The Education Gadfly Weekly

Policy wonks and political prognosticators have begun to forecast the collateral damage that is apt to follow if Donald Trump manages—in spite of himself, and notwithstanding his Wisconsin setback—to win the Republican nomination, damaging not only GOP prospects for retrieving the White House but also the party’s odds of prevailing in innumerable races for Congress and for state (and even local) leadership. Following in the wake of those generally dire prognostications are early conjectures about the policy shifts that may ensue in sundry realms both international and domestic if Democrats are positioned to chart the future course.

For education reformers parsing this prospect, it’s useful first to recall the many worthy changes that followed the GOP’s 2010 sweep of a galaxy of state and federal offices (obviously omitting the one that’s ovular). Though nothing in the list below is (from my perspective) perfect, it’s hard to picture many—perhaps any—of these things happening had Republicans not been in positions of influence:

• New assessments in most states, geared to higher academic standards and featuring higher “cut scores” that correspond more accurately and honestly to the actual demands of college, career, and international competitiveness
• Accelerating the spread of school choice, both the public version (typically charter schools) and the private kind (including vouchers, tax-credit scholarships, and education savings accounts)
• Multiple experiments with nontraditional forms of education governance, such as “recovery districts” 
• Serious efforts in many states and communities to implement forthright evaluations of teacher and administrator performance, often linked to student learning gains
• Newfound attention in some places to the educational needs of high-ability learners—and also to high-quality career and technical education
• The (overdue) overhaul of No Child Left Behind in the direction of re-empowering states and curbing federal heavy-handedness

To be sure: Some of these changes were brought about through bipartisan effort, some were spearheaded by Democrats, and some were accelerated by Race to the Top. But I invite anyone to demonstrate that most of these reforms would have happened in most of these places were not GOP lawmakers a force to be reckoned with.

As we force ourselves to contemplate the likelihood that November 2016 may usher in widespread erosion in the ranks of Republican policy makers, what might we anticipate on the education reform front? Keep in mind that the Supreme Court majority is already up for grabs; that far more Republican senators are vulnerable in this cycle than Democrats; that GOP influence is shaky in such traditionally blue states as Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, and Illinois; that “purple” states like Colorado are always iffy; and that Democrats in some jurisdictions (Wisconsin comes swiftly to mind) are almost literally itching to undo key changes that recent years have wrought.

The good news for reformers, if there is any, is that the kinds of changes that bring actual, tangible benefit to thousands of families are hard to undo (though their growth may be curbed and their operations slowly impeded). In the realm of school choice, for example, it seems all but impossible that extant charter schools and private school choice programs will be abolished. Witness the inability of Mayor de Blasio to reverse New York City’s vibrant charter school movement, even in mostly blue Albany. Thank you, Eva Moskowitz—a Democrat! Witness, too, the enactment of a new charter law in deep blue Washington State, lest actual schools be shut in the aftermath of that state’s judicial dismantling of the first such statute.

Far more vulnerable to undermining or repeal are the reforms that bring little direct, palpable, short-term benefit to a constituency of parents and children—things like school and educator accountability and standards, alternative certification, and kindred efforts to weaken the hegemony of education schools and traditional licensure practices. The public cannot readily see what difference these things make, and they’re thoroughly unloved by most educators, their unions, and the rest of the old “establishment.” Accordingly, efforts to weaken, defer, or do away with such measures won’t provoke many big marches on the statehouse. (On the other hand, such efforts won’t draw much public enthusiasm, either.)

Also vulnerable are reformers’ efforts to curb the power and influence of public-sector unions, whether through legislation or litigation. This is especially worth noting because a likely consequence of a liberal-majority Supreme Court will be new curbs on the influence of business and wealthy individuals when it comes to campaign contributions. Indeed, today’s deadlocked court failed just last month to overturn the Friedrichs decision, a serious blow to reformers in and beyond California who were striving to liberate teachers from mandatory contributions to their unions’ organizing activities.

