The Education Gadfly Weekly

At a time when the national conversation is focused on lagging upward mobility and yawning income inequality, it is no surprise that many educators point to poverty as the explanation for American students’ mediocre test scores compared to their peers in other countries. If teachers in struggling U.S. schools taught in Finland, says Finnish educator Pasi Sahlberg, they would flourish—in part because of “support from homes unchallenged by poverty.” Michael Rebell and Jessica Wolff at Columbia University’s Teachers College argue that middling test scores reflect a “poverty crisis” in the United States, not an “education crisis.” Adding union muscle to the argument, American Federation of Teachers president Randi Weingarten calls poverty “the elephant in the room” that accounts for poor student performance.

But does this explanation hold water?

It’s an important question. If critics of education reform are correct that our schools are doing as well as can be expected given the economic challenges that their students face, they could also be right in saying that school reform is beside the point, misguided, or even doing more harm than good.

So what does the evidence show? To prove that poverty is the major factor driving America’s meager academic achievement, at least one of these claims need to be established:

1. America’s poor students perform worse than other countries’ poor students; or
2. The child poverty rate in the United States is substantially higher than the rates in countries with which it is compared.

Let’s examine each in turn.

Do U.S. students from low-income families underperform their peers overseas?

Low-income students everywhere do worse on tests of academic achievement than their more affluent peers. That’s as true in the United States as it is in every other country ever studied, and it’s been true for as long as scholars have collected achievement data.

The question isn’t whether America’s low-income students do worse than our upper-middle-class kids. (They do.) It’s whether our poor students are particularly low-scoring compared to other countries’ poor students. Is that what’s dragging down our averages?

To explore this question, we’re obliged to wrestle with measurement issues. The problem is complicated because no international data set contains both good measures of family income and good measures of student test score performance.

The best available data are collected by the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA), which is sponsored by the Organization for Economic Co-Operation and Development (OECD). For its own analyses, PISA uses an index of economic, social, and cultural status (ESCS) that considers parental occupation and education, family wealth, home educational resources, and family possessions related to “classical” culture. PISA analysts use the index to stratify each country’s student population into quartiles.

Not everyone will agree with the way the ESCS index is constructed, but the data presented in Figure 1 are nonetheless instructive. The test scores of students in the bottom quartile of the ESCS index are plotted against those of students in the top quartile. If students in these two quartiles did equally well in each country (as compared to similarly situated students in other countries), then the dotted regression line displayed in green would have a steeper slope, and every dot would fall exactly on that line. As you can see, the actual pattern is not that perfect: Countries like Belgium and France are relatively better at teaching their higher-status students, while other countries like Canada and Finland do relatively better at instructing students from lower-status families. But notice that the United States falls almost exactly on the regression line. It does equally well (or equally poorly, if you prefer) at teaching the least well-off as those coming from families in the top quartile of the ESCS index.

If we look at a different marker of socioeconomic status—parental education levels—we find a similar pattern. In the United States, parents without a high school diploma are much more likely to be in poverty than their better-educated peers, and their children are much more likely than their peers to be low-performing and to drop out of school themselves.

In a study that examined whether some countries are particularly effective at teaching students from disadvantaged backgrounds, Eric A. Hanushek, Paul E. Peterson, and Ludger Woessmann found something interesting: It makes little difference whether countries are ranked by the performance of students whose parents had a college education or by the performance of students whose parents had no more than a high school diploma. If a country is comparatively effective at teaching the first group, it tends to be no less effective (compared to others) at teaching the second. The United States performs as expected, proving to be not especially effective at teaching students from the best-educated or the least-educated families. The authors write,

Overall, the U.S. proficiency rate in math places the country at the 27th rank among the 34 OECD countries that participated in the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA). That ranking is somewhat lower for students from advantaged backgrounds (28th) than for those from disadvantaged ones (20th).

There is no evidence that disadvantaged students in the United States are underperforming other countries’ disadvantaged students. If anything, it’s the “advantaged” American students (those whose parents have a high level of education) who are falling short in international comparisons.

Is America’s child poverty high compared to rates elsewhere?

So far, we’ve demonstrated that disadvantaged students in the United States are performing as expected, given the performance of better-situated U.S. students.

But if more students are poor in this country than in others, it is still possible that students from low-income families are dragging down our national averages. If that is true, poverty could still be the explanation for our mediocre test scores.

In case that concept isn’t intuitive, consider an analogy. Imagine we are comparing two colleges’ athletic programs. Both schools field the same teams, and each team is perfectly matched when it comes to height, on average. The basketball teams are similarly tall; the gymnastics teams are similarly short. But what if School A has twice as many basketball players on its team, and School B has twice as many gymnasts? Those extra gymnasts will drag down the average height of School B’s program.

