The Education Gadfly Weekly

This is an excerpt from Michael J. Petrilli’s opening comments at the Education for Upward Mobility conference. Read the whole speech here; video from the event is available here; the ten papers that were presented are available here.

One of the most important questions in America today is: How can we help children born into poverty transcend their disadvantages and enter the middle class as adults? And in particular, what role can our schools play?

These aren’t new questions.  When President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Elementary and Secondary Education Act fifty years ago, he remarked, “As a son of a tenant farmer, I know that education is the only valid passport from poverty.”

Or, as Jeb Bush put it two weeks ago, quoting Horace Mann: “Education is the great equalizer.”

What is new is the nagging concern (shared across the ideological spectrum) that social mobility in the U.S. has stalled. As conservative scholar Peter Wehner wrote recently, “Two-thirds of Americans believe that it will be harder for them to achieve the American Dream than it was for their parents, and three-quarters believe that it will be harder still for their children and grandchildren to do the same.” And sure enough, the numbers are sobering, particularly for the poorest among us. Richard Reeves of the Brookings Institution explains, “Children born on the bottom rung have a four-in-ten chance of remaining stuck there in adulthood.”

There’s little doubt that education and opportunity are tightly joined in the twenty-first-century economy. Almost every week brings a new study demonstrating that highly skilled workers are rewarded with higher pay and excellent working conditions, while Americans with few skills are struggling. 

Expanding educational achievement, then, is a clear route to expanding economic opportunity. Yet much of our public discourse ends there. Of course more young Americans need better education in order to succeed, especially young Americans growing up in poverty. But what kind of education, and to what end? Is the goal college for all? What do we mean by college? Is that too narrow an objective? How realistic is it? Do our young people mostly need a strong foundation in academics? What role should so-called non-cognitive skills play? Should technical education make a comeback? After all, current policy stresses getting students college- and career-ready. But what exactly does that mean—especially the “career” part? How about apprenticeships? Can we learn from the military’s success in working with disadvantaged youth?

Finding better answers to these questions is critically important if we want to make headway in interrupting intergenerational poverty, which is the real goal of the education-reform movement—the ultimate student outcome that we’re working so hard to achieve.

To be sure, schools aren’t the only institutions responsible for boosting upward mobility. Far from it. Yet for years we’ve been having a debate between the education reformers on one side and the fix-poverty crowd on the other. Like many debates in education, that’s a silly argument based on a false dichotomy. Of course, schools can’t do it alone. But, of course, schools could be doing more. But what, precisely?

***

A few years ago, I started to have a gut feeling—a nagging suspicion—that we in the education-reform movement might be barking up the wrong tree. Namely, that we might be overly focused on college as the pathway to the middle class, and not focused enough on all of the other possible routes. My concern was that the “theory of action” guiding most of our education-reform efforts might not be entirely sound—meaning that some of our policies and day-to-day actions could be misguided.

And what is our theory of action? What guides most K–12 education reforms today? Here’s how I would describe it:

We look at an economy that rewards people with college degrees and measurable skills—and punishes people without degrees and without skills. We see a widening gap in this country between the highly educated and the poorly educated—gaps that show up not only in income inequality, but also in family formation, civic participation, health, happiness, you name it.

We conclude that we need to get dramatically more young people, and especially low-income young people, into and through higher education. Ideally that means four-year degrees, though two-year degrees and industry credentials are good, too. We firmly believe that a high school diploma is not enough. 

The contemporary reform agenda reflects this theory of action—starting with enriching pre-schools; Common Core for grades K–12; effective teachers; no-excuses, college-prep charter schools; and intensive efforts to help first-generation college students make it not just to, but all the way through, college. Most of the focus is on academics—especially in reading and math—though we share a growing interest in non-cognitive skills, or what some call performance character. These are the traits that will help students persist in high school and in post-secondary education.

This worldview looks at an eighteen-year-old who grows up poor, graduates high school, and starts working full-time in a low-wage job as something of a failure. We failed that kid. We didn’t get him to and through post-secondary education. He ended up on the wrong side of an increasingly sharp educational divide.

But does that worldview and theory of action make sense?

