions about the passage, whatever they might be, regardless of how much practice she’s had “finding the main idea” and such.

This is why cognitive scientist Daniel Willingham has said that “reading comprehension are really knowledge tests in disguise.” Many observers have speculated that the reason reading scores haven’t risen in the last decade the way math scores have is because schools haven’t focused on building the knowledge that underlies reading comprehension.

But now we have Common Core State Standards in English language arts—and tests based on them—that call for students to be educated in a way that develops their “base of knowledge across a wide range of subject matter.” This admonition, though, is found in the narrative that backs up the standards, not in the more widely distributed and better known “anchor standards.”

I wondered: Do the reading tests based on the new standards—specifically the Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers (PARCC) and Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortium (SBAC) assessments—reflect and reward Common Core’s call to build broad knowledge? Or do they track the more generic anchor standards? What type of academic content is embedded in these assessments? If elementary teachers knew what was on these tests, would they be encouraged to devote lots more time to science, history-social studies, and the arts?

I reviewed for the Knowledge Matters Campaign the test items that have been publicly released by these two assessments. PARCC was used in eleven states (including D.C.) in 2015; SBAC in seventeen. Both regard their released items as good reflections of the actual tests taken by students in 2015. I thoroughly reviewed the released third-grade items, which arguably would be the least knowledge-dependent and most skills-heavy of all the tests. I focused on the assessment items that were based on informational reading or listening passages, and I excluded freestanding questions specifically aimed at measuring other aspects of language development such as writing, language conventions, and spelling. I also conducted a more cursory review of the fifth- and eighth-grade tests to see if my findings about third grade held up in the later grades. (For a more comprehensive review, see Fordham’s study, Evaluating the Content and Quality of Next Generation Assessments.)

I found that the reading passages of both PARCC’s and SBAC’s third-grade assessments are content-rich and contain challenging vocabulary. Schools that want to boost test scores would be wise to beef up instruction in content knowledge in the early grades—which thankfully would be good for kids, too.

The knowledge and vocabulary that are embedded in these passages ranges across basic astronomy; human and physical geography; cultural adaptation; units of measurement; space travel; biological, physical, and evolutionary processes; manufacturing processes such as logging and papermaking; and a heavy dose of animal characteristics and habitats.

In each of the main reading or listening passages, the vocabulary that I consider challenging totaled 5 to 18 percent of all the words in the passage, including such words as rodent, species, markings, nocturnal, Asia, tassels, gorge, tundra, survival, intestine, adapted, torpid, teeming, caribou, dramatically, heritage, vanished, formula, chemicals, bleached, graphite, slates, crystallizes, chunky, space station, spacecraft, orbits, planets, space, and Antarctica.

A short review of the released items from the fifth-grade tests turns up passages best comprehended by students who have been exposed to additional ideas, topics, and facts, including: the experience of immigration and the role of lighthouses in seagoing cultures (in two literary passages); the effect of humans on the environment and sea animals; crickets and the physiological process that promotes chirping; Renaissance Italy and the Leaning Tower of Pisa; evolution and animal behavior; and more. In eighth grade, released passages draw on: knowledge of the invention process; how the telegraph and phonograph work; how sound waves function; the basics of business and commerce (patents, ventures, and entrepreneurs); the meaning of radicalism; Ansel Adams and the art of photography; and familiarity with terms like finance minister, Federal Reserve Bank, inflation, taxes, and more. The range of topics and the depth with which they’re addressed ratchet up with each grade.

Note that what I’ve listed is the knowledge that is embedded in assessment items that have been publicly released. We don’t know the topics that are addressed in the non-released test items—for any grade. Nor do we know the universe of topics from which these items were chosen or from which future ones will be chosen. But the released items are consistent with the kinds of topics that are set forth in the best state science and social studies standards—and, happily, but, to a lesser extent, arts standards—for the items’ respective grades. We can take a leap and reasonably surmise that the full range of topics and domains that are embedded in these assessments is much broader than what is found in these released items and that it is also consistent with these standards.

Preparing students to score well on these tests requires systematically and deliberately exposing them to and instructing them in a rich, broad curriculum of science, history, geography, and the arts, starting at the earliest grades and continuing through every grade.

Happily, this is the same kind of curriculum that will prepare them well for their middle and high school classes in social studies and science. If the world of elementary schools better understood that these assessments are substantially—even primarily—tests of knowledge, not just skills, they would realize that the best test prep for all our students is engaging instruction based on a rich, well-rounded curriculum, starting as early as possible, preferably even before Kindergarten.

Simply put, a good education is the best prep for these tests.

