The Education Gadfly Weekly

It doesn’t quite have the same resonance as Save the Children, or even Save the Whales, but Save the Regs is the cri de cœur in education wonk circles today. And for good reason: Congressional Republicans’ intent to repeal but not replace the Obama Administration’s accountability regulations via the Congressional Review Act is about to make ESSA implementation a whole lot more difficult than it needs to be.

Let me be clear. I am not a fan of the entirety of the regulations that former Secretary John King published in November. In true Obama Administration style, King and company seemingly went out of their way to recreate the red tape that Congress wanted to cut when it enacted ESSA. If the only choice is all or nothing—keep the whole package, or kill it all—I’d choose nothing.

But that’s not the only option. Secretary DeVos, if left to do her job, could pick and choose—getting rid of the regulations Republicans don’t like, while keeping the ones they do. (More on the mechanics in a bit.)

And indeed, there are rules worth saving. Anne Hyslop did us all a great service last week when she detailed forty of the most important provisions in the accountability regulations. The first twenty, as she wrote, codified “additional flexibilities” that ESSA did not explicitly provide to the states. Some of the most important, in my view, include the following permissions:

• States can use the Academic Achievement indicator to give schools partial or extra credit, via an achievement index, for students that are either approaching or exceeding proficiency.
• States may provide school improvement funds under section 1003 to any school identified for comprehensive or targeted support and improvement, even if the identified school does not have a Title I designation.
• States can tailor their English language proficiency (ELP) goals for different groups of English learners, rather than setting a single timeline for achieving ELP that all students must meet.
• States can include the test scores of former students with disabilities in subgroup data for up to two years for accountability purposes.

I’ve been in touch with senior Republican staffers in the Senate who argue that Secretary DeVos can reinstate these same permissions via Dear Colleague letters, guidance, and the like. Perhaps. But as Brandon Wright argues, and as state and local officials know all too well, only regulations have the weight of law; guidance is just that—a suggestion. And compliance-oriented bureaucrats have learned to be careful about adopting policies or practices that aren’t explicitly codified in law or regulation.

That’s because they all can tell you stories about civil servants getting slammed by the green eyeshade gang—especially those from the Office of the Inspector General—for not following the auditors’ interpretation of a law. Take the example above about letting school improvement dollars flow to non-Title I schools. That’s important because many high schools don’t receive a Title I designation, but still might be in need of a turnaround. So can such schools get federal improvement funds or not? Without a regulation on the books, many local officials won’t take the risk of being accused of misallocating federal funds, and thus won’t take the chance of spending millions of dollars on high schools. That has real-world consequences.

Or what about the regulations’ allowance of using an index to measure academic achievement, rather than proficiency rates alone? This is a passion of ours at Fordham, as we think it sends an important signal to schools that the achievement of all kids matters, not just the “bubble kids” near the proficiency line. But states may be afraid to propose a performance index in their ESSA plan if they don’t know if it will be approved—especially if they need to change state law as part of the process.

Senate Republicans, then, should scrap their plan to use the Congressional Review Act to kill all of the accountability regulations outright. Instead, Secretary DeVos should immediately identify the Obama Administration regulations that she and her team do not plan to enforce. (Most of the twenty items on Anne Hyslop’s list of “rules providing consistency, transparency, or clarity” are good candidates.) The rest would remain operative—especially the ones granting states and local officials greater flexibility than the law itself. That would keep the implementation process moving forward, as states prepare their ESSA plans for the April and September deadlines.

Then, on a more leisurely timeline, Secretary DeVos and her team can redo the rulemaking process—officially getting rid of the regulations they don’t like, and keeping the ones they do. (They might also want to add a few, such as ones Christy Wolfe recommends that would promote the cause of parental choice and innovation.)

Senate Republicans have a sledgehammer; Betsy DeVos has a chisel. They should let her use it.

