The Education Gadfly Weekly

Every child should be in a school where he or she can learn effectively. That’s not a controversial goal in itself, but the methods meant to accomplish it can become hot buttons. That was the case with No Child Left Behind (NCLB), which made the goal a national policy. It’s also becoming the case with the Common Core, under which states commit to educate children to rigorous standards.

Actions taken in pursuit of the goal are controversial because they are inevitably difficult and complicated. There is a lot of work of many kinds to be done: improving teacher training, experimenting with more effective methods, and continuously enhancing learning opportunities for children. Moreover, none of these tasks are enough by themselves. What ties them together is accountability—the use of standards, measures, judgments, and remedies to ensure that students are making significant progress over time and, if some are not, to ensure that they have access to better opportunities.  

Accountability is where the rubber meets the road. And, thanks to NCLB, we have unprecedented data about schools, students, and teachers. We have a sharper focus on students who are failing in schools that serve the average student well. States and localities have new tests to provide early warning when children are not learning, and have tied these results to remedial action and school closure or replacement.

But we are still struggling to get accountability right. In particular, the current backlash against testing is understandable: Tests are imperfect, and if we rely on them too much, they can produce misleading results and distort teacher behavior in negative ways. This is particularly true if we try to use test results to determine teacher employment, dismissal, and pay.

But the need remains. States can’t require parents to send their children to school without saying what they are supposed to learn, and making sure they do learn. In America, it is never enough to say, “Just trust us,” no matter whether “us” is the government, the schools, or teachers.

Earlier this year, a bipartisan and multi-disciplinary group of analysts and educators met to work on our unsolved accountability problem. Everyone in the group believed accountability was necessary, but all agreed that we had not been going about it right. Under the leadership of the three of us, the group formulated a set of principles to guide our search for the best way to redesign school accountability systems that can help states deliver on the promise of Common Core. These include:

• All parents need to know immediately when, based on current achievement levels and trajectories, their children are not likely to graduate high school or be ready for college or a rewarding, career-ladder job.
• Student test scores are indispensable as timely indicators of student and school progress. But they should be considered along with other valid indicators, e.g., course completion and normal progress toward graduation.
• Every family should have the choice among public schools that are demonstrably capable of educating children well. 
• States and school districts must support creation of new options for kids who are not learning.
• School leaders must have enough freedom to lead their schools and take responsibility for the results they get.
• States should hold schools, not only individual teachers, accountable for student progress.

These principles are just a start, but they can ground a productive debate. There is still plenty to argue and worry about, for example:

• How to avoid specifying outcomes so exhaustively that schools are unable to innovate and solve problems.
• How to drive continuous improvement in all schools, not just the lowest performing.
• How to coordinate and limit federal, state, and district demands for data.
• How to prevent cheating on tests and other outcome measures.
• How to motivate students to do their best in school and on assessments.
• How to give children at risk new options without causing a constant churn in their educational experience.
• How to adjust measurement and accountability to innovations in instruction and technology.

These problems are solvable, but they require serious work, not sniping among rival camps. It is time to start working through the problems of accountability, with discipline, open-mindedness, and flexibility.

We are eager to work with others, including critics of tests and accountability. Issues of measurement, system design, and implementation must be addressed, carefully and through disciplined trials.

Will you join us?

This first appeared on the Center for Reinventing Public Education’s blog

photo credit: alternatePhotography via photopin cc cc

Among opponents of the Common Core, one of the more popular targets of vitriol is the standards’ focus on improving literacy by introducing higher levels of textual complexity into the instructional mix. The move to challenge students with more knotty, grade-level reading material represents a shift away from decades of general adherence to so-called “instructional level theory,” which encourages children to read texts pitched at or slightly above the student’s individual reading level. New York public school principal Carol Burris, an outspoken standards critic and defender of leveled reading, recently published an anti-Common Core missive on the Washington Post’s Answer Sheet blog that was fairly typical of the form. Where, she wondered, “is the research to support: close reading, increased Lexile levels, the use of informational texts, and other questionable practices in the primary grades?”

The blog post, which has already been intelligently critiqued by Ann Whalen at Education Post, expanded on remarks delivered by Burris earlier this month at an Intelligence Squared U.S. debate with Fordham president Michael Petrilli and former assistant secretary of education Carmel Martin. There, too, she demanded evidence of literacy improvements arising from the use of complex texts.

