The Education Gadfly Weekly

Let’s just stop pussyfooting around and say it out loud: The “historic” peak in the country’s high school graduation rate is bullshit.

According to federal data released late last year, and dutifully trumpeted ever since (including in last night’s State of the Union address), the nation’s high school graduation rate has hit an all-time high, with 82 percent of the Class of 2014 earning a diploma. “As a result, many more students will have a better chance of going to college, getting a good job, owning their own home, and supporting a family,” crowed then-Secretary of Education Arne Duncan.

Isn’t it pretty to think so?

In fact, Secretary Duncan might be right for now. Confidence and good will are baked into a high school diploma. It is an academic promissory note that signals to college admissions staffers, employers, and others that the holder has achieved some reasonable level of academic proficiency. But it’s also a faith-based system. It only works if people believe it stands for something tangible.

Regarding the recent spike in graduation rates, good luck figuring out what it stands for. Not improved student proficiency, certainly. There has been no equally dramatic spike in SAT scores. Don’t look for a parallel uptick on seventeen-year-old NAEP, better performance on AP tests, or the ACT, either. You won’t find it. The only thing that appears to be rising is the number of students in need of remedial math and English in college. And the number of press releases bragging about huge increases in graduation rates.

A recent New York Times report looked at a South Carolina school district where only one in ten students were ready for college-level work in reading based on their ACT scores; an abysmal one in fourteen were ready for freshman math. An editorial a few days later blasted “counterfeit” high school diplomas, pointing the finger at states with “weak curriculums and graduation requirements that make high school diplomas useless.” To be fair, not everything about the sudden rise in graduation rates smells funny. Motoko Rich’s report notes that declining teenage pregnancy rates, reductions in violent crime, and better data collection to identify chronically absent students and those at risk of failure have surely contributed. Heavens be praised. But, she added, “an increasing number of states and districts offer students more chances to make up failed credits online or in short tutoring sessions without repeating a whole semester or more.”

Right. And this is the point at which graduation rates—and what they say about the value of a diploma—begin to sink into the dark swamp of “credit recovery.”

Take the example of Baltimore. A recent news release from Baltimore City Public Schools trumpets the district’s fifth straight year of gains: In 2010, 66.7 percent of high school students graduated within five years of entering ninth grade; as of 2014, it was 74.9 percent. The city couldn’t have achieved that stunning rate of success without the (even more stunning) 36.5 percent of students who graduated via the “High School Bridge for Academic Validation Plan.” Baltimore’s press release doesn’t mention that fewer than half of Baltimore’s freshly minted high school graduates passed the Maryland State High School Assessments (HSAs).

In New York City, graduation rates are also at record levels, hitting 70 percent for the first time—a dramatic twenty-four-point rise in a decade. Schools chancellor Carmen Farina described the results as “important progress,” but she noted that “there is so much more to do to ensure equity and excellence in classrooms across all five boroughs.” You can say that again. Gothamites have not forgotten the New York Post’s reports on the “EZ-Pass” scandal—a steady drumbeat of stories documenting grade-fixing and phony summer school programs. One student even wrote a front-page article describing how she earned credit she didn’t deserve for a government exam she failed, but needed for graduation.

And advocates for school closure should take note: A new report from the New York City Independent Budget Office casts doubt on the value of diplomas conferred upon students from city schools slated for closure in the Bloomberg era. These pupils were more likely to have earned class credits through credit recovery and to have scored at exactly the cutoff point on state Regents exams—a red flag, to put it bluntly.

To be sure, there are very good reasons for credit recovery: We should want students who fall behind on credits due to illness, pregnancy, or some other disruption to have the opportunity to catch up and graduate. Neither the child nor society benefits if we place barriers in the way of graduation. But problems with credit recovery are legion. There’s no clear definition of what it is, no good or consistent data on how often it’s used, and no way of knowing whether it’s academically rigorous or merely a failsafe to paper over failure and drag unprepared kids across the finish line to boost graduation rates.

The potential for abuse is rampant, whether through less-than-rigorous credit recovery schemes or (as in many of the cases detailed in the New York Post) a teacher holding his nose and passing a student for the sake of expedience. Has the student earned her diploma, or is she merely being handed a diploma as a parting gift?

The even bigger problem is that we might just be stuck with it. Refusing to confer even a debased, potentially meaningless credential on an eighteen-year-old is tantamount to publicly pronouncing him a failure—unfit for post-secondary education, entry-level employment, or military service. As one child advocate lamented to Chalkbeat this week, “Panera Bread asks if you have a high school diploma. What are the options for these kids?”

Look, it’s not a bad thing that graduation rates are up. There may yet be a pony at the bottom of this prodigious pile. But without proficiency measures validating the diplomas we’re handing out like participation trophies after a youth soccer match, we’re flying blind. In the era of ESSA, when every state is on the hook to define accountability for itself, demonstrating the legitimacy of credit recovery—and the value of a high school diploma more generally—is an area ripe for reform and transparency. If states and districts want to claim credit for a meteoric rise in graduation rates, the onus is on them to prove that their diplomas are worth more than the paper they’re printed on.

Until then, leave those self-congratulatory press releases in your desk. 

Officials at the Department of Education have requested public comments by January 21 about areas in the new Every Student Succeeds Act where regulation might be “helpful or necessary.” My recommendation to the feds: Tread very lightly.

That’s not an ideological plea (though I am ideologically disposed to a limited federal role). It’s because there’s no one best system for school accountability, and there never will be. Uncle Sam has to be damn sure not to smother good ideas that the states might develop, now or in the future.

That’s not to say that anything goes. ESSA established “guardrails,” in D.C. parlance, to ensure that states don’t eviscerate results-based accountability. They cannot decide to judge schools by nothing but student engagement, or teacher happiness, or the number of hugs a kid receives each day.

But Congress did give the green light to the states to come up with new approaches to rating school quality. It’s critical that John King and his colleagues don’t put on the red light before the process even begins.

