The Education Gadfly Weekly

At the heart of Robert Putnam’s important new book, Our Kids: The American Dream in Crisis, is a paradox. As Putnam so effectively and compassionately illustrates, the fundamental reality of life for many children growing up in poverty in America today is the extremely low level of “social capital” of their families, communities, and schools. One or both of their parents are absent; church attendance is down; opportunities to participate in sports teams or scout troops or youth groups are few and far between. Put simply, these kids—“our kids”—feel all alone, living “troubled, isolated, hopeless lives.”

The solution, then—the way to help poor children climb the ladder to the middle class and achieve the American Dream—must involve rebuilding this social capital, right? Yet that’s not what Putnam proposes; instead, he calls for more investments in government services and transfer payments. He wants to replace social capital with financial capital.

Why? It’s probably because, like the rest of us, he doesn’t know how to rebuild social capital. Once it’s lost, it may be gone forever.

And that’s the paradox: Social capital is essential to keeping families and communities spiritually and materially prosperous. But once a family or a community experiences social-capital insolvency, declaring bankruptcy and starting fresh is extraordinarily hard to do. This is an age-old insight among conservatives, and it’s why so many on the Right (going back at least to Burke) have worried about protecting civil society. If the Left is also coming around to this view, so much the better. But is it too late?

***

A few weeks ago, I had the honor of hosting Putnam at the Thomas B. Fordham Institute and interviewing him about his book. (You can watch the video here or read the transcript here.) I put that question to him. I asked him what we could do to stitch together the frayed social fabric of the most disadvantaged and dysfunctional families and communities. Is it simply, as President Obama says repeatedly, about “investing in public goods” like pre-school? This was Putnam’s response:

I would love to have some ideas about how to address the collapse of social capital and especially the collapse of family social capital. I mean, I really would. When we convened my group after the book—we are in the midst of convening a set of working groups on various baskets of possible solutions—we convened one on family structure, and we had people from different sorts of backgrounds, and actually liberals and conservatives in the group all agree this is a problem, but we don’t quite know how to fix it. George W. Bush tried the [Healthy Marriage Initiative], and to his great credit, they did evaluations of them, and evaluations are that it’s hard for government to do anything about that part of the problem. It doesn’t mean we shouldn’t do something about it. I think that not all problems have government solutions. I think some of them have social or cultural solutions.

This is an honest and appropriate answer. It syncs with the conclusion Charles Murray comes to at the end of his similar 2012 book, Coming Apart. In a nutshell: He admitted to not knowing what to do about these problems either. (You can watch a video of Murray discussing his book with Fordham’s Chester Finn.)

Maybe there’s nothing we can do about broken families and communities. But that doesn’t mean that all hope is lost. Schools, in particular, can be instruments for building social capital. Consider three strategies:

1. Invite poor children into schools with social capital to spare. If loneliness, isolation, and extremely fragile families are big parts of the poverty problem, then connecting poor children with thriving families and communities can be part of the solution. Great schools can be such communities.

The Left likes this idea as it pertains to school desegregation. In fact, the Century Foundation’s Rick Kahlenberg reads Putnam’s book as an explicit endorsement of experimenting with various ways of integrating schools along socioeconomic lines.

The Right likes this idea as it pertains to school choice, and especially private school choice. Why not let poor children use vouchers to join strong private school communities with oodles of social capital? The results—in terms of academic and other outcomes—speak for themselves.

A “purple solution,” as Putnam might say, would embrace both integration and school choice.

2. Build on the social capital that does exist in poor communities. As devastating as Putnam’s depiction of today’s poverty may be, we shouldn’t think that there’s absolutely no social capital in low-income communities. Far from it. Churches and other faith communities continue to play critical roles; so do a variety of neighborhood organizations. Likewise, sports and other extracurricular programs provide an important home for poor kids. It’s obscene, as Putnam said at our event, that some schools are now charging “activities fees” to participate in these programs.