A fair request and one that warrants a thorough response. But first, for the benefit of readers who are neither teachers nor literacy specialists, a quick explainer on how these two theories of reading work: In leveled reading, a teacher listens as her student reads a piece of text at a given reading level. If the child makes two-to-five mistakes per one hundred words, that is considered her “instructional” level. Zero or one mistakes means the book is too easy; six or more mistakes and that level is deemed her “frustration” level. Children are then offered lots of books at their “just right” level on the theory that if they read extensively and independently, language growth and reading proficiency will follow, setting the child on a slow and steady climb through higher reading levels. It sounds logical, and, as we will see, there are definite benefits to getting kids to read a lot independently.

By marked contrast, Common Core asks teachers to think carefully about what children read and choose grade-level texts that use sophisticated language or make significant knowledge demands of the reader (teachers should also be prepared, of course, to offer students support as they grapple with challenging books). Instead of asking, “Can the child read this?” the question might be, “Is this worth reading?”

Leveled reading is intuitive and smartly packaged (who wants kids to read “frustration level” books?), but its evidence base is remarkably thin. There is much stronger research support for teaching reading with complex texts.

What’s the source of the blind faith that Burris and others have in leveled reading instruction? “In the decades before Common Core, an enormous amount of the instruction in American elementary and middle schools has been with leveled text,” says David Liben, a veteran teacher and Senior Content Specialist at Student Achievement Partners. “The generally poor performance of our children on international comparisons speaks volumes about its effectiveness. To become proficient, students need to have the opportunity to read, with necessary support, rich complex text. But they also need to read—especially if they are behind—a huge volume and range of text types just as called for in the standards.” Students could read many of these less complex texts independently. “Instruction with complex text at all times is not what is called for, even by Common Core advocates,” Liben takes care to note.

Burris and others, however, offer a reflexive defense of leveled instruction. At the Intelligence Squared event, she claimed that “We know from years of developmental reading research that kids do best when they read independently with leveled readers.” Such surety is belied by a surprising lack of rigorous evidence. Literacy blogger Timothy Shanahan, a Distinguished Professor Emeritus of urban education at the University of Illinois at Chicago, recently detailed his discovery of the inauspicious origins of instructional level theory as a young scholar.

Made famous in Emmett Betts’s influential, now-little-remembered 1946 textbook Foundations of Reading Instruction, leveled reading theory actually emerged from a more obscure study conducted by one of Betts’s doctoral students. “I tracked down that dissertation and to my dismay it was evident that they had just made up those designations without any empirical evidence,” Shanahan wrote. When the study—which had in effect never been conducted—was “replicated,” it yielded wildly different results. In other words, there was no study, and later research failed to show the benefits of leveling. “Basically we have put way too much confidence in an unproven theory,” Shanahan concluded.

Experts have spent much of the last four decades unraveling elements of Betts’s thesis, as Douglas Fisher and Nancy Frey recently demonstrated in The Reading Teacher, a popular journal. The authors, who work closely with the International Reading Association (IRA), were longtime advocates of leveled reading. Reexamining the published research in light of the new standards, however, they found that the use of leveled text beyond the very first years of primary school yielded no achievement gains in students. The belief that young readers should only be taught from texts that they understood to a level of 95 percent or higher—a stringent notion of comprehension first envisioned by Betts—has been found to be erroneous. Researchers William R. Powell and C.G. Dunkeld, as early as 1971, said that the 95 percent–cutoff was too high; and, more recently, academic Juliet Halladay condemned it as “somewhat arbitrary.”

Even more striking to Fisher and Frey was the abundance of support for the use of more difficult reading material: “Surprisingly, we did find studies suggesting that students learn more when taught with texts that were above their instructional level.” One such prominent study, though unheralded in their review, was that of the Science IDEAS model put forward by researchers Michael Vitale and Nancy Romance. The program, which replaces eight weeks of English Language Arts lessons with a regimen of complex science instruction for a group of third- to fifth-graders, was shown to not only enhance scientific aptitude among the group, but also accelerate reading comprehension through the use of complex science texts.

Another trial, organized by specialists at Brigham Young University, divided a swath of struggling students into three groups of “paired readers,” each furnished with texts of a set difficulty level. Paired reading, a method by which two pupils read aloud together, has proven broadly successful in generating literacy gains among children; indeed, all three groups improved through the use of the paired system. But the greatest advance was made by the group using text that was two years above its instructional level. Burris has dismissed paired reading and the study as “idiosyncratic”; her meaning here is obscure, but she might have more simply described it as a proven, effective, and inexpensive way of helping children learn to read.

In addition to these studies, Shanahan, in the IRA journal Reading Today Online, lists twenty studies showing the efficacy of instruction with more complex text. Thus we have a significant and growing body of research providing support for this initiative.

