The Education Gadfly Weekly

Last week, writer Laura McKenna took to the Atlantic to try to understand why some suburban moms (yes, many of them white) have turned against the Common Core. She settles on misinformation as a driving force, which is certainly a factor. For example, if these parents understood that their own local schools still have complete control over curriculum and textbooks, perhaps they wouldn’t be so frustrated with standards set so far away.

But this is still an unsatisfactory answer. My own sense from watching this debate play out is that many of the “white suburban moms” who oppose Common Core also share a romantic, progressive view of education that is at odds with traditional schooling in general. We will never convince them of Common Core’s value, nor should we expect to. Instead, we should allow them to opt their kids out of traditional public schools and into schools (including charters) that are proudly progressive.

This conclusion is informed by a groundbreaking study we at the Thomas B. Fordham Institute published in 2013, What Parents Want: Education Preferences and Trade-Offs. Its major (and surprising) finding was that most parents actually want pretty much the same things from their schools: a solid core curriculum in reading and math, an emphasis on science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) education, and the development in students of good study habits, strong critical thinking skills, and excellent verbal and written communication skills. That list matches up pretty darn well with the Common Core. Hence, schools that follow the Common Core North Star will meet most parents’ desires quite well. One size fits most.

But our study also uncovered a handful of parent niches—six of them, to be precise. And one of them—the “expressionists”—sounds an awful lot like the white suburban moms who have been making most of the noise.

Parents in this niche are more likely to let their children develop at their own pace and less likely to set high expectations for them. They are also more likely than the total population to encourage their children to ask questions and less likely to set firm rules for them.

These parents are more likely than the general population to be liberal; less likely to be Christian; more likely to be atheist; and more likely to send their child to a charter school. Perhaps most importantly for Common Core politics, they are a very small minority, representing just 15 percent of all parents.

A subset of white, affluent, well-educated parents have long favored progressive education. Lisa Delpit, in her classic 1986 Harvard Educational Review article “Skills and Other Dilemmas of a Progressive Black Educator,” explained how upscale white parents in the Philadelphia school where she taught “learned the same kinds of things I had learned about education”—progressive things. A decade later, Harvard graduate student Maureen Allenberg Petronio studied the public school choice program in Cambridge, Massachusetts. She found that parents tended to be either traditionalists who wanted their kids to learn basic skills and get the “right answers” or alternative school aficionadas who sought environments that “stimulated curiosity and encouraged exploration.” The alternative school parents were generally white professionals.

Alternative schools are still a good option for such parents today. Those schools—be they charters or magnets—must take state tests, now aligned with the Common Core. But they can choose to do zero test-prep and ignore the test scores if that’s what they want. And they can give these progressive parents all the play, social/emotional learning, and creative expression that their kids can handle.

Meanwhile, the vast majority of parents can get what they want from their children’s schools—which is, by and large, precisely what Common Core delivers.

For advocates of evidence-based urban education policy, a recent New York Times profile of New York City Schools’ Chancellor Carmen Fariña should offer serious cause for concern. That Fariña has worked to dismantle several of the promising Bloomberg-era education reforms is not the main offending issue. (The former is unfortunate, but hardly unexpected from the current administration.) As Robert Pondiscio has previously pointed out in this space, far more worrisome is Fariña’s apparent view of the proper role of research in education policy—one seemingly rooted in the bad old days when high-quality empirical research was dismissed or ignored.

Chancellor Fariña plainly nurtures none of the previous administration’s fondness for data, preferring a more “holistic” approach. Nor, for that matter, does she even require test scores to know which schools are performing well. The chancellor, perhaps with Spidey-sense, knows a good school when she sees it.

To be fair, I’m open to the claim that perhaps some of the Bloomberg reforms were too technocratic. And no one could have reasonably expected Chancellor Fariña to be an empirical data junkie. But her recent statements reveal a remarkable disdain for science’s role in formulating education policy. The following New York Times passage is particularly startling:

Asked recently, for example, about a multiyear study showing that students who attended the small high schools started by the Bloomberg administration were more likely to graduate and attend college than their peers at larger schools, [Chancellor Fariña] dismissed its conclusions. “It’s one view of things,” she said. “There are many views about everything.”

