The Education Gadfly Weekly

For three decades, leaders of both major political parties have recognized the urgency of reforming and renewing American K–12 education, and major elements of the reform agenda have generally enjoyed bipartisan support: higher standards, better teachers, results-based accountability, and more choices (particularly via charter schools). That’s why forty-three states—red, blue, and purple—have passed charter laws, and nearly all have higher standards and better assessments than they did a decade ago. From A Nation at Risk (1983) to Charlottesville (1989) to NCLB (2002) to ESSA (2015), elected officials from both sides of the aisle have been able to work together in pursuit of important goals involving the future of the country and its children.

They haven’t always agreed—especially on which levels of government should do what, how many forms of school choice warrant public funding, how best to evaluate teachers, and so on—but I’m not talking about consensus on the details of policy and implementation. I’m referring to mutual acknowledgment of the acute problems of weak achievement, unequal opportunity, too many dropout factories, and too few terrific teachers. Republicans and Democrats have generally agreed that the need for reform is urgent, and their policy outlines have often included many of the same elements. Both parties, it seemed, could put aside other differences and work together to vanquish the immense challenge of educational mediocrity.

As I wrote last week for the Hoover Institution, it increasingly feels as if that assumption has fallen victim not only to warfare between the parties but also to neglect (if not rejection) by both. As Democrats pander to teachers’ unions and minority grievances and Republicans focus on social issues and culture wars, little energy remains for school reform—much less for working across the aisle.

The 2016 party platforms supply ample if unwelcome evidence. The GOP platform is now final, though the Democratic platform remains a draft subject to change at their Philadelphia convention. It’s true that platforms don’t usually make much difference in the real world once the conventions and election are over. So I may be overreacting. But what I’m seeing so far leads me to fear that education reform no longer has a happy home in either party, let alone both.

To be fair, the original (July 1) draft of the Democrats’ platform was at least mildly pro-reform, committed to “high-quality public charter schools” as well as “high-quality teachers” and declaring that the party wants to “hold schools, districts, communities, and states accountable for raising achievement levels for all students.” As it emerged from the Sanders-friendly amending process in the platform committee, however, it got a lot worse in ways that Education Post’s Peter Cunningham astutely flagged. It’s now opposed to high-stakes testing and the use of test scores in teacher evaluations. It endorses the “opt-out” movement and puts all sorts of restrictions on charter schools while also rejecting mayoral control and other untraditional ways of governing district schools. Cunningham correctly declares, “The amendments adopted by the Democratic Platform Committee are a step backwards at a time when America can’t afford to stand still, let alone retreat.”

The final Republican platform planks on K–12 education are better than their subcommittee draft, but the language is still deeply concerning. It denies any federal role in education whatsoever, with no mention even of civil rights (save for a dig at OCR over its gratuitous fiddling with school bathroom gender access). It says nothing about research, and its only reference to data is opposition to collection of the “personal” kind. It seeks a constitutional amendment to give parents exclusive control over the education of their children—and protect it from the United Nations! There’s no reference to any public purpose for education, despite acknowledging a paragraph or two later that “maintaining American preeminence requires a world-class system of education.” One may applaud this draft’s emphasis on teaching kids American history and civics, as well as its advocacy of “merit-based” teacher hiring and retention. I certainly do. But those praiseworthy components are coupled with abstinence education, opposition to school-based health clinics, and a baffling failure to see any contradiction between “local control” and “consumer rights.” 

The education concert hall, I fear, continues to burn. Meanwhile, the conductors of our two major parties focus on their percussion sections rather than summoning the fire department.

At an EWA webinar last summer, I was asked to name the best thing that could happen to restore civic education as a priority for U.S. schools. My spontaneous two-word answer: “President Trump.” That was good for a cheap laugh back in the days when the Huffington Post relegated coverage of Trump’s campaign to its entertainment section. It’s not so funny in the sweltering and divisive summer of Orlando, Dallas, Baton Rouge, and Nice, when we seem determined to push our tolerance for one another past the limits of human endurance.

