The Education Gadfly Weekly

What’s taught to American children is often controversial nowadays, and our schools will forever be buffeted by the cultural waves that roil our universities. But in that storm, the College Board deserves a cheer for trying to stabilize the vessel known as Advanced Placement U.S. History (APUSH).

This particular tempest blew up when a new “framework” for high school instructors who teach the subject turned out to be biased in its treatment of the nation’s past.

History has been part of the AP program since the mid-1950s. Among the thirty-eight subjects now spanned by that program, it’s the second-most-popular with high school pupils seeking the possibility of college credit.

The end-of-course APUSH exam was always plenty rigorous, lasting three hours and scored during the summer by veteran instructors assembled by the College Board. The problem was that those actually teaching the course to tens of thousands of kids had no useful guidance to prepare students for it. They could consult a vague “topic outline” and look at old exams, but teachers complained that racing through so vast a subject in a single year, combined with the dearth of primary and secondary sources that surfaced on the tests themselves, led to neglect of the nation’s founding documents. More generally, it necessitated the sacrifice of deep student understanding in favor of scads of near-random facts.

The College Board set out around 2005 to improve matters by revamping the exam and developing an APUSH framework that clarified what content might appear on the test. The framework would require many more questions to focus on analysis of primary sources, and would also emphasize thought-provoking essays over multiple-choice items.

When the redesign first surfaced, teachers generally cheered its delineation of historical periods, outline of specific concepts and learning objectives, enumeration of key themes, and focus on analytic thinking and close reading of key documents.

As others scrutinized the new course framework, however, its acute case of left-wing bias stood out, particularly in such key realms as national identity (missing), the contributions of capitalism (mostly pernicious), the nature of intergroup relations (fraught, to put it mildly), and the overall value of the American experiment. A seventeen-year-old student dutifully learning her country’s history according to this framework would likely end up viewing the United States as a place of conflict and inequality, with minimal understanding of the dreams it has fulfilled, the problems it has striven to solve, the world catastrophes it has averted, and the example it has set. Why, after all, do so many people still yearn to come here?

How had this happened? Recall that the AP mission is to certify high school students who do well on its exams as having learned the equivalent of an introductory college class. To frame those exams and the courses that prep kids for them, the College Board appoints committees of professors from the relevant discipline, as well as some high school teachers (most of whom had studied with such professors).

What went wrong here—and could yet go wrong in other AP subjects as they get updated—is that by the time a committee was formed to update APUSH, the academy had lurched leftward. Aand in no field did it lurch further than in history. Professors commonly teach intro courses today that focus on race, class, gender, and oppression, and many of them view the country’s past through the lens of what’s now politically correct and academically fashionable. Unsurprisingly, the 2012 APUSH framework channeled that view and incorporated its biases—and likely did so without its authors even noticing. Fish, after all, don’t notice the water they’re swimming in.

College courses, however, are optional. High school is a different matter. At least forty-four states require students to pass a U.S. history course before graduating, and those taking the AP version are unlikely to have taken any other (at least not since middle school). So what’s in the APUSH framework is as much about shaping future citizens as about garnering college credit.

When David Coleman took the helm of the College Board in 2012, the framework was done. He and his team focused elsewhere and were caught by surprise when the outcry over bias arose, initially from non-professors who take seriously what future Americans are taught in school. The backlash led a number of distinguished historians to read the framework closely—and led the Board’s new leaders to do the same.

Pretty much everyone who studied it came to the same conclusion: The framework was biased. Key figures were omitted. Industrialization was mostly evil. Westward expansion was hegemonic. Almost every imaginable group had been oppressed and abused (ditto the environment). Ronald Reagan was “bellicose.” And identity politics had displaced American identity.

The problem was real and the outcry loud and intense. The College Board had little choice but to respond. Led by AP chief Trevor Packer, they encouraged further public comment, convened mostly new committees, and enlisted veteran history teachers and serious scholars to pore over the framework and suggest ways to root out the biases without introducing new ones.

