The Education Gadfly Weekly

If you caught your pediatrician Googling "upset stomach remedies" before deciding how to treat your child and home-brewing medications over an office sink, you might start looking for a new pediatrician. So how would you feel if you learned that Google and Pinterest are where your child's teacher goes to look for instructional materials?

Well, brace yourself, because that's exactly what's happening. And no, your child's teacher is not an exception. A new study from the RAND Corporation finds that nearly every teacher in America—99 percent of elementary teachers, 96 percent of secondary school teachers—draws upon "materials I developed and/or selected myself" in teaching English language arts. And where do they find materials? The most common answer among elementary school teachers is Google (94 percent), followed by Pinterest (87 percent). The numbers are virtually the same for math.

But don't blame teachers. These data, for reasons both good and bad, reveal a dirty little secret about American education. In many districts and schools—maybe even most—the efficacy of the instructional materials put in front of children is an afterthought. For teachers, it makes an already hard job nearly impossible to do well.

Expecting teachers to be expert pedagogues and instructional designers is one of the ways in which we push the job far beyond the abilities of mere mortals. Add the expectation that teachers should differentiate every lesson to meet the needs of each individual student, and the job falls well outside the capacity of nearly all of America's 3.7 million classroom teachers (myself included).

If you're looking for the root causes of America's educational mediocrity, start with how poorly we prepare teachers for one of the most important parts of the job. "Few teachers ever take coursework on instructional design and, therefore, have little knowledge of the role it plays in student learning," notes Marcy Stein, an education professor with expertise in evaluating instructional design at the University of Washington Tacoma. It's like expecting the waiter at your favorite restaurant to serve your meal attentively while simultaneously cooking for twenty-five other people—and doing all the shopping and prepping the night before. You'd be exhausted too.

"Even if teachers were taught about instructional design, they would likely not have the time to prepare instructional materials, field test those materials to determine if they are effective, and modify the materials before using them to teach students. An iterative process is crucial for the development of effective materials," Stein points out.

There is good evidence to suggest that we are making a serious mistake by not paying more attention to curriculum, classroom materials, and instructional design. A 2012 Brookings study by Russ Whitehurst and Matt Chingos demonstrated that the "effect size" of choosing a better second-grade math curriculum was larger than replacing a fiftieth-percentile teacher with a seventy-fifth-percentile teacher. This is a powerful result, especially considering that it's relatively easy to give all children a better curriculum but extremely difficult to dramatically increase the effectiveness of their teachers. It's cost-neutral too: A Center for American Progress report by Ulrich Boser and Chingos showed virtually no difference in price between effective and ineffective curricula.

To be clear, there are perfectly good reasons why even the best teachers would be hitting the Internet for lesson planning—to find supplemental materials for individual students, for example, or adaptations for special needs kids. And teachers report using books and materials from myriad sources, including those selected by their schools and districts. But the RAND study offers a window into a phenomenon that is rarely discussed in American education: What children learn in school varies wildly from state to state, within districts, and even within grades in the same school.

If we're serious about raising the output of our K–12 system at large—not by a little, but a lot—here are some of the questions we should be asking: What exactly is the teacher's job, and what is the best use of her limited time? Is it deciding what to teach, or how to teach it? Is the soul of the work instructional design or instructional delivery? Do you want your child’s teacher to have the time to analyze student work and develop a keen eye for diagnosing mistakes and misunderstandings? Do you want her to give your child rich and meaningful feedback on assignments and homework? How about developing warm and productive relationships with your child and your family?

Now ask how you expect her to do all those things at a high level while spending precious hours every week creating curricula from scratch. Nearly half of teachers in the RAND study reported spending more than four hours per week developing or selecting their own instructional materials. Newer teachers almost certainly spend the most, hampering their ability to develop their craft.

To be sure, there are master teachers to whom we should eagerly grant nearly complete classroom autonomy, including over curriculum. You wouldn't tell Prince, "Just work on your guitar playing. Someone else will write the songs." But it's simply unrealistic to assume that every teacher is a Prince-level virtuoso and polymath—let alone to base the job description on that assumption. No one would accuse Yo-Yo Ma of being a second-rate talent because he merely plays notes written by Bach.

Without question, we want our best teachers to play a significant role in instructional design so that more children and teachers can benefit from their expertise. But it is equally certain that twelve-plus years of a well-designed and sequenced curriculum would lead to better outcomes for children than the occasional year with a great yet isolated teacher. It would also let teachers focus more time on the art of teaching—that is, more time with student work and less time on Pinterest on Sunday night with an empty plan book at their elbow.