If you want a good cry mixed in with some inspiration, watch noted human rights lawyer and activist Bryan Stevenson give a searing account of bias against the poor and young men of color in a TED Talk about an Injustice. With more than four million views, Stevenson rails against a discriminatory criminal justice system that is disproportionately jailing black men. Indeed, an estimated 516,900 black males were in state or federal prison at year-end 2014, accounting for 37 percent of the male prison population—more than triple their percent in the general population. Asked why the prison population has grown so rapidly, Stevenson says “the great increase in mass incarceration wasn’t really due to violent crime. It was this misguided war on drugs...and three strikes laws that put people in prison forever for low-level property crimes like stealing a bicycle.”

Stevenson is a modern day hero, a fierce advocate for the condemned and wrongly accused. He is right that racism and excessively harsh sentencing laws contribute to the bursting of America’s jails. But even Stevenson’s impassioned oratory does not tell the whole story for why so many crimes are occurring in the first place.

Consider the findings of a powerful longitudinal study that followed a cohort of more than 6,400 young men for more than twenty years from birth through adolescence. This study investigated whether growing up in a fatherless home increased the susceptibility of male youths to a high risk of incarceration. Teenagers who grew up in non-intact families were 250 percent more likely to be locked up than those in married, mother-father families. The report stated that “although youths from father-absent households no longer represent an unusual family situation, there remains a significant divide between their incarceration outcomes and those of youths who grow up in a household with both of their parents.”

The Black Lives Matter movement has also attributed mass incarceration to virulent anti-Black racism, and has galvanized national attention in response to several incidences of police violence in which unarmed black men were killed. But rarely do its leaders ever acknowledge that there is a predictive link between high imprisonment rates and the staggering decline in family stability that now leaves 71 percent of all black babies born out of wedlock. This stunning collapse of family structure is only surpassed by the more than 600 percent increase in out-of-wedlock birth rates over the last five decades that is now decimating a growing number of white families.

Nor do these leaders ever cite other markers of cultural decline, such as when the New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene reported in 2012 that more black babies were aborted than born (31,328 “induced terminations” versus 24,758 live births). Whether you are conservative, liberal, or a pragmatist like me who believes that abortion should be safe, legal and rare, we should all agree that this milestone is indicative of coarsened relationships between men and women, and a social dysfunction that has profound, negative implications for children who are born.

The deafening silence on out-of-wedlock pregnancies and births, and the normally subsequent disruptive environments for raising children, demonstrates that the leaders of the most powerful prison reform and civil rights movements suffer from the same affliction as leaders, researchers, and funders in the education reform community. We share the same unfortunate inability to explicitly acknowledge that when widespread numbers of men in a community — regardless of race—impregnate women but then quit their responsibility to be solid husbands and fathers, there are nearly irreversible emotional, behavioral, and academic consequences on kids who live in those fragmented families.

Yes, black lives matter. Period. I am one. But the above data beg the question: To whom? Each black life, or any life of any race, must matter most to the two people who chose to give birth to and/or raise that girl or boy. No amount of angry protest, liberal guilt, compassionate conservatism, well-intended policy, or impact philanthropy—focused on symptoms versus underlying causes—can replace the fundamental love bestowed by two, married indispensable parents (gay or straight, biological or adoptive) who are ready to raise a child.

To estimate the number of children in kindergarten through twelfth grade who are not being raised in a two-parent, married structure, I compiled the longitudinal birth data in Figure 1 from thirteen “National Vital Statistics Reports” produced by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. From 2000 to 2012, more than 4.5 million babies were born to unwed teenage mothers, and more than 12 million babies were born out of wedlock to women of all races aged twenty four and under. According to the National Campaign to Prevent Teen and Unplanned Pregnancy, somewhere between 70 and 90 percent of these pregnancies were unplanned by these unmarried young people, many of whom already were or became poor.