To be emphatically clear, none of this is data should be taken to advocate for a total phasing-out of texts students can read independently, many of which would be at lower levels of complexity. “Nowhere in the Common Core standards,” Liben concurs, “or in the work of these experts is it recommended that we abandon this practice. This is why the Core standards call for all students to read ‘widely and deeply.’ Not doing so would make it impossible to grow the vocabulary and knowledge essential to success.”

Russ Walsh, a teacher and curriculum director, making the case for leveled instruction in another Answer Sheet post, finally concedes that the best approach “is to balance our instruction between independent level, on-level, and frustration level texts.” On this we agree. But before Common Core, such balance was far less likely, too often denying our most needy students the opportunity to read, enjoy, and benefit from a full range of rich texts. As Alfred Tatum noted in the Fisher article cited above, “Leveled texts lead to leveled lives.”

On Monday, Paul Peterson penned a Wall Street Journal op-ed arguing that American politicians ought to stop exploiting the common, mistaken belief that most schools are getting by on a shoestring. This is also, of course, a strong argument for more fiscal transparency, something that doesn’t get enough treatment in ed reform. If states and districts were more upfront about per-pupil costs, we could start having useful conversations about how to efficiently and effectively spend money—and how to best stretch school dollars.

Over at Education Next, John Bailey and Tom Vander Ark call for democratizing school information. Most of us won’t watch a movie, buy a book, eat at a restaurant, or stay at a hotel without checking crowd-sourced and/or expert reviews. It’s appalling, then, that Americans are forced to choose where their kids attend school without this sort of fundamental, easy-to-access data. Annual school report cards, which are required under federal law and ought to the one-stop shop for discerning parents, are difficult to find, lack key data, and can be hard to understand. And GreatSchools.org, a fantastic, useful resource, often bases its ratings exclusively on test scores, falling short of providing parents a complete picture. Thus a redesign of annual report cards is in order. Fortunately, MySchoolInfoChallenge.com—a joint project from ExcelinEd, Getting Smart, and Vander Ark—is leading the charge.

Ohio recently released its school report cards for 2013–14. The results were predictable, at least when it came to proficiency rates: Suburban, upper-middle-class schools came out looking spiffy, while poorer schools struggled. The local press latched onto the poverty message: School performance, as measured by achievement results alone, was closely linked to economic disadvantage. In the U.S., that fact has been settled for decades; so it's too bad that newspapers still run headlines—as if it were a revolutionary discovery—like “Data Link Poverty, School Performance.” But what is worse is that they ignore high-poverty schools that deliver exemplary results. For those in search of great urban schools in the Buckeye State, look no further than Fordham’s new report, Poised for Progress.

RESEARCH ROUNDUP

University of Michigan scientists think differences in brain architecture could allow doctors to use brain scans to diagnose ADHD—and track how well someone responds to treatment. An American Institutes for Research study shows wide variance in state performance standards, exposing a large gap in expectations between the states with the highest standards and the states with the lowest standards. Large differences among states “clearly indicate why we need more common assessments and the Common Core State Standards,” the report concludes. New data from the Department of Education show that more public school students than ever before were homeless during the 2012–2013 school year. 1.3 million elementary and secondary school children reported lacking a permanent home, many of them living on their own or sharing a space with a relative or friend.

Independence scotched, letting 16-year-olds vote, destructive school boards, think tank journalism, and a deep dive on instructional practices.

Amber's Research Minute

"Examining the Relationship Between Teachers' Instructional Practices and Students' Mathematics Achievement," by Janine M. Firmender, M. Katherine Gavin, and D. Betsy McCoach, Journal of Advanced Academics, vol. 25, no. 3 (August 2014).

Transcript

Michelle:       Hello, this is your host, Michelle Gininger of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute here at the Education Gadfly Show and online at edexcellence.net. And now please join me in welcoming my co-host, the Braveheart of ed reform, Robert Pondiscio.

Robert:           Freedom. How was that?

Michelle:       Eh, not loud enough. See ...

Robert:           Oh, OK, well, best I can do.

Michelle:       So why are we talking about Braveheart? Explain.

Robert:           Scottish independence, which didn't happen, but it could have.

Michelle:       It could have.

Robert:           It could have.

Michelle:       It nearly happened. Everyone was talking about how the vote was a wide margin. I didn't think it was that wide. I think ...

Robert:           Was it 56-44, I believe?

Michelle:       Yeah, that's pretty close.