Education reformers should look for ways to nurture existing social capital and help it grow. Community-based charter schools are one way; so (again) is private school choice. That’s a particularly powerful way to engage faith communities in expanding their mission into education, as we’ve seen with voucher and tax-credit programs in Florida and elsewhere. And as the important book Lost Classroom, Lost Community argues, urban Catholic schools have been in the social-capital business for a century, to great effect. We must do everything we can to stem their demise.

Let’s be honest, though: Growing social capital is a different mission from growing academic achievement. They are probably related, but sometimes clash. If community-based charters or faith-based voucher schools are doing important work on the social-capital front, but are not getting the test scores we seek, it creates a real dilemma for us. We’ve got to tread carefully.

3. Build social capital by creating new schools. This is the toughest item—logistically, politically, and otherwise. It’s like growing a flower in the desert. Yet it’s the approach taken by most “no-excuses” charter schools: to import loads of financial, human, and social capital into an impoverished neighborhood and build something new and enduring. Such schools connect with the deepest desires of the parents in those communities: for their children to succeed, to prepare for college or career, to live the American Dream. But the people who run these schools are often not from the community, and that creates inevitable conflicts. It’s also something of an open question whether these brand-new schools can create true social capital beyond their four walls; the authors of Lost Classroom, Lost Community aren’t so sure.

And what about the other solutions that Putnam, President Obama, and many others on the Left promote? These include investing in pre-school and creating “wrap-around” services at poor schools, à la the Harlem Children’s Zone—which, in addition to providing schooling, also provides health care, meals, and after-school activities for students and their families. I’m certainly game for trying them. But it seems to me that if they are to have much of an impact, they must build social capital rather than just provide services to individual kids. I’m skeptical that a typical Head Start center, after-school program, or school-based health clinic can do that, but I’d be glad to be proven wrong.

***

There are some people, mostly on the Left, who still believe that the poverty problem can be solved by giving poor people more money or services. This position has the benefit of simplicity. But it’s hard to read Putnam and think that such an approach will do much to interrupt intergenerational poverty. If we want to spur upward mobility, we need something much more.

Amanda Ripley famously reported in The Smartest Kids in the World that South Koreans consider their teachers to be “nation builders.” Likewise, our educators—and our education reformers—need to be considered “social-capital builders.” Let’s figure out how.

Editor’s note: This article first appeared in National Review Online.

I like the Common Core State Standards just fine, but let me confess a little secret: standards have never interested me very much. As a teacher, I would no sooner reach for state standards to decide what to teach than an architect would look to building codes for inspiration when sketching a skyscraper. Likewise, I suspect chefs never start with safe food handling procedures when planning a tempting menu. Of course, I want my students to be able to “determine two or more central ideas of a text” (that’s a standard). But deciding which texts are worth reading is far more interesting. And that’s not a standards question—it’s a curriculum question.

Much of my enthusiasm for Common Core has been predicated on the assumption that raising our game on teaching and testing can’t be accomplished without taking a long, hard look at curriculum—the course content and class materials we put in front of students. Curriculum is largely beyond the reach of Common Core; it’s strictly (and correctly) a local concern. But it’s been widely hoped the new standards would create a robust nationwide market for innovative new materials—especially in English language arts (ELA), where Common Core explicitly states the standards “must be complemented by a well-developed, content-rich curriculum.”

In the main, it hasn’t happened. Five years into Common Core implementation, 90 percent of school districts report that they are still struggling to find the materials they need to meet the new standards. On the one hand, this is not entirely surprising. Curriculum has long been the neglected stepchild of education reform, and building new materials takes time. However, not long ago, a study by the Brookings Institution’s Russ Whitehurst demonstrated that curriculum has an even greater effect on student outcomes than most popular policy levers, including charter schools, teacher quality, preschool programs, and even standards themselves.

