The Education Gadfly Weekly

As regular readers know, I’m in the middle of a series of posts exploring how education reformers can work to improve learning besides pushing for policy changes. One way is to spur “disruptive innovations” that target students, parents, and/or teachers directly.

Clay Christensen and his acolytes would surely disagree with my use of that term. His definition goes as follows: “A process by which a product or service takes root initially in simple applications at the bottom of a market and then relentlessly moves up market, eventually displacing established competitors.”

I’m ambitious, but not quite that ambitious. Sure, I’d love to disrupt the traditional education bureaucracy and replace it with a system of high-performing charter schools. That might be doable one day—at least in our major cities and inner-ring suburbs, where student need is greatest, the population is dense, and existing district schools are the least defensible. But in America’s affluent suburbs, exurbs, small towns, and rural areas, I think the “system” is here to stay for the foreseeable future. There’s just not enough appetite in those places for something very different.

What I’m interested in today is how to work around that system and cut out its middle men (and women), such as superintendents and procurement officers. (Future posts will discuss possible strategies for improving the system via stronger leadership, the more resolute use of evidence, and better instructional products.) How can reformers, entrepreneurs, and philanthropists “disintermediate” school districts and provide valuable services to students, parents, or teachers directly? What innovations are already underway, and what others might be pursued in the future? Let’s tackle each of those groups one at a time, starting with kids.

Take it to the tots and teens

Schools have never had a monopoly on teaching. Children have always learned plenty of stuff from their parents, communities, churches, and friends; for the past five hundred years, many of them have also had books to turn to. And recent decades have brought educational television, an underappreciated technology with proven results and massive reach.

The Internet, of course, ramps up the possibilities. And as Julie Petersen—a writer, editor, and communications strategist—told me, there is a lot of venture capital going into apps, games, and tutoring platforms that are “student-facing” and being sold direct-to-consumer (or available for free).

Khan Academy is the best-known “disruptor” in this class, and for good reason. According to a 2014 implementation study by SRI, Sal Khan’s initiative was already attracting 6.5 million unique users per month in the United States alone. I’m particularly intrigued by its new partnership with the College Board, which allows students to use their PSAT or SAT results to find free, targeted help through Khan Academy. In the lead-up to the new SAT, administered for the first time in March, over one million students used Khan’s official SAT practice modules. And it wasn’t just affluent kids in hothouse high schools logging on; usage was even across all major demographic groups.

Khan is great, but it’s been fairly limited to date. It offers nothing for young kids, for instance. For that market, PBS Kids has a natural advantage, providing a whole suite of video content, games, and interactive features that are great complements to school-based learning. (At eight, my elder son has learned much more science from Wild Kratts and the like than from the Montgomery County Public Schools.) Other good sources are Brain Pop and Brain Pop Jr. and National Geographic, both for videos and for interactive activities. Tinybop has created several “strange and beautiful” apps that make learning fun for preschoolers. Older kids can get a lot out of Ted Ed or the Art of Problem Solving or Duolingo (for learning languages); many younger kids enjoy the Age of Learning’s products. (That company boasts over a million subscribers who pay $7.95 a month.) We at Fordham have even tried our hand at compiling good streaming videos from across the interwebs. And of course, don’t forget about the learning potential of games like Minecraft.

Still, there’s plenty left to do. Are you a funder or reformer who cares about, say, a content-rich curriculum? Especially stuff that kids aren’t learning much of in school, like geography or the imperative of financial literacy? While you’re seeking to get the system to change its ways and make those things a priority, why not develop engaging instructional products that kids can find online themselves, with videos, games, social interactivity, and more? Not surprisingly, that’s what the “teach coding” people are busy doing.

Another idea: kid- or teen-centric podcasts. Imagine you want to help first-generation students make it through college. Why not develop a compelling weekly podcast, produced by and for teenagers, with tips and inspiration? Do you worry that there’s not enough history being taught in our elementary schools? Put together a weekly podcast with teachers, professors, or amateur historians telling fascinating stories about the past in a kid-friendly way. Do the same for science, music, or literature.