Only the most rabidly partisan and deeply unserious among us is not a touch fearful, wondering what the hell is happening. The concern is especially deeply felt among those of us whose jobs require helping children to process the irrational actions of adults in a world that seems to inch closer to the edge every day. What will we tell the children?

Our opportunity—perhaps obligation is the better word—is to think long and hard once more about the civic mission of schools and restore a vision of schooling organized around an embrace of the civic ideals enshrined in the Constitution. A surprising and counterintuitive step in this process may be reclaiming and rehabilitating the “melting pot” metaphor as a central narrative of schooling. There is good evidence to think that the key to creating conditions that sincerely welcome and celebrate diversity may lie in focusing the attention of our children on what makes us one country and one people.

Writing in the American Interest, Jonathan Haidt, a social psychologist and New York University professor, offers an eye-opening analysis of the clash between “nationalists” and “globalists.” This conflict has given us the Brexit vote and the rise of Donald Trump, as well as the sense among many “that something dangerous and ugly is spreading.” Haidt’s essay is long and thoughtful, and it deserves to be reflected upon deeply. Its big idea is that globalization and rising prosperity have changed the values and behavior of the urban elite, “leading them to talk and act in ways that unwittingly activate authoritarian tendencies in a subset of the nationalists.” Those who dismiss those tendencies as mere racism, Haidt notes, “have missed several important aspects of moral psychology related to the general human need to live in a stable and coherent moral order.”

As Haidt writes,

Nationalists see patriotism as a virtue. They think their country and its culture are unique and worth preserving. This is a real moral commitment, not a pose to cover up racist bigotry. Nationalists feel a bond with their country, and they believe that this bond imposes moral obligations both ways: Citizens have a duty to love and serve their country, and governments are duty bound to protect their own people. Governments should place their citizens’ interests above the interests of people in other countries. There is nothing necessarily racist or base about this arrangement or social contract. Having a shared sense of identity, norms, and history generally promotes trust.

Haidt’s illuminating essay draws deeply on the work of Karen Stenner, an Australian political scientist who studies authoritarianism, racism, and intolerance. Her core finding, per Haidt, is that “authoritarianism is not a stable personality trait. It is rather a psychological predisposition to become intolerant when the person perceives a certain kind of threat.” In other words, we are basically tolerant, but most of us have an “authoritarian button on our foreheads” that, when pushed, focuses us on defending our in-group. The authoritarian button is activated by what Stenner calls “normative threat,” which translates as a threat to the integrity of the moral order we perceive—“the perception that ‘we’ are coming apart.”

Haidt’s essay is not aimed at teachers. But his insights are critical for K–12 education, particularly those of us concerned with civic education and the citizen-making role of schools. It will be tempting—and wrong, I think—merely to dismiss it as an apologia for racism, bigotry, and nativism. Those who seek authoritarian solutions to political problems “are not being selfish,” he writes. “They are not trying to protect their wallets or even their families. They are trying to protect their group or society.”

The challenge for our diverse, pluralistic and democratic society—a challenge that, as ever, falls most heavily on schools, the civic institutions with the broadest reach in American life—is to blunt the sense that we are, in fact, coming apart. But there’s a paradox at work: While common sense would suggest that exposure to difference—discussion and celebration of diversity—should be critical to understanding and empathy, this humane and intuitive impulse might be precisely the wrong one. “All the available evidence indicates that exposure to difference, talking about difference, and applauding difference—the hallmarks of liberal democracy—are the surest ways to aggravate those who are innately intolerant,” Haidt quotes Stenner, “and to guarantee the increased expression of their predispositions in manifestly intolerant attitudes and behaviors.”

“Paradoxically, then, it would seem that we can best limit intolerance of difference by parading, talking about, and applauding our sameness,” Stenner observes. “Ultimately, nothing inspires greater tolerance from the intolerant than an abundance of common and unifying beliefs, practices, rituals, institutions, and processes. And regrettably, nothing is more certain to provoke increased expression of their latent predispositions than the likes of ‘multicultural education,’ bilingual policies, and non-assimilation.”