Let me offer a few examples of novel approaches that deserve to be permissible, and even embraced, under the law—but that the micromanagers at the department might inadvertently close off if they’re not careful:

1. Weighting academic achievement and academic growth differently for different types of schools. As regular readers know, I’m a big proponent of individual-level growth measures because they can largely control for factors that schools cannot influence (prior student achievement, the challenges of poverty, etc.). They are the fairest way to measure school performance. But it can be hard for schools with high academic achievement (typically those with affluent populations) to show much progress over time. Thus systems that look at growth alone sometimes end up labeling affluent, high-achieving schools as mediocre or worse. Since those ratings don’t pass the smell test, this can’t help but create face validity problems. Here’s one solution: Start with the premise that a great school either has very high achievement for all students or helps all of its students make a lot of progress over the course of the year. Both types of schools deserve A ratings. So states might adopt a rule that says that any school that gets an A for either academic achievement or for academic growth gets an A overall. That will mean, of course, that for some schools, either academic growth or academic achievement will count for very little. Will the department allow that?
2. Weighting the “English language proficiency” index more heavily for schools with many English language learners. ESSA requires state accountability systems to measure “progress in achieving English language proficiency”—and for this indicator to count for a “substantial amount” in a school’s grade. And there’s no doubt that it should be a major component of a school’s rating if much of its population is still learning English. But what if a school has just a few ELL students? Surely their progress shouldn’t count too much compared to, say, the reading and math gains of all students. Will states have the flexibility to weight this component differently depending on the makeup of the student population?
3. Considering performance at the “advanced” level when measuring academic achievement. The new law also requires states to use, as part of their rating systems, an indicator of academic achievement “as measured by proficiency on the annual assessments.” But must such an indicator look at achievement on the “proficient” level only? What if a state wants to give extra credit to schools that get more kids to the advanced level (like level four on Smarter Balanced or level five on PARCC)? That’s clearly worthy of support. They might also want to give partial credit for getting kids to the basic level so that we don’t repeat NCLB’s mistake of encouraging schools to focus only on the “bubble kids” just below the proficiency cutoff. (See how Ohio’s “performance index” currently does this, for example.) Will the department allow this? Maybe even encourage it?

So how might King et al. deal with these sorts of issues? One option is to answer these questions in the affirmative: In the regulations, declare that these particular approaches meet the spirit of the law and are welcome. (I’m hopeful that our ESSA Accountability Design Competition on February 2 will generate many more such ideas.) But here’s the rub: We’re going to have to live with this law for at least five years, if not a lot longer. Isn’t it likely that some state is going to come up with other promising approaches down the road?

Perhaps there’s another option to consider, then. The department could make it clear, via its regulations, that it will defer to state plans unless they clearly violate both the letter and the spirit of the law. The feds will aim to get to “yes.” That’s surely what the Republicans in Congress expect.

At every turn, federal officials should ask themselves: Is additional regulatory language absolutely necessary? Is it closing off some good ideas that nobody has thought up yet? Are we assuming a certain structure for state accountability systems (that they all include an index, for instance, with indicators weighted the same for all types of schools) that might get in the way of promising innovations?

Arne Duncan was not known for showing restraint—or for seeing wisdom in the adage that sometimes less is more. Here’s John King’s chance to show that his tenure will be different.

• The ink is dry on the bill, the interest groups are mollified, and the lobbyists have made the first payments on their tastefully appointed condominiums. Now that the Every Student Achieves Act has become the law of the land, it’s time to examine its implications for our federal education bureaucracy. Ace Fordham policy fellow Andy Smarick has identified the shrinking classroom influence of Uncle Sam as the top media takeaway from ESSA’s passage, and there’s no denying that Congress acted decisively to roll back the Department of Education’s Obama-era authority. But just how much has the agency—and John King, who will act as its leader regardless of whether he ever gets a confirmation hearing—seen its prerogatives narrowed? This recap from Education Week offers a good primer, consulting aides from both parties along with education superlawyer Reg Leichty. Shockingly, the sources don’t agree on whether future secretaries of education will be “handcuffed” in their dealings with state accountability schemes. But as Leichty happily observes, those differences in opinion will likely be resolved in the courts.
• Now that it’s the second week of January, you’ve probably received your W-2 tax form. And as the old saying goes, there are only two certainties in life: the opposition of teachers’ unions to the promise of public support for religious schools, and taxes. With the new year comes a revived effort on the part of the New York Catholic Conference to pass a bill through the Empire State legislature to create such an incentive, though their foes remain recalcitrant. (Ninety thousand students attend schools operated by the Archdiocese of New York, which should add some political heft to the pleas of Big Apple believers.) The ground for legislative progress is fertile in New York: Governor Cuomo is on record supporting the tax credit bill, and even Mayor Bill de Blasio has proven surprisingly amenable to collaboration with religious partners. Cardinal Timothy Dolan, perhaps the most eloquent advocate of religious education, put it nicely: “This is about our kids, where they go is second to their getting a quality education wherever they happen to be.”
• The reading of judicial tea leaves isn’t the Gadfly’s specialty, no matter how many Perry Mason reruns he screens nightly. Still, Monday’s oral arguments in the Supreme Court case Friedrichs v. California Teachers Association certainly seemed to point in a clear direction—and one that friends of public employee unions might find ominous. For the uninitiated: The case was brought by California teachers who objected to paying “agency fees,” which finance union work in the (ostensibly apolitical) collective bargaining realm. If the court finds that the fees infringe on the plaintiffs’ First Amendment rights—as they seemed disposed to do, if their public remarks were any indication—they could act to deprive public unions of an important source of revenue and effectively make the United States a “right-to-work” nation. It may be the most important case decided in this term, but don’t assume that the court watchers have their ruling figured out already.