So we have to decipher what’s going on here. Do we have a larger number of low-income students compared to other countries? Do we have more gymnasts on our team?

For those educators quoted at the beginning of this essay, the answer is yes. They assert that the United States has a sky-high child poverty rate compared to other developed countries.

To support their claim, they use a “relative poverty” measure stipulating that all families with less than half the median income in the country are, by definition, “poor.” By that measure, we do indeed have a lot more children living in poverty than most other advanced economies.

Relying on measures of relative poverty is appealing for its simplicity, but it is a highly misleading approach because it’s more a measure of income inequality than of poverty. That’s a particular problem for countries (like the United States) with high median income and lots of income inequality.

To see how relative poverty rates can be misleading, let’s look at how they compare to absolute poverty rates for the general population in the American states. In Figure 2, we report the proportion of people living in households earning less than half of their states’ median incomes (basing state median incomes on the 2013 Census Current Population Survey). We also show each state’s absolute poverty rate as it is traditionally defined: the percentage of all people in the state living in households below the federal poverty line, which is currently set at $24,250 for a family of four.

For some states, looking at either relative poverty or at absolute poverty makes little difference. Arizona, Mississippi, and Louisiana have a lot of poor people no matter how you slice the data.

But notice where wealthier states like Massachusetts and Connecticut appear on the graph. Their absolute poverty rates are among the lowest in the country. But their relative poverty rates are above average, and notably higher than states like Texas, Tennessee, and Oklahoma. Massachusetts has a higher relative poverty rate than Georgia, Kentucky, and Alabama.

Of course, Massachusetts doesn’t really have more poverty than Alabama—but it does have more income inequality. Nobody argues that Massachusetts’s “large number of poor students” drags down its state test score averages, because it doesn’t actually have a large number of poor students as compared to other states. Yet that’s what you would think if you relied on relative poverty measures.

The same dynamic plays out when we use relative poverty rates to compare countries.

In Figure 3, using 2010 data from the Luxembourg Income Study, we approximated absolute poverty using a methodology that takes into account all forms of income, including social welfare benefits (see here for a full explanation of our methodology). By this measure, the absolute poverty rate in the United States is lower than the that of the United Kingdom, virtually the same as Germany’s, and just barely higher than Finland’s. To be sure, we still have too much poverty. But once social welfare benefits are included and we look at absolute rather than relative poverty, America is hardly an outlier. That’s because many of the U.S. households counted as poor on a relative measure would be considered middle class on an absolute measure.

The United States doesn’t really have more poverty than, say, Germany. It simply has more income inequality. As with Massachusetts, we can’t blame America’s “large number of poor students” for dragging down our average test scores because, compared to other countries, we don’t have an unusually large number of poor students.

Conclusion

Critics of education reform are certainly correct when they say that poverty is a major factor in lackluster academic performance.

Still, poverty is an issue for virtually every nation on the planet. Where reform critics get it wrong is when they claim that America’s average scores are dragged down by the particularly poor performance of low-income students—or that the advantaged kids are doing just fine. That is objectively untrue. And its scores are not dragged down by an unusually high proportion of poor students, as measures of absolute poverty find the United States not to be an outlier at all.

America’s mediocre performance is remarkably consistent. Yes, our affluent students outperform our poor students. But they don’t outperform their peers overseas.

This doesn’t imply that reform, as currently formulated, is on the right track. The enigma of our mediocre student performance is a topic worthy of study and debate, as is the challenge of helping students at all points on the economic spectrum perform better.

What it does show is that poverty can’t explain away America’s lackluster academic performance. That excuse, however soothing it may be to educators, politicians, and social critics, turns out to be a crutch that is unfounded in evidence. We need to stop using it and start getting serious about improving the achievement of all the nation’s students.

Editor’s Note: This article originally appeared in a longer and different form in Education Next—and was that publication’s most-read article of 2015.