Great teachers need great instructional materials. It's time we got serious about providing them.

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

Does keeping a child in a school that appears to be struggling mean that parents are happy with it? Should we consider resistance to school closures a sign of demand for those schools?

Those are two of the big questions raised for me in a fascinating debate between Jay Greene and Mike Petrilli about the role test scores should play in school closure.

It’s true that parents often fight back when their children’s schools are going to be closed. And why not? In most cases, they’re losing their current option without being offered a replacement. They are told to go find a new school. Often, the alternatives are not much better than the old schools, and they may be a lot less convenient. It’s not a trade. It’s a one-sided loss—and a huge headache.

But we should be careful about assuming that just because their kids are still enrolled in a school, parents like that school. Enrollment is modest proxy for family satisfaction. Instead of asking parents if they want their children’s schools to remain open, we should ask them whether they would choose to stay if they had other options. Then we should give them other options.

Here’s something that happens fairly often for us at EdNavigator, where we provide high-touch educational support to families in New Orleans. We sit down with a parent for an initial get-to-know-you conversation. When we ask whether they are happy with their current schools, they say yes. Nearly all of them say yes. This is consistent with years of polling, during which parents give high marks to the schools their kids attend—even if those schools have poor academic results. This trend baffles and frustrates those of us in the policy sphere.

But then we ask a follow-up question: Would you like to stick with this school, or do you want EdNavigator to help you explore your alternatives? Many times, even “satisfied” parents are very eager to know what’s out there. Ten minutes later, they have decided to participate in OneApp (the universal enrollment system in New Orleans) to seek a new school.

Why?

It’s not because we gave them the hard sell to change schools. We don’t go through a litany of negative information about their current schools. In most cases, we just share information about alternatives. When families get complete information, they consider more options. And when they consider more options, they are more likely to move away from underperforming schools because they feel confident that they can upgrade.

In a vacuum, school closures are a blunt instrument for creating a market for educational quality. That is not to say closures are ineffective; there’s evidence that they can have positive effects for students. But they will never be popular—or efficient.

The way to get families out of failing schools isn’t to close the doors; it’s to throw them wide open. That means investing first in family engagement when a school’s performance seems lacking. We need to support families to understand their options and decide whether their present schools are still the best place for their children. Maybe that doesn’t change anything; they may believe the school is improving and the pieces are falling into place. Parents may also place a premium on safety, proximity, or other factors not readily apparent to outside evaluators. If so, it seems prudent to defer to those parents and let the school remain open—unless the school’s performance or management is so abysmal that the governing authority must act to close it.

If, instead, the family engagement process shows that families are eager for an escape route out of the school and into another, they should receive help finding that route. If the school eventually closes, it will be because families have made the well-considered choice to go elsewhere and left it under-enrolled, not because policy makers or elected officials made that choice for them.

The market for school quality is not yet fully mature. It’s come a long way in a decade or two. But it will not function smoothly without more robust assistance for families to complement the investments that have been made in increasing choices. Until then, many parents will opt to remain in what appear to be failing schools, and they will dig in their heels when someone tries to take those schools away from them. I don’t blame them.

Tim Daly is a founding partner of EdNavigator and the former president of TNTP.

• The heroic journalism of the Boston Globe in exposing pedophilia enabled by the Catholic Church was the focus of last year’s Oscar-winning Spotlight. Now the paper has trained its attention on New England preparatory schools, where some allegations of misconduct date back a half-century or more. Its survey of the claims is penetrating and comprehensive: Nearly seventy such schools have faced complaints of sexual harassment or abuse in the last twenty-five years, with accusations lodged by two hundred alleged victims. And we have no reason to believe that the exploitation is limited to private schools; as a 2004 literature synthesis undertaken by the Department of Education makes clear, sexual misconduct plagues schools across the country and in every sector.
• At one point, forty-four states were affiliated with one of the two next-generation testing consortia (PARCC and Smarter Balanced) that arose with the widespread adoption of the Common Core. This spring, just twenty-one of those states will be administering the tests. Chalkbeat has published a thorough account of the political machinations that overtook the assessments, as well as the efforts of legislators to pull away from them. In dozens of states, what followed was chaos. Curricular experts were overruled by lawmakers, instructional materials were withdrawn, and their hastily adopted replacements fell victim to technological mishaps. As a policy analyst with the New America Foundation put it, “A lot of this has to do with sort of perception wars around the assessments and less to do with the practicality of choosing the best assessments for our kids,” 
• Grit—the melding of motivation, perseverance, and tolerance for boredom that allows our greatest scholars and athletes to spend hours honing their skills—has been getting an awful lot of play lately. It’s occasioned by the release of a new book by Angela Duckworth, the researcher most closely associated with the emergence of grit as an attribute worthy of attention (and promotion in schools). But if you only have time to read one of the quickly multiplying takes on the book, let it be David Brooks’s column in the New York Times. In it, he praises Duckworth but offers a different gloss on grit—not as a superhuman indefatigability in the face of exhaustion and tedium, but an inward drive pushing people toward the goals and values they care about most. Of course, there probably isn’t a succinct, tough-sounding label for that quality (some might call it passion), but it’s still worth thinking about.

