The Education Gadfly Weekly

National news outlets including Slate, Politico, Esquire, and the Washington Post have predicted that charter schools might be a growing thorn in Governor John Kasich’s side as he competes for the Republican presidential nomination. Kasich is being criticized for the overall poor performance of Ohio’s charter school sector, as well as for last year’s scandal over authorizer evaluations and its aftermath (including a hold placed on Ohio’s $71 million federal Charter School Program grant).

But by calling charters Kasich’s “little problem back home”—or, more boldly, claiming that his track record with them is “terrible”—national reporters are missing big pieces of the story. If these journalists had dug a little deeper, they would have realized that Kasich mostly deserves praise, not scorn, for the steps he’s taken to improve Ohio charter schools. In fact, any real examination of the candidate’s record on charters would reveal that no Ohio governor has worked harder to strengthen oversight of the charter school sector.

Kasich inherited a charter sector that was notorious for conflicts of interest, regulatory loopholes, self-dealing, and domination by powerful special interests. The mediocre performance of Ohio’s charter sector precedes Kasich’s tenure as well: CREDO’s 2009 charter study rated Ohio among the lowest-performing states.

In his first year in office, Kasich attempted to prohibit authorizers from opening new schools if they had any school rated the equivalent of D or F (a move that would have essentially frozen the sector entirely). This was later modified to prohibit the bottom one-fifth of authorizers from opening schools, based on a ranking system that, for the first time ever, evaluated them on the academic performance of their schools.

On the heels of two studies Fordham released pointing out the remaining weaknesses in Ohio charter law and sector performance, Kasich continued pushing for reforms. In remarks to the Ohio Chamber of Commerce in December 2014, he said, “We are going to fix the lack of regulation on charter schools. There is no excuse for people coming in here and taking advantage of anything. So we will be putting some tough rules into our budget.” His remarks were likely surprising to leaders in the Republican-controlled legislature, as well as for-profit charter school operators with a history of powerful influence at the statehouse.

It wasn’t empty rhetoric. Released two months later, Kasich’s budget bill outlined unprecedented reforms for charter schools and authorizers, many of which were embodied in the final reform bill that passed with overwhelming bipartisan support in October 2015. The legislation is significant: It builds on the authorizer performance system that Kasich had begun building in 2011, aligning incentives so that high-performers will be rewarded and low-performers will be shuttered. It eliminates conflicts of interest and installs new transparency measures for governing boards and operators. Credit also belongs to several lawmakers for seeding reform ideas and getting the legislation across the finish line—but it’s indisputable that Kasich set the tone and put pressure on lawmakers to get the job done.

Kasich also has been slammed for the actions of former Ohio Department of Education official David Hansen, who was charged with implementing the world-class authorizer evaluation system. Hansen made a serious error in judgment by excluding the failing grades of online charter schools from authorizers’ evaluations and resigned shortly after the omission came to light last July. Despite zero evidence that Kasich was aware of Hansen’s actions, many believe he’s guilty by association. (Hansen is married to Kasich’s campaign manager.)

However, the education department during Kasich’s administration has played a far more active charter oversight role than ever before. In 2013, the governor’s hand-picked state superintendent ordered the closure of charter schools for egregious health and safety violations; the next year, the department investigated underperforming authorizers and prevented them from opening poorly vetted schools. By the end of 2015, a new authorizer evaluation system with more emphasis on academic performance was approved.

Critics have also pointed to the political sway of Ohio’s academically struggling e-schools, exercised through sizeable donations to Republicans. Politico, as evidence of influence, points out that Kasich was responsible for lifting the state’s moratorium for online schools. But that move enabled competitors to enter the market, which didn’t exactly benefit the powerful e-school oligopoly. Since then, three new online schools have opened, subject to an additional layer of approval by the department. The law has also capped the annual growth of existing Ohio e-schools. Most importantly, the state is currently holding the line against the anti-reform efforts of the e-school lobby more than at any other point in our charter history. Recent efforts to water down accountability are being met with strong resistance, evidence that the power of Ohio e-schools is dwindling.