• There’s a reason we don’t bounce our grandkids on our knees and delight them with stories of how Congress muscled through the Deficit Reduction Act of 1984. As the saying goes, there’s nothing pretty about the way the sausage gets made. But for those who were begging for a new federal education law, Politico’s postmortem on the passage of the Every Student Succeed Act provides an inside look at a splendid, savory knackwurst of statutory goodness. In the year following the 2014 Republican midterm landslides, draft legislation had to overcome anti-testing fervor from teachers’ unions, the remnants of the anti-Common Core crusade, and the sudden resignation of House Speaker John Boehner. Between clearing these obstacles and stitching together the perennial philosophical differences of Left and Right, the ESSA used up seven or eight of its nine lives. Thankfully, it’s now a matter of settled law.
• Speaking of the backlash against high academic standards: Reporting out of Colorado suggests that we might need to think differently about the opt-out movement and its adherents. Though the bulk of the students who absented themselves from the state’s PARCC test were indeed residents of wealthier, high-performing districts—you know, where the white suburban moms do their white suburban mom stuff—a whopping eighteen of the twenty counties with the lowest participation rates were rural and sparsely populated. That includes districts like Dolores County (opt-out rate: 91.6 percent), Buffalo (90.4 percent), and Mancos (86.7 percent). In such far-flung spots, officials claim, locals are wary of the government collecting (apparently any) information on their kids or dubbing school districts as underperforming. While it’s obviously worth selling the bigger, more affluent districts on the value of these assessments, it seems that accountability proponents need to spend their time in the country, too.
• A good education can improve a child’s life in innumerable ways. It can make him a better citizen, help him escape the grind of poverty, and bestow the skills he needs to lead a fulfilling life. That being said, you really don’t have to be some bleeding-heart to support improved academic programs as a public policy priority. According to a new paper co-authored by renowned Stanford economist Eric Hanushek, there’s a justification that Scrooge McDuck could get behind as well: cold, hard, cash. The country’s Gross Domestic Product would grow by some 14.6 percent—that’s $32 trillion, in case you were curious—if all students could be brought up to NAEP’s “Basic” standard of proficiency, the authors suggest. That’s probably a tall order, considering our dismal national scoring averages over the decades. But with employers practically begging for a better-prepared workforce and international competition growing by the day, it’s also a job we’ll eventually have to tackle. Improving the nation’s schools is good for students, their families, the U.S. economy, the world (provided you favor a prosperous America as the guarantor of a thriving, rules-based global order) and the galaxy (provided you believe in Earth’s intelligent life as the last, best defense against sinister forces from outer space).
• It hasn’t been the easiest couple of years for Teach For America. Applications have slowed dramatically as the economy has emerged from its recessionary depths. College activists have waged a truly out-there campaign to kick recruiters off campuses. And the critical voices (including a few emanating from unhappy alumni) have reached such a din that a rapid response media team has been organized to counter damaging narratives. But a piece of news from the Seventy Four should warm a few hearts, even among the skeptics. After more than two decades changing the lives of students in persistently struggling schools, the program is beginning to attract a second-generation cohort—that is, corps members who were themselves taught by TFA teachers when they were kids. Nearly one in ten New York City recruits this year are considered second-generation TFA instructors, and their stories are inspiring: local kids who made good, then came back to follow in the steps of their childhood role models. As one new teacher put it, “I feel like I’m living my purpose.”

ESSA implementation, TFA students who become TFA teachers, Justice Scalia’s ill-spoken comments on race, and the effect of teacher layoffs on teacher quality and student achievement.

Amber's Research Minute

Matthew A. Kraft, "Teacher Layoffs, Teacher Quality, and Student Achievement: Evidence from a Discretionary Layoff Policy," Education Finance and Policy (November 2015). 

Transcript

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 welcoming my co-host, the Jedi Knight of education reform, Robert Pondiscio.

Robert :                Is he Bobby Knight's younger brother, coach of Indiana?

Mike :                   Come on, don't be a buzzkill here, Robert. We're all going to have fun watching that Star Wars movie. Hey, anybody know ... Have they rated it yet? Is it PG or PG-13? It has been unrated for so long. Of course, this is important for those of us that have kids and mistakenly promise that we would take them before thinking about the fact that this movie might be rated PG-13.

Robert :                Star Wars, is that with the one little guy who's like call home?

Mike :                   Robert, it's not funny. It's just not funny. It's not funny. Maybe this is an age thing.

Robert :                Phone home, it was phone home.

Mike :                   Robert, maybe this was not a big part of your childhood since you grew up during BC.

Robert :                Dude, Star Wars came out when I was in middle school, so I was like at the sweet spot of that stuff.

Mike :                   Why all the cynicism?

Robert :                It's not cynical. I never understood how it became a thing.

Mike :                   It's a great story. It's a great legend. It's right in there with all those other great legends.

Robert :                Such as?

Mike :                   I don't know. Name them. I like The Hobbit. I don't know. The bible, The Odyssey.

Robert :                I just don't think I did those kind of drugs in high school, Mike.

Mike :                   Well, fine. If you don't want to have fun with the Star Wars thing, that's fine. That is your choice. You know what? We believe-

Robert :                I don't have fun, and I don't like people who do.

Mike :                   We believe in school choice here and we believe in movie choice as well. It's almost the end of the year, but we are going strong. Lots to talk about in education reform, especially a certain law that the president signed last week. Let's start with that. Clara, let's play Pardon the Gadfly.

Clara:           Last week, President Obama signed ESSA into law. Mike, can we get a preview of what's to come in 2016?

Mike :                   Well, first of all, there's going to be a big debate on whether we say E-S-S-A or if we start saying ESSA.

Robert :                Good point.

Mike :                   Robert, what do you think?

