The Education Gadfly Weekly

As of Thanksgiving 2016, nobody can forecast what the Trump administration will do—or even try to do—in K–12 education. Practically all he proposed during the campaign was a whopping new federal program to promote school choice. There was also loose talk about “cutting” the Department of Education and about the Common Core State Standards being “a total disaster.” It’s also no secret that, as governor of Indiana, Mike Pence was strongly pro-school choice and allergic to the Common Core (though the Hoosier State wound up with a close facsimile).

There’s not much more to go on today, save to note that Betsy DeVos, a highly accomplished, take-no-prisoners, school-choice advocate, is Trump’s pick for education secretary, and able individuals such as Gerard Robinson and Bill Evers are working on the education department’s “transition team.”

So let’s focus instead on some unsolicited advice to the President-elect as to what his administration’s policy priorities in this domain should (and shouldn’t) be.

Start, please, with the huge fact of the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) and its implications. When Congress passed and President Obama signed it in December 2015, almost fifteen years after George W. Bush proposed No Child Left Behind, the great bulk of the federal role in K–12 education was all but locked in—locked up, you might even say—for a foreseeable future that is all but certain to outlast the Trump presidency. I can’t imagine the next two Congresses (or probably the two after that) reopening this vast statute, which contains just about everything Uncle Sam does in primary-secondary education save for special education, vocational education, and the research-and-statistics functions housed in the Institute for Education Sciences (IES).

ESSA’s existence—and legislative history—makes it extremely unlikely that Congress will agree to launch any large new school-choice program or to make portable the funds that flow through existing programs to states and districts. Lamar Alexander, chairman of the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor & Pensions, tried but failed to muster the votes for a lesser such initiative—and that was with a larger Republican majority in both houses than Trump will face. Secretary DeVos will almost surely come forward with a proposal and choice could likely clear the House of Representatives in some form, but its prospects in the Senate are bleak—and the appetite for even trying to amend ESSA will be faint-to-nonexistent.

ESSA also means that, from Washington’s standpoint, Common Core is now a non-issue. Sure, senior federal officials might try to jawbone states that have stuck with those new academic standards into abandoning them, but the executive branch has no formal leverage. In Chairman Alexander’s words, ESSA “specifically prohibited the U.S. Department of Education from requiring or even incentivizing any state to have Common Core or any other academic standard. That is now entirely a state decision. So the Secretary of Education couldn’t abolish it and he couldn’t require it of states.”

There are, to be sure, innumerable regulatory, budgetary, and implementation issues posed by ESSA, and these are bound to engage the new Education Secretary, although they won’t likely rise to the level of White House attention. Because John King’s team is striving during Obama’s final weeks to promulgate regulations that violate the spirit of ESSA, such as mandating that states issue single summative grades for all schools, revising or withdrawing these will be a matter of some urgency. Important budget decisions must also be made. But that’s about it.

Three other important federal education laws await final Congressional action, and if they don’t get it during the waning weeks of 2016’s “lame duck” session, the new administration will have a shot at influencing them during the 115^th Congress. The “Perkins Act”—a source of federal aid to career, technical, and vocational education—needs a major modernization and recently got one in the House but seems to have stalled in the Senate. The reauthorization of IES has neared final passage a couple of times but hasn’t cleared both chambers in quite the same form. And the parts of the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) that are not permanently authorized (i.e., the lesser parts) are sorely overdue for Congressional attention. In my view, the big parts also need a total makeover—and would be a terrific vehicle for school choice akin to Florida’s McKay Scholarship Program—but everyone in Washington seems allergic to touching special ed, an issue that would challenge even the most politically sure-footed of Presidents.

If Congress doesn’t finalize Perkins and IES, the new team should swiftly weigh in. Trump has hinted at a real interest in “vocational and technical” education—and his business history would seem to incline him that way. He also seems less enamored of the “college for all” mantra. Particularly if the administration simultaneously addressed Perkins and the also-needs-reauthorizing Higher Education Act, the Trumpsters might persuade Congress to do something significant to give the U.S. a robust, rigorous, and respectable alternative to college.

