The Education Gadfly Weekly

Like many, I’m convinced that what happens inside the classroom—curriculum and instruction—has as much of an impact (if not more) on student outcomes than structural reforms. For those who believe as I do, the revamped Elementary and Secondary Education Act has the potential to help states figure out how to hold schools accountable for student learning and what, if anything, to do about teacher evaluations. Let me throw out a few ideas.

“If you want more of something, subsidize it,” Ronald Reagan famously quipped. “If you want less of something, tax it.” During the No Child Left Behind era, test-driven accountability has too often stood Reagan’s maxim on its ear. Annual reading tests have practically required schools and teachers to forsake the patient, long-term investment in knowledge and vocabulary that builds strong readers, critical thinkers, and problem solvers. High-stakes accountability with annual tests that are not tied to course content (which reading tests are not) amounted to a tax on good things and a subsidy for bad practice: curriculum narrowing, test preparation, and more time spent on a “skills and strategies” approach to learning that doesn’t serve children well. Under the new ESEA, states will still have to test students annually, including in reading. But they have a lot more control over the way the results from those tests are turned into grades for schools. This could offer an opportunity to restore some sanity to schooling.

“If we wish to advance our students’ literacy, we must devote ourselves to increasing the breadth and depth of their domain knowledge,” Brown University reading expert Marilyn Jager Adams has observed. This is a good place for states to start thinking through their newly won freedom: Does what you are about to do in the name of accountability tax or subsidize student knowledge across the curriculum? Does it incentivize adding more social studies, science, art, and music to the school day, or does it encourage schools to do less?

The sooner schools see building knowledge across the curriculum as Job One in strengthening reading comprehension, the better. Years of treating reading as a discrete subject or a skill—teaching it and testing it that way—have arguably set reading achievement in reverse. You don’t build strong readers by teaching children to “find the main idea,” “make inferences,” and “compare and contrast.” You do it by fixing a child’s gaze on the world outside the classroom window.

Measuring inputs, not outputs, is the kind of thing that reform-oriented thinking typically eschews. But with states in the accountability driver’s seat, I could persuade myself that the time has come for at least some foresighted states to set subject matter targets and hold schools accountable for meeting them. This might help reverse the worst effects of the curriculum narrowing and testing mania we’ve seen in the No Child Left Behind era. Lisa Hansel of the Core Knowledge Foundation suggests that kids need 150 minutes per week of science, 150 of social studies, and sixty of the arts in elementary school. That sounds reasonable. “But I think it has to be 100 percent of students,” she adds. “Otherwise, we’ll continue to see reading and math remediation happening during the science, social studies, and art time.”

The other big tax on content-rich curriculum that needs to be repealed is teacher evaluation. “This is a big one,” writes Stephen Sawchuck at Education Week. States and districts can use federal funds to create teacher evaluation systems, but they’re not required to do so. “This is a big change from the Education Department's ESEA flexibility waivers, which required them to revamp these reviews and to integrate student achievement,” he notes. I’ve long argued that marrying reading tests to teacher evaluation ultimately demands bad practice because it forces teachers to emphasize reading “skills and strategies” of limited utility. Consider the Kafkaesque nature of a reading test. Unlike subject tests in math or science—where there is no mystery for teachers about what’s on the test, and hence how to prepare students—the “content” of a reading test is a random walk in the woods, though we know that reading is not a “skill,” per se. A student’s familiarity with the content “domain” can dramatically affect comprehension. Since teachers don’t know what content to teach, their only recourse is to teach “reading skills” of questionable utility, drill for the test, and pray. There’s no incentive to build knowledge in a particular domain—plants, astronomy, colonial America, the Harlem Renaissance—since there’s no guarantee that those subjects will come up on the reading test this year, next year, or ever. But increasing the breadth and depth of students’ domain knowledge is exactly how you build strong readers. States need to subsidize it —or at least stop taxing it.

To be sure, there is nothing in our current forms of direct evaluation that requires schools and teachers to abandon a broad, knowledge-laden curriculum to boost test scores; but it should be abundantly clear that if the field hasn’t gotten this message nearly fifteen years after No Child Left Behind, it’s not going to.

The best course is to abandon efforts to use tests to evaluate teachers—or, at the very least, stop using reading tests for those purposes. Reading is not a school-based subject or skill, like math or science, that lends itself to clear measures of teacher effectiveness. The moment you attempt to evaluate teachers through reading tests, which are de facto tests of background knowledge, you’re taxing good teaching and subsidizing bad.

To be sure, establishing minimum requirements for time spent on different subjects is far from a satisfying answer. It could easily become a bureaucratic exercise in filling out timesheets for compliance. But if states are clear on why these measures are needed, it could start to undo some of the damage inflicted by the blunt-axe of test-driven accountability. States could do worse than chiseling that expectation into their accountability regimes and making sure it sticks.

Aided by a highly misleading New York Times article, the anti-Common Core crowd is pushing the narrative that Massachusetts’s recent testing decision (to use a blend of PARCC and its own assessment rather than go with PARCC alone) spells the end for the common standards effort. AEI’s Rick Hess and Jenn Hatfield called it a “bruising blow.” Bill Evers and Ze’ev Wurman described a testing system in “disarray.” Cato’s Neal McCluskey tweeted that Common Core is getting “crushed.”

It reminds me of my favorite Monty Python scene. I’m sorry, haters, but Common Core isn’t dead yet.