In short, improving curriculum is almost certainly the last, best, juiciest piece of low-hanging fruit left in our efforts to improve student outcomes.

All is not lost. There are good reasons to think that Common Core may at last be spurring the development of innovative curriculum. Last month, my Fordham Institute colleagues released a report that gives a warm review to EngageNY, a comprehensive, Common Core-aligned curriculum developed by New York State for its seven hundred-odd school districts. “While imperfect, the materials offer educators…an important alternative to traditional textbooks of questionable quality and alignment,” the report notes.

It’s also free. Schools and teachers anywhere can download materials from EngageNY, and they have been doing so with abandon. Though New York was the only state to spend the money it won from the federal Race to the Top competition to build a curriculum, its policymakers seem to have tapped a nerve—and a deep well of demand for Common Core-aligned materials far beyond their borders. I recently obtained data from the New York State Education Department showing that while EngageNY units, lessons, and curriculum modules have been downloaded nearly twenty million times as of early May, more than half of those have been outside of New York. EngageNY may be quietly emerging as Common Core’s first “breakout hit.”

Some disclosure is needed here: I worked for several years for the Core Knowledge Foundation, which won the contract to create the EngageNY ELA curriculum from pre-K to second grade, so I cannot pretend to be a neutral observer. But I was not involved in the Fordham review, which lauded the span of K–12 EngageNY curricula, noting that “in general, alignment to the Common Core State Standards is strong—and the materials go beyond the standards in specifying important content and skills for each year of instruction.”

A closer look at where EngageNY materials are being accessed outside New York shows that the heaviest downloading traffic is in California, Arizona, Louisiana, Illinois, and Washington. Non-Common Core states are at or near the bottom of the list (Alaska, North Dakota) or vastly under-represented, given their size (Texas, Virginia). Downloads of math curricular materials outpace ELA almost precisely two-to-one. And within math, elementary math materials are consistently the most popular, week-to-week.

Indeed, what EngageNY’s widespread usage may reveal is a vein of discontent with math curricula. All of the math materials on EngageNY are produced by Great Minds, a Washington, D.C. nonprofit curriculum developer. The top out-of-state users of EngageNY appear to track almost perfectly with requests for training. “Some of the earliest adopters who called on us for professional development services were in California, Arizona, and in the state of Louisiana,” says Lynne Munson, Great Minds’ president and executive director.

Great Minds is also field-testing another Common Core-aligned English language arts curriculum, which should be freely available by the 2016–2017 school year. Meanwhile, a handful of states have begun promoting the use of “open educational resources” (OER), online public domain materials including full courses, textbooks, software, or other materials that schools, teachers, and students can take freely and re-purpose. Language in the Senate version of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) would promote the use of OERs through state grants. A similar amendment has been proposed for the House bill. In sum, there are encouraging signs that Common Core may yet usher in an era of curricular dynamism.

Reliable, neutral evaluations are another obstacle to curriculum coming into its own as a true reform lever, but there’s encouraging news here, too: A new, independent organization called EdReports.org has begun reviewing instructional materials for alignment to the Common Core, providing something akin to a free Consumer Reports of curriculum. (They are fans of EngageNY too.)

In sum, the stars may be aligning for some long-overdue attention to curriculum as a means of improving student achievement. Those of us who were hoping for that day may yet see our faith rewarded.

Editor’s note: This post originally appeared in a slightly different form at U.S. News & World Report.

I liked Grant Wiggins more than just about anyone with whom I disagreed so much. On several occasions, he’d write something about teaching or curriculum I vehemently disagreed with, or vice versa. A sharply worded blog comment or tweet would follow. Then, invariably, there would be an email. Often lots of them. Nothing remarkable there; arguments begun in one venue often spill over into others. But what I came to value about those exchanges with Wiggins, who passed away suddenly and unexpectedly last week at age 64, is that they weren’t an attempt to win an argument or a convert. If you disagreed with him—if you looked at the same evidence and came to a different conclusion—he had to know why. 

