The Education Gadfly Weekly

Let’s begin with some data. Fewer than 33 percent of young people succeed in attaining a four-year degree by age twenty-five. If you disaggregate by income, only about 15 percent in the bottom third of the distribution attain a degree. In the bottom quintile, it’s half that. If you look at graduation rates among those who enroll, only about 30 percent in the bottom two income quintiles complete within six years. The economic returns of “some college” (i.e., those who drop out with no degree or occupational certificate) are no different than for those with only a high school diploma.

Finally, nearly half of those young people who attain a four-year degree are struggling in this labor market: 44 percent are underemployed, working in jobs that historically have not required a four-year degree, or working part-time while seeking full time employment. Meanwhile, there is rising evidence that those with two-year technical degrees (AAS) are out-earning average young BA holders.

It’s no longer a matter only of how much education you have, but what skills you have acquired and how well they match up with what the economy requires.

While it obviously should be a critical national priority to increase the proportion of low-income kids—especially African Americans and Latinos—attaining four-year degrees, these numbers suggest that the risks of putting all our eggs in the four-year college pathway are huge. A new report tells us we now have 5.5 million 16–24 year olds who are “not in education, employment, or training” (or NEETS, as they are known in the international research). It’s time to focus on building some alternative pathways for getting most kids not only through high school, but also through to some form of postsecondary credential with value in the labor market.

Promising high school reform models

We have two national high school reform networks serving low-income and minority kids that now have sufficient scale and evidence of success to be taken seriously: career academies and early college high schools (ECHS). The career academy movement is now thirty years old. There are several thousand academies all over the country, but the network I’m referring to consists of 670 academies operating under the umbrella of the National Academy Foundation. These academies serve over eighty thousand students, two-thirds of whom are African American and Latino. They operate in five career areas: engineering, information technology, health care, finance, and hospitality and tourism. They combine rigorous academics with relevant career-focused technical courses and aligned workplace learning opportunities. Most importantly, NAF academies have very high graduation, college enrollment, and on-time completion rates.

The early college movement developed more recently; it is now about twelve years old. It was launched with a series of grants to school development organizations by the Gates Foundation (and a grant to Jobs for the Future to serve as the foundation’s ECHS intermediary, providing technical assistance and a student information and tracking system). The ECHS movement, like the career academy movement, has grown to the point where there are hundreds of one-offs beyond the initial group launched with Gates support; but we now have good data on the roughly eighty thousand students who are counted in the Gates-funded network. The demographics of these schools are similar to NAF’s: heavily low-income and minority, with most students coming from non-college-going families.

ECHSs are designed with two-year and four-year higher education partners. The incentive of a year or more of free college is used to motivate lagging students to complete high school with at least a year of college credit. Roughly half of ECHS students are now graduating with a year of college credit, and at least one-fourth do so with an associate’s degree. It is no surprise that when compared with their peers, ECHS students have higher graduation and college enrollment rates. We don’t yet have enough data to compare completion rates.

For charter advocates wanting to address the needs of the two-thirds of young people who are not attaining a four-year degree, especially those who are candidates to join the ranks of the 5.5 million NEETS, designing schools that combine the strengths of career academies and early high schools seems a promising option.

A career-focused early college charter

What might such a charter look like?

• It would be co-designed by charter leaders in collaboration with regional employers and community college leaders. This would ensure that its programs were focused on preparing young people for careers in high-growth, high-demand industry sectors like IT, health care, and public services.
• It would be designed to span at least grades 9–14, ideally with connections back to the middle grades and forward to aligned four-year degree programs.
• It would offer students choice among at least three broad career areas, depending on school size, after providing an opportunity for students to explore each area in the first semester of ninth grade.
• It would provide a strong, Common Core-aligned curriculum through tenth grade, integrated with its career-focused courses.
• It would offer all kids sequential workplace exposure, beginning with job shadowing and other light-touch experiences and culminating in paid internships in their chosen sector.
• In eleventh grade, students would enroll in a community college program of study in their chosen field, taking dual-credit courses. The general education courses could be taught either in the high school or the college; the technical courses would be taught mostly at the college.
• The charter would retain responsibility for the students until they had obtained a one-year postsecondary certificate or a two-year technical degree.
• The charter and its partners would negotiate transfer agreements with regional public universities to facilitate enrollment with credits intact for any student who wished to enroll in an aligned four-year program.

