The Education Gadfly Weekly

The sweetest and shiniest word in the progressive lexicon is “universal.” It connotes equity, equality, and above all fairness. As a practical matter, however, these lofty ideals are undermined when we give everyone the same even if some need more. This is a truth universally acknowledged.

It also seems lost upon New York City’s uber-progressive mayor, Bill de Blasio, who seems oddly determined at times to make worse, not better, the “Tale of Two Cities” dichotomy between rich and poor New York that he rode into office two years ago.

The second year of de Blasio’s signature education initiative, a $300 million program to provide free, full-time pre-K to all New Yorkers, began this fall with troubling data suggesting that it is badly misfiring. Using census data and information from the mayor’s office, Bruce Fuller—a professor of education and public policy at University of California, Berkeley (Berkeley!)— estimates that there are 103,000 four-year-olds eligible for the program. In many instances, however, those who need it most are not being reached.

Children from low-income homes make up the largest share of program participants, accounting for roughly one-third of the sixty-five thousand registrations. But Fuller calculates that more than twelve thousand kids in the poorest two-fifths of the city’s ZIP codes remain unenrolled in any preschool. According to a report in ProPublica (ProPublica!), Fuller’s data indicates that Mayor de Blasio’s pre-K program added a mere 195 kids from the bottom 20 percent of ZIP codes this fall. Middle-income neighborhoods are showing the greatest gains in registration, while enrollments have actually fallen in nineteen of the city’s thirty-four poorest zip codes.

 “We just don’t have the evidence to back why we would heavily finance pre-K in middle class and upper class communities,” Fuller told ProPublica. “I think the mayor has virtuous intentions, but I think once he made this ambitious campaign promise, he sort of charged ahead with blinders on.”

It is no exaggeration to say that the battle for literacy is largely won and lost in early childhood. Children who grow up in well-off homes reap all the benefits of educated parents who speak in full sentences, read to them nightly, and engage them in conversation. They live lives of concerted cultivation, and to them accrue all the blessings of knowledge and language. Low-income children, by contrast, reap few or none of these benefits. Thus a sensible approach, if you were serious about your own Dickensian rhetoric, would be focus your energies—and the public’s tax dollars—on those who need it most. Previous work by Fuller has shown that upper-middle income communities benefit disproportionately from de Blasio’s initiative. There are many words to describe this, but one prevails above all: predictable.

Less attention has been given to the mayor’s speech last week, in which he announced a plan to spend an additional $75 million per year to ensure (here comes that word again) “universal second-grade literacy” by 2026. “To boost literacy, every elementary school will receive support from a dedicated literacy specialist,” the mayor announced.

Well, bravo…sort of. There's a clear and strong correlation between early reading struggles and long-term academic failure. About 90 percent of struggling first graders are still struggling by fourth grade. One in six children who are not reading proficiently in third grade don't graduate from high school on time. Many never do. So it’s encouraging that de Blasio wants all students reading at their grade level by the end of second grade. His focus on early reading makes more sense than his headline-grabbing announcements of “computer science for all” and “AP classes for all” in the same speech.

That said, it’s hard to have faith that the mayor or Chancellor Carmen Farina know what it takes to get kids reading successfully by third grade. Farina is notoriously in the thrall of Lucy Calkins of Teachers' College, a literacy guru whose approach to reading failed a generation of city kids and was wisely dumped by the New York City Department of Education before Farina took over and resurrected it. If Gotham is about to invest $75 million in the same occupying army of “TC” trainers and staff developers who were ubiquitous in city schools ten years ago, it's an occasion for tears, not cheers.

A DOE spokesperson tells me that an implementation plan for the mayor’s early reading initiative is coming later this year, and that the city will work with “national experts and universities” to train the seven hundred new reading specialists they plan to hire. “To already claim these reading specialists will be trained by TC is premature and not accurate,” the spokesperson insists. Here’s hoping that plan starts by examining an important analysis by the Manhattan Institute’s Charles Sahm from earlier this year, which catalogued the K–2 curricula used in the city’s 1,168 elementary and middle schools. The mayor’s initiative promises to prioritize “schools with students that need the most support.” Bravo again. But a premium should be placed on helping teachers rigorously implement the curricula that schools have already purchased and are using. A plan to hire boxcar numbers of “literacy specialists” seems oblivious to that notion and likely to fail.

In sum, the de Blasio administration “has not devised a coherent strategy for addressing the needs of schools in high-poverty neighborhoods,” says Pedro Noguera of UCLA’s Graduate School of Education. “They have to know at a very granular level the academic and social needs of [low-income] kids, and then they have to have a staff that’s trained and resources in place to meet those specific needs.” Doesn’t sound “universal,” does it?

The bottom line: Mayor de Blasio has shown a good instinct for identifying the right targets—early childhood education and reading. But it’s hard to be encouraged that either he or chancellor knows how to hit them.