The Friedrichs case and the future of teacher unions, whether schools are asking too much of young students, debating the role of federal regulation under ESSA, and computers’ effect on the writing gap. Mike Petrilli and Robert Pondiscio cohost, and Amber Northern delivers the Research Minute.

Amber's Research Minute

 Sheida White, Young Yee Kim, Jing Chen, and Fei Liu, "Performance of fourth-grade students in the 2012 NAEP computer-based writing pilot assessment," Nation Center for Education Statistics (October 2015).

Transcript

Mike:                       Hello, this is your host, Mike Petrilli of the The Thomas B. Fordham Institute here at The Education Gadfly Show and online at edexcellence.net. Now please join me in welcoming my co-host out of hiding, the El Chapo of education policy, Robert Pondiscio.

Robert:                   That makes you Sean Penn.

Mike:                       That's exactly right.

Robert:                   Oh, man.

Mike:                       Hey, hey, hey.

Robert:                   At least Charlize Theron didn't break up with me, dude.

Mike:                       Oh my gosh. What is up with all of this? Sean Penn is an interesting guy.

Robert:                   You know what, I have no patience here. As you know, I spent a lot of years in the print journalism business. I'm kind of in mourning over Rolling Stone. I think one of two things should happen. Either they need to give up, or their readers.

Mike:                       Hey. We're still not sure that maybe Sean Penn was just working with the US Government ...

Robert:                   Oh, stop.

Mike:                       ... that this was all an elaborate ...

Robert:                   Stop it.

Mike:                       ... plan that it worked. It worked.

Robert:                   The US Government that he has reviled and given every opportu-

Mike:                       Hey, that's what makes it such a great plot.

Robert:                   Not possible.

Mike:                       You can imagine the pitch. They said, "All right, here's the plan. We're going to have you set up an interview with this guy, and we're going to track you." It's perfect. It's brilliant.

Robert:                   Are you done?

Mike:                       I'm done.

Robert:                   Good. Is Sean Penn done?

Mike:                       We'll see. He may be done, because if that was not ... if he did, in fact, lure the Government to him, I would be watching my back.

Robert:                   He's now in hiding.

Mike:                       I think that's true. Okay, hey, but we're not the El Chapo podcast. We're not the El Cheapo podcast. We're the Education Gadfly podcast.

Robert:                   We are in a secure location.

Mike:                       Yes, we are. Okay, hey, lots of interesting things happening. Clara, let's play Pardon the Gadfly.

Clara:                      The Friedrichs versus California Teachers Association case reached the Supreme Court this week. How will this ruling impact education reform?

Robert:                   Mike, for those of you who are not watching at home, is doing a happy dance right now.

Mike:                       That is my happy dance. You're right.

Robert:                   Go ahead. Explain.

Mike:                       Oh my gosh, explain, what are you talking about? This is great news. It certainly looked like there are at least five Justices who are ready to declare the plaintiffs the winners in this one, which would mean that California and every other State that is, so far, not a right to work State for public employee unions, will become a right to work State. What that means is that California and these other, mostly blue, States, teachers will now be able to both opt out of the union, which they can already do now ...

Robert:                   A new opt-out movement.

Mike:                       A new opt-out movement, and they don't have to pay these agency fees anymore, where they have been made to pay for collective bargaining and other activities of the union, even if they are not members. The thing is, these agency fees are almost as expensive as membership fees.

Robert:                   Okay, time out. Let me point out that you are not answering Clara's question.

Mike:                       I'm giving background.

Robert:                   Clara's question was, how will this ruling, and by the way, caveat here, you cannot assume you know how the ruling is going to go based on oral discussions ...

Mike:                       That's correct.

Robert:                   ... we know this.

Mike:                       We could be surprised.

Robert:                   Let's just assume that you're right. They're going to throw this out. No more agency fees. The question that Clara asked, the question I want to hear you answer, is, how will this ruling impact-

Mike:                       Are you the host here? What's going on? This is some kind of mutiny. What's happening?

Robert:                   Yeah, there you go. How will it impact education reform?

Mike:                       All right. Point is, if it goes against the unions, they are going to lose a lot of money. They're going to not only lose the money from these agency fees, they are also ...

Robert:                   Still not answering the question.

Mike:                       Robert, I'm getting there. They're also going to likely lose a lot of members, because members are now going to choose between a thousand dollar fee a year and zero. Before, they were choosing between the eight thousand dollars a year and maybe eight hundred dollars a year. Okay, this is going to have a couple of things for education reform. One is, in all of these big political fights, the unions are going to have less political money to spend.

Robert:                   Fair enough.

Mike:                       Supposedly, the non-members were already able to opt out of the political spending, but a lot of this stuff is squishy. What's political, what's not? They're going to have less money. The unions are probably going to have to find other ways to save money. They're going to have, for example, fewer resources in order to provide experts when collective bargaining. The way it works right now all over the country is you've got these volunteer school boards who go up against the unions. The unions have paid people who fly in and help them negotiate. They're going to have less money for that kind of stuff. All of this is going to mean that the unions are going to be somewhat weaker than they are now. That doesn't mean that their power completely goes away. There's still a lot of teachers and teachers' families. In States like California, there's still going to be plenty of union members and political spending and all the rest, but they will likely be ...

                                    Here's the other thing that Mike Antonucci thinks is likely to happen, is that the more moderate members of the union, people who may be can take it or leave it, but just hasn't been worth the while to opt out at this point. If they now decide, "Hey, I could save a thousand bucks. Yeah, I'm opting out," the union becomes smaller, but it becomes more ideologically strident.

Robert:                   Oh, interesting.

Mike:                       Only the true believers stay behind.

Robert:                   That makes sense, actually.

Mike:                       If you want to see a glimpse of the future, look to the Chicago Teacher's Union, for example, ...

Robert:                   Do we have to?

Mike:                       ... and how they act.