The big challenge with this strategy is motivation. College-crazed high school seniors have a clear incentive to boost their SAT scores, and little kids (in my experience) can be easily captivated by compelling videos or clever games. But what about everyone in between? Digital badges might help, but if the system has to decide whether they “count” (for either credit or grades), we’re back to trying to persuade a lethargic, stubborn system. Maybe someone could figure out the education version of Fitbit rewards programs. (People can earn coupons, gift cards, or even cash for completing fitness goals.) What if kids could earn points by completing digital badges—or just showing up at the library—and could redeem them at toy stores or local fro-yo joints? Another possibility: Leverage positive peer pressure. That’s the strategy being used by Peer Forward, a project of College Summit, which trains teens to take the lead on college and career access goals for their schools. Brain Chase, which the Charter School Growth Fund’s Alex Hernandez has used with his own school-age twins, turns academic achievement into a visceral adventure.

Knowledge is power

It’s not just learning tools that could target students directly. There are also big “disruptive” opportunities in empowering them with information. To take one example: Common Core-aligned exams are finally delivering honest (if often sobering) news to kids about whether they’re on track for college and career. The “score reports” coming from the states are better than they used to be. But they’re still not clear or compelling enough, I would argue, for the message to really hit home. Here’s an idea: a website where an elementary or middle school student could enter his standardized test score, and maybe his GPA, and be informed by an algorithm what kind of a college he’d be on track to attend. For lots of young people, alas, the answer would be no college at all, at least without remedial education. It would then point them to resources (like those above) to help them boost their learning and their grades.

And what about the other half of college and career readiness? Michelle Obama is currently promoting the Reach Higher Career App Challenge; its five finalists are offering a variety of tools to help teens map their route into promising jobs. Hats and Ladders, for example, is “a game-based app that supports middle and high school career exploration with swipe-to-choose self-assessments, connected activities, and mini-challenges.”

You get the idea. Imagine: There are millions of students out there, bored at school but yearning to learn. Reformers, give the kids what they want! 

Editor's note: This was a submission to Fordham's 2016 Wonkathon. We asked assorted education policy experts to answer this question: What are the "sleeper provisions" of ESSA that might encourage the further expansion of parental choice, at least if advocates seize the opportunity? Of the eleven submissions, this was selected as the winner by a poll of our readers.

One of my biggest concerns about ESSA has been its lack of a meaningful “safety valve” for kids in failing schools. There is no getting around the fact that this version of ESEA does not spell out parent-directed education options the same way No Child Left Behind did, with its explicit provisions for supplemental educational services and school choice. When ESSA eliminated the “cascade of sanctions” for schools deemed “in need ofimprovement”, explicit references to closing schools and reopening them as charters also disappeared. There are no requirements (let alone incentives) for choice and transportation.

What we learned from NCLB, though, is that unwanted mandates don’t usually lead to much real access to seats in better schools. Washington can tell a district it must offer school choice regardless of capacity, but in the real world the absence of high-quality school options means that parents are still stuck. And when the Obama administration attempted to jump-start stalled interventions under NCLB with redesigned School Improvement Grants, we learned yet again that even a convoluted “rule of nine” can’t “make” districts choose the turnaround options that they find most challenging (even if those are the options with the strongest odds of doing well by kids).

ESSA has real potential, though, for states and districts that want to leverage Title I to expand choice and enlarge their capacity to serve students otherwise stuck in struggling schools. “Sleeper” language embedded in the legislation could allow states to increase access to high-quality seats and transform entrenched failure in schools or districts by:

Replacing a school identified for comprehensive support and improvement with one or more charter schools

Opening new charter schools or expanding successful schools

Developing a comprehensive district choice program that includes expanding the number of high-quality seats through replication and expansion of high-quality charter schools.

Yes, these are options, not mandates. But they are clear and present options for places that have the savvy and courage to make use of them.

Choice 101: States should set parameters on school improvement funds—not just hand them out by formula!

ESSA lets states choose whether to allocate school improvement funds by formula or via competition (or both, as under NCLB). States that want to play a significant role in directing the use of 7 percent of their Title I funds for school improvement should allocate them competitively, whenever possible. Running a competition allows the state to establish priorities and eligibility requirements to shape the local use of funds. But even where political or practical reasons make a formula more compelling, states need not automatically turn those funds over to districts. They should set eligibility requirements (determining how district applications will be funded) that reflect the state’s priorities for assisting its lowest-performing schools. Yes, Section 1111 gives districts wide latitude to design comprehensive support and improvement activities, but the potential efficacy of such interventions can be influenced—or dictated—by state-set parameters. The state can set expectations that districts will reopen schools as charters under certain conditions, for instance, or that districts will open new schools to increase their capacity to serve students otherwise stuck in their lowest-performing schools. SEAs could even require LEAs to use 5 percent of their Title I allocation for public school choice transportation. (Yes, that, too, is permitted under ESSA.) They could link monetary awards to the use of direct student services and provide additional funding for choice opportunities through the competitive grant framework.

