Redefining the school district in America
When designing turnaround districts, details truly matter. Amber M. Northern, Ph.D., and Michael J. Petrilli
Redefining the school district in America
Years into America’s quest to fix its failing schools, everyone agrees that it is extraordinarily hard work to turn them around. But that hasn’t stopped us from trying.
Indeed, the federal government has spent over $5.7 billion on school improvement grants (SIG) to date and has very little to show for it. Data from 2013 indicated that roughly two-thirds of schools that received SIG funds saw incremental gains in student proficiency—in line with the performance trend for all U.S. schools, including those that didn’t get SIG dollars. Even more disappointingly, one-third of SIG schools did worse after receiving the funding. (A small percentage stayed the same.)
A May 2015 study helped to explain these sobering results. It found that most states lack the expertise to turn around persistently failing schools. In fact, 80 percent of state officials reported “significant gaps” in this realm.
Even when we stumble upon promising strategies, the old familiar barriers make implementation difficult. In 2012, for example, the Center on Education Policy found that a majority of state officials believed that replacing the principal or staff of low-performing schools was a key element in improving student achievement there. Yet many also reported that the tight schedule for implementing SIG grants, combined with various union requirements and other HR restrictions, seriously impeded such changes.
The resultant frustration, at a time when millions of children are stuck in schools that fail to educate them, fueled our interest in better understanding just how America’s fragmented, politicized, and bureaucratic system of education governance impedes school reform—and how it could itself be reformed. That’s why, over four years ago, we and our friends at the Center for American Progress launched a multi-year initiative to do just that. We commenced that work with an “anchor book” called Education Governance for the Twenty-First Century: Overcoming the Structural Barriers to School Reform. One of the promising innovations it identified was the “recovery school district” (RSD), an alternative to district-based governance and traditional state takeovers. The RSD was then already visible in New Orleans, where the first such venture was undertaken. As new entities charged with running and turning around their states’ schools, RSDs enjoy certain authorities and flexibility—such as the ability to turn schools into charters and to bypass collective bargaining agreements—that allow them to cut the red tape that has made so many schools dysfunctional and hard to change in the first place. Backers of RSDs correctly assume that “failing schools” are merely symptoms; failing districts are the disease.
To conduct a deeper investigation into these alternative arrangements, we enlisted Nelson Smith, former head of the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools and now senior advisor to the National Association of Charter School Authorizers (NACSA). He launched the series in spring 2013 with an in-depth profile of the Tennessee Achievement School District (ASD), followed by a fall 2014 case study of Michigan’s Education Achievement Authority (EAA). (A precursor to the current series was his report on Louisiana’s original RSD and its lessons for Fordham’s home state of Ohio.) All three papers provide a detailed history of formidable challenges that these novel arrangements have faced in their respective states.
Last week we released the “capstone report” of this series, in which Smith provides updates to his earlier reviews of the RSD initiatives and adds a comprehensive cataloguing of similar initiatives underway and under consideration elsewhere. No other report—we’ve looked!—provides a comparably thorough analysis of turnaround districts and their kindred efforts.
Nelson explains the status of such districts in thirteen states—some of which have crashed and burned, but others of which are very much alive. As we write, a bill creating a turnaround school district just passed in the Nevada legislature, and lawmakers in Pennsylvania and Wisconsin are giving serious consideration to similar initiatives. The number of states undertaking this hugely promising but highly challenging (and endlessly varied) reform might double by mid-summer. What’s clear from the nearly twenty policy and governance recommendations contained in Smith’s brief is that these states and others have a lot to learn from both the failed and the successful attempts.
Here are a few of the report’s key takeaways for policymakers who might consider following in the footsteps of Louisiana, Tennessee, and other pioneers:
1. Call your lawyer. A close reading of the state constitution is essential. Some states are so wedded to traditional forms of “local control” that setting up a state district will require fancy legal footwork, if not a constitutional amendment. (That’s the case in Georgia.) It may be worth taking on this challenge, but it’s wise to know what’s in store.
2. Decide the endgame—for both schools and the turnaround district. Apart from setting goals for school performance, other decisions must be addressed—and the earlier, the better. For example: Who decides if a school returns to its home district? What conditions must the home district fulfill, both before and after any such return?
