The Education Gadfly Weekly

Sports fans have the NFL draft. Politicos relish the presidential election. And on Tuesday, education wonks enjoyed their favorite day: the release of the nation’s report card, or NAEP. The assessment found modest gains in fourth-grade math and in both reading and math at the eighth-grade level since the last round of testing in 2009. (Fourth-grade reading scores have been flat since 2007.) Two days after the release, much of the relevant inference and conjecture that can be bled from the NAEP data stone already has been: Kevin Carey of Ed Sector used the longitudinal data to articulate that we can move the needle on student performance—especially for math. (In the last twenty years, the percentage of fourth-grade students scoring below the basic level in math fell from 50 percent to just 18 percent.) Mike Petrilli speculated that the statistically significant uptick in eighth-grade reading could be attributed to the efficacy of Reading First (prior to its defunding). Politics K-12 dissected results of Race to the Top winning states (especially Hawaii, the only state to see gains in all four categories). And Matt Ladner ranked states on how well they’re teaching low-income, minority, and special-needs students. Go ahead and join in the fun; play with the user-friendly NAEP data explorer here.

There is much opposition against teacher merit-pay programs today. But one such venture stands largely outside that debate: Denver’s ProComp program enjoys teacher-union support and is partially funded by a voter-approved tax. ProComp offers individual and school-based incentives to participants based on both input measures (acquisition of higher degrees, etc.) and output measures (student performance and progress, etc.). Under the ProComp contract, new teachers are automatically ushered into the program—which offers rewards for a variety of input- and output-based achievements, including advanced degrees, higher than expected student test scores, and working in hard to staff schools—while veterans must volunteer, creating unique conditions for research. Five years into the program (which enrolls 80 percent of DPS teachers), Dan Goldhaber and Joe Walch offer some perspective on its effectiveness. Their findings are promising, but with caveat (notably because of the convoluted statistics done to ascertain results). The findings? Student achievement did increase (notably at the secondary level in reading) since implementing ProComp, and students of participating teachers fared better than those not in the program. That said, even veteran teachers not partaking in ProComp saw positive residual effects from the system. Yet, the researchers also found that advanced-degree or professional-development bonuses had little effect on student achievement. The upshot? Merit-pay programs can lead to better results—if designed and implemented thoughtfully.

Dan Goldhaber and Joe Walch, “Strategic Pay Reform: A Student Outcomes-Based Evaluation of Denver’s ProComp Teacher Pay Initiative.” (Seattle, WA: Center for Education Data & Research, 2011).

So many institutions—from Congress and Wall Street to public schools and HMOs—have lost the nation’s confidence: “Citizens don’t consider many institutions…to be either responsive or effective,” write the authors of this Public Agenda/Kettering Foundation report. This, despite much effort on the part of organizational leaders to provide transparent data to the public. Why? According to the report, it’s because the public and those leaders don’t agree on the fundamental nature of “accountability.” While elites tend to see accountability as transparently holding organizations to objective, quantifiable standards, the public views it, more opaquely, as a moral issue. Pervasive irresponsibility causes a lack of accountability, regardless of measurable results. This disconnect, the report argues, cripples policy. To remedy it, leaders need to listen to and empathize with the public’s concerns, rather than unilaterally choose technical solutions, the authors argue. To buttress this point, the report authors draw from examples in education, housing, and health care. (On the education front, they showcase school closures as a prime time for enhanced communication.) Still, though they tout communication’s virtues, the authors remind that it is not the same as consensus: Leaders must hear all opinions. But the ultimate decision-making power must rest in their hands. The public is accountable for remembering that.

Jean Johnson, Jonathan Rochkind, and Samantha DuPont, Don’t Count Us Out: How an Overreliance on Accountability Could Undermine the Public’s Confidence in Schools, Business, Government, and More. (New York, NY: Public Agenda; Dayton, OH: Kettering Foundation, October 2011).

Forget Occupy Wall Street. Liberal reformers and prominent editorial pages are steaming mad about the supposedly weak approach to accountability that the Harkin-Enzi ESEA-update bill takes—in comparison to current law and the Administration’s waiver plan. But are they right to be so hot and bothered?