Ruth Wattenberg is a writer, researcher, and policy analyst. Formerly the editor of American Educator and director of educational issues for the American Federation of Teachers, she is currently a member of the DC State Board of Education. This blog entry is based on her study for the Knowledge Matters Campaign, Inside the Common Core Reading Tests: Why the Best Prep is a Knowledge-Rich Curriculum.

Last week, the U.S. Department of Education released the results of its most recent national science test for fourth, eighth, and twelfth graders—the 2015 National Assessment of Education Progress (NAEP). There’s a bit of good news, in that average scores are up slightly in the fourth and eighth grades and race-based achievement gaps narrowed slightly since 2009.

This was what Peggy Carr, acting commissioner of the agency responsible for assessment, seized on, as reported by the Washington Post. “This is exactly what we like to see,” she proclaimed, “all students improving but students at the bottom of the distribution making faster gains.”

Her statement erred in at least two important ways. First, it’s simply not true that all students improved. Twelfth grade was, regrettably, flat. And more importantly, our development of high achieving students might be, too.

It’s true that in fourth and eighth grade, if you define “high achievers” as those who score in the top ten percent, then the scores of such students have risen, including those of low-income and minority students. But we should be wary of such a definition. Recall that NAEP also reports student and state performance against three “achievement levels,” dubbed Basic, Proficient, and Advanced. This is, in part, because set score-cutoffs are meant to reflect real-life aptitudes. Proficient is defined as “solid academic performance for each grade assessed.” Advanced indicates “superior performance.” We should thus resist calling scores below that level “high-achieving,” even they’re in a given subgroup’s top decile.

Viewed in this more objective manner, the news isn’t very good. In science in 2015, the proportion of students scoring at or above the Advanced level was flat across the board—and woefully small (or negligible) for poor and minority pupils. No more than 2 percent of American students were Advanced in science in any of NAEP’s three grade levels—rates that have all failed to rise since the 2009 test administration. Worse, in all three grades, the percentage of low-income, Black, or Hispanic students who score at the Advanced level rounds to zero. In other words, according to this rigorous, highly regarded, and nationally representative science assessment, disadvantaged pupils attending American schools have virtually no chance of being high-achieving science students.

A further problem with Dr. Carr’s sentiments is her apparent contentment that low achievers are rising more than others. It’s great that they’re rising. But what about everyone else? I understand the impulse to show particular concern for our lowest-achieving students. But are we so sure that we’d rather have big gains at the bottom rather than big gains at the middle or at the top? Or across the board? Carr seems to be echoing the oft-said but always-misguided view that higher-achieving students require less attention because they’ll be fine no matter what. Such attitudes lead to classes geared to universal but modest proficiency, taught by instructors who are admonished to raise the floor but under no pressure to lift the ceiling. In such environments, advanced students are bound to languish. Yet they, too, deserve an education that develops their potential and maximizes their attainments.

The country also needs these children to be highly educated in order to ensure its long-term competitiveness, security, and innovation. Our highest achievers are young people who hold perhaps the greatest promise for making major advances in science, technology, medicine, the humanities, and much more. Our nation’s economic vitality and growth depend heavily on the quality and productivity of our human capital and its capacity for innovation.

Moreover, such neglect is inequitable. The students most harmed are disadvantaged high achievers—boys and girls who face such challenges as disability, poverty, ill-educated parents, non-English speaking homes, and tough neighborhoods. They depend far more than upper-middle-class students on the public education system to do right by them. So if they don’t receive the attention that they—like all children—deserve, many will fall by the wayside, destined by circumstances beyond their control never to realize their full potential.

The NAEP science results clearly show—yet again—that U.S. schools aren’t doing right by our high-achieving students, and that they’re failing miserably to bring disadvantaged children to the level of high achievers. Recall, once more, that zero percent reached the test’s top achievement level. If this is “exactly what the department of education likes to see,” then we have a serious problem.

One must also wonder about Dr. Carr’s expectations. In the same interview with the Washington Post, when asked how the U.S. compares to other countries on international tests such as PISA and TIMSS, she replied that “we’re not that bad at science.” Huh? PISA’s science exam is given to 15-year-olds, and TIMSS administers science tests to fourth and eighth graders. On only one of those three measures did the U.S. perform in the top five, compared to other affluent countries. The other two gauges showed America in the middle of the pack, at best.

I don’t discount the gains our schools have made for some kids. But we can recognize and applaud those accomplishments without framing the results as universally positive. Our job is to educate all our students to the max. It’s the right thing to do for them. And it’s the right approach for America’s future. The new NAEP results plainly show that today we’re failing at that mission.  

On this week’s podcast, Mike Petrilli, Alyssa Schwenk, and Brandon Wright discuss the pitfalls of deciding education policy issues with ballot measures. On the Research Minute, Amber Northern discusses the surprising parity between the effectiveness of teachers of low- and high-income students.