3. Expect course corrections. Running a statewide district is a huge, complex undertaking full of political, financial, and logistical challenges—not to mention the myriad crises and complications that always arise in institutions serving real children. Leaders need to pay close attention to real-time developments, build in feedback and reflection points, and be ready to pivot when results aren’t there or public support starts to evaporate. Sometimes even turnaround efforts need to turn around.
4. Give the locals a chance. After taking over failing schools, reformers sent by the state may want to clean house and start fresh with a whole new cast of characters. But attracting new talent is not easy, and even dysfunctional systems usually have some able (if underutilized or miscast) people working there. Incumbent staff should be given the opportunity to apply for work under the new arrangement and prove that they can shine under different circumstances.
As with virtually everything in education reform, when it comes to the design of turnaround districts, details truly matter. If these entities are to succeed where other school turnaround efforts have failed, they would do well to learn from the early wins and losses in Louisiana, Tennessee, and Michigan. If you are a policymaker or advocate thinking of proposing a turnaround district for your state, consider our new report required homework. And if you walk away thinking this will be easy, please go back and read it again.
Deregulation in the Buckeye State
For decades, policymakers have piled regulations onto public schools. This top-down, input-driven approach made sense back in an era when too many students weren’t receiving even a rudimentary education and nobody was as fussy about academic results. As Netflix’s Reed Hastings once said, the only thing worse than a regulated monopoly is an unregulated monopoly.
But times have changed. We now realize that students need strong minds, not just strong backs, to compete for jobs in a competitive and knowledge-based economy. Rigorous academic expectations are the coin of the realm in contemporary education policy, but there is also near-universal consensus that youngsters deserve schooling experiences tailored to their individual needs, gifts, and interests. And parental choice is no longer a distant dream of Milton Friedman’s; it’s a reality in most urban communities in America.
These powerful forces demand a radically different approach to public education—and especially to the old regulatory regime that ruled it. States must demand that schools raise their academic performance to prepare all students for success in college or a career. In return, educators should have the autonomy to design instruction aimed at achieving these ambitious goals and to customize their approaches to accord with their pupils’ needs, capabilities, and circumstances. This means that the compliance-based approach to public education must give way to more flexible arrangements.
Some states, such as Ohio, have taken some praiseworthy steps in this direction. The Buckeye State is implementing rigorous school report cards that shine a bright light on academic results. Families have more schooling choices than ever before, including public charters, private school vouchers, and an array of specialty options like STEM and technical vocational schools. Legislators recently created a competitive grant program (the Straight A Fund) that has catalyzed more than sixty innovative projects during the past two years.
Yet despite promising steps like these in Ohio and other states, many legislators continue to shackle their public schools with a burdensome regulatory regimen. Policymakers understand the problem, and some are considering ways to cut the red tape. Ohio Governor John Kasich and State Senate President Keith Faber have both pointed to the need for education “deregulation,” and legislators have responded by introducing bills that would (if enacted) free certain districts from a handful of onerous state requirements. In our view, however, lawmakers could go much bigger and bolder.
Given the urgency, promise, and the peril of deregulating public schools, we sought to create a framework for policymakers in a new policy brief. What should be on the table for deregulation? What are the issues that policymakers should not touch? What are the surest levers to provide educators and local communities with badly needed flexibility? Should legislators simply repeal laws and start over, or are there other alternatives? And what about local schools—if given greater freedom, how should they wield it, and how can state policymakers safeguard against abuse?
Knotty questions like these warrant expert thinking, so we enlisted Paolo DeMaria of Education First, along with two of his colleagues. Paolo is a veteran of policy debates, having held leadership roles in the state’s education department and worked with the legislature and governor’s office.
The anchoring principle of Paolo’s fine brief is that if educational excellence is to be a top priority, policymakers must vest much greater operational authority in on-the-ground educators and leaders. We understand that this is commonsense advice that dates back to the ancient idea of “subsidiarity”: Whenever possible, the people closest to a problem should have the power, as well as the obligation, to address it.
It’s also a view that we at Fordham have been pressing for years. Indeed, empowering education leaders on the ground is one reason we support the charter school model, which allows schools to operate with less state interference. In reports like Yearning to Break Free and Ohio at the Crossroads, we’ve documented our belief that district schools should not have to toil under heavy regulation, either.
This paper fleshes out the policy mechanisms by which policymakers can empower local leaders—and nurture the productive use of newfound autonomies. It recommends several avenues, including rolling back archaic legislation (we flag areas ripe for repeal); providing for a simple waiver process that districts can use to get out of unconstructive regulations, such as teacher licensure and uniform salary schedules; and creating a culture where deregulatory activity becomes the norm, not the exception.
