The Education Gadfly Weekly

The Bernie Sanders/Elizabeth Warren/Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez wing of the Democratic Party hasn’t won a lot of primaries this summer, but time may be on their side. (Well, Sanders himself will soon turn seventy-eight and may not want to wait…) So one can infer from an alarming survey of young Americans between the ages of eighteen and thirty-four undertaken a few months back by the University of Chicago’s GenForward project. As summarized by the Chicago Tribune’s inimitable Steve Chapman, “49 percent in this group hold a favorable opinion of capitalism—and 45 percent have a positive view of socialism. Socialism gets higher marks than capitalism from Hispanics, Asian-Americans, and African-Americans. Sixty-one percent of Democrats take a positive view of socialism—and so do 25 percent of Republicans. (emphasis his)”

This peek into a possible sea change in the country’s economic future grows considerably more alarming when we pause to note what some energetic socialist writers are saying about America itself and about our fundamental political structure. Consider the stunning—no, appalling—column in the New York Times last week by two staffers from the socialist magazine Jacobin.

“[T]he subversion of democracy,” they wrote, citing Madison and Federalist No. 10 as exhibit A, “was the explicit intent of the Constitution’s framers.” “The byzantine Constitution he helped create,” they continued, “serves as the foundation for a system of government that rules over people, rather than an evolving tool for popular self-government…. These perspectives are vital at a time when many progressives regard the Constitution as our only line of defense against a would-be autocrat in the White House.” In its place, they seek “a new political system that truly represents Americans. Our ideal should be a strong federal government powered by a proportionally elected unicameral legislature.”

That’s not just socialism as an alternative economic regimen. It’s an entire “new political system.” And it’s madness.

Which brings us to education, particularly the imperative for schools to deliver a thorough and proper education in civics, history, philosophy, and economics—and the capacity for deep reading and critical thinking that might help readers grasp the depth of the lunacy that we see here. One need not emerge from school and college in love with capitalism or democracy, and it’s the job of schools and colleges to present other ways of organizing economies and systems of governance, but it’s also the obligation of schools to build strong foundations under tomorrow’s citizens. Those foundations include—as the social studies crowd likes to put it—“deep and enduring understandings, concepts, and skills from the disciplines. Social studies emphasizes skills and practices as preparation for democratic decision-making.”

How and why did the U.S. Constitution come about? Why was such a document needed? How does the political and governmental framework that it created differ from those that it replaced—both the Articles of Confederation and George III’s monarchy? How to compare the pros and cons of each?

Why were the Federalist Papers written, and what are their messages? According to most scholars, the central point of No. 10—perhaps the most famous of them all—was to explain the need for a strong central government to mediate and contain the dangers posed by factions, a problem that the several states—and the Confederation—had failed to solve. Madison allowed as how—lots of folks are recalling this today—the occasional bad apple might slip into the governmental barrel, even get elected to high office, but constitutional democracy was the surest hedge against this happening very often—and to limiting the damage when it did.

To charge Madison and his colleagues with contriving to subvert the very democratic system they were creating and defending is ahistorical madness. And it’s the solemn responsibility of our schools to educate young Americans in ways that enable them to recognize that—and reject it.

As for socialism, any decent world history or comparative economics curriculum will include a close look at places where it’s actually been tried—and how well that did or didn’t work. Where an authoritarian government forces it upon a society, it seems to work for a while, but in time it leads to repression, famine, political prisoners, and a more or less total collapse of human rights. A truly “socialist” society—in which everything gets decided “democratically”—eventually, even axiomatically, brings corruption and tyranny.

Madison understood that, too, and so should young Americans by the time they’ve completed a proper K–12 education. They would also do well to understand—as the writer Jonah Goldberg expertly points out in a powerful and troubling new book—that democratic capitalism has bequeathed riches upon America and much of the world beyond the founders’ wildest dreams. That fact doesn’t necessarily point us toward either more government and redistribution of resources, as the left wants, or less of both, as the right wants. But surely we should teach our kids how full-on socialism has ended whenever and wherever it’s been imposed.

Editor’s note: This article originally appeared in a slightly different form on CenterPoint Education Solutions’ blog.

There is no doubt that the quality of instructional materials makes a real difference in schools and classrooms (see a great roundup of recent studies in Ashley Berner’s recent blog post here). We know we are unlikely to achieve the real power of those materials—and their potential to help educators serve all students—until we invest in building the capacity of educators to understand and implement those materials with integrity.

Learning Forward’s recent whitepaper, High-quality curricula and team-based professional learning: A perfect partnership for equity, explores how team-based inquiry cycles offer teachers meaningful, frequent opportunities to dive deep into the academic content of the materials they use with students along with the resources and context essential to supporting such learning.

