The Education Gadfly Weekly

You may have missed it over the holidays, but NPR ran a fascinating profile of Jason Zimba, one of the primary architects of the Common Core math standards. The piece, by the Hechinger Report’s Sarah Garland, an exceptionally thoughtful education reporter, traces Zimba’s career from Rhodes scholar and David Coleman’s business partner to “obscure physics professor at Bennington College” and unlikely standards bearer for the math standards that he had so much to do with creating.

Garland makes much of the fact that Zimba spends Saturday mornings tutoring his two young daughters in math. We’re told he feels the math his kids are getting at their local Manhattan public school is subpar, and that’s even after the school began implementing Common Core. “Zimba, a mathematician by training, is not just any disgruntled parent,” Garland notes. “He's one of the guys who wrote the Common Core.”

Some will surely see irony in Zimba feeling compelled to supplement what his kids learn in school with breakfast-table math lessons—more schadenfreude for Common Core critics—but there is no irony. As my Fordham colleague Kathleen Porter-Magee noted in another great piece you might have missed in recent days, even the best standards don’t help teachers ensure that all students master the content and skills set forth in those standards. That’s what a good curriculum does—a point pressed by Zimba in the NPR segment. "I used to think if you got the assessments right, it would virtually be enough,” he tells Garland. “Now I think it's curriculum.”

This insight is no surprise to those of us who have long championed curriculum and rich academic content as ed reform’s great un-pulled lever—or who support Common Core simply because it puts curriculum onto the reform agenda. Happily, the ranks are growing of those who recognize that curricular content and quality are at least as important to student learning as teacher quality, accountability, and school choice. At Fordham’s upward mobility conference in Washington, D.C. last month, Dacia Toll, who heads the highly-regarded Achievement First charter school network, was admirably candid in noting her own conversion to content. Common Core testing in her New York schools, she noted, has been “one hell of a wake-up call.”

“The achievement gap,” she said, turned out to be “even wider than we thought it was. Our schools, which were high-achieving under the old regime, are no longer, and it has really sent us back to the drawing board….The more you look at the English language arts gap, the more you come back to background knowledge and vocabulary.” Translation: Curriculum and content matter—and for no one more than poor kids who get too little of that knowledge and vocabulary at home.

One of the bigger mistakes Toll made as a practitioner, she acknowledged, was cutting back on science and history to make more time for reading. It just didn’t work. So for the last two years, Achievement First has refocused on building knowledge in the service of stronger language proficiency. “It’s the only thing that moves the needle,” Toll declared, “and it moves really slowly.”

Achievement First isn’t the only closely watched CMO that’s getting serious about curriculum, content, and what kids learn. Nearly half of KIPP's schools have adopted Eureka Math, a CCSS-based math curriculum. And KIPP is working with Common Core, Inc., the non-profit that developed Eureka, to create a new K–8 English curriculum for KIPP schools that is designed to build student knowledge systematically through the use of high quality works of literature, nonfiction, and informational text. This objective is required by the standards, but few English curricula actually attempt it. "Our English curriculum will be as relentless in building knowledge as it will be in reaching each and every standard in the CCSS," Common Core's Lynne Munson promises. An especially encouraging development: Common Core is writing the curriculum for KIPP, but Munson says that her organization (which is not affiliated with the Common Core State Standards initiative, despite its name) will publish it, making it available for use to any school or district.

In short, curriculum’s day as the neglected stepchild of education reform seems to be coming to an end. More and more of the country’s savviest practitioners are beginning to realize that structural reform is one important lever, but instructional reform is equally powerful—and instructional reform isn’t just about the instructors. It’s at least as much about the content they impart to their young charges.

This is an awakening too long in coming. The entire edifice of education reform has forever treated content and curriculum as far less consequential than teacher quality, testing, charters, and choice. That was a whopping error. Simple common sense would dictate that the effectiveness of different teachers or schools should have as least as much to do with differences in what is being taught as who is doing the teaching, or under whose roof and which assessment regime.

As Zimba acknowledges, and the experience of KIPP and Achievement First demonstrates, wise decision making on curriculum and content is where the battle to attain rigorous standards will be won or lost.

The NPR piece drove home the point that standards themselves can only accomplish so much: “Even as Zimba and his colleagues defend the standards against cries of federal overreach,” Garland wrote, “they are helpless when it comes to making sure textbook publishers, test-makers, superintendents, principals and teachers interpret the standards in ways that will actually improve American public education.”