Figure 1. Children born to unmarried mothers, by age of mother and year of birth

These staggering numbers of children being born outside of marriage are precisely why the education reform community must rethink the role we can and should play in constructing the curriculum to teach the next generation about family formation and the sequence of personal choices that give them the best shot at life fulfillment. While every student should learn these facts, these 12 million boys and girls are in our K–12 schools today, five days a week. They are at the greatest risk of repeating the same cycle of family instability they have likely witnessed every day of their young lives, despite the best efforts of their single parent or whoever stepped in as a guardian to raise them.

Of course in life there are no guarantees. Some troubled children are raised in the most stable of two-parent households. Others thrived, despite chaotic homes. Moreover, I work everyday with extraordinary women and men who have defied the odds. They overcame the challenge of having a child out of wedlock early in their lives and beat back the struggles of being a single parent to raise wonderful, college-bound children. But we know that is the path of most resistance, not least, as it relates to achieving the best outcomes for children.

Maybe one way to look at marriage is how British statesman Sir Winston Churchill referred to democracy in 1947:

Many forms of Government have been tried, and will be tried in this world of sin and woe. No one pretends that democracy is perfect or all-wise. Indeed it has been said that democracy is the worst form of Government except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.…

So perhaps it is that marriage is the worst structure for child-rearing, except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time that have reliably worse outcomes.

Overwhelming research, such as in the recently released study “Strong Families, Successful Students,” demonstrates the inextricable link between family stability and academic outcomes. The report used data from 1,340 Ohio children in the National Survey of Children’s Health. After controlling for student race and ethnicity, parental education, and a number of socioeconomic factors, the report finds that: (1) students from intact, married-parent families were 46 percent less likely to have their parents contacted by their school for negative school behavior; (2) students were 64 percent less likely to be held back in school if they came from a home with intact, married parents; and (3) having stably married parents increased a student’s chances of showing consistent engagement in schoolwork by 43 percent.

* * *

In the management bible Leadership on the Line, the authors encourage leaders to frequently get off the “dance floor” and move to a mental “balcony,” overlooking the people who are engaged in a day-to-day struggle, such as the hard work of educating children or dismantling the school-to-prison pipeline. From this symbolic perch, one can gain perspective from a broader vantage point, see patterns not easily visible from the front lines, and be bold in crafting adaptive solutions that actually confront the real, underlying issues.

As education leaders, researchers, and funders, we must regularly challenge our most deeply held beliefs to solve the riddle of generations of academic failure. We know that our schools do not exist in a vacuum, impenetrable to other forces, most importantly the force of family dysfunction.

My central thesis is that racism and poverty are diminishing in their significance as the causal factor driving the heartbreaking trauma and despair we as educators witness in our students nearly every day. Whether black, brown, or white, the explosion in out-of-wedlock pregnancies and births, and the subsequent normalization of children raised in one-parent homes, are now the most formidable barriers impeding our ability to improve poor academic outcomes.

We must accept the evidence that cultural norms that disassociate childbearing from marriage and family instability—across race and class—are increasingly the greatest determinants of a child's likelihood of life success.

From the balcony, we know the truth. Now let’s teach it to our children. All their lives matter.

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

Pop quiz! Try to solve this word problem. If students in Louisiana make more progress over time than almost any other state’s, does that mean Louisiana’s education policies are working or failing? What if I tell you that Louisiana, despite its impressive gains, still has a long way to go in terms of its students’ absolute performance? Now would you say that its policies are failing?

The right answer, of course, is that Louisiana’s education policies are succeeding. And indeed they are. A recent analysis by the Rand Corporation found that the state’s fourth graders made the greatest gains in reading on the latest National Assessment of Educational Progress; they were tied for first place in math gains. That’s a promising sign that Louisiana’s embrace of higher academic standards, tougher tests, and quality charter schools and school choice is paying off, and the state should stay the course. This rapid improvement should be a source of pride for the state’s policymakers. They inherited a dismally performing system; all they could do was adopt policies that would lead to big gains, mindful that reaching lofty targets would take time.