Sony Pictures Home Entertainment / Via here

First, let’s deal with Massachusetts, where the state board of education has decided to use a hybrid of PARCC and the Bay State’s own MCAS. In what must surely be a first, Commissioner Mitch Chester and Common Core opponent (and one-time senior associate commissioner) Sandra Stosky concur: This move is no repudiation of PARCC. As Chester wrote in a letter to the Times, “Neither my recommendation to the Massachusetts Board of Elementary and Secondary Education nor the board’s Nov. 17 vote rejected PARCC or the Common Core. In fact, both embraced PARCC as part of the future of statewide assessment in Massachusetts.” As Stotsky tweeted, “It looks like a compromise between MCAS and PARCC, but it's really PARCC.”

Indeed, there’s every reason to believe that MCAS 2.0 is going to look much the same as PARCC 1.0. This is akin to a state dropping the “Common Core” label but keeping nearly all of the standards. It’s essentially a rebranding exercise undertaken for political reasons.

But let’s widen the lens and scan the bigger picture. Just how fragile is the Common Core effort today? Is a death watch warranted? Let’s look at its markers of health against five big aims:

• Goal #1: To dramatically improve the English language arts and mathematics standards currently in place in the states. As we’ve argued since 2010, the Common Core standards are vast improvements over their predecessors in the great majority of states. They are admirably aligned with rigorous research (on early reading instruction, for example); explicit about the quality and complexity of reading and writing that should be expected of students every year; very solid on arithmetic as a clear priority in the elementary grades; ambitious in aiming for college and career readiness by the end of twelfth grade; and relatively jargon-free. Furthermore, they are still in place in every state that adopted them, save for Oklahoma and South Carolina. To be sure, plenty of states have dropped the name (like Indiana), added some standards (like Florida), or started review processes (like New York, Tennessee, and Louisiana). But outside of those two states, all of this activity has resulted in very little change—or tweaks that make the standards even better.
• Goal #2: To significantly raise the quality of the reading, writing, and math tests in use throughout the country. Another big goal of the Common Core initiative was to help states make the shift to “next-generation” assessments—the kind that would encourage better teaching and learning in the classroom, tap the advantages of online testing, and remain faithful to the higher standards. In January, we at Fordham will announce the results of a major study of PARCC, Smarter Balanced, ACT Aspire, and MCAS, which will provide more evidence as to whether the new tests represent an improvement as promised. We already released preliminary results for PARCC and MCAS, finding the former to be significantly stronger than the latter (though notably, both tests were found to have “high quality items and a variety of item types”). This is saying a lot, since we reviewed MCAS precisely because it was widely considered to be a “best in class” state-level assessment. Of course, PARCC itself is down to just seven states—more politics at work—so it matters a lot whether Smarter Balanced (still with fourteen members in its consortium) is equally strong. It also matters whether the growing number of states trying to go it alone are capable of making stronger assessments. They might be; we simply won’t know until someone gets under the hood of those tests.
• Goal #3: To align cut scores with college and career readiness so that parents and educators know whether students are on track for later success. This has surely been Common Core’s clearest victory to date. All fall, states have been announcing the results from last spring’s tests, and every state but one (Fordham’s beloved Ohio!) has reported much more honest proficiency rates. We know from the NAEP that between 35 and 40 percent of high school graduates are prepared for college in reading and math. State proficiency rates have been landing in that general vicinity. This is a huge improvement from the days of the “honesty gap,” when states regularly reported that upwards of 80 or 90 percent of their students were “proficient.” One worry here, though, is whether states are providing clear and honest reports to parents. They might gain inspiration from the District of Columbia’s approach, which is worth emulating.
• Goal #4: To dramatically improve instruction in the classroom. This is really what it’s all about, right? And yet this is by far the hardest to measure. We have very little evidence about whether teachers are aligning their instruction to the Common Core standards (what we know isn’t very promising, especially with respect to reading), whether it’s working, or whether students are learning more as a result. To find out, we’d need a sophisticated, large-scale study that sent researchers into hundreds or thousands of classrooms to see what’s going on. (The Center on Standards, Alignment, Instruction and Learning [C-SAIL] recently received a $10 million IES grant to launch such a study.) What we do know is that higher-quality curricular programs have been developed, and at least one—Eureka Math—is being widely used all across the country. And yet that’s pretty thin gruel; the classroom remains a black box—something that’s true for all manner of reform efforts.
• Goal #5: To make interstate comparisons of performance more feasible. Finally, the “common” in “Common Core” was supposed to equip policymakers and policy wonks alike to compare schools and school systems nationwide. In my mind, that’s always been a “nice-to-have,” not a “must-have”; we still have NAEP to make comparisons between states, and PISA and TIMSS to benchmark U.S. performance against the world. I have surely argued that certain economies of scale would result from commonality—better curricular products and better assessments in particular. But comparability per se doesn’t matter that much except to us researchers and analysts. Still, it will be easier than in the past for psychometricians to compare schools across state lines, since cut scores are much closer to one another (and to NAEP) now. But with a majority of states using their own tests, it surely won’t be perfect.

So there you have it. The standards are still very much alive; cut scores are dramatically higher than ever; school-level comparability is largely a lost cause; and the quality of what matters the most—the tests and the classroom instruction—remains mostly unknown at present. A mixed picture for sure, but hardly a description of a patient ready for life support.

In the immortal words of the Bee Gees, Common Core is “stayin’ alive.”