As for IES, wonky as it is, the government’s research, statistics, and assessment work could be far more informative than it now is. Consider, for example, the fact that the National Assessment of Educational Progress reports state-by-state achievement in reading, math, and science for grades four and eight but not grade twelve. What’s with that? And it produces no state-level data on student learning in history, civics, and other key subjects. If states are truly to be re-empowered to shape and run their K–12 education systems, transparency and comparability seem (at least to me) to argue for more reliable external data by which state leaders can see how their schools are faring.

Legislation and bully pulpit aside, the Trump team faces plenty of opportunities on the regulatory and de-regulatory front, not just in sanely implementing programs like ESSA and IDEA without constraining state flexibility but also—especially—in the civil rights realm. There the Education Department Office for Civil Rights (OCR), often teamed up with the Justice Department, has gone wild in pushing schools and districts around, via both formal regulations and menacing “dear colleague” letters, in far-flung realms from student discipline to bathroom access. OCR has long been in the hands of zealots committed both to “progressive” social policies and to such appalling doctrines as “disparate impact” (whereby an even-handed policy or practice is suspect if the results of its application vary by race, gender, whatever). This won’t be an easy omelet to unscramble, especially in today’s hyper-racialized climate of mistrust and even violence, but there’s no part of federal education policy in greater need of redirection—and none that is more subject to unilateral action by the executive branch.

In short, plenty needs doing in the K–12 realm, although it doesn’t much resemble Donald Trump’s campaign talk. 

Editor's notes: This article was updated on November 23 after President-elect Donald Trump named Betsy DeVos as his pick for U.S. Secretary of Education.

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair…

Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities

That about sums up the charter school movement’s reaction to the elections a fortnight ago. For those on the right, the Light of Donald Trump plus two-thirds of governors and state legislative chambers, Republicans all, will shine on the charter sector, ushering in an early spring of hope. As Jeanne Allen of the Center for Education Reform told the Washington Post, “It’s an extraordinary opportunity for far-reaching education reform.”

On the left, however, a great Darkness has come upon the land. It’s not only dastardly Trump, but also those state-level zealots who will destroy “public education as we know it,” unleashing charters upon the people without nary a concern for quality, bringing a new winter of despair to the entire K–12 sector. As Robin Lake recently wrote: “Given the largely successful push by teachers unions and other opponents of public school choice to brand charter schools as a conservative, partisan issue, the last thing public charter schools need is to have the next president feed the ‘end of public education’ narrative.” Or, as Democrats for Education Reform President Shavar Jeffries told Richard Whitmire: “I can’t think of anything more potentially harmful to the charter school movement, or anything more antithetical to its progressive roots, than having Donald Trump as its national champion.” 

This is not A Tale of Two Cities but it is a tale of two political universes. President Obama may claim that there’s not a “red America or blue America,” but we’ve all seen the maps, and it’s obvious that in many parts of the country we’re looking at bright red states and deep blue cities. Navigating this tricky terrain will take all of the political agility we reformers can muster.

Simply put, if charter schools are to thrive, we need support from Democrats and Republicans. While it’s going to be hard, keeping the reform coalition together is essential. Here’s why:

1. We need Democrats. It has become fashionable by some on the right to write off the left as far as school choice is concerned. With such GOP dominance at the state level, and now in Washington, who needs Democrats? Beyond the measly four states with complete Democratic control, that is.

To be sure, in many red states, charter supporters don’t need Democratic votes in the statehouse in order to get bills passed and budgets enacted. But we do need the support—or at least the benign neglect—of big-city mayors and other municipal officials if charters are to live up to their potential. Charters in most cities still struggle to find affordable, suitable facilities; there are still endless nagging problems around transportation and other “support services”; common enrollment systems are a boon to parental choice but can’t happen without district consent. On all of these issues, we’re better off with supportive leaders than without them—and those leaders are almost all Democrats.

Furthermore, over the long-run, the political sustainability of the charter movement is at risk without the support of the people who live in the communities the charters are designed to serve. In most of the country, that means the cities. And that means continuing to fight for the hearts and minds of urban Americans, especially communities of color. (Peter Cunningham has some good ideas on how to do precisely that.)