As Kathleen noted, many other countries address this problem by dictating, via national curricula, the content taught in schools to a degree that would make most Americans uncomfortable. “Given our country’s unique mixture of democratic values, diverse populations, and sheer size,” she wrote, “this use of standards has been a wise approach to bridging these two needs.” I agree. But the fact of local control of schooling is what puts the onus squarely on districts and schools to be critical consumers of curriculum. Standards do not compel them to choose well or wisely what their teachers actually use in the classroom.

Fortunately, we can profit from the experience of others. “It may seem esoteric to talk about background knowledge and vocabulary,” Dacia Toll noted at the Fordham symposium. “But I have become religious on these questions.”

May she be the first of many such converts. If so, 2015 may be the year of curriculum-based reform. Happy New Year!

photo credit: jacinta lluch valero via Flickr

Editor's note: This post was originally published in a slightly different form as an op-ed in the Washington Post. It was subsequently republished in the Denver Post, Tampa Bay Times, Salt Lake Tribune, Tampa Tribune, Philadelphia Inquirer, Commercial Appeal, Post and Courier, Post-Standard, News Tribune, News Journal, and Capital Times.

In November, former Florida Governor Jeb Bush suggested to hundreds of lawmakers and education reformers gathered for his foundation’s annual summit that “the rigor of the Common Core State Standards must be the new minimum.” Furthermore, he said, to “those states choosing a path other than Common Core, I say this: That’s fine. Except you should be aiming even higher and be bolder and raise standards and ask more of our students and the system.” Several Republican politicians, including Louisiana Senator (and gubernatorial hopeful) David Vitter and Mississippi Lieutenant Governor Tate Reeves, promptly took up his suggestion, calling on their states to replace the Common Core with standards that are even more challenging.

In theory, this position is exactly right. Academic standards are the province of the states; it’s within their rights to have their own standards if that’s what their leaders and residents want. Furthermore, though there are benefits to having common standards in terms of cost savings (for taxpayers) and continuity (for students who move across state lines, including the children of military families), most of Common Core’s upside stems from its rigor, not its sameness.

But if our fellow Republicans move to embrace standards that are even higher than Common Core, they’d better have a realistic plan for putting them in place. Otherwise, such calls will be viewed as political posturing and pandering at the expense of our children. Unfortunately, states that have thus far attempted this effort—replacing Common Core with something even stronger—have found that it is quite difficult to achieve.

For all the hoopla, just a handful of states have proposed significant changes to Common Core, and none of them has written higher standards. South Carolina’s new draft standards have been widely panned, and they will probably need to go back to the drawing board. Oklahoma passed a bill that requires Common Core to be replaced with the lower standards that were being used in the state while yet another set of standards is written—forcing educators to deal with three sets of standards in as many years. In Indiana, modifications to Common Core were met with skepticism from supporters and detractors alike (though Republican Governor Mike Pence and his team deserve credit for attempting to reach compromise on the standards and help districts with follow-through). And Missouri, which passed a bill to make changes to the standards, seems unlikely to please both those who want high standards and those who value standards only in terms of how different they are from Common Core.

The basic problem is that it’s impossible to draft standards that prepare students for college and career readiness and that look nothing like Common Core. That’s because Common Core, though not perfect, represents a good-faith effort to incorporate the current evidence of what students need to know and do to succeed in credit-bearing courses in college or to land a good-paying job—and the milestones younger students need to pass to reach those goals. That’s why states that are sincere about wanting to aim higher would be smart to start with Common Core as a base for additions or modifications—as Florida did when it added calculus standards several years ago.

Starting from scratch, on the other hand, pulls the rug out from under educators who have spent almost five years implementing Common Core in their classrooms. “You just get frustrated and tired with trying to appease people who really have no idea what’s going on with you day to day,” one kindergarten teacher told Mississippi’s Clarion-Ledger. “It’s just really mind-blowing that this is something they’re considering doing at this point.” Teachers are all too familiar with the fad du jour. Policymakers promised them that Common Core would be different, that it would have staying power. Teachers are right to be angry at those broken promises, especially because so much of the backlash to Common Core has little to do with the standards themselves.

So raise standards beyond Common Core? Sure—but you’d better make sure it’s not all talk and no action.