What if that eighteen-year-old, for example, goes on to stay in that low-wage job, gaining important skills along the way, and starts to get raises? What if that eighteen-year-old avoids the poverty traps of early fatherhood, incarceration, and substance abuse? What if, by age twenty-four, that young man is earning $25,000 a year, is self-sufficient, a good role model, and an upstanding member of his community? Have we failed him? What if, at twenty-four, he’s now ready to gain some additional skills and get an industry-certified credential in order to get one of those middle-skilled jobs—which, by the way, are quite plentiful?

What if we’re wrong that stopping with a high school diploma is equivalent to a life of certain poverty? What if there’s no sharp educational divide, and instead it’s more like an educational continuum—but we’ve ignored the routes in the middle of that continuum, the middle-class jobs that require technical skills?

What if, by putting all of our focus on preparing students for higher education, we’re overlooking other issues that matter just as much, like decisions around parenting or a strong work ethic? Or the acquisition of useful workplace skills while in high school? What if, by spending all of our efforts trying to boost the proportion of low-income students who are making it through college from 10 percent to, say, 20 percent, we’re ignoring the needs of the other 80 percent?

What if we’re wrong that low-wage work is a cause of poverty? What if we learn that the true cause of poverty in America is not working at all? What if we put our minds toward solving that problem?

***

My hope is to spur an honest conversation about these issues and more, and find a middle ground between the utopianism that characterizes so much of the reform movement (“Let’s get every child college and career ready!”) and the defeatism that emanates from too many corners of the education system (“There’s nothing we can do until we end poverty!”).

We can all agree that intergenerational poverty is fundamentally un-American; sharply reducing it is an objective we can all embrace. The only question is how. Let’s stay open to any and all good answers.

photo credit: Nancy Bell

Before the age of standards and tests, teachers generally taught the textbook. They began on page one and got as far as they could before the end of June, sometimes racing through the last four chapters in less time than they devoted to the first.

Standards, testing, and accountability changed that. Now there are clearly defined goals that all students must meet, and teachers are asked to ensure not just “coverage,” but that all students master a predetermined set of content and skills.

That means today’s curriculum and instruction are driven not by where you began but by where you want to end up. In a data-driven, results-oriented classroom, good teachers begin with the standards and “backmap” from June to September to ensure that the most critical or difficult topics get the instructional time they deserve.

This approach makes sense for most subjects, where the standards describe the actual content that students need to master within and across grades. Math, for instance, is a hierarchical subject with a logical progression of skills and content. Yearlong curriculum plans can be devised and focused on ensuring adequate time to master all of the key standards. And teachers who themselves are math experts may well be able to piece together a coherent program that meets their students’ needs using the standards as their guide.

Reading, however, is different.

Beyond the foundational reading skills, standards in this realm don’t articulate the content that students need to learn to become good readers. Instead, the standards describe the habits and skills of “good readers.” Good readers can, for instance, identify the main idea of a text. They can understand “shades of meaning” and can even use evidence to support comprehension and analysis.

The challenge arises when a habits-driven subject meets a results-driven classroom. In that environment—i.e., in our world of standards-based and data-driven instruction—schools have often tried to do for reading what they did for subjects like math, science, and history. They took the standards—which, for reading, were mostly a list of skills that strong readers demonstrate—and backmapped those skills across the year, carefully selecting texts that would illustrate a particular strategy or that would give students extra practice as they honed particular skills.

A decade into this effort, the results have been underwhelming. While we’ve seen gains in math achievement, we have seen only modest improvements in reading achievement in grade four, and minimal, if any, in grades eight or twelve.

Why?

The answer is simple, although the solution is not.

In grades K–3, reading is largely a suite of skills to be developed. Students need to learn to decode, which demands fluency practice and explicit instruction in phonics and vocabulary. This approach to reading instruction—where discrete skills are broken down into bite-sized chunks and taught explicitly, largely independent of texts—works for beginning readers. And our standards-driven reading instruction in grades K–3 has been rewarded by modest achievement gains in grades three and four, when reading tests with relatively simple passages still largely reward mastery of decoding. But fourth grade also marks the beginning of a worsening decline, particularly among low-income students’ scores, as tests demand ever more sophisticated reading-comprehension ability.

After students learn how to read, the “outcomes-focused” instruction that characterizes the standards era needs to adapt as the classroom shifts to English language arts. Then we must stop trying to teach reading the way we teach math. Rather, we need to view the skills and habits described by the standards as tools—tools that can and should be honed over time, in service of understanding and analyzing great texts, but that are not the “content” of reading instruction.