The charter advantage

Although this is a model that, in theory, district schools could adopt as readily as charters—the IBM/CUNY/NYC Department of Education-sponsored P-TECH is an existence proof—I think this model is much easier to carry out under the charter umbrella. For one thing, charters in many states have the flexibility to hire people from industry to teach on an as-needed basis without worrying about certification requirements. For another, charters can more easily create a schedule flexible enough to allow for substantial internships and other forms of workplace learning without worrying about seat-time requirements. Charters could, if they chose, allow seniors who had met all other requirements to complete a semester-long paid internship.

The key to making this model work goes back to engaging employers and community colleges in the design from day one. The basic decision rule in building the curriculum should be this: Anything that can be taught more effectively at a workplace or a community college should be pursued there rather than in the high school. Among other things, this means that the charter would not be expected to purchase expensive equipment that might already exist in a partner’s lab.

Two more reasons charters should consider this option

It is understandably a continuing point of frustration for many high school charter operators that so many of their graduates who enroll in four-year institutions fail to graduate, even if the charter has done a great job preparing them for success. Too many of the variables that lead kids to drop out – financial problems, family issues, bad teaching, weak advising – are simply outside the reach of the charter school once the kids have left it. A huge advantage of the career-focused ECHS model is that the school can see the kids all the way through to the completion of a first credential with value in the labor market, providing whatever support is necessary to help kids get to the finish line.

A second argument for this model comes back to a core principle that undergirds the charter movement: the importance of choice for young people and their families. One reason that many education reformers instinctively recoil at anything that smacks of career education is the knowledge that vocational education was too often a historical dumping ground for black and brown kids—especially those whom teachers and counselors deemed “not college material.” The career pathways movement is predicated on the assumption that it is young people and their families who must be given the right to choose among pathways, all of which should be designed to lead to some form of postsecondary education or training.

The goal here is not to slot kids for life at age sixteen. Our economy is much too fluid and dynamic for that. Rather, the goal is to get many more kids through adolescence and into young adulthood with the knowledge, skills, credential, and work experience to get launched successfully into the labor market, while keeping open the option to continue on to a four-year degree if they choose.

Robert Schwartz is professor emeritus of practice in educational policy and administration at Harvard. This article was adapted from his chapter in Michael J. Petrilli’s forthcoming book, Education for Upward Mobility.

As everyone knows, the reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education act is closer to the finish line now than at any time in the past eight years. (The law was due for an update in 2007—soon after NASA sent New Horizons to Pluto. That was a long time ago.)

For a great overview of where things stand, it’s hard to beat this excellent rundown by Alyson Klein of Politics K-12. But that won’t stop me from trotting out my ever-so-popular color-coded table. (Previous editions here, here, and here.)

The items that are “up in the air” are those that the Senate, House, and Obama administration will wrangle over in conference.

A few caveats: First, some of these provisions aren’t in current law—some were in the stimulus bill (like Race to the Top), some are in Arne Duncan’s conditional waivers (like teacher evaluations), and some are in one of the bills passed this month (like Title I portability). Second, the administration may very well try to add more items to the “up in the air” column in conference. For instance, it might try to save Race to the Top, even though it was included in neither the House nor Senate bills.

***

So what to make of where we are? The most important thing to notice is how short the “up in the air” column is. Though there will be a great gnashing of teeth by advocates on all sides—which will surely drag out the conference process longer than is needed—the contours of a deal are in sight.

Senator Lamar Alexander has said repeatedly that he wants to send the president a bill he can sign. That means moving the Senate bill to the left (the civil-rights left, that is) in order to satisfy both the administration and Bobby Scott, ranking member on the House Education Committee. A betting man would expect to see some elements of the Murphy amendment* folded into a final bill, meaning that there will be a bit more federal prescription around school ratings and interventions in failing schools.

That also means scrapping (or at least paring back)* House provisions that added Title I portability and subtracted current “maintenance-of-effort” provisions, and throwing the administration a bone on pre-K and “investing in innovation.”

All of which leaves the Title I formula for conferees to fight over—always a great sport to watch.

If those deals get made, I suspect that a final bill will pass with a big bipartisan majority in the Senate and a smaller bipartisan majority in the House—though House Education Committee Chairman John Kline will have to be careful not to let the bill move so far left that he can’t get a majority of his Republican caucus to vote for it.