Robert:                   Okay. The only reason I was being extraporous on the point, and I will freely admit this is somewhat of an unorthodox view, especially in these halls - I just, at the end of the day, I was saying to one of our colleagues, if you gave me a magic wand and said, okay, you can fix anything you want in education. Go down the list ... I'd get pretty far down my list before I'd get around to defanging the Unions. Not that I think that they are good guys, I just don't think they have the deleterious effect on education outcomes that a lot of people who do what we do seem to believe.

Mike:                       I don't know, Robert. There is certainly the case that there are plenty of States or school districts that are unionized and do get good results: Massachusetts, is the best example.

Robert:                   A lot, just the opposite.

Mike:                       You're right. You would also say in recent years we see Florida making big gains, you see Arizona making big gains, DC has had this big turnaround where the unions are very weak. I do think it is helpful if you can remove some of the worst parts of the unionization.

Robert:                   Fair enough.

Mike:                       I don't know that it's so much ... it works on several levels. One is, literally, the contracts that can be barriers to improvement, but the other thing is the political power. They try to stop so many of the promising reforms that are out there, and if they have less, fewer members, less money, less clout, that means that they are going to have a harder time getting in the way of promising reform.

Robert:                   All of that true. I'm not disagreeing with any of that, and believe me, I'm not suggesting that the unions are good guys in our struggles, but I don't think they are the three-headed monsters of some people's bull-

Mike:                       That's just because you are Mr. Curriculum, Robert. If you were a true believer on structural reform, you might feel differently.

Robert:                   There you go. I'm not going to gain-say that. You're right.

Mike:                       Okay. Do you still have that Al Shanker poster up in your office? Is that ... just kidding.

Robert:                   I do not.

Mike:                       Okay. Topic number two.

Clara:                      NPR recently wrote that Kindergarten is the new First Grade. Are school's asking for too much, too soon?

Mike:                       Robert?

Robert:                   No. Next question.

Mike:                       Oh, now you're going to be the one who ... I'm going to push you on this one, a little bit. First of all, the evidence. Is there really ...

Robert:                   What evidence?

Mike:                       Is there really evidence that Kindergarten is the new First Grade? I thought I saw something recently from AERA that said, "Well, we looked, and actually Kindergarten still looks pretty much the same as it did ten, twenty years ago.

Robert:                   I think, and I don't have the transcript in front of me, I think the NPR piece that Clara was alluding to was that teachers, themselves, report higher expectations in terms of reading than they did a generation ago. NPR being NPR, looked somewhat ascant to that. I do not. I think that's a very, very, good thing. The data could not be more clear. As regular listeners to this podcast know, I still teach one day a week, working predominantly with low-income kids of color, so that is the population that I'm concerned with. The evidence could not be clearer, that if kids are struggling in First Grade, they have a ninety-percent chance of still struggling in Fourth Grade. If three out of four strugglers in Third Grade are still struggling in Ninth Grade.

                                    If there's any good guy that the education reform movement at large has created is this sense of urgency around early education, in general, and early literacy in specific. We dare not let go of that.

Mike:                       People complain. They say, "Well, the Common Core, they expect kids to be doing some reading by the end of Kindergarten.

Robert:                   Nothing wrong with that.

Mike:                       We're not quite sure, what, the sounding out words a little bit, that kind of stuff, some degree of fluency.

Robert:                   Sure, absolutely, by the end of Kindergarten.

Mike:                       By the end of Kindergarten. The question would be, you say sooner is better. We wouldn't' say that, okay, therefore we're going to try to get three-year-olds to start sounding out words.

Robert:                   A lot of three-year-olds come into Kindergarten already with letter-recognition and knowing how to spell their names, and whatnot.

Mike:                       How do we draw these lines? How do we know? There is such a thing as too young to do some stuff.

Robert:                   Sure.

Mike:                       I don't know. What kind of evidence do you have to look to to say, hey, maybe these people have a point, that if we try to push it too early for some kids, it's just not going to work and it's going to provide unnecessary stress?

Robert:                   This is that, what was that ridiculous piece the Atlantic, a few weeks ago, about the joyful little literate Kindergartners of Finland or someplace ... Mike:                  By the way, my preschooler is in a Waldorf preschool, as many listeners know. Otherwise known as Finland, here in America.

Robert:                   Do as I say, not as I do, says Mike Petrilli.

Mike:                       He spends all his day playing outside in the woods, gardening.

Robert:                   Are you unschooling your kid, then?

Mike:                       We're paying a lot of money for him not to learn how to read, is what you do in the Waldorf system. I do not plan to stick with that system after preschool. Look, is this just more of the same in terms of upper-middle class parents, like me, we don't like to have our little ones be too pressured. We find, boy, my kid goes to preschool and does nothing but play and sing all day, and he's also learning to read. Therefore, why are we forcing those poor kids ...

Robert:                   Play is not necessarily play. A lot of play is building literacy skills.

Mike:                       Not in Waldorf.

Robert:                   Perhaps. I have no experience with them.

Mike:                       You can't even have letters on your shirts.

Robert:                   Oh, my goodness. Again, I think this is one of those classic, false dichotomies that ... take me to the Kindergarten, someplace, where kids are working with worksheets all day and they're not playing at all. This is one of those ridiculous ...

Mike:                       You don't think those places exist?

Robert:                   I really don't think that they exist.

Mike:                       I think there's some horrible school districts out there who responded to the pressure of no child left behind and other things, and had no clue what to do, and had five-year-olds sit down and do worksheets.

Robert:                   Here's what I will say. You try making a five-year-old sit down and do worksheets.

Mike:                       No, I know, but my concern is that we would all agree that's terrible practice ...

Robert:                   Of course.

Mike:                       Yet, what do you do if that's actually the case out there?

Robert:                   First, show me where that's the case. I earnestly do not believe that any Kindergartner in America is being forced to do nothing but sit in front of worksheets all day. Not one.

Mike:                       All right. There's your challenge. Find us one.