Kevin Case/Flickr

During his time in the United States, Pope Francis will make a quiet stop at East Harlem’s Our Lady Queen of Angels. His visit to this 120-year-old elementary school, which educates an overwhelmingly low-income and minority student body, underscores the Church’s centuries-long commitment to the disadvantaged. But it will also shine a light on an unreported story in urban education: the budding renaissance of Catholic schools.

For fifty years, inner-city Catholic schools have been shuttering, victims of shifting city demographics, changes in the workforce, the advent of charter schooling, and much more. Impoverished families have too few accessible school options to begin with, so this erosion of parochial schools has been especially painful. A substantial body of evidence shows that Catholic schools have an unusual ability to help underserved kids succeed. Newer research suggests that longstanding urban Catholic schools foster social capital outside their walls, helping to decrease crime and other societal ills.

In the early 1970s, Daniel Patrick Moynihan (a White House adviser at the time) saw a looming crisis and warned President Nixon about the tragic consequences if these schools disappeared. Little was done; as a White House aide thirty-five years later, I was part of an effort to re-sound the same alarm, organizing a White House summit and authoring a report on the worsening threat to faith-based urban schools.

The prognosis then was ominous. It looked as if divine intervention would be required. But less than a decade later, America’s miracle-working civil society is beginning to come to the rescue. Thanks largely to the energy of social entrepreneurs, the generosity of donors, and—counterintuitively—the lessons of charter schooling, urban Catholic education may be on the rebound.

In hindsight, it’s becoming clear that Catholic education’s foundational virtue, its steady adherence to venerable principles and practices, was also holding it back. Yes, it was right to serve the underserved, stubbornly believe in every child, set the highest standards, and teach character. But many of its approaches to staffing, leading, organizing, governing, and funding its schools had become anachronistic. A rejuvenation was needed.

Like the European Renaissance, this rebirth blends the old and the new. There are new networks of Catholic schools modeled after successful charter management organizations (think Catholic versions of the Knowledge Is Power Program, such as the Faith in the Future Foundation). There are Notre Dame’s ACE program, often called the “Catholic Teach For America,” and other new pipelines of teachers and leaders. There are new tech-driven school models using virtual and “blended” strategies for instruction. There are innovative approaches to financing, including the Drexel Fund (the first-ever venture philanthropy fund for Catholic and other private schools) and Cristo Rey’s work-study program, which sends high schoolers into offices one day every week to help pay for their education.

Though many of these innovations put some distance between schools and the old parish- and diocesan-based systems that used to control them, they are dedicated to preserving the authenticity of Catholic education.

So on Friday, Pope Francis won’t simply be touring a high-performing, high-poverty school that’s been part of Harlem’s social fabric for over a century. Our Lady Queen of Angels is also part of Partnership Schools, one of the nation’s new independent Catholic-school networks. The Partnership’s superintendent, Kathleen Porter-Magee, isn’t just a former Catholic school student and teacher; she was also an executive of one of the nation’s best charter school organizations. The network’s board includes representatives from the New York archdiocese as well as business and philanthropic leaders.

There’s more reason for optimism now about the future of Catholic education than at any time in the last half-century. Those hoping to learn more might check out my guidebook for Catholic school donors, soon to be published by the Philanthropy Roundtable (excerpted here).

But for those interested in K–12 education more broadly, there’s also an important lesson to be learned. The revitalization of this sector of schools is a modern-day barn-raising. It’s a quiet triumph of civil society: collective action with public benefits but absent centralized government direction.

Through the loosely coordinated collaboration of parents, educators, faith leaders, social entrepreneurs, colleges, and philanthropists, an organic movement has developed. It’s growing sturdier while evolving to meet an array of needs in a variety of locations.

This is precisely how education reform was described ten years ago. But because of the field’s growing technocratic tendency—the view that brainy central administrators know best—the public education version is increasingly seen by many as top-down. Indeed, Washington has inserted itself into accountability, standards, tests, teacher evaluations, and more, provoking a backlash.

It is highly instructive that perhaps the world’s most famous hierarchical organization, the Roman Catholic Church, has made substantial progress with its schools by preserving its principles and devolving power to civil society. The next White House occupant should take note.

Editor’s note: This post was originally published in a slightly different form at National Review Online.