The end is near. Hooray!

* Note that I’ve tweaked my calculus since this article was first published on Fordham’s Flypaper blog on Monday, partly because of feedback from House Republicans. They are unlikely to agree to the Murphy Amendment as currently written, or anything close to it (nor would Senate Republicans, for that matter). And they might need something to show their constituents on choice and spending flexibility too (such as maintenance of effort).

• Teachers at “no-excuses” charter schools are widely thought to fit in a single, aggrieved category: twenty-two years old, working twenty-two hours a day, and earning $22,000 per year. It’s assumed that the exhausting daily schedule and prolonged school year, so crucial to the mission of lifting disadvantaged kids out of poverty, also ends up churning many depleted young educators out of the profession. But according to a new analysis from Education Week, that phenomenon may be overstated. The item, which builds on a more in-depth look published in the same outlet last month, points to Education Department data showing that charter teacher turnover dropped by 5.3 percent between the 2008–09 and 2012–13 school years—even while it ticked up slightly in traditional district schools. Imperfect collection methods and the sector’s rapid recent expansion make the signs hard to read, but this development certainly doesn’t qualify as bad news.
• And it’s not the only upbeat story this week. In an American nerd triumph worthy of the great Rick Moranis, Team American took gold in last week’s International Mathematical Olympiad for the first time since 1994. The scrappy team of adolescents who will someday employ us all edged out China’s juggernaut squad by the slimmest of margins. Sweet victory has already given rise to good old-fashioned jingoism (commentators have compared the magnitude of the upset to USA Hockey’s victory over the Soviets in the 1980 Olympics, which seems about right), but let’s not lose perspective when it comes to education: Gifted American kids are still being let down by slumping standards and insufficient attention in the classroom.
• Just when you thought it was safe to go back into the value-added debate, there’s been another flare-up of hostilities that will make you want to rate your entire life as “ineffective.” The three bad boys of teacher evaluation methodology—Raj Chetty, John Friedman, and Jonah Rockoff, who gained a measure of notoriety testifying against California in the Vergara case and are commonly referred to as “CFR”—have released a new paper questioning the research assumptions of their frequent foil, Jesse Rothstein. In a nutshell, their response to Rothstein represents a defense of their earlier research on teacher switching, a phenomenon that they believe provides a quasi-randomized sample with which to compare one teacher’s performance to another’s. It’s a lot of information to parse, but 538’s Andrew Flowers does an excellent job elucidating the subject for all you non-social-scientists out there.
• Finally, in case you’ve still got an appetite for more recondite policy squabbles, we’ve got another one centered on the question of school finance and educational inequality. Over at Education Next, the Hoover Institute’s Erik Hanushek takes down the findings of a new paper that has concluded that a 22.7 percent spending increase would suffice to eliminate the average school attainment gap between poor and non-poor families. As Hanushek mentions, education funding has risen way higher than that since 1970, and we’re still stuck complaining about the gulf between the haves and have-nots. The paper’s authors have issued their own response to some of Hanushek’s critiques, but we’re hard-pressed to believe that simply throwing more money around will make much of a dent in what he rightly calls “a large and frustratingly-resilient average attainment gap” between the classes.

U.S. mathletes, career-focused charter schools, Minecraft, and the teacher quality gap. 

Amber's Research Minute

SOURCE: Dan Goldhaber, Lesley Lavery, and Roddy Theorbald, "Uneven playing field? Assessing the teacher quality gap between advantaged and disadvantaged students," Educational Researcher (June 2015).

Mike:              Hello, this is your host, Mike Petrilli of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute here at The Education Gadfly Show and online at edexcellence.net. And now please join me in welcoming my co-host, the American Ninja Warrior of education reform, Alyssa Schwenk.

Alyssa:           You know Mike, I think the first time I hosted you called me, what's-her-name, the woman who did really really well on ...

Mike:              Casey something-or-other.

Alyssa:           Casey. It's glad to have some thematic continuity.

Mike:              Well, because it is summertime, which means that American Ninja Warrior is back and that means in the Petrilli household we are all about that show. Do you watch it? It is so much fun.

Alyssa:           I have seen some clips on YouTube. It seems insane. It seems like I would probably make it, maybe through half of the first obstacle.