Finally, no Ohio charter school discussion would be complete without mentioning funding. While charter detractors might suggest that Ohio charters made money hand over first under Kasich’s administration, such claims are bogus. State funding for charters expanded overall during his tenure, but that’s primarily because the number of students enrolled in charter schools has increased. The base state allotment for charter schools has gone up in precisely the same manner it has risen for district schools. Charters, deprived of access to the state’s school facilities program and denied the ability to raise funds locally, were awarded a meager $150 per pupil toward facilities and may apply to a competitive $25 million facilities state grant if they rank among the top performers. That’s hardly pork barrel politics at work.

There are many other aspects of the governor’s education record that most school reformers would laud. Kasich was instrumental in bringing Teach For America to the state and was at the helm when Ohio designed award-winning report cards; he also improved learning standards, raised the bar on proficiency, expanded a program to help high schoolers earn college credit, and created an innovation fund. In sum, Governor Kasich has been a powerful advocate of charter school reform in a state whose sector has long been deeply troubled, and it’s shameful that the national media has created the opposite impression. In fact, Ohio could become a leader on charter quality if the latest reforms are implemented well. Rather than haunting his political career, the turnaround of Ohio’s charter sector could be another example of Kasich beating the odds. 

A few years into my experience as a public school parent, I can confidently say that I know what angers moms and dads the most: when a teacher puts on a movie during the school day. I don’t care if it’s the afternoon before winter break or the last minutes before summer recess: If anyone is going to use a video to babysit my kids, it’s going to be me! Allowing our children to have screen time comes with a lot of guilt and shame, and parents feel that we should exclusively benefit from of it.

So I make the following argument with a great deal of trepidation: What if watching videos is good for kids? What if it is so good that it should be part of the regular school day?

I’m not talking about the latest Pixar movie (although Inside Out certainly could be a great resource for social and emotional learning). I’m talking about explicitly educational videos that teach content to kids in engaging and memorable ways.

Here’s why: E. D. Hirsch Jr. has argued for thirty years—and cognitive scientists like Dan Willingham have backed him up—that teaching content is essential to teaching reading. While children are learning to decode the alphabet (which they are doing significantly better since the reading reforms of the late 1990s and early 2000s), the other priority is to grow their vocabularies and background knowledge. Those two things are intertwined and closely correlated with a broad understanding of the world.

The ability to pick up any text and make sense of it depends in large part on knowing at least something about its subject matter. A book about Tyrannosaurus rex might not make much sense to a boy who has never learned anything about dinosaurs, even if he can sound out all the words. Similarly, the lessons of a book about Harriet Tubman might be lost on a girl who knows nothing about slavery, even if she understands how to decode. Schools need to see building knowledge not as something that’s nice to do  once kids learn to read; rather, they should promote it as an essential, nonnegotiable component of building literacy, starting as early as possible. This is doubly true for low-income children, who tend to come to school with smaller vocabularies and knowledge about the world than their more fortunate peers.

Yet the message is clearly not getting through to the nation’s elementary schools. The latest data collected by the National Survey of Science and Mathematics Education (a project funded by the National Science Foundation) indicates that just sixteen minutes per day in the typical K?3 classroom is dedicated to social studies, with just nineteen additional minutes earmarked for science. It’s hardly any better in grades 4?6, where the subjects together get forty-five minutes each day on average.

So what are our children and their teachers spending their days doing instead? They are supposedly working on reading, which (the survey suggests) gets an hour and a half on average in the early elementary grades and almost as much in the later grades. Unfortunately, it doesn’t appear to be working. While we’ve made some gains at the fourth-grade level (probably reflecting better instruction in decoding), reading achievement trends by the end of high school are depressingly flat. Hirsch, Willingham, and others believe that’s because we continue to teach reading comprehension as a skill to be mastered rather than seeing it as explicitly linked to content knowledge. We’re wasting too much time in those reading blocks on ineffective practices—like teaching kids to look for the “main idea” of a story—instead of teaching them about the world.

So what can we do to fix the problem? The most obvious solution is to beef up the time spent on social studies, science, and the arts, starting as soon as possible (by kindergarten at the latest). But another approach is to make better use of the time we spend teaching “reading.”

Consider that the typical ninety-minute English language arts block in the primary grades features “literacy rotations” through different “learning stations.” The teacher works with a small group of kids on fundamentals—phonics, phonemic awareness, etc.—while she engages the rest of the class with other tasks at their desks or at stations set up around the classroom. (Stations might feature, for example, phonics games, independent reading time, sight word practice, or writing tasks.)