Louis-Paul St-Onge/iStock/Thinkstock

• If Pennsylvania Avenue’s barricaded sidewalks didn’t make it obvious, the whooshing pantaloons of the Swiss Guard certainly will—Pope Francis is officially touring the capital! And while his three-day visit will be punctuated by extensive coverage of the Church’s role in American life and politics, Kavitha Cardoza’s piece on the fate of urban Catholic education is our recommended read (or listen) for anyone intrigued by the issue of school choice. Initially established as alternatives for the children of European immigrant families (who objected to compulsory Protestant indoctrination in nineteenth-century classrooms), Catholic schools grew to serve five million students by their 1960s peak. Since then, tuition increases and fraying religious communities in inner cities have sliced that number by more than half, but optimistic signs exist. As one of Cardoza’s sources remarks, last year’s drop in national Catholic school enrollment was the lowest since 2000, and the decline has substantially slowed over the past few years. That’s a dramatic turnaround from 2008, the year that the pope last visited and Fordham issued its gloomy dispatch on Catholic education, amid freefalling enrollment and tumult in the Church. For families seeking the combination of educational rigor and moral direction that has been the hallmark of these schools, news like this helps revive that wonderful New Testament virtue: hope.
• The Department of Education’s newly released College Scorecard is an online tool that allows consumers to compare colleges and universities on different metrics of student debt and future earnings. A useful instrument, the scorecard unfortunately shrinks from pitting different schools against one another in a kind of Academic Affordability Deathmatch for the entertainment of frenzied, riotous wonks. But where government fails, private enterprise rushes in to fill the void! Both the New York Times and NPR now feature their own access and affordability indices, complete with rankings of schools that make the best financial sense for families struggling with the burden of paying for college. The big takeaway is that both lists are filled with competitive, selective institutions. This is a point that Fordham has been flogging for some time on the K–12 end, but it’s equally valid in the realm of higher education: While upward mobility has to be a holistic priority, lifting up every poor child to the prospect of college and career success, smart students from low-income families can benefit tremendously from the elite instruction that only selective schools can provide. Whether applying for seats at Berkeley or test-based academies like Stuyvesant High School, these kids are graduating from America’s best schools with great prospects and low (if any) debt. That’s great for them, and great for the country.
• Teacher evaluations and student test scores make for a combustible mix. Ideally, you’d like to incorporate measures of student progress into assessments of teachers’ performance; in practice, parsing the data can be a fraught process. The Obama administration’s insistence on linking the two as a condition for state NCLB waivers has been one of its biggest whiffs in education, and one that will very likely be rescinded if and when Congress reauthorizes the Elementary and Secondary Education Act. Perhaps sensing its own misstep, Arne Duncan’s education department has helpfully begun to tap the brakes on the policy, allowing some fourteen states extra time and flexibility to craft their evaluation systems. Arkansas and Massachusetts have been given until 2018 to complete their work, long after a new president is sworn in and Duncan signs on to anchor the U.S. over-fifty men’s basketball team. It’s good to see the administration’s willingness to change course here. Teaching is already a famously difficult profession to assess, and the implementation of new testing regimes in most states has made this federal mandate a burden too heavy to bear.

Catholic schools and the Pope’s stateside visit, Bill de Blasio’s pre-K enrollment efforts, STEM education for gifted kids, and KIPP’s successful scale-up.

Amber's Research Minute

SOURCE: Christina Clark Tuttle, Kevin Booker, Philip Gleason, Gregory Chojnacki, Virginia Knechtel, Thomas Coen, Ira Nichols-Barrer, and Lisbeth Goble, "Understanding the Effect of KIPP as it Scales: Volume I, Impacts on Achievement and Other Outcomes," Mathematica (September 2015).

Transcript

Robert:                  This is your host, Robert Pondiscio, at 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 Jon Hamm of education reform, Brandon Wright.

Brandon:                  How's it going?

Robert:                  Things are great, Don Draper. Come on, you kind of have that look.

Brandon:                  Do I?

Robert:                  I mean, for those of us who are following along on television today, which is none of us, yeah, you've kind of got that a little bit.

Brandon:                  Take that as a compliment. I think the funny thing about him is if you've seen him in any comedies, what I think he really wants to do is be a comedian, but he's just too handsome. So it just doesn't work, right? People who are hilarious have something interesting about their look that you can't always pinpoint, but he just doesn't work visually as a comedian.

Robert:                  I can even see that, it's funny, the only thing I've ever seen him in is that role.

Brandon:                  He's actually pretty funny.

Robert:                  Is he really?

Brandon:                  Yeah.

Robert:                  And he might be one of those guys who is doomed to forever just be typecast as that guy.

Brandon:                  I don't know, he's been in a lot of stuff.

Robert:                  Has he?

Brandon:                  Yeah.

Robert:                  Clearly, for all the pop culture references we make here, I need to brush up my pop culture expertise. I've never seen him in anything other than "Mad Men."

Brandon:                  Yeah. I think he really wants to be a comedian.

Robert:                  Good luck with that, hope that works out. Do we want to be comedians here? Let's hope not.

Brandon:                  I'm not that funny, I don't think.

Robert:                  Clara, you're funny. Let's play Pardon the Gadfly.