Robert:           Right.

Michelle:       Like deciding the future of your country.

Robert:           Yep. In my other life I teach civics at a charter school in New York City, and this was a big topic for discussion for us because this was history, our own history, being revisited 250 years later. I think my students thought that they were going to vote "yes," and they voted "no," but still, a fascinating story.

Michelle:       Had they seen "Braveheart"?

Robert:           That's a great question. No, I don't know.

Michelle:       Because they're so young that they might not have seen the movie which is ...

Robert:           They might have missed it.

Michelle:       ... really sad.

Robert:           Might have missed it. Twenty years ago now?

Michelle:       Yeah, it's a long time ago.

Robert:           Back when people knew who Mel Gibson was?

Michelle:       Well, on that note, let's play part on the Gadfly.

Ellen:              Last week, 16- and 17-year-olds were allowed to vote in the Scottish independence referendum. Should we do the same in America? Would it encourage schools to do a better job with civics education?

Michelle:       OK, Mr. Civics ...

Robert:           Wow. Those are two very, very different questions, and I think I'm going to surprise you with my answer.

                        "Would it encourage schools to do a better job with civics education?" Yeah, probably.

                        "Should we allow 16- to 17-year-olds to vote?" This is heresy, but I don't think so.

Michelle:       Why not?

Robert:           Because they're kids, Michelle. Why would you want 16- and 17- ... This is funny. I do civics education. It's one of my passions in this field, so you would think, "Of course Pondiscio's going to want 16- and 17-year-olds to vote." I'm not sure I even want them to drive let alone vote.

Michelle:       You're not for expanding the vote. You want to take away the rights: driving. Anything else you want to add to that?

Robert:           Now hold on a second. I'm not taking away the right for 16- and 17-year-olds to vote. They don’t have it yet.

                        I guess, and this is again a little bit of heresy on my part, the more time I spend doing civic education, the more time I think that our goal should not be to encourage more voting, it should be to encourage more informed voting. And I'm not sure that just creating an entitlement for 16- and 17-year-olds to vote ...

                        On the one hand, maybe it would incentive them to pay more attention. On the other hand, based on just the sample size that I see of high school students, do we want them to vote? Are the paying attention to the news? If you could convince me that we could create boxcar numbers of really deeply informed 16- and 17-year-olds paying attention to the news, civically engaged, then sure. I think we've got to do one before we can do the other.

Michelle:       I agree. I don't know that 16- and 17-year-olds should vote, and I also don't want to get into the "Are these kids ... Do they know enough about civics to vote?" Because what are you going to do, have a civics test? And then are we going to have a voting test? All of those sort of things that's down a rabbit hole we absolutely in no way want to go down.

                        I think the fact that Scotland did not win independence ...

Robert:           And those kids could vote.

Michelle:       ... and those kids could vote I think is perhaps an indication that 16- and 17-year-olds could vote, and it wouldn't drive everything crazy. They wouldn’t be voting for insane candidates or ... Another question is, could we do any worse than we're already doing?

Robert:           If you want to set the bar there, Michelle. I haven't seen the breakdown of the Scottish vote, but I'm assuming that 16- and 17-year-olds broke heavily for independence.

Michelle:       Yes, I would assume so as well.

Robert:           Right.

Michelle:       So if they still didn't even get independence, maybe our 16- and 17-year-olds can vote and not want to legalize marijuana and lower the alcohol age and all these things that perhaps we would assume 16- and 17-year-olds would care about.

Robert:           Lower the age of compulsory education.

Michelle:       Yeah.

Robert:           Do all kind of mischief.

Michelle:       Exactly. All right. Question #2.

Ellen:              A recent "This American Life" episode told listeners about a New York State school board battle that escalated into an all-out war, complete with threats of violence and felony charges. In a democracy, where we respect majority rule, what could have been done to prevent the conflict?

Michelle:       This is not a new story, but "This American Life" just recently covered it, and after you've finished listening to our podcast, I encourage everyone to go listen to that podcast, but not before you reach the end of ours.

Robert:           After you watch "Braveheart."

Michelle:       Actually, it's going to be third on the to do list after "Braveheart."

                        This isn't a new study, but I was listening to it on my morning commute into the office, and I thought the person next to me on the Metro was going to ask if I was OK because I was sitting there just getting so up in arms about the whole thing. Because talk about a breakdown in governance.

                        For too long we haven't focused on the governance aspect of education, and in this civics edition of the podcast, let's take it on. Robert, what's your take?

