The Education Gadfly Weekly

Five years ago, I felt like public enemy number one when it came to education. Despite my fifteen years in education policy, including time spent chairing a local school board, and my standing as a father of two school-aged kids in public schools, I was accused of single-handedly trying to destroy public education in Connecticut.

As I helped lead the fight for the most significant education reform legislation in the Nutmeg State in a generation, I had my tires slashed at a public event. My kids’ teachers, when I went to school to volunteer, literally refused to speak to me. I was depicted in the media as everything from Penguin the Batman villain, to a carpetbagger, to a Klansman. And I was branded a privatizing profiteer, seeking to get rich off the backs of poor children and overworked teachers.

Essentially, I was “DeVossed” before getting DeVossed was cool. I was deemed an outsider because I had never been a classroom teacher, and I was trying to disrupt the status quo in public education. It didn’t matter what background and experiences I brought to the discussion. It didn’t matter that I had a history of successfully working with teachers and teachers unions. All that mattered to my opponents was that a non-educator was talking teacher quality, school choice, early childhood education, and parent engagement. Fortunately, my colleagues and I were still able to push through significant, beneficial reforms.

The “resistance” to Betsy DeVos was motivated by similar sentiments. Yet it, too, was unsuccessful in defeating her confirmation. Despite all the protests, phone calls, emails, and vitriol, DeVos is now the U.S. Education Secretary. And we’ll soon see her vision for the future of public education and what that means for traditional public schools, charter schools, parochial schools, and even homeschools. We know almost nothing of what will come, other than more power for states, more voice for parents, and likely more discomfort for teachers unions.

As EdSec, one of the first jobs DeVos ought now undertake is that of public educator, as in one who educates the public and, I hope, the education reform community about what to do—and what not to do—if forward progress for our children remains an urgent national priority. Her experience, and the experiences of reformers before her, speaks to the need to diversify the discussion, focus more on substance, and stop painting teachers as the problem. Here are a few suggestions for the reform curriculum going forward.

Lesson one: Diversify your Game

While in Connecticut, I would commonly respond to questions about charter schools by noting that fewer than 3 percent of Connecticut public school students were in charter schools, and advising that our time was better spent talking about more important issues like teacher quality and standards. While this dumbfounded my allies, it was always intentional. The public needed to hear that education reform was about all kids, not just 3 percent of them. We successfully passed comprehensive policies—including major increases in both charter seats and per-pupil expenditures for those seats—by not always talking charters. A diversification of issues meant that more folks boarded our boat. Social-emotional learning, effective reading instruction, next-gen science needs, and other such topics should be central to any and all school improvement discussions.

Lesson two: More substance, less operations

It is no longer enough for reformers to believe they are the “smartest people in the room”; they have to start showing their work. Truly understanding the differences between growth and proficiency matters, as does appreciating the differences between high-need urban and high-need rural schools. That means that future discussions of true school improvement have to be about more than school structure, operations, and funding. We need to start talking about instructional content—not just who is teaching but what they are teaching, why they teach it, and how to ensure students are actually learning it. Despite all of our criticisms of the status quo in public education and its poor outcomes, too many of our solutions focus on inputs and processes rather than on outputs.

Lesson three: Stop blaming teachers

We’ve long known that teachers are a strong, dedicated force in America—DeVos’s squeaker confirmation just reaffirmed that. But in reformers’ zeal to identify an enemy, too many opted to place the blame largely on the shoulders of millions of hard-working educators. Talk to a parent about what is needed in the schools, and they invariably will reference a conversation with their child’s teacher. If one wants to try to thread the needle by saying the fight is not with teachers, it’s with unions, fine (it is an argument I once tried to make). But legislators, community leaders, and parents—all necessary for real change—won’t buy it. They should, but they don’t. Teachers unions aren’t going away. Ed reform’s merely managed to repeatedly poke a bear it can’t bring down. (Sorry, necessary bear metaphor.)

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Education reform itself is in dire need of reform. From the paucity of victories in recent years, to the growing number of groups doing and saying the exact same things as their predecessors, to the significant sums of money spent simply to “fight the good fight” without a reward, it is clear the the old model isn’t working. The DeVos process only provided a clearer blueprint for how to oppose such changes and turn communities, states, and even the nation against needed improvement.

The reform community can either learn from the past few years—and particularly the past few months—or it can stand by the dogmatic approaches that are struggling to resonate with policymakers, parents, advocates, and educators. The choice seems easy, no?