Warner Music Group; Viacom International Inc. / Via GIFSoup.com

Most kids don’t willingly ask their grandfathers to retell his “endearing” story about how he used to trudge uphill to school every day through ten feet of snow. But last Thursday, students jumped at the opportunity to interview their older relatives as part of StoryCorps’s “Great Thanksgiving Listen,” and have uploaded more than thirty-seven thousand stories to date. Apart from giving kids a reason to avoid post-feast dish duties, StoryCorps aimed to bolster the collection of verbal histories it’s been gathering for the last decade. With applicability to history, government, civics, and journalism curricula, students and teachers were encouraged to participate in collecting their family’s narratives, which will be archived in the American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress. For those expecting stories of slushy drudgery, the results were surprisingly rewarding. Students heard tales of living through the Great Depression and the personal battles of growing up in poverty- and violence-afflicted neighborhoods. So while you spent Thanksgiving in an insulin-induced coma, your niece was learning how to be both a historian and a journalist.

Those who can’t teach can study law, business, or medicine at Harvard—because teacher training is basically rocket science. That’s the spirit behind Harvard University’s new teacher training program, which enrolls students in a three-year fellowship combining pedagogy with mentor-guided practice in middle school and high school. The program is being hailed as a souped-up version of Teach For America (whose enrollment numbers are declining), despite the Harvard TFA recruitment manager’s insistence that the two programs can coexist. The program is free to fellows thanks to $18 million from anonymous donors. Hey, it’s their money. But if that’s what it costs to adequately prepare a handful of teachers, we’re doomed. Perhaps Harvard’s considerable brain power and vast resources might be applied figuring out how to make mere mortals successful in the classroom.

Could the key to economic development lie in training our workforce while they’re still young and impressionable? Massachusetts Governor Charlie Baker has made that great leap of faith in his recent plan to expand career education, workforce training, and economic development. The plan would bring together leaders from government, business, and education to address workforce needs using the strapping youths of high school and collegiate STEM, vocational, and CTE programs. There’s also the added bonus of upward mobility: Check out those head-turning starting salaries and the increased rate of postsecondary education attendance. All eyes should be focused on Massachusetts to see what comes of Baker’s proposals.

The MCAS/PARCC hybrid assessment, Governor Baker’s new workforce skills initiative, Harvard’s new teacher training program, and the state of K-12 computer science education.

Amber's Research Minute

SOURCE: "Images of Computer Science: Perceptions Among Students, Parents and Educators in the U.S.," Gallup (November 2015).

Mike:                                    Hello, this is your host Mike Petrilli of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute here at the Education Gadfly show and online at edexcellence.net! Now, please join me in welcoming my co-host, the Adele of education policy, Robert Pondiscio.

Robert:                                 Hello.

Mike:                                    Wow! Amazing, Robert. That was so good. We didn't even rehearse that in advance. You didn't know it was coming. Man, you have a teenager daughter, don't you?

Robert:                                 I do. Actually, my wife is a bigger Adele fan than my teenage daughter.

Mike:                                    She, supposedly, has fans all across the generational spectrum and other lines.

Robert:                                 She's a pretty talented young lady.

Mike:                                    25? Does that refer to her age?

Robert:                                 I believe, see this shows you of my ... I don't know how I know these things. Pop culture is like second hand smoke. You just get exposed to it. She names her albums after her age when she records them. 21 was all about her bad breakup. Now, she's 25, still singing about that bad break up, sounds like. Now, she's just 4 years older.

Mike:                                    This seems to be a thing. Was it Taylor Swift who's album was after the year she was born?

Robert:                                 1989?

Mike:                                    All these people are just trying to make me feel old.

Robert:                                 Most of these people are younger than us, Michael. Don't fight it.

Mike:                                    That is the bottom line. If you were Adele, you would not be giving this podcast away for free, would you?

Robert:                                 No. I'd have it on iTunes and you'd be paying at least $10.

Mike:                                    Exactly, which we're thinking about doing at some point. Hey, Robert! Good to be on the show with you again. Lots of excitement happening in the world of education reform, including ESEA. We're not even going to talk about ESEA today.

Robert:                                 ESEA.

Mike:                                    We've been talking about it. We like ESEA. We'll talk about it some more next week. Looks like the House may vote on it this week. Looks like it's going to happen.

Robert:                                 Who'd've thunk?

Mike:                                    Who'd've thunk? But what we are going to talk about-

Robert:                                 Adele was 9 the last time ESEA was authorized.

Mike:                                    Yes. Is that right?

Robert:                                 Well, she's 25 now, minus 15. She was 9 or 10.

Mike:                                    14 years, rather. Doing some common core math there, Robert. The reason we're not doing ESEA is because it is not central to Massachusetts, and this is a special Massachusetts edition of the Education Gadfly show.

Robert:                                 What are we thinking?

Mike:                                    We like themes around here. Let's get started. Clara, let's play Pardon the Gadfly.

Claire:                                   Earlier this month, the Massachusetts Board of Education voted to continue to use their own assessment with questions from PARK rather than go whole-hog with PARK itself. Does this mean that Common Core is on the ropes?

Mike:                                    Audrey, producer Audrey, can could we clip in some things into this segment here from the internet? I have a blog post up on this right now claiming that Common Core is not dead yet. I can try and do the British accent, pretend to be Monty Python-

Robert:                                 Bring out your dead!

Mike:                                    I'm not dead yet! It'd be better if we could do the clip. Insert clip here, Audrey.

Monty Python:                 I'm not dead!

Mike:                                    Okay, there you go.

Robert:                                 We need a cow bell.

Mike:                                    Or, another way to say it is have the Bee Gees in there. Staying alive, staying alive. Ooh, Ooh, Ooh. Staying alive. The point is-

Robert:                                 Mike.

Mike:                                    Some friends of ours, including our good friend Rick Hess, who once upon a time a long time ago used to host the podcast with me, speaking of not giving stuff away for free anymore, Rick Hess. He used to host the podcast with me. He has been writing that this Massachusetts decision is just yet another blow. "A devastating blow" I think he had in the National Review for Common Core. Neil McCleskie says it's getting crushed.