The various bureaucracies that have long dominated the operations of K–12 education at every level will be re-empowered—and their capacity for regulatory heavy-handedness enhanced—whether in the realm of special education, textbook approval, or school discipline, and the individuals placed in leadership roles in those bureaucracies are more likely to be plucked from establishment ranks. That’s also likely to happen in new-style bureaucracies (such as recovery districts) that are ultimately answerable to elected officials; this could gradually result in cramped, overregulated charter schools and other choice programs. The diminished capacity of GOP lawmakers (in Congress and state legislatures alike) to ride herd on bureaucratic excesses will embolden those in authority to give freer rein to their own predilections and to the preferences of those they view as constituents. Those constituents, in turn, are more likely to be the “producers” of education and less apt to be “consumers.” Even where Republicans retain majorities, the disarray and infighting within the GOP will dampen their ability to get anything done and distract them from such causes as revitalizing the schools of their states and cities. We can expect Democrats to spend more on education, yes, but more of it will go to the education system’s innumerable first-, second-, and third-order hangers on—vendors, employees, factions, interest groups, and activist clusters. Which means the interests of children, parents, and taxpayers will be given less heed and fewer resources.

Thanks a whole bunch, Donald Trump. 

Allow me to let you in on a little secret from deep inside the nation's policy making machinery: Policy elites view the rise of Donald Trump—the candidate and everything he stands for—with equal parts alarm and revulsion. That's probably not much of a secret. A campaign that draws its oxygen from anti-elite sentiments probably doesn't expect much attention or affection from think tanks and serious people in education reform. Not surprisingly, there hasn't been much.

But it's well past time to start thinking seriously about education reform in the Trump era. Even if 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue becomes the one piece of real estate destined never to be festooned with the candidate's surname, the restive 2016 campaign should serve as a wake-up call. Broad swaths of Americans feel disconnected from public institutions and are convinced that policy makers don't understand or much care about them.

Education policy has done little to bridge that divide. When downwardly mobile white, working-class Americans hear us talking about education reform, it's a fair bet they don't think we're talking about them and their children. And they're not mistaken. The priorities and language of reformers—achievement gaps, no-excuses schools, social justice, and the "civil rights issue of our generation"—betrays a focus on fixing schools attended by urban, low-income families of color.

Those looking for advice on how to bring disaffected Trump voters back into the fold—or the economically disconnected in for a landing—might wish to start with a copy of Education for Upward Mobility, a new book edited by my Fordham Institute colleague Mike Petrilli. (I contributed a chapter on elementary education and literacy.)

There are myriad recommendations in the book, which Mike boils down into three major themes: First, balance our fixation on college completion with renewed attention to career and technical education; next prioritize the needs of "strivers"—the low-income students who are working hardest to make it to the middle class; finally, encourage all students to follow the "success sequence"—including delaying parenthood—as the surest means of avoiding pitfalls that push kids off the path to upward mobility.

I strongly agree with Mike that ending education reform's "college or bust" mentality is the right place to start. On the one hand, encouraging college-going makes a great deal of sense. The wage premiums associated with college completion make it the nearest thing in education to an economic sure thing. Even when a recent graduate has trouble landing a good job right after collecting his degrees, he can expect to earn as much as a million dollars more over the course of his career than someone whose education ended with a high school diploma.

But college-for-all is another example of the kind of unrealistic, aspirational moon shot (like every child reading on grade level by 2014) that education reform seems powerless to resist. Andrew Kelly of the American Enterprise Institute notes that of children from families in the bottom third of household income, a mere 14 percent of children 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," Petrilli points out. That's simply too many to ignore.

"A better approach for many young people would be to develop coherent pathways, from high school onward, into authentic technical education options at the post-secondary level," Petrilli writes. "This can start with [career and technical education] or apprenticeships in high school."

I also strongly agree with the book’s plea not to forget the strivers. As a teacher, I often felt encouraged—tacitly and sometimes overtly—to focus my energies on my students who were below grade level. Those who were at or above "proficiency" were, from the perspective of test-driven accountability policies (and the classroom practices those policies encouraged), already where we needed them to be. But the strivers are also our "best customers." Parents who send their children to school every day in uniform, with homework neat and checked, and for whom the voice of a teacher is the word of God, are signaling a belief in the transformative power of education. If their children do everything that is asked, yet graduate from high school unprepared for college what comes next, parents feel betrayed. That's on us. We've earned their contempt.

The last recommendation is the most controversial—but arguably the most potent. Suppose you knew there was something you could teach kids that, if it were learned and followed, would give them a 98 percent chance of breaking out of poverty and into the middle class. You'd probably say it's not just important to teach it, but that we had a moral obligation to do so. OK, here's the formula: 1) Stay in school and graduate, 2) get a full-time job, 3) get married, and 4) don't bring a child into the world until you've completed steps 1–3.