That is precisely why the Common Core ELA standards deliberately call for a “content-rich curriculum.” The CCSS authors realized that, particularly when it comes to reading, standards do not a curriculum make. They provide a broad outline upon which a curriculum needs to be built, but it’s the curriculum, and not the standards, that should drive daily practice in the classroom.

Stated more plainly: When it comes to teaching reading, a curriculum that is aligned to the standards—but not the standards themselves—should drive daily instruction. Taken seriously, this idea has enormous implications for the routines of the American elementary school classroom, from the use of interim assessments to the selection of books and much else. (Stay tuned for more thoughts on all that.)

In the end, the path to improved reading comprehension—to mastery of the skills outlined in state literacy standards—is a cumulative process driven by effective curriculum-centered instruction. If we continue to treat reading like every other subject and march through the standards as if they were a curriculum, we will remain stuck in place.

• Many, including some of us at Fordham, have argued that under President Obama and Secretary Duncan, the Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights is running amok on issues like school discipline and access to AP courses. Now it has released guidance that, according to the New York Times, will walk back the Bush-era policy allowing single-sex schools and classrooms. (a policy that was also encouraged by Hillary Clinton). According to the Department of Education’s guidance, schools may still offer these classes, but only if they jump through nine hoops. They must, for example, provide evidence that these classrooms benefit children in a way that mixed-gender ones cannot, offer students both alternatives, and ensure that all parents volunteered their kids for enrollment. Why not just allow it if parents want it?
• In Pittsburgh, a state statute and local bargaining agreement dictate that teacher layoffs must be based exclusively on seniority. Yet the school district—cognizant of the policy’s many shortcomings—ignored the law and the CBA in favor of keeping a number of highly qualified special-education teachers. The union grieved, an arbiter ruled in its favor, and the district appealed to a higher court. The case isn’t getting Vergara-like attention, but a ruling is expected in the coming week. The district has argued, among other things, that this foolish seniority-based system violates NCLB and the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act because it removes effective teachers from students with special needs—arguably the youngsters that need them most. Indeed.
• The International Baccalaureate recently launched a stand-alone program designed to combine its rigorous academic curriculum with specific career-ready training for students in their last two years of secondary schools. Participants prepare for careers as chefs, auto mechanics, and suchlike while benefitting from IB’s respected academic courses. It’s a smart initiative that meets the needs of today’s changing world—one in which career preparation is the best path for a number of students.
• Senator Lamar Alexander, the incoming chairman of the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions, intends finally to have ESEA reauthorized, telling the Associated Press that the law’s current iteration, No Child Left Behind, overregulates local schools and is detrimental to quality education. Among the likely reforms will be an easing of the law’s annual testing requirement, which is intimately tied to NCLB’s controversial waivers. He hopes to get a bill signed by President Obama in 2015, an accomplishment that would require something exceeding rare in today’s Washington—bipartisanship. 

Upward mobility, IB’s career-ready program, Pittsburgh school district’s teachers union fight, and peer pressure.

Amber's Research Minute

Leonardo Bursztyn and Robert Jensen, "How Does Peer Pressure Affect Educational Investments?," National Bureau of Economic Research, Working Paper 20714 (November 2014).

A core assumption of the education-reform movement is that excellent schools can be engines of upward mobility. But what kind of schools? And to what end?

In tandem with the release of several papers, this path-breaking conference will consider thorny questions, including: Is “college for all” the right goal? (And what do we mean by “college”?) Do young people mostly need a strong foundation in academics? What can schools do to develop so-called “non-cognitive” skills? Should technical education be a central part of the reform agenda? How about apprenticeships? What can we learn from the military’s success in working with disadvantaged youth?

Keynote Address: Hugh Price, Senior Fellow, Brookings Institution “What the Military Can Teach Us About How Young People Learn and Grow” 