• The Republicans are now in charge on Capitol Hill, and they’ve set their sights on No Child Left Behind. Politico reports that the chairmen of the education committees—Senator Lamar Alexander of Tennessee and Representative John Kline of Minnesota—have made it clear that an overhaul is in order. And what that likely means is a significantly reduced federal role in education. Gadfly is sanguine about that—but keep the annual testing, please.
• It’s been a busy month in the world of Ohio charter schools. The end of 2014 brought about two Fordham-sponsored reports urging reform in the beleaguered sector: Stanford University’s Center for Research on Education Outcomes (CREDO) study Charter School Performance in Ohio and Bellwether Education Partners’ The Road to Redemption: Ten Policy Recommendations for Ohio's Charter School Sector. Both made big splashes in myriad Ohio media outlets, such as the Columbus Dispatch, Cleveland Plain Dealer, Toledo Blade, Youngstown Vindicator, and Akron Beacon Journal. They also attracted the attention of charter school experts and Ohio’s Governor Kasich. Couple that with an encouraging slowdown in the number of new charter schools in the state (authorizers are becoming choosier), and 2015 looks bright for schools of choice in the Buckeye State.
• Over the last ten years, the Chinese government, via an entity called Hanban, has set up 1,100 state-run Confucius Institutes to teach Chinese language and culture in schools worldwide. Last month, Hanban Director-General Xu Lin admitted to the BBC that the organization intentionally exports the Chinese Communist Party’s values. Editors at the Wall Street Journal rightly worry about the implications for academic freedom; our own Checker Finn has said that schools shouldn’t participate. This report coincided with a startling profile in the New York Times of a Chinese “test-prep factory,” where head teachers work seventeen-hour days and students are encouraged to train around the clock for China’s national college-entrance exam, the sole criterion for college admission. The College Board’s David Coleman reportedly said that Hanban is “like the sun. It lights the path to develop Chinese teaching in the U.S.” Chinese policies seem more like a black hole to us.

NCLB reauthorization, curriculum reform, the Common Core’s quintessence, and the impact of youth employment programs.

SOURCE: Alexander Gelber, Adam Isen, Judd B. Kessler, "The Effects of Youth Employment: Evidence from New York City Summer Youth Employment Program Lotteries," National Bureau of Economic Research, Working Paper No. 20810 (December 2014).

Children cannot be truly literate without knowing about history, science, art, music, literature, civics, geography, and more. Indeed, they cannot satisfactorily comprehend what they read unless they possess the background knowledge that makes such comprehension possible. Yet most American primary schools have been marching in the opposite direction: treating reading only as a “skill” and pushing off history, science, art, and music “until later.”

This problem grows more serious with the advent of the Common Core State Standards for English Language Arts, which take for granted that children expected to meet those standards are being supplied with a content-rich curriculum. In far too many U.S. schools, however, that is simply not happening.

So what should we do?

Commit to implanting a sequential, content-rich curriculum in the country’s elementary and middle schools.

Learn about E. D. Hirsch in this short video that follows his career, how he came to develop the Core Knowledge curriculum, and his thoughts on the future of the Common Core. Featured in the video are prominent education reformers such as David Coleman, Joel Klein, Chester E. Finn, Jr., Tom Birmingham, Randi Weingarten, Valarie Lewis, Sol Stern, Kati Haycock, and Dan Willingham.

Pop quiz: If you’re a Chicago ninth grader, what are the chances you’ll have earned a four-year college degree ten years from now? This research brief from the University of Chicago Consortium on Chicago School Research (CCSR), claims it’s just 14 percent. Sounds grim until you do a little math: At present, the national high school graduation rate is 81 percent; four-year college enrollment is 38 percent, while the six-year graduation rate among those enrollees is 59 percent. Multiply those figures together and you get an 18 percent national “degree attainment index” (a figure that sounds curiously low given that one-third of Americans ages 25 to 29 have at least a bachelor’s degree, according to the National Center for Education Statistics). Regardless of how you keep score, Chicago has improved markedly since CCSR first published its index in 2006. High school graduation rates have jumped from 53 percent to 73 percent, and a higher percentage of grads are enrolling in four-year colleges (college completion rates have not changed significantly). Meanwhile there has been a slight increase in the grade point average and ACT scores of CPS students, even though more than 5,000 additional students took the exam compared to eight years ago—implying that the improved high school graduation rate cannot be attributed to reduced rigor or a lower bar. Still, with 75 percent of CPS high school students reporting they want to obtain a four-year degree, while only one in six are projected to reach that goal, there’s a yawning gap between students’ aspirations and their accomplishments. Yet there’s significant upside in the data: One in four Chicago students with GPAs above 3.5 do not enroll in a four-year college after graduating, suggesting there’s more low-hanging, college-ready fruit to be harvested. After that, things quickly get thornier, and the hope of college even for 75 percent seems unrealistically sunny. Almost a third of graduates leave Chicago schools with a GPA of less than 2.0, “which means they are not showing the skills they need for success in either college or the workforce,” the authors note. This sobering data point alone makes the report’s singular focus on college seem a bit tone-deaf. One of the authors’ takeaways is that “students and their families need guidance in selecting a college where the student is likely to graduate.” Perhaps, but even more of them may need first-rate CTE programs and preparation for a life of economic self-sufficiency that does not include college.