Last week, the revamp was unveiled. To my eye and those of many who reviewed it in advance, the bias appears to be gone. America again has a national identity. The failings and blemishes of our past are still there, as they should be, but they’re no longer the main story. Teenagers competently taught by teachers versed in the revised framework will be a lot closer to readiness for responsible citizenship.

What they may not be ready for is what awaits them in college! Indeed, they might be wise to avoid the history department when they get there. (Maybe it’s just as well that few colleges still require their students to study history while on campus.)

Obviously, the College Board should not have allowed this problem to arise in the first place. It should have better supervised its own process and insisted on a balanced product. But its leaders deserve credit for addressing the problem, and they’ve mostly solved it. How many outfits today—especially those associated with the academy—have the guts to acknowledge error, organize to set matters right, and actually produce an acceptable repair job? 

Some arguments in education are endlessly recycled. Battles over homework, the best ways to teach math, school discipline, and other hot-button issues wax and wane, but they never go away or get resolved. One of these hardy perennials is in full flower again: the myth of the overstressed child.

The New York Times's normally sober columnist Frank Bruni last week pronounced himself filled with sadness over the plight of "today's exhausted superkids" and their childhoods, which he described as "bereft of spontaneity, stripped of real play and haunted by the 'pressure of perfection.'" He lauded the arrival of a shelf of new and recent books—an "urgently needed body of literature," in Bruni's words—collectively arguing that "enough is enough."

There's already a fairly rich body of literature on the subject, and it paints a very different picture. In 2006, a trio of researchers—Joseph L. Mahoney, Angel L. Harris, and Jacquelynne S. Eccles—published an extensive study based on a nationally representative longitudinal database of five thousand families and their children. The researchers concluded there was "very limited empirical support for the over-scheduling hypothesis." In fact, the opposite seemed to be true: Participation in organized extracurricular activities is closely related (even when controlled for socioeconomic status) to a broad range of positive outcomes, including children's physical safety and psychological well-being, supportive relationships with peers and adults, higher self-esteem, reduced alcohol and drug use, and higher high school graduation rates.

If American childhood has become a hothouse of overscheduling and stress, it's not showing up in the data. Mahoney and his colleagues calculated just how much time kids spend at sports competitions and practices, faith-based activities, volunteer work, afterschool programs, and other obligations. The average was about five hours per week. Many teens—about 40 percent—spent no time at all in organized activities during the school week.

Where are all the exhausted superkids? A mere 6 percent of U.S. teens participate in twenty hours or more of organized activities in a week, and even those who overdo it end up better off than the completely disengaged. “At a national level, over-scheduling in organized activities seems to be overstated," says Mahoney, a professor of psychology at Elizabethtown College. "Relatively few youth participate excessively in organized activities and even their adjustment is reliably more positive across broad array of outcomes, from childhood to young adulthood, than youth who are uninvolved," he observes. When they revisited the data in 2012, Mahoney and his colleagues found the benefits of participation in organized activities had persisted into young adulthood "in terms of lower psychological distress, and higher educational attainment and civic engagement."

Academically, a similar tale seems to be true: Privileged outliers drive the narrative. In his column, Bruni decried our "insanely programmed, status-obsessed and sometimes spirit-sapping race. Take one more Advanced Placement class. Add another extracurricular. Apply to all eight Ivies."

Once again, look at the available data and a different picture emerges. One more AP class? Two-thirds of American high school graduates take exactly none. Now factor in the 19 percent of Americans who don't even graduate. For diligent and ambitious college-bound students, five AP courses over a high school career is a rigorous course load, but not an excessive one. From 2011 to 2014, despite enormous growth in the program, fewer than 8 percent of high school students took more than five AP classes before graduation. Raise that to seven or more APs in high school—presumably the sweet spot of superkid status—and the number drops to less than 5 percent of the three million 2014 high school graduates. Meanwhile the College Board estimates there are at least twice as many, some 300,000 academically prepared students, who either did not take an AP course they could have or attended a school that did not offer an AP course in that subject.

In sum, there is yawning gap between the media meme of the overstressed American teen and the reality. To his credit, Bruni acknowledges that overscheduling may indeed be a problem among "an ambitious, privileged subset of Americans." The mischief inevitably comes when the concerns of the worried well-off influence parenting and educational practice for the less well-off. Most children, particularly those from low-income families, are non-participants in the academic and extracurricular arms race.