But why not devote one of the learning centers to teaching social studies and science? If only we had a way to impart content to children (including those who can’t yet read) that could be put on remote control, that was captivating, and even research-based.

Hey wait, we do! It’s called streaming video.

Imagine a second-grade classroom in New York. The EngageNY web site, which hosts a Common Core?aligned curriculum that is both free and voluntary, incorporates lessons from Hirsch’s Core Knowledge Foundation. It suggests that halfway through the year, second graders should learn about insects.

Now imagine that while the teacher is doing small-group instruction on decoding and such, the other children rotate through stations, including an online video station. During the unit on insects, the children might watch the “Giant Bug Invasion” episode of the PBS Kids show Kratts’ Creatures to learn about “exotic bugs such as scorpions, centipedes, tarantulas, and many others.” Another option is the French documentary Microcosmos, available for streaming on Netflix, which documents “insect life in meadows and ponds, using incredible close-ups, slow motion, and time-lapse photography.” After watching a clip, students could construct a Venn diagram comparing two types of insects they learned about (providing accountability and insight on whether they’ve absorbed the lesson) and later go outside to see if they can find any in the wilds of their school playground.

This sort of integrated, on-topic use of streaming video is promoted by Lisa Guernsey and Michael H. Levine in their new book, Tap, Click, Read: Growing Readers in a World of Screens. “The proliferation of interactive media and digital video,” they write, “has made it easier than ever to help children acquire [the] background knowledge that Hirsch, Willingham, and many other scholars have shown to be so important to literacy.”

To be sure, streaming video isn’t a perfect solution to today’s content-free elementary schools. Most notably, some subjects are covered more thoroughly than others. There’s a ton of good video content on science (from children’s shows like Wild Kratts, Sid the Science Kid, Magic School Bus, and Dinosaur Train, along with nature shows on the Discovery Channel and National Geographic). Social studies and the arts, meanwhile, are mostly barren wastelands. Hey PBS: Can you please fix that?

Incorporating the use of content-rich video into elementary school classrooms is hardly a novel or radical idea. It’s surely not a silver bullet or 100 percent solution to all that ails our schools. But it might be one of those 1 percent solutions that measurably moves the needle. Teachers should give it a try

Editor’s note: This article originally appeared in a slightly different form in Education Next.

Last week, we noted the departure of New York Board of Regents Chancellor Merryl Tisch, essentially the face of the state’s rushed reform efforts over the past five years. This week, we learned who will step into the big chair, and the news isn’t wholly reassuring. Betty Rosa, the former Bronx principal and superintendent who is replacing Tisch, is the hand-picked choice of Common Core foes and a veteran of the testing wars. After winning a unanimous 15-0 confirmation vote, she announced that, were she a parent instead of a regent, she would choose to opt her own children out of state tests. That’s a potentially harmful claim in a state where 20 percent of eligible students were kept from participating in the assessments last year. The Tisch-Cuomo team certainly wasn’t a blameless player in the Common Core saga; the former chancellor has herself acknowledged the error in linking the brand-new tests to teacher evaluations, which led to an uproar among the state’s unionized instructors. But swinging too far to the other extreme by undercutting the standards won’t bring the city’s schools any closer to the accountability they desperately need.

You have to wonder how many times Washington State’s charter schools are going to have to prove their right to exist. The public passed a referendum to allow for their creation in 2012. But after eight schools had opened, the state supreme court ruled them unconstitutional last year because charter boards aren’t elected. Then state legislators got behind a bill to save the schools, only to see it stall in committee. Now the bill has finally passed both houses and awaits approval from Governor Jay Inslee, a charter agnostic—but more legal challenges may still await. The legislation attempts to sidestep the issues that tanked the referendum by establishing an alternative funding source for the schools and appointing elected officials like the state superintendent to the statewide charter authorizing commission. We’ll soon see whether those measures will do enough to mollify the court.

In this week’s podcast, Alyssa Schwenk and Brandon Wright discuss Washington State’s new charter school bill, John Kasich’s education record, and the use of on-topic streaming video in classrooms. In the Research Minute, David Griffith explains the benefits of grouping high-IQ kids with high-achievers.

Amber's Research Minute

David Card and Laura Giuliano, "Can Tracking Raise the Test Scores of High-Ability Minority Students?" NBER (March 2016).