Robert:                   I'm talking to you, Alfie Cohen, I know you're out there.

Mike:                       Find us that kid. Okay. Topic number three.

Clara:                      The US Department of Education is asking for public comments on what the new role of Federal Regulation under ESSA should be. What are your thoughts?

Mike:                       The thing I love about this, you look at the public, the announcement in the Federal Register, as I have, and they say, "We would like to know what you think we should regulate on. Regulations that might be helpful or necessary.

Robert:                   How about none? Let's start with none.

Mike:                       Helpful. That's very interesting. Right. Yes. Let's start with zero-based budgeting, okay? It is possible, if you really have to do the regulations, you can just cut and paste from the Bill itself, and that's it. You can repeat the Bill.

Robert:                   You can grow thousands of people out of work, Mike?

Mike:                       No, no, no. It doesn't take thousands. I know these people, the Department. They mean well, but they are busy-bodies and micro-managers.

Robert:                   What's that thing, the road to hell is paved with what, again?

Mike:                       Yes, exactly. We, at Fordham, are excited that we are having a big accountability design competition.

Robert:                   This is going to be fun.

Mike:                       We've encouraged people, including you, Robert, to come up with ideas for how State accountability systems could work under ESSA. Part of the reason that I want to do this right away is to surface promising ideas that you may look at and say, "Well, I'm not quite sure if that's allowed under the Law, or not," that maybe doesn't quite meet the letter of the Law, as a way to identify areas where the Department should either tread carefully - make sure, whatever you do. Don't write the regulation in a way that makes this good idea unallowable, or could be proactive and say, "Hey, here's ten ideas that we've heard of and we are okay with all of them."

Robert:                   My big one, this will surprise you not in the least, I'm back to early literacy. I'm a content guy, I'm a literacy guy. My big concern under the past regime under NCLB, is we've created conditions that almost literally disincentivised teachers to invest in vocabulary and background knowledge from the earliest days of school. Reading tests, speaking of good intentions, get in the way of that. I'm not going to sit here and give away my ideas, but I'm going to tell you that that's what I'm going to be focused like a laser on, is how can we create the conditions through assessments, through accountability, that encourage schools to make those patient, steady investments in background knowledge and vocabulary that are not happening right now.

Mike:                       I think that's exactly right. Some of this stuff gets super wonky, but for example, they added one - every State has to have an indicator in their accountability system, now, that looks at the progress that English language learners are making toward language proficiency. That's never been as prominent a part of State accountability systems before. Makes a lot of sense, a lot of schools out there have lots of English language learners.

                                    What if your school doesn't have a lot of English language learners? What if you have ten kids out of the whole school who are English language learners, should that indicator count a whole lot towards your grade? Should it count as much as if fifty-percent of your kids are English language learners? That's the sort of thing where hey, you might want to have a little nuance, there, in your accountability system to have waiting and deferred, depending on that student population.

                                    Again, I don't think anybody sort of thought that through in writing the Law. States are going to come up with ideas like that, and you don't want the Department to have this mindset where they say "no" to ideas that make sense.

Robert:                   Sure, because if they do, then local control is a myth.

Mike:                       Yeah, and the idea that this Law gives a lot of power back to the States. Furthermore, what you do is you recreate a system where people look at it and it doesn't make sense.

Robert:                   Right. Let's replace the Federal system that's not working with fifty State systems that aren't working.

Mike:                       Right. In this example, again, okay, now you're going to have some school, somewhere, that's a great school, but gets a "D" because ten of its kids who are English language learners aren't doing well, and you say, come on, that doesn't pass the smell-test. Not to mention, what's going to happen? The rest of the school's going to be really mad at those ten immigrant kids from Mexico. This is practically calling on Donald Trump to make this an issue.

Robert:                   You lost me there. I kind of agree with you ...

Mike:                       El Chapo.

Robert:                   ... except I'm always going to have at least some concern for let's not go back to the bad old days where you could completely throw those ten kids under the bus and say, hey, we're a great school. You're not a great school for those ten kids.

Mike:                       How about this. Those ten kids don't do well, then instead of getting an "A," you get an "A minus."

Robert:                   I'm flexible, Mike.

Mike:                       We'll see you on February 2nd for the design competition.

Robert:                   Yes, you will.

Mike:                       These are the kinds of things that are going to be in play, and the fundamental question, of course, the ideological question is, who should get to decide?

Robert:                   Right.

Mike:                       Conservatives generally say on all of these issues, why should the Federal Government have anything to do with any of this? Let the States decide. The Civil Rights Left is going to say, oh, no, no, no, without oversight, the States are going to find creative ways to throw poor and minority kids under the bus.

Robert:                   I suppose that's true, but do you really believe, and I'm not being naive here, but do you really believe in 2016 that States need an incentive to not throw large numbers of their own kids under the bus? Come on. It's not 1964 anymore.

Mike:                       Look, Robert. We're on the same side on that one. At the same time, will there be examples of States doing stupid things?

Robert:                   From carelessness, yes, but not out of maleficence.

Mike:                       Well, people say, well, if that were the case, Robert, why do we have so many States that still don't fund poor and minority schools at an appropriate level, right? That's not just carelessness, that's a lack of political will.

                                    What we need, we need somebody from the Civil Rights Left to come on the show, here, and talk through these issues with us.

Robert:                   Yeah.

Mike:                       If you are from the Civil Rights Left and you're listening ...

Robert:                   Call Mike Petrilli.

Mike:                       Call me. Let's talk. Okay. That's all the time we got for Pardon the Gadfly. Now it's time for everyone's favorite, Amber's Research Minute.

                                    Welcome back to the show.

Amber:                   Thank you, Mike.

Mike:                       If you had to pick, who is your favorite: El Chapo, or Sean Penn?

Amber:                   I don't have a favorite out of those two. Really, really don't. That's a head-scratcher, isn't it? What the heck?

Mike:                       Quite a story.

