The Education Gadfly Weekly

This week, the U.S. Department of Education released the final version of regulations to implement the Every Student Succeeds Act’s accountability provisions. It incorporates feedback the agency received on its earlier draft, and reveals a number of changes. One of these is particularly praiseworthy: States can now create accountability systems that measure student achievement at multiple levels—not just “proficient”—using a performance index.

Despite the good intentions of No Child Left Behind, which ESSA replaced a year ago, it erred by encouraging states to focus almost exclusively on helping low-performing students achieve proficiency and graduate from high school. Consequently, many schools ignored pupils who would easily pass state reading and math tests and earn diplomas regardless of what happened in the classroom—a particularly pernicious problem for high-achieving poor and minority children, whose schools generally serve many struggling students. This may be why the United States has seen significant achievement growth and improved graduation rates for its lowest performers over the last twenty years but lesser gains for its top students.

The Every Student Succeeds Act requires the use of an academic achievement indicator that “measures proficiency on the statewide assessments in reading/language arts and mathematics.” There are, however, multiple ways to interpret this. And the Department of Education’s earlier version of proposed regulations seemed to expect states to use proficiency rates alone to fulfill this requirement and gauge school performance. Such a mistake would have merely extended NCLB’s aforementioned flaw.

That is why, in recent reports and letters, we at Fordham and our colleagues in other organizations urged the Department to rethink that provision and allow states to rate achievement using a performance index. Schools would continue to track the percentage of students who attain proficiency on state tests, but they’d receive additional credit for getting students to an “advanced” level of performance—such as level four on Smarter Balanced or level five on PARCC—a smart policy for encouraging sustained achievement for high-flying youngsters.

Mirabile dictu, the final regulations do just that:

Achievement indicator must include a measure of student performance at the proficient level against a State’s academic achievement standards, and may also include measures of student performance below or above the proficient level, so long as (1) a school receives less credit for the performance of a student that is not yet proficient than for the performance of a student at or above the proficient level; and (2) the credit a school receives for the performance of a more advanced student does not fully compensate for the performance of a student who is not yet proficient. (Emphasis added.)

Proficiency is still the central measure per the regulation, but now a state can incent its schools to focus on all kids. For example, states can create an achievement index that gives schools partial credit for getting students to a basic level, full credit for getting them to proficient, and extra credit when they attain the advanced level.

By gauging the performance of students at three or more achievement levels instead of just one, such models also better inform educators, administrators, policymakers, and parents so they can make sounder choices. The mother of a high achiever can know whether her child’s school is doing well by similarly able students. Teachers and principals can track the effectiveness of their curricula and pedagogical techniques. And state education officials get more complete and nuanced pictures of their schools that better aid their decisions, rules, and regulations.

One of ESSA’s best features is the autonomy it gives back to states. Yet that also means that the burden now rests with every one of them to create an accountability system that goes beyond proficiency when measuring pupil and school achievement. Currently, sixteen states and the District of Columbia rate, or plan to rate, their high schools’ achievement using such a model. For grades Kindergarten through eight, fourteen jurisdictions have such a practice or intention. The new regulations mean these states can and should stay the course. And for the three-dozen states with work to do, the regs confirm that performance indexes are allowed—so there’s no excuse to forego them.

Wild cards in all this are President-elect Donald Trump and incoming Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos. No one knows what they’ll do with the Education Department, let alone with its recent regulations. But their records—especially DeVos’s—suggest that any changes will give even more power to states, not less. It’s therefore unlikely that states will lose the ability to use a performance index—and likely that proficiency-dominated accountability is gone for good.

In any event, the current administration deserves credit for considering feedback and, at least in this case, responding to critics who said it was devising regulations that ESSA didn’t authorize—and in some cases even prohibited. The Department still tends to overreach, and the new rules aren’t perfect, but they’re a step in the right direction for school accountability. 

Back in September, with the presidential election and Freddie Gray’s death as backdrops, my sister organization MarylandCAN hosted 50CAN’s annual summit in Baltimore, which included a dinner at the church of one of its board members. The city’s Sandtown-Winchester neighborhood, where Gray lived and where I grew up many years ago, had been on my mind a lot during the days leading up to the trip, and I felt distant as we boarded the bus and started our ride to the church from downtown.

Baltimore is a distinct city, and it is a deeply familiar place if you have lived there. But as the bus turned onto Calhoun Street, I realized that it was familiar not because we were driving through Baltimore but because we were driving through my old neighborhood. Down the very streets I used to walk. On one side, there was the staccato of boarded-up row houses and the occasional stoop with small kids playing. On the other, the first school I attended; then the corner where I rode my bike. And, just out of sight, the little red house of my childhood—now an empty and collapsing husk.

I mentioned this, quietly, to two of the people sitting closest on the bus, and it sounded like thunder. I talk of the place often, but I don’t think any of my colleagues understood that “this” place was the one I meant: a place where the majority of houses sat vacant, a community devoid of its people—and opportunity.

