The Education Gadfly Weekly

“Being valedictorian, it didn’t mean anything,” said Shanika Bridges-King about her time at Bryn Mawr to the Boston Globe last month, as part of a series of exposés. Reporters spent a year tracking down the city’s public high school valedictorians from the mid-2000s to learn how their lives had turned out. “I didn’t understand anything I read. I didn’t know how to write. I felt like I was disabled in this elite environment.”

Bridges-King graduated at the top of her class at The English High School in Boston. Her statement is upsetting, yet not really surprising, due to an all too common problem at low-income high schools nationwide: inflated grades that wrongly and harmfully signal to graduates—even valedictorians—that they’re ready for college.

“I felt like I wasn’t prepared to be there,” echoed Jose Barbosa, who attended Boston University after he finished at the top of his class at the Jeremiah E. Burke High School, also in Boston. “I was massively unprepared,” said Abadur Rahman, valedictorian of East Boston High School and recipient of a full scholarship to Northeastern University, who added, “Folks were at a different quintile than we were in terms of how much material they had [already] comprehended and internalized.” “I felt like Hyde Park High School did nothing, really, to prepare you for a school like Boston College,” said Michael Blackwood, valedictorian of The Engineering School in the Hyde Park Education Complex.

The fact that America’s high school education is broken is not new. Over the last year, stories have cast doubt on the stratospheric graduation rates reported in several states, including Alabama, California, Georgia, Florida, Maryland, Minnesota, New Jersey, Texas, and Washington, D.C. Pressure to boost those rates, often due to school accountability policies, plays a role—but so do complex motivations like empathy and concern for kids’ future well-being. It’s these latter impulses that lead folks to believe that easing expectations, at least for disadvantaged and struggling students, is a victimless, thoughtful, and maybe even noble act. Though it does young people no real good to be awarded unearned diplomas.

The harm done by lowered expectations doesn’t just befall the kids who are barely making it through high school. As illustrated by those profiled in the Globe, a disservice is being done to their high-achieving peers—not young people at risk of not graduating at all, but those who leave high school at the top of their class and under the impression that they’re fully ready for college, including elite schools like Bryn Mawr, B.U., and B.C. They discover—with surprise, pain, angst, embarrassment—that they’re nowhere near ready. The culprit is grade inflation, which occurs when subjective course grades exceed objective measures of performance.

According to a September 2018 Fordham study of the problem, “rising high school grade point averages have been accompanied by stagnant SAT, ACT, and NAEP scores.” That’s true just about everywhere in America. In North Carolina, the focus of the study, the median grade in affluent high schools in 2016 was a B; in less affluent schools, it was a slightly lower B-. In Kentucky, my colleague Adam Tyner found much the same thing using data compiled by the Bluegrass Institute: in 2016, the average GPA in rich schools was 2.95, and 2.93 at lower-income ones. 

Standardized tests, however, indicate far wider gaps—and a much more dire situation for disadvantaged teens. More than seven out of ten affluent twelfth graders in North Carolina were proficient on statewide assessments, but barely four in ten of their low-income peers cleared that bar. ACT scores in Kentucky are considerably higher at richer schools than poorer ones. Back in Boston, the 53 percent proficiency rate on MCAS among tenth graders in the city’s public schools, most of which are low income, falls well short of the statewide rate of 74 percent. And this phenomenon isn’t new: A 1994 U.S. Department of Education study found that A students at high-poverty schools had the same average English and math scores on tests administered as part of the National Education Longitudinal Study of 1988 as C and D students at affluent schools. These kids’ dreams are being killed by kindness.

Grade inflation causes many problems, but two are especially harmful. The first, aptly explained by Seth Gershenson, a professor at American University who conducted the Fordham Institute analysis, is complacency that stunts kids’ potential: “When a student thinks he has already mastered material that he has not, the student will not invest the extra effort and time necessary to truly learn it. Likewise, parents will not recognize the need to help their child catch up. In this case, the complacency is not due to lack of desire or ability, but rather faulty information about the student’s academic standing.”

The second problem is that inflated grades allow students to progress through high school and then into colleges for which they aren’t actually prepared—a problem known succinctly as “overmatching.”

