The Education Gadfly Weekly

Yesterday, the Century Foundation and the Poverty & Race Research Action Council released a report touting the benefits of racial and socioeconomic diversity in charter schools. For a variety of reasons, charter schools are more likely to serve a high-poverty population than traditional public schools. The authors stress the need for this fact to change because, they claim, poor students fare better in low-poverty versus high-poverty schools. The report profiles seven high-performing charters that have tackled racial and socioeconomic integration in different ways. Diversifying charter schools is an attractive—and noble—idea, but one that creates a policy conundrum as feasible integration of schools often proves to be a prickly challenge. (Think about parents’ reactions to busing in Wake County, for example.)

A recent policy brief from the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools (which profiles many of the same schools as the Century Foundation report) offers a smart alternative. NAPCS recognizes the value in fostering high-performing charters that serve either homogenous or socioeconomically diverse communities—and the value of letting parents choose to send their child to one or the other. Both reports make recommendations for policy changes that will be more hospitable to diverse charters. NAPCS urges the federal government to loosen restrictions on charters’ admissions practices—to permit weighted lotteries (which allow for a more diverse or targeted student body). The Century Foundation recommends that states provide incentives to integrated charters akin to those created for high-poverty charters. Integrating charters is a touchy subject; these reports offer valuable perspective—and some smart ideas—on how to navigate these turbid waters.

SOURCE:

Richard D. Kahlenberg and Halley Potter, Diverse Charter Schools: Can Racial and Socioeconomic Integration Promote Better Outcomes for Students? (Washington, D.C.: The Century Foundation and The Poverty & Race Research Action Council, May 2012).

Nora Kern, Renita Thukral, and Todd Ziebarth, A Mission to Serve: How Public Charter Schools Are Designed to Meet the Diverse Demands of Our Communities (Washington, D.C.: National Alliance for Public Charter Schools, May 2012).

Collecting student-level data is a necessity for schools and districts looking to track and improve achievement. But it is not sufficient. To realize the transformative power of data, teachers must know how to analyze and utilize this information to inform instruction. Yet teacher-preparation programs provide woefully inadequate training on this front, according to this National Council on Teacher Quality report. The authors evaluated 455 courses in 180 undergraduate and graduate teacher-prep programs along three needed “areas of knowledge”: assessment literacy (whether the course teaches how to measure student performance), analytical skills (whether it teaches how to analyze data), and instructional decision-making (whether it informs the use of data to plan instruction). The upshot: Teacher-preparation programs are doing a lousy job on all of these fronts. NCTQ offers recommendations to rectify this situation. For example, the federal government should invest in research, states should tighten the accountability screws on these programs, and foundations should develop institutional datasets on which prospective teachers can practice during the course of their prep programs. Most interesting is the recommendation that districts leverage their hiring power to influence the syllabi and course-offerings of teacher-prep programs. Districts flexing their might to change education-school norms. What a novel idea.

SOURCE: Julie Greenberg and Kate Walsh, What Teacher Preparation Programs Teach about K-12 Assessment (Washington, D.C.: National Council on Teacher Quality, May 2012).

Since Hurricane Katrina, New Orleans has emerged as an education-reform laboratory, a grand experiment in parental choice and teacher accountability where 70 percent of schools are charters and 1,700 students take advantage of vouchers (a program now being supercharged—throughout the whole state—under Governor Jindal’s new education-reform plan). This new documentary follows five children (from supportive families) in the middle of this experiment for one year—among them, a KIPPster, a student in a Recovery School District school, and a child attending Catholic school thanks to a voucher. The story is compelling—if not altogether unfamiliar. And it offers a boon for those new to the education-reform arena and craving a fast, painless tutorial on the ins and outs of education in the Big Easy today. But the film also reminds the viewer that the future of that city’s bold education reforms is far from certain. For example, Ben Lemoine, the film’s director, profiles local detractors who would curb the city’s charter sector and turn school governance back to the traditional district. Not such a “big easy” initiative, after all, but the film is well worth viewing.