I have no doubt that for some families, the pressure on kids to achieve and perform are a legitimate source of anxiety. But the far greater concern is almost certainly the undertaxed American child who lacks access to rigorous academic coursework, the incentive and opportunities to participate in organized activities, or both. It would be a shame if the concerns of the privileged few—however valid—became the new conventional wisdom. The data speak clearly: Most kids need more enrichment and challenge, not less.

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

• You know how the old ditty goes: Fish gotta swim, birds gotta fly, Chris Christie gotta churlishly analogize all political conflict to a bar fight. In an interview this week, CNN’s Jake Tapper asked the New Jersey governor which political adversary he’d most like to “punch in the face”; without reframing the question, he launched into one of his trademark diatribes against teachers’ unions. Everyone knows that Christie’s a combative politician who has struggled mightily to get his state’s public employee pension system under control. And Fordham yields to no one in our antipathy for union excess and overreach. But viable leaders can’t allow themselves to be baited into silly threats against political constituencies that aren’t going away. Teachers’ unions are to be curbed, cajoled, prodded, persuaded, and challenged. Not cold-cocked.
• We’re not sure if it has anything to do with those infamous cooling towers, but something strange must be behind a wave of uncomfortable honesty overtaking New York City. First, a recent graduate of Queens’s William Cullen Bryant High School wrote a letter to the New York Post claiming that she hadn’t actually earned the credits counting toward her diploma. The eighteen-year-old skipped class, neglected her homework, and missed a final exam, but somehow ended up graduating anyway. Her teacher later claimed that she’d passed the student due to the “tremendous amount of pressure” to boost graduation rates, believing that it was in “the school’s best interest” to make a mockery of academic standards. The sudden outbreak of candor is startling, and it looks like this incident isn’t the only trouble brewing at Bryant High. One thing’s clear: The school’s namesake, one of America’s great learned men and a former Post editor himself, isn’t resting too peacefully these days.
• The Progressive Policy Institute’s Diane Carew has a terrific take on the skyrocketing cost of higher education. Citing new research on the plight of frustrated job-seekers with some or no college, she deftly counters the push among Democratic presidential candidates for “debt-free college,” achieved either through total debt forgiveness or tuition regulation. As Carew puts it, “we need better workforce preparedness options for those without a college degree, not simply debt-free college.” Fordham wholeheartedly agrees. That’s why we’ve stumped for options like career and technical education, workplace apprenticeships, and alternative industry credentials, all of which can help kids make their way to the middle class without taking on coursework they don’t want and debt they can’t handle. PPI has been issuing the same call recently, and we’re always happy to find an ally in the fight for social mobility.

AP U.S. History, teacher professional development, the myth of the overworked American kid, and math coursework’s effect on college readiness.

Amber's Research Minute

SOURCE: Shaun Dougherty et al., " Early Math Coursework and College Readiness: Evidence from Targeted Middle School Math Acceleration," National Bureau of Economic Research, Working Paper 21395 (July 2015).

Robert:                        Hello, this is Robert Pondiscio of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute here at the Education Gadfly show and online at edexcellence.net. Now, please join me in welcoming my co-host, the Lucas Duda of Education Reform.

Brandon:                     All right, Lucas Duda.

Robert:                        The Duda abides.

Brandon:                     ML Player of the week.

Robert:                        How could he not be? Like, nine home runs? It's August 1st. I don't know what the date is, but it's August 1st. Why? Because it's August and they're in first place. That hasn't happened since some people who worked at Fordham, before they were born.

Brandon:                     Yeah.

Robert:                        Well, not really, but it's been a long, long time. I'm going to enjoy every minute of this, because, as a Met fan, we know this too shall pass.

Brandon:                     And we are both huge baseball fans.

Robert:                        We are.

Brandon:                     Talk about it often.

Robert:                        I was going to call you the Noah Syndergaard before because of your long, flowing blonde locks.

Brandon:                     He was on my fantasy team. Thor.