As the chancellor well knows, the reporter was referring to a 2014 study by Howard Bloom and Rebecca Uterman of MDRC (a nonprofit research group) that was published in the Journal of Policy Analysis and Management—a distinguished, peer-reviewed public policy and administration journal.

Taking advantage of certain students’ random assignment to small NYC schools, Bloom and Uterman adopted a randomized field trial (RFT), widely considered the “gold standard” of social science research methodologies, to measure educational outcomes based on school size (small or regular).

RFTs, it is true, have their own limitations (beyond the scope of this post to describe). Nevertheless, Bloom and Unterman’s findings raised eyebrows: Students randomly assigned to small high schools were, on average, 9.5 percentage points (!) more likely to graduate from high school than had they attended larger, traditional public high schools. Their result, robust to a variety of statistical specifications, is, quite literally, a life-changing outcome for the students involved. Indeed, few other modern education reforms have rivaled such empirically observed impact.

To the best of my knowledge, there has been no serious critique of Bloom and Unterman’s methods or findings (at least as they relate to the impact of the policy on students attending small schools). Nor are there competing studies of similar methodical rigor purporting to find contradictory results. When it comes to the impact of small schools on students, the study is on the cutting edge of knowledge.

For what it’s worth, I am no small schools evangelical. Though supportive of the trial as a valid experiment, I had no particular expectation of the outcome. Further, plenty more remains to be learned about small schools; no single analysis can or should settle a major policy issue. Yet to treat a randomized field trial, with large, robust findings, conducted by highly respected researchers writing in a prestigious journal, as merely “one view” among “many” suggests an alarming disregard for empirical social science—or at least impartial research at odds with Chancellor Fariña’s worldview.

Alas, this is not the first time the chancellor has played fast and loose with data. Take, for instance, her recent comments suggesting that the city’s charters push out low-achieving students to improve test scores. As Pondiscio and others have pointed out, despite numerous requests from charter school supporters, she has yet to supply any direct evidence supporting her bold accusation, even though the necessary data is stored in her office. To date, the chancellor’s spokesperson has only been able to produce a finding by New York City’s Independent Budget Office (IBO) that students with disabilities are more likely to exit charters than traditional public schools—despite the fact that IBO itself had previously repudiated it. (Indeed, when IBO recently released a follow-up analysis on special ed, its finding directly contradicted the chancellor.) Given such indifference to hard facts, one could scarcely expect the chancellor’s office to acknowledge the reality that students with disabilities and those learning English are—as demonstrated by my research (here and here), as well as that of the IBO—significantly less likely to exit New York City charters than traditional public schools.

With such ideologically driven leadership at the helm of America’s largest public school system, what’s in store for U.S. education reform efforts?

Not too long ago, high-quality empirical research on the impact of education policies was out of vogue. As recently as 2001, sociologist Thomas Cook lamented that education research was in the midst of an extended period of domination by a consensus that held that empirical research based on rigorous experiments was too simplistic to understand the complex nature of schools. Instead, researchers studied individual schools in isolated, bubble-like fashion, with the convenient consequence that overarching policy frameworks could never be applied.

Happily, empirical education research has since grown by leaps and bounds. At the time of Cook’s article, only one of 116 U.S. Department of Education-funded studies was a randomized field trial. Today, as any young assistant professor will tell you, it’s extraordinarily difficult to secure major research funding without employing random assignment or other strategies that can plausibly lead to causal inference. By notable contrast, Chancellor Fariña’s belief in her own judgment over evidence remains rooted in a dated, science-phobia mindset.

High-quality empirical research is, admittedly, not the exclusive domain of the modern education reform camp. When they occur, divergent findings should spark a serious, empirically grounded conversation on the proper direction of education policy. I’m eager for that conversation.