On this week’s podcast, Robert Pondiscio and Brandon Wright discuss why teachers turn to the internet for lesson plans, whether David Brooks gets it right on grit, and how reformers can better facilitate effective parental choice. During the Research Minute, Amber Northern explains how voucher programs across the globe affect math and reading achievement.

Amber's Research Minute

M. Danish Shakeel, Kaitlin P. Anderson, and Patrick J. Wolf, "The Participant Effects of Private School Vouchers across the Globe: A Meta-Analytic and Systematic Review," EDRE (May 2016).

Over a million students nationally wait for seats to open up in already-full charter schools. Many more attend failing schools in neighborhoods that could benefit from the high-quality charter networks revolutionizing public education in places like Newark and New Orleans. In the face of a clear and persistent need for excellent charter schools, what stands in the way of their growth? This paper from the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) attempts to answer this question by examining constraints on charter expansion.

Authors Jenn Hatfield and Ian Lindquist profile three of the nation’s oldest and most successful networks: Uncommon Schools (forty-three schools in six northeast cities), Great Hearts Academies (twenty-seven schools in Phoenix and, recently, Texas), and Carpe Diem Learning (six schools scattered throughout Arizona, Indiana, Ohio, and Texas). They use in-depth interviews with teachers, principals, staff, and executives within each network to explore two sides of the same coin: What factors facilitated the growth of these networks, and conversely, what factors deterred them and likely still hinder others?

Specifically, they seek to identify the “bottlenecks” limiting each operator’s expansion. All three networks experienced problems with authorizers and/or identified authorizer relationships as essential to manage well. For instance, Great Hearts’ attempted Nashville expansion was blocked by the local authorizer (the district school board), which refused them a charter. And each network struggled with expectations from local stakeholders that weighed on the pace and size of their growth. Carpe Diem, a blended, project-based model for students in grades 6–12, was able to expand quickly in response to pressing demand for high-quality, innovative options. But as CEO Robert Sommers relayed, authorizer expectations and state regulations don’t always make it easy for new models: “People on the ground want us, but states want schools that look like other schools.” Across the board, public resources have been insufficient and charter organizations leaned heavily on philanthropic support. Finally, each network named human capital as a tremendous growth hurdle, echoing what Fordham discovered in a survey of high-performing Ohio charter leaders.

While the findings themselves aren’t groundbreaking—finances, regulatory burdens, and scarcity of high-quality staff are well-documented challenges—the case studies offer valuable insight into specific state barriers (or opportunities) and the strategic nature of expansion, as well as a fascinating window into each group’s decision-making processes. In sum, the profiles are a useful read for other high-quality charter networks.

The paper is also a must-read for policy makers, who should consider the three concluding recommendations: enable charter operators to certify their own teachers (a cutting-edge idea that makes good sense given the overwhelming human capital barrier, and considering that the skills desired by various charter networks are fairly unique); streamline the authorization process across state boundaries for operators with proven track records, thus reducing barriers to entry (a fine idea in theory, though likely staggeringly difficult in practice); and waive state charter caps for high-performers (a sensible recommendation with varying degrees of urgency depending on the state).

Overall, the paper ought to help policy makers and advocates understand how states can create more hospitable climates for excellent charter schools and ultimately ensure that more students receive a good education.

SOURCE: Jenn Hatfield and Ian Lindquist, “Scaling Up: Successes and Challenges of Growing High-Quality Charter Networks,” American Enterprise Institute (May 2016).