Isabel Sawhill and Ron Haskins of Brookings dubbed this the "success sequence." On the one hand, it feels awfully personal. On the other hand, schools are prescriptive about all kinds of personal habits and behaviors, from teaching small children to share to warning older kids about the dangers of drinking and smoking (to say nothing of district-mandated sex education and HIV prevention programs). The data is what it is: Violate all three "success sequence" behaviors and you have a better than three-in-four chance of living in poverty. Follow all three and now you have a three-in-four chance of reaching the middle class.

Still squeamish? "As so often happens with the nation's social problems," observes Haskins in Petrilli's book, "society must fall back on the schools to help young people, especially the disadvantaged ones, make better life choices."

The 2016 campaign has been a wake-up call for America's elites generally and its policy elites specifically. It's time for a course correction.

Editor's note: This post originally appeared in a slightly different form at U.S. News & World Report.

Now that New York’s students are heading into another year of Common Core-aligned standardized testing, it’s probably time to start taking bets on exactly how many kids will actually show up. With last year’s opt-out numbers reaching a staggering 20 percent and a new Regents chancellor claiming that she’d keep her own kids from taking the exams, assessment boosters might be wondering if anyone’s willing to speak up for the joy of filling in tiny bubbles. If so, they’ve found perhaps the least surprising champion in Success Academy honcho Eva Moskowitz, who gave a stridently pro-assessment interview last week following a pre-test pep rally in Harlem. “We need to know how the most affluent communities are performing and whether our kids can do as well as those—and you can’t do that with internal assessments,” she noted. Her arguments were later echoed by old pal Al Sharpton—you remember, the guy who memorably roasted her for protesting Mayor de Blasio’s charter policies. The good reverend is now on the record imploring students to take the tests and expose gaps in achievement. See? Testing was always meant to bring people together.

Chicago kids looking to enjoy a long spring weekend got a treat last Friday, when thousands of union teachers staged a one-day walkout and closed the city’s schools. The cool-sounding “wildcat” strike, which pulled in local low-wage workers and tied up downtown traffic, was launched in protest of the state government’s failure to agree on legislation addressing the district’s yawning financial deficit. The union’s relationship with the city government, which has been contentious since a much longer work stoppage in 2012, isn’t likely to benefit from the demonstration; the school board has denounced it as illegal and filed a complaint with the Illinois Educational Labor Relations Board. If they’re hoping to get under the skin of Mayor (and union bête noire) Rahm Emanuel, though, they’re likely to be disappointed: He spent the weekend in New York, savoring a performance of Hamilton on Broadway. On the bright side, it’s possible he was just absorbing some edifying lessons in civics.

Rhode Island is, in many ways, the unpolished jewel in New England’s crown. Uncomplicated by Connecticut’s plutocratic sterility and Maine’s interminable tracts of frozen darkness, it is nevertheless easy to lose track of during the American traveler’s long sojourn to the mid-Atlantic. But state officials want you to know that there’s more to Massachusetts’s tiny southern neighbor than carnivorous seagulls and organized crime! Just last week, reform-friendly Education Commissioner Ken Wagner released his plan to allow the state’s schools to be designated “empowerment schools,” allowing them unheard-of levels of autonomy. Under the proposal, such entities would gain far greater budgeting, curriculum, and personnel authority. They would also be allowed to embrace open enrollment, accepting students from anywhere in the state. The plan is already receiving a far better reception than the state’s troubled new publicity campaign: In addition to ludicrously overbilling Rhode Island’s share of national historic monuments, the publicity push also attempted to christen a state slogan of “Cooler & Warmer,” which, as you may have gathered, makes no sense. Hope they aren’t earmarking future tourism dollars in the education budget.

On this week’s podcast, Robert Pondiscio and Brandon Wright discuss Donald Trump’s effect on education reform, efforts to improve gifted education in Illinois, and Eva Moskowitz’s disapproval of the opt-out movement. In the Research Minute, Amber Northern examines school turnaround efforts in North Carolina.

Amber's Research Minute

Jennifer A. Heissel and Helen Ladd, "School Turnaround in North Carolina: A Regression Discontinuity Analysis," CALDER (March 2016).

A recent study released by NCES compares the competencies and skill levels of U.S. adults to their counterparts in foreign countries. The study relies heavily on the Program for the International Assessment of Adult Competencies (PIAAC), which tests three “domains”: literacy, numeracy, and problem solving.

Researchers looked at data from 2012 and 2014 on a representative sample of 8,670 U.S. households—including PIAAC test scores, educational attainment, employment status, and more. They split the sample into three subgroups: unemployed adults (ages 16–65), employed young adults (ages 16–34), and employed older adults (ages 66–74).