Let’s start by examining the language that’s causing the hullabaloo—the main options on the table today when it comes to determining which schools qualify for interventions:

• The Administration’s waiver package. In order to opt-out of ESEA’s Adequate Yearly Progress metric, states must propose accountability systems that “set new ambitious but achievable [Annual Measurable Objectives] in at least reading/language arts and mathematics for the State and all LEAs, schools, and subgroups.” In other words, states must set a goal for each year in terms of the percentage of students reaching the “proficient” standard on the state test. States must also identify “Title I schools with the greatest achievement gaps, or in which subgroups are furthest behind.”

• The Harkin-Enzi bill (as passed out of committee). Under this version of ESEA, states would have to develop accountability systems that expect “the continuous improvement of all public schools in the State in the academic achievement and outcomes of all students, including… subgroups.”

• The Lamar Alexander-Johnny Isakson bill. Under this bill introduced by several Senate Republicans, states would have to establish “a system of identifying and differentiating among all public elementary schools and secondary schools in the State based on student academic achievement and any other factors determined appropriate by the State [that] also takes into account achievement gaps…and overall performance of all students and of each category of students.”

So the waiver plan, the darling of civil-rights groups, requires states to set annual targets for all kids and subgroups. The Harkin-Enzi bill, on the other hand, just asks for “continuous improvement” (whatever that means). And the Alexander-Isakson bill would leave it up to states to design their own systems—and determine whether they want to use annual targets or not—though such systems must consider subgroup performance, too. Even astute readers will have a hard time discerning what the big-deal differences are among these three options. Observe that none of these approaches maintains AYP as we know it. But none of them eliminates the federal mandate around accountability entirely. This is a debate taking place between the forty-yard lines.

That being said, I favor the Alexander-Isakson approach, for two reasons. First, we know that setting annual (and ever-rising) targets à la NCLB put pressure on states to keep their “cut scores” modest so as not to label every school in their jurisdiction as failing. I worry that the continued use of fixed targets will either encourage the Common Core testing consortia to set their cut scores low—or, if not, that the combination of high cut scores and annual targets will cause lots of states to bail from the Common Core project entirely. And in my view, it’s more important for states to be gunning for high standards (à la Common Core) than it is to have utopian annual targets in place.

The second reason for preferring Alexander-Isakson is more straightforward: We don’t know what the ideal accountability system looks like so why not give states the latitude to innovate? Asking them to consider subgroup performance is appropriate, but there are lots of ways to do that without looking at annual performance targets, per se. Why tie our hands unnecessarily?

Including achievement targets in the next ESEA wouldn’t be the end of the world. Neither would excluding them. Let’s pick one approach and get this reauthorization across the finish line.

This piece was originally published (in a slightly different form) on Fordham’s Flypaper blog. To subscribe to Flypaper, click here.

Who's afraid of the big bad
pension-reform wolf?
(Photo by Wayne NoffSinger)

Doomsday projections aside, NCTQ found in a recent survey that layoffs in large urban districts were modest: Over the past two years, only 2.5 percent (on average) of the teaching staff at the seventy-five large urban districts they surveyed were let go. Half of the participating districts saw no forced layoffs at all. (Many districts decreased staff size simply through teacher attrition.) This falls in stark contrast to the rhetoric of a “new normal” pushed out from the White House: Remember its forewarnings of 280,000 teacher layoffs this year alone? The story of how cities avoided layoffs is interesting: A large percentage cut their central-office workforce. Good. But more districts cut class time or school days than reduced workers’ benefits. In fact, only 7 percent of surveyed districts in 2011-12 dared mess with teacher benefits. These data could bolster the case of reformers like Scott Walker who argue that state policy should tackle runaway growth in benefits because school boards and administrators will not. Clearly only a tiny minority of districts were willing to touch these areas of their budget. So lay off the predictions, Nostr-Obama.

This piece was originally published (in a slightly different form) on Fordham’s Flypaper blog. To subscribe to Flypaper, click here.

Charters rise the school-performance
tide (Photo by Mike Haller)

Despite all the good she’s done—her Harlem Success Academy 1 ranks in the top percentile of schools in New York State, and the others in the network are no slouches—Eva Moskowitz has earned herself some fierce opponents among Gotham’s upper-middle class. How come? First, a year ago, she sought to locate one of her schools on the Upper West Side—only to see hordes of public-school parents freak out at the thought of their schools competing with a new charter for space, money, and kids. (After some effort, Moskowitz opened the school this fall.) Now she’s back for a rematch, this time in the upscale urban hamlet of Brooklyn’s Cobble Hill. Why the focus on more-affluent locales? As Moscowitz has explained, “middle-class families need options, too.” (The political heft that middle-class folks could provide to the charter movement isn’t a bad reason, either, especially as the majority of her schools are in lower-income neighborhoods.) Voicing an agenda of excellence for all, Moskowitz is finding support from parents who aren’t willing to wait for their zoned schools to improve—and facing opposition from those who see her charters as siphoning resources (and education-minded families) away from the project of improving district schools. There is much to be said for rebuilding neighborhood schools, but we happen to think Moskowitz is right that more parental options will lift all boats, rather than sink revitalization campaigns.