Robert:                        Thor, that's right.

Brandon:                     Yeah.

Robert:                        This is much more fun than talking about education. Let's just make this baseball puns. The fun just begun. We have a new voice of the Gadfly this week. Please welcome Audrey Kim to the proceedings, and Audrey, take us away.

Audrey Kim:                Thank you Robert. Your recent U.S. News and World piece argues that we shouldn't buy that today's students are overworked and exhausted. Why not?

Robert:                        Because they're not. Simple. Next question. No, I should give the back story here. There was a column in the New York Times by a columnist who I normally like, Frank Bruni, and I still like him. He's a serious, sober guy. He writes thoughtfully, but he swallowed whole what I take to be a bit of, I don't want to call it a myth, that's overstating the case, but a bit of a non-problem. "We're working kids too hard. They're taking too many APs. We're stressing them out. They're over-scheduled." Look, I don't want to minimize this because for some kids this is surely the case. There have been stories of kids even committing suicide. Not massive numbers, but it happens. The much larger the story, I think, and this is what I wrote about at U.S. News, is exactly the opposite. The under-stressed U. S. teen. I looked at the data, it's something like 5% of American students take more than 5 APs. They are the anomaly. What percentage of students, Brandon, would you guess take no APs.

Brandon:                     60?

Robert:                        Yeah, about that. Two out of three.

Brandon:                     Lucky guess.

Robert:                        Two out of three American students don't take a single, darn AP.

Brandon:                     That's not surprising.

Robert:                        This is the problem that I describe as the worried well. In other words, people whose children or people who write columns in the New York Times, whose children go to school. Yes, this is their reality, but for the vast majority of American students, this is just not the case.

Brandon:                     Yeah, and we ran this by a colleague here, and she sympathized, but she was more interested in the other side of the over-stressed kid. The low-income kid who has to do a lot of things outside of school, like take care of his or her siblings or go to work. Do all these things that actually don't advance his or her academic prospects. That's kind of a bigger and really kind of more interesting and dire issue than the over-stressed affluent kid.

Robert:                        For what it's worth, I went looking for data on that, and it's hard to find, I don't know what number of kids have part-time jobs or are taking care of siblings after school. I suspect that it's a lot more than we think. What was interesting, there is data, since one of the other things that Frank Bruni was writing about in his column, was the over-scheduled kid. One activity after another, their scheduled within an inch of their life with youth soccer, dance lessons, whatever. There's every good reason in the data to look at that and think, "Look, those kids have really good outcomes. They're more likely to stay in school. They're more likely to not get involved with alcohol and drugs. They're more likely to grow up and finish high school and live lives of active, engaged citizens."

                                    These are all good outcomes. Yes, there is some, small subset who perhaps over-do it. This was another interesting data point. Something like 40% of American youth do no organized activity whatsoever, so it's exactly the same thing as the AP. For every single kid who does too much, there are multiple who do nothing at all.

Brandon:                     Right. Which, again, seems to be a bigger issue.

Robert:                        Again, I don't want to say that it's not a problem at the high-end, but it's a much larger problem at the other end.

Brandon:                     Yeah, agreed.

Robert:                        Question number 2.

Audrey Kim:                A new study from the New Teacher Project finds that, although districts are investing in teacher development, teachers aren't getting much better. What do you make of this?

Robert:                        I don't know about you Brandon? Having been a teacher for several years, I can tell you what I make of it, which is that, forgive my language, professional development sucks.

Brandon:                     Yeah, I haven't been in the classroom beyond being a sub for a year, but I don't think it is extremely effective in any job. It seems more important to hone training before someone enters, or in their early years, than to do these continuous. things like going to a seminar or taking a night class every year or two years.

Robert:                        A lot of it is choose your own adventure. It doesn't end up being very, very good. This is a bit of a wasteland. Here's a list of all of the goods. I went to in five years as a full-time teacher. Ready? Here's the list ... Okay I'm done. It really was a bit of a waste of time. What the New Teacher Project report find that is sobering is this is bewilderingly expensive. I think the figure was something like $18,000 per teacher, per year.