Empirical researchers should also, perhaps, attach greater importance to (serious) qualitative studies and other descriptive research. Yet this much is certain: High-quality empirical research offers invaluable objective information on the quality of American schools and, thus, on the impact of public policies. Pursuing the alternative—a reversion to the days when school chancellors adopted policies based on their gut instincts and “feel for the situation”—would be a grave mistake.

Marcus A. Winters is a Manhattan Institute senior fellow and an assistant professor at the University of Colorado—Colorado Springs. Follow him @MarcusAWinters.

• Politico has a look at Chicago’s fast-approaching mayoral election, in which incumbent Democratic Mayor Rahm Emanuel faces off against four challengers. Even though he leads his closest opponent, Cook County Commissioner Jesus Garcia, by nearly twenty-five points, Rahm still can’t seem to consolidate the necessary support needed to avoid a runoff. At issue is his sweeping education reform agenda, which has been credited with the closure of a raft of failing schools, the expansion of pre-K to more low-income kids, and a record spike in the high school graduation rate. Teachers’ unions and their backers are having none of it, throwing their support behind Garcia after having gone on an infamous weeklong strike at the beginning of the mayor’s term. Let’s hope Rahm sticks to his guns and broadens the growing network of Democratic figures agitating for reform.
• The Windy City isn’t the only place handing out more caps and gowns. According to the Wall Street Journal, the U.S. high school graduation rate reached a record 81 percent in 2013. It’s a terrific development, and Education Secretary Arne Duncan lost no time in trumpeting it as “a vital step toward readiness.” If you want to understand the causes of the increase, look no further than a certain oft-badmouthed piece of legislation that’s currently up for renewal: No Child Left Behind and its associated reforms arguably did more than anything else to propel students toward the commencement podium. As Johns Hopkins Professor Robert Balfanz recently told the Senate education committee, federal accountability turned around America’s graduation rates from a modern low of 71 percent in 2001 to its present-day peak.
• One great way to keep kids engaged and persisting through high school is by making room for earlier emphasis on career and technical education. On that front, some heartening news out of Wisconsin: Republican state legislators have crafted a proposal to allow the state’s sixteen technical colleges to authorize and run their own charter schools. The legislation would allow students to attend the affiliated charters over four years, earn their diploma, and then graduate from the authorizer college after a year with an associate’s degree. It’s exactly the kind of innovative approach the country needs to broaden the pathways to fulfilling careers.

Common Core in the suburbs, the highest high school graduation rate ever, our international education gap, and a comparison of the MCAS and PARCC assessments.

SOURCE: “Educating Students for Success: A Comparison of the MCAS and PARCC Assessments as Indicators of College- and Career-Readiness,” Massachusetts Business Alliance for Education (February 2015).

Michelle:            Hello, this is your host, Michelle Lerner of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, here at the Education Gadfly Show and online at edexcellence.net, and now please join me in welcoming my co-host, the Amy Poehler of education reform, Alyssa Schwenk.

Alyssa:            Why thank you, Tina Fey.

Michelle:            Oh, why thank you!

Alyssa:            Did you watch SNL?

Michelle:            Of course. I even watched it live ...

Alyssa:            Okay, just checking.

Michelle:            ... which means I stayed up very late.

Alyssa:            That is way past your bedtime.

Michelle:            I know. It's a few hours, in fact. It ended and I immediately shut off the lights to go to sleep because I was that tired.

Alyssa:            I will actually cop to, I watched it the next day during the daytime hours.

Michelle:            We're switching roles, here!

Alyssa:            We're clearly influencing each other.

Michelle:            Okay, favorite take-aways?

Alyssa:            Well, obviously I loved seeing all of the old cast members. I also recently finished or am almost done reading ...

Michelle:            Of course you are.

Alyssa:            ... I never finish books, but "Live From New York", the oral history of Saturday Night Live. It was really cool to ...

Michelle:            I think I'm going to have to read that.

Alyssa:            It's very good.

Michelle:            I'll put it on my GoodReads.

Alyssa:            It's a good book. I would highly recommend it to anyone who is looking for a new book to read. It was really cool to see the older cast members. I never really watched the older episodes, never really saw the '70s, '80s, really only started watching probably ten years ago. It was cool to see the older skits.