Clara:                  All right. Pope Francis is in D.C. How has public perception of urban Catholic schools changed since the last time a Pope was in our nation's capital?

Robert:                  I'm not sure when the last time the Pope was in the nation's capital. 10 years ago?

Brandon:                  According to Mike, it was when we put out the last Catholic schools report, which I just saw online today was 2008, I think.

Robert:                  Okay. All right. So the pope is here in D.C., snarling at traffic and administering last rites to the Washington Nationals. Thank you.

Brandon:                  Got to throw the Mets in there.

Robert:                  I'm trying to be funny.

Brandon:                  Although it will be bad if they're six and a half back, and lose. Only one team ever that's ever done that.

Robert:                  Call on the Pope for divine intervention. First of all, we need to start by giving just enormous props to our own Kathleen Porter-Magee, who when she is not here at Fordham, runs a small number of independent Catholic schools in New York City, and the Pope, for the first time ever, is going to visit a parochial school, he's visiting one of Kathleen's schools. How exciting is that?

Brandon:                  Very cool. Very cool.

Robert:                  On the other hand, I feel kind of bad for her, because no matter what happens for the rest of her life...

Brandon:                  I'm sure she's very stressed out too.

Robert:                  That too. Well let me tell you, "in 2015 the Pope came to my school", I'm not sure what tops that.

Brandon:                  Sure, sure.

Robert:                  But as much as I'm thrilled that he is visiting Catholic schools, Kathleen's in particular, and turning the lights up on Catholic schools, I have to be honest, where was he 50 years ago? I'm not meaning this Pope, but any Pope. Catholic education was at its high-water mark in 1960, when there was approximately 5.2 million Catholic school students. Guess how many there are right now.

Brandon:                  I don't know, a million?

Robert:                  More than that, 2.3. But about half. Catholic schools, especially if you're from the northeast part of the United States where I'm from, kind of built that part of the country. And I recognize that Kathleen and Andy Smarick has a piece in the National Review saying "hey Catholic schools are innovating now," and that's great, but I can't help but be a little bit sad, we've just lost something spectacular in this country, in the form of weaker Catholic schools, far fewer of them, and the conventional wisdom of course is that charters have replaced that.

                                    But you know what? I just don't know that you can ever replace the mission-drivenness of Catholic schools. The character, the values, the academics, especially for low-income kids, I'm just not sure that what we have now replaces what we used to have, with a far more robust Catholic education sector.

Brandon:                  So you say that the number's dropped over the last 50 years, and you cite the number now, and the number then. Has the number gone down that whole time, or is it going back up at the moment now?

Robert:                  I think it's been a steady decline, but the irony of course is that the number of Catholics in this country has steadily increased. In about the time that Catholic school enrollment has been cut in half, the number of Catholics in America has roughly doubled. Now yes, it's probably a significant rise, I don't have the data in front of me, so maybe I shouldn't freelance this: I assume it's a much higher percentage of very low-income Americans, who maybe can't afford even the modest tuition of Catholic schools, and that's why charters are stealing share of them then.

                                    But it is absolutely true that we have more Catholics in America than we did 50 years ago, but far less attendance in Catholic schools.

Brandon:                  Well to be a bit of an optimist, could it be that public schools have gotten better? So people feel less of a need to pay even a small amount to go to a private school.

Robert:                  Let me answer that with one word. My one word answer is, no.

Brandon:                  Okay. All right.

Robert:                  At least if that's true, I challenge one of your listeners to show me that that's true. All the evidence I've seen suggests just the opposite is true. So welcome Pope, and have a great visit at Kathleen's school, but don't be a stranger, come back, again and again and again.

Brandon:                  Except for the traffic.

Robert:                  Except for the traffic. Question number two, Clara.

Clara:                  Mayor Bill de Blasio recently disputed Berkeley Professor Bruce Fuller's study that found those who most need early learning don't get it. Has Mayor de Blasio been successful in his push to increase pre-K enrollment?

Robert:                  I'm going to take a look at this and write about this for this week's Gadfly, and I'm really tempted to title the pieces something about "How to Widen the Achievement Gap". Because if you look at what Mayor de Blasio is doing, and we've talked about this on the podcast before, he's created basically a new entitlement, universal pre-K, but what Professor Fuller's data seems to indicate is that the kids who need it the most aren't getting... I'm not saying they're not getting it at all, but they are far less likely to get it than modest income, but not the lowest of the low, and that's who really needs pre-K the most.

                                    If you look at the way that children develop language, pre-K is never going to be a substitute for growing up in a home with parents who are educated and speak in full sentences and read every night, but that's where the battle is won and lost in terms of language proficiency, is in the first four years of life. So why are we creating in New York this universal entitlement that goes to everyone, and the evidence that Professor Fuller seems to be seeing here is that those who need it the most are getting it the least.