The suggestions for repeal are necessary priorities for any reform effort. They focus on giving districts the flexibility to fine-tune their staffing arrangements and ensure the very best education for their students. Some of this flexibility has already been given to school leaders in Cleveland’s school district, STEM schools, and charters. We recommend that state policymakers provide the same staffing latitude to districts across Ohio.
The paper also insists—and we strongly concur—that granting regulatory relief hinges on an unwavering commitment to state-led, results-based accountability based on rigorous academic standards and assessments. Policymakers must ensure a fair and transparent system that holds all public schools and districts to account for student outcomes. Autonomy in exchange for honest-to-God accountability—that’s the bargain.
Experience has shown the wisdom of this axiom: Government authorities can tell schools what to do, but they can’t force them to do it well. No government can regulate schools into excellence. Yet all students deserve an excellent education, which requires policymakers to adopt a more pliable approach to public school governance. Baby steps are already being made, and policymakers would do well to make even longer strides forward.
Save our stats! Researchers use data to improve schools
- It’s usually best to make laws after first collecting an abundance of relevant information (though Congress tends to treat research funding about the same way that Dracula treats garlic). Certainly this is true in education, where the institutional opacity of schools and districts can only be penetrated with the help of mounds of student data. But the recent public kerfuffle over privacy, enflamed by widespread concern over domestic surveillance and rogue hackers, is starting to imperil the data that educators need to improve schooling. Senator David Vitter’s proposed FERPA overhaul would effectively shut down information dissemination between schools and researchers, which has fueled some of the most critical educational advances of the last few decades. We’re not really sure why the government would want to blindly construct policy, but Vitter probably understands the virtues of discretion better than most.
- The prolific blogger and education policy poobah Rick Hess, on the other hand, is an open book. In a profile in the latest issue of Ed. Magazine, we get an enthralling look at the career of a reform titan and official Friend of Fordham—from his humble beginnings as a Harvard Ph.D. to the lofty posts he now occupies at AEI and Education Next. In between gobs of slavering praise from various figures in the education community was a sage description from none other than Diane Ravitch: “He has strong opinions, but he’s respectful of people who disagree with him. In the polarized world that we live in, it enables him to be heard across the political spectrum.” Yep, sounds about right.
The Game of Thrones edition
Student data privacy, Jeb Bush’s education record, questions about curriculum, and the positive effects of working mothers.
Amber's Research Minute
SOURCE: Xiaodong Fan, Hanming Fang, and Simen Markussen, "Mothers' Employment and Children's Educational Gender Gap," National Bureau of Economic Research, Working Paper 21183 (May 2015).
Robert: Hello, this is your host Robert Pondiscio of the Thomas B. Ford Institute here at the Education Gadfly Show, and online at EdExcellence.net. Now please join me in welcoming my co-host, the Jon Snow of ed reform, Brandon Wright.
Brandon: Yeah, so that's from Game of Thrones ...
Robert: It is.
Brandon: ... Which I don't watch.
Robert: You know, I don't watch it either. But there's one thing I know about Game of Thrones.
Brandon: Tons of people die on it?
Robert: Everyone, it's like Shakespeare.
Brandon: Very, very violent.
Robert: Right. There's two types of characters, those who have been killed and those who will be killed. At least I gather that. My daughter made me watch this one scene of this guy, God, literally ripping a guy's head apart with his bare hands. That was all I needed to see of Game of Thrones.
Brandon: Yeah, I've heard about that scene and my wife doesn't really like violence that's that graphic. So we haven't watched it and it would just be a big lift to start watching it by myself in the small amount of free time I have without my wife or without being at work.
Robert: Maybe you and me, will, after the podcast, maybe we'll start binge watching it on Netflix, what do you say?
Brandon: Is it like, seven seasons in?
Robert: I don't know but it's like seven seasons I'm not going to watch.
Brandon: So like, three hundred hours of shows?
Robert: We got time, let's do this. Okay, that's all the time we have for the podcast. Here we go, time to play Pardon the Gadfly. Take it away, Dominique.
Dominique: Question one: The New York Times published an article on Saturday that argued against legislation that would effectively prevent research from using student data. Thoughts?