The same logic applies to educators. They have no control over the academic level of the students who enter their schools and classrooms; all they can do is to help them make as much progress as possible while in their care. So when evaluating schools, the fairest approach is to focus mostly on what they can control: “student growth”—or, in educationese, “value added”—rather than a student’s performance level at one point in time.

Thus the Louisiana Accountability Commission deserves kudos for proposing that the state tweak its A-F school accountability system to focus more on student growth than it has in the past. But instead of applauding the move, The Advocate’s editorial board, plus a coalition of advocacy groups, have criticized it. “Over-emphasizing student progress,” the groups wrote, “is misleading to parents and the public about the performance of the school.”

Misleading parents and the public is of course worrying—but that’s precisely what the current system does. Consider KIPP New Orleans Leadership Academy, a K–8 charter school that gets a perfect 10 out of 10 for the progress its students are making from year to year. Its teachers can’t help it that many of its students come through its doors unprepared for kindergarten. What they can do is help those children make maximum gains every year, by teaching their hearts out, staying late, and pushing their pupils to work hard. These teachers deserve recognition and gratitude. The school deserves plaudits. Yet the current system gives it a mediocre C. Isn’t that misleading to parents and the public? Demoralizing to teachers and students?

If it were up to me, I’d give that school an A-Plus for its awesome learning gains, just as I’d give Louisiana’s policies an A-Plus for leading the nation in learning gains. If that’s too rosy, given how far the school’s students—and the state—still have to go, a B would be reasonable. (That’s probably what KIPP New Orleans Leadership Academy would get under the proposed system, as growth would still count for just a quarter of its overall grade.) What’s unreasonable is arguing that students’ learning gains should count hardly at all, which is how the present system works.

The Advocate and the concerned organizations are right that we have to keep our eyes on the prize—whether children will be prepared to succeed in postsecondary education and on the job. That’s why it’s essential that Louisiana continue to report honestly to parents about whether their own children are on track for that kind of success.

But evaluating schools is another matter. High-growth schools deserve high marks for excellence—which is exactly what they are demonstrating every day of the year.

Editor’s note: A version of this article was first published by The Advocate.

On this week's podcast, special guest Anne Hyslop, a senior associate at Chiefs for Change and an alumna of the Obama Education Department, joins Mike Petrilli and Alyssa Schwenk to discuss Republican efforts to repeal ESSA accountability regulations. During the Research Minute, David Griffith examines how delinquent students affect the achievement of their peers.

David’s Research Minute

Tom Ahn and Justin G. Trogdon, “Peer delinquency and student achievement in middle school,” Labor Economics (January 2017).

My outrageously prolific friend Rick Hess has another new book out, this time co-edited with Max Eden, formerly of AEI and now the Manhattan Institute’s resident D.C. education policy stalwart. It’s all about the Every Student Succeeds Act, which as you know is the latest incarnation of ESEA and such an elusive, ever-changing creature that they were brave to undertake something as long-fused, durable, and static as an actual hard-copy book.

Yes, ESSA’s interpretation and application are in flux, because the federal regulations are in flux, both because the DeVos team is re-examining them at the Education Department and because Congress is on the verge of voiding the whole lot of them, at least those pertaining to accountability, data, and state plans. Publishing an actual book on this topic took chutzpah, as it looks from afar a bit like writing a book about the February weather or the waves at Ocean City.

Yet it turns out that The Every Student Succeeds Act: What It Means for Schools, Systems and States was well worth publishing at this time. Setting aside my own memoir-ish chapter (about a half-century love-hate relationship with ESEA in its many incarnations), I can say with confidence that Hess and Eden rounded up a bunch of very smart and deeply knowledgeable people and that team produced a thoroughly worthy volume about the law itself, where it came from and how it came to be, many of its strengths and shortcomings, and—as the subtitle promises—its complicated implications for states, districts, and schools.