We have long advocated for job-embedded collaborative professional learning for educators, as outlined in the Standards for Professional Learning. Policy at the national level in the U.S. offers an exciting lever for advancing effective professional learning with the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA), which includes a definition of professional learning aligned with these standards. The definition states that professional development is “sustained (not stand-alone, one-day, or short-term workshops), intensive, job-embedded, data-driven, and classroom-focused,” essential elements to ensuring teachers have time to study and implement high-quality materials. (See the full ESSA definition here.)

As I consider starting points for how schools and districts might plan their professional learning to align with the ESSA definition, particularly related to understanding and using instructional materials, I’d suggest these key shifts:

With each research study and example of effective use of materials, we more fully understand how much curriculum matters. I’m determined that professional learning always go hand-in-hand with robust academic materials so each student has the opportunity to experience great teaching every day. As schools and school systems make these shifts, educators will have the support they need to use data about what their students need to set their own learning goals and learning agendas. These educators, through their learning, will come to each class equipped with knowledge about the materials their students are using and with the instructional strategies required to adapt materials for the particular students they serve.

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

On this week's podcast, Sekou Biddle, a vice president at UNCF, joins Mike Petrilli and David Griffith to discuss African American youth’s near-universal aspirations to go to college, but frustration at an education system that is not preparing them for success. On the Research Minute, Amber Northern covers a new comprehensive look at America’s colleges of education.

Amber’s Research Minute

Jacqueline E. King, “Colleges of Education: A National Portrait,” American Association of Colleges for Teacher Education (August 2018).

Educators have rightfully complained for ages that the professional development (PD) that they typically receive in school districts is next to useless. And countless studies have shown that most forms of PD fail to help teachers improve.

A new meta-analysis by Brown University’s Matthew Kraft and colleagues tries to separate the empirical wheat from the chaff by examining the causal evidence (only) for one PD model that is very popular in schools: teacher coaching. They define coaching programs broadly as in-service PD where coaches or peers observe teachers’ instruction and provide feedback to help them improve. More specifically, coaching is an instructional expert working with teachers to discuss classroom practice in a way that is (a) individualized—coaching sessions are one-on-one; (b) intensive—coaches and teachers interact at least every two weeks; (c) sustained—teachers receive coaching over an extended period of time; (d) context specific—teachers are coached on their practices within the context of their own classroom; and (e) focused—coaches work with teachers to engage in deliberate practice of specific skills. They exclude teacher preparation and school-based teacher induction programs.

They identify sixty studies of teacher coaching programs, including fifty-five in the United States and five in Chile and Canada. Each had a causal research design (mostly randomized controlled trials), as well as examined the effects of coaching on both instruction and achievement. All of the included studies were published during or before 2017, met the coaching definition summarized above, and took place in early childhood through grade twelve settings.

Data sources included a range of standardized test scores, data from classroom observation instruments that captured teachers’ pedagogical practices, and measures of teacher-student interactions, student engagement, and classroom climate. The meta-analysis leveraged increased statistical power by pooling results across multiple studies.

In a nutshell, analysts find pooled effect sizes of 0.49 standard deviations (SD) on instruction and 0.18 SD on achievement. They find no statistically significant effects on student achievement for general coaching programs, but do find them for content-specific programs (0.20 SD), positing that the former are often focused less on helping teachers improve test scores. Further, coaching was equally effective at the elementary, middle, and high school levels. Surprisingly, they did not find significant differences in effect sizes for coaching programs that were delivered in-person versus virtually, although the latter data are less reliable. They also fail to find evidence that coaching must be “high dosage” to be effective. Finally, their results show that the average effects from larger programs are only a fraction of those found in smaller programs. Specifically, in comparing programs with fewer than one hundred teachers to those that exceed that number, they find diminishing effects as programs are taken to the larger scale.

Thankfully, some teachers have not completely soured on the power of professional development, done right, to help them improve. And we’ve heard for years that PD can be much better than it’s traditionally been, as long as it is content-based, collaborative, sustained, supportive, and so on. But those are simple words that are hard to put into effective practice. That’s why the report’s major recommendation—based in both rigorous science and common sense—is so helpful: “It may be that coaching is best utilized as a targeted program with a small corps of expert coaches working with willing participants and committed schools rather than as a district-wide PD program.” Yes, yes indeed—this former teacher agrees. That very well may be.

SOURCE: Matthew A. Kraft et al., “The Effect of Teacher Coaching on Instruction and Achievement: A Meta-Analysis of the Causal Evidence,” Review of Educational Research (August 2018).

A new American Institutes for Research report takes an in-depth look at Texas’s dual-credit programs, which allow high school students to enroll in a college-level course and receive simultaneous academic credit from both their high school and a college. This is the second phase of a two-year study. The first phase was conducted by RAND, and is currently in the midst of a public comment period that the authors plan to use to shape “practical policy recommendations.” The analysis focuses primarily on “traditional” dual-credit education programs delivered by community colleges, which means that academic dual-credit courses are offered through regular high schools, not early-college high schools.