Robert:           I want to answer a slightly different question. One are the things, and this is a difficult device and story. Makes me a little bit sad, and I'm going to put back on my civics educator hat again.

                        I'm very fond of reminding people ... We talk all the time in our current ed reform era about college and career. The two C's. I like to remind people that it was a third C that started it all, and that was "citizenship."

                        If you go back and you read the work in Don Hirsch, Edie Hirsch's book, "The Making of Americans" talks a lot about this. You go back and look at the founding thinkers of American education, names you never hear any more like Benjamin Rush and Noah Webster, they were not concerned with things like college, career, STEM subjects, etc. They were really concerned with creating what Benjamin Rush called, I think, "republican machines." Small R republican.

                        Our entire public school system was really about making Americans. Creating this class of citizen who were deeply informed, who were capable of managing their own affairs.

                        This story just says to me how far we have strayed from that, and how much we've simply forgotten that we invest so much money in public education for a reason. We want self-governing, thoughtful citizens. This just shows how easily it can all fall apart.

Michelle:       I think this story is shocking in that it was a total breakdown of the public good and the private good of education.

Robert:           Exactly.

Michelle:       And we talk about that all the time. I want my kids to be well prepared, and have a great life, and be able to go on to college, and get a good career, and raise a family, and all of these great things. But I want all of your kids to do the exact same thing.

Robert:           Sure.

Michelle:       Mostly because it's what's best for our country, but also you can take the very fiscal route of we don't want to pay for people not to be able to support themselves.

Robert:           I wrote a blog post about this not long ago in response to Andy Smarick's very nice series about conservativism and ed reform. And I made what I thought was just a simple point, which is that there's an institutional value to public education that we tend to forget sometimes when we're focused on what you called that "private good," that "I'm going to go to college, I'm going to get a good job, I'm going to be upwardly mobile."

                        There is an institutional anchor purpose that schools serve in a community. On the one hand, we all want schools to perform better, but I worry sometimes that we can lose site of what is essentially a large, important public institution in our communities. And it sounds like the folks that "This American Life" were talking to have completely lost sight of that.

Michelle:       It would be interesting if in this new Common Core debate we're having, we bring that idea into it a little bit. Obviously Common Core isn't breaking down the school system like this example, but it would be interesting if everyone just took a step back. OK, Common Core high standards, what does this mean for the purpose of schooling? And I think we could have perhaps a more productive debate.

Robert:           Yep, and you're never going to hear me argue against civic education. It is that third C: college, career, and citizenship. I always like to remind people of that.

Michelle:       I like it. OK, Ellen, question #3.

Ellen:              On Saturday "The Economist" reported on the rise of think-tank journalism, a trend that's blurring an old line between creating news and distributing it. Is this change a good thing? Are there pitfalls?

Michelle:       This isn't an education story per se, but I think that there's an education angle we can get to.

Robert:           Sure there is.

Michelle:       And there's certainly a civics education angle we can get to [crosstalk 09:03].

Robert:           And here's my second movie reference vis-a-vis journalism. "I keep trying to get out. They keep dragging me back in." Name the movie.

Michelle:       I can't. I'm drawing a blank.

Robert:           Godfather III.

Michelle:       Oh, yeah.

Robert:           Yeah. I started my career in journalism. I still to this day spend far more years in radio news and the magazine business than I have in the classroom or here.

                        Yeah, these lines are blurry, but part of it is ... Look, American journalism has been sort of on a suicide mission for several years. If you're looking for high quality, thoughtful content about any public issue, there's a vacuum that needs to be filled, and folks like us like to think we have a role in filling it.

Michelle:       Absolutely, I think that this isn't necessarily the traditional story that journalism ... there's so few journalism ... journalism is failing and think tanks are filling the void.

                        I actually view it from a little bit of the opposite view. Instead of there being so many beat reporters and straight up journalism where you're just reporting on the story, or even doing an investigative story, so many journalists today are jumping to this commentary aspect. This "what does it all mean?" thing, which is not necessarily a bad thing, and I enjoy reading it, and I sort of appreciate it. But that role is more a role that think tankers have often taken.

                        So I think that it's actually journalism is going more towards the think-tank world as opposed to the think-tank world adapting to the journalism world.

Robert:           That's one, and you alluded to before there's a loss of subject specialty knowledge as well. I'll give you a good example. I worked for years at Time Magazine. Back when I started, we had a dedicated religion reporter, a law reporter, lots of science reporters, an education reporter. Now everybody is a generalist.