Michelle:            My parents loved SNL and so when SNL put out all the videos and DVDs of the old skits, I watched them as a kid. Dana Carvey is my favorite. I love him as Bush Sr., and I was just so happy to see that Eddie Murphy showed up.

Alyssa:            Came back, yes.

Michelle:            Considering he never talks about SNL, I was kind of hoping he'd do a skit.

Alyssa:            Or at least the Gumby impression.

Michelle:            Oh, Mr. Rogers. There are so many good and inappropriate skits. I love it, but from SNL to ed reform, let's play “Pardon the Gadfly.”

Alyssa:            Fordham president, Mike Petrilli argues that Common Core works for most parents, even progressive, anti-test moms and dads in the suburbs. Will these folks be convinced?

Michelle:            No.

Alyssa:            Yeah, no.

Michelle:            I feel like, okay, I grew up in the suburbs. I'm hoping I don't end up in the suburbs, but I feel like ...

Alyssa:            Where are you house hunting again?

Michelle:            Okay, Arlington is not the suburbs.

Alyssa:            The suburbs.

Michelle:            Yeah. I feel like it's kind of in my destiny to be a suburban mom. I will never, mark my words, drive a minivan. In 10 to 15 years you can track me down and see if I'm driving a minivan.

Alyssa:            Okay, I will actually put that on my calendar for 2030: "Track down Michelle Lerner. Is she driving a minivan?"

Michelle:            Yeah, and the answer will be, "No." Anyway, I think the thing about education is there are lots of things that every kid receives, and it's for your kid but it's also for the other kid, the kid you don't know. I think it's really important to understand that Common Core and the assessments, which is what this is really about ...

Alyssa:            A big part of it.

Michelle:            ... it's not about your kid. It's about all kids. Checker has written about this in the past, and he said, "You know, testing is not about little Johnny. It's about all the little Johnny's out there in all the cities in all the states and all of that." I think we need to keep that in mind. I think this is a huge issue with Common Core and ed reform. I think messaging wise and policy wise, we would be wise not to cut out the suburban parents, but I think overall Common Core is actually good for all kids.

Alyssa:            Yeah. I do think something to keep I mind too is that the implementation matters, and if Common Core can be implemented well in high performing suburban districts, than yes, they're on board. Our report Common Core in the Districts found that teachers are, you know, the first source of buy-in and if you get the teachers on board, you can get the parents on board. I think focusing on implementation is a way that we can really reach these parents.

                        A lot of it is, you can incorporate Common Core into good instruction, high quality, developmentally appropriate instruction, and so keeping that at the forefront I think is critical for these parents, but I think it's going to be a tough sell at this point.

Michelle:            But I also think, to counter argue what we just, what I literally just argued, because this is what I do, what Mike's post talked about and our What Parents Want report found when we released that last year or the year before, it all molds together, is that in general, parents actually want the same thing. Common Core delivers on those same things, which is a high quality ... Well, parents want high quality curricula. Standards would hopefully deliver a good curricula. This should please suburban parents.

Alyssa:            Yeah, but whether or not it's being implemented well…

Michelle:            It's implementation every time. Always the implementation! Ugh! On the note of implementation, the most fascinating policy aspect there can be, let's go to question number two.

Alyssa:            Oh yeah. The high school graduation rate will soon hit an all time high, good news, surely, but does this raise concerns about college and career readiness?

Michelle:            Yes.

Alyssa:            Also yes.

Michelle:            We're agreeing again.

Alyssa:            Mike's going to hate this.

Michelle:            Whomp, whomp. Maybe we have more disagreement on SNL, even though that, too, is awesome. Yeah, I think this is, it's a good thing but it's also a bad thing. Yes, we want more kids graduation high school. We want a lot of them going on to college and being successful there or getting a really great career. The concern that's always there is, are we graduating students to up our graduation rate or are we graduating students at the level that they need to be in order to have a high school diploma?