Amber:                   Quite a story.

Mike:                       I think Sean Penn is redeeming himself by working for the CIA ...

Amber:                   Do you?

Mike:                       ... or the DIA, or whatever it might be.

Amber:                   I had warm and fuzzy feelings about him because of his reaction after Katrina, where you saw him in a little boat helping people. He went down to Katrina and really help. I've always kind of had a soft-spot for him, even though I don't agree with his politics. Yeah, I was kind of dismayed at this latest news.

Mike:                       Head-scratcher. Speaking of head-scratchers, what do you have for us this week?

Amber:                   We have a new study by IES that provides results for Fourth Grade students on the 2012 NAEP Pilot Computer Based Writing Assessment. The study asked whether Fourth Graders can fully demonstrate their writing ability, on a computer, and what factors are related to Fourth Graders' writing performance on that computer?

                                    About ten thousand four hundred Fourth Graders from five hundred and ten private and public schools were asked to compose writing tasks intended to gauge their ability to persuade or change a reader's opinion, explain their understanding of a topic, or convey an experience, real or imagined.

                                    It's like narrative, persuasive writing, descriptive writing, basically.

                                    There were randomly assigned two writing tasks out of thirty-six. They had thirty minutes to complete each of their writing task. The study built-in all this other information from a 2010 paper-based pilot, so we got both a paper-based pilot and we got a computer-based pilot. Then we have 2011 NAEP results for Grade Eight and Twelve computer-based tests. We actually have the real tests. It's a bunch of stuff, okay?

Mike:                       Okay.

Amber:                   That's not that important. What is important, is they were all different groups of kids. We can't say these kids are the same kids. This is a cross-cohort. Whatever.

Mike:                       They didn't have Johnny sit down one day and do it on the computer, and another day do it on the paper?

Amber:                   Ditto. Why didn't I just say that? That's exactly right. They did have results for am analysis of fifteen tasks that were common to both the paper version of the test and the computer version of the test.

Mike:                       Okay.

Amber:                   They spent a lot of time talking about these fifteen tasks.

                                    Key findings. Number one, sixty-eight percent of Fourth Graders received scores in the bottom-half of the scoring scale on the computer pilot. The majority of kids are in the bottom on the computer test. Okay?

                                    Number two ...

Mike:                       Isn't that just, I guess I'm not quite understanding. Fifty-percent of the kids are always going to be below average, is that all that it's saying?

Amber:                   The bottom-half of the scoring scale. They were like a six-point scale, but they're in the ...

Mike:                       Oh, I see. That's a Criterion effort? Okay. A lot of these kids did not do well.

Amber:                   Didn't do well. I didn't want to get into the nitty-gritty of the six-point scale.

                                    Number two, the percentage of responses in the top two categories of the scale, was higher on the computer than the paper assessment.

                                    Related high performers scored substantively higher on the computer than on the paper assessment. The high performers did good on the computer rather than the paper. Low and middle performers did not appear to benefit from using the computer. Either way, it seemed like a non-factor for our low and middle performers.

                                    Then they dug into some nitty-gritty. The number of words produced by Fourth Graders was smaller on the 2012 Computer Pilot than on the 2010 Paper Pilot. Even though they're not the same kids, but still they're not producing as many words on the computer as they are on paper.

Mike:                       They're pecking around the keyboard looking for their ...

Amber:                   Well, that's what we're going to get to. Low performers produced fewer words by about sixty, than middle and high performers. Middle kids produced about a hundred and four words, high performers about a hundred and seventy-nine. Then they dug into all these things that might have to do with all these factors that might relate to these results.

                                    Having access to the internet as home, is associated with text-link. You have access, it has to do with how many words you're typing up.

                                    Use of editing tools was also associated with having access to the internet. You're more likely to use your spell check or your backspace, that kind of thing.

                                    Specifically, the longer a student's response, the higher a score it is likely to receive. We tend to like those longer responses.

                                    Fourth Graders, another little factoid, more likely to say that they prefer to write on paper rather than computer. If they didn't have access to the internet at home, they also had lower average scores.

                                    All this stuff seems to be related relative to, if you like to write on paper, low and behold, you end up having lower average scores on the computer.

                                    There are a ton of stats, it's a really long report, I just picked out a few. Anyway, the bottom line is pretty simple. They say since low performers have less exposure to writing on the computer, and they produce shorter texts, guess what? They are likely struggling with keyboarding, which takes time away from the cognitive work, the brainpower of actually developing your essay, right?

Mike:                       Right.

Amber:                   This is great. This is simple stuff. What do you think they recommend at the end?

Mike:                       More internet access for low-income kids?

Amber:                   Well ... teach the kids keyboarding!

Mike:                       Teach the kids keyboarding!

Amber:                   Tell them how to do spell check and all that, and I guess, especially the low performers, but I'm thinking, it's been a long time since I've been in Elementary school, but wouldn't you think they're teaching keyboarding in Elementary schooling, or they just assuming kids know keyboarding?

Mike:                       I've seen it in my son's school that there's been some of it, in that some of it encourage for them to practice at home, and there's some little games that you can play where you have to follow some little character around and practice your keyboarding. It's interesting. This was back in 2010, 2012? You also wonder whether things have changed, at all, since then.

                                    The internet access, I thought, Amber, that we had made huge progress in closing that digital divide?

Amber:                   I know.

Mike:                       Although, maybe some of those studies count if you have a Smartphone at home, for example, that's not going to help the kid versus ...

Amber:                   That's what I was wondering, too. I haven't dig into that.

Mike:                       ... having an actual computer?

Amber:                   How they operationalized internet access, and whether it was your phone.

Mike:                       Why not just say, you know what, Fourth Grade is too early to do the testing on ...

Amber:                   Keyboard.

Mike:                       ... online. Keep doing paper-based tests in Fourth Grade?

Amber:                   Yeah, it's a good ...