Brandon:                  So if everyone gets it, wouldn't everyone get it?

Robert:                  Was that...?

Brandon:                  It was a topology, I think it is.

Robert:                  A topology?

Brandon:                  No, right, if the complaint is that the kids who need it aren't getting it, and the answer being put in place is universal pre-K, isn't that by definition giving it to everyone? So wouldn't all the kids get it?

Robert:                  Sure. That's the point. Everybody gets it, then nobody has a chance to catch up. Let me have a look at the site...

Brandon:                  So the kids who don't need it shouldn't get it at all? So that the other kids can catch up?

Robert:                  Well, I see what you're saying. Yes.

Brandon:                  Doing a little debating now.

Robert:                  Well, I don't have this data in front of me, but I believe that Professor Fuller has also pointed out that a significant percentage of kids who are in the free pre-K either did or would have had a private pre-K. So basically you're just saving them the cost. But the number that jumped out at me is this one: families residing in the poorest fifth of city zip codes saw just a 1% increase in registration of four-year-olds compared with school last year. So most of the growth from year one to year two is coming in not the bottom quintile but the others.

Brandon:                  So it's available but people aren't sending their kids there?

Robert:                  People don't take advantage of it enough.

Brandon:                  So then if you took the money that they're spending to give it to everyone, even people who would pay regardless, you could better spend that money to increase the enrollment of the kids who need it most?

Robert:                  Sure. Absolutely.

Brandon:                  That makes sense.

Robert:                  And the other thing that concerns me is, this has nothing to do with pre-K, but Mayor de Blasio also gave a big speech last week, where he announced his priorities for education. And one of them was universal second-grade literacy. Sounds good, right? My fear is that Mayor de Blasio and his chancellor Farina have kind of one flavor of literacy that they like, which I've written about deathlessly over the years, a program by Lucy Calkins of Teacher's College, the so-called Teacher's College Reading and Writing Program, the only reason Brandon I'm still in education these days, after teaching years and years ago, was I got so scandalized by what we were doing to low-income kids in the Bronx where I taught, with this program, that I kind of became militant on the subject.

                                    So when I hear that Mayor de Blasio wants to spend $75 million I think in the next couple of years on reading specialists, every alarm bell that I have is ringing, saying "oh no, please not that again." And I have been over the last two days, calling and emailing City Hall, the Tweed Building, the DoE in New York City, to say "what are you spending the $75 million on?" So far, no answer. Please return my phone calls, Tweed.

Brandon:                  Please do. All right.

Robert:                  Question number three, Clara.

Clara:                  Intel announced that it will soon pull its sponsorship of the annual Science Talent Search, which former president George H. W. Bush once called "the Super Bowl of science." How could this withdrawal of support impact America's brightest students, especially those interested in STEM?

Robert:                  Great question for Brandon Wright, who is our house expert on gifted education.

                                    Why would Intel do this? This is nuts, they've had that competition since I was your age, young man!

Brandon:                  I'm not sure. Actually Intel took it over from Westinghouse-

Robert:                 I remember Westinghouse. That's how old I am.

Brandon:                  ... in I think the '90s. But still, I'm not sure, but it does kind of seem like it's par for the course in American education. We've moved so far away from actually focusing on our brightest kids, and this kind of goes along with that trend. Unfortunately, it's in the subjects that we needed most, stem subjects, and it's for the age group, high school, that's doing the worst. So if you look at the United States compared to other countries, our fourth graders actually do pretty good. And then when they get to eighth they do worse, and then when they get to be 15 they do awful. So I don't know, it just doesn't make a lot of sense, and this is like another nail in the coffin of gifted education, or education of our highest potential, brightest kids, however you want to label that group of kids.

Robert:                  You mean the ones who are going to hire my daughter in a few years, when she gets out of college?

Brandon:                  Yes.

Robert:                  Yeah, those guys. Please. And we should also plug your book, with Chester Finn, you've got a new book out within the last week or two on exactly this subject.

Brandon:                  Last week.

Robert:                  Just last week. Congratulations, you're now a published author. And the title is?

Brandon:                  "Failing Our Brightest Kids".

Robert:                  There you go. That says it all, doesn't it?

Brandon:                  Yeah.

Robert:                  And that's all the time we have for Pardon the Gadfly. And now it's time for everyone's favorite, here's Amber's Research Minute.

                                    I came down here for three days, and found out that all of my Fordham friends and colleagues are going to be working from home tomorrow.

Brandon:                  I did warn you well ahead of time.

Amber:                  Yes, my schedule this week for the Pope, so the Pope has upset my life this week, but I'm glad everybody else is happy about him coming.

Robert:                  Yeah, so if the Pope wants to hang out in the empty Fordham offices, I mean you could fire a cannon off in this place and nobody would know about it.

Amber:                  This is true.

Brandon:                  Probably not a good idea with the Pope around.