Robert :                still trying to get used to not saying E-S-E-A.

Mike :                   No Child Left Behind, that is definitely in-

Robert :                It's been left behind.

Mike :                   It has been left behind. It's in the rear-view mirror.

Robert :                How are you saying it? ESSA or E-S-S-A?

Mike :                   I haven't really decide yet. In my head, I think I still say E-S-S-A but ESSA. I guess we're going to say ESSA. Yeah, ESSA.

Robert :                E-S-S-A. In 1975-

Mike :                   I like it. Bless me. Here's the scoop. It's going to be a hurry up and wait time in 2016 is my preview. The states are chomping at the bit here to finally take advantage of the newfound flexibility that they've got in this law. On most counts, I'm afraid they are going to have to wait for the federal regulations to come out.

Robert :                Oh, lord.

Mike :                   This is an interesting timing. You've got John King who, for some unknown reason, the administration is not nominating to be the next education secretary but merely the secretary-designate.

Robert :                They don't have to. Why have a fight you don't need?

Mike :                   Because, I don't know, laws, constitution-

Robert :                Because of constitution, yeah, yeah. Details, details, Mike. It's so old fashioned.

Mike :                   Because we're in a rare moment of bipartisanship and they might want to continue that. Anyway, he's going to be in charge of coming up with the regulations for this law although the law itself tries to say at every turn, "Mr. Secretary, hands off, buddy. Hands off." Still, we got to wait for that.

Robert :                It's an easy regulation to write.

Mike :                   They should be. They should just basically restate the law in most cases but then the states can start getting to work. Those regs aren't going to come out probably until the fall when we are very close to a presidential campaign and a new administration. This is going to be interesting timing. It's going to be, I would say, a 24-month process, well, at least 18 months until we see what the states come up with. Hey, you've had some ideas in this, Robert. One of the big issues in the new law is that states get to come up with some indicators of school quality that do not have to do with test scores.

Robert :                That is true. Now, you're making me just now think, well, to what degree would they just say, "Hey, we've invested so much time in what we're doing. Let's just keep doing it."

Mike :                   Well, they have to come up with something that's not test scores. That is now required by law. You have a suggestion on what they might do which is what?

Robert :                Well, I'd love to. This is heresy I know if you're a good reformer to say, "Let's start measuring inputs." As you know, I'm very concerned with curriculum narrowing and I want to see us get back to a day when kids got a nice rich curriculum, not just reading and math, but science, and history, and art, and music. Is it the worst idea ever to suggest that schools should have some kind of minimum guidelines for the amount of time kids spend learning those subjects, not just reading and math? Is it a heresy?

Mike :                   Not the worst idea ever.

Robert :                I'm just kidding. The worst idea I've heard in the last 30 seconds.

Mike :                   Look, I might think that might be appropriate. Here's the goal here is that we want a balanced look at school quality. We want to encourage schools to do good things. If that includes teaching a well-rounded curriculum because that's important in its own right and, by the way, that's the best way to teach kids how to read.

Robert :                By the way.

Mike :                   By the way. We say we care about reading a whole lot, then, look, I'm open to it. You know what else I'd like to do for high schools?

Robert :                Tell me.

Mike :                   The percentage of a school's graduates who vote in the next election.

Robert :                Really?

Mike :                   Yeah. Citizenship, baby.

Robert :                Well, no. Look, I'm all for civics and citizenship, obviously. A lot of states now are putting in that kind of bare minimum graduation requirement which I frankly have advocated for a while now that you should be able to pass the citizenship-

Mike :                   That could be another way to go.

Robert :                I'm not sure that meets my test for a great school accountability. For me, it's baby steps. Hey, wouldn't it be nice if we could prove that we can do one simple thing before we got more into it?

Mike :                   Sandy Kress on Twitter was making fun of my idea saying that, "Great. We're going to have schools paying kids just to show up to vote." I'm like, "You know what? I'm not sure that's such a bad thing." Once you established that habit, maybe they'll keep at it.

Robert :                One, I'm not sure that's how I narrowly want to define civic engagement. Look, I'm all for schools encouraging civic engagement. Two, do we really want to have a nation where people are sort of coerced into voting? Shouldn't it be a voluntary thing?

Mike :                   Well, there are other nations that certainly coerced people into voting. There is a healthy debate that, and it can go both ways. In this case, I think the point is, again, to send strong signals to schools about what school quality means and that their civic duty should be a-

Robert :                Well, look, to be earnest about it for one second, I do think this is a nice opportunity if you are a state to think outside the box, to get back to some sort of these broader purposes of schooling and maybe institute some accountability measures that incentivize those things.

Mike :                   Topic number two, Clara.

Clara:                     A second generation of TFA teachers who were once TFA students are finding their way back to the classroom. Why are they doing it?