Amber's Research Minute

Eric Isenberg et al., “Do Low-Income Students Have Equal Access to Effective Teachers? Evidence from 26 Districts,” Institute of Education Sciences, U.S. Department of Education (October 2016).

Education leaders and policymakers should be just as concerned about what happens to young people after they exit their schools, I would argue, as they are about what happens to these students before they cross the dais on graduation day. Do they have the momentum, the skills, the confidence, and the know-how to stride right into success in postsecondary education or a decently paying job? Are they ready to be engaged citizens in our democracy and good parents? Such leaders should say to themselves: I know I don’t have direct leverage after these kids graduate, but am I doing everything I can during the four or eight or twelve years when I do have some influence to prepare them for the leap into adulthood and—let us hope—the middle class?

If that makes sense to you—if you believe in “beginning with the end in mind”—then Coming of Age in the Other America should be at the top of your back-to-school reading list. To be clear, this is not an education book. Schools are treated superficially, mentioned only in passing; education reform is completely invisible. But educators and education policy wonks should read it nonetheless, because it provides one of the most compelling depictions you’ll ever find of poor teenagers struggling (often heroically) to make the transition from high school to adulthood.

The book is set in Baltimore, a city that already looms large in the public imagination as a model of postindustrial urban decay. The authors, accomplished sociologists all, place the book in this context, arguing that the pervasive narrative that Baltimore’s youth are just a bunch of “thugs” is hugely inaccurate as well as unfair. The young people featured in their pages “scorned the drug dealers and other hustlers who dominated the public space of their neighborhood.”

These youth do, however, face incredible odds—the “long shadow” of poverty that makes upward mobility such a rare occurrence in America today. We’ve all seen the statistics; this book adds names and faces to common facts and figures.

Coming of Age in the Other America is the result of a decade of fieldwork with 150 African American youth in some of the most disadvantaged parts of Baltimore. The study’s subjects were born in the late eighties and early nineties (meaning they’re in their mid to late twenties today). They were selected because their parents had volunteered for the Moving to Opportunity (MTO) program, an initiative to enable low-income families to use housing vouchers to escape high-poverty neighborhoods and move to mixed-income ones instead (see “New Kids on the Block” and “All Over the Map,” Fall 2007). Not every young person’s family won a housing voucher, but almost all of them eventually moved to mixed-income neighborhoods regardless, thanks to the destruction of several large housing projects at the same time.

The authors interviewed all 150 individuals for several hours each and then selected twenty subjects (who “represented the range of outcomes—positive and negative—that we had observed”) to get to know even better. The authors also had decade-old interview data from these kids’ parents, which provided even more context for their lives.

There’s good news in the book, mostly that these young people are doing markedly better than their parents in terms of reaching a certain level of educational attainment (most graduated from high school), enrolling in postsecondary education, and finding employment. (These findings track with evidence from Raj Chetty and colleagues that MTO children whose families moved to a lower-poverty neighborhood when they were young completed more schooling and earned more as young adults.) In the authors’ words, they are aspiring to “mainstream goals.” The bad news is that the vast majority still failed to complete college or find steady work with a living wage. These trends—both positive and negative—largely track with the national picture for disadvantaged minority youth.

The reasons for their struggle are what should captivate K-12 educators and were true even for the “most promising students” in the study: “Family, school, and neighborhood could still act as an ‘undertow’—a drag on their momentum as they attempted to launch,” which “compelled them to take shortcuts to fulfill their ambitions, propelled by the need to make an expedited leap into adulthood.”

This expedited leap is in sharp contrast to the new normal for upper-middle-class twenty-somethings, who are taking their time hitting the milestones that mark the road to maturity. But for impoverished youth, the strong desire to get out of their parents’ cramped housing and leave behind dangerous neighborhoods means that making money becomes job number one. And that can easily get in the way of the pursuit of postsecondary education.

It also makes disadvantaged kids easy prey for unscrupulous and greedy for-profit trade schools. Such schools promise quick, easy entry into decently paying jobs after just a few months of training. But because so many poor youth are unprepared to succeed in even these programs and are often distracted by having to show up for their low-wage jobs at the same time, they rarely complete the degrees. Even when they do, the jobs on the other side hardly pay enough to make up for the big debts incurred. It’s a trap that can make the ascent to the middle class that much harder.