Robert: Thoughts ... The Luddites have taken over. That was the same era ... No, that was after Games of Thrones, the Luddites, they're the ones that destroyed all the machinery. They shouldn't make fun, but there's legitimate reasons, but you first, Brandon, what do you think of this?
Brandon: Like anything, I think there are pros and cons, so we have to see what the benefits are of keeping this information and providing it to people who actually want to use it in a legitimate way to improve education.
Robert: To use their powers for good, not evil.
Brandon: Right. I think that there are great benefits to using this information in a legitimate and safe way ...
Robert: Sure.
Brandon: And let me underline the word safe, because the other part of it to kind of minimize the cons, that is, the kind of infringement on privacy, you have to provide certain protections for this information. The article in New York Times talks about this researcher, everything that she's done, the data is on a secure server and there is no identifying information at all. If a researcher were to break these rules there are both potential civil and criminal consequences.
Robert: What you're saying, and the writer in the piece from the Times, by the way, was from your Alma mater, Susan Dynarski of the University of Michigan.
Brandon: Go Blue!
Robert: There you go. Now, you're making the argument that she's making that there should be strong protections to keep sensitive data private.
Brandon: Sure.
Robert: But here's my question: Do we already have that and if not, where is all this angst about student data coming from?
Brandon: I think there are protections there but I think online security is an ever-evolving battle.
Robert: It is, and look, every time people are nervous about this they come by it honestly. If you think about it every time we hear about data privacy in the news it's bad news. It's WikiLeaks, it's the NSA it's hackers, it's credit card fraud so while I'm deeply concerned that these kinds of measures could cost researchers the access that they need to valuable data to move the field forward, I can't sit here and pretend I'm surprised at the level of parental anxiety about this. Every time you hear about data being stored, like Game of Thrones, this ends badly.
Brandon: Sure, but what we're talking about now are people who are breaking laws and what the author is arguing against is laws that will make it more difficult for a researcher to use this information to better education. So they are following laws. What we're concerned about are people breaking laws so more laws don't really seem to solve that problem. So you essentially have two options. You have one, which is where you don't store information at all, and I think that's unrealistic and I'm not sure it's wise, or you do your best to protect it and create rules so that the people who do use it, use it in a smart and productive way.
And I think that's essentially where we're at and we should continue those who secure it as that technology becomes available and advancements in security occur.
Robert: Agreed, but I don't think you can not be concerned about this. Data and testing the data from testing is to education research what rocks are to geologists, what tissue samples are to biologists. If we don't have that we do not move forward.
Brandon: Sure.
Robert: But that said, I would hope that we would ... I think those of us who are in the reform game as it were, owe it to parents to be more explicit and clear about how uses of these data benefit all kids, including theirs. It just won't do to say, "Get over it."
Brandon: Agreed.
Robert: Dominique, question two.
Dominique: Jeff Bush announced yesterday that he's running for President. How does he measure up to other candidates on education?
Robert: I thought we already knew he was running, right? This is not big news.
Brandon: It's his formal announcement.
Robert: There you go, it's his formal announcement. Well Brandon, you have been doing incredible due diligence, pouring over the published statements of every candidate as they announce, Jeff Bush being the least. I'm guessing, correctly if I'm wrong, of all the candidates you've examined his track record has to be the deepest and widest on education.
Brandon: Yeah. When he was at the helm of Florida he instituted a bunch of ed reforms, things like school choice and standards, tax scholarships, and then when he left, he founded one of the most influential ed reform non-profits out there, the Foundation for Excellence in Education. He's been doing this stuff for a very long time.
Robert: So if you're an education reform voter, he's your guy.
Brandon: I guess it depends on if you agree with his ideas, right? If you like the common core ...
Robert: Oh, there's that.
Brandon: And you're a Republican, then he's essentially the only choice if that's a deciding issue for you. If you don't, then it seems like one of the other, I think there are now twelve with Trump having announced.
Robert: Only twelve?
Brandon: Twelve Republicans in the race so it seems like if you were very, very against common core then you would go with one of the other eleven.
Robert: Hmm. It's Jeb against the field and if common core is your issue then you're going with the field. But I guess my question is to what degree common core will be an issue, and 2016 is still a very long way away.
Brandon: I would be surprised if common core were the deciding issue in the Presidential race.
Robert: Look, education is never the deciding issue in the race, is it? It's our issue, but come on.