This is a startling and emphatic rebuke of recent decades’ abandonment of the melting pot as America’s defining metaphor in favor of multiculturalism, sometimes termed the “salad bowl.” If Stenner and Haidt are correct, the key to greater tolerance and even reducing the threat of hate-driven violence is not to celebrate diversity but precisely the opposite—to emphasize commonality. This invites a fascinating thought exercise for educators: Is the “normative threat” of difference blunted when we focus on the things that unite us? Is the formula for making diversity a point of pride and strength embedded within shared civic traditions and common purpose?

If you are over a certain age, a linchpin of your K–12 education was the image and narrative of your country as a melting pot. E pluribus unum. “Bring me your tired, your poor; your huddled masses yearning to breathe free.” Gradually, the term fell into disrepute, giving way to metaphors of quilts, mosaics, and kaleidoscopes. The salad bowl replaced the melting pot, which became an object of derision—and not without cause. The metaphor of a vast cauldron into which individuals from diverse background are tossed, emerging as one people, elides the myriad ways in which some groups did not, would not, or were not permitted to “melt.” For too many, the cauldron was a crucible. Still, the abandonment of the melting pot imagery, even as an ideal—the unum to balance the pluribus, a touchstone of the more perfect union we strive to build—may be precisely the kind of “normative threat” unwittingly activating the very authoritarian impulses we must blunt and avoid if we are to keep this republic. The opportunity is to see our way forward to a new, more capacious and generous vision of the melting pot. 

I have often observed that the first and most important relationship a child builds with a civic institution is with his or her school. Haidt’s essay and Stenner’s eye-opening work offer a compelling rationale for a civic education renaissance as a means to cultivate in our children a sense of attachment to the nation and its civic ideals. It is not an overstatement to suggest that if we are threatened by intolerance and slouching toward authoritarianism, the civic mission of education is elevated—immediately and urgently—not merely to a priority for education itself, but something very much like a matter of national security. 

You, like me, may find something tiresome about the sudden recrudescence of the Japanese pocket monster after its deserved interval in pixelated purgatory. The arrival of the Pokémon Go app has sent an army of dead-eyed phone worshipers traipsing through Arlington National Cemetery and D.C.’s Holocaust Memorial Museum in search of imaginary cuddle beasts, and it’s hard for us grumps to find an upside. That’s why we should leave it to USA Today’s inimitable gaming correspondent, Greg Toppo, who has gone to bat for the social and educational benefits of the app. In interviews with tech-savvy educators, he detects great admiration for the way it disperses its users into public spaces—churches, parks, museums, and historic buildings—and pushes them to rediscover their communities. A whole array of “augmented reality” games could harness this level of engagement for educational ends, even if their participants just think they’re stalking the elusive Jigglypuff.

Veterans of the reform movement probably don’t need any reminders about the sorry state of K–12 education in Newark. From the thousands of pupils served in abominable schools to decades of state intervention and the squandered $100 million gift from Facebook tycoon Mark Zuckerberg, the city’s troubles are old news. But if you haven’t checked in for a while, you may have missed some green shoots popping up through the scorched earth. As Richard Lee Colvin writes in Education Next, Superintendent Chris Cerf is fighting for accountability and excellence in Newark while also working to lower the political temperature around the city’s schools. Following the sometimes unruly tenure of his predecessor, Cami Anderson, Cerf has worked to bring local stakeholders into the education discussion more than in years past. For anyone concerned about reformers’ penchant for technocracy, it’s a relief to hear the superintendent vow that “there is an essential value in listening and giving people an opportunity to seriously engage on important questions.”

The design of a school report card can be a tough balance to strike, since it needs to be user-friendly, informative, and accurate all at once. If you fetishize accessibility, you’ll struggle to convey the full picture of a school’s academic environment and culture. But if you try to pack too much data into one document, you’ll baffle parents who don’t spend their days poring over data sets and scatter plots. Now poised to deploy a new report card to comply with the Every Student Succeed Act, the state of California may have erred a bit on the side of complexity, unveiling a Fauvist farrago of categories and ratings. This kind of information overload probably isn’t going to win any awards for clarity. On the other hand, there’s something reductive about the Education Department’s emphasis on a single, summative rating for schools—a danger, perhaps, that the simple can become simplistic. Smart policy wonks answered our call for accountability system designs; maybe they should now address themselves to solving this problem.

