The Education Gadfly Weekly

Nobody knows how this year’s wild presidential campaign is going to end. But one thing’s for sure: It has exposed some fundamental rifts in American society that won’t easily be resolved.

Donald Trump’s and Bernie Sanders’ populist messages have struck a chord, particularly with working-class voters. That doesn’t surprise scholars and intellectuals on the Right and Left, who have studied these issues for years and sounded the alarm about rising inequality in wages and lifestyle.

As Charles Murray put it in the Wall Street Journal, “During the past half-century of economic growth, virtually none of the benefits have gone to the working class.” Furthermore, “for someone living in a town where the big company has shut the factory and moved the jobs to China, or for a roofer who has watched a contractor hire illegal immigrants because they are cheaper, anger and frustration are rational.”

State and national leaders have warned since at least the 1980s against leaving people behind. Southern governors particularly—think Bill Clinton and Lamar Alexander, Dick Riley and George W. Bush—understood what globalization and the changing economy meant for their citizens, and they grasped the imperative of getting many more of their workers ready for high-skill jobs. Then-Governor Alexander said in 1986, “What has suddenly riveted everyone’s attention on our education system is that our standard of living is threatened….We’re not going to have the jobs and the good incomes in America if we don’t have the good skills.” That was thirty years ago.

And to be sure, there have been lots of school reform efforts over the years—most well-meaning, and some even effective, like raising standards, publishing test results, creating charter schools, and offering vouchers for poor kids to attend private schools. But it hasn’t been nearly enough. While NAEP scores have risen at the fourth- and eighth-grade levels, they remain stubbornly flat at the end of high school. Fewer than 40 percent of our graduates leave school ready for college—not just four-year universities, but community colleges too. The numbers are much, much worse for kids growing up poor and working-class. We saw the need to equip a vastly larger number of people with stronger skills, and we didn’t get the job done.

So here we are, with low-income and working-class voters getting hammered and falling further behind their college-educated neighbors. Now they’re letting their anger be heard.

But there’s a silver lining: The political system, regardless of its dysfunction, is starting to respond. In part because of the Trump phenomenon, the challenges faced by the working class have finally captured the attention of key thinkers within the conservative coalition. Intellectuals such as David Frum and Reihan Salam, and political leaders including Speaker Paul Ryan, are calling for specific policies to help working Americans. To date, those policies have been anathema to conservative dogma and the Republican donor class. “Reform conservatives,” in particular, are showing an openness to new ideas, such as an expanded Earned Income Tax Credit, child tax credits, and more comprehensive wage supports.

But is that all we can do? Yes, we should ease the burden of poorer Americans by buttressing their incomes. But we must not accept that poor and working-class children will also be confined to low-skill, low-wage work. That would be tantamount to giving up on the American Dream. Instead, we should do all we can to make sure that the next generation develops the skills they need to compete for the middle-class and high-wage jobs that our economy can still produce. Our generation of reformers must succeed where the previous generation fell short.

Our schools can’t do it all, or all by themselves, but there’s still plenty of low-hanging fruit that most schools have yet to pluck—tested strategies that can help low-income and working-class kids and spur upward mobility nationwide. Let’s take a look at three of them.

1. Technical Education as a Path to the Middle Class

There’s a good reason why education reformers have become obsessed with getting many more low-income students “to and through” four-year college degrees: They are the closest things we have to a guarantee of propelling poor kids into the middle class. 

But as Andrew Kelly of the American Enterprise Institute has argued, while a college degree has a big payoff, it also comes with a low probability. Among children from the bottom third of the income distribution, Kelly estimates, just 14 percent will complete four-year degrees. Even if we could double that proportion, there would still be a large majority of poor and working class kids needing another path to the middle class.

Thankfully, there is such a route: High-quality career and technical education, culminating in industry-recognized post-secondary credentials. But we’re going to need to rethink our approach to high school if we want many more students to be able to take this promising path.

Right now, we mostly shuffle kids through so-called college preparation courses. According to the most recent data, 81 percent of high school students are taking an academic route; only 19 percent are “concentrating” in CTE (which means earning at least three credits in a single CTE program area).

