The Education Gadfly Weekly

We have many reasons to be troubled by the Left’s push to dramatically reduce the use of suspensions and expulsions by public schools. At the top of the list is the worry that disorder and violence will return to high-poverty schools across the country, putting the safety and learning of poor and minority students at even greater risk. This is hardly hypothetical; it’s already happening, report teachers in New York, Minnesota, and elsewhere.

But an even more fundamental question is whether school discipline reformers are diagnosing the problem correctly. Many analysts and activists look at national, state, and local data illustrating large disparities in discipline rates between racial subgroups and interpret them as proof of racial discrimination or bias. Why else would African Americans and Latinos be suspended or expelled at much higher rates than whites or Asians?

In a system of fifty million children and one hundred thousand schools, instances of minority children being treated unfairly will undoubtedly occur. A white teenager pulls a fire alarm and gets a slap on the wrist; a black ten-year-old does the same and gets a week’s suspension. That’s wrong and is a legitimate target for civil rights enforcers.

But discrimination isn’t the only possible explanation for disparities in discipline rates. What about disparities in actual student infractions? Nobody seriously thinks that boys are suspended and expelled at dramatically higher rates than girls because of gender bias; everyone understands that boys, for a host of reasons, are much more likely to exhibit violent or antisocial behavior. But if you raise the possibility that kids from some racial groups are likelier to exhibit violent or antisocial behavior than others—not because of their race, but because of other factors in their lives—you risk getting labeled a racist.

Consider another analogy: the racial gap in academic achievement. Few reputable scholars contend that it’s caused exclusively by racial bias or discrimination. Most would say that less money for minority schools, less experienced teachers, and a past history of unintentional or unspoken bias (e.g., lower expectations for racial minorities, white flight) are partial explanations.

But no serious analyst would ignore the role of background characteristics. African American and Latino students are, tragically, much more likely to be poor than white and Asian students;  much more likely to be living in long-term or deep poverty; and more likely, too, to grow up with only one parent, or with parents who didn’t complete high school. We know that all of these factors are related, on average, to lower test scores. That’s why much of the racial achievement gap is already present when students start kindergarten. Could our schools be doing more to close the gap in grades K–12? Should we fund our schools more equitably? Should we launch an all-out attack on teacher bias? Yes, yes, and yes. But we’ve learned not to look at the achievement gap and place 100 percent of the blame on the schools.

So why do we blame schools exclusively when it comes to discipline? Children growing up in poverty, in single-parent homes where fathers are absent, and in violent neighborhoods are more likely to act out in school. African American and Latino children are more likely to endure these harsh life circumstances than their white and Asian peers.

Some scholars have looked at these questions and found that poverty and related factors can’t explain all of the racial disparity in discipline rates for minority and for non-minority students. (The same is true of the achievement gap.) Perhaps that’s because their data sets don’t have the best indicators for poverty. Perhaps their findings really do indicate willful racial bias and discrimination. But even these scholars, who are also strong advocates of discipline reform, acknowledge that background factors do explain some of the disparity.

That brings us to the Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights (OCR). As many of us have noted before, OCR has published guidance explaining that it will investigate racial disparities in discipline rates and that it may find school districts guilty of discrimination even if they have a race-neutral discipline policy that is implemented on an even-handed basis. In other words, even if there’s no evidence of discrimination, the fact that certain racial groups are disciplined disproportionately is enough for OCR to find that students’ civil rights have been violated.

Put aside that Orwellian logic for a moment. One might think that OCR would, at a minimum, strive to control for poverty when doing their analyses. In other words, if OCR is going to go down this road, surely it should be careful not to identify the wrong school districts as over-disciplining certain groups of students. If it fails to take these pains, we might expect social scientists across the political and ideological spectrum to cry out. We might even hope that the American Education Research Association would issue a statement criticizing the practice.

Think again.