Alyssa:            I think having the diploma, having the credential is important particularly for kids who are at risk or maybe not doing so hot in high school. Graduating high school, I think is important for them in the future, but right now there's still troubling gaps between states. Iowa, where I grew up and graduated high school, had a 90 percent graduation rate, but DC had a 62 percent graduation rate. There is still a lot of variance. There is still gaps between high income and low income students, and I think the important thing is, a we go into Common Core implementation, of course ...

Michelle:            I was waiting to say, isn't Common Core supposed to solve this?

Alyssa:            Yeah. We have to keep the graduation rate high while also turning the screws a little bit on college readiness.

Michelle:            I applaud you for not calling out any specific teachers, perhaps, in Iowa.

Alyssa:            Oh yeah, yeah, yeah. I think Mrs. Cox probably still is listening to this. My high school graduation rate, full disclosure, was not the highest in the state. In fact, it was the fifth lowest, which is not necessarily something to put on the bumper sticker, but I checked their 2013 data, and they've upped it by 20 percentage points.

Michelle:            I think we should take this as a step in the right direction, both for your high school in Iowa and for all high schools around the country but we should rest on our laurels.

Alyssa:            Yep, still a lot to do. Question number three. U.S. Millennials, our most educated generation ever, are consistently outscored by international peers in all subjects on international assessments, including problem solving and technology rich environments. What's going on?

Michelle:            Oh, those lazy Millennials.

Alyssa:            This makes me so prickly when we call them Millennials. Anyways, I think this question is a really nice complement, actually, to our second question today, about whether or not the credentials actually mean what we hope their conferring. This report showed a lot of gaps at all levels, including people who are Millennials and have bachelor's degrees. They're either in the lowest or the three lowest scoring in almost all of these dimensions. The earlier study on high school graduation rates, we still have a lot of room here.

Michelle:            I also, I think this is just the story that gets printed every decade. When "A Nation At Risk" was released, what, 31 years ago ...

Alyssa:            And this report quotes it.

Michelle:            ... we said, "Hey, you know, there's a huge problem. We're falling behind our international peers. America is at risk," and all of the things that "A Nation At Risk" said, which is very similar to what we're still saying now. I just read a really great update report from the William T. Grant Foundation, is that right?

Alyssa:            I think I know which report you're referring to and I think it is, yes.

Michelle:            Which was an updated report from the early '80s about the forgotten half, which talks about how in the '80s there was a problem of getting people into college. Now it's a problem of getting people through college. It was a really fascinating report, but the big takeaway, which is not the one they intended, perhaps, was that we keep issuing the same reports every 10, 15, 20 years. Maybe it's not a new problem, it's just the continuation of the same problem.

Alyssa:            It's not, "the last group walked uphill both ways in the snow." It's "we're all walking uphill both ways in the snow." I also think that this report highlights the digital gap. One of the things that people are really focusing on with it is that it looks at problem solving skills in a digitally enhanced environment. Can you use the internet to find out information that you need? What we have in this country is a pretty wide digital divide between high income students who have ready access to it and low income students who do not.

                        When I was teaching, this was three or four years ago, my kids were in the computer lab for two hours a month, sometimes, and that's not enough to really get you to be very literate on the computer. It's not enough to teach you how to use digital resources. I think what this report ultimately highlights is there is a lot of inequality, and that extends to the digital realm.

Michelle:            While I'm not a thousand percent on the digital education is the way to go, I do think, because of all the jobs we have, everyone I know, whether it's a professional job or not, uses computers, uses technology. I really think we need to up this. I have always been a fan of teaching coding to everyone. I don't know any coding and I feel like I'm, all these younger people are smarter than me and I'm feeling left behind and all of those things.

Alyssa:            Snapchat.

Michelle:            Yeah. See, I just learned about YickYak as a new social media thing.

Alyssa:            I'm still confused about YickYak. I think I bring this up about once a week. YickYak confuses me. How to pay things on Snapchat confuses me, and I'm still technically a Millennial, yet all of these things confuse me.

