The Education Gadfly Weekly

It is not reasonable to expect research to resolve all issues or to erase all differences of opinion. We can but supply some information that we think reliable, and we will continue in the future to supply more. But it is up to the American people to decide what to do. The better their information, the wiser will be their decisions.

So wrote my colleague Chester Finn in his introduction to a compendium of research findings about teaching and learning.

The book was called What Works, and it was published in March.

March of 1986.

In the thirty years since, America has gone through several waves of reform, but we’re still talking about establishing research-based practices in our schools. Figuring out how to do this better is another way that reformers and funders might improve our education system without overhauling laws and regulations. (I’ve identified other tactics, besides policy change, for reforming our schools, namely building a new system via charters or education savings accounts; spurring disruptive innovations that target students, parents, or teachers directly; and investing in leadership.)

No, it’s not easy. Policy makers can exhort educators to adopt “evidence-based practices,” as Congress did in both No Child Left Behind and the Every Student Succeeds Act. Philanthropists and advocates of every ideological stripe can do the same, and they frequently do. Think tanks and scholars and evaluation shops and the What Works Clearinghouse (WWC) can pump out studies and practitioner guides. Structures can be put in place to incentivize education leaders to seek evidence about “what works”— results-based accountability systems, for instance, or the competition that comes with school choice. Insights from research can be embedded into academic standards like the Common Core. Yet it seems to me that all of these efforts have gotten limited traction. Education remains a field in which habit, intuition, and incumbency continue to play at least as large a role as research and data analysis.

The question is why, and what might be done about it. Many people much smarter than I have thought hard and long about these questions, among them Vivian Tseng at the W.T. Grant Foundation, Tom Kane at Harvard’s Center for Education Policy Research, and Michael Barber at Pearson. Some of the key problems they identify include:

• Limited supply: There’s undoubtedly more research findings to guide practice today than there were a generation ago; it’s no longer fair to call the What Works Clearinghouse the “Nothing Works Clearinghouse.” As IES founding director Russ Whitehurst told me, the Clearinghouse has identified 111 effective educational interventions in the last twelve years. Rigorous studies have made a big impact on teacher evaluations (for better or worse) and helped make the case for high-quality charter schools. (Ruth Neild, IES’s current acting director, points to yet more examples.) Still, we could all name dozens of practical questions for which education research still hasn’t provided definitive guidance.
• Too much supply—of the wrong kind: Education is awash in a deluge of reports, journal articles, emails, tweets, and news stories, all making claims about “what the research shows.” It’s too much for anyone to sift through, and much of it is bogus to start with, so some educators understandably shun it all and keep doing what they’ve always done.
• Poor dissemination: A recent study from the National Center for Research in Policy and Practice found that fewer than one in five district administrators checks the What Works Clearinghouse “often” or “all the time” for research findings. Instead they look to books, turn to peers in professional associations, pick up ideas at conferences, and rely on state education departments and the news media. Maybe if the WWC and similar outlets (like this one) did a better job pushing out their findings, they’d have a better uptake rate. (I hear that a new and improved WWC website and social media strategy is coming next week.)
• Weak incentives: Maybe test-based accountability and competition from school choice aren’t enough to entice leaders to seek out evidence-based interventions. Maybe what’s needed is an FDA for education, an entity with explicit regulatory authority to keep districts from purchasing dubious products and services. (Then again, if you thought Common Core was controversial….)
• Ideology: It’s those education school professors! They’re fundamentally opposed to the reform agenda, measuring schools via student outcomes, and hard-nosed quantitative analyses. Our teachers and principals get trained to love the warm-and-fuzzy while in college or grad school, and they never recover.
• Habits of practice in schools and districts: Maybe the problem is that educators aren’t particularly open to new research in the first place. Perhaps they’re weary of the “reform of the month.” Maybe educators distrust the “external validity” of national studies and only put faith in findings from studies about their own students and contexts.

There’s surely some truth in all those explanations, which means that we should stay open to a variety of solutions for addressing the problem. Some options include:

1. Book it! If education leaders often turn to books for ideas and evidence, let’s develop evidence-based books that might have an impact. Doug Lemov’s best-selling Teach Like a Champion demonstrated a market demand for specific, practical advice for teachers. I’d personally love to work on Evidence-Based Elementary Schools, which could share practices that boost achievement—especially for disadvantaged kids—including teaching a broad, content-rich curriculum. (Anyone out there want to pay for that or publish it?) It would help if universities rewarded junior scholars for publishing well-read books when making tenure decisions.
2. Get together! Professional associations and personal networks are key sources of information and ideas, so reformers and researchers should do a better job partnering with the key education groups that already exist, like ASCD, AASA, and NCTE. Another option, naturally, would be to create ones. Tony Bryk’s “Networked Improvement Communities” represent one promising model. And how about a national network, or at least an annual gathering, for chief academic officers from large districts and charter management organizations? These folks don’t yet have their own association, perhaps because the role is relatively new. Yet they make key decisions that could and should be guided by evidence, including textbook selection, daily schedules, and so on.
3. Go small! As Tom Kane and others have been arguing, we might shift a hefty chunk of our research funding from large, national impact studies to smaller, local, “short cycle” evaluations. These publications can help districts and charter networks learn quickly what’s working and what’s not, and adjust appropriately. And we should strive to produce studies that go beyond simply “what works” on average to uncover what works for particular kinds of students in specific situations.

To be frank, I’m not sure any of these strategies will gain traction, at least in our traditional school system. As I wrote in an earlier post about education leadership, nobody seems to know how to transplant the DNA of our best charter management organizations like KIPP into central office bureaucracies that have learned to pay more attention to the dictates of elected boards than what’s best for kids. I don’t know why so many schools and school systems, including some I’m personally familiar with, seem so uninterested in tweaking their curricula, or hiring, or schedule, or student assignments, or anything else that might make them 10 or 20 or 30 percent better.

One final thought: What Works circa 1986 was an earnest effort undertaken because then-Secretary of Education Bill Bennett said it was needed—and devoted much of the department’s discretionary budget to dissemination. I can think of no better mission for whoever takes that post next year than to push not just his (or her) agency, but also the field itself, to infuse U.S. schools with practices that actually help kids to learn.

June 4 marked the twenty-fifth anniversary of Minnesota's charter school law, the nation's first. In 1990, charter pioneer Ted Kolderie foresaw that chartering would "introduce the dynamics of choice, competition, and innovation into America's public school system, while at the same time ensuring that new schools serve broad public purposes."

A quarter-century later, forty-three states and the District of Columbia have passed such laws, and 6,800 charter schools educate almost three million children. Remarkably, charters account for the entire enrollment growth in American public education since 2006. District schools actually lost students during this time, as did some private schools.

Thus far, the mission that chartering has carried out with greatest success and acclaim has been to place tens of thousands of disadvantaged children on a path to college and upward mobility. In fact, charters today primarily serve low-income children of color—the kids who typically fare worst in big-district systems. For reasons of both equity and politics, many state charter laws give priority to schools that focus on such students, while some confine chartering to core cities.

University of Michigan economist Susan Dynarski put it this way: "In urban areas, where students are overwhelmingly low-achieving, poor, and nonwhite, charter schools tend to do better than other public schools in improving student achievement."

One type of charter school, the so-called "no excuses" model, has had the most visible success at producing these results. Such schools are typically characterized by high behavioral and academic expectations, much more learning time, curricula geared toward college entry, and robust school cultures. Many of them—including such well-known brands as KIPP, Achievement First, and Success Academy—have worked wonders with their youthful charges. In no small part because of their success—as well as the compelling needs of the children they seek to serve—philanthropists, policymakers, a growing school reform movement, and aligned ventures such as Teach For America have striven to expand them across the country. They've made great progress—KIPP alone is up to 200 schools—yet plenty of needy kids still lack access to such options. Hence, as we look toward the future of chartering, one rational strategy is to continue scaling and perfecting the no-excuses model.

Yet there's a downside, too. The focus on this one model, laudable as it is, has narrowed the broad promise originally envisioned by Kolderie and other founders of the charter movement. In fact, in the eyes of many educators, policymakers, and philanthropists—and probably in the eyes of the broader public—chartering has come to be viewed principally as a mechanism for liberating poor kids from bad urban schools and relocating them to better schools. The No Child Left Behind Act, and similar reforms at the state and local levels, equated progress with boosting reading and math test scores for low-achieving and minority youngsters. Philanthropy, too, has contributed to this narrowing of focus as—for legitimate reasons—it channeled most of its K-12 dollars into strategies and schools that promised to boost achievement for those students.

But is this important mission all that the charter sector should undertake? Chartering's founders didn't think so, nor do we. We know that no-excuses schools don't suit every child or family seeking alternatives to woeful neighborhood options. Some balk at this model's rigid practices, which can yield great test scores but don't necessarily cultivate qualities of character, creativity, and deep understanding. Critics also fret that no-excuses schools don't do a great job of preparing young people for the independence and self-management they'll need to thrive in college and beyond. It's also a fact that, because they provide additional services and all those extra hours, no-excuses schools typically need more money than is generally supplied by regular charter funding streams. This adds a special fundraising burden to a sector that already receives nearly 30 percent less per pupil in operating dollars than do nearby district schools—and that, in many places, also gets no help with the cost of facilities.