Like any collection of individually-authored essays, it has no single point of view. Indeed, several chapter pairings are intended to present a sort of yin-yang take on ESSA, most conspicuously in Marty West’s thoughtful argument in favor of it combined with Chad Aldeman’s slightly feverish depiction of its wrong-headedness. (Cindy Brown and I also duel a bit about ESEA’s history.) Yet almost every one of the individual chapters supplies important insights and perspectives, and the co-editors do a fine job with a concluding chapter that doesn’t exactly drip with optimism about the law’s prospects but that did add to my own understanding of the “new left-right alliance between teacher unions and small-government conservatives” that lubricated the political compromises that made it possible to get this bill enacted—albeit fourteen long years after NCLB and about seven very long years later than it should have been done.

Several chapters are deeply informative about recent history, both about the rise and fall of NCLB and the sausage-making involved in ESSA. (Alyson Klein’s “inside scoop” is catnip for political junkies.) Going forward, however, perhaps the most useful chapters are Arnold Shober’s, Ashley Jochim’s, and Mike Casserly’s perceptive thoughts on what ESSA portends for states and districts.

For all the talk about how this law restores authority to the states and, in a burst of subsidiarity, empowers practicing educators and real schools to decide what’s best for their pupils, ESSA in fact makes many demands of states (particularly when it comes to reporting), contains more rigidities than its fans have likely spotted, takes for granted many capacities (data, experience, wisdom, courage, horsepower, travel dollars, etc.) that those who are supposed to exercise them may not possess, and empowers them to make decisions that they may not actually want to be responsible for. (For a very long time they’ve been able to say “Uncle Sam makes us do it this way.”)

Shober’s superb analysis of “state capacity and ESSA” deserves special attention (at least by me, perhaps because the state whose school board I’m on is currently struggling with its ESSA plan). After smartly elucidating some ways in which fifty years of being pushed and tugged and directed by Washington have helped prepare states for these newfound flexibilities, he then focuses on the constraints—both political and technical—that will make it hard for many of them to do this well, and he identifies features of the law itself, several of which were news to me) that may frustrate states’ ability to be boldly creative even if they want to be.

For all the appearance of momentary consensus and old-fashioned bipartisanship that accompanied ESSA’s passage, and all the praise lavished upon Senators Lamar Alexander and Patty Murray for getting this ball across the goal line, in truth what they produced is more compromise than consensus, which means it contains much horse-trading and tons of giving and taking, which also means many things were glossed over, intentionally blurred, or entrusted (for clarity) to the regulatory process—the very process that the Obama team overreached in a leftward direction and that the GOP Congress may now overreach toward the right.

The book, on balance, is a fine piece of work. ESSA, however, is precariously balanced between give and take, between Washington and the statehouse, between freedom and constraint. Indeed, it recalls Samuel Johnson’s famous (and sexist) epigram about female preachers: "Sir, a woman's preaching is like a dog's walking on his hind legs. It is not done well; but you are surprised to find it done at all."

SOURCE: Frederick M. Hess and Max Eden, eds., The Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA): What It Means for Schools, Systems, and States (Harvard Education Press, 2017). 

It’s no secret that dismissing an ineffective teacher is exceedingly difficult. It’s why we recently recommended that states and districts take the tenure process seriously rather than rubber-stamping every eligible teacher for approval. So what happens when a state chooses to do just that and more?

This study examines the effects of changing teacher tenure policy in Louisiana. In 2012, Louisiana passed a law that made tenure contingent on how a teacher performed on the state’s teacher effectiveness measure, known as Compass. The law extended the time to tenure and made tenure status contingent upon Compass performance. For untenured teachers, as of the beginning of 2012–13 school year, tenure would be granted only after he or she received a highly-effective Compass rating for five out of six consecutive years. Further, tenure status is revoked if a teacher is rated ineffective once and that teacher has to regain tenure by receiving consecutive highly-effective ratings.

Analysts use teacher employment records—specifically, summer exits—from a period before the reform (2006–11) compared to teacher exits for two years after the reform (2012–13). The analysis attempts to control for other things that might be responsible for a change in exit rates, like an aging workforce or more challenging working conditions, and by comparing teachers with similar characteristics. But it is nonetheless very difficult to control for everything else that might also be occurring during the same period as the tenure reform.

