The Education Gadfly Weekly

In the world of education reform, the biggest, baddest elephant in the room is, without question, the broken manner in which American schools are governed. This latest attempt to dispel our romantic attachment to the traditional school board comes from Kenneth Wong, who has long studied the impact of mayoral control and who here examines the effects of it on student achievement and resource allocation. He and his colleague analyze eleven districts that were governed by some version of mayoral control from 1999 to 2010—meaning, the mayor had direct authority over at least some of the schools. They find that mayoral-control districts have generally improved district-wide performance relative to average school-district performance statewide, though the results vary from place to place. Specifically, five of the eleven cities (New York, New Haven, Chicago, Philly, and Baltimore) significantly narrowed achievement gaps, while the other six (Hartford, Harrisburg, Boston, Providence, Yonkers, and Cleveland) saw patchier outcomes. The researchers also looked at performance on the NAEP for the seven districts that participated in the Trial Urban District Assessment (TUDA) and found that students in New York, Boston, and (to some extent) Chicago outpaced their peers across various subgroups. What’s more, an in-depth, school-level analysis in New York showed that mayoral control increased the percentage of students in a school who are proficient on state standards by 1 to 3 percent annually, which can add up quickly in a large district. Finally, the study revealed a positive relationship between mayoral-control districts and increased spending on instruction. One must, however, remember that these are not causal findings—and that a city’s choice of mayor, the mayor’s specific powers, and the reform agenda he or she advances make a great deal of difference.

SOURCE: Kenneth K. Wong and Francis X. Shen, Mayoral Governance and Student Achievement: How Mayor-Led Districts Are Improving School and Student Performance (Washington, D.C.: Center for American Progress, March 2013).

In September 2011, Jay Greene’s and Josh McGee’s Global Report Card rattled America’s sleepy suburbs with its declaration that none of America’s affluent districts performed at a level that would place them among the top third of developed nations’ PISA results. This new report from America Achieves, finds essentially the same thing for middle-class schools (as gauged by PISA’s somewhat shaky indicators of socioeconomic status). U.S. students in the second-to-top SES quartile (i.e., 50th–75th percentile) are bested by students of similar demography in twenty-four countries in math and fifteen in science. (These same U.S. students are also outdone by Shanghai’s poorest quartile of pupils.) Alarming, yes, but maybe not too surprising. What’s probably more consequential about this short report—and the trove of online data that underpins it—is that it signals the beginning of an ambitious effort to bring PISA testing (and international comparing) down to the school level. Some 105 U.S. high schools took part in the pilot, supported by several major foundations, and beginning in the autumn, every American high school that is game to submit to this kind of scrutiny can join in. There is terrific potential here to awaken those sleepy suburbs to the state of learning in their own smug schools. There are, to be sure, limitations. Schools don’t necessarily have to make their results public. (A lamentable concession, in my opinion, though it may boost participation.) And because PISA tests fifteen-year-olds, they haven’t been in the high school long enough for its actual effectiveness to make a big dent in their performance. (The test results are likely reveal more about the elementary and middle schools that feed into the high school.) PISA has substantive critics, too, mostly because it isn’t designed to be aligned with curriculum; it’s more like a report on the literacy and numeracy of a large population of which the test takers (minimum of seventy-five per school in this case) are a sample. Still and all, enabling the residents—and parents and taxpayers—of a community, even a neighborhood, to see how their kids are faring in math, science, and literacy against Singapore and Germany (and many more places) can be a real eye-opener and, one hopes, a source of upset and action to rectify the situation. (Even Thomas Friedman has cocked an eye to this possibility.) And the news that results isn’t always grim. Several of the schools participating in the pilot—and willing to make their results public—did as well as the planet’s top-scoring countries! They have cause for pride—but I hope not smugness.

SOURCE: America Achieves, Middle Class or Middle of the Pack? What Can We Learn When Benchmarking U.S. Schools Against the World’s Best? (New York, NY: America Achieves, April 2013).