SOURCE: Kaleen Healey, Jenny Nagaoka, and Valerie Michelman, “The Educational Attainment of Chicago Public Schools Students: A Focus on Four-Year College Degrees,” the University of Chicago Consortium on Chicago School Research (December 2014).

A new National Bureau of Economic Research study examines how gender composition in schools and classrooms impacts student performance. Analysts study middle school classrooms in Seoul, South Korea, where the students are randomly assigned to single sex schools, co-ed schools with single sex classes, and co-ed schools with mixed gender classes. In Seoul, under the “Equalization Policy,” the prior achievement of students is used to “balance” the performance in the classroom. In other words, they dole out kids of varying performance levels across classes—so essentially the average quality of peers is held constant. Students are not allowed to submit schooling preferences, which means that compliance to random assignment is high. Other variables, like curriculum and school funding, are more or less held constant because Korea adheres to a national curriculum and schools are centrally financed. The sample comprises 76 percent of middle schools in Seoul; no differences were found in student background across school types. There are two key findings. First, classroom or school gender composition does not impact outcomes for females. Second, the impact of single sex education on male achievement varies by school gender composition, with single sex schools increasing achievement and single  sex classes within mixed gender schools decreasing achievement. Yet interestingly, they find that the impact of single sex schools on male achievement is driven by increases in student effort and study time—not gender. Males report spending more time on homework and tutoring. Analysts hypothesize that single sex schools are able to specialize teaching techniques when they teach only males—but in single sex classes within co-ed schools, they teach both girls and boys, so educators are less likely to change their teaching style. One possibility: Without girls around, the boys had nothing better to do than their homework.

SOURCE: Soohyung Lee, Lesley J. Turner, Seokjin Woo, and Kyunghee Kim, “All or Nothing? The Impact of School and Classroom Gender Composition on Effort and Academic Achievement,” National Bureau of Economic Research, Working Paper No. 20722 (December 2014). 

New York City has a serious attendance problem. This new report from the Center for New York City Affairs at the New School reveals that 240,000 students in the nation’s largest school district—more than one in five—were chronically absent during the 2012–2013 school year. Chronic absenteeism, defined as missing 10 percent or more of class time, adds up to almost a month of school per student and is (unsurprisingly) correlated with poor performance on end-of-year tests. Indeed, the authors of the report argue that chronic absenteeism better predicts a student’s academic achievement and school’s test scores than more traditional metrics, such as eligibility for free or reduced price lunch. And schools with high absent rates are more likely to face other poverty-related problems, including high rates of teacher and student turnover, high numbers of unemployed males, low adult education levels, and higher numbers of homeless students. The lattermost factor is particularly startling. Nearly 80,000 New York City school students were homeless at some point during the 2012–2013 school year. Often forced to move from shelter to shelter, they are most at risk for chronic absenteeism. The city is making efforts to fix these problems—and, if successful, these steps that could be applied to other urban areas facing similar issues. For example, the Department of Education is teaming up with the Department of Homeless Services to provide transportation and childcare and build affordable housing. The city also plans to transform nearly one hundred of the lowest-attended schools into full-service community schools, which would provide wraparound services individualized to a particular neighborhood’s needs—although the evidence that the community schools model can raise academic achievement is mixed at best, based on similar programs in Cincinnati, Chicago, and Portland.

SOURCE: Kim Nauer, et al., “A Better Picture of Poverty: What Chronic Absenteeism and Risk Load Reveal About NYC’s Lowest-Income Elementary Schools,” Center for New York City Affairs at The New School (November 2014).