I’m interested but rarely surprised whenever independent research shows strong evidence of curriculum effects. So this study of the efficacy of the Reading Recovery program by the Consortium for Policy Research in Education (CPRE) at the University of Pennsylvania’s Graduate School of Education caught my eye. Recall that Reading Recovery, a short-term intervention program of one-to-one tutoring for low-achieving first graders, was one of the big winners of the Investing in Innovation (i3) scale-up grants back in 2010. The feds allocated $45 million in federal dollars, plus $10 million more raised from the private sector, for the training of 3,675 teachers to offer the oddly named program (how do you “recover” a skill you don’t possess?) to more than 300,000 students.

Created forty years ago by a developmental psychologist and professor at the University of Auckland, New Zealand, Reading Recovery is a series of daily, one-on-one lessons provided by specially trained teachers over a period of 12–20 weeks. Its entire point is to intervene early, before young students’ reading difficulties become too hard to address and reverse. Students who participated in Reading Recovery “significantly outperformed students in the control group on measures of overall reading, reading comprehension, and decoding,” the evaluation found. The effects were “similarly large for English language learners and students attending rural schools,” subgroups that were priority interests for the i3 scale-up program. CPRE’s four-year, multi-site, randomized control trial involved nearly seven thousand first graders in more than 1,200 schools. It found that effect sizes on the Iowa Test of Basic Skills (ITBS) Reading Total assessment and its Comprehension and Reading Words subscales at the end of the treatment period ranged between 0.30 and 0.48 standard deviations. Students who participated in Reading Recovery over an approximately five-month period gained 131 percent of the national average rate of progress for first-grade students.

Big study, big results. However it’s worth noting that the study’s control group received no consistent, validated intervention from trained teachers. As psychologist Steven Dykstra waggishly observed, it's like comparing a new cancer treatment to aromatherapy, then claiming the results prove that your treatment is valid. Is the secret sauce Reading Recovery? Or would any well-structured, intensive program of one-on-one intervention work equally well? Answering that would require a massive study that compares Reading Recovery not just to the dull hum of workaday literacy instruction in struggling schools, but to competing programs like Core Knowledge Language Arts, Success For All, Teacher’s College Reader’s Workshop, and any number of “big box” programs from commercial publishers. Once we can line those initiatives up and say, “good, better, best,” we’ll start to seriously arrest and address the desultory reading achievement that chronically plagues American children, particularly low-income black and brown children in underperforming schools.

For now, the reason to cheer is that we have another reason to believe that curriculum matters. Whether it’s the recent Center for American Progress report on “the hidden value of curriculum reform” or Thomas Kane’s report earlier this month for Brookings on textbook effects, our longstanding agnosticism on curriculum and lack of due diligence when weighing the educational materials we put in front of kids is beginning to crumble.

SOURCE: Henry May, Philip Sirinides, Abigail Gray, and Heather Goldsworthy, “Reading Recovery: An Evaluation of the Four-Year i3 Scale-Up,” CRPE (March 2016).

A new study by Brian Jacob and colleagues examines the relationship between teacher hiring data and subsequent teacher performance in D.C. Public Schools (DCPS).

Analysts focused on information gathered between 2011 and 2013 through TeachDC, the district’s centralized application process that collects data on applicants’ education history, employment experience, and eligibility for tenure (the study includes over seven thousand applicants). TeachDC winnows down applicants based on their performance on subject-specific assessments, interviews, and teaching auditions. Those who pass all three stages are put in the recommended pool to be seen by principals (though new hires can also be hired outside the pool). Data also included IMPACT, D.C.’s teacher evaluation system, for all district teachers between 2011–12 and 2013–14.

There are four key findings. First, applicants with no prior teaching experience are less likely to be hired by DCPS schools than those with prior experience. Second, teachers with better academic credentials (e.g., ACT or SAT scores) appear to be no more or less likely to be hired. Third, for those who are hired, achievement measures (undergraduate GPA, SAT and ACT scores, and college selectivity) and some screening measures (such as applicants’ performance on mock teaching lessons) mostly did not predict hiring outcomes, but were all nonetheless positively related to performance. (Those with graduate degrees have higher performance scores as well—contrary to the findings of other studies). Fourth, the three application scores were also positive predictors of teacher performance.