Brandon:                     For public schools.

Robert:                        Right, and what good outcomes do we see from that? None whatsoever. The vast majority of teachers show no improvement whatsoever.

Brandon:                     Like 3 out of 10 did or something?

Robert:                        Yeah. From memory, I think, 3 out 10 improved, 2 out of 10 got worse, the rest, no difference whatsoever. The logical question that TNTP is asking is, "What are we spending all this ... What are we getting for all this investment in it.?" The answer seems to be not a lot.

Brandon:                     The thing was that, for charters, I think the number was 7 out of 10 teachers improved, but it also cost, I think, $33,000 per. The interesting thing there though, right, I brought up earlier that investing in teachers early, be it before they start or in their early years, that seems like that would produce better gains and charter teachers are, on average, younger than public school educators. We're involved in a book right now, and I think the average number of years teaching for charter school teachers is something like 8, and for public schools it's 15.

Robert:                        Yeah.

Brandon:                     It's a younger workforce ... With less experience.

Robert:                        It is younger, but I haven't poured over the TNTP report in detail, but if I understand it correctly that most of the gains come at the front end and then you level out. Then that's exactly what you'd expect to see.

Brandon:                     Okay. Sure. Yeah.

Robert:                        It's still sobering. Ed reform, I think, at large, we put a lot of value on the idea of professional development, on improving teachers, on teacher quality at large. I've made a joke of this myself over the years saying, "You go to school with the teachers you have, not the teacher you wish you had," so we have to find a way to make them better. This report suggests that's a really, really heavy lift.

Brandon:                     Agreed.

Robert:                        Question number 3.

Audrey Kim:                The college board has just released a new set of AP U.S. History standards in response to criticism that the 2014 standards presented a negatively biased view of American History. What's your take, and do these new standards present a more fair view of our nation's history.

Robert:                        What do you think Brandon?

Brandon:                     The expert opinion on the latter question seems to be yes. Pretty much everyone who has reviewed the new ones think the liberal bias is kind of gone. The majority of the people who reviewed the old one believed that it was there. People on both sides of the aisle. Step back and see what the college board did. It's pretty impressive actually. You have this big organization taking a bunch of flack for a program that they made, that almost everyone has an opinion on, regardless of whether they have kids in the actual class. For instance, you aren't going to see this in AP Chem. They got the flack. They stepped back, and they really put a ton of time into improving them, and it seems like they have.

Robert:                        Yeah. You know what's interesting, too, I think the perception, I don't know this, but I suspect that a lot of the perception will be, "Oh the college board caved to conservative critiques." I just had a conversation with Trevor Packer, the head of the AP program. He was here visiting us a few weeks to tell us about these changes. What impressed me most is, yeah that may be the narrative that they were paying attention to conservative, political critiques, but when you really start to unpack what they did. They were paying attention to teachers, and I don't have this data in front of me, so this is from memory. Now, to be fair, the majority of teachers did not perceive a bias, but among teachers who did perceive a bias after teaching the previous framework, they were four times more likely to perceive a liberal bias than a conservative bias. That was a revelation to the folks who had issued the framework and folks like Trevor Packer, so yeah, I give them credit. I do think they made an earnest attempt to get it right, and all the initial feedback from the pundit class, at least, is favorable. I'll be paying attention a year from now, when they go into the field and ask teachers what they think.

                                    The other interesting thing about this is, we've forgotten in all of this what the big idea here was in re-vamping the AP History framework to begin with. It wasn't about who gets in, who gets left out, and what the bias is. It was an attempt to get AP History students to engage more with primary source documents, to do more historical work as opposed to just making it ... Repeating facts and taking a multiple choice test, and that seems successful as well.

Brandon:                     Yeah. Agreed, agreed.

Robert:                        And that's all the time we have for Pardon the Gadfly. Next, here's Amber with this week's research minute.

Brandon:                     Amber. How are you?

Amber:                        Hey Brandon. Doing great.

Brandon:                     Good, good. Are you a baseball fan?

Amber:                        I am. I like the Orioles and the Nats.

Brandon:                     You like both.