When reality hits—especially if students are disadvantaged and therefore lack the familial safety net and support of their more privileged peers—this combination of faulty information and academic ill-preparedness can be devastating. Consider, again, the valedictorians featured in the Globe series. Jose Barbosa reported feeling disappointed in himself and withdrew from Boston University after three semesters, though he later graduated from Mount Ida College. Abadur Rahman got to a point where “Maybe you’re not who you think you are. Maybe you’re not good enough. Maybe you’re not meant to be in school.” He had to leave Northeastern’s honors program and switch to a less challenging major. Scariest of all is Telma Taveres, whose 4.76 GPA made her the 2005 valedictorian at the John D. O’Bryant School of Mathematics and Science, one of the city’s three prestigious exam schools. In her third year at Smith College, one of America’s top liberal arts schools, she suffered a panic attack so severe that she ended up in a psychiatric ward and was told to take a year off. She never returned to Smith, though later was able to earn a degree at UMass Boston.

Of the ninety-three valedictorians the Globe checked in with, one in four failed to graduate with a college degree in six years. Forty percent earn less than $50,000 a year, while just one in seven has an annual income exceeding $100,000. One in four has an advanced degree. Four have been homeless.

If these are the outcomes of the top graduates of the city’s low-income high schools, one can't help but wonder what hope students with a 3.5 GPA have of succeeding, let alone those with 3.0 or 2.5. Their schools are lying to them about what they’ve accomplished. This most harms the most vulnerable among them—and it needs to change.

Yet the policy winds are blowing the other way. The easiest way to check inflated grades is via external exams, but states are rushing to get rid of those—and colleges are pushing to make admissions SAT-optional. That might help the children of privileged parents who are pushing for their children to look even better to the admissions teams at the colleges from which they’ll almost surely graduate. But it won’t help poor and minority kids like those valedictorians in Boston.

Whether initiated from the bottom-up or the top-down, any effort to help educators align their practice with the best evidence is going to succeed or fail on the strength of its implementation. As my colleague Robert Pondiscio wrote recently:

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.

He’s right, of course. But how can schools and systems actually do this—build capacity, and teachers’ understanding in a way that will alter what they actually do in their classrooms?

Scholars and reformers have been struggling with this question for basically forever. (See, for example, this classic thirty-year-old article by my University of Michigan thesis advisor David Cohen, “A Revolution in One Classroom: The Case of Mrs. Oublier.”) Bundling evidence-based practices into a coherent, highly teachable curriculum can help, as can videos of teachers delivering the material with real groups of students. But ultimately, the transmission of evidence-based practices is a slow, steady, and social grind, not something to be achieved entirely by articles, videos, or reports.

That’s the takeaway from this excellent Atul Gawande article in the New Yorker from a few years ago, “Slow Ideas.” The whole article is worth a (slow) read, but let me highlight some key passages about various attempts to change medical practice, and save lives, in poor, low-tech parts of the world.

Every year, three hundred thousand mothers and more than six million children die around the time of birth, largely in poorer countries. Most of these deaths are due to events that occur during or shortly after delivery. A mother may hemorrhage. She or her baby may suffer an infection. Many babies can’t take their first breath without assistance, and newborns, especially those born small, have trouble regulating their body temperature after birth. Simple, lifesaving solutions have been known for decades. They just haven’t spread…

The most common approach to changing behavior is to say to people, “Please do X.” Please warm the newborn. Please wash your hands. Please follow through on the twenty-seven other childbirth practices that you’re not doing. This is what we say in the classroom, in instructional videos, and in public-service campaigns, and it works, but only up to a point.

Then, there’s the law-and-order approach: “You must do X.” We establish standards and regulations, and threaten to punish failures with fines, suspensions, the revocation of licenses. Punishment can work. Behavioral economists have even quantified how averse people are to penalties. In experimental games, they will often quit playing rather than risk facing negative consequences. And that is the problem with threatening to discipline birth attendants who are taking difficult-to-fill jobs under intensely trying conditions. They’ll quit.