Mike:                       …balanced have moved on?

Amber:                   They have. They've moved on, and they offer the paper version, but I think the push is - this has been this for twenty years, right? We're pushing closing the digital divide, and more and more and more States have put money in infrastructure into this computers in schools. That's why these testing windows, you know, these testing windows can be six weeks long, because some schools still have one computer lab where they got to shuffle the groups of kids through to take the test. It's definitely better in other places.

                                    In Ryko County where I now live, has a laptop, and has had a laptop for every kid for like twenty years or something. They were the forerunners, and they're still doing it.

                                    I think access, obviously, we know this looks different depending on where you live.

Mike:                       Are PARCC and Smarter Balanced, they're doing this at the Third Grade level?

Amber:                   They are, yes. Very interesting. It is a hmm, right? I tend to think that we probably do need to move kids into the computer age pretty early. I used to be really bothered, I don't know about you, you have kids that don't. I used to be so bothered when you'd see kids playing on computers when they were just so dang young. Of course, there's all these studies showing that we need to be careful about this. I don't think we really know yet if it can damage or stunt their growth or all these other things.

                                    It tends to be, this is the way the world's moving, so I'm really torn as to how young is too young? What are your thoughts?

Mike:                       You absolutely worried about limiting screen time, but the other thing, and I've tried to write about this in various ways, is to say when there is screen time, can you try to be choosy about what it is? There's some stuff that's more nutritious, than other. Try to avoid the empty calorie screen time. Every once in a while, let the kid have fun is fun, but there's a lot of cool stuff out there that is educational in a variety of ways, and fun, including these games to help kids learn how to keyboard.

Amber:                   Yes. Very well said. My Godson likes Doodle Drop, where you catch these little bombs that fall from the air. I don't think it's too educational, but, whatever.

Mike:                       Checkout Leo's Fortune, very, very beautifully-designed game.

                                    All right, well, thank you, Amber!

Amber:                   You're welcome!

Mike:                       All right. That is all the time we've got for this week. Robert, how are you going to tunnel out of prison, this time? You got a plan?

Robert:                   Sean Penn left me a shovel.

Mike:                       Good. I'm glad he did. Until next week ...

Robert:                   I'm Robert Pondiscio.

Mike:                       ... and I'm Mike Petrilli. The Thomas B. Fordham Institute, signing off.

A new study from the National Bureau of Economic Research examines how Louisiana’s statewide voucher program affects student achievement. The Pelican State expanded its program statewide in 2012; by 2014, twelve thousand students had applied for more than six thousand slots to attend 126 private schools. Because the program was oversubscribed, the vouchers were randomly assigned such that some kids were offered vouchers and some weren’t. This study focuses on roughly 1,400 grade students in grades 3–8 who applied in fall 2012—the first application cohort after the program expanded.

The primary (and surprising) finding is that attending a voucher-eligible private school reduces voucher students’ test scores in math, ELA, science, and social studies (though ELA is not significantly lower). Math scores go down by 0.4 standard deviation one year after the lottery, and for other subjects, the drop is between one-quarter and one-third of a standard deviation. Voucher use also reduces the probability of being promoted to the next grade and shifts students into lower state performance categories. The outcomes are even bleaker for younger children.

In short, this is all very bad news. But remember that these are first-year outcomes, and first-year evaluations of anything ought to be taken with a grain of salt.

So what explains the negative findings? They stand out in comparison with those of other gold-standard voucher studies, which have identified neutral or positive results—particularly for African American students, who make up the vast majority of recipients in Louisiana. Let’s examine the limited evidence in the study that may provide an explanation.

Some analysts are pointing the finger at “overregulation.” Jason Bedrick of Cato, among others, argues that the best private schools in the state opted out of the program because they didn’t want to comply with its many mandates. Only the most desperate, cash-starved schools participated, which explains the disastrous results. (The private school participation rate in Louisiana—about one-third of schools—is much lower than that seen in most other voucher or tax credit programs.)

Does that explanation hold water? It’s certainly true that Louisiana’s program comes with many requirements for schools. To participate, they have to administer the Louisiana state test to voucher students; receive a rating based on the achievement of their voucher students; and risk being deemed ineligible to enroll new voucher kids if they do poorly for two consecutive years. These accountability provisions are all policies that Fordham has promoted in the past.

But that’s not all. Schools also must have an open enrollment policy, meaning that they cannot apply their usual admissions requirements. Plus, schools must accept the voucher amount as the full tuition payment (which is about $3,300 less than what the students’ “sending” districts spent per pupil). That’s largely a moot point, however, since eligibility is limited to students from families earning below 250 percent of the federal poverty line (on average, applicants’ families earned roughly $15,400).

So it’s not hard to believe that the litany of requirements is keeping many private schools on the sidelines. But is there really evidence that non-participating schools are stronger than the ones that played ball, because all of the participating schools were “desperate” for students and dollars?

In short: no. Results for schools with rapid enrollment declines in previous years were no worse than other schools to which students applied.

Further, there’s no evidence that testing and accountability mandates are keeping many private schools from participating. But an AEI survey in 2015, which focused on Louisiana’s program in particular, found that “administering the state accountability test” was a “major factor” in the no decision for just 34 percent of non-participants. This meshed with a 2013 Fordham study in which our principal investigator, David Stuit, found that 37 percent of non-participants said the requirement to comply with state testing was “extremely or very important” to their decision not to take part.

But it seems just as likely that non-participating schools are concerned about the other regulations at play, and especially the limitation on using their regular admissions standards. In AEI’s study, most of the non-participating principals in Louisiana cited “future regulations that might come with participation” as their biggest hurdle—the fear of the unknown. And in the Fordham study, Stuit found that regulations restricting student admissions and schools’ religious practices are more likely to deter school participation than requirements pertaining to academic standards, testing, and public disclosure of achievement results.