2. We need Republicans. This should be obvious, especially considering the national and state election results. Yet it feels to me as if many of reformers on the left have spent the last year denying this reality, pushing the reform movement to embrace what they call “social justice” and what I would view as hard-left positions on race, criminal justice, and more. To the extent that these reformers were trying to gain credibility on the Democratic side of the aisle, I get it—but you cannot continue to antagonize mainstream Republicans (by, for example, constantly calling them racists just because they don’t agree with you on issues of race) and expect them to continue to champion our cause.

And as a matter of basic arithmetic, the charter movement cannot survive today without GOP support. There just aren’t enough Democrats for Education Reform willing to buck the unions. We’ve all seen what’s happened in Boston, home to the best charter sector in the country. Charter supporters threw a Hail Mary pass in the form of a ballot initiative; the reason they had to take such extreme measures was because the teachers have had the legislature in a head lock for a decade. A Republican Senate in Massachusetts would go a long way (as it has in deep-blue New York).

3. The best charter policy tends to be bipartisan. For those of us who are as committed to charter quality as to quantity, it’s pretty obvious that bipartisan politics tend to produce better policy. States with overwhelming Republican control—think Michigan—tend not to do enough to ensure strong charter oversight and adequate funding. States under iron-fisted Democratic control, meanwhile, don’t allow charters to expand at all, or micromanage them into conformity and mediocrity. But “just right” policies—strong accountability, lots of operational autonomy, fair funding, no micromanaging—tend to be embraced by charter school realists in the center of the political spectrum. When you look at smart charter policies in Colorado, New York, Louisiana, Tennessee, and elsewhere, you tend to see the fingerprints of mainstream Republicans and reform-minded Democrats—the folks with lots of influence when government is closely divided.

Despite the rhetoric of it being the “civil rights movement of our time,” education reform has in fact been a centrist project for at least twenty-five years. It needs to stay that way if it’s going to live for twenty-five more. Let’s try to remember that in coming days, when we will all be tempted to head to the barricades, to fight the “other side” in various battles to come. If only for the kids, let’s keep the friendly fire to a minimum.

In October, President Obama announced that the national high school graduation rate had reached an all-time high in 2015. Yet that same year, the percentage of high school seniors ready for college-level reading and math declined to 37 percent. In other words, as graduation rates rise, other metrics of student achievement are falling, raising questions about how schools are getting more students to graduate. One answer could be the widespread but questionable use of online credit recovery courses (OCRCs).

Students can enroll in OCRCs to earn credits in courses they’ve previously failed. They’re often administered by private companies that contract with school districts. National enrollment statistics are unavailable, but according to the International Association for K–12 Online Learning (iNACOL), more than 75 percent of U.S. school districts use online learning for expanded course offerings and credit recovery. In Georgia, for instance, approximately 20,700 OCRCs were taken in 2016. And the Los Angeles Unified School District recently credited its highest ever graduation rate to the use of these courses.

One of the biggest red flags about this method of remediation is that passage rates don’t match achievement data. For example, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution recently reported that only 10 percent of OCRC students were proficient on Georgia state exams in 2015 and 2016, yet a whopping 90 percent earned credit.

My personal experience overseeing OCRCs showed me how this is possible—and it ain’t pretty.

From 2011–15, I worked in a school district in Douglas County, Georgia, just west of Atlanta. During that time, it saw a 13 percent increase in graduation rate in 2015—including a Title I school that increased by 26 percent—despite no meaningful gains in student achievement. In fact, the percentage of our graduates taking remedial courses in college rose.

My training for my role as an OCRC classroom manager comprised one class period, during which a colleague—a physical education teacher and football coach, who also oversaw OCRCs—taught me how to “unlock” multiple-choice quizzes that students took after completing lessons. I was told that my main goal was “to make sure the students have at least an 80 percent average so that if they fail their standardized course tests they will still get credit and graduate." In other words, teachers were trained how to manage the program in such a way as to guarantee that students at least made a B.

