The Education Gadfly Weekly

Long viewed as the purview of local school boards and superintendents, education governance has become more complicated—and politicized—in recent years. Executives at every level, including mayors and governors, have gotten into the act. So have judges, legislators, and federal officials. In this book, Teachers College professor Jeff Henig makes sense of the complex and intersecting governance structures that we have today. He explains the “whys” of this shift: While school boards and superintendents (what he calls “single-purpose institutions”) were once widely viewed as apolitical experts, concerns about the country’s global competitiveness have called their expertise into question and opened school systems to criticism. He also speculates that newly active outside organizations (i.e., reform groups) find the more distant decision-makers (what Henig dubs “general purpose” bodies) more amenable to their interests and policy goals—and thus have advocated for their increased involvement in education. Henig also offers perspective on how the various actors engage with policy: Analyzing data on legislative activity, he finds that Congress and statehouses micromanage in all manners, while courts have become more active on such issues as racial segregation and school finance. Looking forward, Henig offers reasons for both concern and optimism. With so many cooks in the kitchen, there may be little hope for policy coherence. Still and all, he concludes that “general-purpose institutions” might be more able to give education clout in the broader policy conversation (it’s now not even a “top five” issue). Henig’s thesis comprises a chapter in our new book, Education Governance for the Twenty-First Century—and dovetails well with the other ideas therein.

SOURCE: Jeffrey R. Henig, The End of Exceptionalism in American Education: The Changing Politics of School Reform (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Education Press, 2013).

Education reformers who take on the important but massive issue of school governance often find themselves, like three captains at the helm of the same ship, attempting to navigate in different directions. The devolution model, piloted by Andy Smarick and Neerav Kingsland, embraces efforts to expand the role of charter organizations and dispenses with the district. The school-transformation model, put forward by Mass Insight, relies on third-party support to construct K–12 feeder patterns of allied schools; and the portfolio strategy, championed by the authors of this short CRPE paper, puts forward a system in which diverse, autonomous schools are governed by the district via performance contracts. Though these approaches seem to conflict, the authors of this paper contend that these proposals are actually complimentary variations on a theme: Government ought to steer (e.g., set goals, judge performance) but not row (i.e., provide). The success of the portfolio model, which creates exactly this kind of government, depends on the supply response: the presence of smart entrepreneurs with innovative ideas about education, folks who are willing to fund those ideas, and so on. And while the devolution and school-transformation models can provide the supply response (respectively, a marketplace for providers and networks of schools organized in feeder patterns), they need a government that allows schools to innovate but closes those that fail. Though this report takes the (not unexpected) perspective that the portfolio strategy charts the clearest course through these stormy seas, it is an important step towards finding a common guiding star in a turbulent voyage.

SOURCE: Paul Hill, Ashley Jochim, Christine Campbell, Portfolio Strategies, Relinquishment, The Urban School System of the Future, and Smart Districts, Portfolio School Districts Project (Seattle, WA: Center on Reinventing Public Education, February 2013).

A shoddily constructed stool, no matter the quality of wood used or the care given to whittling its parts, will not stand. And so it is with Common Core implementation: No matter the strength of the standards (and their linked assessments and accountability systems), they will collapse if not implemented with fidelity at the state, district, school, and classroom levels. Unfortunately, these two survey reports from EPE’s research shop (one done in collaboration with Education First) elicit little confidence that this is happening. The first, a survey of 600 teachers, found that while most are aware of the content within the CCSS ELA standards (92 percent) and math standards (78 percent), only 33 percent believe their schools are primed to implement them in both subjects—and an even smaller percentage believe that their districts and states are prepared. The second survey asked state departments of education how far they’ve come in creating plans for CCSS implementation in the following three categories: teacher professional development, assessment alignment, and curricular-materials alignment. And on these fronts, we learn that only twenty-one states have, as of yet, constructed fully developed plans for all three (note that the report evaluates neither the strength of these plans nor the states’ adherence to their timetables). The take-home message: Common Core supporters need to keep hammering away at these implementation issues.