An eerie calm hung over everyone, making the bright edges of the sparse conversations blunt and dull. And in my head, all I could think was: If I had to wait for this neighborhood's school system to right itself—or a “talent strategy” to be implemented, or for the central office to “right-size”—I very likely would still be sitting there, watching this bus roll by, speeding away with one of my life’s possible futures locked up in it.

Instead, a scholarship to the right school—a private school in a time before charter schools even existed—lifted me up and made my education possible. It wasn’t a reform that took years of pursuing; it was a scholarship implemented on a single day with my admission to school. I did not have to wait. Why should any child?

With the nomination of Betsy DeVos—the soon-to-be former chair of the American Federation for Children and a lifelong school-choice advocate—as the next secretary of education, many folks are now trying to understand for the very first time the role vouchers and private school choice play in the reform universe. Over the holiday weekend, several people approached me to ask where I stand on them as a matter of public policy and principle.

For clarity and context, a “voucher” is a way to pay for something, and in this case that something is private school. There are numerous devices that can achieve this goal (tax credits and education savings accounts, for instance), and some offer greater flexibility than others, but through the policy lens, they all accomplish the same thing: giving families and children who would not normally have the chance to choose private school the opportunity to do so. There are different flavors of private-school-choice advocacy, just like there are different flavors of charter-school advocacy, but they are broadly unified by this goal: more choices, more opportunities.

Private-school-choice supporters (among the bedrock of the reform universe writ large, as their advocacy typically crosses sectors and supports the work of those reforming school districts as well—support that is, incidentally, infrequently returned) have two general overriding philosophies. One is that competition and the marketplace, driven by parent choice, are the best ways to create, reward and regulate schools. They believe the government should not have a monopoly over the operation of schools with enrollment based on ZIP code. They also believe—and the research shows—that competition can drive improvement in public schools through the pressure generated by parental choice.

The second guiding belief is that there is something fundamental in the right to choose and in the ability of the right school to actualize human potential, in particular for low-income kids of color who grow up in places like Sandtown-Winchester. Which is to say, there is a moral imperative about the future of children who traditionally don’t have access to great schools that animates the support of the policy. These sorts of dichotomies are all the rage in education reform right now, but they are an older and long-standing dinner-table exchange among the private-school-choice set.

I am a fierce supporter of school choice—and that includes vouchers, tax credits, opportunity scholarships and all the other devices that make private schools part of the choice equation—and I am broadly on team two, believing we have a moral obligation to empower parents with more choices and greater freedom in how they choose to educate their child. My reasons are simple. Every local public school is not the right fit for every child, and no child should have to wait for a school to get better when there are other opportunities available regardless of governance. Nothing less than a child’s future is at stake every day they attend a school that is the wrong fit or that does not work simply because they did not win the parent lottery.

As we’ve heard since the DeVos announcement on Wednesday, some education pundits seem to believe that supporting vouchers is dooming the republic; that there is some larger good served by state-run school monopolies where low-income kids have the least leverage and the least opportunity. Though his support of charter schools has been laudable, one of these people, President Obama, currently sits in the White House. I’ve always found the president’s blind spot on private-school choice troubling given his own schooling, which included St. Francis of Assisi and the prestigious Punahou School in Honolulu, which he attended from grades five to twelve—on a scholarship. Though he is not the first political figure to ignore that his own life and success were profoundly affected by a private school, his lapse on this issue may be the most profound given his role as the country’s first black president. I’ve agreed with the president on a great many things, but in denying children the same opportunities we both had, we will disagree violently and always.

I imagine this discussion of private-school choice will only intensify as Betsy DeVos makes her full-blown transition to Secretary DeVos, working across states and in concert with Congress to create leverage for greater educational opportunity than exists today. From a technical perspective, this will prove difficult given the limited role the Department of Education is allowed to play within the framework of the Every Student Succeeds Act—a limiting supported by numerous Democrats in addition to Republicans. What the policy ultimately looks like may also be a creature of what is politically possible given the congressional agenda and the backlash in certain states against perceived meddling from the federal government. But those big caveats aside, it seems likely that “choice” in its broadest form will be a priority of both DeVos and the President-elect’s DOE.

But while lobbyists and editorialists bicker over the role vouchers and scholarships should play, I’ll be thinking of the kids in Sandtown, who need DeVos to use every bit of leverage she has, and to use it as quickly as possible.

When discussing the power of levers, Archimedes said, “Give me a place to stand, and I will move the earth.” I imagine that, for Secretary DeVos, that place will be the Department of Education and that lever will be school choice. And for far too many children, who have been relegated to the margins of our priorities for far too long, she can’t start pulling on it soon enough.

Editor’s Note: This article originally appeared in a slightly different form in The 74.

On this week's podcast, special guest Lisa Graham Keegan, executive director of A for Arizona, joins Mike Petrilli and Alyssa Schwenk to discuss the pros and cons of a big federal push on school choice. On the Research Minute, David Griffith teams up with Matthew Ladner, Senior Research Fellow at the Charles Koch Institute, to examine the effects of teacher turnover on instructional quality.

David's Research Minute

Eric A. Hanushek, Steven G. Rivkin, and Jeffrey C. Schiman, “Dynamic Effects of Teacher Turnover on the Quality of Instruction,” CALDER (November 2016).