Patrick Riccards, a recovering education reformer, is the chief communications and strategy officer for the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation and is the author of the Eduflack blog.

The views expressed herein represent the opinions of the author and not necessarily the Thomas B. Fordham Institute.

The major charge against Betsy DeVos—and certainly the one that the writers at “Saturday Night Live” recently ran with—was that she doesn’t know enough about “school” to be Secretary of Education. She hasn’t been a teacher, a principal, or a superintendent. She doesn’t know how to pick a curriculum, evaluate an instructor, or write an Individual Education Plan for students with disabilities.

All true. And if she were seeking employment as a teacher, a principal, or a superintendent, that experience gap would be damning. But she’s not.

President Trump selected her to be the U.S. Secretary of Education. That person’s job is to do education politics and policy—to work with members of Congress and governors, to understand how a bill becomes a law, to provide moral support to reformers as they fight it out in the states and at the local level. With her decades of involvement in politics, with policymakers, and in the trenches of the parental choice movement, DeVos is an inspired choice for the job that the Senate confirmed her for yesterday.

Which isn’t to say that the millions of teachers and parents who flooded social media and the Congressional switchboard to urge her rejection had nothing to worry about. Especially during the Bush 43 and Obama years, the Secretary of Education has occupied a powerful role, one that has sought to influence almost every nook and cranny of education policy and practice.

Particularly under Obama’s education secretaries, the feds did indeed stick their noses into curriculum, teacher evaluation, and the intricacies of serving students with disabilities, as well as who can use which restroom. Anyone assuming that the future would be a linear extension of that past might have reason to fret about DeVos.

Well, the big change that’s coming isn’t the change of individuals. It’s the change in the Education Department’s role. It’s not that DeVos and her team will play the Obama-era melody in a different key. It’s that they won’t being playing those tunes at all.

During her confirmation process, DeVos promised time and again to shrink Uncle Sam’s impact on the nation’s schools—to devolve decisions back to states, communities, educators and parents. That’s in keeping with the mandate from Congress, which just over a year ago updated the major K–12 law to expressly limit the federal role in education.

The grassroots energy around the DeVos confirmation fight demonstrates that Americans care deeply about their schools. That’s good news. The even better news is that parents and teachers can now focus that energy on changing policies closer to home, where the action is, rather than in Washington, D.C. And the U.S. Department of Education can go back to being the sleepy agency it was always meant to be.

Editor's note: This article was originally published, in a slightly different form, by Fox News.

Ten days ago, Jason Bedrick wrote that I was mistaken to equate school “accountability” with “top-down government regulations”:

This fundamentally misunderstands accountability. As I explained at the Heritage Foundation earlier this week, true accountability is when service providers are directly answerable to the people most affected by their performance. When that isn’t possible, as when a utility company has a monopoly, top-down regulations may be necessary instead. But we shouldn’t confuse the inferior alternative accountability regime for the ideal form of accountability just because that’s what we’re used to. As Thomas Sowell has written, “It is hard to imagine a more stupid or more dangerous way of making decisions than by putting those decisions in the hands of people who pay no price for being wrong.”

As Jason knows, I agree with him—and with Sowell, Milton Friedman, and many others—that schools must be accountable to parents via the marketplace, that school choice is a better system than a regulated monopoly, and that I don’t in fact support “top down regulations.” What I and other “choice realists” want is for schools of choice to be lightly regulated yet subject to societal expectations regarding results. That’s what we mean by “accountability.” It’s Jason and his like-minded colleagues who have sought to redefine that word to mean “regulation.” Ironically, the teachers unions play the same game, saying that schools such as charters, which are partially freed from meddlesome government regulations (like tenure rules), are not “accountable.” This strikes me as mildly Orwellian.

As I pointed out with my school choice quiz several weeks ago, there are some folks within reform’s big tent who want to put multiple restrictions on schools of choice—e.g., they can’t teach religion, can’t be for-profit, can’t suspend too many students, can’t choose their own curriculum, can’t use selective admissions. But not I. I want parents to have a wide range of choices among independently operated and very diverse schools, schools whose autonomy is limited in just three ways: their operators may not engage in financial shenanigans; they must abide by safety and civil rights rules; and they have to demonstrate that their students are learning.

It’s this last point where I part ways with Jason and his fellow libertarians. They have been arguing that parents should be the sole arbiters of quality. As Jay Greene wrote back in 2015, “the reality is that the average low-income parent has more complete information about their kid’s school quality than does the highly-trained regulator armed only with test scores. When we wonder why parents are choosing schools that regulators and other distant experts deem to be ‘bad,’ it is almost certainly because the parents know more about what is good and bad than do the experts.”