Mike and Kathleen bust some podcast moves, taking on Thomas Friedman over “innovation education,” revamped teacher-evaluation systems whose results look suspiciously last season, and the Atlanta test-fraud scandal. Amber is the mayor of mayoral control.

Amber's Research Minute

Mayoral Governance and Student Achievement: How Mayor-Led Districts Are Improving School and Student Performance by Kenneth K. Wong and Francis X. Shen (Washington, D.C.: Center for American Progress, March 2013).

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.

Sir Michael Barber is no stranger to education reform—indeed, he is well known to serious policy reformers, education leaders, and wonks in the U.S. and around the globe, thanks to his key roles in British reforms under Tony Blair, his penetrating analyses of diverse systems while at McKinsey, his writings on “deliverology” and other education topics, and—most recently—his work as “chief education adviser” at Pearson.

What practically nobody (outside Pakistan) knew about Barber until a week or two ago is that he has also served these past three years as “special representative on education in Pakistan” for Britain’s Department for International Development (the U.K. counterpart to USAID). In that capacity, he has spearheaded a remarkable ed-reform initiative—indeed, an education transformation, albeit just getting beyond the pilot stage—in Punjab, the largest province in Pakistan with 94 million people. Considering that nearly all the news about Pakistan that reaches American eyes and ears is so grim—political upheavals, terrorism, assassinations, floods, poverty, corruption, illiteracy—I was blown away to learn that Michael and his team of change-agents in the Punjab government, with help from several international donors, have been successfully beavering away at this hugely ambitious endeavor to bring a decent education to children throughout that vast chunk of south Asia.

Now he’s described that project in a short, readable book that is informative and optimistic without trivializing the many challenges ahead, particularly the challenge of sustaining a complex undertaking in a volatile place.

The book and the project it describes are interesting from three perspectives:

• Aficionados of South Asia, and all who understand the complex role of Pakistan in a dangerous neighborhood, will welcome evidence that two major sources of that country’s poverty, instability and radicalism (namely, widespread illiteracy and governmental failure) can actually be tackled.
• Foreign-aid skeptics and international-development doubters will find here a promising example of how this sort of endeavor can be undertaken in a way that actually succeeds—and true believers will find a case-in-point to justify their faith.
• And education reformers around the globe, but especially in poor and developing lands, will encounter a really interesting case study of a hugely ambitious undertaking with multiple moving parts—and a master plan (known here as the “Reform Roadmap”) that holds them together.     

Although I’ve long harbored a mild interest in the Punjab—my wife began life there back when Barber’s territory was still part of British India—the ed-reform angle was what caught my eye.

The Roadmap’s reform goals are straightforward: getting kids into school, reducing the dropout rate, and ensuring that they learn the basics. But that requires decent teachers who actually turn up, as well as adequate facilities. (In rural Pakistan, obtaining fundamentals such as water and toilets is a true challenge.)

The plan’s framers understood, as Barber writes, that “above and beyond all this activity on improving the supply of education, there has also been a major drive to strengthen demand.” That has meant using media extensively and also enlisting religious leaders.

Perhaps most interesting to me—and least expected from a government-driven development program—is the Roadmap’s vigorous use of the private sector to deliver education, leading to the creation in Punjab of what Barber believes is the world’s largest voucher program. A new non-governmental (but government-financed) entity, the Punjab Education Foundation, was fashioned, as was a major program of aid to low-cost private schools (making them free for children to attend), followed by a parent-driven voucher program which, by 2011–12, was assisting more than 140,000 youngsters and planning to add up to 80,000 more.

Like many developing countries with disastrous public schools, Pakistan had a robust sector of low-cost private schooling even before the Roadmap began. In Punjab, it served about 40 percent of all children; in the big city of Lahore, that figure reached a staggering 70 percent.

Unlike so many aid programs that work only through governmental institutions, here the Roadmap sought both to capitalize on this private capacity and to create more nose-to-nose competition with the public school sector.