Robert:                                 Crushed in 40 some odd states!

Mike:                                    Still getting crushed in 40 odd states. Look, number one, the standards are still here. Outside of Oklahoma, maybe South Carolina, they're still there. They might not be called Common Core, a few places have added some standards, there's some review processes, so far they're still there. Even places where they've made tweaks, in most places they've become better. They've made improvements. Fine, no problem. The whole goal was better standards. Another goal, better tests. What we've seen so far looks pretty good. We'll know more in January when Fordham releases a big study on these tests.

                                                What about cut scores? Cut scores are through the roof, Robert! At Fordham, we're riled up about, more than anything else, what we call the proficiency illusion where states had these ridiculous low cut scores, telling parents that their kids are doing fine. Every state that has released tests from last Spring, except for our home state of Ohio, has been quite honest, really putting their cut scores pretty much at the same level as [nape 00:04:46] or close to it. In the ball park of saying we know about 35-40% of kids in this country are college ready. Guess what? According to these state tests, especially in math, about 35-40% of kids are on track. That matches. On a lot of these different ways, Common Core is alive and well. The one area where it is not alive and well, though, is around comparability.

Robert:                                 Right. This is where you and I disagree, I think. [inaudible 00:05:12] I'm always going to be just a little bit more focused on the instructional side of things, and you are I think, so I want that data. I want to be able to look at, not just a state level or even district level, I want to be able to look at school level data and say, "Who's doing this good, better, and best?"

Mike:                                    You want to be able to do that nationally.

Robert:                                 Absolutely.

Mike:                                    The issue here is, of course, that PARCC is down to now seven states, that Massachusetts isn't going to use PARCC whole-hog, although it does look like they're going to use a lot of test items from PARCC. Maybe that the next version, what they do in Massachusetts, is they call it MCAS 2.0. They look exactly the same as PARCC. Louisiana, other states are now saying they're going to use questions from PARCC. It does cut against the argument that you're going to be able to directly compare the results from these state tests. Of course, we lost that right off the bat, Robert, because there was always going to be Smarter Balance plus PARCC, plus we always knew that some states were going to do their own thing.

                                                What we maybe didn't know was that it was going to be half the states still doing their own thing on tests which is what we have coming up this Spring. I think we're at about 22, 23 states doing PARCC or Smarter Balance, the rest are not. I still don't get it. So what, Robert? You want to be able to compare a school in New York state to a school in Illinois. Why?

Robert:                                 That's how the field advances. That's how we get better.

Mike:                                    It is? How?

Robert:                                 Sure!

Mike:                                    Play that out. Continue. I don't understand.

Robert:                                 If you use-

Mike:                                    By being what?

Robert:                                 If I have two different populations and one is doing better than the other, I want to know what A is doing better than B.

Mike:                                    Does it actually happen? You're saying-

Robert:                                 Because the conditions don't exist-

Mike:                                    This would enable national studies to be able to use the same data sets and to be able to-

Robert:                                 Yeah. Of course.

Mike:                                    All right. Maybe.

Robert:                                 Look, I'm not saying it's a deal breaker. I'm saying it's important. To me, it was one of the appeals of Common Core. You're absolutely right. We did lose this one out of the box, but I remember saying years ago I would rather have fifty different sets of standards and one test than one set of standards and fifty different tests.

Mike:                                    The tests would be the real standard. We will continue to disagree on this. By the way, this whole notion that Massachusetts is backing away from the Common Core is preposterous. Hey, that's all right. We're still friends. We still love you, Rick, and Neil, and the rest of you people. Again, not dead yet!

Robert:                                 If you say it long enough, eventually the sun will go out and we'll all be dead.

Mike:                                    Yes, that's true. Topic number two. That's depressing, Robert. The fatalism ... Yes.

Claire:                                   Governor Charlie Baker announced new workforce skills initiative this week with a heavy focus on career and technical education, are there lessons here for other states?

Mike:                                    Yes. Here we are. Massachusetts governor Charlie Baker-

Robert:                                 Massachusetts?

Mike:                                    I told you. This is an all Massachusetts edition. Give him a hard time on Common Core, because he is the guy who really forced them to not just use PARCC because he's got issues with it. He used to run the Pioneer Institute, blah, blah, blah.

Robert:                                 I think I've heard of him.

Mike:                                    On career and technical education, he is doing some great stuff. Massachusetts already, as in so many other areas, is a leader in career and technical education. They have the regional CTE scores that were, by the way, partly improved by people like Sandra Stotsky, another person from the Common Core fight ... These fantastic CTE schools that are now some of the highest performing schools in Massachusetts that are getting great results, not just on technical education, but also on the core academics, sending kids into pathways and higher education to do all kinds of cool stuff. Charlie Baker is right, though. There's not enough of it.

                                                When I look out there, Robert, and you say in a typical metro area, what percentage of the seats are in CTE? How many high schoolers are concentrating on CTE? It is diminishingly small.

Robert:                                 I was going to say, I should know the answer to that. I don't.

Mike:                                    I think it's in the probably in the neighborhood, depending on how you count it, of 5% or 10% of the kids. This is ridiculous at a time where at least 30% or 40% of the jobs out there are these middle skill jobs that need some post-secondary but not a 4 year degree, they need the technical oriented skills, and we have 5% or 10% of the kids going through them? Supposedly, the rest are going through "traditional college prep." As we know, a huge percentage of those kids are not graduating actually ready for college.