It’s not working. About 20 percent of teenagers don’t graduate from high school at all, including 28 percent of economically disadvantaged students. Of those who do graduate, about two-thirds matriculate to some form of college, including about half of low-income students. But a majority of students entering community colleges—and 20 percent of those going into four-year colleges—land in remedial (“development”) education because they are not academically prepared for college. Two-thirds of low-income students at community colleges start in remedial classes that earn them no degree credit.

Here’s where things really fall apart: Almost two-thirds of community college students who start in remedial courses won’t complete a credential within six years; 40 percent don’t ever get beyond the remedial stage. It’s not hard to understand why. Our K–12 system, especially the high school level, is simply not getting most of these students ready for success.

All too often, then, the outcome of our current strategy—what you might call “bachelor’s degree or bust”—is that a young person drops out of college at age twenty with no post-secondary credential, no skills, and no work experience, but a fair amount of debt. That’s a terrible way to begin adult life, and it’s even worse if the young adult aims to escape poverty.

A better approach for many young people would be to develop coherent pathways, beginning in high school, into authentic technical education options at the post-secondary level. Such efforts show great promise in better engaging students, helping them succeed academically, boosting their college-going and college completion rates, and brightening their career prospects. These arrangements not only provide access to workplaces where students can apply their skills, they also offer seamless transitions into post-secondary education, apprenticeships, and employer-provided learning opportunities. By age twenty, graduates of such programs have academic credentials, technical credentials, and work experience—and, usually, well-paying jobs.

To make this option a reality, however, local communities and education leaders will have to overcome the painful legacy of tracking. It simply doesn’t work to wait until kids are eighteen for them to choose an academic path that leads to four-year college or a technical path that leads to an associate’s degree, certification, or license. Generic high school experiences are not preparing low-income students to thrive in either academic or technical routes after they receive their diplomas. The system shouldn’t choose a student’s path—but there should be a choice.

2. Remember the Strivers

The last few years have brought long-overdue attention to the needs of high-achieving, low-income students, as well as new initiatives to ensure that they have opportunities to take rigorous coursework in high school and apply to selective colleges upon graduation.

But as welcome and important as these are, they must be complemented by efforts to help high-potential, low-income students much earlier in their academic careers.

As Tom Loveless of the Brookings Institution argues, affluent high-achievers who come into school with so many advantages typically enjoy opportunities that prepare them well for college: gifted-and-talented programs, accelerated courses, and classes with high-achieving peers. Low-income high-achievers, on the other hand, are often denied these opportunities. Their urban school systems don’t offer (or greatly restrict) gifted-and-talented programs; they mandate “heterogeneous” groupings of students and tell teachers to do their best meeting a panoply of diverse needs using “differentiated instruction.” Out of fealty to the principle of equity, they don’t let high-achievers move faster than their peers. This even though an advanced academic track would help to reduce inequalities in opportunity between rich and poor (and suburban and urban) students with great academic promise.

Partly as a result of federal pressure, many large urban districts have also embraced the idea that they should slash student suspensions and expulsions, on the grounds that doing so will interrupt the “school-to-prison pipeline.” The impulse is understandable, but if it results in more disruption in urban schools (an all-too-likely consequence), well-behaved and academically striving low-income students will lose out yet again. Who is looking out for their interests?

As Loveless argues, these issues tend to come to a head in middle school. If traditional public schools refuse to provide a safe, orderly, academically enriching environment for young adolescents to prepare for college preparatory high schools or high-quality career and technical options, then we should encourage the development of charter schools, magnet schools, and other choice strategies that do. By focusing all of our energy on the toughest cases—the very poorest kids, in the most difficult circumstances—we risk overlooking the needs of their low-income peers with the best shot at making it. That needs to change.

3. Teach the “Success Sequence”

Several years ago, Isabel Sawhill and Ron Haskins of the Brookings Institution made a startling discovery: Even young people with just a high school diploma can make it into the middle class if they work full-time and delay parenthood until they are at least twenty-one and married. Ninety-eight percent of the people who followed those norms aren’t poor; the vast majority are in the middle class. They termed these three steps—graduate high school, work full-time, and delay parenthood until marriage—the “success sequence.”