That wasn’t the whole story, of course. The Roadmap also focused on teacher quality, the effectiveness of local administration, and a vigorous data-and-reporting system that made participation and results transparent to all, including provincial leaders.

Their leadership was, and remains, hugely important to the success of all this, beginning with Punjab chief minister Shahbaz Sharif, “the dominant political force in Pakistan’s biggest province.” “He runs a centralized administration,” Barber writes, “with everything important running through his office. He is impatient, determined and demanding….”

But the man at the top can’t do it alone, and Sharif and Barber enlisted top-notch civil servants, business leaders, technocrats, and others to help design and deliver the Roadmap. They mustered the requisite financial resources (predominantly from the provincial government, not overseas) and the leverage to dismiss people who didn’t deliver.

The Roadmap approach works only if a number of stars align, and that’s not the case today even in other parts of Pakistan. But the early results in Punjab are encouraging after just two years.

“As of January 2013,” Barber reports. “there are approaching one and a half million extra children enrolled in school…[A]ttendance daily is now over 90 percent, 81,000 new teachers have been hired on merit and more than 35,000 more teachers are present at school every day than two years ago. Over 90 percent of schools now have basic facilities…Across all the indicators, there has been a narrowing of the gender gap.” 

It’s quite a saga. And if the dozen lessons Barber adduces at the end are familiar, at least to “deliverology” mavens—“set clear goals,” know what’s happening,” “refine but don’t compromise,” “create momentum,” etc.—they come to life vividly when read in the context of an ambitious real-world enterprise in a tough location, an enterprise inspired and overseen by a very impressive fellow.

There’s a lot of interest in this question in ed-reform circles today; Alexander Russo sketches the line of thinking here. It’s understandable, considering how successful proponents of gay marriage*  have been in changing public opinion, state statutes, and, perhaps soon, constitutional law on the issue. If only education reformers could be so lucky!

Some of the lessons being bandied about include the following:

• Picking one issue and rallying the whole movement behind it (gay marriage instead of gays in the military, for example)
• Reframing the debate (in this case, from “gay rights” to embracing the “responsibilities” that marriage brings)
• Making sure that movement leaders keep a low profile

So can we make a plausible education analogy? I think it’s a stretch, and not just because ed reformers love to appear on magazine covers. Gay marriage is fundamentally a moral issue. Legalizing it doesn’t cost taxpayers any serious money; it won’t balloon the deficit; there are no “vested interests” in terms of employee unions protecting their pensions or rapacious corporations seeking to make a fast buck. It’s simply a matter of inclusion and freedom on one side, tradition and gut feelings on the other. It’s a classic social issue.

Not so with education reform. Though all sides of its debates try to claim the moral high ground and use moralistic rhetoric, making schools work better is largely a management/service/governance challenge.

Take the question of “picking one issue” to rally around. Which would it be? Teacher evaluations? Tenure? Common Core? School choice? Funding? While any of these can be framed as an issue of right or wrong, once you get serious about specifics, a world of complexity unveils itself. Sure, bad teachers should be fired. But who decides if they are bad? Using what metric? What safeguards do you put in place? Yes, children should have a right to go to the school of their choice. But what if the schools don’t want them? What if their parents don’t pay property taxes where the school is located? What if parents choose poorly?

In fact, education reform is more akin to health-care reform. In both cases, we’re talking about big chunks of the economy, much of it paid for with tax dollars; wrestling with issues of quality and equity; and trying to ascertain the appropriate role of government versus the private sector.

Even in the aftermath of the Affordable Healthcare Act, you don’t hear people asking what ed reformers might learn from health-care reform. But we should. And the answer? It’s complicated.

 * Which, yes, I support.

When the charter school movement started twenty-plus years ago, charters represented a radical innovation in governance: School districts would no longer enjoy an “exclusive franchise” on local public schools; they would compete with public, independent, autonomous (but accountable) charter schools too.

In the last twenty years, American education and its charter sector have evolved in important ways.