Robert:                                 They're graduating. We just don't know what they're graduating to.

Mike:                                    We do, though. They graduate to the community college where they end up in remedial education-

Robert:                                 Not taking a degree.

Mike:                                    -and drop out with debt and regret. Instead of majoring in debt and regret, they could be doing CTE instead.

Robert:                                 There you go. Look, you have been at the forefront of banging on this drum with those of us in Ed Reform, so keep on banging.

Mike:                                    Let me try this on you, Robert. What if I said then, let's go to a given city. Let's say your wonderful city there, New York City, and say, "You know what? In New York City, based on the economy, based on all kinds of factors, 80% of the kids in New York City in high school should be doing CTE." What kind of reaction would I get then?

Robert:                                 I'll tell you what reaction I would give you. I like the idea of setting a quota, especially, if I'm taking you literally. When you want to base it on current economic conditions? You lose me right away on that. I think the traditional resistance to this, obviously, has been tracking. Whenever you say CTE people hear tracking. Still don't think it's a bad idea. The bad idea is when we decide what track kids go on.

Mike:                                    That's fine. Here's a proposal, though. I think you should either have really high quality CTE programs, or really high quality true college prep programs, and nothing else. None of these general, big, comprehensive schools that are not one or the other. Okay. Topic number three.

Robert:                                 Let me guess, Massachusetts.

Mike:                                    It is a university in Massachusetts. In fact, a very famous one.

Robert:                                 Holy Oak!

Mike:                                    Robert!

Claire:                                   Harvard University recently launched a new teacher training program. Don't we already have enough teacher prep programs? Why is this one significant?

Mike:                                    I wrote this one in, Robert. Don't we have enough? We've got 1,200 teacher prep programs out there. 1,199 of them suck. That's a bit of an exaggeration, but not by much. Really? We need one more? Huh? You know the whole Daniel Patrick Moynihan line, was it him? No, no, no. It was-

Robert:                                 I'd rather be ... It was Bill Buckley.

Mike:                                    It was Bill Buckley. You're right.

Robert:                                 I'd rather be governed by the first 1,000 names in the Boston phone book.

Mike:                                    You really think the people at Harvard know anything about teaching?

Robert:                                 I love this. There was a piece in the Washington Post, Lyndsey Layton, who we love, noted that ... Let me ask you. How much is this program costing? Did you notice this?

Mike:                                    I did not. Tell us a little bit about it. This is for undergrads, or graduate students? Of course, Harvard has a graduate school of education, always has. Never has had a big focus on teaching, per se, but on research and other things.

Robert:                                 I just can't get past this one data point. I swear it's just going to make my head explode. They're going to train twenty-four teachers with private donations. How much money in private donations?

Mike:                                    How much?

Robert:                                 $18 million! $750,000 per teacher!

Mike:                                    Are you serious?

Robert:                                 Look, it's right here in the Washington Post. "Thanks to $18 million from private donors, who wish to remain anonymous ..." I would too if I was that dumb spending that money-

Mike:                                    Maybe, maybe, that's for multiple years. Maybe that's several cohorts?

Robert:                                 "About two dozen Harvard seniors will begin a three year fellowship designed to combine pedagogy, blah, blah, blah." $18 million for two dozen teachers!

Mike:                                    I need to find that fundraiser. Wow. That is impressive.

Robert:                                 Oh my lord. Can you imagine?

Mike:                                    In all seriousness, it is Harvard, and a well-respected graduate school of education with a very well-respected dean-

Robert:                                 A little bit less well-respected today, Mike.

Mike:                                    -that we like, Jim Ryan. What do you think, though? If they were to do this right, what would be different about this Ed. School program than the other ones?

Robert:                                 You're asking the wrong guy. I have unorthodox views about this. My long-held belief is that we have to make teaching a job that can be done at a competent level by mere mortals. Why? Because that's who's in our classroom. You could spend, Harvard, $18 million to create two dozen superstars, that's great. Now, let's talk about the 3.7 million other non-superstars. We have to make this a profession that ordinary people can do well.

Mike:                                    That's interesting. Even if Harvard comes up with a great program, you're saying it is not at all scalable or replicable, right?

Robert:                                 Are you kidding me?

Mike:                                    First of all you've got all this money, which other people don't have. Second of all, you have Harvard seniors, which are not exactly a representative sample.

Robert:                                 They are not. Look, it shouldn't take $18 million to turn two dozen Harvard seniors into competent teachers. Say what you will about Teach for America, they do that in six weeks at considerably less cost. I literally could not get past that figure. I don't care what you're doing. If it takes that amount of money, this is not a serious model.

Mike:                                    Let me issue a challenge to Marty West, our friend at Harvard, or anybody else there at Harvard Graduate School of Education, you're welcome to come on the podcast and make the case for why this is a good investment of $18 million to come up with the Harvard super powered teacher. That is all the time we have for this week's edition of the special Massachusetts Edition of the Education Gadfly show Pardon the Gadfly segment. (laughter)

Robert:                                 What?

Mike:                                    You're right. We should stop doing these themes. It's too complicated. Here's the good news, Robert and Claire, it is now time for everyone's favorite, Amber's Research Minute. Amber, welcome back to the show.

Amber:                                 Thank you, Mike!

Mike:                                    Amber, you are the one non-Massachusetts part of the show today. Everything else has been a Massachusetts focus. Amber is from North Carolina, is that right?

Amber:                                 I taught in North Carolina.

Mike:                                    I always get it wrong.

Amber:                                 It's okay. I lived in Virginia Beach.