Mike:              Yeah, this goes on my good shows for kids list. It's wholesome entertainment. They tell these uplifting stories, and then the kids are also excited to go to the playground and pretend to play on American Ninja Warrior.

Alyssa:           Have you guys ever set up a Petrilli Ninja Warrior course in the backyard?

Mike:              Oh, yeah. Well, it's best to go to a playground and do it where there's monkey bars and stuff like that. Absolutely. We were also at a resort recently in Georgia that had this thing called Aqua Island, which was like American Ninja Warrior, on these big blow up things in the middle of a lake which was awesome.

Alyssa:           Now that sounds like fun.

Mike:              It was amazing. Okay. Speaking of amazing, so many amazing things to talk about this week. Let's get started, Ellen. Let's play Pardon the Gadfly.

Alyssa:           Last week, US mathletes took first place at the International Mathematical Olympiad for the first time since 1994. Does this mark the end of America's international education lag?

Mike:              First of all Alyssa, I've gotta ask, were you a mathlete in high school? Did you participate in any of these academic contests?

Alyssa:           Not in high school but I was on my sixth grade math bee team. We did make it to state. It was interesting. That followed me through high school too, I'm going to say.

Mike:              The state championship, that was the Iowa State Championship.

Alyssa:           Yes. We did not place in the top ten which was a source of pain and humiliation for our teacher.

Mike:              Okay. This is good news. Right? We should be excited about these guys. We read up on this a little bit. I'll show you a sample problem that these guys had to solve.

Alyssa:           So hard.

Mike:              I have no idea. Is it Calculus? What is it? I don't even know what it is.

Alyssa:           I think it's Algebra. They apparently can't use Calculus. I was reading a lot of the rules. I pulled a question. I couldn't read it out loud to you because I don't know how to interpret it.

Mike:              Can I admit it's like when I read these research studies like NBER studies and I get to the formulas and I'm just like, "All right. Skipping that part."

Alyssa:           You can tell me. I wouldn't tell Amber.

Mike:              All right. I won't tell Amber. Nobody tell Amber. What does this mean, Alyssa? Does this mean that the woes of our high achieving students in America, our gifted kids, are over? That we now can consider that our high achievers in the US are doing just fine, thank you very much? Is that how you would take it?

Alyssa:           Absolutely not. This means that we had six kids do really really really really well on one international math competition. While that's great, the US is also scoring in the top three or five for the last 21 years that we haven't exactly won the competition. We've been scoring lower in PISA and international rankings overall in that time frame.

Mike:              That's right. It's like the athletic Olympics. Right?

Alyssa:           Mm-hmm.

Mike:              We do well in those Olympics partly because we're a big country. That's certainly helps. Partly because we have a handful of incredibly gifted athletes that do well competing on the international stage. That does not mean that we are the fittest nation on earth.

Alyssa:           Right. Michael Phelps, he's not only a gifted athlete but he a ton of opportunities that he could take advantage of. He had these great training programs and access to those. The analogy [stands 00:03:49]. Not every kid has those things in this country and not every kid is Michael Phelps.

Mike:              Right. We still have a long way to go in terms of raising achievement including at the top of the spectrum. It also means that America is still fat. That's what we're saying.

Alyssa:           Yes. America is still fat is the key takeaway here.

Mike:              Yeah. We're not talking P-H-A-T fat.

Alyssa:           No, but we're not that either.

Mike:              Okay. Topic number two.

Alyssa:           This week's op-ed by Robert Schwartz makes the case for career focus charter schools. Do you agree with this approach?

Mike:              Yeah. This op-ed in the Education Gadfly this week by Bob Schwartz who is leading the Pathways to Prosperity project at Harvard and really inspired my thinking on this quite a bit and got me to really understand the importance of career and technical education. He comes out and very clearly says, "This is why of course not all charter schools, but the charter sector as a whole should embrace career and technical education." There are very few CTE focused charter schools, but charters are well positioned to do this. Right? Alyssa, talk a little bit about the particular model that he is so excited about.

