The Education Gadfly Weekly

Eight years ago, Mariah Carey’s “We Belong Together” was Billboard’s top song, Pluto was still a planet, and the National Council on Teacher Quality began work on its comprehensive evaluation of the nation’s 2,400 educator-preparation programs housed in 1,130 higher-education institutions. This Tuesday marked the culmination of that gargantuan effort (a partnership with U.S. News and World Report). Of the secondary programs evaluated at more than 600 higher-education institutions, just four—Ohio State, Lipscomb, Furhman, and Vanderbilt—received top honors (four stars); zero elementary programs earned the same accolades. Across both levels, 14 percent of programs were placed on a “Consumer Alert” list for earning zero stars. Appallingly, 64 percent of California’s seventy-one elementary programs earned the lowest rating. Why? In 1970, in an overwrought effort to strengthen teachers’ content knowledge, California “all but prohibited the traditional education degree,” requiring candidates to obtain subject degrees as undergraduates and limiting their pedagogical coursework to a maximum of one year—to disastrous results. NCTQ based its rankings on eighteen criteria in four main areas: rigor of candidate selection, quality of content-area preparation, amount of professional skills the program teaches, and the impact of a program’s graduates. Along with the overall rankings, NCTQ provides detailed data on how programs fare across each of its eighteen criteria, offering page after page of sobering analyses in an attempt to bring order to the “Wild West” of teacher-preparation programs. As expected, the report has not been universally well received. To that, Gadfly notes: Haters gonna hate. This study (and the continued follow-up work of NCTQ) will have lasting impact on policy and practice—perhaps more so than any study in the past decade. Snaps!

SOURCE: Julie Greenberg, Arthur McKee, and Kate Walsh, Teacher Prep Review: A Review of the Nation’s Teacher Preparation Programs, 2013 (Washington, D.C.: National Council on Teacher Quality, June 2013).

In this new NBER working paper, Jason Grissom and colleagues explore the implications of involuntary teacher transfers (or those in which educators are shuffled from one school to another without say) in Miami Dade County’s public schools. Specifically, analysts examined which types of schools made use of—and accepted teachers from—the transfer policy, “the characteristics of transferred teachers and their replacements, and whether the transfers affected productivity, at least in terms of teacher absences and value added. First, they examined involuntary transfers from 2009 through 2012, finding that seventy-three (of 370) of the district’s schools transferred at least one teacher in at least one of those years, totaling 375 teacher transfers. Schools that used the policy tended to be far lower achieving and tended to serve higher percentages of African American students and those with free-and-reduced-price-lunch than schools that did not. The involuntarily transferred teachers were sent to higher-achieving schools than those they left (on average, they were moved from D to B schools on Florida’s A–F grading system). With regards to teacher characteristics, the booted educators were relatively experienced, with 60 percent having five or more years of teaching under their belts and only 8 percent having one year or less. They were absent more often than other teachers—and in mathematics, they had significantly lower value-added scores than those who were not transferred. Importantly, their replacements tended to be younger, less experienced, and generally higher performing (though the sample size for this particular analysis was small). Finally, the authors found some suggestive evidence that involuntarily transferred teachers were less effective than their colleagues in both the school they departed and the one that received them, and they were also less effective than the average new hire in the receiving school. And curiously (not!), the odds of their being placed in an untested grade or subject were about twice as large for an involuntary transfer as for other teachers in the school. Many reformers say that leaders need flexibility to allocate teachers as they see fit—to make lemonade out of lemons, if you will. But why not be done with the lemons?

SOURCE: Jason A. Grissom, Susanna Loeb, and Nathaniel Nakashima, “Strategic Involuntary Teacher Transfers and Teacher Performance: Examining Equity and Efficiency,” NBER Working Paper No. 19108 (Cambridge, MA: National Bureau of Economic Research, June 2013).

There are a number of laudable statistics found in this year’s Diplomas Count: At 75 percent, the U.S. graduation rate in 2010 hit its highest point since 1973—the most recent year for which data are available—marking an 8 percentage point boost from ten years earlier. Further, Hispanics boasted a 16 percentage-point rate improvement; African Americans, a 13 percentage-point bump, which halved the white-Hispanic graduation-rate gap and cut the white–African American gap by 30 percent during that same time period. Yet this year’s report focuses on a depressing corollary point: We’re failing our youth who have already dropped out. Currently, 1.8 million young adults, or 6.5 percent of those aged sixteen to twenty-one, are neither enrolled in school nor have they received their diploma. And we have no comprehensive public-policy strategy to bring these youth back to school or get them college- or career-ready. Still, the report profiles a handful of dropout-recovery programs—run by districts, CMOs, or nonprofits—that are working to reengage would-be students. It’s tough stuff: One Boston-based nonprofit brought 501 of the 867 students it contacted back to the classroom in 2011–12, for example. Among them, fewer than 100 graduated at the end of the year. The message? Progress is good, but there’s no rest for the weary.