Robert:                  Probably not a good idea. Amber, what have you got for us today?

Amber:                  I've got a new study out by Mathematica, looks at their latest results on KIPP.

Robert:                  Oh, I read this.

Amber:                  I'm glad you did. So it's called "Understanding the effect of KIPP as it scales." So Mathematica's had this contract for years to be tracking the impact of KIPP, so just a little bit of background, KIPP received in 2010 $50 million and an i3 scale-up grant from US DOE. So it got some money. And so now these folks are saying "okay, how did that scale-up go?" So it tracked some of these students.

                                    So basically part of their i3 commitment was to develop their leadership pipeline, which I'm assuming means hire a bunch more principals and train them, and double their students, from 27,000 to over 55,000 by 2015, so by this year. So that was a pretty big jump.

Robert:                  They overachieved, I think they've got like 60,000 kids now.

Amber:                  So they are really scaling. All right, the latest evaluation examines impacts at the elementary, middle and high school levels, which we haven't had before, they've been kind of doing this in a piecemeal fashion, and again as I mentioned, looked at the scale-up. So I'm going to go "boom boom boom" at each level, big highlight, okay.

                                    For elementary level, they were able to use this random assignment versus this lottery winner and loser, I think we've all heard about this design before, it's this rigorous design. And they found that being offered admission to a KIPP school led to an increase of .25 standard deviation on a standardized reading test, it was Woodcock Johnson.

Robert:                  Woodcock Johnson, yes.

Amber:                  In math, the impacts were also positive, equivalent to an increase from the 58th to the 68th percentile, which sounds pretty good to me. At the middle school level, again they were able to use this lottery-based design, in most cases, not all cases. And they also used a matched design, where they kind of match the kids on demographics of baseline scores, so not to get too wonky, but they weren't able to use the lottery design for every single level.

Robert:                  It's still a positive effect, right?

Amber:                  Still positive. Both designs showed KIPP middle schools had positive impacts on students' test scores in reading, math, science and social studies, so all four core areas. For instance, in science and social studies, both of them, on average KIPP middle schools have a positive impact of .25, so about a quarter of a standard deviation, every single time almost.

Robert:                  That's a big effect.

Amber:                  And at the high school level finally, last of all, having an opportunity to attend a KIPP school boost new entrants' math scores, so these are the new guys that are coming in, they haven't come up through the middle school, .27 standard deviation, which is still pretty good, increase, which they try to always tell you what that means in terms of percentile, so it's going from the 48th to the 59th percentile for the average kid.

                                    And then they look at the scale-up, I'm really trying to... there's a ton of stuff in here, it's really long, but anyway, for the scale-up, the average impact of middle schools were positive for both math and reading throughout the whole 10 years. So we're talking about 2005 to 2014. But it was a little bit higher in earlier years than in recent years, but it wasn't terrible, I kind of dug in a little bit.

                                    And then they looked at, and this will be interesting to you Robert, they looked at all these non-academic outcomes at the end, which people are more and more interested in.

Robert:                  This fascinates me.

Amber:                  And student and parent survey data show that KIPP elementary and middle schools have positive impacts on school satisfaction, parents love the KIPP schools, but not at the high school level. High school parents are tough. KIPP high schools however, compared to their treatment schools, have positive affects on various aspects of college preparation, like how often they discuss college with the kids. That makes sense.

                                    Oddly enough though, across all grade levels, KIPP schools had no statistically significant impact on most measures of student motivation and engagement, behavior or educational aspirations.

Robert:                  And that fascinates me.

Amber:                  Right? Isn't that something?

Robert:                  Because if there's anything that even non-wonks now about KIPP, "oh those are the grip guys. Those are the everyone-must-go-to-college guys."

Amber:                  Right. And on the aspirational front, that was weird. But they found the measures were also high in the treatment schools. One exception which they note in the report is that parents of KIPP school students are 10 percentage points more likely than the comparison group to believe their child is very likely to complete college.

                                    But bottom line: it's a ton of information, but mostly all of it is good, I mean you have to look hard to find the negative takeaways in that report.

Robert:                  KIPP is one of those chains of charter that's always going to have their detractors, and people who just don't like their flavor of education, that's fine, school of choice, parents like it, that's great. The question that I have is not how they did the last five years, that's your point, all good. How are they going to do for the next five years? In other words, they doubled, and I figured this out, they went from being, if they were a standalone school district, to being somewhere now in the mid-60s, somewhere in between say El Paso and Boston, in terms of their size. If they double again, which I think is what they are planning to do in the next five years, then suddenly they're as big as a top 20 US school district. At what point do you reach the talent speed limit? Because those of us who have worked in the charter world will tell you that the biggest impediment to growth is leadership. That's what the i3 grant was about, was trying to find enough qualified leaders to grow as quickly as they might. Is there a point where you just can't find the talent anymore?