Wiggins, the author of the influential curriculum planning guide Understanding by Design, held to his beliefs tightly and argued them passionately. He would never have embraced the label of education reformer—far from it—but he resisted the facile view of the education world as an “us versus them” proposition. He was adamant that instructional practices he railed against—dry lectures; activities divorced from big ideas and important skills; dutiful marches through content to be covered—were not a product of “reform,” but default modes of instruction widely practiced everywhere, from public schools to charters to elite private schools.

Good teaching and deep student engagement were what mattered to him. These passions compelled him to pen a memorable open letter to Diane Ravitch at the height of her anti-reform influence, risking the wrath of her devoted legions of fans—many of them teachers. “Reform is strongly needed in many schools,” he wrote. “Many teachers are just not currently capable of engaging and deeply educating the kids in front of them, especially in the upper grades. Why can’t we just admit this?”

This quote illustrates well why his loss will be deeply felt. Wiggins focused squarely on reforming what matters most: what actually happens in our classrooms. What teachers teach and what students do all day. One of his best recent posts went viral last year. A teacher, later revealed to be his own daughter, did something Wiggins had often recommended: She spent a long, exhausting day as a student in her own school, sitting and passively listening for hours, with few opportunities to engage or even move. The experience left her with deep respect and empathy for students.

I can think of no more fitting tribute for teachers who wish to honor Wiggins’s memory than to take his good advice: shadow a student and experience personally what we ask of them. “By the very nature of the job of teaching, we are prone to be insensitive (literally) to the actual daily experience of our students, what they feel, unless we get outside of ourselves by acts of will,” he wrote.

I was in the midst of another battle with Wiggins on the day he passed, this time over a pair of posts attacking an argument of Dan Willingham’s, whose work I’ve long lauded and admired. His very last tweet praised Dan for engaging with him on his blog. “Needs to happen more often!” he tweeted. Then he was gone.

Poignantly, when I look at his blog even now, I can still see a comment I hastily wrote that day—a bit cranky; a little too adamant. It’s still sitting there, unpublished, with these words under it: “Your comment is awaiting moderation.”

I will miss sparring with him. I will miss his deeply informed pushback. I will miss his sense of what matters and his gentlemanly decency in disagreement.  I fear that without him, too often, my comments will be awaiting moderation.

The year was 2013. Bruce Springsteen was on the European leg of his “Wrecking Ball” tour. Seagulls squawked warily on the freshly rebuilt piers of the Jersey Shore. And here’s what Governor Chris Christie had to say about Common Core: "We are doing Common Core in New Jersey, and we're going to continue. And this is one of those areas where I have agreed more with the president than not.” Ah yes—rousing if uncharacteristically unprofane words from the state’s chief executive. But after countless years (actually, we counted; it was a little less than two) of study and consideration, Christie is now signaling his intent to abandon the Common Core standards he once championed. You can only imagine our shock at the sudden inconstancy of this resolute man, especially when New Jersey is only in the very first stages of implementing the CCSS-aligned PARCC tests. But at least we know that this reversal isn’t some cynical ploy to grab conservative support in the 2016 Republican primary. After all, what would be the point? His chances of seeing the Oval Office on anything other than a school trip are sinking faster than a fat guy thrown off the George Washington Bridge.

While Christie and fellow erstwhile Common Core supporter Bobby Jindal ponder how best to undermine standards on the way to an eighth-place tie in the New Hampshire primary, at least one Republican executive is showing how real education reform is done by those who care enough to see it through. This week, Nevada Governor Brian Sandoval signed a groundbreaking bill creating education savings accounts of roughly $5,000, which can be used to subsidize tuition and associated costs for a child attending a participating private school. Though it will vastly expand school choice for millions of families, the bill was never a slam-dunk proposition: It passed on a party-line vote, and the governor later had to cross his Republican allies by signing a major tax increase to help underwrite the plan. Taken together with an April bill establishing private school tax credits for families under 300 percent of the poverty line, the creation of a new “Achievement School District” for Nevada, and funds to recruit high-quality charter networks to the state, this represents the most productive state legislative session since Indiana’s 2011 spate of education triumphs—and we haven’t even mentioned Reno’s bona fide standards success story. It’s official: Governor Sandoval is the new Ed Reform Idol.