Alyssa:           He talks a lot about the early college/high school and then as the National Academy Foundation as potential models that charters can adopt. Both of these have done a really great job of connecting community colleges and industry in an area to the schools to really align what the kids are learning to the skills that they need to know to be successful and to earn a solid salary as adults. That's really what we're looking for. We're looking for ways that we can turn high school kids into high performing, high earning individuals who are solid participants in the middle class. That's something that we're lacking in a lot of schools necessarily. We are only about one-fourth of kids earn a four-year degree by the age of 25. This is a way that we can get more kids into strong and good paying jobs I think.

Mike:              Yeah. You notice, again, and we're talking about career education. The proposal he's making is early college. Instead of early college meaning early four-year college degrees, which is what of the early college programs are doing. A big focus on getting kids into and onto four-year college campuses and thinking about those routes, is to focus on technical colleges, community colleges and technical fields. There are a few examples of people doing that, but to do more of that so career academies plus early college high schools plus the charter piece makes everything easier. It makes it easier to hire teachers who may not have certifications but have the content expertise, they have the job expertise. Easier to bring these partnerships together. Easier to think about partnering up with community colleges. Yet, for some reason, we just haven't seen much of this in the charter sector yet, and here's hoping that changes.

Alyssa:           Yep.

Mike:              Okay. Topic number three.

Alyssa:           A recent NPR story looks at the extremely popular online game Minecraft and asks, "Is this good for kids?" Mike, you're a parent. What do you think?

Mike:              I'm so torn on these things. If people have been reading my blog over the years, you know that I'm torn on this. One the one hand our kids have Waldorf preschools. The Waldorf philosophy is there should be basically zero screen time or extremely limited until they're maybe 10 or 11 or 12.

Alyssa:           That old?

Mike:              Yeah. This is popular. These schools are popular in Silicon Valley even where some of these Silicon Valley engineers and entrepreneurs, they see the value of screens in general but they don't want their kids anywhere near it. They want to protect this idyllic romantic childhood where you're outside running and playing in the fields. Yet, it does seem like some of these video games and apps have some value. Minecraft is very much a creative enterprise. It's engineering or engineering-esque, so maybe it's not so bad.

Alyssa:           Yeah. I mean, for me Minecraft is something that's just come out of nowhere in the last couple weeks. I hadn't heard of it but it's so popular with teens.

Mike:              Where have you been Alyssa? It's not out of the last couple of weeks. Until you saw it on the cover the The New Yorker, you'd never heard of it? Come on!

Alyssa:           Actually, yes. It's completely come out of the blue for me. I don't know. I don't see a lot of young children much these days. Does your oldest son ... He's in elementary school now. Does he play it?

Mike:              He's 7. He's not a fan of Minecraft though. Now after seeing all this stuff I'm like, "Hey, come on. Maybe give it a chance." I think he may get into it later. He's been into Clash of Clans lately which sounds terrible. It's actually not. Not violent. The premise is violent. You go marauding and attacking other clans, but it's actually-

Alyssa:           That's violent.

Mike:              You don't actually do any of the marauding. It's more strategy and it's fun and it's social. Anyway, all of these things, I guess I would take the Buddhist approach here. Everything in moderation. Try to find the middle pathway. Don't prohibit it, but certainly keep on eye on kids doing too much of it. Let the pediatricians of the world worry that kids are going to sit around doing nothing but playing video games instead of getting out there and running around. That's a reasonable concern.

Alyssa:           Yup. I agree.

Mike:              One last point on this though. New finding came out about teenage pregnancy and teenage sex. That it continues to plummet in percentage of teenagers saying that they're having sex is down. Particularly among boys to which I say, "Video games." That's good. If kids are playing video games instead of having sex, I'm all for that.

Alyssa:           Okay. All right then.

Mike:              Now that I've embarrassed Alyssa, that is all the time we've got for ‘Pardon the Gadfly.’ Now it’s time for everyone's favorite, Amber's Research Minute. Amber, welcome back to the show.

Amber:           Thanks, Mike. 

Mike:              Amber, we were just talking about something earlier on the earlier segment. I want to know from a research perspective. We see two trends. Kids are playing a lot more video games these times, especially boys. Teenagers, especially boys, reported having less sex these days. How can we prove that these two things are related?

Amber:           That's a really tough correlation you're trying to draw there.

Mike:              Don't you think it might be related?

Amber:           It seems like it could be, but it's not a research study I'd want to be conducting.

Mike:              The boys are having less sex because they're playing video games instead, and because they girls know they're playing more video games.