Last week brought news that the Oklahoma City school district agreed to settle a complaint with OCR. At the heart of the federal case was the fact that African American students are 62 percent more likely to be given in-school suspensions in Oklahoma City than are white students.

That was it. As far as I can tell, nobody found instances of black youngsters being penalized more harshly than white kids for the same infractions. Nor did anybody ask whether African American children were at greater risk for misbehavior due to poverty and related factors. In Oklahoma City, African Americans are three times likelier to live in poverty than are whites. We should be surprised that Oklahoma City’s racial disparity in school discipline rates isn’t larger.

So Oklahoma City will suspend fewer students, possibly putting student learning and safety at risk, because nobody was willing to challenge the federal government’s questionable assumptions. Oklahoma politicians were up in arms over the feds’ heavy-handedness on the Common Core; why are they so willing to be pushed around on student discipline?

Children have a right to be safe in school and not overly disturbed by their own classmates when trying to learn. Nobody deserves to be subjected to violence and disorder. But neither should any student be subjected to discrimination in how penalties are handed out. Getting this right requires good judgment and hard work. The Office for Civil Rights appears to be coming up far short on both counts.

Editor’s note: This piece was originally published in a slightly different form at National Review Online.

School leadership is one of the keys to making our schools stronger and giving every student the educational opportunities that prepare him to succeed. That’s why the Thomas B. Fordham Institute and the Center on Reinventing Public Education recently released A Policymaker’s Guide to Improving School Leadership for state policymakers and advocacy groups interested in improving school leadership policies.

Much attention has been focused on teacher effectiveness, but there has been too little discussion about the role that principals play in ensuring that educators have the support, tools, and working environment they need to provide high-quality instruction. Education advocates need to understand which state policies most impact principal quality and how they can strengthen or alter them to benefit schools.

As with any proposed reform, however, advocates are likely to encounter some pushback from institutions and individuals resistant to change. Yet many of the arguments against changing school leadership policies are not founded on a full understanding of the research and facts. What follows are rebuttals to five common justifications for maintaining the status quo.

1. Improving the principal training pipeline

Argument: It’s not clear that preparation programs are the problem. And even if they are, we can’t fix them by adopting new state policies.

Rebuttal: Researchers have been recommending that states raise standards and strengthen oversight of principal preparation programs for over a decade. Yet studies indicate that states are still woefully behind on basing decisions about leadership programs on key data indicators, like how well principals perform once they’re on the job. Far too many training programs are not providing rigorous courses or relevant clinical experience, so it’s unsurprising that schools and CMOs across the country report significant challenges in recruiting effective principals.

2. Evaluations

Argument: It’s too difficult to evaluate principals because a school’s success depends on too many other factors outside a principal’s control.

Rebuttal: When it comes to in-school factors that influence student success, school leadership is second only to classroom instruction. In fact, highly effective principals raise student achievement by somewhere between two and seven months of additional learning each school year compared to the average principal, while ineffective principals lower achievement by the same amount. And a great leader’s impact is more significant in more challenging schools. So it’s clear that we need to be able to identify our strongest principals and make sure they’re leading schools where students need them the most.

More importantly, research shows that successful principals are making better decisions and using their time more wisely. For instance, effective principals set high standards and create school cultures that facilitate high-quality teaching and learning, leading to better classroom instruction and greater school-wide gains. Good principals are also more likely to make personnel changes in grade levels where students are underperforming. In short, there are many things within a principal’s control that impact whether students and educators are more successful, and we should evaluate principals on their effectiveness in these areas.

3. Distributed leadership

Argument: Schools work best when there is one leader in charge, and most teachers just want to teach and be left alone. How do we know distributed leadership will even work?

Rebuttal: When the objective of a good distributed leadership model is improving instruction, researchers have found that the model strengthens the professional community and helps educators demonstrate instructional practices that are strongly associated with student achievement.