Applicants who are hired by DCPS do tend to have higher average predicted performance, though there are also many applicants who are not hired but whose predicted performance exceeds the average of those who are. Analysts find that principals appear not to pay much heed to the discrete information gathered in the hiring process beyond the recommendation for hiring applicants by simply placing them in the recommendation pool. That’s a mistake—there is other powerful information in the hiring database. Explaining this to principals and encouraging them to better leverage the information could do even more to usher highly effective teachers into classrooms.

SOURCE: Brian Jacob, Jonah E. Rockoff, Eric S. Taylor, Benjamin Lindy, and Rachel Rosen, "Teacher Applicant Hiring and Teacher Performance: Evidence from DC Public Schools," NBER (March 2016).

This report from Public Impact describes an unusual $55 million school turnaround effort in North Carolina’s Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools called Project L.I.F.T. (Leadership and Investment for Transformation). Despite its sizable price tag, the project offers lessons for funders, district leaders, and anyone else taking on the tough work of overhauling low-performing schools—as spelled out in this examination of outcomes at the project’s two-year midway point.

Launched in 2012–13, L.I.F.T. is an effort led and largely funded by a group of donors working in partnership with the district to raise the graduation rate at West Charlotte High School and improve performance at select feeder schools. The project’s initial investment group, led by local foundations, pledged an astonishing $40.5 million to the effort during its planning phase; corporate sponsors, individual donors, and federal School Improvement Grants and Title I dollars have funded the rest. Project reforms center on four areas: time, talent, technology, and parent and community engagement. This has included implementing extended learning in select schools and opening a credit recovery high school, as well as issuing hiring bonuses, revamping the district’s hiring calendar, and realizing “Opportunity Culture”—an initiative through which teachers teach more students for more pay. Laptops have been subsidized or purchased for families and elementary schools. Engagement efforts included ongoing communications initiatives and wraparound services such as mobile medical clinics and dental clinics.

Two years in, L.I.F.T. has fallen short of its ambitious goals of a 90 percent graduation rate at West Charlotte High School and a 90 percent proficiency rate for students in feeder schools. (The authors point out how North Carolina’s new state standards, assessments, and proficiency cutoff points have made the 90 percent threshold even more onerous.) But L.I.F.T. has seen some early successes: West Charlotte’s graduation rate has risen to 78 percent, up from 56 percent in 2011–12; all nine L.I.F.T. schools met or exceeded growth targets in reading; and all but one exceeded growth in math in 2013–14, compared to five schools meeting or exceeding growth in both subjects during the project’s early implementation phase. Teacher vacancy rates at the start of the school year have plummeted from three hundred in 2012 to fewer than five two years later, and overall teacher retention has nudged up by six percentage points, from 55 percent to 61 percent. The district received eight hundred applications for twenty-seven Opportunity Culture positions and is expanding the program. The district is beginning to borrow L.I.F.T.’s greatest successes and replicate them elsewhere (including a University of Virginia school turnaround leadership initiative). Thus, despite missing promised benchmarks, the project has sown many seeds—especially around teacher and principal talent—that may yield later payoffs.

This North Carolina endeavor is worthy of close study by state leaders for at least two reasons. First, the funding and governance model is unique and could be adopted by city leaders: As the authors note, “public-private partnerships of this scale and ambition are relatively rare.” Project funders, along with the Charlotte-Mecklenburg superintendent and one community member, make up Project L.I.F.T.’s board. An executive director and a handful of staff (including a former Wells Fargo recruiter as the human capital strategist) drive the project and are dually accountable to the L.I.F.T. board and the district. With just twelve pages of governance guidelines and a five-page “collaboration agreement” between them, the relationship between the L.I.F.T. board and the district is characterized by trust and nimbleness—hard to come by in the typical city school system. Second, Public Impact’s report is a thorough review of a large-scale project that includes useful information on the timeline, budget details, and admitted mistakes at the midway point; that kind of careful documentation is necessary when undertaking an innovative (and expensive) reform project. For urban reform groups seeking to turn around low-performing schools, this report should be required reading.

SOURCE: Juli Kim and Shonaka Ellison, “The Project L.I.F.T. Story: Early Lessons from a Public-Private Education Turnaround Initiative,” Public Impact (December 2015).