Michelle:       On the Media, clearly everyone knows I listen to NPR all day, On the Media just did a story on the loss of the beat reporter, so this is something that's well known and out there. Now within education reporting, Mike Petrilli has an interesting column coming out in the next edition of Education Next about how education journalism seems to be flourishing. So maybe in the local paper in Louisville there's not an ed reporter any more, though don't quote me on that. I feel bad for Louisville now. They're might be an ed reporter.

                        But we're seeing so much specialized reporting on whether it's Vox, whether it's VentureBeat launching an education channel. The Atlantic has an education channel. There is a focus on education. All the Chalkbeats.

Robert:           Right.

Michelle:       We can list and list and list examples.

Robert:           But hold on, Michelle. Why do you think that's happening?

Michelle:       Well it's foundation funded.

Robert:           And what makes education news sexy from the standpoint of a journalist? What do we have that a lot of other beats don't have?

Michelle:       Conflict.

Robert:           Exactly. We love conflict. And whenever people are willing to beat themselves bloody and get in high dudgeon over something that makes for good copy, you're going to see more attention.

Michelle:       And we have lots and lots and lots of players on both sides who ...

Robert:           Both sides?

Michelle:       ... happy to step up to the plate.

Robert:           There are multiple sides.

Michelle:       Multiple sides.  All right. That's all the time we have for Pardon the Gadfly. Thanks so much, Robert.

Robert:           Thank you.

Michelle:       Up next is Amber's Research Minute.

                        Welcome to the show, Amber.

Amber:           Thanks, Michelle.

Michelle:       Have you seen "Braveheart"?

Amber:           "Braveheart?" As in Mel Gibson?

Michelle:       Mel Gibson. Yeah.

Amber:           Of course.

Michelle:       That's a little out of left field. I'm sorry. But we were talking about the Scottish independent vote.

Amber:           Ah, gotcha.

Michelle:       And that was our pop culture reference.

Amber:           Love that movie. Mel Gibson was phenomenal in it. I think it's a movie that appeals to women and men, which doesn't always happen. But yeah, I really enjoyed it.

Michelle:       Do you think it's because Mel Gibson is so young?

Amber:           He's some pretty good eye candy, right? At least back then.

Robert:           Used to be.

Amber:           Back then. Back then.

Michelle:       All right. What do you have for us today?

Amber:           We have a new study out. And by the way, it's a little long, but I'm going to do my darnedest to get through it quickly, but there's important stuff in here. It's called "Examining the Relationship Between Teachers' Instructional Practices and Students' Math Achievement."

                        Analysts studies two instructional practices in math. One, engaging students in discourse with the teacher and their peers to make sense of problems and explain their answers. We've heard a lot about this with the Common Core math. Explain your answer.

                        #2, using appropriate mathematical vocabulary.

                        Importantly, these practices reflect the mathematical practices of the common core, but that actually wasn't the purpose of the study, which is why I like the study. That was sort of like an afterthought. They realized later, hey, these actually reflect what the Common Core says in little bit different terms. The Common Core talks about constructing viable arguments and critiquing the reasoning of others. And the Common Core talks about attending to precision, including the use of appropriate mathematical vocabulary.

                        So there was a decent overlap between what they were studying and what the Common Core math practices say.

                        The study occurred as part of a larger evaluation of Project M-Squared, which is an advanced math curriculum covering geometry and measurement in Grades K through 2. I normally don't do evaluations of curriculum, but I like this study.

                        The final sample includes 34 Grade K-2 teachers and 560 students who participated in the field test of the larger evaluation. Teachers were randomly assigned to the intervention and control groups. The intervention group teachers attended roughly 10 days total of PD. That's not chump change. They were observed weekly during the study, which was a big deal. Whereby they were rated on fidelity of implementation to the content and those two instructional strategies.

                        The kids were administered the Iowa Test of Basic Skills as a pre-test and as a control.

                        Bottom line. Teachers' implementation scores for those two strategies significantly predicted math achievement as gauged by the students' gained scores on an outcome measure known as the Open Response Assessment, which had me scratching my head. In other words, a kindergartener who was average on the ITBS standard score, and his teacher was rated "always implementing these practices," basically could be expected to gain about 72% pre- to post-test on this measure.

                        Problem is, at the front of this, it sounds like, wow, this is great data that bolsters evidentiary claims of the Common Core math, which people are always acting like, "let's see the evidence."

                        But they developed because there's nothing. And they're kind of like you're damned if you do, you're damned if you don't because there's no good measure for geometry and measurement in Grades K-2, so they had to develop their own. So they developed both outcome measure, and they developed the classroom observation measure.