Moreover, it’s no secret that some schools and districts have a serious problem retaining their best teachers. One key reason? Teachers often feel that they don’t have advancement opportunities, particularly those that enable them to stay in their schools and classrooms. Distributed leadership eases the burden for principals and provides important opportunities for great teachers to develop and practice leadership skills while remaining in teaching roles.

The United Kingdom is way ahead of the United States in this area, having redesigned school leadership positions to create specific, substantive responsibilities for teachers at different levels within schools. And although it’s true that distributing leadership might not work in every school, it has shown great promise when teachers are responsible for carrying out certain leadership practices and the principal’s role is aligned to fit the new model.

4. Empowering principals with autonomy

Argument: The problem isn’t that principals don’t have enough authority, but rather that they just aren’t doing their jobs.

Rebuttal: We know that principals have a big job to do, and they know it too. One problem is that less than half of principals surveyed feel like they have control over the things that facilitate success. And they’re right. Principals often lack control over how to build and manage staff, even though it is one of the most important elements of principal effectiveness. And many have little say in how they can use their funding; they often encounter inflexible and outdated district procurement rules that make it difficult to spend quickly, efficiently, and creatively.

All of these issues matter because research shows that leaders in schools that have autonomy to determine their needs, goals, and programs do the best job of identifying approaches to change. Simply put, when effective principals have autonomy over decision making, schools improve.

5. Retaining our best principals

Argument: Principal turnover might be a problem, but it’s primarily the result of district under-funding and troubled schools.

Rebuttal: Principal turnover is a big problem. According to one study, more than one-half of middle school principals and almost three-quarters of high school principals leave their initial schools within five years. That’s bad for school stability and expensive for districts.

There are, however, other factors at work beyond the tough job and limited resources. Compensation is a problem. The difference in pay between veteran teachers and school principals is often small and not proportional to the latter’s greater responsibility and accountability. And principals often come in unprepared; this is especially true when they are placed in schools that don’t match their skills, even though a good fit is a major factor in principal success. Districts need to account for this reality in recruitment, because when they don’t, principals feel isolated and hamstrung by policies that rob them of their autonomy over personnel and funding decisions.

When faced with such challenging environments, it’s no wonder that many principals leave in search of a school that makes life a little easier.

It doesn't have to be this way. States can do a lot to improve retention of great principals, such as investing in leadership development, establishing peer networks, requiring districts to provide ongoing coaching, and removing barriers to autonomy. And states can help keep the best principals at the schools that need them most by ensuring that districts have greater flexibility when it comes to compensation—and incentivizing them to use it.

***

Enough with the excuses and cynicism! School leadership matters a lot, so let’s help states position their principals for success.

Eric Lerum is the author of A Policymaker’s Guide to Improving School Leadership. He is also vice president of growth and strategy for America Succeeds, where he leads the organization’s efforts to amplify the business leader voice in support of improving public education.

The whole point of the Every Student Succeeds Act was to revert financial and regulatory authority back to states after No Child Left Behind’s era of federal supremacy. In addition to rolling back the Education Department’s manifold oversight powers, though, the law also takes affirmative steps to grant states more flexibility to achieve their desired educational ends. Case in point: The good folks over at Chiefs for Change have released a paper zeroing in on an unsung ESSA wrinkle that allows states to set aside up to 3 percent of their federal Title I funding for so-called “Direct Student Services.” These funds, which must be earmarked for districts with large percentages of underperforming schools, can include online course access, tutoring, school choice programs, and the like. If every state availed itself of this perk, it could free up $425 million per year. That buys an awful lot of state autonomy.