Brandon: I'm not that old so I haven't been through that many elections so you might be a better judge of that.
Robert: I saw what you did there, Brandon.
Brandon: But I'll trust you. Obviously, the race itself will end up deciding what the biggest issue is, and I guess it's possible that it's the common core but probably not.
Robert: I'm kind of with you. I would love if we would have this great, deep national debate and education was the defining issue and the deciding issue in 2016. I think it will be a lot more discussed in the primaries than the general, but I would be very surprised if common core at the end of the end of the day either helped him or hurt him.
Brandon: Sure.
Robert: I think there's a lot of other things that voters are concerned about, it would be great if our issues were theirs but there's a lot of stuff going on.
Brandon: I think you're right.
Robert: There you go. Question three, Dominique.
Dominique: This one's for you, Robert. You wrote an editorial last week on which you called on districts to publicly release their information about their curricula. Why should districts comply?
Robert: Boy, this is a piece with the data story we were talking about earlier, right? This to me is just an enduring mystery. If you think about it, in our test driven, accountability mad, data focused age, we measure everything about schools. We can tell you where teachers went to ed school, we can tell you their SAT scores before they got in, we can tell you the value added scores of twenty-five fourth graders in any school. Here's my question: How come it's impossible, and I mean almost literally impossible to find out what curricula a school is using to teach say, math or English language arts. This strikes me as being not a difficult thing to find out, a deeply important thing to know.
I always like to point out the report by Russ Whitehurst and Matt Chingos over at Brookings a few years ago that discovered that effect sizes of curriculum were even bigger than some of the things we obsess over in ed reform. Things like class size and teacher quality and chartering and whatnot, so if we know curriculum is so important and could be potentially so important in moving the needle, why are we not mandating that districts report what curricula they're using? This is my challenge to parents all the time. Do you know what math curriculum your school is using? I'll bet you don't. The difference that the parent has over a researcher benefit is that if the parent wants to know they can just look in their kid's backpack. If you're a researcher, good luck trying to find out what the curriculum is in the school.
This issue became an issue last week when Charles Sahm of the Manhattan Institute released a report. He had a very simple research question. He wanted to find out what curricula New York City schools were using to implement common core. There had been two different recommendations on the ELA curricula. This is going back to the Bloomberg era, and the only way he could find out was not by looking up on the State or city web site, he had to send a questionnaire electronic to every single school in New York City. That's lunacy.
Brandon: Yeah, it seems totally absurd. To better define this for people who aren't in education all the time, what exactly do you mean by curriculum?
Robert: I should not take for granted that people understand the difference. We talk about standards all the time and I'm always the guy who says, well look, standards are important but standards are important insofar as they influence curriculum choices.
Brandon: People confuse the two often.
Robert: Absolutely, they completely conflate the two. For example, when I was a teacher in the South Bronx, our math curriculum was every day math, our literacy curriculum was teacher's college reading and writing project.
Brandon: These are actually brands, essentially?
Robert: Yeah, call them brands I guess, or call them products, call them programs. Another reason this is important is from an accountability standpoint. I, full disclosure, I've never made a secret about this, I couldn't stand either of those programs, the math or the literacy programs, but this was what I was compelled to teach. Now, if you look at the results that I posted with my students, is it me as the teacher or is it the curriculum? The thing that frustrates me and has frustrated me for years, is we just see, those of us in education reform, absolutely incurious about this. All the matters is the teacher, it doesn't matter what program. Let me tell you, having taught these programs for a couple years, I would not want my performance evaluated on the strength of those curriculum. Give me a choice, I'm going to choose something different.
Brandon: So why do you think schools haven't made this information more public or public period?
Robert: I simply think I could be just wrong and naive about this, I think it's just simply a blind spot. I think just mainstream ed reform thinking is that it's the teacher, it's the governance model, curriculum is an afterthought. I just don't think that we in education, the field, we're just not that savvy consumers about these things.
Brandon: And final point, how do you think we can change this?
Robert: Morgan Polikoff of the University of Southern California, has been filing freedom and information act requests in four States trying to get the curriculum.
Brandon: Over three thousand, right?
Robert: Three thousand of them in four States. He raises the point, and I completely agree with, we already have any number of data capturing mechanisms, why not just mandate at a State level that schools have to report this in existing mechanism that they're almost certainly already performing.
Brandon: Okay.
Robert: So that's that. And that's all the time we have for Pardon the Gadfly.