If Jason and Jay and others are saying that those of us in the Ivory Tower shouldn’t sit in our Star Chamber and decide which schools should live and die, based solely on their test scores, I say Amen. But that’s not what we’ve ever proposed. The charter sector has invented an entity called a school authorizer. The best ones know the schools they oversee inside and out. They aren’t “distant”; they build relationships with the schools’ boards, leaders, and parents. They understand the stories behind the test scores. And when reviewing the performance of “their” schools, they look at myriad factors besides those test scores. (As Andy Smarick has argued, voucher programs could use something like authorizers, too.)

The relevant policy question is whether those authorizers, in rare cases, should overrule the wishes of parents and close a school for chronically poor performance and dysfunction. Not from afar. Not impulsively. Not based simply on test scores. But after the school has demonstrated an inability to turn itself around and show any indication that its students are benefiting academically from its program of instruction.

Appropriately, it’s unusual for charter authorizers to pull the trigger—by one estimate, just three percent of charters are closed for poor performance. (Doing this infrequently is appropriate because Jason and Jay are right that we should defer to parents’ judgments most of the time, because they do have important information, and because we’re talking about their children.) But in my view, we’re better off—and kids are better off—without a handful of truly dismal schools among the set of options for parents to choose. That’s because education is a public good as well as a private good. And when taxpayers are paying for it, the public has a right, even an obligation, to ascertain that adequate learning is taking place.

Perhaps Jason, Jay, and Thomas Sowell would disagree. They might argue that taking decisions out of the hands of parents can never be justified. But with education, it’s simply not true that the public “pays no price” for being wrong. We all pay a hefty price when kids don’t learn. So, in rare cases, we need to act accordingly.

On this week's podcast, Mike Petrilli, Alyssa Schwenk, and Brandon Wright discuss how Education Secretary Betsy DeVos can shore up support going forward. During the Research Minute, Amber Northern examines the effectiveness of “instructional scaffolding” for struggling readers.

Amber’s Research Minute

Dan Reynolds and Amanda Goodwin, “Supporting Students Reading Complex Texts: Evidence for Motivational Scaffolding,” AERA Open Journal (October–December 2016)

When we last caught up with KIPP, they were setting the reform world on its collective ear with a report, at once edifying and sobering, on the college completion rates of its alumni. That report, back in the Spring of 2011, showed a surprising 33 percent of the earliest cohorts of KIPP middle-school students had graduated from a four-year college within six years. Surprising how? That depends on how you look at it. If you are born poor and black or brown in the U.S., your chances of graduating college by your mid-twenties is merely 9 percent; KIPP was improving those odds four-fold. On the other hand, the network itself has long insisted its goal was for the students it serves to graduate at rates comparable to the most advantaged American kids, or about 75 percent.

Bolstered by that initial report, KIPP redoubled its efforts, forming partnerships with colleges, re-examining its academic offerings, and launching other initiatives to increase college persistence among its grads. Those efforts are paying off: As of fall 2015, 44 percent of KIPP students have now earned a four-year college degree after finishing eighth grade at a KIPP middle school ten or more years ago.

Remarkably, KIPP now has 10,000 alumni in college. Fresh data from the network sought to surface “financial and career-access obstacles” those students face on campus. The most disturbing data point is how many of them are worried not about grades and books, but food. Sixty percent of those responding to the survey worry about having enough to eat; forty percent have actually missed meals. And no, this is not a matter of merely being too busy to hit the dining hall between classes. The survey asked specifically if ex-KIPPsters on campus have ever “missed meals to have money for books, fees, or other school expenses,” or whether while in college they have “worried whether my food would run out before I got money to buy more.”

KIPP chief executive officer Richard Barth says he knew “on an anecdotal level” that his kids were anxious about missing meals and worried their money would run out. “But the magnitude is still shocking,” he says. While he is careful not to make casual claims, he suggests that “why first generation, low-income children, take longer to graduate, a lot longer to graduate, don’t graduate or ‘stop out’ is found in this data.” Other important findings: More than half of KIPP alumni work at least one job while in college; of those who qualify for work study, 40 percent have not found a work study job; and one in four financially support other family members while in college. “When one or two of these things go against you,” Barth says, “the compounding effect is immense.”