Sports fans have the NFL draft. Politicos relish the presidential election. And on Tuesday, education wonks enjoyed their favorite day: the release of the nation’s report card, or NAEP. The assessment found modest gains in fourth-grade math and in both reading and math at the eighth-grade level since the last round of testing in 2009. (Fourth-grade reading scores have been flat since 2007.) Two days after the release, much of the relevant inference and conjecture that can be bled from the NAEP data stone already has been: Kevin Carey of Ed Sector used the longitudinal data to articulate that we can move the needle on student performance—especially for math. (In the last twenty years, the percentage of fourth-grade students scoring below the basic level in math fell from 50 percent to just 18 percent.) Mike Petrilli speculated that the statistically significant uptick in eighth-grade reading could be attributed to the efficacy of Reading First (prior to its defunding). Politics K-12 dissected results of Race to the Top winning states (especially Hawaii, the only state to see gains in all four categories). And Matt Ladner ranked states on how well they’re teaching low-income, minority, and special-needs students. Go ahead and join in the fun; play with the user-friendly NAEP data explorer here.

There is much opposition against teacher merit-pay programs today. But one such venture stands largely outside that debate: Denver’s ProComp program enjoys teacher-union support and is partially funded by a voter-approved tax. ProComp offers individual and school-based incentives to participants based on both input measures (acquisition of higher degrees, etc.) and output measures (student performance and progress, etc.). Under the ProComp contract, new teachers are automatically ushered into the program—which offers rewards for a variety of input- and output-based achievements, including advanced degrees, higher than expected student test scores, and working in hard to staff schools—while veterans must volunteer, creating unique conditions for research. Five years into the program (which enrolls 80 percent of DPS teachers), Dan Goldhaber and Joe Walch offer some perspective on its effectiveness. Their findings are promising, but with caveat (notably because of the convoluted statistics done to ascertain results). The findings? Student achievement did increase (notably at the secondary level in reading) since implementing ProComp, and students of participating teachers fared better than those not in the program. That said, even veteran teachers not partaking in ProComp saw positive residual effects from the system. Yet, the researchers also found that advanced-degree or professional-development bonuses had little effect on student achievement. The upshot? Merit-pay programs can lead to better results—if designed and implemented thoughtfully.

Dan Goldhaber and Joe Walch, “Strategic Pay Reform: A Student Outcomes-Based Evaluation of Denver’s ProComp Teacher Pay Initiative.” (Seattle, WA: Center for Education Data & Research, 2011).

So many institutions—from Congress and Wall Street to public schools and HMOs—have lost the nation’s confidence: “Citizens don’t consider many institutions…to be either responsive or effective,” write the authors of this Public Agenda/Kettering Foundation report. This, despite much effort on the part of organizational leaders to provide transparent data to the public. Why? According to the report, it’s because the public and those leaders don’t agree on the fundamental nature of “accountability.” While elites tend to see accountability as transparently holding organizations to objective, quantifiable standards, the public views it, more opaquely, as a moral issue. Pervasive irresponsibility causes a lack of accountability, regardless of measurable results. This disconnect, the report argues, cripples policy. To remedy it, leaders need to listen to and empathize with the public’s concerns, rather than unilaterally choose technical solutions, the authors argue. To buttress this point, the report authors draw from examples in education, housing, and health care. (On the education front, they showcase school closures as a prime time for enhanced communication.) Still, though they tout communication’s virtues, the authors remind that it is not the same as consensus: Leaders must hear all opinions. But the ultimate decision-making power must rest in their hands. The public is accountable for remembering that.

Jean Johnson, Jonathan Rochkind, and Samantha DuPont, Don’t Count Us Out: How an Overreliance on Accountability Could Undermine the Public’s Confidence in Schools, Business, Government, and More. (New York, NY: Public Agenda; Dayton, OH: Kettering Foundation, October 2011).