                        Lo and behold, the teachers who scored well on these measures, the kids did well, and so you kind of have to call into question the validity and the soundness of the findings because the analysts and the researchers themselves both created and evaluated the ... created the measures and evaluated the outcomes for the curriculum.

                        I didn't like that, but at the same time, I thought, wow ... What gave it credibility at the outset in my mind, they didn’t go into this thing saying we're going to measure these two Common Core math practices. It was just sort of an ah-ha moment was kind of how I read it when they reflected back on the evaluation.

Robert:           But I'm going to push you on something that you said early on. You said you don’t like to do evaluative studies of curriculum and instruction? Why?

Amber:           Sometimes they just really, really micro-level in some ways, so if you look at what works clearinghouse, a six in math ...

Robert:           What doesn't work in clearinghouse?

Amber:           You've got about 50 different nuances that you can't cover. Granted I do 2 minutes around here, but, you really can't give justice to, and I think in some ways a lot of these studies are supported by the curriculum developers themselves. So unless it's an external evaluation by a third party, I ...

Robert:           I'm just always going to be the guy that wants to see more study of curriculum and instruction because I'm always going to be that guy who says, that's what really matters.

Amber:           I think around here we care more about curriculum obviously now than we used to. But there are scads of evaluations. I used to work at a firm that did this for a living. And obviously, any developer of anything wants to have their product evaluated. But obviously it's always best if they're not paying for the evaluation. That's usually the nature of the beast. And if you hire a qualified evaluator, then that's half the battle of making sure you've got some reliable information from reliable evaluators.

Robert:           But am I also not right to say that the effect sizes that we know of are larger for a curriculum than for most other factors?

Amber:           I think it depends ... I know that the success for all has posted some pretty impressive research. I'm not so sure ... When you look at What Works Clearinghouse, I'm actually surprised there are more evaluations of curriculum. I don't know if you've looked at it.

Robert:           But to your point, that has to do with the nature of the studies as opposed to the curriculum, generally.

Amber:           Right. Yeah. If it's a well done study. Yeah, and you've got a decent sample size, and all that good stuff.

Robert:           More well done studies of curriculums, please.

Amber:           Yes. And I was hoping this was one. And it sorta, kinda was, but then once I read that they had developed all the measures, I wasn't as enamored. But regardless what I liked was that they really went down and got into a specific practice. You know how, Robert.

Robert:           Absolutely.

Amber:           Sometimes you just look at the curriculum writ large, and you don't really know what is the "it" about the curriculum that actually is doing something good.

Robert:           Yeah, look, you've got me excited. Ten days of PD, measuring implementation weekly, I thought, yes, this sounds great.

Amber:           Yeah, and these two defined strategies. They just didn’t look at Project M-Squared, like what's it? And looked at these two specific things, so, that's the kind of detailed information that useful for teachers on the ground.

Robert:           Absolutely.

Amber:           Anyway.

Robert:           It was a disappointment.

Amber:           Yeah.

Robert:           Just like "Braveheart."

Amber:           Sorry, Michelle, I got a little wonky today.

Michelle:       No, I like it, and you know, any time you mention curriculum in front of Robert, you know where the conversation's going to go.

Robert:           Sorry, ladies.

Michelle:       All right. Thanks so much, Amber.

Amber:           You're welcome.

Michelle:       And that's all the time we have for this week's Gadfly Show. Til next week.

Robert:           I'm Robert Pondiscio.

Michelle:       And I'm Michelle Gininger for the Thomas B. Fordham Institute signing off.

Growing numbers of parents, educators, and school administrators are calling for a local "opt-out" from state tests and accountability systems.

Is this opt-out a cop-out? Or would students benefit from a system that their own teachers and principals devised? Should all schools be offered an opt-out alternative, one in which they propose to be held accountable to a different set of measures? What about opt-outs for high-achieving schools or schools with good reason to be different? Would such a system move us toward or away from the goals of the Common Core? As for charter schools, must they continue to be tethered to uniform statewide accountability systems? Or should we rekindle the concept of customizing each school's charter and performance expectations?