It raises the question: Is there anything schools could do to promote the success sequence, and especially the last component—delaying parenting until marriage, or at least until young people are ready for the challenges of starting a family?

It’s not hard to understand why this is such a critical issue. It’s tough enough to gain the academic and related skills to be ready for a four-year college or high-quality technical training. Add a baby and the odds can become insurmountable. You try finishing school, working a low-wage job, and caring for an infant or a toddler all by yourself. It’s no surprise, then, that only 40 percent of teen mothers finish high school, and fewer than 2 percent finish college by age thirty.

But as the working class has gotten beaten up economically, its families have fallen apart too. Single-parent families went from just under 20 percent of the working class in the 1950s to over 60 percent by the 2010s.  

So what can schools do? Beyond making sure that their charges receive effective instruction about birth control, they can help teenagers develop strong prospects for interesting, decently paid careers (a good motivation for delaying parenthood). We’ve already discussed the role that well-designed technical education programs can play in getting young people ready for post-secondary education and work. Such education also appears to have a positive impact on the success sequence itself. A sophisticated evaluation by MDRC found that young men who had graduated from a career academy were 33 percent more likely to be married and living with their spouses than selected peers in a control group. They were also significantly likelier to have custody of their children.

Schools can also help their students develop the character skills needed to think long-term and stay out of trouble. The time-honored way to do this is with religion. A 2012 study by David Figlio and Jens Ludwig found that Catholic high school students were less likely to participate in risky behaviors, including teen sexual activity. They speculated that Catholic schools put the fear of God into their students. Religious instruction, they reported, “could affect students’ ‘tastes’ for misbehavior, or increase the perceived costs of misbehavior by defining a number of activities as sins that have eternal consequences.” And there was also the role of positive peer pressure—by “exposing them to more pro-social peer groups,” particularly by selecting out or expelling students more likely to engage in risky behaviors.

A newer and explicitly secular approach to teaching character is best illustrated by KIPP, which has placed character education at the heart of its “no-excuses” ethos. As made famous by Paul Tough’s best-selling book How Children Succeed, many KIPP schools now use a “character growth card” to help teachers, students, and parents work together to develop specific character traits like optimism and curiosity. Some KIPP schools are incorporating “mindfulness training” and even yoga to help their students build the self- control necessary to make better choices and build their long-term success.

There’s another way that schools can help students develop important character strengths and avoid pregnancy: provide an excellent suite of extracurricular offerings. This might be one secret to Catholic schools’ success; in their 2012 paper, Figlio and Ludwig report that students in Catholic schools “spend more time on homework and extracurricular activities than those in public schools....Private schools may thus reduce delinquency if only because of an ‘incapacitation effect’—teens who are doing homework or running track are not out looking for trouble.”

Extracurricular activities, including athletics, appear to be important for public school students too. As June Kronholz reported in Education Next, studies have long found that disadvantaged students who participate in such activities are less likely to drop out, use tobacco or alcohol, or get pregnant; they are also more likely to score well on tests, enroll in college, and complete college.

Conclusion

While our education system alone cannot solve the stubborn, tragic problem of persistent poverty and the growing gaps between working-class and college-educated Americans, there’s much it can do for the children entrusted to it. But first we have to change the way we think about the problem and its possible solutions.

Poor and working-class voters are right to be angry. Our leaders saw globalization coming and understood that it would upend our economy. But we failed to provide opportunities for all Americans to build their skills and compete for well-paying jobs. Let’s not do the same to their children.

This essay is drawn from Mike’s new edited volume, Education for Upward Mobility, which was released this week.