SOURCES:
EPE Research Center, Findings from a National Survey of Teacher Perspectives on the Common Core (Bethesda, MD: EPE Research Center, 2013).
William Porter, et al., Moving Forward: A National Perspective on States’ Progress in Common Core State Standards Implementation Planning (Seattle, WA: Education First; Bethesda, MD: EPE Research Center, February 2013).

A wise wonk once wrote that the biggest challenge facing America’s schools is the enormous variation in the academic level of students coming into any given classroom. The subject of this NBER working paper is one proposed solution to this quandary: sorting students by ability. And though conventional wisdom (and some prior research) suggests that kids in the lower-achieving groups would fare worse with such an approach, the researchers in this study concluded that sorting is beneficial for both high and low achievers—though high achievers did see larger gains than those of their lower-scoring peers (approximately 1.6 times greater). The analysis used student- and classroom- level  data linked to one cohort of Dallas elementary students—amounting to roughly 9,000 children in 135 schools who progress from the third to fourth grade (in 2003–04 and 2004–05). Analysts attempt to account for unobservable ways that schools might sort (say, by student behavior) and ultimately find that three-quarters of the schools organize students along at least one dimension: Nineteen percent by prior math scores, 24 percent by prior reading scores, 28 percent by “gifted” status, 57 percent by LEP (limited English proficiency) status, and 13 percent by special-education status (further, around 40 percent sort by at least two dimensions). If schools began perfectly grouping by ability, they would see a 0.4 SD gain in student learning. While this small-scale study provides evidence that sorting is beneficial for increased test scores, school leaders must bear in mind the importance of other factors, such as the impact of homogeneous classes on classroom culture and the importance of flexible grouping (so that students move out of low-level classes after they demonstrate mastery).

SOURCE: Courtney A. Collins and Li Gan, “Does Sorting Students Improve Scores? An Analysis of Class Composition,” NBER Working Paper Series (Cambridge, MA: National Bureau of Economic Research, February 2013).

Mike and Dara talk about Louisiana’s ed-reform disappointment, anticipate the effect of big money in L.A. (or not), and plan for the Snowquester that wasn’t. Amber puts her teacher hat back on with a study on student ability grouping.

Amber's Research Minute

“Does Sorting Students Improve Scores? An Analysis of Class Composition,” by Courtney A. Collins and Li Gan, NBER Working Paper Series (Cambridge, MA: National Bureau of Economic Research, February 2013)

There are too many cooks in the education kitchen—and nobody's really in charge.

To anyone concerned with the state of America’s schools, one of the more alarming experiences of the past few decades has been seeing waves of important reforms and promising innovations crash on the rocks of failure. Why this persistent failure? One major cause is our flawed, archaic, and inefficient system for organizing and operating our public schools. To their discredit, education reformers in the U.S. this past quarter century have largely neglected the issues of governance and structure—widely regarded either as politically impractical to touch or as too boring to get anyone interested. Yet the very structures and governance of our K–12 system often prevent other badly needed changes from taking place, enduring, or succeeding.

Perhaps the biggest failing of the education system is its fragmented approach to making decisions; there are too many cooks in the education system, and nobody is really in charge. Despite America’s romantic attachment to local control, the reality is that the way it works today represents the worst of both worlds. On one hand, district-level power constrains individual schools; its standardizing, bureaucratic, and political force ties the hands of principals, keeping them from doing what is best for their pupils with regard to budget, staffing, and curriculum. On the other, local control is not strong enough to clear the obstacles that state and federal governments place before reform-minded school board members and superintendents in the relatively few situations where these can be observed.

Sure, remarkable individuals can sometimes make it work, at least for a while: Michelle Rhee (backed by Adrian Fenty) in the District of Columbia, Joel Klein (backed by Michael Bloomberg) in New York, Arne Duncan (backed by Richard Daley) in Chicago, and Jerry Weast (abetted by a rising budget) in Montgomery County, Maryland, stand out. Readers can surely cite additional examples. But these are the exceptions that prove the rule. The rule is that education-policy decisions are made in so many places, each with some capacity to initiate change but with even greater capacity to block it, that there is nobody in charge.

Despite America’s romantic attachment to local control, the reality is that the way it works today represents the worst of both worlds.