Texas is an ideal state to conduct such a study because its dual-credit landscape has grown dramatically. From 2000 to 2016, the number of high schoolers taking at least one dual-credit course rose from 18,524 to 204,286, an increase of more than 1,100 percent. There are two reasons for this growth: First, state legislation has made it easier for more students to participate. Second, colleges and universities have taken advantage of expanding access by promoting dual-credit as a strategy to improve college access and completion.

The phase-two report is a whopping five chapters, but this particular review will focus only on the first, which contains quantitative analysis of three research questions: Which factors contributed to racial and ethnic disparities in dual-credit participation? To what extent did dual-credit education increase college enrollment, credential attainment, and efficient degree completion? And what changes in dual-credit participation, success, and delivery have occurred since the passage of the state’s HB 505, which in 2015 removed limitations on the number of dual-credit courses a student may take during high school and during each academic year, and expanded dual-credit access to ninth and tenth grade students?

To answer these questions, the authors tracked Texas public school students through high school and into public colleges or universities in the state using databases from the Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board (THECB) and the Texas Education Agency (TEA), as well as data from the National Student Clearinghouse.

RAND’s phase-one report documented disparities in dual-credit participation across race and ethnicity and mainly found that white and Asian students had higher participation rates than their black and Hispanic peers. The phase-two report seeks to build on these findings by using descriptive analyses to assess how six different factors could have contributed to these gaps, including: access to dual-credit across high schools; academic preparation as measured by scores on state math and reading achievement tests in the eighth grade; income as measured by eligibility for free or reduced price lunch (FRPL); access to alternative forms of advanced coursework like Advanced Placement or International Baccalaureate courses; access to tuition and fee waivers; and the type of high school a student attended.

Overall, the analyses suggest that if underrepresented minorities were equally prepared academically, had similar incomes to, and attended similar schools as white students—schools that are well-resourced, actively promote dual-credit opportunities, and do a good job of academic preparation—then gaps in dual-credit participation would be quite small.

The phase-one report focused on data from before the implementation of HB 505, but the phase-two report examines changes in student participation and outcomes, as well as dual-credit course delivery post-HB 505. Results show that the overall participation rate held relatively steady, while participation among ninth and tenth graders increased significantly from 1 percent to 2.1 percent for ninth graders and from 2.7 percent to 4.3 percent for tenth graders. Course offerings also remained about the same, with the most common courses being English composition, government, history, economics, and college algebra. The percentage of courses that were taught face-to-face and on college campuses held steady, as did the share of courses that were academic versus part of a career and technical education program. Results show little evidence that the academic preparation of dual-credit participants changed overall; participants scored above the statewide average on eight grade math and reading standardized tests before and after HB 505. But the academic preparation of ninth and tenth graders declined even though they continued to score above average. The data also show slightly higher grades in dual-credit courses since HB 505, especially for ninth graders. Because the academic preparation of ninth and tenth graders has declined, the authors suspect that instructors lowered standards to prevent success rates from dropping.

Although the initial study found that dual-credit students had higher college enrollment rates after they graduated from high school and were significantly more likely to persist in and complete college than students who did not participate, it did not determine whether these benefits were directly attributable to their participation in dual-credit programs or another factor. To answer this question, the authors designed a quasi-experimental analysis to compare outcomes for similar students with the only difference being access to and enrollment in dual-credit courses. They controlled for observable student characteristics such as race and ethnicity, FRPL eligibility, eighth grade standardized test scores, and differences across high schools. Results confirmed that dual-credit participants enjoyed better outcomes than non-participants, but the differences on a variety of outcomes were driven by self-selection—unobservable characteristics of students who enrolled in dual-credit programs. Indeed, self-selection caused most of the observable differences between participants and non-participants when it came to high school completion, college enrollment rates, and college completion rates. There was also no increase in college completion at two- or four-year colleges among black and Hispanic students, though participation did increase enrollment at two-year colleges. And participation created large negative effects on most outcomes for students who were FRPL eligible—a result the authors say is likely due to lower academic preparation levels among low-income students.

Unsurprisingly, the data show that students with better academic preparation benefit more from their participation in dual-credit programs. And although dual-credit participation improved a variety of student outcomes on average, the causal impact analysis shows that the effects are far more modest than previous reports—including the phase-one report—suggest. The upshot is that dual-credit serves academically prepared kids really well. Kids who aren’t as well prepared? Maybe not.

SOURCE: Trey Miller et al., “Dual-Credit Education Programs in Texas: Phase II,” American Institutes for Research (July 2018).