The Education Gadfly Weekly

With a few exceptions, most of the races decided yesterday didn’t hinge on education reform. But the outcome will have big implications for education policy nonetheless.

That was certainly true in 2010, when a voter backlash against Obamacare triggered a wave of Republican victories, especially at the state level, which in turn set the stage for major progress on education reform priorities in 2011 (rightfully dubbed “the year of school choice” by the Wall Street Journal). In fact, as Ty Eberhardt and I have argued, 2010’s Republican surge deserves more credit for the education reforms of the past several years than does Arne Duncan’s Race to the Top:

So here we are again, with Republicans winning stunning victories in races for governor’s mansions and statehouses nationwide. And once again this will be good for education reform, especially reforms of the school-choice variety. Voucher and tax-credit programs in Wisconsin, Florida, and Arizona will continue apace; charter caps may be lifted and bad laws amended in Massachusetts, Maryland, and Illinois; comprehensive reform efforts in New Mexico, Nevada, and Michigan have a new lease on life.

There’s good news for reformers on the Democratic side of the aisle too, what with the teachers unions’ terrible, horrible, no good, very bad day signaling their waning influence. Of particular note is Rhode Island—Rhode Island!—which just elected a pro-education reform, pro-pension reform Democrat as governor and a bona fide charter school hero as lieutenant governor. All while voters in Providence rejected a union-backed convicted felon in favor of a charter supporter. Remarkable!

And what about Common Core? For sure, some of these outcomes will complicate matters in the short term. With an anti-Common Core governor-elect and an anti-Common Core state chief, Arizona is probably the most precarious state, but we should expect another round of bruising legislative fights this spring all over red America, particularly in states with emboldened Republican legislatures. Those of us who support the Common Core will win some and will lose some. But it won’t change the fundamentals: The vast majority of states, I predict, will continue to move ahead with these higher standards.

The national political scene is even more interesting. The 2016 primary campaign starts today and features several strong Common Core supporters as serious contenders. Of course there’s Jeb Bush, who continues to stick to his guns even as he wisely builds bridges to his base. But there’s also Chris Christie, who resurrected his presidential chances thanks to his role as chairman of the Republican Governors Association—and as fundraiser and campaigner-in-chief for the many GOP candidates who won last night, including those in deep-blue Maryland, Illinois, and Massachusetts. John Kasich, meanwhile, crushed his opposition in Ohio, as did Susan Martinez in New Mexico and Brian Sandoval in Nevada. All three of them are legitimate vice-presidential candidates, at the least, and all three strongly support the Common Core.

Of course, plenty of top GOP presidential contenders are anti-Common Core (Rand Paul, Ted Cruz, Bobby Jindal, etc.). What this means is that we can expect the topic to get lots of air time over the next year and a half, as it’s one of the few issues (unlike, say, Obamacare) where there will be significant differences among the candidates. In other words, there’s no need for an expensive “Ed in ‘16” campaign. Education is going to figure prominently, at least in the Republican primaries, whether we like it or not.

Over the last five years, prodded by the feds, states have adopted teacher evaluation systems. According to a recent report from the National Council on Teacher Quality, forty-one states, including Ohio, now require evaluations that include objective measures of student achievement. These aren’t the meat-axe assessments of yesteryear, though. These next-generation teacher evaluations combine classroom observations using new prescriptive protocols with quantitative evidence of learning gains on state tests (or another form of assessment) to determine each teacher’s effectiveness.

The national focus on teacher evaluations raises a couple of questions. First, why have states chosen to focus on teacher evaluations (i.e. what’s the problem that policymakers are trying to solve)? Second, are the new evaluations proving effective in solving the problem?

Let’s start with the why. Recall all the evidence that the single most important in-school factor for student achievement is teacher quality. If we know that good teachers make a difference, it's not surprising that we've focused on evaluating them. Such evaluations hold the potential to identify great teachers whom we can reward, retain, and/or hold up as models, struggling or developing teachers whom we can help to improve, and ineffective teachers who should be removed from the classroom. In other words, evaluations are intended to boost the effectiveness of teachers whom our children learn from.

That’s really only part of the answer, though. Even before there was a law mandating it, principals have long conducted teacher evaluations. Yet those traditional evaluations, typically based solely upon classroom observations, had little effect on teacher quality. Teachers remained in place even if they were obviously struggling. And nearly every one of them got a satisfactory (or even “outstanding” rating).  For instance, a California judge in the recently-decided Vergara case found that a significant number of “grossly incompetent” teachers were allowed to remain in the classroom “because school officials don’t want to go through the time and expense to investigate and prosecute” these cases. (The court estimated that, under the state’s teacher laws, it could take between two and ten years and anywhere from $50,000 to $450,000 to investigate and potentially dismiss an ineffective teacher.)

Now for the second question: Are the new teacher evaluation systems effective in accurately identifying which teachers are making the biggest difference for students and which are struggling?