The lesson of the day, therefore, is that politics and education can intersect in some pretty funny ways. It’s as true in presidential races as it is in academic standards. And by the way, those tricky Common Core guidelines are hardly the only ones stirring up controversy. Last week, Wall Street energy analyst Paul Tice decried the Next Generation Science Standards, which have been adopted by thirteen states and the District of Columbia, as a Trojan Horse for climate change activists to push their environmental message on impressionable students. Whether or not anthropogenic global warming should be taught as fact to fifth graders isn’t for the Gadfly to say—we’re not scientists, man. But we find the way the Next Generation standards go about it extremely wanting, and haven’t been shy airing our reservations about them as a whole.

Common Core–aligned curricula, cut scores, spelling bees, and the benefits of high school athletics. 

Amber's Research Minute

Maryland’s demanding new Kindergarten Readiness Assessment was administered statewide for the first time this year. Its results are revealing and sobering, to put it mildly. Many states don’t even check in any systematic way on their children’s readiness for kindergarten, and in previous years, Maryland used metrics based on modest expectations, outdated standards, and feel-good politics.

With the leadership of State Superintendent Lillian Lowery and Assistant Superintendent Rolf Grafwallner, Maryland has brought a new sense of reality to the skills that five-year-olds ought to possess if they’re truly prepared to succeed in kindergarten and the early grades. These span four domains, two of them cognitive (language, math), plus physical wellbeing (motor development, hygiene, etc.) and what they term “social foundations” (self-control, for example).

The assessment is individually administered by kindergarten teachers and was given this year to all of the Old Line State’s sixty-seven thousand kindergartners. The results are sorted into three bands, politely labeled “demonstrating readiness,” “developing readiness,” and “emerging readiness.” But only the first of these means actually ready to succeed in kindergarten—and slightly fewer than half of Maryland’s entering kindergartners met that standard.

Which is to say that more than half are not ready. This report candidly displays the results not just for the state as a whole, but also for each of Maryland’s twenty-four local districts—and further disaggregated in all the ways we have come to expect and demand in the NCLB era.

Every which way you look, you see gaps. And often the gaps are alarmingly wide—by district, by race, by income, and more. You may not be surprised, but you ought to be alarmed and energized. Children who enter school without what they need to succeed in kindergarten are destined to have great difficulty catching up, even in schools that do their utmost. It’s not impossible, but it’s very hard.

Opinions will of course differ on what to do about this problem. I’m in favor of intensive, targeted early-childhood education for the kids who need it most, not the thin, inadequate version that so often follows from demands for universal pre-K.

But we should at least be able to agree that this problem is acute—and that Maryland deserves plaudits for exposing it.

Note: Chester E. Finn, Jr. was recently appointed by Governor Hogan to the Maryland State Board of Education.

SOURCE: “Readiness Matters!: The 2014-2015 Kindergarten Readiness Assessment Report,” Maryland State Department of Education (May 2015)

A new study from MDRC evaluates the impact, over three years, of a support program for low-income community college students in New York who are taking remedial courses. Developed by the City University of New York, the program is called the Accelerated Study in Associate Programs (or ASAP) and includes several components. Among these is a requirement to enroll full-time and participate in tutoring; comprehensive and dedicated student advising; a non-credit seminar that covers academic planning and goal setting; and career and employment services. Participants enjoy tuition waivers, free transportation vouchers, and free textbooks. Eligible students had to meet income eligibility requirements and take one to two remedial courses, among other conditions.