• Merryl Tisch, who is stepping down as chancellor of New York’s Board of Regents, gave a valedictory interview to the New York Times last week. As head of one of the foremost educational authorities in the state, she will principally be remembered for championing and helping implement the Common Core State Standards and a new teacher evaluation system alongside New York State Education Commissioner John King (confirmed Monday as secretary of education). Her efforts led to some necessary improvements in curriculum and instruction across the state, but they didn’t come without a backlash: Roughly one-fifth of all eligible students were kept out of the new tests by their parents last spring, and unions revolted over the Regents’ recommendation to link teacher evaluations to student scores. Now, with Governor Andrew Cuomo backing slowly away from that notion and an opt-out favorite in line to replace Tisch as chancellor, the movement for high standards looks like it’s undergoing a reset in the Empire State. It’s up to both local leaders and national reformers to make sure that new players don’t change matters for the worse.
• You may be wondering why, after many months and approximately eight thousand primary debates full of nasty invective, Ben Carson decided to back former rival Donald Trump last week. After all, most conservatives have either explicitly denounced the orange menace or sat out the contest entirely. Well, as Carson explains it, there are actually two Donald Trumps: One’s the guy who calls you a lying pedophile, and the other is a sweetie pie who trades endorsements for future jobs. Although the retired neurosurgeon didn’t spill too many details about the almost certainly felonious arrangement, it’s speculated by some that Trump could have him in mind for education secretary (especially given his comments at the end of last week). But that would be kind of a tough job to come by in a Trump administration, since he’s already vowed to abolish the Education Department. Maybe he thinks Carson would literally just be his very well-educated secretary?
• Though it may sometimes seem that way, not all presidential news is attributable to the mephitic emissions of a certain oft-insolvent developer. Sometimes Bernie Sanders also says things. Or doesn’t quite say anything coherent, like at Sunday night’s Democratic town hall. Asked by Columbus, Ohio KIPP administrator Caitlynn Dunn whether he supports charter schools, the Vermont senator burbled out a response that sounded like nothing so much as the gibbering of a man who cannot recall the words of a very boring limerick. In a happy twist, his questioner was actually quoting a Columbus Dispatch article that reported the charter-related findings of Fordham’s own Aaron Churchill. From our mouths to Bernie’s ears—there has to be a first time for everything, I guess.
• Now that Washington lawmakers have finally gotten around to updating the cobwebbed No Child Left Behind Act, state education authorities are expected to revise their accountability measures to comply with the new law. Right now, that means rushing to approve changes ahead of the Department of Education, which is still determining how it will interpret and enforce the will of Congress. According to Education Week, some of the plans being batted about in places like California, Arizona, and Florida might skirt the line of what is, strictly speaking, legal. (The last state, for instance, proposes to give districts the option of administering multiple assessments in grades 3–8; that’s in direct contradiction to ESSA, which mandates the use of a single test.) We leave it up to the lawyers to determine that, which should make for a fun couple of decades. In the meantime, if any state board members or school chiefs are hoping to steal good ideas for accountability, they’ve got an invaluable resource at their disposal: Fordham’s own ESSA Accountability Design proposals, unveiled at our blockbuster event last month. Because after all, why tear your hair out trying to fine-tune school ratings when you can just get Morgan Polikoff to do it for you?

In this week’s podcast, Mike Petrilli welcomes guest host Dan Scoggin, founder of Great Hearts Academies charter schools. They discuss whether Senator Bernie Sanders misunderstands how charter schools function, how schools like Great Hearts can serve students from a variety of socioeconomic backgrounds, and what the U.S. Department of Education might look like if Ben Carson were Secretary. In the Research Minute, Amber Northern examines the long term effects of disruptive peers in American classrooms.

Amber's Research Minute

Scott E. Carrell, Mark Hoekstra, and Elira Kuka, "The Long-Run Effects of Disruptive Peers," NBER (February 2016).

A new working paper by researchers Matthew Kraft and Allison Gilmour examines teacher evaluations reform by revisiting The Widget Effect. The widely read TNTP report found that less than 1 percent of teachers in most districts were rated as unsatisfactory—even though 81 percent of principals could identify an ineffective teacher in their school.

Kraft and colleagues looked at the distribution of teacher effectiveness in nineteen states, including fourteen Race To The Top winners. They also conducted a case study in a large urban district in the northeast that adopted new evaluations in 2012–13. The experiment included surveys of evaluators who are responsible for evaluating teachers and interviews of principals. Among the nineteen states, the analysts found that the median percentage of teachers rated below proficient was 2.7 percent. Yet the percentages rated below proficient varied across states, as do those rated above proficient.