Amber:           Are boys and girls supposed to be having sex as Miss Conservative Person here. I mean, hello, these are boys.

Mike:              They're not supposed to be. Right.

Amber:           Right.

Mike:              We're saying this is good. We do not want them ...

Amber:           Want them ...

Mike:              We would prefer for teenagers ... Fewer teenagers to be having sex.

Amber:           Got you.

Mike:              We just have trade-offs. Other people are like, "We don't want them playing video games all the time." I'm saying that's an easy choice. Okay?

Amber:           Yes. It is an easy choice. Although you know this pixel ... Have you seen this pixel movie where the video games come back and attack everybody? Like Pac Man comes to life.

Mike:              No.

Amber:           It's the latest Adam Sandler movie. It's going to be interesting, speaking of video games, but I digress.

Mike:              That will happen eventually. Okay. What do you have for us this week?

Amber:           All right. We got a new study out by Dan Goldhaber. Always liking Dan's studies. Good old Dan. On Even Playing Field is the title. Provides loads of descriptive data that documents the extent and depth of the teacher quality gap between advantage and disadvantaged kids. Dan and his colleagues basically show that disadvantaged kids, once again, get the short end of the stick when it comes to high quality teachers. What's different about this study is that they look at different definitions of teacher quality. Experience, teacher license, exam, value added estimates, so both inputs and output measures.

                        They look at various ways to define student disadvantage, so free and reduced price lunch status, under represented minority or low prior academic performance. They slice it on both sides multiple ways. Okay? They use data from Washington state for grades 3 through 10 for the 2011-2012 school year. They look at 4th grade classrooms in particular just to zero in on that grade, but then they replicate their findings for the other grades. I'm just going to give you a short litany of the findings which all point in the same direction. Okay? The distribution of prior value added estimates for teachers of student on free/reduced priced lunch is routinely lower than the distribution for non-free and reduced lunch 4th graders.

                        Low-income 4th grades are more likely to have a teacher with a low teacher licensure exam score. The distribution of lower quality teachers is most inequitable within the most disadvantaged districts. One of the biggest teacher quality gaps occurs in the distribution of 7th grade teachers with low value added scores. This is just one little specific factoid here. Almost 20% of low-performing 7th grade math students are assigned to a teacher with a low prior year VAM estimate, versus just 7% of the higher performing kids. It goes on and on.

                        In short, the bottom line is disadvantaged kids are less likely to be taught by a high quality teacher in nearly every grade level, no matter how you define high quality, no matter how you define disadvantaged kids. Then, they have a section at the end that talks about: Why is this happening? What are the various theories? We know that for instance principals tend to give the Advance Placement jobs, the favorable assignments, to the teachers who are higher performers. We know this, teacher agreements for instance don't allow senior teachers to be transferred involuntarily, so on and so forth. We can talk about why this happens, but the bottom reason is that it continues to happen.

Mike:              I don't find the AP thing very convincing. At least specifically AP, because that's 12th grade for the most part. Right? That's not mostly what we're talking about here. There may be some places where there are some tracks or ability groups and things like that where that comes into play. This is important because forever we assumed that there was a big teacher quality gap when you looked at inputs. Then, when the value added stuff started coming out, I thought that there were a few studies that started raising some questions instead.

                        Maybe that gap isn't as big as we thought. That if you look at value added, teacher distribution is actually more equitable than we used to think. Now, Dan is saying, "No, no, no. It actually still looks very bad." What I'm always confused about, Amber, is whether there's some circular logic in here at all. In other words, are we sure the value added methodology is doing a good job taking into account the fact that it is harder to teach disadvantaged kids or low-performing kids. In other words, is it that the worry that teachers who teach lower performing kids, it is harder to have a high VAM score with those kids than it is at higher performing.

Amber:           That's the Matt Chingos rationale.

Mike:              That's certainly the case for teacher observations. Right? That it is harder to do well in teacher observations when you've got a bunch of low-performers in your classroom. What is the question with VAM? They're starting from a lower point, so you should be able to bring them up to a higher point, but if they continue to have disadvantage at home, etc, etc, than maybe it is also that one surprise. It's the school level too. Right? There's some stuff that's been debated this week in DC that these schools that are the more advantaged schools, the lower poverty schools, the schools with high proficiency rates also tend to be the ones with higher growth rates. You say, "Really? Can that be true?" Or is that something about the methodology?