SOURCE: Education Week, Diplomas Count 2013: Second Chances: Turning Dropouts into Graduates (Bethesda, MD: Editorial Projects in Education, June 2013).

Terry livens up the airwaves, bantering with Mike about NCTQ’s blockbuster report, the Blaine Amendment, and Philly’s budget woes. Amber waltzes through the dance of the lemons.

Amber's Research Minute

“Strategic Involuntary Teacher Transfers and Teacher Performance: Examining Equity and Efficiency,” by Jason A. Grissom, Susanna Loeb, and Nathaniel Nakashima, NBER Working Paper No. 19108 (Cambridge, MA: National Bureau of Economic Research, June 2013).

What a difference a decade makes. For all the debate around vouchers and student loans, perhaps the most striking element of Mitt Romney's education agenda is how much it differs from the approach of No Child Left Behind, the defining policy of the George W. Bush years. That does not mean, however, that other Republicans necessarily agree with it. The GOP stance on education, and particularly federal education policy, is clearly shifting. But in any clear direction? And for the better?

To examine those questions, the Fordham Institute will bring together two former GOP education secretaries to discuss the Republican Party's direction on this vital issue.

The following is Mike’s final entry in Deborah Meier’s Bridging Differences blog—for now.

Dear Deborah,

It's been a real joy to join you in dialogue these past six weeks. I very much appreciate the opportunity and hope we can continue the discussion in other forums in the months ahead. (Well, maybe after the summer break!)

Let me use my last correspondence to introduce one new idea and summarize some of the others we've explored—to determine just how far we've come in bridging our differences.

The new idea is this: Poverty is a lot like global warming.

As a Whole Foods Republican, I acknowledge that global warming is real, that it's a major threat, and that it's caused (at least in part) by human activity. Here the science is overwhelming.

But unlike most progressives, I'm not yet convinced that we know how to stop it. Will curtailing our carbon output halt climate change? Or is it too late at this point? Here the science is inconclusive.

Yet many environmentalists (including President Obama) argue that we should take drastic actions to limit carbon production anyway, even though such actions are likely to wreck the economy, which would drive millions (if not billions) of people into poverty. That's not a price I'm willing to pay for policies that may prove to be nothing more than symbolic—or a salve for our guilty conscience.

So it is with childhood poverty. We know that it matters—a lot—when it comes to achievement in school and in one's life chances as an adult. There's no serious debate about that, in the social sciences or in the public dialogue. (Even George Will concurs.) Where agreement breaks down, though, is regarding what to do about it. As with climate change, we don't really know how to fix it. And what many progressives advocate that we do about it amounts to—in my view—mostly symbolic actions, or a salve for our guilty conscience. And some of these actions might make things worse.

The most obvious way to "fix" it is to provide "income supports" to poor parents (via welfare, tax credits, a higher minimum wage, etc.). By definition this will reduce income poverty. But as we both agree, Deborah, this won't fundamentally alter the life trajectory of poor children. (I would also argue that some of these policies can do real harm by reducing the incentive to work, by infantilizing adults, by increasing taxes which slow economic growth, etc.)

Other anti-poverty programs—the kind that seek to develop the social and intellectual capital of low-income children—are more promising. But even here we must be modest. High-quality preschool, for instance, has great potential, but we don't really know how to scale up the kinds of programs that have gotten dramatic long-term results. Our efforts at scale (like Head Start) have been almost universally disappointing. (Almost: Recent results out of New Jersey and Texas provide glimmers of hope.)

What else might we do? Curb teenage pregnancy; provide quality prenatal care; offer home visits for expectant mothers; eradicate lead from every American home; keep fathers out of prison by reforming our criminal-justice system. Each of these is worth pursuing, and each could help at the margins.

But I will repeat my supposition that to make the biggest difference for the most children growing up in poverty, what we must do is offer them incredible schools—schools that help them to build the vocabulary, content knowledge, "non-cognitive skills," aspirations, confidence, and relationships needed to "climb the mountain" to college or a middle-class career.