Amber:                        That seems odd. I know, that seems like a traitor, right? You don't like the Orioles and the Nats, but I don't know, Orioles cause of Cal Ripken. I was always a Cal Ripken fan, so I still like them, and the stadium is phenomenal. They used to have these great pretzels with about 10 pounds of cinnamon on them. That was the whole reason, really, that I really liked going to the games. Then, they stopped ... The pretzel vendor left, so now they have these crummy little stale pretzels. Aren't half as fun for me, so anyway that's really what it is. It's the pretzels, it's not really the baseball for me at the Orioles.

Brandon:                     The ball-park experience.

Amber:                        Yes, the experience. I normally don't eat junk food, but you have to when you go to the games. Anyway, it's all good. I'm a baseball fan.

Brandon:                     Cool, cool. What do we have this week?

Amber:                        We got a new NBER study, doing a lot of those, examines the impact of math acceleration on students prior to their graduating. This is a little bit wonky, but a lot of people know that we had these Algebra-For-All policies in the 90s, where we really trying to push all kids into Algebra 1 because we thought we have an access problem here. We need to get these kids on track to college readiness. Then they kind of fell out of favor because a lot of the kids weren't being successful in the harder courses, and there was some questions whether we were watering down the courses.

                                    Now we've kind of got the next generation of policies trying to solve this problem. These analysts looked at Wake County public schools in North Carolina, and they had implemented a more targeted acceleration policy in 2010-2011 that funneled particular students into a higher sequence of math courses. It's not college for all, it's college for these kids that we're going to identify. They were identified based on an algorithm, which basically used the history of that kid's test scores that predicted their probability of passing a standardized Algebra test. The threshold they used corresponded to the 25th percentile of the district's skill distribution, which essentially means about 75% of students would be placed on the accelerated track, so pretty big number.

                                    Analysts were able to compare the performance of nearly identical students who scored just above and just below the threshold. They followed students from the end of 5th grade, when they received their probability score, through high school. All right, quick findings. Number one, acceleration had no clear effects on end-of-grade math test scores. Number two, it did, however, induce lower grades at the middle school level, so we saw the kid's grades go down in the middle grades. Yet, it raised the probability of taking, and passing, geometry in 9th grade by over 30 percentage points, including for those disadvantaged kids. Number four, most students accelerate in middle school do not remain that way in high school. In other words, there are three or four sequence of courses they were supposed to take, but a lot of them don't make it to the end. They get, was "de-accelerated" a word? Maybe. For those that do manage to stay in that accelerated pipeline, they end up earning lower grades in those courses.

                                    For instance, 40% of students accelerate into pre-Algebra in 7th grade, continue on to Geometry in 9th grade, so that's a significant drop from 7th to 9th grade. Anyway, the bottom line is, they say we have a leaky pipeline, right, and that these acceleration policies alone aren't enough to keep kids on track with rigorous coursework. There's a little bit of discussion, okay like, now what do we do? Everybody says ... What do you think? What do you think that people think the answer is? I mean, like okay, if kids can't do it, then maybe we should give them ... Tutoring, right?

Brandon:                     Okay. Sure.

Amber:                        Then there was some other evidences they site that said, "Oh by the way, when we looked at the impact of tutoring, that didn't really seem to help them either." It was kind of a bleak report at the end, where you're like, "Okay, so we have this more targeted way of identifying these kids and trying to open up access, but the results were really mixed. On the one hand, we didn't see a big bump in these test scores. On the other hand, there were some positive impacts around Geometry, and so on and so fourth. At the end of the day it just seemed like a lot of these kids weren't able to stay and stick into that acceleration pipeline and were dropping out at pretty high rates."

                                    Then when you say, "Okay well maybe they need more resources and supports." The supports didn't seem to be helping either. Honestly, I don't know what the answer is. You know?

Brandon:                     Yeah. The findings leave me stumped. I don't really know what to say at all.