Analysts found that, compared to people in other participating countries, U.S. adults between the ages of 16 and 65 have lower average PIAAC scale scores in numeracy and problem solving. American young people are less ready for college and career, and larger percentages of them scored in PIAAC’s lowest level in literacy, numeracy, and problem solving.

Moreover, compared to the international average, U.S. students who graduate high school typically only possess reading, math, and problem solving skills needed to complete brief and simple tasks in the workplace. And 69 percent of unemployed young adults in the United States scored at PIAAC’s lowest level in problem solving. That’s far more than the international average of 58 percent.

Researchers also pinpoint disparities among American workforce-aged adults. In the 16–65 age bracket, the percentage of employed adults scoring at the top proficiency levels (Levels 4 and 5) in literacy and numeracy was eight percentage points higher than the rates for unemployed adults, suggesting a link between these skills and success in the workforce. Racial disparities were also noted within this same age range. Larger percentages of white unemployed adults scored at the top proficiency levels in all three domains compared to their black and Hispanic counterparts. And black and Hispanic young adults between the ages of 16 and 34 fared worse in literacy than their peers in other racial groups, regardless of employment status.

Although analysts did not explore the “complex interactions and relationship” among variables, keeping readers from drawing causal inferences based upon the results, their findings do reaffirm the importance of closing America’s achievement gap and strengthening our K–12 system so that high school graduates can be internationally competitive.

Rigorous standards, along with state- and district-level expansion of CTE programs, can help accomplish this only if states remain committed to these changes for the long haul.

SOURCE: Bobby D. Rampey et al., “Skills of U.S. Unemployed, Young, and Older Adults in Sharper Focus: Results from the Program for the International Assessment of Adult Competencies (PIAAC) 2012/2014: First Look,” National Center for Education Statistics (March 2016).

In recent years, a few early childhood advocates have blasted the Common Core State Standards for their “harmful” effects on kindergarteners, particularly in reading. While a careful examination of the standards reveals this claim to be overstated—and overheated—the notion that we are killing kindergarten was gaining traction long before Common Core came onto the scene. Until now, this narrative has been informed largely by anecdotal evidence, idealism, and good old-fashioned nostalgia. Noting that “surprisingly little empirical evidence” has been gathered on the changing nature of kindergarten classrooms, this paper attempts to fill the void by comparing kindergarten and first-grade classrooms in 1998 and 2010—capturing the changes in teachers’ perceptions of kindergarten over time.

Using the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study, researchers compared survey response data from public school kindergarten teachers in 1998 and 2010 to investigate changes across five dimensions: teachers’ beliefs about school readiness, curricular focus and use of time, classroom materials, pedagogical approach, and assessment practices.

Overall, researchers found that kindergarten has indeed become more like first grade. When asked to rate the importance of thirteen school readiness skills, 2010 teachers tended to rate all of them as more important than their 1998 counterparts had. This was true for academic skills (identifying letters, counting to twenty) and non-academic ones (being “sensitive to others’ feelings,” problem solving). The most striking change in beliefs was related to reading: only 31 percent of 1998 teachers believed that children should learn to read in kindergarten; by 2010, that figure had risen to 80 percent. In short, teachers expect more from kindergarteners than they did in the 1990s—not necessarily a bad thing, given that their expectations have an enormous influence on student behavior and achievement.

However, the findings also point to an unfortunate narrowing in curriculum. Namely, the percentage of those teaching daily music and art went down (by eighteen and sixteen percentage points, respectively). It’s not that music or art disappeared altogether; they just happened less often. An overwhelming majority of teachers in 2010 still reported teaching music and art weekly. (On a positive note, more teachers in 2010 than in 1998 reported that children had daily recess.) Kindergarten teachers also reported an increasing reliance on didactic instructional activities (use of worksheets, workbooks, and textbooks) as well as fewer centers for hands-on learning (particularly water or sand tables, art stations, and dramatic play and science areas). Schools serving more low-income and non-white children were more likely to use didactic instruction and less likely to provide hands-on learning opportunities.