They found a wide variation among states from Hawaii (where fewer than 1 percent of teachers were judged below proficient) to New Mexico (where 26 percent of teachers were considered not up to par). Meanwhile, Georgia rated 3 percent of teachers as above proficient, compared to 73 percent in Tennessee. Massachusetts, our highest-performing state, placed 8 percent of teachers above proficient. Analysts also found that having more rating categories does not appear to translate into greater differentiation at the lower end of the rating scale—this is only true at the top end (e.g., the difference between “effective” or “highly effective”).

As for the case study, the survey showed that evaluators estimated that 27.8 percent of all teachers in their schools were performing at a level below proficient. Yet this estimate is four times the percentage of teachers actually rated below proficient. Interviews with principals revealed a number of reasons for this disconnect: time constraints (it takes lots of time to document poor performance); the belief that it’s unfair to rate educators below proficient if they aren’t provided with support; the desire not to discourage teachers who show potential; the fear that a replacement might be worse; the simple difficulty and discomfort of telling a teacher she’s not performing well; and racial worries (concerns that a disproportionate number of non-white teachers would receive low ratings and it would become an identity issue).

These findings tell us that these are not problems that can be addressed with technocratic solutions. On-the-ground "norms and practices are proving much more difficult to change," say the analysts. They are indeed a different beast, not easily handled through straitjacket policies. 

SOURCE: Matthew A. Kraft and Allison F. Gilmour, "Revisiting the Widget Effect: Teacher Evaluation Reforms and the Distribution of Teacher Effectiveness," Brown University (February 2016).

The “college preparation gap” among students graduating from high school is real and persistent. There are some signs that it has been stabilizing in recent years, but the fact remains that too many—arguably even most—holders of high school diplomas aren’t ready for college-level work. Nowhere is it more apparent than in the realm of community college, where 68 percent of students require at least some form of remedial coursework (also known as “developmental education”) just to get to square one. Perhaps four-year colleges should face facts and refuse to admit students who aren’t ready, but we’re not there yet. For better or worse, community colleges have their doors wide open when it comes to “underprepared” students who still want to give college a go. But do they have their eyes similarly wide open? Two recent reports highlight the good, the bad, and the ugly among community colleges’ efforts to build successful students via remediation.

First up, a report from the Center for Community College Student Engagement (CCCSE) surveying approximately seventy thousand students from more than 150 of its institutions across the country. The vast majority (86 percent) of the incoming students surveyed believed that they were academically prepared to succeed at their college; yet 68 percent of those same students reported placing into at least one developmental education class. Despite their belief in their own readiness, most who took the remedial placements indicated that the material was, in fact, appropriate for their skill level. The report cites the National Student Clearinghouse’s college completions report from late 2015, which showed that just 39 percent of degree-seeking, first-time-in-college students earn a degree or certificate within six years—with or without remediation. To combat these odds, CCCSE calls for a “remediation revolution” comprising a number of research-based options. One of those is greater collaboration with high schools (e.g., curriculum alignment, advising/mentoring, dual-credit offerings), with evidence provided from a new program in the Goose Creek, Texas school district that aims to align education pathways from pre-K through college graduation.

Interestingly, new research in the current issue of the Journal of Higher Education also examines remediation in Texas colleges (six community colleges and two four-year colleges). Specifically, the research investigates whether the institutions’ Developmental Summer Bridge Program (DSBP) helped recent high school graduates in need of remediation increase their persistence in college, credit accumulation, and course completion. The DSBP included 4–5 weeks of accelerated instruction in remedial coursework, student supports, instruction in the “soft skills” required for college success, and a $400 stipend for successful completion of the program. The control group was left to its own devices over the summer, and while many students took advantage of traditional summer brush-up courses, most simply enrolled in the fall in their assigned remedial classes. The treatment group, meanwhile, showed only “modest positive impacts in the short term” from the intensive DSBP, all of which had dissipated in a year.