Early results from states with next-generation teacher evaluation systems suggest that the answer is a resounding no. In Florida, more than 97 percent of teachers are still rated as effective or better. In Delaware, it’s 99 percent. New evaluations are producing more of the same results.[1]

It’s important to note that there isn’t a “right” number of teachers that should be deemed ineffective. But we also need to be honest that teaching—especially teaching well—is incredibly difficult to do. So while it would be great if 99 percent of teachers were effective, it’s hard to believe that in teaching (or any profession) we could actually reach that level.

While there is some anecdotal evidence from teachers and school leaders that regular observations required under the new teacher evaluation systems have value and can improve practice, these relatively modest gains (if you believe them) have come with significant costs.

First, the controversy surrounding teacher evaluations has resulted in a moving target for educators. Here in Ohio, for instance, the GOP-controlled legislature spent the better part of six months debating changes to the nascent Ohio Teacher Evaluation System (OTES). OTES, still in its first year and without any meaningful data, was already being changed in substantive ways, including the frequency of evaluations, the percentage of the evaluation based upon student value-added, and the use of student surveys in evaluations. At the end of the day, a compromise was reached, but nothing about the debate suggests that the underlying issues have been resolved. It’s worth pondering how effective an evaluation system can be if its key components continue to be the focus of debate.

Second, whether fair or not, teacher evaluation systems are being portrayed publicly as being anti-teacher. This is harmful in at least two ways: it has a negative effect on teacher morale, and the ensuing debate becomes polarized and focused on the wrong issue. If we can’t even discuss the real problem, the chance of finding a solution is barely a dream.

Third, perhaps the least anticipated and potentially greatest cost relates to student testing. As Russ Whitehurst and Matt Chingos have noted, state assessments—usually limited to reading and math in grades 3–8—don’t give us enough information to analyze most teachers based upon student growth on objective assessments. To gauge a teacher’s impact on student learning in Ohio, we’ve devised an intricate web of additional assessments and student learning objectives that supplement the state assessments. The result has been a dramatic increase in time students spend testing and teachers spend administering tests. The overreliance on tests for every teacher’s evaluation has put the entire test-based accountability system on trial and jeopardizes the progress that’s been made over the past twenty years.

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The move to enshrine teacher evaluations in state law, however well intended, has created a bureaucratized, divisive solution. It’s also a workaround, designed to escape the harmful effects of the laws and policies that the Vergara court found protected adults but damaged the educational prospects of children. As with most workarounds, teacher evaluations are an inefficient way of achieving an admirable and needed goal.

If statewide, uniform teacher evaluations fail to effectively identify struggling teachers, change regularly, cause debate over the value of teachers, and contribute to needless over-testing of students, then we should rethink how we can best achieve the goal of improving the quality of teachers in every classroom. Stay tuned for a future Gadfly where we’ll explore what that might look like.

• Over the weekend, Lyndsey Layton of the Washington Post wrote a thoughtful article about parents’ quest to better understand the Common Core’s approach to math instruction. For example, the standards want kids to understand numbers as something more than symbols. Thus, what “10” means might be taught by asking kids to draw ten candy canes. Word problems are also plentiful. The trouble is that these new and improved methods differ from how some older folks learned how to add and subtract—and these caring moms and dads are struggling to help with homework. These training sessions, paired with web resources like Khan Academy, are a smart solution. Not to mention the fact that they get parents more involved in their kids’ schooling—always a good thing.
• Accountability at work is a beautiful thing—even (or especially) when the realities it reveals are ugly. Such is the case of the Louisiana voucher program. Louisiana Believes, a part of the Bayou State’s Department of Education, just released the 2013–14 annual report of the state’s scholarship program. Under the initiative, schools are permitted to take in voucher-wielding youngsters, but in return, these schools are subject to annual oversight pertaining to how their scholarship students perform. If a school’s not up to par, it can’t take in more kids the following year. In 2013–14, 126 schools participated, and at least twenty-three of them—about a fifth—fell short. Those are grim results, but kudos to Louisiana for ensuring that kids will be going to better-performing schools next year.

Some education reformers contend that elected local school boards are anachronisms that maintain the status quo rather than change agents bent on ushering U.S. education toward a brighter future. Their supporters argue that they embody democracy, give voice and power to the local community, and are more reliable and trustworthy than any other school-governance structure.

Wherever you may stand on this issue, please join some thoughtful leaders for a lively debate about the role of school boards in today’s public-education system—and in tomorrow’s.  

The midterm elections, Common Core math confusion, Joel Klein, and teacher selection tools.

Amber's Research Minute

Dan Goldhaber, Cyrus Grout, and Nick Huntington-Klein, “Screen Twice, Hire Once: Assessing the Predictive Validity of Teacher Selection Tools," Center for Education Data and Research, Working Paper 2014-9 (2014).