Michelle:            Yeah but Ellen is younger than the both of us and she knows what YickYak is. I heard her talking about it the other day. There's a generational divide within Millenials.

Alyssa:            Yeah. There really, really is.

Michelle:            Actually, Catherine Rampell had a really fascinating column about how we shouldn't group Millennials all together because ...

Alyssa:            Under 24 is much different than older 25, I would venture.

Michelle:            Yeah, it is.

Alyssa:            It's the Snapchat line. Do you Snapchat?

Michelle:            On that note, that's all ... On the Snapchat note, that's all the time we have for Pardon the Gadfly. We'll ask Amber about these very, very interesting social media outlets in a second, in Amber's Research minute.

                        Welcome to the show, Amber.

Amber:            Thank you, Michelle.

Michelle:            Do you know what YickYak is?

Alyssa:            Not to put you on the spot or anything.

Amber:            I do not. I missed the top of the podcast.

Michelle:            We feel like there's a line at age 25. Everyone above it has no idea what YickYak is and doesn't understand how it's used.

Amber:            Oh no.

Michelle:            We don't know what it is really either.

Alyssa:            We were discussing Millennials and technology and segwayed from a very interesting study on how they use it to solve problems to, what the heck is YickYak, which we do not know.

Amber:            Oh, and we do not know. We'll be googling that when we leave the room, I guess.

Michelle:            Possibly or we'll ask one of the interns [crosstalk 00:11:35].

Alyssa:            Using our digital literacy.

Michelle:            What we actually talked about at the top of the podcast was SNL 40th Anniversary. Do you have a favorite skit?

Amber:            Oh nice. Of course! It is "More Cowbell" is my favorite all time.

Alyssa:            Classic.

Michelle:            Yeah, that's everyone's. It's so good.

Alyssa:            It's really good but I'm going to go with the 2008 election coverage. I really am. I've reconsidered.

Michelle:            I just go with Dana Carvey, and everything he did [crosstalk 00:12:01].

Alyssa:            That's also fair.

Amber:            He's awesome. I know. He's awesome.

Michelle:            Yeah, I love that. All right, from SNL to ...

Amber:            Research Minute.

Michelle:            Why not? Perfect transition there.

Amber:            All right. We've got a new study out by Massachusetts Business Alliance for Education, which is MBAC-, MBAE, sorry about that, that compares the MCAS, which is the Massachusetts state test, and the PARCC, which is the new test coming out. They look at three indicators of college and career readiness. Here are their three indicators and their results.

                        Number one, does the test identify students who are college and career ready? The authors say no for MCAS, since it sets no bar for college and career readiness and its bar for proficient is very low compared to the SAT. They also say that Massachusetts does better overall than other states on NAPE, but they're still below the NAPE college preparedness benchmark, which was a little curious for me, but when you look at a footnote, it reveals not by much.

                        On the 2013 NAPE Grade 12, the MCAS average was 161. The NAPE college preparedness benchmark was 163, so kind of close. Authors say that the PARCC plans to establish a real college and career ready bar.

                        Number two, and I'll speed it up, does the test contain the right content to measure college and career readiness? Authors say MCAS consists of one ELA and math test administered in 10th grade and it's only designed to measure mastery of 10th grade standards, yet PARCC will test high schoolers in these three grades, 9, 10, 11. It's going to assess a broader and deeper array of content. It's going to have more application of skills and concepts and abstract reasoning, so on and so forth.

                        Number three, do the elementary and middle school tests provide good information about student progress towards college and career readiness. Authors say MCAS are a patchwork of tests. They are developed at different times, different purposes, different proficiency standards across the grades, don't appear to be equally rigorous. Yet PARCC has a consistent design, is developed with coherence across grades, so on and so forth.

                        Bottom line, the study was a little presumptuous. We don't have too much information about PARCC quite yet and in so doing, I think it was a little bit more flattering to PARCC than may be warranted at this time. It could have been a little bit more objective, but it did admit at the end that it was kind of like comparing apples and oranges, because the MCAS was not designed to be a college and career ready measure. There you have it.