Next, here's Amber with the research minute.
Hey Amber, how are you?
Amber: I'm great, how are you?
Robert: Good! Let me ask you a question: Does the name John Snow mean anything to you?
Amber: Jon Snow ... Oh no, I feel like I'm failing a quiz.
Robert: You kind of are.
Amber: No, it does not.
Robert: I referred to Brandon as the Jon Snow of ed reform, not even sure what I meant by that.
Amber: Okay.
Brandon: I'm not sure what he does on the actual show, Game of Thrones.
Robert: He does what all the characters do: He dies.
Brandon: He died. Like every other character on that show.
Amber: Oh, wow. How do you guys know this if you don't watch it?
Brandon: It's all over the news.
Amber: Twitter and stuff?
Brandon: It's the most talked about show in the world.
Robert: I describe this as the cultural equivalent of second hand smoke. You pick it up. You don't have to be ...
Amber: And you don't really want to sometimes and it's dangerous for you. We could keep carrying this metaphor, I guess.
Robert: Having seen the way people die on Game of Thrones, no, I would not wish that upon.
Amber: Is that good for kids? Is that one of these video games that's like, damaging ...
Brandon: I'm not sure it's a kid's show.
Amber: Oh, it's not a kids show. Okay, I got you.
Brandon: It is a very, very adult show.
Amber: It has one of those stickers on the front when you buy it.
Brandon: Perhaps the most adult show that's on popular television.
Amber: Oh, all right.
Brandon: It's on HBO.
Robert: Brandon and I are going to binge watch right after the podcast. Please join us.
Amber: I will not be doing that.
Brandon: For three hundred hours.
Robert: Amber, what you got for us this week?
Amber: We've got a new NBER study called "Mother's Employment and Children's Education Gender Gap." I know it sounds thrilling but it's actually interesting. It examines the impact of women's participation in the workforce on their child's college attainment. And let's use data from the Norway registry, so it's not here, which includes information on all children born in Norway between 1967 and 1993. That's about roughly seven hundred and twenty-five thousand males and six hundred and ninety thousand females, s that's a lot of kids. Then they match the child's data with data from their parents which describes among other things their parents' earnings history when their children were birthed and up to age seventeen. Zero to seventeen. Descriptive data show that the employment of mothers with young children, this is interesting, has increased form ten percent in 1967 to what do you think in 1993? Now you get a quiz.
Robert: What a great question. I'm going to guess forty percent.
Amber: Brandon, you got an answer? Don't be looking! Sixty-five percent in 1993.
Robert: Basically, a generation.
Amber: That's pretty big deal, isn't it?
Robert: That really is.
Amber: Father's employment has remained fairly constant, about ninety-three percent which seemed kind of high to me.
Robert: Hard working country, Norway.
Amber: Controlling for various family and child demographics, they find that the mother's employment has a positive impact on their daughter's college attainment relative to the affect on the son's. Specifically, daughters are more likely than sons to have a college or higher degree by the age of twenty-five. Mother's with more female children are also more likely to be in the workplace after controlling for the total number of children.
Lots to think about. I'm almost done.
Interestingly, the father's employment also has a negative effect on boy's college attainment and a positive effect for the girls.
Robert: Hold on a second, this makes on one hand sense, on the other hand am I wrong about this, if moms have gone ... their workforce participation has gone from 10 percent to 65 percent, you're just seeing a society in general that is transitioning from a defined ... The man works, the woman stays at home to a two paycheck family which implies, does it not, a greater need for education. So this has nothing to do with the moms, this has to do with the cultural shift where women are entering the workforce in huge numbers, right?
Amber: Well, I think that one could propose that but this is an NBER study that was fairly rigorous and controlled for about a gazillion different things. But let me tell you about one thing that they hypothesize which is similar to what you hypothesize. Increased time with the son already resulted in higher marginal gains for him, so he already benefits from more time with the mom. It makes sense that if you decrease that time it's going to have a higher consequence for him as well, all right? And then for the daughter, the analysts reason that working mother provides a working role model which may have increased her expected return from schooling. So she's kind of seeing this, "Man, I can do this too, this is the direction I'd like to head." Anyway, that's the theory.