Some describe education governance in the United States as a marble cake (because the jurisdictions and zones of control of different governments and agencies are so jumbled). Still others favor the image of a loosely coupled train, where movement at one end does not necessarily produce any motion at the other. We find a more apt analogy in a vast restaurant or food court with multiple kitchens, each thronged with many cooks yet with no head chef in command of even a single kitchen, much less the enterprise.

Consider so seemingly straightforward a decision as which person will be employed to fill a seventh-grade teacher opening at the Lincoln School, located in, let us say, Metropolis, West Carolina. One might suppose that Lincoln’s principal, or perhaps the top instructional staff at that school, should decide which candidate is the most likely to succeed in that particular classroom. But under the typical circumstance, the most the principal might be able to do is reject wholly unsuitable candidates. (And often not that, considering seniority and “bumping rights” within the district, its collective-bargaining contract, and, frequently, state law.) The superintendent’s human resources office does most of the vetting and placing, but it is shackled by the contract, by West Carolina’s inflexible licensure practices (which may be set by an “independent—and probably union- and education school–dominated—professional standards board), by seniority rules that are probably enshrined in both contract and state law, and by uniform salary schedules that mean the new teacher (assuming similar credentials) will be paid the same fixed amount whether the subject needed at Lincoln is math or music.

By the end of the process, at least a dozen different governing units impede the principal’s authority to staff his or her school with the ablest (and best suited) teachers available.

Teacher selection is but one of many examples of the “too many cooks” problem. Much the same litany can be invoked for special education, for the budgeting and control of a school’s funds, and for approved approaches to school discipline. (Not to mention a more literal “too many cooks” issue: what to serve for lunch in the school cafeteria.)

What great leader or change agent would want to become a school principal under these circumstances? Or a local superintendent? Or even a teacher? Well, maybe in a comfy (but probably smug) suburban setting, but not in the places that most need outstanding talent.

American education does not need czars or dictators. Separation of powers and systems of checks and balances are important elements of our democracy. Children and communities do differ, and there needs to be flexibility in the system to adapt and adjust to singular circumstances, changing priorities, and dissimilar needs. But today, our public education system lacks flexibility and nimbleness of all sorts. Surely that is not the education the creators of universal public schooling had in mind. And it is most definitely not what our children need at this point in the nation’s history.

This piece is adapted from Education Governance for the Twenty-First Century.

After attracting criticism for his description of how sequestration would impact schools (most notably, his comment that schools were already sending “pink slips” and that 40,000 teachers would be out of a job), Education Secretary Arne Duncan apologized for his “choice of words,” but emphasized that the cuts are still a big problem. Apology accepted—though we still miss the Arne Duncan who used to say that “doing more with less” was “the New Normal.”

After a school board election with a price tag in the millions, Los Angeles superintendent John Deasy’s job appears to be safe, at least for now. The board president, Deasy ally, and two-term incumbent Monica Garcia, won her district handily despite fierce opposition of the unions, though one-term incumbent and union ally Steven Zimmer won a close race versus a reform-y newcomer. Whether or not the reformers maintain a voting majority will be determined by a third race, which is headed to a runoff. Back to the trenches!

In an unprecedented move, Georgia governor Nathan Deal removed six members of the dysfunctional DeKalb County school board—and a federal judge upheld his right to do so. The case is likely to move on to the Georgia Supreme Court. But in the meantime, the search is on for six replacements. At the least, it’s a fascinating example of target="_blank"governance reform.

Pennsylvania, Wyoming, and Texas became the latest (and possibly last) states to apply for NCLB waivers on February 28. Texas, which has eschewed the Common Core State Standards and all iterations of Race to the Top, is the one to watch—as the state has indicated that it does not plan to adopt several of the strings attached to the waivers. Good luck to them—we saw how well that went for California.

On Tuesday, a Baton Rouge judge struck down Governor Bobby Jindal’s signature education-reform package for “technical reasons”—specifically, the bill “bundled too many objectives that should have been spread out among multiple measures.” For a little hindsight, check out this week’s Education Gadfly Show podcast.

The greatest failing of education reformers in the U.S. this past quarter century has been their neglect of governance and structure—widely regarded either as politically impractical to touch or as too boring to get anyone interested. Yet the very structures and governance of our K–12 system often prevent other badly needed changes from taking place, enduring, or succeeding.