The kinder version of “You must do X” is to offer incentives rather than penalties. Maybe we could pay birth attendants a bonus for every healthy child who makes it past a week of life. But then you think about how hard it would be to make a scheme like that work, especially in poor settings…

Besides, neither penalties nor incentives achieve what we’re really after: a system and a culture where X is what people do, day in and day out, even when no one is watching. “You must” rewards mere compliance. Getting to “X is what we do” means establishing X as the norm. And that’s what we want: for skin-to-skin warming, hand washing, and all the other lifesaving practices of childbirth to be, quite simply, the norm.

To create new norms, you have to understand people’s existing norms and barriers to change. You have to understand what’s getting in their way. So what about just working with healthcare workers, one by one, to do just that?

Working with people one by one was the approach taken by a Bangladeshi nonprofit in the 1980s in a remarkably successful initiative to combat cholera:

The organization didn’t launch a mass-media campaign—only 20 percent of the population had a radio, after all. It attacked the problem in a way that is routinely dismissed as impractical and inefficient: by going door to door, person by person, and just talking.

It started with a pilot project that set out to reach some sixty thousand women in six hundred villages…The workers were only semi-literate, but they helped distill their sales script into seven easy-to-remember messages: for instance, severe diarrhea leads to death from dehydration; the signs of dehydration include dry tongue, sunken eyes, thirst, severe weakness, and reduced urination; the way to treat dehydration is to replace salt and water lost from the body, starting with the very first loose stool; a rehydration solution provides the most effective way to do this...

Initially, the workers taught up to twenty mothers per day. But monitors visiting the villages a few weeks later found that the quality of teaching suffered on this larger scale, so the workers were restricted to ten households a day. Then a new salary system was devised to pay each worker according to how many of the messages the mothers retained when the monitor followed up. The quality of teaching improved substantially. The field workers soon realized that having the mothers make the solution themselves was more effective than just showing them. The workers began looking for diarrhea cases when they arrived in a village, and treating them to show how effective and safe the remedy was…

The program was stunningly successful. Use of oral rehydration therapy skyrocketed. The knowledge became self-propagating. The program had changed the norms.

No, the analogy is not perfect for K–12 education. Implementing a high quality English language arts or mathematics curriculum requires a much higher level of intellectual dexterity than treating cholera. But the tale resonates on several levels. It illustrates the power of social learning, the importance of active learning, the willingness of program designers to adapt their approach based on what they were hearing in the field, and ultimately the incredible impact on real outcomes that can come from a peer-to-peer approach. All of this is applicable to implementing evidence-based practices in American schools.

This, however, requires someone to play the role of the healthcare workers, the peers, the conduits. Thankfully, the vast majority of American schools—especially elementary schools—already have such people today. We call them instructional coaches.

One of the most significant, yet least noted, developments in the recent history of American schooling is the advent and scaling of this whole new class of educators. According to the National Center for Education Statistics, three-fourths of all primary schools and two-thirds of all high poverty schools have someone in a coaching role. A recent meta-analysis by Matthew Kraft and his colleagues indicates that coaching is very effective at changing instruction and somewhat effective at improving outcomes, especially when programs are relatively small-scale.

Obviously, giving someone the title of “instructional coach” doesn’t suffice; this is another case where implementation is everything. The coaches themselves need to be highly effective educators—both of students and of fellow teachers. Helping other instructors improve their craft takes a high degree of social and emotional skill, technical expertise, and patience. It can’t be generic, lest it will prove no more effective than conventional professional development. Coaching tied to specific, high quality curricula is probably best. And it’s not inexpensive; as Diana Quintero pointed out in a recent article for the Brookings Institution’s Brown Center, these coaches are precisely the sort of positions that have inflated the ranks of “non-teachers” working in our schools, which in turn has squeezed out other priorities, like higher teacher pay.

If deployed well, however, instructional coaches show great potential. So state and local leaders should ask themselves, when trying to implement a high quality curriculum or other evidence-based practices:

• Am I using instructional coaches effectively?
• Have we picked the best people for that role?
• Have they been properly trained on the new curriculum?
• Do they have a manageable number of teachers to work with?
• Do we have a way to collect their feedback so that we might make changes to the curriculum or program in response?