Amber:           Right. When I think too what the research around VAM has shown consistently is that it's better identifying the teachers that are at the tail ends. Right? The high-performing and the low-performing. I think if you got a room full of VAM experts in the room and they've done this before, most will agree that that mass distribution in the center is really hard to parse. We have better precision at the tail ends than in the middle which is a problem. Right? That's was Eric and others have been saying, "We stand on more credibility." Talking about the bottom 5% because we can identify those teachers more reliably than the others.

Mike:              All right. So, bottom line is Dan Goldhaber tells us, "Yes, we do indeed have a teacher quality gap." It's something that we need to worry about because it's really bad for disadvantaged kids. Okay, Thank you, Amber. That's all the time we've got for this week. Until next week.

Alyssa:           I'm Alyssa Schwenk.

Mike:              I'm Mike Petrilli. The Education Gadfly Show, signing off. 

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

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

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

Every sentence in Sir Ken Robinson’s Creative Schools begins with a capital letter. There is also a punctuation mark at the end of each, without exception. I have made a careful study of his nearly three-hundred-page manuscript, and can now report conclusively that its author employs—precisely and exclusively—the twenty-six letters of the standard English alphabet. 

Normally, this would not be worth remarking upon. Most of us have come to expect standard English in books written for general readers. But most of us are not Sir Ken Robinson, Ph.D. He is “one of the elite thinkers on creativity and education,” whose TED talk on how schools kill creativity in children is “the most watched in TED history.”  Sir Ken intensely dislikes standardization in all its forms. So it is at least somewhat disappointing that he has chosen to eschew interpretive dance, semaphore flags, or other means to argue against standards and for creativity in education.

It is not uncommon for education gurus to lack the courage of their convictions.  So allow me to be creative on Sir Ken’s behalf: Don’t think of Creative Schools as a book; think of it as a jukebox cranking out all of the anti-reform hits. Nod your head like, yeah, as Sir Ken critiques not just standards, but competition, corporatization, back-to-basics, “industrial model education,” and, inevitably, the school-to-prison pipeline. 

Original and creative, Sir Ken is not. See if you can answer this fill-in-the-blank question without even cracking the cover of Creative Schools: “The story in [which country] could hardly be more different,” Robinson writes.

The correct answer is:

a)      Finland.

b)      Obviously Finland.

c)      Of course it’s Finland! It’s a freakin’ Sir Ken Robinson book!

d)     All of the above.

He is also deeply self-referential. I started to count, then quickly lost track of, the number of times Sir Ken referred to his own work (“In 2006, I gave a talk at the TED conference in California…”; “In my book Out of Our Minds, I quoted…”; “If you’ve read my book The Element…”).  I stand corrected—Creative Schools isn’t a jukebox, it’s a greatest hits album.

To be fair, there is not a complete lack of inventiveness in Sir Ken’s prose. Some of his criticisms seem to have sprung entirely from his imagination. “In terms of knowledge, the standards movement favors direct instruction of factual information and skills and whole class teaching rather than group activities,” he writes. He’s inadvertently revealing that he lacks even a passing familiarity with the standards movement and hasn’t spent very much time lately in schools, where teachers are expected to “differentiate instruction” at all times, and students sit in pods…because group work.

Sir Ken’s oeuvre is well-intentioned, but it is almost entirely nonsense—a warmed-over Rousseauian fantasy suggesting all children are “natural born learners,” defying what cognitive science tells us about how knowledge and practice drive skill and competence.  It is also much easier to divine what Sir Ken dislikes about schools than what he proposes we should do about it.  At several points, he compares education to organic farming. “Plants grow themselves,” he writes. “The job of the gardener is to create the best conditions for that to happen. Good gardeners create those conditions, and poor ones don’t.”  I defy you to read that last sentence out loud and not think of Peter Seller’s Chance in Being There.

“One of the declared aims of public education is to provide all students, whatever their backgrounds and circumstances, with opportunities to prosper and succeed and to become active and engaged citizens,” Robinson notes early on in Creative Schools, before failing utterly to follow this idea where it leads.