Several looming questions remain and point to the need for further study. For one thing, there’s an ongoing debate regarding how much academic content is appropriate for kindergarteners—some argue that too much is damaging, while others posit that exposure to rich content in kindergarten benefits students. Given the wide range of developmental maturity among kindergarten-age students, it seems both imprecise and unproductive to generalize in either direction. (Instead, educators and policy makers may want to explore solutions, like a transition year between kindergarten and first grade or competency-based groups instead of age-based ones, to help mitigate concerns that less developmentally mature children are harmed by increasing rigor.) Additionally, the paper briefly mentions that “low-performing teachers in high-stakes grades are disproportionately reassigned to untested early elementary classrooms.” This trend deserves urgent attention because low-income children can’t afford underperforming teachers in the early grades. Finally, the report alludes to—and rightly rejects—the notion that academically oriented classrooms crowd out exploration, social skill development, and play. High-quality kindergarten teachers do both. Yet low-income students, again, are more likely to receive poorly structured pedagogy and get shortchanged.

Today’s kindergarten classrooms are increasingly rigorous, meaning that youngsters who come to school unprepared are at an even greater disadvantage than in the past. The study reminds us of the importance of high-quality, targeted preschool, as well as teacher policies that ensure that kindergarten students—especially those with skills deficiencies—don’t get short shrift.

SOURCE: Daphna Bassok, Scott Latham, and Anna Rorem, “Is Kindergarten the New First Grade?” American Educational Research Association (January 6, 2016). 

Social Impact Bonds (SIB), also known as “pay for success” loans, are a novel form of financing social service interventions, including education initiatives. First piloted six years ago in the United Kingdom and now making their way to the United States, SIBs aim to leverage private funding to start new programs or scale proven ones. Broadly speaking, the instrument works like this: Private lenders and philanthropists deliver dollars—the bond—to a nonprofit provider that, in turn, implements the intervention. A government agency pays back the bond principal with interest, but only if the program achieves pre-specified results.

In its ideal form, an SIB has the potential to be a triple win: Governments receive risk-free funding to test or expand social programs that could help them save money; investors reap a financial return if the program works; and providers gain access to new sources of funding. To ensure that the deal will benefit all parties, due diligence occurs on the front end, including selecting a program provider, estimating government savings, and developing an evaluation method. 

To date, the discussion on SIBs has been largely conceptual, engaging both supporters and skeptics alike. But a fascinating new report written by MDRC President Gordon Berlin provides a first-hand look at an early SIB experiment. In July 2012, Bloomberg Philanthropies, Goldman Sachs, MDRC, and New York City teamed up to create a four-year, $9.6 million SIB that funded a behavioral therapy program at Rikers Island jail. The objective was to reduce adolescent recidivism by at least 10 percent. The deal was structured in such a way that after three years (summer 2015), the program evaluators would determine whether to continue into a fourth year or pull the plug.

The program fell short of its goal and folded early. Using quasi-experimental methods, independent evaluators found that the intervention did not reduce recidivism for its participants. Berlin describes the implementation challenges, among them the harsh prison environment and hurdles to program completion (just 9 percent of participants completed the full intervention). The null findings resulted in Goldman taking a loss of about $1.2 million (Bloomberg’s grant protected the bank from absorbing the entire loss). Meanwhile, the New York City government was freed from payment: Under the SIB terms, it would have paid back the principal if the program met the 10 percent threshold—and more (principal plus interest) if the reduction had been greater than 10 percent.

Based on this experience, Berlin provides helpful lessons for those contemplating SIB financing. To highlight just a few: First, he notes that SIBs, as currently structured, tend to carry more risk on the lenders’ side. SIBs are commonly conceptualized as high-risk/high-return “venture capital” for the social service sector. Yet the “bond-like returns” governments may be willing to pay aren’t commensurate with the risk that SIB investors have to bear, thus limiting their viability. Second, Berlin discusses the incredible intricacy of SIB deals and how the “tyranny of inflexible loan agreements” can stifle on-the-ground flexibility. For instance, the Rikers Island program found it more difficult than expected to recruit participants; consequently, the parties had to negotiate changes in the already complex SIB contract. He concludes, “Each SIB will confront this tension between inflexible contract terms and the need to respond to unexpected operational challenges.”

This report is important reading for anyone interested in SIBs, including their potential use in financing education interventions like pre-K or scaling high-quality schools. (Utah is presently using an SIB to fund pre-K for 595 low-income children, with the aim of reducing special education placements in elementary school.) To be sure, SIBs hold the potential to unlock non-traditional financing to help grow and replicate innovative programs; they also rightly focus on results and rigorous evaluation—features not traditionally emphasized in the public sector. But as this report acknowledges, such arrangements must be done thoughtfully and with a strong dose of realism. Berlin observes, “Reality is turning out to be more nuanced than either proponents or detractors have promised.”

SOURCE: Gordon L. Berlin, “Learning from Experience: A Guide to Social Impact Bond Investing,” MDRC (March 2016).