The focus of no-excuses schools on minority kids also plays into the hands of critics who assert that charters are resegregating public education. Analysts affiliated with the Civil Rights Project at the University of California, Los Angeles, for example, assert that "charter schools are more racially isolated than traditional public schools in virtually every state and large metropolitan area in the nation." We find no merit in those allegations—indeed, University of Arkansas researchers reached opposite conclusions from the same data—but chartering faces strong political headwinds even without this additional tempest.

Charter insiders know that this sector is already more diverse than the hype around no-excuses schools suggests. Indeed, a recent American Enterprise Institute study of charters in 17 cities found roughly equal numbers of more progressive models and no-excuses schools. (Plenty of other charters fit neither category.)

Poor kids need those options, too, but they're not the only pupil population that can benefit from charters. In the years ahead, we believe chartering should plant many seeds and cultivate many crops. It's a flexible instrument that can address all manner of needs and opportunities. What about more high-quality career-and-technical-education charters, or charters for gifted and talented students? (More than 100 charter schools now focus on children with disabilities.) Charters for art enthusiasts? Personalized-learning charters that take advantage of digital options to let kids proceed through the curriculum at their own pace? More charters for youthful offenders and former offenders? Schools just for girls and just for boys? For athletes or classicists? Character-and-civics-centric charters? Schools for rural residents? For kids whose posh but rigid suburban districts don't meet their needs? More teacher-led schools?

Since it was first conceived, chartering has held the capacity to develop new structures for delivering and governing public education. We look to the next decade or two for chartering to pilot new delivery systems, structures, and governance arrangements, as have already begun to emerge via networks like KIPP and Aspire and in cities like Washington, Denver, Indianapolis, and New Orleans. We also look to chartering to continue innovating at the system level with respect to staffing, technology, governance, and curriculum.

Enabling such a future will call for imagination and flexibility on many fronts, including changes in chartering's statutory and regulatory environment, as well as new approaches to accountability and parent information. There's also a need for more careful attention to sensitive issues of community engagement, human capital, and race. It's a tall order but one that, if properly filled, will benefit millions more youngsters. As we observe the present anniversary, let us celebrate chartering's past but not be confined by it. Bona fide school choice means plenty of different options, and chartering is the surest mechanism in America today to make these options available. Let's use it to the max.

This essay originally appeared in a slightly different form in Education Week.

On this week’s podcast, Mike Petrilli, Alyssa Schwenk, and Brandon Wright discuss this summer’s ten biggest education stories. During the research minute, Amber Northern examines the effects of paying teachers for performance.

Amber's Research Minute

Alison Wellington, Hanley Chiang, Kristin Heallgren, Cecilia Speroni, Mariesa Herrmann, and Paul Burkander, "Evaluation of the Teacher Incentive Fund: Implementation and Impacts of Pay-for-Performance After Three Years," Mathematica (August 2016).

A new report uncovers some good news about narrowing socioeconomic gaps in kindergarten readiness.

It compares the early life experiences of incoming kindergarteners in 1998 with those in 2010 using two large, nationally representative data sets called the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study (ECLS). The data include survey information from a child’s parents and his/her teachers, as well as results from assessments of skills administered multiple times during kindergarten and elementary school.

Analysts examine, among other things, various readiness gaps at the tenth and ninetieth percentiles of the income distribution. For the most part, the data showed many encouraging signs: Across the board, analysts found that both high- and low-income young children in the 2010 cohort were exposed to more books and reading in the home than their 1998 peers. They also had more access to educational games on computers, and they engaged with their parents more both inside and outside the home.

These developments took shape despite the fact that other negative shifts in family characteristics have occurred in the twelve years between samples. Among families at the tenth percentile, the likelihood that a mother was married at the time of a child’s birth dropped five percentage points; fathers in the lowest-income families had the largest declines in full-time work (eighteen percentage points) compared to those in the highest-income group; and families at the tenth income percentile did not make any gains in college completion. (On the other hand, an analysis from the Manhattan Institute’s Scott Winship indicates that child poverty rates have declined over roughly the same period.)

Still, there’s been much progress on the early readiness front. The likelihood that low-income kindergarteners will use a computer three or more times each week doubled since 1998, for example (perhaps reflecting upward trends in home broadband access). There were increases across the board in income relative to “in-home enrichment activities”; that uptick was most pronounced among low-income children, whose parents are now more likely to sing songs to them, help with arts and crafts, play games, and play sports or exercise. Outside the home, more low-income parents are taking their kids to the library; the low-income versus high-income gap in library trips narrowed by about twelve percentage points over time.