Maybe the testing and accountability requirements are encouraging some private schools in Louisiana to stay away. But isn’t it just as likely that they aren’t thrilled with the idea of accepting extremely poor students (some of whom wouldn’t meet their usual admissions standards) and losing money in the bargain?

All of this to say that, sure, we need to need to be careful about meaningfully safeguarding the autonomy of private schools in voucher programs. But this study left us with a simpler takeaway: Some private schools in Louisiana stink. But if we hadn’t tested those kids, we would never have known that.

SOURCE: Atila Abdulkadiroglu, Parag A. Pathak, Christopher R. Walters, "School Vouchers and Student Achievement: First-Year Evidence From the Louisiana Scholarship Program," NBER (December 2015).

This year marks the twentieth edition of Education Week’s annual “Quality Counts” report, but not much has changed from the nineteenth—or other editions of recent vintage. Massachusetts is still the tops—with a handsome 86.8 out of a possible hundred points—and the nation’s only B-plus state for education. Maryland, New Jersey, and Vermont are next in line, each earning a B. The nation at large earns a C, as do most states—thirty-two of them registering somewhere from C-minus to C-plus. The biggest gain in the standings was accomplished by the District of Columbia, which jumped from thirty-eighth last year to twenty-eighth this year and earned an overall C.

Perhaps more unpredictable days are ahead. To wit, of particular interest in Education Week’s package is Edie Blad’s piece on California’s so called “CORE districts”—six school systems that received the only local-level waiver from some NCLB requirements. The districts, which include Los Angeles, San Francisco and Fresno, adopted an accountability system that includes “suspension rates; school-climate survey responses from parents; and measures of traits related to students' social development and engagement, like self-management and social awareness,” in addition to traditional test scores to monitor schools. In short, the CORE districts are at the forefront of the kind of non-academic accountability measures that are ostensibly encouraged by the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA).

Not surprisingly, emerging trends in accountability dominate the report, with several pieces examining “how new state and federal strategies are transforming the assessment of school performance and reshaping the consequences for poor results.” Andrew Ujifusa weighs in with a piece on the “Innovation Lab Network,” a twelve-state effort to “rethink, redesign, and lobby for changes to instruction and accountability” incubated in districts with the potential to evolve into statewide accountability systems. 

The first “Quality Counts” was issued in 1997. Its point, then as now, was to track state progress in implementing the then-novel idea of standards-based-reform. The new year promises to usher in a new era of state dynamism, particularly on accountability. Perhaps that will shake up things in the not-too-distant future. Here’s hoping a handful of new Massachusettses will emerge in the brave new world of ESSA.

SOURCE: “Quality Counts 2016: Called to Account,” Education Week (January 2016).

The expansion of the Advanced Placement program, on its face, is one of the great feel-good stories of education in my lifetime. Instead of being relegated to a boutique résumé item on the college applications of America’s most fortunate high schoolers, AP has broadened access to its more rigorous curriculum to kids across the country. Demanding coursework prepares students better for the higher expectations of post-secondary education, and successful completion of exams can often be counted for precious college credit. So, high-fives all around, right?

Maybe not. After all, if we’re moving so quickly to fit new students into AP classes, can we be sure that the experience is still as enriching as it was when the program was more narrowly focused on elite pupils? Is the content being diluted? On the flip side, critics point to huge gaps in participation among different ethnic groups. With disproportionate numbers of white and Asian students taking and passing exams, has the march toward equity made any real progress?

Those are the questions this AEI report, which focuses on the national spread of AP participation between 1990 and 2013, seeks to answer. It begins with an enlightening look into just how widely Advanced Placement classes and exams have expanded over the last generation. According to data from the College Board, some 2.2 million students took 3.9 million AP tests in 2013. That figure represents a more than five-fold increase in test takers over twenty-three years. What’s more, the total portion of high school graduates who received AP course credit has risen from 12 percent in the era of Perfect Strangers to 39 percent in the time of How I Met Your Mother. Importantly, these numbers didn’t spike merely because a greater variety of courses are now being offered; classes like AP calculus—which has been available throughout the entire period featured in the study—have seen an increase in enrollment as well.

The extent of this growth leads us to the matter of scale: With so many new students being welcomed into the program, and so quickly, is there a risk of spreading AP rigor (i.e., qualified instructors and resources) too thin over too many students? The author addresses this concern by looking at NAEP mathematics scores in 2000, 2005, and 2009—three points of measurement covering a decade of rapid AP expansion. (Since math achievement is well correlated with performance in other subjects, it is used as a proxy for overall academic success.) In each year, participant scores were effectively the same—between .63 and .68 standard deviations better than the national average. So far, at least, we haven’t seen Advanced Placement turn into too much of a good thing.

There is some concerning news, however. Participation in AP courses has gone up among every conceivable student group: boys and girls, whites and blacks, Asians and Hispanics, as well as for every level of parents’ education. But that growth has been realized faster among some groups than others, leading to worrying discrepancies among groups: The average black student earns just half of an AP credit over his high school career, compared to 1.1 credits for white students and 2.7 for Asian students. While there was no gender gap in AP participation as recently as 1998, an eight-point difference now separates girls receiving AP credit (43 percent) from boys (35 percent).

Importantly, the report suggests that these disparities are driven chiefly by preparedness rather than access—that the well-known achievement gaps separating some students from their classmates are naturally reflected in AP participation. We should absolutely hope that this is true, and that minority, male, and disadvantaged students aren’t arbitrarily being kept from more challenging academic opportunities. But there’s no excuse for us neglect the challenge of improving student performance among those underrepresented groups. “While we should responsibly expand AP,” the author concludes, “we must recognize that the ultimate solution to AP participation gaps is closing the preparation gaps before high school.” Thankfully, our forthcoming book on Education for Upward Mobility has some clear ideas on how to do precisely that.

SOURCE: Nat Malkus, “AP at scale: Public school students in Advanced Placement, 1990–2013,” AEI (January 2016).