Mike:                                    That's right. You were on the Virginia Beach side and then you taught in North Carolina. By the way Amber, Adele was a big focus of conversation earlier. Did you buy the album?

Amber:                                 I have not yet. I have heard such great things. I just think she can really sing. Somebody with a real voice, finally, that doesn't get out there in some little slinky outfit and just parade around. She has a voice.

Robert:                                 No auto-tune there.

Amber:                                 It is so refreshing. I just really, really like her.

Mike:                                    Excellent. I love it. See, Robert? You should feel good about being the Adele of education policy.

Robert:                                 Am I complaining?

Amber:                                 It's the real deal.

Robert:                                 I hope this podcast gets downloaded just as much.

Mike:                                    All right. Amber, what you got for us?

Amber:                                 I'm going to give you guys a quiz because I got one of these studies as a survey. It's got a bunch of little factoids. Put your little student hat on.

Robert:                                 I'm ready.

Amber:                                 We got a new report out that examines whether computer literacy is getting short-shrift in America's schools.

Robert:                                 Oh, no. My favorite topic.

Amber:                                 It's a Gallup Poll commissioned by Google.

Robert:                                 Can I go now?

Amber:                                 They've got a little skin invested in the-

Mike:                                    Is it funny that Google has to do a poll? They know everything about us already. You'd think they could just mine it.

Amber:                                 All right. We're going to play along. The Bureau of Labor Statistics apparently estimates that jobs in computer and mathematical occupations will increase by 18% between 2012 and 2022, creating, what they say, will amount to 1.3 million job openings in the computer science field. Obviously, Google says, "Look, this is coming. We need kids that have strong computer science literacy skills." They surveyed nationally representative samples of over 1,600 7th to 12th grade students, 1,600 parents of 7th to 12th grade students, 1,000 teachers, so on and so forth, principals, superintendents, you name it. They had the money to survey these populations. Key findings: Number one, how-

Mike:                                    Where's our quiz?

Amber:                                 What? This is the quiz right now!

Mike:                                    Oh, okay. All right.

Amber:                                 How many students report using computers every day at school?

Robert:                                 What percentage?

Amber:                                 Out of ten.

Mike:                                    What grade are we talking about?

Amber:                                 7th through 12th.

Mike:                                    Sorry. 7th through 12th. Using computers every day?

Amber:                                 Everyday. Are you all going to do this with every single one of these?

Robert:                                 80%.

Mike:                                    I'm going to say 60%. If you'd said "three times a week" I'd say darn near 100%.

Amber:                                 Four in ten. 40%.

Mike:                                    That's it?

Amber:                                 Everyday. That percentage obviously increases as students move up the grade levels. About 31% say everyday in grades 7 and 8. By the time they get to high school, it's about 50%. Hispanic students are less likely than white or black students to use computers at school daily. Next one coming up. 75% of Hispanic students have a computer at home that can be used to access the internet, compared with 85% of Black students, and how many white students?

Robert:                                 It's got to be higher.

Mike:                                    95%

Robert:                                 97%.

Amber:                                 98%. God, that's high isn't it? Yet nearly how many have a cell phone? This is all students. No subgroups. How many, all students overall, have a cell phone or a tablet they can use for internet access?

Robert:                                 I'm going to say 110% because some of them have two.

Mike:                                    That's a pretty good one (laughter). 90%.

Amber:                                 91%. Very good. That's high, right?

Mike:                                    Which, by the way, does mean that they have a computer at school.

Amber:                                 Well, that's right.

Robert:                                 As you know, I teach at a charter school in Harlem, fairly low-income students. There's not one single one of them students who I cannot assign online work. Not one. The digital divide practically does not exist.

Mike:                                    You could use their phones for instructional purposes in the classroom potentially.

Robert:                                 I prefer not to, but we'll talk about that another time.

Amber:                                 More than a third of students in 7th through 12th grade say their school does not offer a dedicated computer science class. Now we're getting away from access and talking about what the school offers.

Robert:                                 That's a victory.

Mike:                                    Robert.

Amber:                                 What percentage of principals surveyed from schools that offer computer science classes say that AP computer science courses are available at their school? How many principals have an AP computer science course available at the school. Obviously, we're talking about high school here.

Robert:                                 25%.

Mike:                                    Yeah, that sounds about right. It's going to be a low number.

Amber:                                 You guys are really good. 25%. That was a very educated guess. However-

Mike:                                    Amber, we are supposed to be experts here. Come on! (laughter)

Amber:                                 Well, I'm just saying. Gallup reports a 50% increase, by the way, in the number of students who took the AP computer science exam.

Mike:                                    I remember ... Isn't there a stat that there's still no African American males passed the AP computer science exam. Not a single one.

Robert:                                 Are you serious?

Mike:                                    Not in the whole country.

Amber:                                 Is it really that bad?

Robert:                                 Wow.

Mike:                                    I should check that.

Amber:                                 What percentage of parents ... This is a bias question, whatever. What percent of parents say computer science is just as important to a student's future success as math, science, history, and English?

Mike:                                    What percentage of parents?

Robert:                                 70%.

Mike:                                    No, I'm going to say it's 45%.

Amber:                                 64%. If we're playing Price is Right [inaudible 00:20:21]. What percentage of superintendents say the main reason their school doesn't offer computer science is that no teachers are available within their district with the necessary skills to teach it?

Robert:                                 That's going to be high.

Mike:                                    75%.

Robert:                                 82%.

Amber:                                 73%.

Robert:                                 Why even ask me? Just ask Mike. (laughter)

Amber:                                 Just a couple more.

Mike:                                    I am good at this, aren't I?