This solution isn’t sexy or particularly “disruptive.” It’s hard work. But whether we want to save children’s lives from cholera or illiteracy, there are no shortcuts.

Since the passage of the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) in 2015, there has been buzz about the change to the “supplement, not supplant” requirement for Title I, Part A. The Obama administration tried to saddle the requirement with regulations and conducted negotiated rulemaking on the matter, but they never found consensus nor finalized any rules. The Trump administration rejected regulations but promised guidance. That was two years ago. School administrators have been in a holding pattern all the while.

The wait is over. On January twenty-fifth, the Department of Education (ED) released its clarifying document. What does it mean?

For the uninitiated, the requirement basically states that grantees may not use Title I funds to replace state and local investments or reduce the local responsibility to deliver quality educational programming. The idea is straightforward, but the methods of ensuring compliance prior to ESSA were so technical and granular that grant managers who valued their jobs tended to use the funds in very conservative ways. Good ideas for new student services and programs suffered bureaucratic deaths at their hands.

Recognizing the problem, Congress made a significant change. Instead of examining every item purchased with Title I to ensure compliance, districts will now “demonstrate that the methodology used to allocate State and local funds to each school receiving [Title I, Part A funds] ensures that such school receives all of the State and local funds it would otherwise receive if it were not receiving [Title I, Part A funds].” In other words, the new rule, unlike the old one, ensures that districts cannot “backfill” state and local money with Title I dollars in a Title I school. The particular investments that school leaders make with Title I are not critical so long as the costs support the intents and purpose of Title I, Part A for eligible students.

The change is buzzworthy. Under NCLB, only schools operating a “school-wide” program could show compliance with “supplement, not supplant” using this method, but now all Title I schools, both schoolwide and targeted assistance, benefit from the flexibility. Under NCLB, most schools parsed out core instructional investments from supplemental investments because that’s what Title I has encouraged. That’s no longer necessary. Eligible schools can more easily use Title I to support strategic school-wide investments so long as the Title I contribution benefits eligible students. If a school wants to invest in personalized learning programs that are adaptive to the unique needs of each student, Title I can now be a part of that conversation, not a barrier to it. That’s a big deal.

Would new guidance complicate this or somehow screw it up? Based on the ED’s clarifying document—actually it was a “Non-Regulatory Information Document” (which seems a bit soft-footed, but no matter)—it appears not. There are no technical models or regulatory traps to navigate. The new test for compliance is as it reads in the statute (see above). While this may be anticlimactic, it does means we are officially into a new era for Title I, Part A.

Some in the education community worry that this new era will undermine the vital role that Title I has played to promote educational opportunity for low-income students and children of color. Yet nothing in the new guidance subverts that role, and keep in mind that the document isn’t even legally binding. If anything, it’s an invitation for grant managers and school leaders to tell better stories about how they are using Title I, along with state and local funds, to improve educational opportunity for at-risk students.

So go forth, federal program directors, and be a part of meaningful educational program solutions. Tell better stories about Title I supporting innovative and effective programming. The cloud of regulatory uncertainty is now behind us.

The views expressed herein represent the opinions of the author and not necessarily the Thomas B. Fordham Institute.

In an essay in The Washington Post last summer, Sonja Santelises, the courageous chief executive of Baltimore City Public Schools, described a problem commonly overlooked in school districts like hers: a “disjointed” curriculum that’s not simply lacking in rigor, but fails even to “connect [students’] experiences to other people’s histories and the larger world.” More than 80 percent of her district’s pupils are black, but according to Santelises, the world they saw through the lens of their school curriculum was impossibly skewed, even depressingly so. Baltimore’s children were “taught about tragedies of African American history such as slavery and Jim Crow but learned nothing about the Great Migration and very little about the Harlem Renaissance,” she wrote.