Much has happened in the charter sector since then—in fact, what began as a community-led, mom-and-pop movement has evolved to include a burgeoning assemblage of charter school networks, as well. But the laws ruling charter school governance remain largely the same. It’s time for a reboot in order to address three critical problems.

First, state laws and authorizer policies often require a full-fledged governing board for every charter school, and these policies make no exception for high-performing charter networks (such as KIPP and Rocketship Education). Thus, replicating at scale is difficult. In fact, only ten states explicitly allow for networks to operate multiple schools under the oversight of one governing board* and three states (Pennsylvania, Connecticut, and Iowa) explicitly prohibit the practice.

Second, management organizations—especially for-profits—often control their schools’ governing boards, leading to serious questions about accountability and conflicts of interest. The Fordham Institute, both as an education think tank and a charter school authorizer in Ohio, firmly believes that governing boards and management organizations should be independent of one another—and the former should be in charge of the latter.

As my colleague Terry Ryan explained recently, too many Ohio charter schools have been controlled by their management organizations, rather than by their governing boards. This explains much of the low performance (and high-profile scandals) that the Buckeye State charter movement has spent years cleaning up.

Lastly, charter governance is most outdated when it comes to technology. Most virtual charter schools are authorized by local school boards, which collect massive fees to oversee what are often statewide schools. This creates a perverse incentive to look the other way when quality is weak—especially if the money is rolling in and the school mostly serves “other people’s children.”

To answer these challenges, we recommend the following:

• Allow existing high-performing networks to organize multiple schools under single boards. KIPP’s geographically based “governing pods” are a good way to develop a locally based governance structure while still drawing on a network’s brand name.
• Require performance-based contracts between governing boards and education management organizations (EMOs) and charter management organizations (CMOs). These contracts should incorporate explicit terms regarding evaluations, oversight, compensation, and conditions for contract renewal and termination. Policies should also outline how the board will maintain an arm’s-length relationship with its management company.
• Require statewide virtual schools to report to a statewide authorizing entity, such as an independent charter commission or state school board, rather than a local board of education. States that are serious about online learning must provide a governance model that can meet the changing requirements that technology brings to education.

Twenty years later, charter schools remain the most promising governance innovation in American public education. Let’s make sure the governance of charter schools themselves is up to the task of even greater charter quality and quantity in the years ahead.

Download Governance in the charter school sector: Time for a reboot to learn more.

* These states are Arkansas, California, Delaware, Hawaii, Maine, Massachusetts, Minnesota, New York, Texas, and Washington.

The dramatic test-cheating scandal in Atlanta—which has seen the indictment of thirty-five educators, including the former superintendent, for messing with the scores—has fingers pointed every which way. AFT president Randi Weingarten placed the blame squarely on our “excessive focus on quantitative performance measures,” arguing that the incentives make cheating inevitable. We disagree; we respect teachers enough to believe that most will resist wrongdoing, and submit that you don’t fix cheating by refusing to keep score.

Saturday’s New York Times sounded the alarm: The early results from states that have recently overhauled their teacher-evaluation systems have seen very little change, with 97 percent of Florida’s teachers still deemed effective or highly effective, 98 percent of Tennessee’s judged to be “at expectations,” and 98 percent of Michigan’s rated “effective or better.” This is certainly newsworthy (though Ed Week’s Stephen Sawchuk beat the Times to the punch). For our take, listen to this week’s Education Gadfly Show podcast.

Policymakers in the Texas House of Representatives have passed legislation that would reduce the number of required high school courses, as well as the number of statewide end-of-course exams, thereby rolling back the Lone Star State’s present ambitious graduation expectations, damaging the value of students’ high school diplomas, and taking a big step back from college readiness. And we’re not the only ones who think so: Texas’s business leaders do, too. The bill does, however, install a useful A–F grading scheme for Texas schools and end the state’s charter school cap. Moreover, the measure still needs to pass the state Senate and then survive a conference committee. Let’s hope saner heads end up prevailing.

According to a new study by psychologists at the University of Iowa and Michigan State University, students understand mathematical concepts better when their instructors gesticulate as they teach. So math teachers: Free your inner Italian!