Robert :                Why are they doing it, Mike?

Mike :                   Well, this is pretty cool, Robert. I mean, look-

Robert :                It is cool, isn't it?

Mike :                   There's some stories out there about ... I forget which city this one was from. A woman who had grown up in one of these high poverty schools and was taught by a TFA teacher, and now she's in a school herself trying to help the next generation do as well as she did. She made it through college and now is giving back. Look, first of all, it indicates how long TFA has been active.

Robert :                Absolutely right.

Mike :                   We minimize sometimes TFA saying, "It's only a mandate. There's not that many teachers." Look, it's at what? 10,000 teachers a year. That starts to add up to some pretty impressive scale.

Robert :                I was wondering about this. I have no idea what the data would be, but I bet it's larger than we think. That if you figured out, not just the percentage of the teaching core who is or has been TFA, but the number of students who even once in their academic careers had a TFA teacher, I bet it's a larger number than we think. It doesn't necessarily surprise me. In fact, this is the outcome that you want, the so-called second generation TFA teachers are coming back.

                                Look, the education world is made up of people who are good at school. We want more of these to be low income kids of color, the types of students that TFA was designed to improve outcomes for. I've said this, a lot of times in this podcast and elsewhere eventually, the charter movement, the ed reform movement has to start to look a lot more like the people it serves. This is one way to accomplish that, so this is a great thing.

Mike :                   Great. Topic number three.

Clara:                     Supreme Court Justice Scalia came under fire for comments he made about Black students and elite colleges. How was his rhetoric problematic?

Mike :                   All right. Well-

Robert :                Wasn't it problematic?

Mike :                   Well, when you look at this, the quote people are using certainly sounds bad, right?

Robert :                Yeah.

Mike :                   It sounds like he is implying that all African American students should go to "slow track colleges." Of course, that is not the case. I think what he was trying to say in the context of the conversation they were having was that African American students or any other students who do not meet the qualifications of a particular campus and have only get in because they lower those qualifications for that group of kids, that those students, those less qualified students would do better on other campuses. I think there's pretty good research that says that's probably the case. You want to match the level of preparation that a student has with the level of rigor of a college campus.

                                What many people are pointing out though is that we, in many cases, have the opposite problem. That too many African American kids and low income kids are under matched. That they could do great at Harvard but for a variety of reasons, they go to their local community college instead.

Robert :                Right. It's complicated. I have to say it's all ... I've read the transcript quickly. I should have spend more time with it. It was not entirely clear to me that he was voicing his own comments as much as quoting a brief that was filed as well. He was asking about a brief. It's very difficult when you read the transcript to parse out what his words and what was-

Mike :                   Is it because of our last names that we're defending Scalia?

Robert :                Yeah, I think so.

Mike :                   Look, we're pretty proud of him. Italian American on the court.

Robert :                Speaking as a White male, cisgendered, privileged Italian American, yes.

Mike :                   Exactly. You got to love that. Now, of course, we should point out that it's not just one Italian American on the court. No, no. We have two. We are well-represented.

Robert :                It's not our turn yet, is it?

Mike :                   No, I guess not.

Robert :                It's not our turn.

Mike :                   Here's another point though, Robert, that we really need to make. The higher ed affirmative action debates are always so frustrating in my opinion because-

Robert :                And charged.

Mike :                   And charged. The reason they're so frustrating is, of course, the reason that we have this difficult dilemma in higher education is because our K-12 system,

Robert :                Thank you. You guessed what I was going to say.

Mike :                   ... has not solved the problem. We have these achievement gaps. Further more, the K-12 system is not doing close to everything it could to identify minority kids and low income kids as early as possible who show a lot of academic potential and do everything they can to nurture the talent of those kids. In fact, we have a system where if you're affluent and you live out in the suburbs, and you are academically gifted, you are likely to be identified as academically gifted, be given special programs and services, get to go to track classes all the way from middle school into high school and take lots of AP classes.

                                In the cities where the liberals are in charge, they have, by and large, decided that gifted and talented programs are evil and tracking is bad, and so they've gotten rid,

Robert :                Good enough is good enough.

Mike :                   ... of all that stuff out of this "concern of equity." They've gotten rid of all that stuff. What happens? You're White and rich, you still get it. You're poor and minority, you don't get it. As a result, those talented, academically gifted minority kids, poor kids often sit in classes that are heterogeneous where they've got classmates who are way, way behind them. Now probably are disruptive because the liberals now want to get rid of school discipline on top of it. It's like we're doing everything we can to keep low income and minority kids from having a chance to get on the fast track to the Ivy Leagues.

Robert :                Because equity.

Mike :                   This is the problem and we debate affirmative action. Look, to all the members of the court, if we would just provide some opportunities for these low income and African American kids stating in elementary school all the way through high school, it would not be as hard of a problem.