Santelises wasn’t indulging in platitudes and generalizations. She had hard data on her desk that showed how the district’s “patchy curriculum” was “exacerbating knowledge gaps for our low-income students.” Baltimore was one of the first school districts to put its English language arts curriculum up for analysis by a team led by David Steiner and Ashley Berner at the Johns Hopkins Institute for Education Policy. In the past year, they have quietly performed a similar analysis for one entire state, another urban school district, and several smaller ones in Massachusetts. They lifted the veil on their “knowledge mapping” tool this week in a webinar with Chiefs for Change, which co-sponsored the work. It offers an intriguing mechanism for education leaders to see the degree to which their English language arts curriculum, as a whole and over time, builds critical background knowledge and aligns with their local vision and priorities.

It’s been a pleasant surprise to see curriculum come into its own in the last few years as a potentially powerful lever for improving student outcomes. But the tools we have to evaluate it are focused primarily on whether a published or “OER” curriculum is “aligned” with standards. Unlike math or science content standards, English language arts standards typically describe skills and processes—the kinds of things students should be able to do when they read a text. Skills like “compare and contrast” and “find the main idea,” when viewed exclusively through the lens of standards, might appear content-neutral, but in reality they’re closer to content-dependent. Common Core famously (and in retrospect, impotently) valorized “build[ing] a foundation of knowledge” in social studies, science, and other disciplines. But it’s beyond the scope of standards to dictate curriculum content. That’s a state or district’s job and a heavy lift.

If a curriculum routinely requires students to “read closely to determine what the text says explicitly and to make logical inferences” it will likely satisfy the conditions for “alignment.” But this tacitly encourages a view of ELA that elevates skill over content, eliding entirely the role of prior knowledge in comprehension. “America’s reading gaps are not caused by skills shortages but by knowledge vacuums,” Steiner noted just last month in this space. “When we provide even very weak readers with a story about a topic they know, finding the main idea is a snap. By contrast, give strong readers a passage about something they know nothing about, and they can stare at it forever with little chance of finding that same idea.”

“Alignment” also tells us nothing about literary merit, quality, or lasting value. You can explore themes of fratricide and revenge by studying Shakespeare’s Hamlet or Disney’s The Lion King. In no way are they “equal.” A three-star restaurant and Taco Bell may both get “A” ratings from the board of health if they’re aligned (as they must be) to safe food handling standards, but they are not otherwise comparable. The same is true of various ELA curricula. Each can be aligned to standards, but the one that attends to coherent and cumulative building of knowledge is clearly superior and preferable. You can spot the difference between a fast food joint and a high-end restaurant at a glance; it’s not as immediately obvious with curricula.

Critically, the Hopkins’s knowledge mapping tool is not an off-the-shelf exercise that suggests, “We know what quality curriculum is and here’s why yours doesn’t cut it.” It starts with a robust framework of key domains—“U.S. History before 1865”—and then topics—“dystopian literature”—that any knowledge-rich ELA curriculum should address. It then asks systems leaders, “What else do you want your curriculum to accomplish?”

Then via painstaking analysis, it reveals how well the ELA curriculum hits the mark or misses it, surfacing gaps that are invisible at the classroom or even school level. Neither is this a mere exercise in list-making and box-checking. The mapping tool considers the social and emotional dimensions of works of literature in addition to the knowledge “domains” students are exposed to in both fiction and non-fiction works. What arrives on district decision-makers’ desks is (among other things) a “heat map” representing the frequency and level of exposure to domains of knowledge. As Berner describes it, the effect might be, “Wow, we're doing a good job of reinforcing social and emotional learning, but we're not touching on Asia, Africa, or the Middle East.”

The work is being done in partnership with Chiefs for Change. That’s potentially powerful because the mapping tool gains strength and insight the more broadly it’s used. If a significant number of districts (or states) represented by the Chiefs put their ELA curricula up for review using the Hopkins tool, it will be possible to make more and better generalizations about curricula across the U.S., prying open the classroom “black box” that researchers and policymakers often lament.

The tool does have some inevitable shortcomings. It cannot account for the entirety of curricular inputs; it’s looking merely at ELA, for now (Steiner and Berner hope to build out social studies and science knowledge mapping capabilities eventually). But the approach is promising and bears watching closely. It’s a potential “last mile” solution that enables states, districts, or CMOs to evaluate curricula with greater nuance and sophistication than ever before.