Amber:                  Well, I can just tell, this is my own anecdotal story. I'm on a charter board here in D.C., we are not one of these well-known brand name CMO types, and we're always commiserating that we can't attract or are losing teachers when KIPP and democracy prop come knocking on their doors. Because teachers are proud, they want to be a part of these brand name... it's sort of a respect thing for them, it's a big deal to be affiliated with these schools, so what they've been able to do in terms of attracting talent, it's a pretty big deal.

Robert:                  Yeah. Folks who are within KIPP will tell you that the goal is to create a true pipeline where they work more with schools of education and whatnot, so they're not cherry-picking to your point, but I just can't help but wonder. Let's make a note of this: five years from now, if they double again, will they still be able to do so and maintain quality? It's a fascinating question I think.

Amber:                  Well I think if anybody can do it, it's them. I think that they have this on their radar screen right, because these data bear it out. Everybody thought I think when they double, they're going to just tank. A lot of people thought that. But I mean, they've even rebounded a little bit, if you dig into the data you begin to see even in the high growth areas, where they experience a little bit of a lull, they're already beginning to bounce back. So I think these guys are on their A-game, but I think it's a great question because at some point, you think there's going to be some tipping point, where you cannot begin to keep up with the advances they've made, and get the talent.

Robert:                  Yeah. And if they get to the point where they are a de facto major US school district, and can still pull that off, then good for them.

Amber:                  But I mean if you're sitting around your table around Thanksgiving, do you most of your family members, have they heard of KIPP? Because my family members have, because I asked them, and like wow, when Joe Blow's heard of KIPP, that's kind of a big deal, right?

Robert:                  Exactly. And five years from now, perhaps even more so.

Amber:                  Yeah.

Robert:                  Great. Thanks Amber, that's 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. 

If KIPP were a geographic school district, it would roughly be the nation’s sixty-fifth largest, somewhere between Boston and El Paso. With 162 schools and nearly sixty-thousand students, it’s also growing like kudzu, courtesy of a five-year, $50 million scale-up grant awarded in 2010 through the U.S. Department of Education’s Investing in Innovation (i3) program. At that time, KIPP’s stated goal was to double in size while maintaining its positive impact on kids.

Taxpayers seem to be getting a solid return on that investment. A new report from Mathematica, which contracted with the KIPP Foundation under the terms of the i3 grant, finds that “network-wide, KIPP schools have positive, statistically significant, and educationally meaningful impacts on student achievement, particularly at the elementary and middle school grades.” The picture is murkier at the high school level, where KIPP had “educationally meaningful impacts” on students who were new to the network. No statistically significant effects were found among students continuing from KIPP middle schools, however. Still, the high schools have positive effects on “several aspects of college preparation, including discussions about college, applying to college, and course taking.”

The study is based on both lottery-based and quasi-experimental designs in eight KIPP elementary schools, forty-three middle schools, and eighteen high schools across twenty cities. It looks at outcomes in math, ELA, science, and social studies up to four years after students enter a KIPP school, as well as student and parent surveys.

No single study is conclusive, and KIPP continues to support a cottage industry of detractors who question its results and its approach. On the other hand, KIPP parents—particularly those of elementary and middle school children—were found to be pleased with their kids’ schooling, especially at the elementary and middle school levels.

While the Mathematica report is largely positive, the KIPP “brand” might have taken a hit with one surprising finding: The research team generally found “no impacts of KIPP schools on measures of students’ motivation, engagement, educational aspirations, or behavior.” It’s much easier to measure performance character traits than to alter or grow them. But KIPP has long worshipped at the altar of “grit.” Paul Tough wrote an entire book about it. Clearly, much is going right at KIPP; just as clearly, grit is not.

In addressing the question of whether KIPP could double in size while maintaining quality—short answer: “yes”—the report raises a second question: Can they do it again? KIPP’s i3 scale-up grant was specifically aimed at building its leadership pipeline. Does the supply of talent impose a speed limit on growth at some point? One veteran KIPP official I spoke with believes that a growth rate of 15–20 percent each year is possible without diminishing quality—if the network continues to invest in recruiting and training would-be school leaders. If it doubles in size over the next five years, as is planned, KIPP might be large enough to crack the list of the nation’s twenty largest school districts. That’s a tantalizing proposition, so long as quality isn’t made secondary to quantity.

SOURCE: Christina Clark Tuttle et al., “Understanding the Effect of KIPP as it Scales: Volume I, Impacts on Achievement and Other Outcomes,” Mathematica (September 2015).

Since 2003, Florida has required that schools retain third graders who fail to demonstrate proficiency on the state reading test. A new study by Martin West and colleagues examines the impact of this policy by rigorously comparing the results from students who are just above or below the cutoff for retention. The first cohort to be affected by the new policy entered the third grade in 2002, and West et al. track it through high school graduation. They also track five additional cohorts, the last of which entered third grade in 2008.