Amber:                                 [inaudible 00:20:46] Low income parents are more likely than high income parents to say that students should be required to learn computer science. That's just a factoid. Your last one: What is the main reason that school principals and superintendents say that they do not offer computer science? It's not the teacher skills thing.

Mike:                                    It's not that? I was going to say.

Amber:                                 It's another main reason. I'll give you a hint. Think about what's going on right now.

Robert:                                 Because of the demands of testing and whatnot.

Amber:                                 Bingo. Focusing on testing is the main reason they don't spend more time on it.

Robert:                                 Hey, I got one that Mike didn't get.

Amber:                                 That was a little bit more intricate of a quiz, right?

Mike:                                    Interesting. It was. Well done.

Amber:                                 I just wonder whether parents ... People just think, "Oh, the kids just pick it up by osmosis because they're online all the time."

Mike:                                    Using a computer ...

Amber:                                 But this is programming. They went to pains to describe what a computer science course is.

Robert:                                 I'm more worried about how much of what we have in the schools right now. Look, I'm completely out of my depth on this. I couldn't code at gunpoint. I do worry that we're doing this as a parlor trick more than a serious course of study. Just because schools are "offering coding or computer science," how serious is it?

Mike:                                    You're coming from New York where de Blasio says, "Everybody's going to do this coding." In the younger grades, I think that probably is true, but aiming to get a lot more kids ready for AP computer science in high school, I think, is a legitimate goal.

Robert:                                 Absolutely.

Mike:                                    Here's the thing. This intersects with what we've been saying on high achieving kids, especially on high achieving low income kids. What you need to do is start as early as possible, making sure that those kids have access to rigorous math programs, to gifted and talented, to ability grouping, to tracking. What keeps tripping us up is that in many cities, you talk about that and people go bananas. The low income kids who show some promise on mathematics don't get access to that stuff. Out in the suburbs, the white kids still do, and they're still getting started in a pipeline that will result in them being ready for AP computer science by the 12th grade.

Robert:                                 My only question to the folks at Google who came up with the survey, is to what degree is this a problem in search of a solution, so to speak? In other words, if we have a robust STEM program, is that not all the preparation an average to above average student would need to prepare for a career in computer sciences?

Amber:                                 Yeah. I think it's a legitimate question.

Mike:                                    But we don't have that (laughs).

Amber:                                 We don't have that either, right. I'm just thinking ... Honestly, what do we do around here? How long have we looked for a really good web designer? That's a hugely good skill, right? These people make a ton of money. Remember last time we put an external contract out for our website? We were like, "Holy cow!"

Mike:                                    I want that job.

Amber:                                 What are these people doing in an hour? Because we don't know what they're doing in an hour, we're paying them (laughter).

Mike:                                    I did just learn how to embed a GIF in a Tweet, though.

Robert:                                 But you don't know how to say "GIF" which is the proper pronunciation.

Mike:                                    There's a debate about that.

Amber:                                 Anyway, it's a black box, I think, to a lot of us.

Robert:                                 It sure is.

Amber:                                 Wow, we really should know more about it.

Mike:                                    We should indeed. All right! Thank you, Amber. That was fun and enlightening. Always a pleasure, Robert. Until next week-

Robert:                                 I'm Robert Pondiscio.

Mike:                                    And I'm Mike Petrilli of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute's Education Gadfly Show signing off.

This study examines whether information supplied about a student’s ability helps inform that student’s decision to enroll in Advanced Placement classes. Specifically, the information “signal” is the “AP Potential” message on the student’s PSAT Results Report, as written by the College Board. Students who score at a certain cut point on the PSAT get a message that says, “Congratulations! Your score shows you have potential for success in an at least one AP course!” or else a message that says, “Be sure to talk to your counselor about how to increase your preparedness.”

Students in Oakland Technical High School who took the PSAT in 2013 made up the sample of roughly five hundred sophomores. The intervention was as follows: Right before and after they received their PSAT results that included one of the AP Potential messages above, they were given a survey that asked them (1) how they perceived their academic abilities and their plans relative to attending college; (2) the number of AP courses they plan to take; (3) whether they would take the SAT; (4) the probability that they’d pass the exit exam; and (5) the probability that they’d graduate high school.

Analysts found that the AP signal contained information that led students to revise their beliefs about their ability and future academic plans from the first survey to the second. Specifically, the PSAT is a “negative information shock” on average, meaning that students tended to adjust down their beliefs about their ability. Students who got bad news revised their beliefs down by .286 points on a five-point scale, whereas those who got good news increased their beliefs about their academic ability by only .187 points. Of all the beliefs surveyed, however, expectations around AP course enrollment were most affected by the new information. Students who upwardly revised their expectations in response to the new information enrolled in more AP classes compared to those who did not revise expectations.

The authors also found that students at the margins who were surveyed (a group for which three-quarters were minorities) and told they had AP Potential enrolled in and passed approximately one more AP class the following semester—and were more likely to take and pass one or more AP exams. But these patterns did not hold for non-surveyed students, suggesting that filling out the survey itself increased the salience of the information and made for an “intensified treatment.” Yet students near the margin who didn’t get the AP Potential signal took fewer AP classes, even though both groups were nearly identical in ability. So there is both an upside and a downside to the intervention, depending on whether the message to students is positive or negative. Perhaps we should just deliver the good news?

SOURCE: Naihobe Gonzalez, "Information Shocks about Ability and the Decision to Enroll in Advanced Placement: Evidence from the PSAT," Mathematica (October 2015).