Robert :                What you said.

Mike :                   Boom. I'm a little bit fired up.

Robert :                I could tell. I could tell. Look, I think you're right.

Mike :                   Next time I'm going to write an amicus brief about this. I've never done that.

Robert :                Really?

Mike :                   I've never written an amicus brief. Do you think you have to have any particular legal training to do that, or can you just bust it out as not bad and send it in?

Robert :                I honestly do not know the answer to that.

Mike :                   All right. We're going to look into that. All right. That is all the time we've got for Pardon the Gadfly. Now it's time for everyone's favorite, Amber's Research Minute.

                                For Amber this week, we've got Dara Zeehandelaar. Dara, welcome back to the show.

Dara:                     Hi, thank you.

Mike :                   Earlier Robert was being Mr. Party Pooper on Star Wars. How excited are you?

Dara:                     Super excited. I'm getting a little nervous that I don't actually have tickets yet due to travel plans and the fact that we can't see it at the Air and Space Museum which was our original plan,

Mike :                   That'd be cool.

Dara:                     ... until January. We'll see it there in January.

Robert :                Who are you, people?

Mike :                   Come on, Robert. Come on, Amber. I mean, Dara here was a physicist of some sort.

Robert :                All right. All right.

Dara:                     Something like that.

Mike :                   Astronomer?

Dara:                     Good enough.

Mike :                   Astrology? No, that's different.

Robert :                Spotlight. Go see Spotlight. That's a great one.

Dara:                     I also agree.

Mike :                   Dara, do we know ... Is it PG or PG-13? Have they decided?

Dara:                     I don't know.

Mike :                   This is an important question for some of us parents out there.

Dara:                     I wouldn't let it stop you.

Mike :                   Really? With a five year old?

Dara:                     It's Star Wars.

Mike :                   I haven't let them ... They've not seen the second trilogy because they're all PG-13 and extremely violent.

Robert :                My five year old was terrified by Elf so what do I know? I'm not kidding. She really was.

Mike :                   Dara is filling for Amber. You can't let us down. People love Amber's Research Minute. Make it your own, Dara.

Dara:                     They do. I will do my best. Big shoes to fill. Today's fascinating study comes from Matthew Kraft at Brown University, and it's published in the current issue of Education Finance and Policy. It's on discretionary layoff policies in Charlotte-Mecklenburg.

                                You probably already know this but just a quick review. When districts need to reduce the number of employees, there are some very non-discretionary ways of doing that. Of course, there's seniority, last in, first out. There's also very strict inverse objective evaluation criteria. You've the worst evaluations, you're the first to be fired. Again, not discretionary. Reasons not to do either LIFO we know about, but using only value add might result in teachers focusing solely on test scores or in losing teachers that fill other needs at a school, things like that.

                                Charlotte-Mecklenburg, they use a discretionary policy. Candidates for layoffs are ID-ed using whether the position is necessary or not but also enrollment, job qualifications like your license, length of service aka seniority and job performance as determined by principal evaluations. Now, student test scores are not officially part of the process, but the author had access to those as well which I'll go into a second.

                                Between 2008 and 2010, because of the recession, the district laid off over a thousand teachers. With that, the author asked two questions. First, under the discretionary policy which teachers actually got laid off? Second, what was the impact of that policy on student achievement? We all know Charlotte has great data. I won't say more about that.

                                First, was it actually discretionary layoffs? Who was laid off? The obvious candidates: probationary teachers, teachers with insufficient license, teachers hired after the start of the school year, returning, retired teachers, teachers with a temporary license or no license but also, yes, teachers with poor evaluation. The district laid of the lowest performing teachers across all levels of seniority.

Mike :                   Good for them.

Dara:                     Good for them.

Mike :                   That's good.

Dara:                     Lower performing tenured teachers were more likely to be laid off than higher performing non-tenured teachers.

Mike :                   Amen.

Dara:                     It's not all about probationary status. Clear evidence that there was actually discretion being used.

Mike :                   And used well.

Dara:                     And used well. Well, what is the impact of that you might ask?

Mike :                   I might ask. In fact, Dara, what's the impact of that?

Dara:                     Recall that the effectiveness was measured by principal evaluation and not value add. You might wonder did it actually work or not? The impact on student achievement is suggestive. Some highlights, laying off a more effective teacher as measured by either principals or value add lowered student achievement. Exactly what we would expect. Laying off a more effective teacher did lower student achievement. Particular, achievement of students who lost an effective math teacher went down significantly compared to students who lost an ineffective one. No similar finding for reading, however.

Mike :                   You're saying even with this discretion, there were still effective teachers that were let go for one reason or another?

Dara:                     Right. That is true. Interestingly, the achievement of students who lost a senior teacher as opposed to an early career teacher is not statistically significant which, again, is in line with previous research i.e we want to lay off the least effective teachers.