Last week, we told you about “School Money,” NPR’s ongoing examination of educational finance in districts across the country. In addition to long, national entries, the organization has also filed evocative dispatches from its affiliate stations in different states. Boston’s WGBH featured a gloating segment on how Massachusetts became the national gold standard, while WBHM in Alabama shined a spotlight on the unrelieved poverty and deprivation in rural Sumter County. One story out of Illinois, however, perfectly demonstrates the purpose of the exercise: In tiny Chicago Rindge School District, a three-school entity on the troubled southern end of the city that mostly serves low-income students and English language learners, per-pupil funding stands at just $9,794—roughly 20 percent lower than the national average. Just north of the city, meanwhile, each student at Rondout District 72 is lavished with $28,639 per year as a result of the heavy property taxes paid primarily by local businesses. School funding isn’t an altogether simple concept to grasp, but certain inequities require very little elaboration.

Dollars aren’t the only resource distributed unevenly across the country. In some states, qualified teachers can be found in abundance, while in others, experienced instructors with the necessary credentials are scarcer than hen’s teeth. That’s the assessment of the Hechinger Report’s Jill Barshay, who investigated complaints of a national teacher shortage only to find that many places already have more than they can use. Numbers can even fluctuate within individual states—Oklahoma, for instance, can’t seem to push the glut of surplus teachers from its overserved central portion to outlying regions where principals can’t fill classrooms. Those hiring problems have prompted national efforts to bring new recruits into the field, but a better solution might be to keep existing professionals from quitting so soon—and incentivizing them to go where they’re most needed.

On this week’s podcast, Mike Petrilli and Robert Pondiscio celebrate Prince’s little-known legacy in the world of education, assess education policies that hold parents accountable, and question the alleged diversity of the opt-out movement. During the Research Minute, Amber Northern examines the causes and effects of test score manipulation in New York State.

Amber's Research Minute

SOURCE: Thomas S. Dee, Will Dobbie, Brian A. Jacob, and Jonah Rockoff, “The Causes and Consequences of Test Score Manipulation: Evidence from the New York Regents Examinations,” National Bureau of Economic Research (April 2016).

Choice as a means to drive school improvement is a simple enough idea: If parents are permitted choose where to send their kids to school, they will (in theory) maximize what they value—good schools, presumably—while minimizing their effort and risk to get it. And (also in theory) no one should be more motivated to get what they value than those who currently can’t gain access to it.

As the authors of this paper note, however, studies have tended to find that this simple idea doesn’t always play out that way in real life. The students most likely to move to a higher-quality school are typically already higher-achieving and less likely to live in poverty.

Post-Katrina New Orleans turns out not to be an exception to the rule. On average, the authors find, high-achieving NOLA students switch to high-quality schools, and low-achieving students transfer to low-quality schools. This is “suggestive evidence of a stratified school system and may lead to increased student segmentation based on student achievement and school quality,” they note.

The study, one of the first on student mobility in post-Katrina New Orleans, examines student-level data from 2007 to 2011. “It is clear some students are taking advantage of the ability to choose a high-quality educational option, although many students are still not,” they write. Indeed, of just over twenty-two thousand students in the dataset, nearly three out of four (72 percent) did not switch schools at all; 23 percent changed schools at least once; and about 5 percent switched schools at least twice. These rates are “similar to other traditional urban school districts,” they note. Significantly, within New Orleans, mobility was higher in non-charter schools. “More than one-third of students in traditional public schools changed schools, roughly twice the rate for students leaving charter schools,” the study finds.

As for those charters, the authors note that “several scholars have questioned” whether improvements in student achievement have been driven either by charter schools “creaming” high-achievers or ridding themselves of low-performing students. Mind you, they find no evidence of this happening in NOLA; yet oddly, they insist that “nevertheless, selective marketing and recruiting or cream-skimming by high-performing charter schools cannot be readily dismissed.”

The trio are on firmer ground in observing that objects at rest tend to remain at rest: The majority of NOLA students remain in the schools they initially choose, even when parents are given the freedom to choose among different (presumably better) schools. “Given the rate and frequency of student mobility, these patterns suggest that initial school selection may be an equally or more important factor than student mobility in post-Katrina New Orleans.”