Choice 201: SEAs can engage directly with other partners to expand choice within  districts

We all know that some (maybe many) districts lack the capacity or will (or both) to make fundamental changes to offer choice—even when alternative options are sought by parents and would be appropriate in the context of a given district. Section 1003(b)(1)(B) is for districts that need heavier state “direction” than they would otherwise receive through a competitive grant process (under Choice 101). This section declares that state education agencies“may, with the approval of the local educational agency, directly provide for these activities or arrange for their provision through other entities such as…nonprofit or for-profit external providers with expertise in using evidence-based strategies to improve student achievement, instruction, and schools.” (Section 1003(b)(1)(B))

Doesn’t that mean the LEA must approve any outsiders receiving funds? Yes—but the SEA holds the funds. Ideally, the SEA and LEA would work together, but the LEA will ultimately need to go along with the SEA’s conditions for funding interventions. The statute clearly says that funds could go to a non-profit, which includes charter operators and management organizations (CMOs) chosen to replicate or expand schools. This provision opens the door to implementing district-wide strategies focused on improving the quality of education provided in schools that are identified for comprehensive support and improvement.

And if identified schools in an LEA don’t make sufficient progress to meet state “exit” requirements, Section 1111(b)(3)(B) broadens state authority to act directly—potentially without LEA approval—to “take additional improvement actions” to implement “alternative evidence-based State-determined strategies” for improving the district’s comprehensive and targeted improvement schools.

Choice 301: SEAs can widen pipelines for better schools in hard-to-serve areas

Section 1003(b)(2)(C) also encourages SEAs to “reduce barriers and provide operational flexibility for schools.” This creates opportunities for states to offer additional autonomies so as to attract high-performing networks that might not otherwise consider putting down stakes in particular districts. Additional funding is also possible through the state’s 5 percent set-aside of Section 1003(b) funds. Through the provision to work directly with private organizations, funds could be used to recruit and train high-potential school leaders to serve in areas where it’s hard to attract talent.

As states look for ways to expand choice and capacity, the key is to jump on Choice 101 and take an active role in promoting the creation of excellent alternatives for students in struggling schools. You can be sure that the U.S. Department of Education won’t take the lead in figuring out all of the choice potential that exists with ESSA. States have to activate the sleeper provisions on their own—and push the law as far as it will go. The opportunities are there, however, and any state serious about doing right by its educationally neediest children will seize them.

Here’s a quick cheat sheet for implementing choice under ESSA:

Christy Wolfe is a senior policy advisor at the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools.

• At the same time we wrapped up our Wonkathon on parental choice under the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA), the Washington Post’s Jay Mathews published a column on the new law’s implications for school accountability. With authority ostensibly withdrawn from the Department of Education, he wonders which measures—particularly non-academic ones—state-level officials will use to determine whether schools and districts doing right by their students. It’s a question that we originally asked in our accountability system design competition this February, yielding novel proposals for student satisfaction questionnaires, school climate surveys, and the tracking of chronic absenteeism, among others. Mathews’s take is no less rewarding.
• Meanwhile, developments in Denver are also providing a real-time examination of issues we’ve been exploring this month in our national commentary. District officials there have unveiled a new, three-phase framework for initiating the shuttering of underperforming schools, echoing the recent debate between Fordham’s Mike Petrilli and the University of Arkansas’s Jay Greene on the utility—or futility—of relying on test data for closures. (Jay struck a deeply skeptical note on “distant authorities” using such information to overrule parental demand, while Mike was more bullish on what regulators can learn from test scores.) The Denver approach seems to exhibit both rigor and balance, using student growth data to broadly classify schools before turning to local actors like teachers and parents for a more granular view. Closure is one of the truly hot-button questions in the reform conversation, so let’s hope this method gains traction.
• Andy Boy, the founder and CEO of Columbus Collegiate Academy (CCA), had every reason to be jaded about the prospect of opening an excellent charter school in Ohio. His career in education began as a teacher at one of the state’s enormous number of failing and under-regulated charters (its founder eventually did time for fraud). But if cynicism ever set in, his results at CCA don’t show it. Students at two of the school’s campuses—both serving overwhelmingly disadvantaged populations—have vaulted over the state averages for math and reading performance. Along the way, the program has grown quickly and dramatically: from fifty-seven pupils at its 2008 inception to six hundred today. And the best part? We’re their authorizer!