                                Taken together, results confirm that from an achievement perspective, LIFO is not the way to lay off teachers. Measures of effectiveness, not seniority, predict how layoffs will affect achievement but, here's the but which I think, Mike, you might appreciate, while value add scores would have helped identify effective teachers, principal evaluations did a really good job of informing the layoffs. Mike, I think you would agree that including non-rigid measures is important rather than treating one inflexible layoff policy for another.

Mike :                   I like it. I like it very much. It's interesting. There has been some research. At least the conventional wisdom is principals don't know how to evaluate teachers.

Robert :                You think that's the conventional wisdom?

Mike :                   Well, there's some conventional wisdom out there. I think-

Robert :                Not with the principals I know.

Mike :                   Well, of course. Some of the reform crowd says, "Well, we have to come up with these teacher evaluation systems and force them down the throats of the states with a federal mandate," excuse me, "Because principals are hopelessly bad at evaluating teachers." Well, it turns out, especially on either end of the performance spectrum, really good teachers are really bad teachers. Principals are quite good at it.

Robert :                That doesn't surprise me at all.

Mike :                   Kindergartners are good at it. It doesn't take them much. This is pretty obvious.

Dara:                     I think what this study is showing, at least for this district, is principals are identifying additional characteristics that are valuable to students that aren't necessarily captured in a value add.

Mike :                   Look, here's the great thing though is that Charlotte faced a difficult situation as did many, many school districts. Because they used human judgment and did it well, students benefited. It was able to do that in part because North Carolina is a very weak teacher union state. One of the few states where I believed collective bargaining is actually illegal.

Dara:                     That's correct.

Mike :                   In a lot of other places, especially in politically blue places around the country, districts did not have that choice. They would have just done LIFO and almost surely that means that kids lost out. Which is, look, it's another reason to keep fighting for these kinds of flexibilities for principals. I wish that was the fight that we had been fighting the last several years instead of this crazy fight over teacher evaluations.

Robert :                I agree. I spend a lot of time in schools as you know, and it is just not that hard to walk into a classroom and within minutes know whether you're in a classroom of a good teacher who's good, better, best or bad, worse or, oh, my god.

Mike :                   Yet is really hard in many places to actually be able to do anything about that or to use that information. We have to make tough decisions like this.

Dara:                     I think what is particularly interesting is that some places might be worried that we could give schools and principals this discretion, but they're not going to use it. That they're still going to resort to seniority. At least in Charlotte, after laying off kind of the low hanging fruit as it were, that principals really were using job performances as the layoff criteria.

Mike :                   By the way, not partisan or things like that which is the other charge people always say, "Well, you're just going ... Make sure to fire your sister-in-law."

Robert :                Right. I'm curious-

Mike :                   Of course, they probably did not have data on the family relations.

Dara:                     No, they did not. It's a large district.

Robert :                Was there any differentiation in the study between or among the principals in terms of their seniority, their achievements. In other words, can we look at principals and say, "Good ones make good decisions. Bad ones make bad decisions?" Was that level of granularity not part of the study?

Dara:                     It wasn't a question that the researchers asked, but it could certainly be possible given the robustness of the data that's coming out.

Mike :                   Yeah, that would be a great question about ... Where certain principals particularly good at making the right call? Cool. Well, Dara, you did quite well.

Dara:                     Thank you.

Mike :                   We will have you back on this.

Robert :                After Star Wars.

Mike :                   After Star Wars, absolutely. All right. Until next week.

Robert :                I'm Robert Pondiscio.

Mike :                   And I'm Mike Petrilli. The Thomas B. Fordham Institute signing off. 

Perhaps it’s because, as a nation, we’ve come around on teacher quality. Or perhaps it’s because so many of the policy prescriptions that contribute to improving the teacher corps are so dry, technical, and largely beneath the hurly-burly of public debate. Either way, NCTQ’s 2015 Policy Yearbook is notable for the substantial amount of positive change it documents, with states “continuing down a reform path focused on teacher effectiveness” and “fewer states out of step with the prevailing trend each passing year.” What the report fails to note is that NCTQ itself can claim substantial credit for creating this tipping point, amassing a substantial record of effectiveness in a very short amount of time.

Getting religion on teacher quality is one thing. Ending our sinful ways is a very different matter. The average state teacher policy grade for 2015 is a C-minus, a mark that is “still far too low to ensure teacher effectiveness nationwide,” NCTQ notes. Yet just six years ago, in the 2009 yearbook, the average was a D. The pews are beginning to fill up.