Amber:                        Then they say, well ... These guys are rock stars, one of them is one of our EEPS, Shawn Doherty, but one of the things it says, "You know, well maybe we would see impacts if we looked at long-term outcomes," which seems kind of, you know, a long shot. They are going to check back in and look at these kids after high school and see if there is any college acceptance outcome or any, kind of like, things like that. You know, maybe we're just not following them long enough. Maybe we're going to be surprised by some of the long-term impacts of such a strategy. Kudos because I think there's a real understanding that the Algebra-For-All sounded good, it's kind of like the 2014 rhetoric around NCLB, but when you really kind of dig in, there are a lot of perverse incentives.

Brandon:                     Interesting. Kind of bleak.

Amber:                        Kind of bleak. Kind of bleak, but I mean I think we ... You've done a lot of research around gifted education.

Brandon:                     Right.

Amber:                        I think acceleration sounds pretty good.

Brandon:                     For certain kids, yeah.

Amber:                        For certain kids, right? Maybe they try to target the kids here? Who knows. Maybe their target was off? Maybe they needed to set a higher threshold for how to identify those kids. I don't know. Acceleration just seems like it's not the new answer to all of our woes either for some of these struggling kids.

Brandon:                     For sure, for sure. Okay. All right. Thanks Amber.

Amber:                        You're welcome.

Robert:                        That's all the time we have for this week's Gadfly show. 'Til next week.

Brandon:                     I'm Brandon Wright.

Robert:                        And I'm Robert Pondiscio for the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, signing off. 

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?

A new study by Bellwether Education Partners examines the changes to teacher pension systems over the last thirty years. The report uses an historical data set from the Wisconsin Retirement Research Committee (RRC) and the state legislature that includes data from public employee pension plans in eighty-seven retirement systems across all fifty states. The data span from 1982 to 2012 and are based on annual reports, employee handbooks, statutes, and actuarial reports. Analysts examine defined benefit plans only—and, to facilitate comparisons, only the plans offered to hypothetical newly hired, twenty-five-year-old teachers who remain in those plans in each state. Analysts note several trends that have developed over the last thirty years, including:

1. The median state offers a much lower vesting period compared to several decades ago, dropping from ten years to five years.
2. States began lowering the normal retirement age in the 1990s and continued into the 2000s. But in recent years, states have increased the retirement age, which decreases retirement benefits and results in fewer years collecting a pension. In 2012 alone, nineteen plans increased their normal retirement age for new teachers, pushing the average retirement from age fifty-five to fifty-eight.
3. Average employee contribution rates remained relatively constant throughout the 1980s, 1990s, and 2000s, but increased after the recession, thereby lowering teachers’ net retirement compensation.

Further, when states reduce pension benefits, those cuts fall disproportionately on new and future teachers. While benefit increases tend to apply to all workers, benefit decreases typically only affect new workers. And because pension benefits are severely back-loaded, teachers inherently accrue very little wealth at the beginning of their careers.

For example: Although pension benefits for career teachers fell only 1 percent from 1982 to 2012, teachers who were hired in 2012 and stayed ten years would qualify for an inflation-adjusted pension benefit worth 25 percent less than their peers who began in 1982. Worse, in Illinois (a.k.a. the Abuse-the-New-Teachers state), a new teacher would not see a positive return on her contributions unless she served more than two decades in the system. The report closes with this depressing factoid: For every $100 that states and districts contribute to teacher pension plans, an average of $70 goes toward paying down pension debt, rather than toward actual retirement benefits. Not much good news to share here—or ever on this topic!

SOURCE: Leslie Kan and Chad Alderman, "Eating Their Young: How Cuts to State Pension Plans Fall on New Workers," Bellwether Education Partners (July 2015).

As a teacher, I measured professional development on a spectrum from “vaguely aligned” (we played math games!) to “I’d rather be teaching phonics right now” (any session that involved someone reading, verbatim, from a packet I had in hand). The midpoint was “at least it’s free grading time,” which was how I, an early childhood teacher, viewed any session on standardized test reading passages. But while I was frequently frustrated, I thought it was a problem specific to me; somewhere out there, I reasoned, there was PD that could help a teacher improve. And anyway, it was only a couple of days a year—not too significant.