Less than four years after stepping down as chancellor of the New York City Department of Education under then-Mayor Michael Bloomberg, Joel Klein’s tenure is already being re-appraised. A recent study showed that the small schools built from the remains of large, comprehensive high schools on Klein’s watch have smartly raised both graduation rates and college attendance. In his new book, Lessons of Hope: How to Fix Our Schools, Klein discusses his successes, shortcomings, and hopes for the future. At the helm of the nation’s largest school district, Klein pushed for radical reform over incremental change, in hopes of uprooting a stubbornly bureaucratic and complacent system. The Bloomberg administration’s set of education reforms, labeled “Children First,” centered on three major areas of improvement. The first wave focused on building and supporting great school leaders, namely principals, through the rigorous Leadership Academy. Designed to develop leaders eager to disrupt the status quo, the fourteen-month long academy immersed trainees in extensive role-playing activities and turned out hundreds of new leaders who went on to serve in the city’s most disorganized schools. Building on this foundation, Klein set out to establish a system of choice, breaking up large, failing high schools into dozens of small academies focused mainly on improving graduation rates among minority, low-income students. Klein further championed choice by attracting and encouraging charter schools, which now serve over 70,000 families who are happy with their kids’ education and continue to fiercely defend the right to school choice. Finally, a Division of Accountability and Achievement Resources was constructed to organize student data and provide access to both teachers and parents. This system made sense of years’ worth of data that had previously gone unused and provided teachers with programs to identify books, study materials, lesson plans, and other resources that might improve their work. Accountability and transparency brought much-needed coherence to what Klein called a “system of chaos.” Lessons of Hope is bold in calling out the deeply politicized teachers’ unions and their effort to preserve the status quo and protect the adults at the expense of children. Klein’s reflection is honest and transparent while offering “readily attainable” lessons of change we must continue to pursue to rescue the nation’s failing schools.

SOURCE: Joel Klein, Lessons of Hope: How to Fix Our Schools, Harper, 2014.

This week’s election results remind us that factors other than the ideologies and performance of candidates often determine the outcomes. One such factor is voter turnout. Campaign strategists and politicos often cite President Obama’s ability to mobilize the minority vote as a major factor in his successful 2008 and 2012 presidential bids. In those elections, down-ballot candidates politically aligned with the president benefitted from this galvanized voter pool. Not so in off-cycle elections, during which the vast majority of the country’s 500,000 elected officials win office—and which aren’t held on Election Day. (Note that midterm elections, like last night’s, aren’t off-cycle; midterms are held on Election Day, just like presidential ones.) So what does this mean? How are these elections different? And who benefits? These are the sorts of questions that Sarak F. Anzia tackles in her new book, Timing and Turnout. Anzia argues that organized groups have more influence in off-cycle elections because the voters they mobilize have a greater relative impact due to smaller overall turnout. Take teacher unions: Anzia offers data showing that educators operating under school boards whose members are elected off-cycle have higher salaries than those whose boards are constructed on federal election days. Other data demonstrate that, during such elections, voters who sympathize with teachers’ union ideology compose a larger percentage of the voting bloc, bolstering like-minded candidates. So, Anzia asks: Do these elections enhance democracy by increasing the public’s opportunities to choose their officials? Or do they marginalize the broader electorate by decreasing turnout and allowing the overrepresentation of organized factions concentrating disproportionally on a single set of issues?

SOURCE: Sarah F. Anzia, Timing and Turnout: How Off-Cycle Elections Favor Organized Groups, The University of Chicago Press, 2014.

The introduction of the Common Core State Standards into America’s schools offers a unique opportunity to rethink teachers’ professional development. Drawing on recent research and interviews with key state and district stakeholders, Education First’s latest report, Common Core State Standards and the Transformation of Professional Development, offers recommendations for how to re-conceptualize teacher training to drive effective Common Core implementation. The report consists of three briefs covering what professional development should look like, examples of successful systems, and advice for policymakers, respectively. Among the first’s key takeaways: Isolated and sporadic professional development should be replaced with ongoing sessions (both individually focused and collective) that help educators to cultivate a deep familiarity with the Common Core and to identify and utilize high-quality curricular materials that are well-aligned to the standards. The second brief highlights places where teacher development is working well and identifies effective practices to be replicated at scale. For example, Washoe County School District’s Core Task Project is a three-week Common Core implementation boot camp. It utilizes free resources provided by national organizations to immerse teachers in an intensive introduction to the standards, support them during implementation, and provide them with continuous feedback as they progress. The third and final brief challenges policymakers and district leaders to create conditions that support this new concept of teacher development. It proposes reallocating professional development dollars to reflect district priorities, building time into the school day for professional development, and encouraging school leaders to prioritize true instructional changes. While not all of the briefs’ proposed solutions are novel, the series nonetheless highlights many of the major issues with existing professional development and proposes thoughtful and clear solutions. Supporting and developing teachers is critical if the ultimate aims of Common Core are to be realized. Now that we have a roadmap to better professional development, hopefully people will start to listen—and act.

SOURCES: “Common Core State Standards & the Transformation of Professional Development”: “The New Essentional Elements of Professional Learning,” “Three Vignettes that Showcase the Professional Learning that Helps Teachers Succeed,” and “What Policymakers Can Do to Advance High-Quality Professional Development at Scale,” Education First (Summer 2014).