Better evidence of improvement can be seen state-by-state. In 2015, thirteen states earned grades between B-minus and B-plus (six years ago, no state scored better than a C). Today, twenty-four states set a high academic bar for admission into teacher preparation programs; in 2009, thirty-six didn’t require even a basic skills test. Twenty-two states now require elementary school teachers to demonstrate content knowledge in core subjects they teach; twenty-six now measure their knowledge of math. And perhaps the biggest conversion of all: In 2009, not one state tied evidence of teacher effectiveness to employment decisions of any consequence. A mere six years later, nearly half (twenty-three) do. Can I get an “Amen”?

Lest complacency set in, the yearbook still offers ample cause for outrage. It is fine and laudable, for example, that a slim majority of states now require middle school teachers to pass a test in the core subject that they teach. But it’s mind-numbingly stupid that states everywhere didn’t long ago make this the very first criterion for teaching middle school. (What could possibly be more important? Ensuring that prospective teachers aren’t on the FBI’s Most Wanted list?) It’s also alarming that, for all the attention given to early childhood education, NCTQ cannot identify even a single state as a “best practice state”—or even one meeting the goal of delivering well-prepared early childhood teachers.

Florida is still atop the leader board with an overall grade of B-plus (the nation still awaits its first A-rated state). New Mexico wins “most improved” with a jump from D-plus to C on the strength of gains in its teacher preparation program accountability, alternative certification programs, and teacher effectiveness policies. Indiana and New York this year join Louisiana and Tennessee with overall B grades. NCTQ singles out the Empire State for particular praise in improving policies for certifying special education teachers. Fordham’s home state of Ohio rates a B-minus; however, the yearbook gives Ohio the highest marks in the nation for expanding the pool of teachers with “flexible yet rigorous pathways” into the profession.

“The teacher policy glass is starting to look half full on many fronts,” the report notes. That is indeed encouraging. Under the leadership of Kate Walsh, NCTQ has good reason to be proud of its work writing the hymnal from which an ever-increasing number of state policy makers are singing.

SOURCE: “2015 State Teacher Policy Yearbook,” National Council on Teacher Quality (December 2015).

The effort to improve educational outcomes for African American students can fairly be described as the animating impulse behind the education reform movement broadly. Hence, it’s downright depressing to repeat some of the figures in this report: “On the 2015 NAEP, only 18 percent of African American fourth graders were found to be proficient in reading, and only 19 percent scored proficient in math,” the authors note. “The eighth-grade numbers were even worse, with only 16 percent of African American students rated proficient in reading and only 13 percent rated proficient in math.” College and career readiness? Not so much. Quick: In how many states did more than 5 percent of African American students graduate having passed at least one AP exam in a STEM subject? (Three: Colorado, Massachusetts, and Hawaii.) How many states with five hundred or more African American ACT test-takers had 17 percent or more score as college-ready on all four tested subjects? Not one.

Depressed yet?

Still there are some examples of significant progress: Twenty-five years ago, only 1 percent of Washington, D.C.’s eighth-grade African American students were proficient in math; today it’s 13 percent. High school graduation rates for black students are on the rise—as high as 84 percent in Texas, the national leader (Nevada and Oregon are the laggards, graduating only 57 percent of African American students). “But college preparedness rates that equal only one-tenth of the graduation rate seem extreme,” the authors note, with understatement.

While nothing if not clear-eyed about the challenges and results, this report ventures out where far too many publications in this sad genre fear to tread. It features hopeful news of programs large and small that have had a demonstrable positive impact on outcomes for African American kids (many of which, I confess, I was almost wholly unfamiliar with). There’s “Advancement via Individualized Determination” (A.V.I.D.), a program for C students with college ambitions. AVID reaches hundreds of thousands of kids annually and has made college entrance gaps between black and white students in the program “statistically nonexistent.” Even more promising, those gains seem to stick: “After four years, the gap between white and black AVID students making it to the senior year of college was only 3 percent.” Another option, the National Math and Science Initiatives (NMSI), has made “great strides in closing the STEM achievement gap, dramatically increasing participation and success in AP STEM courses among traditionally underserved populations.” The Ten Boys Initiative, a Boston Public Schools project, likewise shows promising gains in language proficiency, with concomitant reductions in absences and suspensions.

The highlighted initiatives “prove it is effective to identify a strategy, integrate it into everyday work, and make it a long-lasting priority rather than a fleeting program.” The authors (principally Michael Q. McShane, late of AEI and now director of education policy of Missouri’s Show-Me Institute), conclude with several “common themes” that have emerged from their research into these promising programs: small things matter, like creating environments conducive to learning; community support is also imperative; without the public’s and parents’ support, efforts can be short lived. And of course, measurement matters. “The most promising of programs highlighted are able to connect success stories to real data that are moving the needle on improving student performance.”

SOURCE: Michael Q. McShane, “The Path Forward: Improving Opportunities for African-American Students,” U.S. Chamber of Commerce Foundation (December 2015).