Since P-16 alignment is still an unproven strategy, and summer tune-ups like DBSP have barely registered effects, what else remains in the community college toolbox? CCCSE suggests three other strategies to bust the remediation boom. First is using multiple measures to determine placement for incoming students rather than a single test. Evidence for this one comes from North Carolina, which adopted the policy for all community colleges in 2013 (mandatory compliance is due in fall 2016). Davidson County Community College got a head start and has already seen fewer remedial placements and more student success in credit-bearing courses by using a mix of unweighted GPA and high school transcript data, especially in math courses/grades. A second strategy is eliminating “cold” sittings for placement tests. Washington State Community College in Marietta, Ohio mandates compulsory brush-up sessions for students before taking placement tests, and Passaic County Community College in New Jersey offers a sample online placement test and video tutorials to keep students from being surprised by the rigor of the test. Both schools have seen reduced remedial placements. Third is co-requisite remediation—that is, students simultaneously attending a remedial and a credit-bearing course in the same subject. No one’s talking about the cost of this—a common bugbear with remediation—but the data from a startup program at Butler Community College in Kansas is nothing to sneeze at.

As Pennsylvania State University’s Sean Trainor put it a while back, “Community colleges have been at the forefront of nearly every major development in higher education.” They are also the canaries in the coal mine of higher education, it seems, as the remediation boom is making an even bigger noise in two-year colleges than in their four-year counterparts. Let’s hope that one or more of these efforts—along with higher standards for K–12—can dampen the boom for good.

SOURCE: Center for Community College Student Engagement, “Expectations Meet Reality: The Underprepared Student and Community Colleges,” February 2016.

SOURCE: Heather Wathington, Joshua Pretlow, and Elisabeth Barnett, “A Good Start? The Impact of Texas’ Developmental Summer Bridge Program on Student Success,” The Journal of Higher Education (March/April 2016).

Can classroom observations be used as the sole measure for identifying effective teachers? In a new study, Rachel Garrett (AIR) and former Fordham Emerging Education Policy Scholar Matthew P. Steinberg (University of Pennsylvania) attempt to answer this question by investigating the relationship between observation scores and student achievement.

They rely on the Measures of Effective Teaching (MET) study to extract data from a sample of 1,559 teachers of grades 4–8, who were randomly assigned to students in six major school districts. The sample was separated according to content area to determine teacher effectiveness in math and reading, with both sub-samples exhibiting similar student, teacher, and classroom characteristics. Analysts compared student performance (measured by test scores on state-mandated exams during the 2009–2010 and 2010–2011 school years), to teacher observation scores based on the Framework for Teaching (FFT) instrument, a widely used observation protocol. They measured both the expected and observed effects of teacher performance on student achievement. 

If students were randomly assigned to teachers in both content areas, the researchers calculated, the expected growth of a student taught by a “proficient” teacher should be between 1.2 and 1.5 months of extra learning in math per year compared to a “basic” educator. But in English language arts, a “proficient” teacher should produce no more growth than a “basic” one—suggesting that, by observation score, the better-rated teacher is actually no more effective than her lesser-rated colleague.

In practice, however, the researchers observed “fairly extensive, post hoc, nonrandom sorting of students to teachers”—despite the intended randomness of the study. This “assortative matching was likely more limited than under a natural context”; but still, they posit, it probably caused the “observed” effects to be greater than the “expected” effects. And indeed, students assigned to “proficient” teachers gained 3.6 months and 3.4 months of learning in reading and math, respectively, compared to students taught by “basic” teachers.

The researchers conclude that the true effect of a “proficient” teacher compared to a “basic” one falls somewhere between the expected and observed measures. Nevertheless, the findings lead them to “question the wisdom of solely relying on observational protocols like the FFT for the purposes of evaluating teachers in a formal system that will affect decisions relating to tenure, performance pay, and other key personnel decisions.” Instructional quality can be enhanced or hindered by the composition of students in a teacher’s classroom, such that a significant amount of the growth a teacher produces could be attributed to the group of students she teacher—not necessarily what she’s doing in the classroom compared to her lower-rated peers.

My own experience as a first-year teacher supports this hypothesis. And although my school administration took into consideration my inexperience and the performance levels of my students when completing my evaluation, this may not be the case across all schools and districts. Let’s pay more critical attention to the use of classroom observations for high-stakes purposes and ensure that teachers are receiving the most accurate and just evaluations. Teachers should not be deemed “high-performing” for riding the coattails of their already brilliant students.

SOURCE: Rachel Garrett and Matthew P. Steinberg. “Examining Teacher Effectiveness Using Classroom Observation Scores: Evidence From the Randomization of Teachers to Students,” Education Evaluation and Policy Analysis (in press).