This was accomplished primarily by giving students as many attempts on multiple-choice quizzes and tests as needed for students to maintain a B average. Because these additional attempts contained many of the same questions (and answer choices in the same order), students were able to score higher on each attempt by process of elimination and guessing.

The teachers further increased the odds of students guessing correctly by giving “answer checks.” Here’s how it worked: When students finished the first attempt on a quiz or test, they call upon the teacher for a “check.” He or she pulls up the student's answers, reviews them, and informs the student which questions are incorrect. The student then changes his or her answers before submitting the assessment for a grade. In spite of this opportunity to change wrong answers, failure on the first attempt was common.

Because students got these answer checks and could retake quizzes as many times as necessary, most didn’t pay attention to the lessons—and therefore didn’t learn the content. Instead, they were permitted to socialize, play video games on the Internet, and fiddle with their phones. Early on, after stopping answer checks, requiring students to seek my help after failing two attempts, and capping the total attempts at three, students resisted. I tried, for example, to help a student after he failed the second attempt on a biology quiz. “It doesn't matter, I just guessed on all of it,” he said. When I asked if that was what he’s been doing throughout the course, he replied, shrugging his shoulders, “Of course, what's wrong with that?” Another student, after failing two quizzes on the fourteenth amendment, angrily objected to taking more notes before getting the third attempt, adding “I would pay attention if this were a legitimate course!”

After assisting my trainer for a few weeks, I oversaw an OCRC for one semester, and decided to document what I witnessed. Through this I gained leverage with the district administration to institute reforms. Consequently, the district eliminated the answer-check practice, along with other abuses. But even after those improvements, problems with OCRCs in our district remain, such as the lack of access to certified teachers.

My experience, albeit anecdotal, demonstrates how perverse incentives and misplaced priorities can lead to higher graduation rates with little or no additional learning. Given how widespread online credit recovery courses are, and the recent evidence that they often yield very little benefit in the way of actual learning, states and districts ought to take a closer look at their offerings to ensure that the students they serve get the help they need to be successful adults after graduation. A diploma is of little value if the recipient didn’t develop the necessary skills and confidence to be a productive member of society. And, sadly, districts like the one in which I taught are failing the very young people that depend on them most.

Jeremy Noonan is a certified science instructor in Georgia and has taught for ten years in public school, private school, and home school cooperatives. He also runs Citizens for Excellence in Public Schools, a local education advocacy group.

On this week's podcast, special guest Chris Minnich, executive director of the Council of Chief State School Officers, joins Mike Petrilli and Alyssa Schwenk to discuss state education leadership in the Trump era. On the Research Minute, Victoria McDougald examines the effects of a North Carolina pre-K program on students' elementary school outcomes.

Victoria's Research Minute

The number of teacher aides in America continues to grow. They comprised only 1.7 percent of U.S. school-based staff in 1970, but forty years later, in 2010, that proportion reached nearly 12 percent. Yet we know precious little about their bearing on student performance. A new study by CALDER attempts to fill the vacuum. Analysts examine the impact of teaching assistants (TAs) on learner outcomes in North Carolina. The study also includes health care providers, but those data are less reliable, so this review does not include them.

Teaching assistants perform a variety of tasks that typically vary by state, district, school and even classroom. They include preparing classroom activities and clerical tasks, working with students in small groups, helping to assess student work, and managing student behavior.

North Carolina uses formulas to allocate positions, not dollars, to local districts, meaning that districts get a certain number of slots for teachers, principals, and support personnel based on student enrollment. There are no incentives to hire a new versus a veteran teacher, for instance, because the state will pay them according to their salary schedule. For teaching assistants, however, the state only provides a certain dollar amount per student to each district, thus limiting the number of TA positions a district can hire using state appropriations. CALDER analysts include state-funded, but not district-funded, positions when analyzing school-level changes to rule out any potential impacts from district dollars; they are also able to control for a number of school, student, and teacher variables, which enhances the credibility of the findings. They use school-level data from 2001 to 2012 for nearly 1100 elementary schools.