SOURCE: Ben Lemoine, director, The Experiment (Covington, LA: Fleurish Productions, 2012).

Mike and Rick break down the flaws in the latest Race to the Top and explain why Obama and Duncan really aren’t twins when it comes to ed policy. In her Research Minute, Amber analyzes Podgursky’s latest insights on pensions.

Amber's Research Minute

Who Benefits from Pension Enhancements? by Cory Koedel, Shawn Ni, Michael Podgursky

The Common Core is coming, with forty-five states and the District of Columbia challenged to implement these new standards. Yet mystery surrounds how much this will cost states (and districts)—and whether the payoff will justify the price.

On May 30, the Fordham Institute will peek behind that curtain with a lively panel discussion of "Pricing the Common Core." Taking part will be former Florida Education Commissioner Eric J. Smith, Achieve President Mike Cohen, former Department of Education official Ze'ev Wurman, and University of San Francisco professor Patrick J. Murphy, who will present the findings of a new Fordham study that he co-authored. It estimates the dollar cost of the implementation process for each participating state—and shows how the pricetag varies depending on the approach a state selects.

As states and districts strain their budgets, the cost of the impending transition to Common Core State Standards has generated a disconcerting lack of attention from state policymakers. At a time when money is a key element in education-policy discussions, the dearth of such cost projections is not only alarming, it has left the entire standards effort vulnerable to opponents eager to spread fears about—inter alia—its fiscal viability. Those who are still pushing states to repudiate the Common Core would have us believe that its price tag is huge—and that all those costs are new. Wrong. Most states have been implementing their own academic standards (good, bad, or mediocre) for years and money that they’re already spending for that objective can (and should) be repurposed for Common Core implementation. Nor do all implementation strategies carry the same costs. Which, especially in an era of tight budgets, is why the nuanced findings of Fordham’s latest study, Putting A Price Tag on the Common Core: How Much Will Smart Implementation Cost?, come at a crucial time.

Watch Amber Winkler explain how much Common Core implementation will cost.

Our analysts (Patrick Murphy of the University of San Francisco, Elliot Regenstein of EducationCounsel LLC, and Keith McNamara) targeted the three primary cost drivers of standards implementation—instructional materials, student assessments, and professional development—to estimate the initial costs of putting the Common Core into action. They did so by crafting three hypothetical approaches to that implementation:

• Business as Usual. This “traditional” approach means buying hard-copy textbooks, administering paper student assessments annually, and delivering in-person professional development to all teachers.


• Bare Bones. This low-cost alternative employs open-source materials, computer-administered assessments, and online professional development.


• Balanced Implementation. This blended approach uses a mix of instructional materials (commercial and open-source plus teacher self-published texts and/or district-produced materials), interim and summative assessments, and a hybrid approach to professional development (e.g., train the trainers).

Cost projections naturally vary with the approach chosen. As shown in the table below (in columns 2,3,4), the total Business as Usual cost exceeds $12 billion while Bare Bones comes to just $3 billion. Balanced Implementation, of course, falls in between, around $5 billion.

The most expensive option equals about 3 percent of annual K–12 education spending—and these transitional costs will likely be spread over more than one year. That’s not very much. But that’s also the gross cost estimate. In reality, recall that states are already spending significant sums on instructional materials, assessment, and professional development. Observe how much in column 5. Then subtract those current expenditures from the gross costs and watch the net new cost shrink (columns 6,7, and 8). Under Business as Usual, current national expenditures cover about one-third of the gross transitional costs, equating to a net cost of about $8.3 billion. Under the less expensive Balanced Implementation approach, current outlays could cover three-fourths of Common Core transition, yielding a national net price tag of $1.2 billion. By opting for the low-cost Bare Bones alternative, it is possible that CCSS states would cover their transitional costs via existing expenditures and even come out in the black.

There are two important lessons here.

First, high-quality implementation need not break the bank.

Common Core critics love to depict the standards as a pricey new mandate with little potential impact on student achievement. In February, for example, the relentlessly hostile Pioneer Institute released a paper estimating that, over the next seven years, CCSS implementation costs would total roughly $16 billion across participating states. No, that number isn’t nuts; it’s not far from our Business as Usual national estimate if you also throw in a ballpark figure for technology infrastructure (which Pioneer did)—and if you limit yourself to gross costs.