Then they ended up with this long discussion of how all of these patterns help to explain the narrowing and the reversal of the education gender gap since the 1950's which is basically the difference in a college attainment between the males and the females. I think this is both encouraging and troubling at the same time because obviously we don't really know exactly what's happening here, even though they try to control for these many, many things. I think that it's a head-scratcher, we all have theories, right? Why would the impact on the daughters be more than the sons ... I think they draw a reasonable assumption that the boys automatically benefit from the increased time so they're going to lose out more but why is that? I don't know. I don't have kids so I can't even begin.
Brandon: It does definitely seem like a son has a different relationship with his father than with his mom and a daughter has a different one between her two parents, too and same with a parent, right? A mother has a different relationship with her daughter than her son and obviously this is anecdotal, I don't know that many parents but it seems to be the case. I don't know exactly why that is?
Robert: I still smell the cultural shift as much as an educational one but that's just one man's opinion.
Amber: What they say is let's bear this theory out, so now it's pretty much stabilized, the women's participation rates in the workplace, so I think what we're going to see in the next twenty-five years, if this is the right theory then we're not going to see the changes that we witnessed so far because that's stabilized and the other change is stabilized so I think we're ... This is a favorite topic, we've got a lot of studies that are really intrigued by the impact of the change of women's participation in the workforce since the 50's.
Robert: Stay tuned, we'll see you back here in twenty years and we'll have answers to those questions.
Amber, before we let you go, and I'm going to completely put you on the spot, did you see Susan Dynarski's op-ed in the New York Times about education data and as a research person how concerned are you?
Amber: I have not read it but obviously I have been immersed in the question and think that we could easily go over board and I'm scared that if we aren't careful we're going to go over board ...
Brandon: Over board in what direction?
Amber: And I think there's some fear mongering about how these data are used that are probably untrue and they may be espoused by folks that have ulterior motives.
Brandon: Over board on the protection of the data?
Amber: Right! Because I think ...
Robert: Protecting it so much that you can't gather it anymore.
Amber: Right, and what people don't realize is that we already have some pretty tight protocols in place for making sure these data are secure, it's not like, I think the average parent might understand, might not understand that you don't get information on Sally Joe's fourth grade, you get student ID number 1188652.
Brandon: That is exactly what the article says.
Robert: Exactly. You're echoing my point which is that I don't think it will do for those of us who need this data to complain about it, we just need to do a better job at explaining it.
Amber: Yes, agreed.
Robert: And that is all the time we have for this week's Gadfly show. 'Till next week ...
Brandon: I'm Brandon Wright.
Robert: And I'm Robert Pondiscio for the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, signing off.
The New TNTP: A conversation with CEO Daniel Weisberg
For two decades, The New Teacher Project, now known simply as TNTP, has been providing excellent teachers to the students who need them most. Its work has ranged from partnering with school districts to supporting teacher-evaluation policies. With new CEO Daniel Weisberg now at the helm, what is the future of TNTP? What role will teacher evaluations play in education reform in the coming years?
Diplomas Count 2015: Life After Special Education
It wasn’t that long ago when you could go from one end of your K–12 education to the other without even laying eyes a student with a disability. “In the early 1970s, these youths were marginalized both in school and in life, with only one-fifth of children with disabilities even enrolled in public schools,” notes Education Week, whose tenth annual Diplomas Count report focuses this year on students with disabilities. Today, nearly six million such students are enrolled in U.S. public schools, with the vast majority studying alongside non-disabled peers. They are “coming of age at a time when they, like all high school students, are increasingly expected to perform to high academic standards and to prepare for further education or training and a productive role in the workplace,” the authors observe.
How are they doing? Eighty-one percent of our public high schools students can now expect to march across stage and be handed a diploma within four years; that’s both a historic high and the headline finding of Diplomas Count 2015. However, the graduation rate among students with disabilities is 62 percent—a figure that masks wild (and somewhat suspicious) variations from state to state: from a low of 23 percent in Mississippi to a high of 80 percent in nearby Arkansas. Education Week is particularly strong in unpacking those disparities, which can be heavily influenced by both discipline practices that “disproportionately affect special education students” and variations in state graduation requirements, some of which “may be less rigorous for students with disabilities than for their peers.”
The theme that emerges is the need for early and comprehensive transition planning to prepare special education students to go it alone, without the resources and supports they receive during their school years. Profiles of young adults with a range of disabilities (a lab school student now successfully attending culinary arts school; twin brothers who graduated high school with modified diplomas and found jobs but “could have benefitted from more career direction in high school”) go a long way toward making the package more affecting than a typical data-fest. The key to preparing students like these for launch is setting “ambitious but realistic goals for students with disabilities, and helping them navigate the often-unfamiliar terrain of the post-high school world.”