Michelle:            I was going to say, that's a lot of PARCC love and you don't often hear PARCC love anymore.

Alyssa:            That sounds like an SNL skit.

Amber:            You do not. You do not.

Michelle:            Yeah, and ed reform SNL skit where exactly 500 people would find that interesting or be able to follow it.

Amber:            Yes. You know, I think, let's just be honest. There are people who want Massachusetts to use PARCC and there are people who do not want Massachusetts to use PARCC. This is grist for the mill, I think, in terms of getting people to think about the differences between the two and as our listeners know, Fordham is undergoing a study too, that's going to look at similar questions, in terms of comparing PARCC and Smarter Balance and ACT and MCAS. We're going to use the criteria for high quality assessments that the chiefs put out.

                        It's a totally different study but again, these are important questions. We just need to make sure that we have all the information at our disposal to be able to answer them. Unfortunately, these guys didn't have actual items from PARCC yet, which we'll have, which is important, but again, I think the point is, yes, tests are designed for different purposes.

Michelle:            That's the whole point of doing Common Core. Well, one of the points was to change the tests. No matter whether we or anyone else finds how PARCC and Smarter are, it will always be apples to oranges, because we changed something. That's the whole point. Fascinating.

Amber:            Yeah, it's fascinating. A lot of these groups that are going to come out, I think, as these tests roll out and there are these various factions that kind of think, "This is the direction we need to go." I'm all about more evaluation, more studies, more information, the better.

Alyssa:            Shocking better research. Vice President would say that.

Amber:            Yes.

Michelle:            It's like whenever I read any given research study, it's like, "And more research is needed on this." Someone once asked me if I thought every organization should have a communications person, and I wanted to be like, "Of course, I think I'm integral to our work here."

Alyssa:            At the same time, I do think as more evaluations come on board and as more people get farther down this path, having this information and keeping this conversation going is critical.

Amber:            Yes, that's right. I think this report brought out some broad level difference between them, but it was really hard to answer these three questions right without real data and real items and really digging in to these tests in a way that a report like this wasn't able to do.

Michelle:            I'm excited to see the differences between Smarter and PARCC.

Amber:            Yes.

Alyssa:            Yes.

Michelle:            That is ...

Amber:            Is what our study will look at.

Michelle:            Yes.

Amber:            Indeed.

Michelle:            All right. Thanks so much, Amber.

Amber:            Yes, ma'am.

Michelle:            That's all the time we have for this week's Gadfly Show. Till next week ...

Alyssa:            I'm Alyssa Schwenk.

Michelle:            And I'm Michelle Lerner for the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, signing off.

An abundance of choice in Milwaukee has led to families leaving the district for charter and private schools. A new study by the Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty (WILL) examines the facility challenge the city now faces as a result. The analysis estimates the “utilization rates” of every public school in the city for the 2013–14 year. This is determined by dividing a school’s enrollment by its maximum capacity, defined as twenty-seven students in each regular classroom.

A few key findings:

• Out of 123 buildings, twenty-seven are operating at below 60 percent capacity; thirteen of those are below 50 percent capacity. Many of these schools are the lowest-performing, most at-risk schools in the city, with declining enrollments and questionable safety. (For instance, they have twice as many 9-1-1 phone calls per student than other public schools.)
• At least seventeen Milwaukee Public School buildings are vacant, costing taxpayers over $1.6 million since 2012 in utilities alone. They have been empty, on average, for seven years.
• Eighty percent of the underutilized schools—twenty-two buildings in total—received either an F or a D on their most recent state report card. Moreover, a severe shortage of quality public schools exists in the vicinity of the underutilized schools. Out of the fifty-two closest schools, only seven scored a C or better on the state report card.

The authors—not surprisingly—recommend that private schools in the choice program, public charter schools, and traditional public schools be allowed to expand into the unused and underutilized MPS buildings. They’d do this either by taking over the administration of the failing schools, leasing out the space, or consolidating MPS schools and leasing or selling the leftover empty building—all of which would save taxpayers money. Yet Milwaukee officials show no interest in doing so. Exasperated, WILL recommends that the state legislature get involved. Badger State policymakers, do you care?