But that big number also assumes 1990s-style implementation. As Fordham’s Kathleen Porter-Magee has pointed out, it assumes that states will do what they have always done, meaning they will not "rethink professional development delivery or imagine savings in this area.” To pretend that there’s one best way to implement the Common Core—which does not consider technological or scale efficiencies and does not net out current expenditures—is more a political ploy than a serious public debate about CCSS costs.

Second, the Common Core offers states and districts the opportunity to rethink standards implementation, even education delivery writ large.

The potential of the CCSS lies not only in its alignment to assessments and professional development, but also in its impact on the quality and effectiveness of teaching and learning. Properly implemented, more rigorous standards mean more rigorous teaching and the application of better tools and materials to do it. Multi-state collaborations are already exploiting the “common-ness” of CCSS via shared assessments, instructional materials, and online professional development. Creation of new and better instructional tools by multiple vendors will help more teachers teach the new standards. And the rise of innovative school-delivery models, such as charter networks and virtual schools, means that lessons gleaned from them can benefit more teachers—all of whom are teaching the same standards.

Let’s not kid ourselves. Of course it will be challenging to implement the Common Core standards well. But it doesn’t have to be wildly expensive.

The Department of Education announced the latest wave of NCLB waivers this week, bringing the grand total of states freed from the law’s most cumbersome strictures to nineteen (counting D.C.). While myriad challenges remain for those winners, Congress is by far the biggest loser; round by round, the Obama Administration is making Washington’s role in education increasingly the product of executive-branch decision-making.

The “digital divide” in access to technology of the 1990s has morphed into a “time-wasting” gap reports the New York Times, with children whose parents lack college degrees exposed to 90 minutes more media daily than their wealthier peers. While the government’s proposed response is misdirected—$200 million to create a “digital literacy corps”?!—this is a useful testament to policymakers that technology is no panacea and to parents that it’s time to turn off the TV and put away the Wii.

Recently I received an email from a student unlike any message I have received in forty years as a college professor. It is worth quoting for what it says not so much about this student as about the culture we have now created within K-16 education in America. Commenting on the failing grade I gave her in a course, the student wrote: “I have never received an F for as long as I have been in college, I complied with the paper and the two tests, and you mean to tell me I did not get anything from the class. I will appeal this because who is the failure? You are the teacher whom I relied upon to teach me about a subject matter that I had no familiarity with, so in all actuality I have been disserviced, and I do expect my money back from the course, you did not give me any warning that I was failing! You should be embarrassed to give a student an F.”

It is no longer sufficient to hold a student by the hand. You must now literally hand them a diploma.  Photo by gadgetdude

Never mind the punctuation errors and illiteracy of the email; we have all come to accept and endure such, irritating as it is, lest we be accused of lacking understanding of new media conventions. Never mind the fact that the student did not even bother to purchase the required textbook for the course, much less read it, or that she came to class only sporadically, or that she had received an F on the midterm exam (which normally constitutes a “warning” that you may be at risk of failing and which, combined with her F on the final exam and a D on the term paper, normally computes to an F grade); under the “new math,” a slate of poor grades during the semester (“formative assessments”) can be instantly wiped clean and the course grade (“summative assessment”) inflated simply by offering redo’s and/or extra credit, unless a teacher is as heartless as I seem to be. And never mind the fact that I even went so far as to copy chapters in the book for her when she claimed she could not afford the book, and gave her (and the entire class) an elaborate study guide prior to both exams, indicating the questions on the tests. I also appended to the course syllabus a “Writing Caution” about dotting i’s, crossing t’s, making sure the paper was proof-read before prof-read, and other common-sense tips. But where my student is coming from, evidently, it is no longer sufficient to hold a student by the hand. You must now literally hand them a diploma.