There are four key findings. First, once the tenure reforms were adopted, the overall teacher exit rate for all traditional public school teachers increased by 1.5 percentage points; in raw numbers an estimated 1,500 to 1,700 left in the first two years after the tenure reform. Second, the effects were greatest for teachers who were eligible for retirement with immediate, full pension benefits (who tended to be the teachers with at least twenty-five years of experience). Third, the increase in teacher exits was highest in schools with the lowest standardized test scores. Schools with a letter grade of F on the state report card saw exits increase from 7.4 percent to 9.4 percent, while A rated schools saw no change. Fourth, exits for fourth-year teachers jumped 3.6 percentage points after the reform—this is the group that used to get granted tenure before the reform took place.

The study does not include teacher effectiveness data so we have no idea whether the least effective educators were most likely to exit. Whether this reform had a positive or negative impact on the quality of the workforce is a question that needs an answer. Unfortunately, this report doesn’t provide it.

SOURCE: Katharine O. Strunk et al., “When tenure ends: Teacher turnover in response to policy changes in Louisiana,” Education Research Alliance for New Orleans, Tulane University (February 2017).

A recent study examines whether federal school improvement grants (SIGs) improved student outcomes in low-achieving schools, which as a condition of accepting the money had to use one of four school-improvement models: turnaround, transformation, closure, or restart. The program also recommended specific practices, such as comprehensive instructional reforms and changes to teacher and principal training. (It should also be noted that the Every Student Succeeds Act eliminated the SIG program, giving states more control over their turnaround efforts.)

The study compares 490 schools SIG and similarly-situated non-SIG schools across twenty-two states using a three analyses over a four-year period: a regressive analysis using 2010–11 and 2012–13 student test data; surveys of school administrators in 2011–12 and 2012–13; and a correlative study conducted in 2009–2010 and 2012–13.

The most important finding came from the regression analysis, and it’s that SIG dollars and tactics failed to improve math and reading scores, graduation rates, and college enrollment, when those schools are compared to similar non-SIG schools. This is in line with other recent studies on the same effects.

The results of the other two research methods are also, however, worth noting. The survey was designed to facilitate qualitative comparisons between SIG and non-SIG (but nevertheless low-achieving) schools. Researchers asked administrators about their schools’ improvement efforts in the areas of instruction, teacher and principal effectiveness, learning time, and operational flexibility. The results suggest grant-receiving schools used more of the SIG program’s recommended practices than low-performing schools that didn’t receive funds. This, if true, would of course pile on to the regression analysis’s woeful findings of SIG-program ineffectiveness.

The results of the correlative analysis were a little less glum. Researchers perused the SIG data, looking for trends and correlations (i.e., nothing statistically significant) in math- and reading-score changes between 2009–10 and 2012–13. On the one hand, there were some signs that the turnaround model—one of the four program-mandated school-turnaround strategies—may have boosted, however slightly, student math marks. On the other hand, graduation rates might’ve slightly decreased in SIG schools. So, on net, the news here isn’t great, either.

School improvement grants were, of course, well-intentioned, but at some point we ought to abandon policies that aren’t having the desired effect. Andy Smarick—who long ago foresaw this failure and recently asked whether the SIG program is “greatest failure in the history of the U.S. Department of Education”—thinks it’s past time for states to jump ship. But Morgan Polikoff last month cautioned against the impulse to prematurely judge policy effectiveness. Although “the recent impact evaluation [of the SIG program] was neutral,” he said, “several studies have found positive effects and many have found impacts that grow as the years progress, suggesting that longer-term evaluations may yet show effects.” The good news is that the Every Student Succeeds Act wisely allows states to make that determination for themselves.

SOURCE: Lisa Dragoset, et al., “School Improvement Grants: Implementation and Effectiveness,” Mathematica Policy Research (January 2017).