On this week’s podcast, Alyssa Schwenk, Brandon Wright, and David Griffith discuss GOP education politics and report that Nebraska might replace its state tests with the ACT or SAT. Amber Northern explains which school leader characteristics positively affect achievement.

Amber's Research Minute

Moira McCullough, Stephen Lipscomb, Hanley Chiang, and Brian Gill, "Do Principals’ Professional Practice Ratings Reflect Their Contributions to Student Achievement?," Mathematica (June 2016).

In a new NBER study, analysts pool estimates from lottery-based studies of the effect of charter school attendance on student outcomes, rescaling as needed so that the estimates of those effects are comparable across studies. They end up with a sample of 113 schools drawn from studies of KIPP and SEED schools, as well as charters in Massachusetts, New York City, Boston, and more.

On average, they find that each year children are enrolled at these schools increases their math scores by .08 standard deviations and their ELA scores by .04 SD on average, yet there's wide variation as expected. They link impact data to school practices, inputs, and characteristics of fallback schools (the non-charter schools that lottery losers attended the following year). They find that schools that have adopted a “no-excuses” model—which typically includes extended instructional time, high expectations, and uniforms—are correlated with large gains in performance. But noting that such schools are also concentrated in urban areas with poor-performing schools, analysts determine that the gains are largely a function of the poor performance of fallback schools. Once they control for the performance of the fallbacks, intensive tutoring is the only no-excuses characteristic that is consistently associated with student improvement. (They also examine and dismiss teacher feedback, data-driven instruction, instructional time, and high expectations.)

Although this latter finding is based on a smaller sample of fifty-seven schools—and is suggestive rather than dispositive, as there’s no random assignment of schools to tutoring—it nonetheless reinforces other studies that demonstrate the impact of tutoring. Keep in mind, however, that many of the qualities that makes no-excuses schools distinctive are hard to measure (like school culture). So we should avoid the temptation to read the study’s message as “Tutoring is all that matters”!

SOURCE: Julia Chabrier, Sarah Cohodes, and Philip Oreopoulos, "What Can We Learn from Charter School Lotteries?," NBER (July 2016).

A report released last month by the DC Public Charter School Board looked at how far students must travel to attend charter schools in the nation’s capital. It breaks down data by students’ age, race, and at-risk-status, examining how travel distances differ for those who live within the city’s various wards.

We learn that, on average, D.C. charter students commute a remarkable 2.1 miles to school as the crow flies. Depending on the method of transportation, this could mean a forty-two-minute walk, an eight-minute Metrorail ride (not counting the commute between home, metro station, and school), or a ten-minute drive (in no traffic—a fanciful scenario in our nation’s capital). Yet the report also found much variance between student subgroups.

Those travelling to special education schools had the farthest to travel: an average of 3.1 miles, almost a mile more than those in standard pre-K or elementary schools (both averaged two miles), middle schools (2.2 miles), high schools (2.4 miles), and adult and alternative schools (2.1 miles). When disaggregated by race and ethnicity, Hispanic students have the shortest commute to school (1.7 miles). All others faced an average travel distance of 2.2 miles. At-risk students (i.e., those who are homeless, in the foster care system, or qualify for welfare or food stamps) travel 0.2 miles less than students not at risk. And thirty-four out of 114 campuses enrolled at least one student from all eight wards.

As noted above, however, a major shortcoming of this report is that authors measured distance as the crow flies—that is, the shortest straight line between home and school. This does not take into account actual transportation time or distance that a child would have to travel in order to attend school, which could radically vary depending on which part of the city the student lived in and the methods of transportation used.

Overall, this report paints a clearer picture of the charter school students of Washington, D.C. and where they choose to attend school.

SOURCE: DC Public Charter School Board, “Choosing Quality” (June 2016).