Unsurprisingly, they find that the policy increased the number of third graders retained. It started with 4,800 kids in the year prior to the policy introduction (2002) and jumped to nearly twenty-two thousand the next year. The numbers retained have fallen steadily over time, however, as more students have cleared the hurdle. The study’s key finding is that third-grade retention substantially improves students’ reading and math achievement in the short run. Specifically, reading achievement improves for retained students by 23 percent of a standard deviation after one year—and by as much as 47 percent of a standard deviation after two years—when compared to students of the same age. In math, it’s 30 percent of a standard deviation after one year and 36 percent after three years.

Unfortunately, these achievement bumps are short-lived. The effects of third-grade retention on reading achievement are reduced in the third and fourth years and become statistically insignificant in years five and six. In math, the effects are statistically insignificant after six years.

The authors also examined results for students in the same grade versus the same age. The impacts are also positive and manage to persist through middle school, though with the caveat that these estimates also capture the effects of being a year older and receiving another year of schooling.

Finally, they find that retention reduces the probability that students at the cutoff will repeat another grade in the future, although it has no impact on the probability of graduating from high school.

The study uncovers a great deal about retention, but in the end, the practice produces a mixed bag of results—at least in the relatively short term. The authors acknowledge that we still don’t know enough about retention’s long-term benefits. And based on some rigorous studies (particularly in early childhood) that retention boosted downstream metrics like college enrollment and future earnings, it’s a safe bet to assume West and company will be back in Florida in due course.

SOURCE: Guido Schwerdt, Martin R. West, and Marcus A. Winters, "The Effects of Test-Based Retention on Student Outcomes Over Time: Regression Discontinuity Evidence from Florida," National Bureau of Economic Research, Working Paper 21509 (August 2015).

In the fall of 1996, Chicago Public Schools (CPS) implemented a new accountability system that placed 20 percent of its schools on “probation.” Poor reading test scores made up the sole criterion for censure, and those scarlet-lettered schools were plastered on the front page of both Chicago newspapers. A new study by Peter Rich and Jennifer Jennings of NYU takes a look at enrollment changes in these “probation schools,” both before and after the imposition of the new accountability system. The authors attempt to determine if the addition of new information (“This school is not performing up to par”) motivated more or different school change decisions among families.

1996 may seem like ancient history to education reformers, but the study illustrates the perennial power of information to motivate school choice decisions. In 1996, CPS had (as it still does) an open enrollment policy that allows any family to choose any school in the district other than their assigned one, provided there is space available. Since the district provided no transportation to students either before or after the policy was imposed, that issue was moot. The number of schools and seats within the district also stayed the same. In other words, access to buildings remained unchanged after implementation of the probation system. The study’s methodology also controlled for the effect of other accountability-related tweaks that CPS made at the same time. The sole variable under study was the provision of information.

The new information was simple and binary. Schools were either on probation for poor reading scores, or they weren’t: no gradations of bad or good, no value-added information, and only minimal ideas of what changes would be made to try to improve the schools on probation. It was a far cry from today’s report card data extravaganzas and “scary” talk of automatic closure and parent triggers. The only new piece of data for CPS families in 1996 was the big red X of probation.

So what happened in light of this new information? Kids left probation schools in higher numbers after the probation designation than before it. Students attending schools that were placed on probation had 19.3 percent higher odds of transferring schools and 16.1 percent higher odds of leaving the district altogether in the summer following initial assignment. Unsurprisingly, higher-income students were more likely to leave the system—the researchers suppose that they went to private schools, but heading for the ‘burbs is just as likely.

Those students who stayed in CPS and moved from a probation school were no more likely to end up in non-probation schools (i.e., to upgrade) after the policy was implemented than before. Keeping in mind that the difference in quality between probation and non-probation schools could be very slim, the alarm set off by the new accountability system resulted mainly in lateral moves.

Does this mean that accountability-based choice was fatally flawed even before the NCLB era began? No, but it does show that a closed system is not the optimal way to go about using that particular tool. Without a mechanism to assist low-income families in leaving a low-performing district just like high-income families can (vouchers, inter-district open enrollment, ESAs), or a plethora of high-quality seats to transfer into (magnets, charters, STEM schools) just like those who can “work the system” have, bad news about school quality is simply bad news. In Chicago in 1996, families heard the alarm and did what they could. The results were not encouraging. In 2015, we know better. Information, options, and access must be part of the same system in order to truly leverage accountability into better outcomes for students.

SOURCE: Peter M. Rich and Jennifer L. Jennings, “Choice, Information, and Constrained Options: School Transfers in a Stratified Educational System,” American Sociological Review (September 2015).