In 2014, for the first time, the overall number of Latino, African American, and Asian students in public K–12 classrooms in America surpassed the number of non-Hispanic white students. To better understand what this “majority minority” student body might mean for public education going forward, the folks at the Leadership Conference Education Fund asked Latino and African American parents what they thought about America’s K–12 system, as well as what sort of education they want for their children.

Researchers surveyed a nationally representative sample of eight hundred African American and Latino adults (parents, grandparents, etc.) actively involved in raising a school-aged child, also conducting focus groups in Chicago (Latinos) and Philadelphia (African Americans).

As with other such surveys, a large majority of parents rated their own children’s schools as “excellent” or “good” at preparing students for success in the future. (It is interesting to note, however, that parents whose children attended schools that were mostly white were more likely to rate those schools positively.) Yet parents were also pessimistic about the quality of public schools writ large—especially for students of color. And they felt that funding, technology, and excellent teachers were inequitably distributed in favor of predominantly white and high-income schools.

The survey does not delve deeply into parents’ bias toward their children’s schools, but it does offer an interesting clue: When participants were asked what factors propelled low-income African American or Latino students into college, the overwhelming response was “support from family”; “the students’ own hard work” came in second. “Education received at school” was a distant third. And when researchers asked whether U.S. schools even try to educate African American and Latino children, the vast majority of respondents chose “they are trying their best, even if they often leave many behind.” A new take on the soft bigotry of low expectations?

The authors of the report tout the finding that parents perceive themselves to have “a lot of power” to bring about needed changes, despite also seeing themselves as holding less sway than state and federal government, superintendents, and school boards. So perhaps one way to narrow the achievement gap between African American and Latino students and their white peers is to give this new education majority more power to influence education in their communities by expanding high-quality schools of choice and assisting moms and dad in picking the best schools for their children.

One way or another, policy makers ought to start listening. Higher expectations for students, better technology, welcomed parental involvement, access to tutors, and top-quality teachers are all high on the wish list for these parents. Sounds like they know what they’re talking about.

SOURCE: Anzalone, Liszt, Grove Research, “New Education Majority: Attitudes and Aspirations of Parents and Families of Color,” The Leadership Conference for Education Fund (April 2016).

This study examines the impact of test-based accountability on teacher attendance and student achievement using data from North Carolina. Under the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB), schools that failed to make “Adequate Yearly Progress” (AYP) toward universal proficiency in consecutive years faced a series of escalating sanctions. Thus, teachers at schools that failed one year had a strong incentive to boost achievement in the next, while those at other schools faced a weaker incentive.

Using a difference-in-differences approach that compares these groups, the author estimates that failing to make AYP in NCLB’s first year led to a 10 percent decline in teacher absences in the following year (or roughly one less absence per teacher). He also estimates that an additional teacher absence reduces math achievement by about .002 standard deviations, implying that schools that failed to make AYP saw a similar boost in achievement because of improved teacher attendance. However, in a separate analysis, he shows that the threat of sanctions led to a .06 standard deviation improvement in math achievement in the following year, suggesting that improved teacher attendance accounted for just 3 percent of all accountability-driven achievement gains.

In addition to the general decline in teacher absences, the author finds that the probability of being frequently absent also decreased markedly as a result of failure to make AYP. For example, teachers were 20 percent less likely to be absent fifteen times or more. This matters because the impact of teacher absences on student achievement is cumulative. For example, having a teacher who is absent more than ten times in one year reduces achievement by .02 standard deviations relative to a teacher who isn’t—equivalent to replacing an average teacher with one in the bottom quintile of effectiveness. Interestingly, the threat of sanctions had the greatest effect on the attendance of teachers in the bottom quartile of the effectiveness distribution, though it’s unclear if those teachers had more initial absences.

Because North Carolina’s pre-NCLB accountability policies differed from those of other states, the results of this study aren’t nationally representative. However, they are broadly consistent with prior research on accountability and teacher effort, such as a Chicago study that found that teacher absences decreased when principals were empowered to dismiss probationary staff. As the author notes, because teacher attendance explains only a fraction of the change in test scores, “much remains to be learned about the channels through which test-based accountability policies raise student achievement.” Still, what we do know makes sense.

SOURCE: Seth Gershenson, "Performance Standards and Employee Effort: Evidence from Teacher Absences,"Journal of Policy Analysis and Management (April 2016).