Starting in K-12, and now extending into higher education, we have been cultivating a mindset where the F-word (“failure”) is no longer permissible, even when a student exerts zero effort. It begins in the early grades, where, during the last several decades, academic standards have collapsed to the point that kids receive gold stars or trophies for nonexistent (or trivial) achievement and are advanced to the next grade if they have a pulse. There is a well-intentioned effort to help struggling learners especially, since in the past they were often overlooked by schools, but in the process all learners are reduced to the lowest common denominator. Many contemporary school administrators instruct their staff that “failure is not an option.” If you are a teacher who is told that, if you issue a failing grade, the fault lies with you and not the student, what are you to do, especially when such well-known professional-development gurus as Robert Marzano and Rick Dufour are constantly cited in the latest education “research” and have been hired by principals to reinforce this message? (For example, Marzano, who puts the onus entirely on the teacher rather than the student or parent and who believes the right kind of “assessment-intervention” regimen can allow “all” students to “succeed,” is the featured speaker at an upcoming school administrators’ conference sponsored by the Missouri Department of Elementary and Secondary Education.)

	Starting in K-12, and now extending into higher education, we have been cultivating a mindset where the F-word ("failure") is no longer permissible, even when a student exerts zero effort.

This model of education is now being transferred to the university level, as professors see many of the products of such K-12 training on college campuses in need of “support” (aka remediation), not only lacking basic academic skills and knowledge but also the most rudimentary understanding of what it takes to become an “educated” person. Thus, on my campus and many others, “retention” centers are proliferating along with “early alert” warning systems designed to help students by sending them regular reminders to come to class, turn in work by the due dates, and perform other basic obligations that can be gleaned if they simply read the syllabus. Thus, the “coddling” paradigm has been imported from K-12 into academia as we treat adults like children (while of course overlooking or excusing potentially harmful behaviors on grounds that these are adults and the college must not act in loco parentis). Many professors are trying to resist the decline in expectations—indeed, despite grade inflation there is still a high college dropout rate—but the combination of “equity” pressures along with cash-strapped colleges wanting to retain tuition-paying students is creating the perfect storm likely to lead to further erosion of standards.

Both left and right are to blame. On the left are those who push the “therapeutic model”—the idea that the student is a “patient” whose problems a school is supposed to fix and who is entitled to endless chances to mess up, redo work, and graduate to the next level in the name of  “access” and “fairness.” On the right are those who push the “business model”—the idea that the student is a “customer” who is entitled to a school’s best customer-is-always-right “services” in the name of “market-style accountability.” President Obama wants to see “college readiness for all,” and many Republican state legislators want to see “higher graduation rates.” Between them, I am getting ready for more emails telling me what a lousy teacher I am.

J. Martin Rochester is the curators' distinguished teaching professor of political science at the University of Missouri-St. Louis.

The Common Core is coming, with forty-five states and the District of Columbia challenged to implement these new standards. Yet mystery surrounds how much this will cost states (and districts)—and whether the payoff will justify the price.

On May 30, the Fordham Institute will peek behind that curtain with a lively panel discussion of "Pricing the Common Core." Taking part will be former Florida Education Commissioner Eric J. Smith, Achieve President Mike Cohen, former Department of Education official Ze'ev Wurman, and University of San Francisco professor Patrick J. Murphy, who will present the findings of a new Fordham study that he co-authored. It estimates the dollar cost of the implementation process for each participating state—and shows how the pricetag varies depending on the approach a state selects.

The Common Core is coming, with forty-five states and the District of Columbia challenged to implement these new standards. Yet mystery surrounds how much this will cost states (and districts)—and whether the payoff will justify the price.

On May 30, the Fordham Institute will peek behind that curtain with a lively panel discussion of "Pricing the Common Core." Taking part will be former Florida Education Commissioner Eric J. Smith, Achieve President Mike Cohen, former Department of Education official Ze'ev Wurman, and University of San Francisco professor Patrick J. Murphy, who will present the findings of a new Fordham study that he co-authored. It estimates the dollar cost of the implementation process for each participating state—and shows how the pricetag varies depending on the approach a state selects.