SOURCE: Rick Esenberg, CJ Szafir, and Martin F. Lueken, Ph.D., "Kids in Crisis, Cobwebs in Classrooms," Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty (January 2015).

High schools hoping to increase student success in college have often turned to an innovative solution: allow students to take college-level coursework before they graduate. The hope is that by exposing teenagers to college courses earlier, they will be more likely to think they are “college material,” earn a bit of college credit for free (or nearly free), and get acclimated to college-level rigor. (Most of these courses are taught on high school campuses by high school teachers.) A new report from the Education Commission of the States (ECS), however, questions just how strong some of these courses are and examines state strategies to ensure rigor.

The ECS analysts found that states generally follow one of four approaches to ensure quality in “dual enrollment” courses: 1) Some states, including Colorado, leave decisions about whether courses are worthy of credit up to post-secondary institutions; 2) others, such as Delaware, require post-secondary institutions and high schools to reach agreements, but do not prescribe the nature of those agreements; 3) eight states have adopted the guidelines of the National Alliance of Concurrent Enrollment Partnerships (NACEP), which are designed to ensure quality and cover topics including curricula, faculty, students, assessments, and evaluations; and 4) six others require or encourage actual NACEP accreditation.

States and districts working to encourage the completion of truly college-level coursework in high school should, as ECS recommends, ensure that educators are prepared to teach such rigorous work. They should also ensure high schools are being honest with students so they don’t enter college thinking they have earned credits only to find out those dual enrollment courses weren’t up to par. The NACEP standards may help, but they might be overly prescriptive and sometimes seem more focused on inputs than outcomes.

For these reasons and others, states may wish to preserve local control and encourage innovation by leaving some additional flexibility to institutions. They might also offer courses that are more focused on earning industry credentials than college credit. Whatever the case, states and districts must ensure that students are focused on the next step, but aren’t deceived about whether they’re progressing toward whatever productive endeavor they ultimately choose.

SOURCE: Jennifer Dounay Zinth, “Dual enrollment course content and instructor quality,” Education Commission of the States (February 2015).

In just twenty-five short years—it’s scarcely older than most of its current recruits—Teach For America has gone from a grassroots edu-insurgency to the largest teacher pipeline in the country and a dominant voice in reform debates. How’d they do it? In this new white paper, Bellwether analysts Sara Mead, Carolyn Chuong, and Caroline Goodson use internal TFA documents and interviews with key past and present staff members to tease out how the organization was able to maintain high quality while scaling up for the last fifteen years. Turns out it’s not rocket science, just hard work. TFA relied on regular measurement of applicants, corps members, and students. They’ve been equally diligent in expansion planning, taking care to evaluate each new region’s need for teachers, potential funding base, and local politics—as well as TFA’s ability to attract talent to live and teach in a given area. Rigorous quality-control mechanisms during new-site development and deepening ties in the places they already serve have fueled an expansion from 1260 corps members in fifteen regions in 2000 to 10,500 in fifty regions in 2013. And much of this has been successful due to TFA’s operational agnosticism (there’s not a lot of, “We do it this way because we’ve always done it this way” in TFA) and commitment to continuous improvement. Particularly in a sector where so many actors elevate intentions over impact, the organization’s aversion to preciousness is both refreshing and instructive. There’s plenty for other nonprofits and ed organizations to learn from here. At the same time, the report highlights the growing pains that rapid expansion has caused, including wear and tear on organizational culture. The Bellwether report offers recommendations for where the nonprofit can go next, including even more operational flexibility for successful regions, a greater focus on getting corps members to embed deeply in local communities, recruiting (even) more teachers of color, and engaging more proactively with the media to combat anti-TFA pushback.

SOURCE: Sara Mead, Carolyn Chuong, and Caroline Goodson, “Exponential Growth, Unexpected Challenges: How Teach For America Grew in Scale and Impact,” Bellwether Education Partners (February 2015).