The logic of using school choice to drive educational quality assumes that choosers will make rational decisions based on complete information and that market forces will do the rest. Isn’t it pretty to think so? Yet “people are flawed as information consumers and decision makers,” notes Tulane University’s Jon Valant in this thought-provoking report from AEI. Most of us, he notes, are “boundedly rational.” Our decisions make sense, but they’re a function of the time we have to spend evaluating our options, and our own cognitive capacity to process the information at hand. Thus, while many proponents see school choice as an intrinsic good arising from values such as freedom and parental control, there are limits to just how much change in the realms of education quality and achievement is actually brought about by choice per se. Valent’s report shows why: Families consider fewer schools than are available (and sometimes only one), typically turning to friends, neighbors and family members “whose insights often come without the school chooser having to search for them.” Providing more school options—and more information about those options—may make little sense when parents remain unaware of the full range of available choices or lack the time and resources to evaluate them. Simply making the data user-friendly isn’t necessarily the answer, either. The much-pilloried school report cards that reduce a school to a simple (or simplistic) A–F grade have measurable influences on the decisions parents make. Yet Valant also shows that narrative comments on those report cards are “stunningly influential” in shaping perceptions of a school—no surprise to anyone who reads reviews on Yelp. Plus, parents may choose on the basis of characteristics that have nothing to do with a school’s academic performance, frustrating those who assume that good academic performance is enough to drive demand—and that demand will boost academic performance. “Successfully informing the public is not easy,” Valant observes, considerably understating the case. He has no choice but to conclude with a call to improve the ways that we measure and report school performance, including goals beyond academic achievement, and for greater attention to how those with choices utilize the information available to them. Perhaps the clearest advice comes from AEI’s Andrew Kelly, who notes in the report’s foreword that “it is time for reformers and policymakers to pay as much attention to the demand side of school choice as they have to the supply of good schools.”

SOURCE: Jon Valant, "Better data, better decisions: Informing school choosers to improve education markets," American Enterprise Institute (November 2014).

Research shows that the gap in reading skills between poor and non-poor kids manifests itself earlier than kindergarten and often widens during summer. With that in mind, this new study examines whether a summer reading program for elementary students affects reading comprehension. During the spring and summer of 2013, second and third graders in fifty-nine North Carolina public schools were randomly assigned to treatment and control groups. The former were given six reading comprehension lessons aimed at fostering their engagement with books at home during the summer and were subsequently mailed a book each week—ten total—over the summer months. (Books were matched to students based on their initial reading level and their interests.) Control kids received six math lessons during the same time period and weren’t mailed books. Both groups were asked to send in response cards on which they reported the number of books read and answered a handful of basic questions about them. There are three key findings: One, the treatment group read an additional 1.1 books more over the summer than the control group. Two, there were significant impacts on reading comprehension test scores in the fall for third-grade girls. Although third-grade boys and second graders of both genders showed no gains, the program caused an increase of 7.3 percent of a standard deviation in reading comprehension compared to the control group. That is equivalent to the gain that a typical third-grader makes in 1.4 months. Third, regarding differences within the treatment group, reading more books and being able to answer questions about them were both linked to increases in reading comprehension scores, which carried over to understanding other texts months later. Why the difference between boys and girls? Analysts posit that girls may read more diligently or in a more engaged manner. In short—unsurprisingly—going through the motions without being focused enough to remember basic facts about a book doesn’t build lasting reading prowess.

SOURCE: Jonathan Guryan, James S. Kim, David M. Quinn, "Does Reading During the Summer Build Reading Skills? Evidence from a Randomized Experiment in 463 Classrooms," National Bureau of Economic Research, Working Paper No. 20689 (November 2014).

This study examines the quality of school management in different countries and school types and its relationship to student outcomes. The authors constructed an index by averaging across twenty management practices in four areas (operations, monitoring, target setting, and personnel), then surveyed 1,800 principals in eight countries on their adherence to these practices. A broad range of schools ended up in the data set, including traditional government schools, private schools, and autonomous government schools (i.e., schools that receive public funding but have some degree of operational independence, such as charter schools). The authors find that the quality of school management varies significantly across countries, with the United Kingdom, Sweden, Canada, and the United States scoring higher than the other four. High scores on the index are positively correlated with better student outcomes. Yet large disparities in management quality exist within countries across different types of schools, with autonomous public schools faring better than both traditional government schools and private schools. The difference, the authors say, is not the autonomy, but how it’s used. “Having strong accountability of principals to an external governing body and exercising strong leadership through a coherent long-term strategy for the school appear to be two key features that account for a large fraction of the superior management performance of such schools,” they note. From a policy perspective, school management tends to get less attention than teacher quality, class size. or school choice. That may be a mistake. 

SOURCE: Nicholas Bloom, Renata Lemos, Raffaella Sadun, and John Van Reenen, "Does Management Matter in Schools," National Bureau of Economic Research, Working Paper 20667 (November 2014).