On this week’s podcast, Mike Petrilli and Brandon Wright discuss the Department of Education’s guidance on transgender rights, Jay Mathews’s call for new ways to measure student success under ESSA, and their favorite Wonkathon submissions. During the Research Minute, Amber Northern explains the varying success of private schools in Milwaukee.

Amber's Research Minute

Michael R. Ford and Fredrik O. Andersson, "Determinants of Organizational Failure in the Milwaukee School Voucher Program," Policy Studies Journal (May 2016).

A new study by Pat Wolf and a few of his graduate students is a formal meta-analysis of the impacts of voucher programs on math and reading achievement. It attempts to set the voucher record straight in the face of conflicting messages coming out of academia, think tanks, and the press.

The authors go through a litany of prior reviews of voucher achievement effects and deem them insufficient, primarily because they include less rigorous studies or omit relevant, rigorous studies. Moreover, they result in divergent conclusions, vacillating from no effect to positive effect to a mix.

Wolf’s meta-analysis, however, includes only experimental studies or randomized control trials—the “gold standard.” They include all such studies ever conducted on voucher programs (both inside and outside the United States) that focused on participant effects and measured test score outcomes in either math or reading, which they found primarily through a comprehensive search of library databases and Google Scholar. (Studies that used outcomes such as graduation rates and college attainment were excluded, as were those not published in English or with English translations.) Included programs could be publicly  or privately funded, or funded indirectly via tax credit scholarships. Ultimately, nineteen studies representing eleven programs met these criteria—eight in the United States (including publications that focused on Milwaukee, Dayton, and New York City) and three in Colombia and India. These comprise a total of 262 effect sizes (which, in laymen’s terms, is the strength of the impact calculated on a common scale).

Wolf and colleagues find that voucher programs produce positive results overall, the magnitude of which vary by subject, location, and funding. They also find that the effects of voucher programs often start out null in the first year or two before turning positive in year four and after. Given these somewhat nuanced findings, it is best to simply repeat the authors’ bottom line:

Generally, the impacts of private school vouchers are larger for reading than for math. Impacts tend to be larger for programs outside the U.S. relative to those within the U.S. Impacts also generally are larger for publicly funded programs relative to privately funded programs.

This summary, however, might overstate the effects of U.S. programs. In reading, the cumulative impact of U.S. voucher programs is null. And in math, they’re rather modest (.07 SD) overall relative to the offer of a voucher (“intent to treat” impact). It should be noted, however, that the inclusion of Louisiana makes the overall “treatment on treated” impact (use of the voucher) for U.S. programs null as well.

In the end, this valuable meta-analysis leads to one big question: Why are American voucher programs being bested by their foreign counterparts?

SOURCE: 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).

A new policy brief from the National Alliance for Public Charter schools takes up the contentious issue of “backfilling”—the practice of enrolling new students when existing ones leave. Should charter schools be engaged in backfilling? If so, when do they enroll those students? At prescribed entry points? At will? Or never?

The paper highlights a range of existing approaches to backfilling taken by states, authorizers, and charter operators. Massachusetts passed legislation requiring all charters in the state to fill any vacancy up to February 15 except seats in the second half of a school’s grade span. For example, if a Bay State K–5 charter school has a vacancy in grades K–2 before February 15, they are compelled to fill it; if a seat goes empty in grades 3–5, it’s at the school’s discretion. Washington, D.C. is playing with a new funding model that creates strong financial incentives to backfill. “The goal is to allow for multiple membership counts at all public schools so schools can be compensated for the students currently enrolled, as opposed to those who never showed up or who left mid-year,” the report notes. At the authorizer level, Indiana’s Public Charter School Board requires charters to use enrollment practices similar to traditional public schools, “which is interpreted as requiring schools to fill any vacancies that become available.” When the decision devolves to charters themselves, practices are mixed. RePublic Schools in Tennessee and Mississippi backfill from their waitlists; Washington, D.C.’s LAMB enrolls kids only at the pre-K level, reasoning that it takes every year of instruction to meet the school’s goal of graduating eighth graders fluent in both Spanish and English. “This approach results in their kindergarten classes being significantly larger than their eighth-grade graduating classes,” the brief notes.