Not exactly, says this new report from TNTP, which dug deep into the efficacy and size of three districts’ (and one charter network’s) investments in teacher professional development; it found the efforts outsized and the payoffs lacking. Researchers looked at three districts and provided low, medium, and high estimates of the annual cost of PD, which were based on which line items one included in the final price tag. On the low end—comprising only teacher time and baseline expenditures to host the PD—districts spent at least $50 million each year. On the high end—when other things like salary incentives, data-analysis, and coaches’ salaries are included—districts shelled out up to $196 million. All told, teachers spent about 10 percent of their time in PD, and it averaged out to $18,000 per teacher, per year—between 6 and 9 percent of a district’s budget. That’s much higher than anticipated, but not necessarily problematic if it’s working.

Unfortunately, TNTP was unable to find a clear link between money spent and teacher improvement. After rapid early gains, teachers plateaued; two years of observation data showed that for every ten teachers, three improved, five stayed the same, and two declined. To be sure, plenty of teachers made great strides, but no unifying factors contributed to that improvement. And teachers also reported dissatisfaction and a lack of faith in their districts’ abilities to create and implement good PD.

The picture at the charter network was slightly different. On the one hand, a highly coherent approach that incorporated a tight loop of observation, feedback, and implementation led to substantial improvement in 70 percent of teachers. On the other hand, the network was spending an average of $33,000 per teacher—nearly double the price traditional districts paid—and operated on a much smaller scale.

TNTP takes the right approach by recommending that districts tweak, not cut, professional development. They make a familiar call for more actionable data, clearer metrics, and strategic reinvestment of funds. More boldly, they suggest reimagining early-teaching careers to focus on one specific aspect of instruction, administration, or engagement, which would create a smoother path to growth. All would likely lead to teacher improvement. But given the size, scope, and entrenched interests in PD, I’ll wager that very little changes in the near future.

SOURCE: “The Mirage: Confronting the Hard Truth About Our Quest for Teacher Development,” TNTP (August 2015).

Recently, the idea of “school-based hubs” has been gaining momentum as a potential solution to the problem of improving upward mobility. These hubs are created when schools partner with doctors’ offices and various other community organizations to offer their clients (students and parents) a wide variety of integrated services. The efficacy of these programs, however, is still in question, as the idea progresses through its infancy; only a small number of them actually exist.

This report offers insight into the successes and challenges of a D.C. school-based hub, the Briya/Mary’s Center. It came together a few years ago, when Briya Public Charter School partnered with Mary’s Center, an “integrative medical center.” Mary’s Center’s mission is to provide families with medical, educational, and social services to improve their overall well-being.

Briya Public Charter School is no stranger to integrated services. In addition to an education, the school provides its students (up to five years old) and their relatives a family literacy program, parenting classes, and two adult credentialing programs. These programs allow Briya parents to become registered medical assistants or early child care professionals, thus setting them up for future success. Briya also encourages parents to be active participants in their children’s education. This entails asking them to spend at least two and a half hours per day in their children’s school (either during school hours or in the evening) participating in various aspects of the four-part program, which includes adult education, early childhood education, parenting, and parent-and-child together time. These are all meant to complement and reinforce one another and lead to an integrated education system for the whole family.

On the other side of the partnership, Mary’s Center offers medical care for the whole family (including pediatric and senior), disease prevention, nutrition counseling, mental health care, and dental care. On top of that, the hub is affiliated with other organizations in the community, including a public elementary school, a summer job program for teens, and a mental health clinic.

At first glance, the Briya/Mary’s Center partnership sounds great. But there are also aspects of this program that should give people pause. For example, Briya had far lower attendance rates than other charter schools in the area, in part because parents who are unable to spend time at the school each day keep their children home, lest they feel embarrassed. More importantly, all school-based hubs suffer from a lack of data collection and analysis, with few longitudinal and empirical studies examining whether the positive results they think will occur ever actually manifest themselves. Briya/Mary’s Center and its brethren ought to pair their admirable aspirations with research that, if positive, will solidify their place in the community and encourage others to follow suit.

SOURCE: Stuart M. Butler, “Using schools and clinics as hubs to create healthy communities: The example of Briya/Mary’s Center,” Brookings (July 2015).