Analysts also examined parents’ beliefs about their children’s readiness. In general, parents in 2010 thought that their kids needed to have more skills to be ready for kindergarten than parents did in 1998. For instance, they were more likely to think that their kids needed to know how to count to twenty or know their letters before entering school. Income breakouts show a widening gap in these beliefs, however, with middle- and high-income parents more likely to think that their kids need these skills versus low-income parents.

There is also a widening gap in formal preschool participation, despite increased public investment in preschool over the study’s timeframe. Particularly among low-income children, there was a shift away from formal childcare and into parental care (the rates were stable among middle- and high-income families). The authors posit that this may be due to the effects of the Great Recession, which occurred around the time that data were collected from the second cohort.

The bottom line is that parents appear to be more attuned to spending quality time with their kids. Whether this is a response to increased academic expectations in school, or more awareness of the importance of early childhood in forming well-adjusted adults, or something else, we don’t know. But it is very good news in an education landscape too often filled with the opposite.

SOURCE: Daphna Bassok, Jenna E. Finch, RaeHyuck Lee, Sean F. Reardon, and Jane Waldfogel, "Socioeconomic Gaps in Early Childhood Experiences," AERA Open (August 2016).

The big news to emerge from the forty-eighth annual PDK Poll of the Public’s Attitudes Toward the Public Schools is that when a public school has been failing for a number of years, Americans would prefer to try to fix it by a six-to-one margin rather than to close it. More than any other finding in the poll, PDK says this result “exemplifies the divide between the reform agenda of the past sixteen years and the actual desires of the American public.” I’m not completely convinced. If school choice of any kind weren’t so utterly foreign to the experience of an overwhelming majority of Americans (nearly three out of four of us have no public school of choice available whatsoever), I’d be more surprised by the result. You’d likely get a similar ratio if you polled 1,221 adult Americans, as PDK has, and asked, “Given the option, would you like to have your home’s leaky roof and faulty wiring repaired? Or would you prefer to have your home condemned?” Without some clear sense of the alternative, you’d likely opt to stay put too. But let me not quibble too strenuously. The finding is noteworthy enough and surely says something about the disconnect between what people want for their children and what reformers believe is best for them.

Has education reform overplayed its hand? The PDK poll, the longest continuously running survey of public attitude toward education, offers a mixed verdict. Reformers have largely pushed a “Ye shall know them by their fruits” vision of schooling, with test scores being the measure of all things educational. The public isn’t completely on board. Less than half of adults (45 percent) see “preparing students academically as the main goal of a public school education.” One-quarter say schools should mainly be preparing students for work, while an equal portion see the goal as preparing kids to be for good citizens. Perhaps the result that should surprise education reformers the most is that—by a better than three-to-one margin (68-21 percent)—those polled would prefer that their local public schools add career, technical, or skills-based classes rather than more honors classes or advanced academics. (Then again, why must we choose?)

Some parts of the reform agenda seem to have gained a bit more traction. More than 40 percent say educational standards in their local schools are too low. And a strong majority (59-37 percent) oppose “opting out” of standardized state tests, although the gap narrows to 55-43 among parents with school-aged children. Interestingly, a solid majority of public school parents—61 percent—say that their children experience “about the right amount” of pressure to do well in school. Among the rest, 24 percent say the pressure is too high; 13 percent, too low. Who is putting this pressure on kids? The most common response is kids themselves, cited by about four in ten respondents. (A mere 19 percent say the pressure comes from teachers.) One thing that has not have not changed: Americans are still far more likely, by a roughly two-to-one margin, to hold a warmer view of their local public schools than the nation’s schools at large.

In a letter released with the poll results, Joshua P. Starr—the head of PDK international and the erstwhile superintendent of schools in Montgomery County, Maryland—writes that the results make clear that “the standards and test-based reforms of the past sixteen years have addressed only part of what the public wants. Given that our system is designed to be locally controlled, how should states, local school boards, and school system leaders think about what comes next?” Good question.

Not long ago, Andy Rotherham observed that education reform is dominated by people who liked being in and around schools and were good at it. “The result is an over-representation of elite schools and elite schooling experiences and little input from those who found educational success later in life or not at all,” he wrote in a perceptive column in U.S. News & World Report. The PDK poll seems to suggest he might be on to something.

SOURCE: “Critical Issues in Public Education: The 2016 Phi Delta Kappa Survey,” Phi Delta Kappa (August 2016).