Also of interest to education leaders should be the authors’ investigation of what differentiated the kids who “made it” by finishing a postsecondary credential or finding a middle-class job from those who didn’t. There’s reason to be skeptical of the sociologists’ conclusion—again, they didn’t look deeply at the educational experiences of their subjects, which might have explained a lot. But their argument is persuasive nonetheless. Namely: the upwardly mobile kids found a passion. They developed what the scholars call “identity projects”—“a source of meaning that provides a strong sense of self and is linked to concrete activities to which youth commit themselves.” (The notion sounds quite similar to what Stanford University professor Bill Damon—a conservative!—calls “purpose.”) These projects allowed young people to develop an identity that was an alternative to being on “the street” and often came in the form of artistic, musical, or vocational pursuits. It powered the holy grail of grit that allowed these youth to persevere in the face of adversity.

We meet Terry, for instance, whose life is tragic beyond imagination. He grew up in the projects with an abusive, drug-addicted mother, escaped to the foster care system, and eventually ended up living in a city park for months on end. Miraculously, he found his own identity, first as a “perfect attendance kid” at school, then as a part-time worker, and later as an aide for a special needs student.

Then there’s Cody, who also grew up with an abusive mother in a run-down housing project but found his identity in high school, first as an athlete and then as a dedicated recruit in the Junior ROTC. When we last see him, he’s on his way to pursue his dreams in the military and later, he hopes, as a Baltimore police officer.

In the end, the authors urge educators to help students develop identity projects, especially by resisting the urge to cut funding for the arts, athletics, and other “extras” and extracurriculars. They also support high-quality career and technical education programs, mostly because such programs have the potential to help kids find a real passion, though I would add that they are also the best defense against predatory trade schools. (Great CTE models put high school kids on a fast track to rigorous technical schools at the postsecondary level, making low-quality trade schools an unattractive option.)

These recommendations are fine, but they aren’t nearly enough. Why not embrace models, including in the charter schools sector, that work overtime to help low-income kids make the transition from high school to college or career? KIPP Baltimore, for example, has seen great success with its “KIPP through College” program, thanks to its obsessive focus on preparing K-12 students and then continuing to provide support once graduates are on college campuses. KIPP administrators even identify colleges that have demonstrated a commitment to helping first-generation students succeed and encourage their graduates to enroll there. The administrators at KIPP and similar schools understand the “undertow” and don’t expect kids to escape it all on their own.

So don’t read the book for its education policy prescriptions. But read it nonetheless, especially if the long shadow of childhood poverty is fuzzy in your mind. After reading this important, compassionate work of scholarship, the challenges will be crystal clear.

SOURCE: Stefanie DeLuca, Susan Clampet-Lundquist, and Kathryn Edin, Coming of Age in the Other America (Russell Sage Foundation, 2016).

Editor’s note: This essay originally appeared in Education Next.

Prior research has shown that one of the most important indicators of effective teachers is that they know their subject matter. This study, by American Institutes for Research (AIR), examines whether content-intensive math professional development (PD) can impact that subject matter knowledge, as well as teachers’ instructional practice and their students’ achievement.

Analysts study a popular PD program called Intel Math, which is focused on deepening teachers’ knowledge of K–8 mathematics. It offers ninety-three hours of total PD time—eighty hours of which was delivered over the summer of 2013, with the other thirteen delivered during the 2013–14 school year. The PD focuses on the conceptual foundations of math and its interconnectedness across grades K–8. Teachers also get time to analyze student work on topics covered in the PD and receive video-based coaching during which they get individual feedback, particularly on the quality and clarity of their mathematical explanations.

Roughly 220 fourth-grade teachers from ninety-four schools in six districts and five states participated and were randomly assigned within schools to either the treatment group that received the PD or the control group that did not, receiving instead business-as-usual professional development.

One of the three key findings is that the professional development—which was deemed as having been implemented with fidelity—had a positive effect on teacher knowledge. Treatment teachers overall participated in a whopping ninety-five more hours of math PD than did control teachers. On average, treatment teachers’ knowledge scores on a study-administered math test were 21 percentage points higher than the control teachers’ scores after the professional development was completed. Second, the PD also had a large positive impact on some aspects of instructional practice, particularly relative to the conceptual aspects of math and the quality of teachers’ math explanations to students.

The third key finding is not so positive. The boost to teacher outcomes did not translate to student achievement gains, as measured on both state math assessments and a study-administered test. Unfortunately, we can’t be sure why. But this study does suggest that professional development alone on discrete aspects of math knowledge is unlikely to move the needle much on student achievement.

Targeting content knowledge only—not instructional delivery, rapport with kids, school or classroom culture, or a myriad of other things that professional development could feasibly target—is only a small and perhaps misunderstood piece of this very complex achievement puzzle.

SOURCE: Michael S. Garet et al., "Focusing on Mathematical Knowledge: The Impact of Content-Intensive Teacher Professional Development," U.S. Department of Education (September 2016).