Recent months, however, have seen some cracks in the governance glacier with a spate of new books, articles, and conferences on the topic—meaning this set of reform challenges is no longer taboo to discuss or to tackle.

In an earnest effort to advance this crucial conversation, the Thomas B. Fordham Institute—in partnership with the Center for American Progress and the Brookings Institution Press—is pleased to present Education Governance for the Twenty-First Century: Overcoming the Structural Barriers to School Reform, edited by Paul Manna of the College of William and Mary and Patrick McGuinn of Drew University.

This important volume should be on the desk or bedside of every serious education reformer and policymaker in the land.

Featuring chapters by education scholars, analysts, and battle-scarred practitioners, it closely examines our present structures, identifies their failings, and offers some penetrating ideas for how governance might be done differently.

All serious reform victories begin with battles over ideas. In that spirit, we urge you to spend some quality time with this book. Overhauling our dysfunctional education-governance arrangements is a key priority for us at Fordham—and will inevitably loom among the hottest and most consequential issues for all serious reformers in the years to come.

The greatest failing of education reformers in the U.S. this past quarter century has been their neglect of governance and structure—widely regarded either as politically impractical to touch or as too boring to get anyone interested. Yet the very structures and governance of our K–12 system often prevent other badly needed changes from taking place, enduring, or succeeding.

Recent months, however, have seen some cracks in the governance glacier with a spate of new books, articles, and conferences on the topic—meaning this set of reform challenges is no longer taboo to discuss or to tackle.

In an earnest effort to advance this crucial conversation, the Thomas B. Fordham Institute—in partnership with the Center for American Progress and the Brookings Institution Press—is pleased to present Education Governance for the Twenty-First Century: Overcoming the Structural Barriers to School Reform, edited by Paul Manna of the College of William and Mary and Patrick McGuinn of Drew University.

This important volume should be on the desk or bedside of every serious education reformer and policymaker in the land.

Featuring chapters by education scholars, analysts, and battle-scarred practitioners, it closely examines our present structures, identifies their failings, and offers some penetrating ideas for how governance might be done differently.

All serious reform victories begin with battles over ideas. In that spirit, we urge you to spend some quality time with this book. Overhauling our dysfunctional education-governance arrangements is a key priority for us at Fordham—and will inevitably loom among the hottest and most consequential issues for all serious reformers in the years to come.

Long viewed as the purview of local school boards and superintendents, education governance has become more complicated—and politicized—in recent years. Executives at every level, including mayors and governors, have gotten into the act. So have judges, legislators, and federal officials. In this book, Teachers College professor Jeff Henig makes sense of the complex and intersecting governance structures that we have today. He explains the “whys” of this shift: While school boards and superintendents (what he calls “single-purpose institutions”) were once widely viewed as apolitical experts, concerns about the country’s global competitiveness have called their expertise into question and opened school systems to criticism. He also speculates that newly active outside organizations (i.e., reform groups) find the more distant decision-makers (what Henig dubs “general purpose” bodies) more amenable to their interests and policy goals—and thus have advocated for their increased involvement in education. Henig also offers perspective on how the various actors engage with policy: Analyzing data on legislative activity, he finds that Congress and statehouses micromanage in all manners, while courts have become more active on such issues as racial segregation and school finance. Looking forward, Henig offers reasons for both concern and optimism. With so many cooks in the kitchen, there may be little hope for policy coherence. Still and all, he concludes that “general-purpose institutions” might be more able to give education clout in the broader policy conversation (it’s now not even a “top five” issue). Henig’s thesis comprises a chapter in our new book, Education Governance for the Twenty-First Century—and dovetails well with the other ideas therein.

SOURCE: Jeffrey R. Henig, The End of Exceptionalism in American Education: The Changing Politics of School Reform (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Education Press, 2013).