Yesterday, the Century Foundation and the Poverty & Race Research Action Council released a report touting the benefits of racial and socioeconomic diversity in charter schools. For a variety of reasons, charter schools are more likely to serve a high-poverty population than traditional public schools. The authors stress the need for this fact to change because, they claim, poor students fare better in low-poverty versus high-poverty schools. The report profiles seven high-performing charters that have tackled racial and socioeconomic integration in different ways. Diversifying charter schools is an attractive—and noble—idea, but one that creates a policy conundrum as feasible integration of schools often proves to be a prickly challenge. (Think about parents’ reactions to busing in Wake County, for example.)

A recent policy brief from the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools (which profiles many of the same schools as the Century Foundation report) offers a smart alternative. NAPCS recognizes the value in fostering high-performing charters that serve either homogenous or socioeconomically diverse communities—and the value of letting parents choose to send their child to one or the other. Both reports make recommendations for policy changes that will be more hospitable to diverse charters. NAPCS urges the federal government to loosen restrictions on charters’ admissions practices—to permit weighted lotteries (which allow for a more diverse or targeted student body). The Century Foundation recommends that states provide incentives to integrated charters akin to those created for high-poverty charters. Integrating charters is a touchy subject; these reports offer valuable perspective—and some smart ideas—on how to navigate these turbid waters.

SOURCE:

Richard D. Kahlenberg and Halley Potter, Diverse Charter Schools: Can Racial and Socioeconomic Integration Promote Better Outcomes for Students? (Washington, D.C.: The Century Foundation and The Poverty & Race Research Action Council, May 2012).

Nora Kern, Renita Thukral, and Todd Ziebarth, A Mission to Serve: How Public Charter Schools Are Designed to Meet the Diverse Demands of Our Communities (Washington, D.C.: National Alliance for Public Charter Schools, May 2012).

Collecting student-level data is a necessity for schools and districts looking to track and improve achievement. But it is not sufficient. To realize the transformative power of data, teachers must know how to analyze and utilize this information to inform instruction. Yet teacher-preparation programs provide woefully inadequate training on this front, according to this National Council on Teacher Quality report. The authors evaluated 455 courses in 180 undergraduate and graduate teacher-prep programs along three needed “areas of knowledge”: assessment literacy (whether the course teaches how to measure student performance), analytical skills (whether it teaches how to analyze data), and instructional decision-making (whether it informs the use of data to plan instruction). The upshot: Teacher-preparation programs are doing a lousy job on all of these fronts. NCTQ offers recommendations to rectify this situation. For example, the federal government should invest in research, states should tighten the accountability screws on these programs, and foundations should develop institutional datasets on which prospective teachers can practice during the course of their prep programs. Most interesting is the recommendation that districts leverage their hiring power to influence the syllabi and course-offerings of teacher-prep programs. Districts flexing their might to change education-school norms. What a novel idea.

SOURCE: Julie Greenberg and Kate Walsh, What Teacher Preparation Programs Teach about K-12 Assessment (Washington, D.C.: National Council on Teacher Quality, May 2012).

Since Hurricane Katrina, New Orleans has emerged as an education-reform laboratory, a grand experiment in parental choice and teacher accountability where 70 percent of schools are charters and 1,700 students take advantage of vouchers (a program now being supercharged—throughout the whole state—under Governor Jindal’s new education-reform plan). This new documentary follows five children (from supportive families) in the middle of this experiment for one year—among them, a KIPPster, a student in a Recovery School District school, and a child attending Catholic school thanks to a voucher. The story is compelling—if not altogether unfamiliar. And it offers a boon for those new to the education-reform arena and craving a fast, painless tutorial on the ins and outs of education in the Big Easy today. But the film also reminds the viewer that the future of that city’s bold education reforms is far from certain. For example, Ben Lemoine, the film’s director, profiles local detractors who would curb the city’s charter sector and turn school governance back to the traditional district. Not such a “big easy” initiative, after all, but the film is well worth viewing.

SOURCE: Ben Lemoine, director, The Experiment (Covington, LA: Fleurish Productions, 2012).