Here’s where it leads: Let’s be done, once and for all, with the idea that standards and curricula are somehow anathema to education. They are the point. From time immemorial, schools have existed to transmit—consciously and unconsciously—the language, knowledge, and values of their societies at any given time and place. The trouble is, they have done so splendidly for those who are the historical heirs and beneficiaries of that language and knowledge—people like Sir Ken Robinson, Ph.D.—who are stewed in its conventions and have the luxury of thinking creatively about schooling. For those on the outside looking in—whose very existence seems lost upon Sir Ken—it’s not quite the same. 

SOURCE: Ken Robinson, Creative Schools: The Grassroots Revolution That’s Transforming Education (New York: Viking, 2015).

A new study by Pennsylvania State University researchers examines which types of instructional practices are most effective with first-grade math students—both with and without mathematical difficulties (MD).

They analyzed survey responses from roughly 3,600 teachers and data from over thirteen thousand kindergarten children in the class of 1998–99. The database is known as the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study (ECLS). The authors then controlled for students’ prior math and reading achievement, family income, classroom and school contexts, and other factors. (MD was defined as falling in the bottom 15 percent of the score distribution on the ECLS-K Math test.)

The key findings: In first-grade classrooms with higher percentages of MD students, teachers were more likely to use practices not associated with greater math achievement by these students. These non-effective practices included using manipulatives, calculators, movement, and music to learn math. It should be noted that these practices were also ineffective for students without math difficulties.

Yet more frequent use of teacher-directed instructional practices was consistently associated with gains in math achievement for first graders with MD. More specifically, the most effective instructional practice teachers could use with these struggling students was routine practice and drills (that’s right, drill and kill!). Similarly, lots of chalkboard instruction, traditional textbook practice problems, and worksheets that went over math skills and concepts were also effective with them.

For students without MD, teacher-directed instruction was also associated with gains—but so were some other types of student-centered instruction, defined as giving students opportunities to be actively involved in generating math knowledge. These practices included working on problems with several solutions, peer tutoring, and activities involving “real-life” math problems.

Youngsters who struggle with math simply need their teachers to show them how to do the math and then practice themselves how to do it—a lot! Why is such instruction so hard for them to come by?

SOURCE: Paul L. Morgan, George Farkas, and Steve Maczuga, "Which Instructional Practices Most Help First-Grade Students With and Without Mathematics Difficulties?," Education Evaluation and Policy Analysis vol. 37 no. 2 (June 2015).

The National Bureau of Economic Research has released a working paper in a series designed to estimate the earnings returns for vocational or technical education students in California community colleges—the nation’s largest such system. While there is a large body of research pertaining to the financial returns of earning a four-year college degree, very little has been conducted on the income of technical program graduates.

Researchers tracked students through their postsecondary institutions and into the labor market between 1992 and 2011. Using administrative records from the California Community College Chancellor’s Office and California’s unemployment insurance system, they were able to match roughly 93 percent of students in the college data to earnings records. The evaluation of certificate and degree holders was divided into four categories: associates of science/arts degrees, 30–60-credit certificates, 18–30-credit certificates, and 6–18-credit certificates. They then analyzed these four groups’ returns in the six largest major employment areas: business and management, information technology, engineering and industrial technologies, healthcare, family and consumer sciences, and public protective services.

The study authors found substantial differences in financial returns for different programs—even among credentials that require the same number of credit hours—and concluded that “all CTE education programs are not equal.” The number of credit hours didn’t necessarily correlate with the magnitude of return. Short healthcare-related programs, for example, yielded significantly greater returns than similar programs in the five other employment areas. Surprisingly, those who completed information technology degrees tended to see underwhelming returns overall.

When interpreting the study’s findings, the authors note several potential sources of bias. Among them: the Great Recession occurring toward the end of the sample period; the fact that top six employment areas included in the study only cover about half of all technical degrees granted during this period of time; and considerable heterogeneity in characteristics of students across programs (including gender and age at enrollment).

To truly understand the labor market payoff of technical degrees, it’s clear that more research is needed. But this study indicates that completing this kind of postsecondary education can have positive earnings effects for students–meaning they must be part of our strategy for narrowing the opportunity gap that persists in America.

SOURCE: Ann Huff Stevens, Michal Kurlaender, and Michel Grosz, “Career Technical Education and Labor Market Outcomes: Evidence from California Community Colleges,” National Bureau of Economic Research, Working Paper 21137 (April 2015).