To be sure, Diplomas Count offers data by the dump truck load. A nifty interactive map allows users to make instant comparisons of state graduation rates, sortable for students with limited English proficiency, socioeconomic disadvantage, race, and other subgroups. Some of the more interesting nuggets: Nationally, graduation rates for disadvantaged racial and ethnic groups remain substantially below those of their white and Asian peers; graduation rates are lower for students with disabilities in every state; and the largest gap between disabled students and the at-large graduation rate is 53 percent, in Mississippi (Alabama’s 3 percent gap is the smallest).
The outlook for students with disabilities after graduation, the report concludes, isn’t negative—just mixed.
SOURCE: “Diplomas Count 2015: Next Steps: Life After Special Education,” Education Week (June 2015).
Early Childhood Education by MOOC: Lessons from Sesame Street
A new National Bureau of Economic Research paper examines the impact of access to Sesame Street on various short- and long-term academic and labor market outcomes. Analysts focus on cohorts of children born from 1959 to 1968. These subjects would have entered first grade between 1965 and 1974, around the time of Sesame Street’s birth in 1969.
The researchers examine the progress of students who would have been at least six years old and already in elementary school at the time of the first airing, as well as those five years of age and below (who would have been exposed to the program during their preschool years). They make use of the natural variation in exposure to the program by calculating, by county, the share of television-owning households that were able to receive a signal over which Sesame Street was broadcast. Two-thirds of the population is estimated to have lived in areas where Sesame Street could be received on their televisions.
Using U.S. Census data as their primary measure, the analysts find that kids with access to the program were more likely to proceed through school in the grade appropriate for their age; in other words, they were not held back. Those in good reception areas were 1.5-2.0 percentage points more likely to be in the appropriate grade level, and in areas with a greater concentration of socioeconomically disadvantaged families, that figure rose to 3 percentage points. More specifically, white and black children who were five years of age or younger when the show was introduced and who lived in strong reception areas were 8–14 percent less likely, respectively, to be below the grade appropriate for their age. However—not surprisingly for such a mild “intervention”—they find no significant changes in high school graduation rates, dropout rates, or college attendance rates, nor on labor market outcomes like hourly wages, employment status, and poverty status.
Analysts comment that Sesame Street, because it was an electronic transmission of educational material, meets the definition of a Massive Open Online Course (or MOOC) and should be considered our very first MOOC—a moderately successful one, in fact. Indeed.
SOURCE: Melissa S. Kearney and Phillip B. Levine, "Early Childhood Education by MOOC: Lessons from Sesame Street," National Bureau of Economic Research, Working Paper 21229 (June 2015).
Holding Public Charter School Authorizers Accountable: State Experiences and Policy Recommendations
What is the role of authorizers in charter school policy? It’s a question that the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools (NAPCS) and the National Association of Charter School Authorizers (NACSA) dive into in this new brief. Based on the assumption that authorizers should be accountable for the quality of schools they authorize and that “authorizer accountability and school accountability are inextricably linked,” NAPCS and NACSA examine recent developments in four states: Colorado, Minnesota, Hawaii, and Fordham’s beloved Ohio (sometimes called the Wild West of charter schools).
In Ohio, a 2012 law mandated that every authorizer would receive an annual performance rating—we were judged an “exemplary” authorizer—based on three components: academic performance of the authorizer’s charter schools, adherence to quality practices, and compliance with laws and regulations.
Policy recommendations include sanctioning and terminating authorizers that fail in essential duties, defining more clearly what happens when a state terminates an authorizer, and detailing the fate of schools “orphaned” by authorizer termination. These policies are critical and ensure that parents and students are not left in the dark when a charter school loses its authorizer; they also help prevent “authorizer hopping,” whereby schools set for closure (either by their authorizer or an automatic closure law) switch to a new authorizer, stay open, and continue to provide a less-then-stellar education to kids.
This brief offers intuitive reforms that states can take to rein in misbehaving authorizers, along with examples of states already taking positive steps.
SOURCE: Margaret Lin, "Holding Public Charter School Authorizers Accountable: State Experiences and Policy Recommendations," National Alliance for Public Charter Schools and National Association of Charter School Authorizers (May 2015).