Given the lack of consensus among charter operator, NAPCS’s report avoids choosing sides, laying out arguments both for and against backfilling. On the one hand, charter schools are public schools that should, by definition, provide open enrollment as a moral imperative. Less persuasive is the argument that if a school does not fill vacant seats, “it becomes more difficult to definitively say that a school’s proficiency data is an accurate reflection of its performance.” (Sure, but is a school’s responsibility to serve its existing students as well as possible? Or to provide a dataset?) One of the strongest anti-backfilling argument is that charters are simply different from traditional public schools. Enrolling students fluidly impedes their ability to establish and maintain a coherent school culture.

“If we require charter public schools to backfill,” the authors note, “we lose the balance of autonomy and accountability that the public charter school model is predicated on and invite regulatory creep into other areas as well.” Just so.

Rather than overtly favoring or prescribing one approach or another, the paper offers organizations and states “options for future work on backfilling” (although collectively, these “options” tilt heavily in favor of backfilling). These recommendations include charters “leading the conversation” by gathering data on enrollment trends and backfilling policies at the school, authorizer, and state levels. Charter supporters might also push for greater transparency, including mandating that authorizers publish their portfolios’ enrollment data at certain points in time. “Posting this data could create public pressure for charter schools to backfill,” the report notes. Another suggestion is creating financial incentives to backfill through, for example, “real-time” funding for students. At present, a student can be counted—and a charter school compensated—on a state’s official enrollment count day, even if that student leaves the school the next day. Finally, the report also candidly notes that philanthropic support for charters has tended to depress backfilling by making up for public dollars lost when seats go unfilled. “By pulling together its philanthropic base and having a conversation about enrollment and backfilling, a state’s charter school movement could highlight particular enrollment trends and encourage funders to consider this data when selecting which models to fund.”

SOURCE: “Backfilling in Charter Public Schools,” National Alliance for Public Charter Schools (May 2016).

A recent report by the Public Policy Institute of California (PPIC) investigates San Diego Unified School District’s (SDUSD) new graduation policy requiring students in the class of 2016 and beyond to receive a passing grade on a sequence of college preparatory courses (commonly called the “a–g” sequence, with each letter referring to a different subject area). This aligns the district’s graduation requirements with admissions eligibility at California State University (CSU) and University of California (UC) member schools, which officials hope will increase rates of college entry and completion—especially for underrepresented communities.

Authors collected data from student administrative records and conducted a comparative analysis to evaluate the likely impact of the new policy. They used students who graduated between 2011 and 2015—who completed the courses that are now graduation requirements—as a baseline for measuring the impact of the a–g sequence on course-taking patterns, graduation rates, and eligibility to attend schools that make up the CSU and UC systems. Researchers also examined the course sequence’s effect on college access for historically underachieving subgroups in the class of 2016. They used individual student’s grade-six characteristics to determine the likelihood of completing the a–g sequence and then compared these estimates to each student’s actual a–g course completion.

The results were mixed. On the positive side, the classes of 2016–18 have been attempting more college preparatory courses—and passing roughly one more semester course with grades of D or higher and C or higher—compared to previous graduating classes. The new policy also appears to increase college readiness. Fifty-nine percent of students in the class of 2016 are on track to meet UC/CSU admissions requirements, versus 47 percent of students in classes 2011–14 who fulfilled these requirements. Even more promising, students in historically low-performing subgroups are benefiting the most. Students in the class of 2016 who had a lower predicted likelihood of completing the a–g sequence increased their a–g course completion to the greatest extent by the end of eleventh grade, completing over two additional courses.

But requiring students to pass more rigorous courses has had some unintended (if foreseeable) consequences. Students in the class of 2016 are indeed taking more college prep courses, but almost 30 percent of them aren’t on track to graduate (have yet to take and/or failed required courses). Approximately one-third of these students finished their junior year needing to complete two semesters worth of a–g coursework in at least three different subjects. Although the SDUSD offers credit recovery during the summer, these students may still be unable to meet the a–g requirements, and are thus denied graduation.

Authors recommend that state education agencies and other localities considering following SDUSD’s lead should support student outcomes in earlier grades—primarily in the early elementary years—before adopting more demanding high school graduation requirements; high-quality pre-K and rigorous content standards can prepare students for these demands. They also support providing alternatives to college preparatory graduation requirements (such as the career and technical education pathway) that accommodate more students and prepare them for success after high school.

All in all, raising the bar for high school graduation doesn’t mean much if the opportunities for success—whether in college or in the workforce—are not equitable for all students.

SOURCE: Julian R. Betts et al., “College Prep for All: Will San Diego Student Meet Challenging New Graduation Requirements,” Public Policy Institute of California (April 2016).