Three of CUNY’s largest community colleges participated, and roughly nine hundred students were randomly assigned either to a control group that received the usual college services or the treatment group, which had the opportunity to participate in ASAP (a study design that actually met the What Works Clearinghouse design standards without reservations).

Now for the results: ASAP students earned, on average, nine more credits than the control group. Moreover, the program nearly doubled the graduation rate, with 40 percent of the ASAP group receiving a degree compared to 22 percent of the control group. Participants were also more likely to transfer to a four-year college (25 percent versus 17 percent). As for the expense, the analysts estimate that ASAP costs roughly $16,000 more per student than CUNY spends on usual college services. Yet the cost per degree was lower because ASAP generated so many more graduates over three years than did the usual college services.

We’re beginning to build a literature around what it takes to help bolster success for non-college-ready students, and it typically involves intensive resources, including lots of one-on-one time with adults shepherding them around various academic and social obstacles. That’s all well and good. But keep in mind that, though the ASAP program doubled graduation rates, a full 60 percent of students with amazing amounts of help at their disposal still did not attain a degree in three years. If we want to boost completion rates, there’s no substitute for improving college readiness rates.

SOURCE: Susan Scrivener et al., "Doubling graduation rates: Three-year effects of CUNY’s Accelerated Study in Associate Programs (ASAP) for developmental education students," MDRC (February 2015).

Classroom discipline is, let’s face facts, a fraught subject. It frequently occurs at the uncomfortable vector between schooling and race, where seemingly all useful reform conversations end up turning poisonous and accusatory. If you argue in favor of curbing suspensions and expulsions for black students, you’re privileging the rights of reprobates over the studious kids trying to learn in an unruly environment. Advance a case for stricter measures, however, and you’ll find “disparate impacts” and the “school-to-prison pipeline” hung around your neck. Few areas of education discourse are more in need of illuminating research.

This new study, conducted by Stanford researchers specializing in the investigation of implicit psychological bias, provides exactly that. Through the use of two separate experiments, it exposes a tendency in K–12 teachers (predominantly white females in the middle of their careers, but including members of both sexes and multiple races) to detect patterns of misbehavior in black students more so than white. In the first experiment, the authors provided participants with disciplinary records for students with either stereotypical white or black names, each detailing two episodes of petty insubordination. They then asked the teachers to describe how “troubled” they felt (a composite measure indicating their degree of irritation, the perceived severity of the infraction, and how great a hindrance they felt it would be to their teaching) after reading about each instance. The results speak for themselves: When a student with a stereotypically black name had a second minor transgression, those surveyed felt significantly more troubled, more likely to recommend a harsher punishment, and more likely to deem him a “troublemaker” than after his first disruption. None of this proved true in the case of white students.

The second experiment replicated the conditions of the first, with the addition of an even more disquieting element. This time, participants were asked whether they could imagine suspending the hypothetical students at some point in the future. As in the previous trial, an obvious racial distinction emerged, and the teachers were far more likely see themselves suspending students with names like “Darnell” or “Deshawn.” “The Black student’s misbehavior was significantly more likely than the White student’s misbehavior to be perceived as indicative of a pattern,” the authors write. “And the more likely that teachers were to think the student was Black, the more likely they were to perceive his misbehavior as indicative of a pattern.”

The results of this report hold weighty implications for education reformers. The effects of a suspension on a child’s academic career—indeed, his life as a whole—could potentially be cataclysmic; it disrupts learning in the event and correlates with delayed academic advancement down the line. Clearly, there is room for right-thinking people to disagree on competing approaches to discipline and how to safeguard the interests of kids who step into the classroom ready and eager to learn. But if the facts behind this debate are suffused with indisputable evidence of racial bias, we need to find a way of addressing it.

SOURCE: Jason A. Okonofua and Jennifer L. Eberhardt, “Two Strikes: Race and the Disciplining of Young Students,” Psychological Science vol. 26 no. 5 (May 2015).