Is there such a thing as too much parental involvement in a student’s education? Lack of parental involvement is often cited anecdotally as an impediment to student achievement. On the other hand, so-called “helicopter parents” can run their children’s education like drill sergeants. The goal is educational and occupational success, but there is increasing concern that such intense involvement could instead lead to dangerous dead ends. A new study in the latest issue of the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology adds much-needed data to the discussion. (Disclaimer: The study is from Germany, so mind the culture gap.)

There have been a number of studies over the last forty years looking at parents’ aspirations for their children, which is a useful way for psychological and sociological researchers to measure parental involvement. However, the current study’s authors noted two gaps in previous research. First, temporal ordering of effects was not generally considered (i.e., it was assumed that parents’ involvement led to certain academic outcomes in the future, but the current research supposes that kids’ past achievement could lead to more/different parental involvement in the future). Moreover, little effort was made to separate parental aspiration (“We want our child to obtain this grade”) from parental expectation (“We believe our child can obtain this grade”). Often only one or the other question was considered, or both were conflated into one measure. The current study not only looked at those questions separately, but made the difference between them its subject. Remember that point; it’s important later.

The researchers carried out a five-year study with 3,530 students and their parents in Bavaria. It included the annual German math test for the kids and a survey for the parents. Parental aspiration and expectation were measured via separate questions as worded above, both on a scale of 1–6 . While a majority of parents in the first year expressed aspirations that matched their expectations, more than 30 percent of parents reported significantly higher aspiration than expectation for their children—a gap called “overaspiration.” Parental overaspiration was negatively correlated with students’ math achievement in that first year.

Resurveying parents on expectation and aspiration each year attempted to account for temporal ordering (“resetting” expectations and aspirations before the test each year); overaspiration did tend to lessen over time. But it never disappeared entirely. Remember that overaspiration is the gap between aspiration and expectation. And despite some tempering, many parents continued to have far higher aspirations for their children’s success than expectations that their children actually would reach that aspired-to score. Call it hope, call it delusion, call it whatever you want: Overaspiration persisted throughout the study. We know that high expectations are generally good for kids, but the mismatch seems to have cut against both parent and child in this study, characterized by the researchers as “poisonous” to math achievement.

These findings appear to apply to students regardless of achievement level. The German education system includes separate schools for students on three “tracks” based on their entry-level academic ability, and the aspiration study included proportional numbers of students from all three tracks. The findings were the same. Bearing in mind that previous studies conflated expectation and aspiration data, the researchers also ran the same differentiated analysis with comparable variables in another data set—from the Educational Longitudinal Study conducted in the U.S. by the National Center for Educational Statistics from 2002 to 2004—that closely replicated the findings from Germany.

The researchers raise a number of questions needing further study, especially regarding the way aspirations and expectations are made manifest between parents and children (not to mention the possibility of a similar effect between teachers and students), but this study seems to suggest that parental involvement may have limited effectiveness on academic outcomes if it isn’t based on a realistic balance of expectation and aspiration.

SOURCE: Kou Murayama et al., “Don’t Aim Too High for Your Kids: Parental Overaspiration Undermines Students’ Learning in Mathematics,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology (November 2015).

A new AEI report argues that private schools have a problem: They need more space. As more states use vouchers, tuition tax credits, and education savings accounts to help families access private education, schools will need to scale up and create new seats for incoming students. And the best way to do this, writes author Michael McShane, is to explore new funding mechanisms that will give the schools the necessary resources to handle growing enrollments.

One solution is for private schools to seek bond financing to help offset expansion costs. Public school districts already tap these financial instruments for capital projects because they expose investors to very little risk and the district itself pays less in interest than if it were to get a loan for the same amount from the bank (such financing for educational organizations is often tax-exempt). In 2012, the Colorado Educational and Cultural Facilities Authority (CECFA) gave $9 million to the Catholic Educational Capital Corporation, which then offered it to Iona Prep, an all-boys high school in New York, to help purchase real estate that would allow it to open an elementary school. CECFA is not a state agency, but it is able to provide bond financing for educational and nonprofit organizations both inside and outside of Colorado. So far, it has offered more than $6 billion in bonds to museums, sports facilities, charter schools, alternative high schools, and performance spaces.

Venture financing is also an option. Charter schools receive a significant amount of venture capital from organizations like New Schools Venture Fund and the Charter Schools Growth Fund. But private schools have yet to fully tap this well. The Drexel Fund, a venture funding organization for private and particularly faith-based schools, has pledged to “concentrate near-term investments in six states that provide the most advantageous environment for new, high-quality, financially sustainable private schools.” Private schools have an opportunity to partner with organizations like the Drexel Fund to replicate successful school models and test new initiatives.

McShane also recommends involving the private sector. He points out that benefits corporations (“B-Corps”) could be especially helpful to schools that are legally required to advance a social mission. In this sense, a B-Corp is a sort of nonprofit/for-profit hybrid, able to support private schools via fundraising, real estate purchases, and lease agreements. One notable example is AltSchool, a private model specializing in personalized learning that has raised over $100 million to create “micro-schools” (a class of schools that combines elements of traditional schoolhouses, blended learning, home schooling, and private schooling). 

Above all, we need more and better schools. Unfortunately, school creation can be daunting and financially risky. And the current funding arrangement for private schools doesn’t allow for sufficient creation and expansion of high-quality schools. The demand is here, but as McShane puts it, there is a “kink in the supply hose.” Schools grappling with funding issues will need to pursue creative solutions if there is any hope of unraveling the kinks in the current supply chain.

SOURCE: Michael Q. McShane, “Funding Growth, Expanding Opportunity: Novel Funding Mechanisms for Schools of Choice,” American Enterprise Institute (September 2015).