If the assumption of policy makers is that in a choice-driven system, low-achievers will find their way into high-achieving schools, that appears not to be happening in New Orleans. That said, not everyone will agree that high-achieving kids flocking to high-achieving schools represents some kind of flaw. It seems reasonable to suggest that parents of low-achieving kids, though they aren’t voting with their feet now, might do so in the future. The marketplace’s timetable might not move at the rate we wish, but that doesn’t mean that it can’t or won’t move at all.

“In sum, the trends in student mobility are troubling and compel policy makers and researchers to rethink the relationship between school choice, student mobility, and school quality in a choice-based public school system,” they conclude. Fostering equal access to higher-quality schools, they advise, will involve better understanding what drives mobility patterns, “such as why parents choose schools for varying reasons, as well as find[ing] ways to sort low-achieving students into higher-quality schools in school choice contexts.” 

SOURCE: Richard O. Welsh, Matthew Duque, and Andrew McEachin, “School Choice, Student Mobility, and School Quality: Evidence from Post-Katrina New Orleans,” Education Finance and Policy (Volume 11, Issue 2, Spring 2016).

A new, somewhat unsettling NBER working paper by Thomas Dee and colleagues examines the prevalence and implications of teachers tampering with student test scores on New York State Regents exams.

The analysts focus on exams taken between the 2003–04 and 2009–10 school years in New York City, which can be reliably linked to students. To qualify for a “local” diploma, the lowest degree available in New York, students entering high school before fall 2005 had to score at least a 55 on all five core Regents exams (English, Math, Science, U.S. History/Government, and Global History/Geography). In fall 2008, local diplomas were eliminated, and students were required to receive at least a 65 score on all five tests.

Up until 2012–13, Regents exams were graded by teachers from students’ own schools, and a policy was in place that required exams with scores just below the cutoff to be re-scored by the schools. The analysts document clear spikes around the cutoffs in an otherwise smooth test score distribution. In other words the scores immediately below the cutoffs appear less frequently than expected from a “well-behaved empirical distribution,” and the scores at or just above the cutoffs appear more frequently than expected, suggesting that scores just below the cut were bumped up. As a point of comparison, they show the spread for standardized math and ELA scores taken by students in grades 3–8, which reveal a smooth distribution; those exams are scored centrally by the state.

In analyzing the magnitude of the “manipulation,” they estimate that teachers inflated roughly 40 percent of test scores near the cutoff. Inflating scores for students who would have failed the test by a small margin raised the probability of their graduating from high school by approximately 27 percent. They also estimate that the black/white achievement gap would be about 5 percent larger in the absence of test score manipulation. Black and Hispanic students, along with those with lower baseline scores and worse behavioral records, benefited more from test manipulation in the aggregate due to the greater number of these students near the cutoff. Interestingly, they also find evidence of manipulation for higher cutoffs on elective exams, which provide students with benefits like taking advanced coursework, conferring college credit, and granting automatic admission to some public colleges. The analysts surmise that teachers are acting out of “altruism” for students, especially because there was no evidence that teachers manipulated scores to receive bonuses and no evidence that manipulation was impacted by test-based accountability.

In 2011, the New York State Board of Regents ended the practice of teachers scoring the exams of students at their own schools (and of rescoring in general) and moved to a centralized grading policy. Not long after, all of the tampering appeared to end. Analysts say that “manipulating scores may have been a ‘cultural norm’ among New York high schools, in which students were often spared any sanctions involved with failing exams, including retaking the test or being ineligible for a more advanced high school diploma.” Yet these are just the type of “norms” we should avoid teaching children. Life after high school, unlike these high school teachers, won’t be so kind.

SOURCE: Thomas S. Dee, Will Dobbie, Brian A. Jacob, and Jonah Rockoff, “The Causes and Consequences of Test Score Manipulation: Evidence from the New York Regents Examinations,” National Bureau of Economic Research (April 2016).