Many schools have decreased physical education classes (PE) or cut them entirely, but there have been recent pushes to get kids back outside during the school day, such as the efforts of Texas Fitness Now (TFN), a large grant program available to high-poverty Texas middle schools. The goal of their PE programs is to get kids healthier, but also to improve academic performance and student behavior. Researchers Analisa Packham and Brittany Street ask of TFN: Did it?

Texas Fitness Now, the second-largest physical activity grant program in the U.S., distributed $37 million to high-poverty Texas middle schools from 2007–2011. Most of each grant was designated for buying PE equipment and hiring PE instructors; some was meant for nutrition education. Students in participating schools had to participate in PE classes for thirty minutes per school day and took a fitness test twice each year. Each school received about $10,000.

Most PE program studies focus on elementary schools, but TFN and this study covered only middle school students. Researchers studied the effects of TFN on students’ BMI and overall fitness levels using a statewide test called the FITNESSGRAM, which measures students in areas such as body composition, aerobic capacity, and strength. Due to privacy concerns, results from the test are only available by school, gender, and grade, and not at the student level. They also looked into likely indirect results of a PE program, including scores on the Texas Assessment of Knowledge and Skills (TAKS), disciplinary actions, and daily attendance. Researchers analyzed these factors in schools right on either side of the program’s eligibility cut-offs, which are similar enough to each other to serve as trial and control schools.

TFN’s impacts on physical fitness were nearly non-existent. When looking strictly at body composition, there was in fact a slight downturn in the percentage of students with a healthy BMI, although the number of obese students (those with extremely high BMIs) did decrease. Marginal fitness levels, measured in the FITNESSGRAM, saw no significant change. The authors suggest a number of possible explanations for these disappointing effects, including the chance that exercising at school makes kids less active at home.

The program had no effect on test scores and a negative effect on student behavior. Neither reading nor math scores saw any statistically significant change. There was also little effect on daily attendance. The authors admit the lack of impact is surprising, given significant declines in student behavior. TFN schools saw a 16 percent increase in disciplinary actions and a 7 percent increase in the number of students misbehaving. They also lost more instructional time due to suspensions than non-TFN schools.

The authors hypothesize that many of the program’s underwhelming results could be due to an uptick in bullying. Out-of-shape students may get discouraged and stop trying during PE if their peers make fun of their weight or coordination, which might explain the stagnant fitness levels. And the increase in disciplinary actions and suspensions could also be concentrated among bullies. However, they were unable to study any of these guesses.

The study and the program itself both have their limitations. Researchers could not obtain the student-level fitness outcomes that might shed light on who is and is not benefitting from TFN. A more granular study might include basic demographic information like race, ethnicity, and income, but also other characteristics such as prior fitness level and previous PE experience. Nor were the authors able to investigate the potential mechanisms of the changes they identified; in particular, more information about bullying trends would be enlightening.

Moreover, as a recent Atlantic article covering the study pointed out, TFN itself is not representative of the types of physical education and activity most scientists recommend for students, especially adolescents. The most effective PE programs are “multifaceted and holistic,” and often require nutrition education alongside exercise opportunities. Experts also point out that unstructured recreational time can be even more beneficial to physical fitness than programmed physical education classes. The results of this Texas grant program are indeed disappointing—but if scientific research continues to show that physical education is more complex than our traditional model, we may need more creative grant opportunities to help kids build healthy lifestyles.

SOURCE: Analisa Packham and Brittany Street, “The Effects of Physical Education of Student Fitness, Achievement, and Behavior,” Working paper (November 2018).

On this week’s podcast, Neal McCluskey, director of Cato's Center for Educational Freedom, joins Mike Petrilli and David Griffith to discuss the appropriate role of for-profit entities in education. On the Research Minute, Amber Northern examines the effects tracking, instructional practices, and text complexity have on students who are struggling with reading in middle school.

Amber’s Research Minute

Laura Northrop and Sean Kelly, “Who Gets to Read What? Tracking, Instructional Practices, and Text Complexity for Middle School Struggling Readers,” Reading Research Quarterly (December 2018).