KIPP remains our bellwether charter network, with a rapidly growing, leading-edge dataset that is sure to deeply inform and influence practice at high-performing, college-prep charters for years to come—including in the very near future, when stadium-sized numbers of KIPP alum have spent a number of years in the workforce, and we can start to see life outcomes for the low-SES students they serve. Barth says KIPP remains committed to continuing to monitor those kinds of outcomes and sharing what they find out with the public—for which they deserve our praise and gratitude.

SOURCE: “2016 KIPP Alumni Survey,” KIPP (January 2017). 

A new study examines the role of high schools in explaining students’ initial placement into college and into a college major. In other words, does where you attended high school have much to do with where you go to college and the quality of the major that you pursue?

Analysts study outcomes from six cohorts of full time, non-transfer students who entered a four-year public university in Missouri as college freshmen straight from a public high school between 1996 and 2001 (the sum of which totaled roughly 58,000 students). Students are tracked for eight years to determine graduation outcomes.

They treat majors as specific to each university such that students at different universities who have the same major (i.e., it has the same classification code from the U.S. Department of Education) don’t get clumped together; this way, they can devise a measure of academic quality for each university major that is based on the academic qualifications of students who complete a degree. In other words, the quality of majors by each university is based on the pre-college academic qualifications (namely class percentile ranks and ACT scores) of the students who completed a degree in that major at that university. So if you have two universities that differ in terms of their overall average selectivity, analysts are able to determine if majors at less selective universities are of higher “quality” than some majors at more selective universities. (Note too, that this is not about measuring growth in high school. They use a measure of high school disadvantage which is the share of students on free and reduced-price lunch and the share of individuals age twenty-five-plus with less than a bachelor’s degree in the high school’s zip code.)

Like previous research, they find that students from lower socioeconomic high schools systematically enroll at lower-quality universities relative to their similarly qualified peers who attended more affluent high schools. Yet high schools have little sway over the quality of college major placements within universities. In other words, students don’t sort into higher or lower quality majors as a result of the high school they attended.

They also find that there is within-university variation in the quality of majors, such that most math and science majors are higher quality and many social science, general education, and fine arts majors are lower quality.

Finally, the quality of the initial major (what students initially declared) strongly predicts the quality of the final major at those same universities. So, for example, kids don’t start in a major comprised of students with lower academic qualifications and switch to one comprised of students with vastly higher academic qualifications.

In short, high schools matter more when it comes to where students will enroll for college, not what they will study.

SOURCE: Rajeev Daroli and Cory Koedel, “How high schools explain students' initial colleges and majors,” CALDER (January 2017).

The American Federation for Children (AFC) recently released its third annual poll on school choice. The national poll surveyed just over 1,000 likely voters early this January via phone calls.

To determine general support and opposition, AFC posed the following question: “Generally speaking, would you say you favor or oppose the concept of school choice? School choice gives parents the right to use the tax dollars associated with their child’s education to send their child to the public or private school which better serves their needs.” By and large, the findings indicate broad support for school choice—68 percent of those surveyed support school choice compared to 28 percent who oppose it. These results are similar to previous years: 69 and 70 percent of likely voters who expressed support for school choice in 2015 and 2016, respectively.

In addition to overall percentages, AFC broke out the survey numbers by specific demographic groups. Seventy-five percent of Latinos and 72 percent of African Americans support school choice compared to 65 percent of Whites. In terms of political affiliation, 84 percent of Republicans support school choice (up slightly from 80 percent in 2016), compared to 55 percent of Democrats (down from 65 percent in 2016); 67 percent of Independents voiced support for choice. Of the four generations surveyed, Millennials had the highest level of support for choice with 75 percent. 

The AFC survey also finds that seven types of choice gain majority support. They include: special needs scholarships (83 percent support), public charter schools (74 percent support), scholarship tax credit programs (73 percent support), education savings accounts (69 percent support), opportunity scholarships (58 percent support), virtual learning (59 percent support), and school vouchers (51 percent support).

Pollsters also questioned respondents on their support for “two potential school choice proposals that may be introduced in Congress.” Seventy-two percent of potential voters expressed support for a federal scholarship tax credit, and 51 percent of voters supported Trump’s proposal of a $20 billion school choice program.

It’s worth noting that the way pollsters ask questions matters. While the report did mention wording for a few questions, the majority of questions aren’t provided. Nevertheless, other national polls find similar levels of support for school choice.

SOURCE: “2017 National School Choice Poll,” American Federation for Children (January 2017).