Our earliest thinkers about education—men like Benjamin Rush, Noah Webster, and Horace Mann—would have found our current obsession with preparing children for college or a career a trifle odd. Given the uncertain prospect of ordinary Americans running their own affairs, they were focused on an entirely different “C”—citizenship. Rush spoke of the need to “convert men into republican machines.” Education was key, he said, “if we expect them to perform their parts properly in the great machine of the government of the state.” Once the impetus, civic education is the forgotten mission of public schools, unloved and—as this report from the American Enterprise Institute correctly observes—increasingly untested. The absence of high-stakes assessments devalues the significance of civics as a subject and sets in motion the dull hum of apathy: no stakes, no urgency, no civic knowledge, no civic engagement. Might high-stakes civics exams help turn young people into informed and engaged voters? David Campbell, a professor of political science and director of the Rooney Center for the Study of American Democracy at the University of Notre Dame, looks at twenty-one states that have some kind of statewide civics assessments. Eleven of those administer a test that’s mandated for graduation or a final grade in a required civics course. These requirements do not appear to influence overall voter turnout or party identification among 18- to 24-year-olds, based on an analysis of voter turnout for the 2012 election. So civics tests don’t matter? Not so fast. A deeper analysis shows that testing appears to boost political knowledge among African American, Hispanic, and immigrant youth. The effect is strongest among Hispanic immigrants in particular, “which is in keeping with the historical role of the public school system to facilitate unum among America’s pluribus,” Campbell notes. Somewhere, Benjamin Rush smiles.

SOURCE: David E. Campbell, “Putting civics to the test: The impact of state-level civics assessments on civic knowledge,” American Enterprise Institute (September 2014).

To answer the questions in its title, this NBER study analyzes administrative and test score data in the upper elementary grades from one of the country’s largest school districts (not identified). The district provides gifted services to three groups of fourth-grade kids, who are mixed together post-identification: 1) non-disadvantaged students who score at least 130 points on an IQ test, the state cut off for gifted eligibility; 2) English language learners and low-income youngsters with IQs over 116 points (a lower threshold allowed under law for these kids); and 3) a group of non-gifted pupils—called “high achievers”—who scored highest among their school/grade cohort on the state test in the previous year. The third group comprises the bulk of students in the program. The district requires schools to create a gifted classroom whenever there’s at least one identified student in a school/grade cohort (e.g., school A, grade 4). And before a teacher is assigned to such a classroom, he or she must complete a specialized five-course training sequence. Researchers utilize a series of analytic models and find that the program had no effect on the reading or math achievement of the first two groups, the disadvantaged and non-disadvantaged kids identified as gifted by their IQ scores. (These results likely weren’t due to gifted kids “topping out” on state tests, because a mere two percent of the non-disadvantaged kids received the maximum reading score.) The third group, however, enjoyed large, positive achievement gains in math and reading—up to 0.5 standard deviations. Moreover, this boost persisted through fifth grade and was particularly concentrated among poor and minority students. So why would a program impact high scorers and not those with high IQ? Perhaps high test scores demonstrate non-cognitive traits, like longer attention spans and willingness to meet social expectations, which are important in gifted classrooms. In any event, the findings suggest that creating separate classrooms in every school for top-performing students is a cost-effective way to significantly boost performance, even in the poorest neighborhoods.

SOURCE: David Card and Laura Giuliano, “Does Gifted Education Work? For Which Students?,” National Bureau of Economic Research (September 2014).

Blended learning, a teaching model in which students learn from both online sources and traditional instruction, has recently seen tremendous growth. Advocates say it can improve brick-and-mortar schools and increase students’ curricular options. A new white paper written for CEE-Trust examines two new blended learning networks created by local, city-based organizations and provides a framework for others who wish to emulate their efforts. Front and center is the work of the Chicago Public Education Fund and the CityBridge Foundation (in cooperation with the NewSchools Venture Fund). The former selected sixteen teams of educators to enroll in their Summer Design Program and provided tools and support that enabled them to better recognize school shortcomings and develop novel ways to offset them—typically through the implementation of blended learning programs. Likewise, CityBridge and NewSchools created the Education Innovation Fellowship to improve the quality of blended learning programs in Washington, D.C. Twelve teachers were chosen to design and implement the model in their classrooms with constant feedback from their peers through CityBridge-organized events. They also took part in workshops and visited schools around the country that are utilizing this type of instruction. Both programs helped foster the development of innovative learning models by creating an environment in which they could succeed, and both organizations shaped their networks around five general considerations: desired outcomes; recruitment, screening, and selection; training and support; external partners; and deciding which entities should pilot the network. The paper argues that these efforts offer a serviceable blueprint for others wishing to follow in their footsteps—but cautions those seeking to create blended learning networks to be strategic and meticulous in creating their design. In all, the report is a worthy roadmap for pragmatic, city-based blended learning initiatives.

SOURCE: Joe Ableidinger, “Creating a City-Based Blended Learning Network,” CEE-Trust (August 2014).