Education reformers who take on the important but massive issue of school governance often find themselves, like three captains at the helm of the same ship, attempting to navigate in different directions. The devolution model, piloted by Andy Smarick and Neerav Kingsland, embraces efforts to expand the role of charter organizations and dispenses with the district. The school-transformation model, put forward by Mass Insight, relies on third-party support to construct K–12 feeder patterns of allied schools; and the portfolio strategy, championed by the authors of this short CRPE paper, puts forward a system in which diverse, autonomous schools are governed by the district via performance contracts. Though these approaches seem to conflict, the authors of this paper contend that these proposals are actually complimentary variations on a theme: Government ought to steer (e.g., set goals, judge performance) but not row (i.e., provide). The success of the portfolio model, which creates exactly this kind of government, depends on the supply response: the presence of smart entrepreneurs with innovative ideas about education, folks who are willing to fund those ideas, and so on. And while the devolution and school-transformation models can provide the supply response (respectively, a marketplace for providers and networks of schools organized in feeder patterns), they need a government that allows schools to innovate but closes those that fail. Though this report takes the (not unexpected) perspective that the portfolio strategy charts the clearest course through these stormy seas, it is an important step towards finding a common guiding star in a turbulent voyage.

SOURCE: Paul Hill, Ashley Jochim, Christine Campbell, Portfolio Strategies, Relinquishment, The Urban School System of the Future, and Smart Districts, Portfolio School Districts Project (Seattle, WA: Center on Reinventing Public Education, February 2013).

A shoddily constructed stool, no matter the quality of wood used or the care given to whittling its parts, will not stand. And so it is with Common Core implementation: No matter the strength of the standards (and their linked assessments and accountability systems), they will collapse if not implemented with fidelity at the state, district, school, and classroom levels. Unfortunately, these two survey reports from EPE’s research shop (one done in collaboration with Education First) elicit little confidence that this is happening. The first, a survey of 600 teachers, found that while most are aware of the content within the CCSS ELA standards (92 percent) and math standards (78 percent), only 33 percent believe their schools are primed to implement them in both subjects—and an even smaller percentage believe that their districts and states are prepared. The second survey asked state departments of education how far they’ve come in creating plans for CCSS implementation in the following three categories: teacher professional development, assessment alignment, and curricular-materials alignment. And on these fronts, we learn that only twenty-one states have, as of yet, constructed fully developed plans for all three (note that the report evaluates neither the strength of these plans nor the states’ adherence to their timetables). The take-home message: Common Core supporters need to keep hammering away at these implementation issues.

SOURCES:
EPE Research Center, Findings from a National Survey of Teacher Perspectives on the Common Core (Bethesda, MD: EPE Research Center, 2013).
William Porter, et al., Moving Forward: A National Perspective on States’ Progress in Common Core State Standards Implementation Planning (Seattle, WA: Education First; Bethesda, MD: EPE Research Center, February 2013).

A wise wonk once wrote that the biggest challenge facing America’s schools is the enormous variation in the academic level of students coming into any given classroom. The subject of this NBER working paper is one proposed solution to this quandary: sorting students by ability. And though conventional wisdom (and some prior research) suggests that kids in the lower-achieving groups would fare worse with such an approach, the researchers in this study concluded that sorting is beneficial for both high and low achievers—though high achievers did see larger gains than those of their lower-scoring peers (approximately 1.6 times greater). The analysis used student- and classroom- level  data linked to one cohort of Dallas elementary students—amounting to roughly 9,000 children in 135 schools who progress from the third to fourth grade (in 2003–04 and 2004–05). Analysts attempt to account for unobservable ways that schools might sort (say, by student behavior) and ultimately find that three-quarters of the schools organize students along at least one dimension: Nineteen percent by prior math scores, 24 percent by prior reading scores, 28 percent by “gifted” status, 57 percent by LEP (limited English proficiency) status, and 13 percent by special-education status (further, around 40 percent sort by at least two dimensions). If schools began perfectly grouping by ability, they would see a 0.4 SD gain in student learning. While this small-scale study provides evidence that sorting is beneficial for increased test scores, school leaders must bear in mind the importance of other factors, such as the impact of homogeneous classes on classroom culture and the importance of flexible grouping (so that students move out of low-level classes after they demonstrate mastery).

SOURCE: Courtney A. Collins and Li Gan, “Does Sorting Students Improve Scores? An Analysis of Class Composition,” NBER Working Paper Series (Cambridge, MA: National Bureau of Economic Research, February 2013).