From the latest issue of the journal Economics in Education Review comes a fascinating paper in which author Metin Akyol creates mathematical models that simulate the effects of private school vouchers on the overall education system. It is not a study of an actual voucher program, but instead a thought experiment meant to test whether both universal and targeted voucher programs can increase the efficiency of the education system as a whole. As strange as this may seem to lay readers, there is in fact a long history of such econometric analyses—and their findings are often worthy of consideration.

Akyol’s complex model can’t be fully explained in this short review, but some features are worth noting. It incorporates the findings of empirical voucher studies to increase its reliability. It simplifies the real world in an effort to find the signal in the noise. Every household therefore has only one child, and the hypothetical school district has neither magnet schools nor charters. And one of its defining assumptions is that more efficient public school spending is an effective proxy for increased educational quality. In other words, it presumes that the money saved by greater efficiency can be reinvested in ways that improve outcomes.

Regardless of how one feels about all this, the model ends up producing outcomes that are very similar to empirical findings regarding actual programs. In one important example, the positive effects on voucher-eligible students who do not opt to leave their district school (found empirically by David Figlio in Ohio) are predicted in Akyol’s targeted-voucher model. Public schools in the model are observed to “up their academic game” to retain students when voucher competition is introduced. Additionally, the model predicts that students lowest on the income scale will be least likely to use vouchers, even in a model where vouchers are universally available and not means-tested. This stands to reason, considering that real-world vouchers often fall short of full private school tuition. (To some extent, it was also borne out in Figlio’s research.) 

Also interesting is the difference in effects between a universal voucher program and a targeted one. Akyol ran models that replicate the prime goal of vouchers—make private schools affordable for more children—in two ways: by manipulating the voucher availability and by simply changing the family income distribution. The results were not the same. The universal voucher model led to an observable decline in “peer group quality” for those students at the lowest end of the income spectrum who did not take the vouchers. This decline in quality was also present to a lesser extent in the model where vouchers were targeted at low-income students. But it was absent in a model that gave high-ability students lower voucher amounts than their lower-ability peers. This appears to be the theoretical sweet spot that results in the most favorable overall outcome: more students were able to access private schools, and public schools felt the competition keenly enough to improve their academics for the students who remained.

None of this means we must redesign real-world voucher programs based on any one of the mathematical models presented in this paper. But to the extent that modeling can predict real-world outcomes, choice advocates and policymakers ought to consider the results, which can elucidate the potential benefits and challenges of particular voucher designs. If the incoming Trump/DeVos education department is going to prioritize vouchers as a means for improving education, Akyol’s mathematical models have at the very least led him to offer some sage advice: “…the outcomes of a voucher program hinge on its design.”

SOURCE: Metin Akyol, “Do educational vouchers reduce inequality and inefficiency in education?” Economics of Education Review (December, 2016).

A new analysis conducted by a research team at Duke University examines the effects of two North Carolina early-childhood programs on students’ educational outcomes in elementary school.

The first, Smart Start (SS), is a state-funded early-childcare program focused on improving academic, social, and health outcomes from birth to age four. It’s open to all children in the state but, in practice, targets disadvantaged ones. The second, More at Four (MAF), is North Carolina’s state-funded pre-K program for at-risk four-year-olds, and aims to improve Kindergarten readiness.

Researchers analyzed state records and school enrollment data from North Carolina’s Education Research Data Center to estimate the impact of state funding for these programs on student outcomes through the end of elementary school (based on funding per county). Their sample was all children who attended a public school in the state between 1995 and 2012—really impressive in size. They also used a regression analysis and controlled for variables such as race, mother’s level of education, and prior test scores.

Outcomes of interest were math and reading scores based on end-of-grade standardized tests, special-education placements, and grade retention. Key questions were whether the program effects were positive, and whether they persisted or faded out by the end of elementary school.  

The analysts found that SS allocations had a significant but marginally positive effect on students’ math and reading scores. MAF allocations were also significantly and positively associated with higher math scores and reading scores. Cumulatively, effects translated into about two to six months of additional learning gained for SS and MAF in both subjects. 

They also found that average SS funding reduced the probability of students being placed in special education by 10 percent, and MAF funding reduced the possibility by up to a whopping 48 percent. Both programs slightly reduced the probability of grade retention by grade 5. Finally, when broken down by Free and Reduced-Price Lunch participants and non-participants, the effects remained positive for all students, but were stronger for lower-income students.

Overall, these findings indicate that North Carolina’s investment in early childhood programs is associated with improved educational outcomes for students in terms of math and reading scores, reductions in special education rates, and diminished incidence of grade retention. Importantly, these effects don’t appear to fade during the elementary grades. More research should, however, be conducted to assess whether benefits are sustained into middle and high school years, and how many resources might be saved by fewer students requiring special education services and grade retention.

Kenneth A. Dodge et al., "Impact of North Carolina’s Early Childhood Programs and Policies on Educational Outcomes In Elementary School," Duke Center for Child and Family Policy (November 2016).