On the descriptive front, analysts find that the mean teacher-to-student ratio is 5.2 teachers per 100 students; for TAs it is 2.9 per 100 students. As for impact, results indicate that one additional teaching assistant per 100 students increased reading scores by 0.009 standard deviations—small potatoes, but we also don’t have other TA studies to compare it to. There is essentially no impact on math overall. Yet when broken down by subgroup, findings show larger effects for minority students than white students in both reading and math. TAs also make small yet statistically significant differences when it comes to curbing student absences and tardiness, but they have no impact on suspension rates. (A 10 percent increase in teachers, on the other hand, reduces the student absentee rate by about 0.15 days per year, which represents a 3 percent decline in the average absentee rate; principals make a similar difference in terms of magnitude.)

Given the paucity of rigorous research on the topic, what we have here is obviously not the last word. But it does indicate that TAs could help improve academic performance somewhat, particularly for minority students, in the early grades. What we don’t know is whether another intervention that costs less might be equally or more effective than this one.

SOURCE: Charles Clotfelter, Steven Hemelt, and Helen Ladd, "Teaching Assistants and Nonteaching Staff: Do They Improve Student Outcomes?," CALDER (October 2016).

Italy has an achievement gap—one that may sound familiar to Americans. PISA scores show a marked gap between Italian students and those of other OECD countries in both math and reading. Digging into the data, Italian education officials found their own intra-country gap: Students in the wealthier north perform far better than students in the poorer south. As a result of all of this, starting in 2010, schools in Southern Italy were offered an opportunity to participate in an extended learning time program known as The Quality and Merit Project (abbreviated PQM in Italian). A new study published in the journal Economics of Education Review looks at PQM’s math and reading intervention, which consisted of additional teaching time after school in four of the poorest and lowest-performing regions in the country.

A couple of things to note: PQM intervention was focused not on improving PISA test scores, but on improving scores on the typical tests taken by students in lower secondary school (equivalent to grades six to eight in the U.S.). There is no enumeration of which/when/how many tests these students typically take and the researchers are not attempting to make a connection between the intervention and PISA test scores. We as readers should not either. The poor performance of Italian students on PISA simply shone a light on poor performance elsewhere, and perhaps more importantly, unlocked the funding from the European Union’s Regional Development Fund that paid teachers to implement an intervention aimed at closing the detected gap. Deciding to initiate the PQM intervention was voluntary on the part of schools. That allowed researchers to match schools that participated with similar schools that didn’t participate. Using results from the typical tests taken by lower secondary school students, the analysts compared changes in test scores before and after the intervention.

The report had two key findings. First, PQM had a positive effect on average test scores in math, but no impact on reading scores. Second, the impact differed depending on pre-intervention achievement: students in the lowest-achieving schools—in the bottom third—made significant gains on math due to the program. For students attending schools in the top two-thirds of achievement, the impact of the after-school program was null in both math and language. According to this evaluation, then, the program worked in a narrow sense—in just math and for the lowest-achieving students.

Researchers conclude that additional in-class instruction time as an intervention in reading is not particularly helpful to students in grades six through eight. “This result is consistent with other studies in the literature showing that it is much harder to intervene on reading and comprehension skills,” they write, “rather than on skills involving practice, like maths, because a large part of literacy work takes place through general vocabulary training in the home environment.” In other words, improving the “skill” of reading is much more than a matter of spending more time on it once fluent decoding has been learned. (We would add that it also relates to content knowledge—something that certainly can and should be taught in school.) However, this research indicates that quantitative reasoning and mathematical knowledge—increased by repetition and “skill building”—responds positively through more time spent on task, especially for low-achieving students.

We need to be careful about the conclusions we draw based on the numerous caveats and unknowns here, not to mention the differing culture and language, but a detailed look at the benefit to students of additional time on task is no bad thing. A longer school day is often seen as a cure-all for students with poor test scores and is sometimes the raison d'être of certain school types. Perhaps a more targeted approach to additional seat time the proper approach.

SOURCE: Erich Battistina and Elena Claudia Meroni, “Should we increase instruction time in low achieving schools? Evidence from Southern Italy,” Economics of Education Review (December, 2016).