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.

In the world of education reform, the biggest, baddest elephant in the room is, without question, the broken manner in which American schools are governed. This latest attempt to dispel our romantic attachment to the traditional school board comes from Kenneth Wong, who has long studied the impact of mayoral control and who here examines the effects of it on student achievement and resource allocation. He and his colleague analyze eleven districts that were governed by some version of mayoral control from 1999 to 2010—meaning, the mayor had direct authority over at least some of the schools. They find that mayoral-control districts have generally improved district-wide performance relative to average school-district performance statewide, though the results vary from place to place. Specifically, five of the eleven cities (New York, New Haven, Chicago, Philly, and Baltimore) significantly narrowed achievement gaps, while the other six (Hartford, Harrisburg, Boston, Providence, Yonkers, and Cleveland) saw patchier outcomes. The researchers also looked at performance on the NAEP for the seven districts that participated in the Trial Urban District Assessment (TUDA) and found that students in New York, Boston, and (to some extent) Chicago outpaced their peers across various subgroups. What’s more, an in-depth, school-level analysis in New York showed that mayoral control increased the percentage of students in a school who are proficient on state standards by 1 to 3 percent annually, which can add up quickly in a large district. Finally, the study revealed a positive relationship between mayoral-control districts and increased spending on instruction. One must, however, remember that these are not causal findings—and that a city’s choice of mayor, the mayor’s specific powers, and the reform agenda he or she advances make a great deal of difference.

SOURCE: Kenneth K. Wong and Francis X. Shen, Mayoral Governance and Student Achievement: How Mayor-Led Districts Are Improving School and Student Performance (Washington, D.C.: Center for American Progress, March 2013).

In September 2011, Jay Greene’s and Josh McGee’s Global Report Card rattled America’s sleepy suburbs with its declaration that none of America’s affluent districts performed at a level that would place them among the top third of developed nations’ PISA results. This new report from America Achieves, finds essentially the same thing for middle-class schools (as gauged by PISA’s somewhat shaky indicators of socioeconomic status). U.S. students in the second-to-top SES quartile (i.e., 50th–75th percentile) are bested by students of similar demography in twenty-four countries in math and fifteen in science. (These same U.S. students are also outdone by Shanghai’s poorest quartile of pupils.) Alarming, yes, but maybe not too surprising. What’s probably more consequential about this short report—and the trove of online data that underpins it—is that it signals the beginning of an ambitious effort to bring PISA testing (and international comparing) down to the school level. Some 105 U.S. high schools took part in the pilot, supported by several major foundations, and beginning in the autumn, every American high school that is game to submit to this kind of scrutiny can join in. There is terrific potential here to awaken those sleepy suburbs to the state of learning in their own smug schools. There are, to be sure, limitations. Schools don’t necessarily have to make their results public. (A lamentable concession, in my opinion, though it may boost participation.) And because PISA tests fifteen-year-olds, they haven’t been in the high school long enough for its actual effectiveness to make a big dent in their performance. (The test results are likely reveal more about the elementary and middle schools that feed into the high school.) PISA has substantive critics, too, mostly because it isn’t designed to be aligned with curriculum; it’s more like a report on the literacy and numeracy of a large population of which the test takers (minimum of seventy-five per school in this case) are a sample. Still and all, enabling the residents—and parents and taxpayers—of a community, even a neighborhood, to see how their kids are faring in math, science, and literacy against Singapore and Germany (and many more places) can be a real eye-opener and, one hopes, a source of upset and action to rectify the situation. (Even Thomas Friedman has cocked an eye to this possibility.) And the news that results isn’t always grim. Several of the schools participating in the pilot—and willing to make their results public—did as well as the planet’s top-scoring countries! They have cause for pride—but I hope not smugness.

SOURCE: America Achieves, Middle Class or Middle of the Pack? What Can We Learn When Benchmarking U.S. Schools Against the World’s Best? (New York, NY: America Achieves, April 2013).