As for what those schools actually do, you and I agree and disagree. We agree that school-level professionals need a significant degree of autonomy—which is why we've both been involved with charter schools, I imagine. We both agree that there needs to be some sort of external accountability, too—and that test scores are hardly perfect arbiters of quality. You posit that a progressive education can provide children, including low-income children, with experiences they will need to succeed in our democracy (and economy). I'm more optimistic that a purposeful program that builds vocabulary and content knowledge (and much else, of course) will provide disadvantaged children the best chance to beat the odds. Let's follow students from both types of schools into adulthood and see who's right, OK? (Maybe we're both right—maybe both paths work as long as the schools are "great" enough.)

Let me finish with one last parting thought. Fundamentally I'm a policy wonk, so I can't stop without leaving a policy recommendation. It's one I first floated a few weeks ago, and I think it could change the terms of the school-reform debate—maybe even end the school-reform wars. It's the Opt-Out.

Let schools opt out of the current testing-and-accountability regime (and the soon-to-be Common Core–testing-and-accountability regime) if they can propose alternative, rigorous metrics for which they are willing to be held accountable. State boards of education are probably the right entities to approve these opt-out requests; the boards' job is to make sure that the alternatives really are rigorous. Some metrics would qualify automatically—long-term outcomes such as college-going and graduation rates and employment outcomes. Others would deserve more scrutiny, such as portfolios of student work or improvements in school climate. If done right, schools would view the opt-out not as a way to "escape" accountability but as a way to mesh accountability with the school's own vision, principles, and beliefs.

Allowing for such opt-outs would require changes to federal and state law, for it would mean moving away from the "single statewide system" of accountability currently required by the ESEA.

But it would be worth it. It would serve as a release valve of sorts for educators and parents with legitimate grievances with today's system. Do you hate testing and the way it warps schools? Measure long-term student outcomes instead. Are you leery of the Common Core? Can you show progress against the AP or IB tests? Great. Are you a career-tech academy with lousy test scores but great long-term impacts? Prove it.

What do you say, Deborah? Are you ready to opt in to opt out? (Which also means opting in to the default—the Common Core?) Here's hoping.

Over and out.

Follow this link to read Deborah Meier’s response.

This article was updated on Thursday, January 20, for the Education Gadfly Weekly.

“When the law is on your side,” the saying goes, “argue the law. When the facts are on your side, argue the facts. When neither the facts nor the law are on your side, pound the table.”

Writing for the Pioneer Institute’s blog, University of Arkansas professor Sandy Stotsky does a lot of table pounding in her latest post, subtly titled, “Why Do They Lie? And Why Do Others Believe Them?”

The post is aimed at exposing Common Core supporters to be the charlatans she believes we are. Unfortunately, Stotsky’s piece is itself so riddled with misinformation and falsehoods that it ends up more effectively proving that her case against the Common Core is, at its core, substantively weak.

In between the name calling and cheap shots, Stotsky advances an argument that rests on three weak claims: 1) The Common Core are not internationally benchmarked, 2) they are really about curriculum and not about standards, and 3) the standards themselves aren’t rigorous.

First, Stotsky insists that the Common Core were not internationally benchmarked. Never mind that Fordham’s comprehensive study found that the CCSS math and ELA were a strong match to the best international assessments, including NAEP, TIMSS, PISA, and PIRLS. Or research conducted by international math expert and former director of the U.S. TIMSS study, William Schmidt, which found that agreement was “very high” between the Common Core math standards and those in place in the highest performing nations around the world. Stotsky brushes aside such evidence—or ignores it entirely—instead devoting several lines to a complaint about the reference to international benchmarking in an “Exxon ad, repeated multiple times during a recently televised national tennis match” and wondering “who influenced Exxon’s education director.” The implication is, of course, that big money, not thoughtful scholarship, is driving the benchmarking claim. It is not.

Second, Stotsky tries to argue that Common Core proponents are lying when we claim that the expectations are about “standards and testing, not curriculum.” Of course, standards will always inform curriculum; the question is whether they mandate it. Just as the Massachusetts standards (which Stotsky wrote) guided curriculum and instruction in the Bay State previously, so the Common Core will provide the foundation for what happens in the classroom. The key question is how much leeway teachers have to design the kinds of curricula that both matches their own teaching style and philosophy and that meets the needs of the students they teach. The simple fact is under Common Core, teachers will have the same degree of flexibility over curriculum and instruction they now enjoy. Stotsky doesn’t refute this. She just wishes they were beholden to different standards.

Finally, Stotsky questions the rigor of the Common Core standards themselves. On the ELA side, she asks,

[H]ow could “rigor” even lurk in Common Core’s ELA standards since they are mostly very abstract and generic skills, like “Analyze how and why individuals, events, and ideas develop and interact over the course of a text”! Such an unintelligible statement is obviously applicable to any grade level and almost any text; it does not indicate any educational level or text quality, as an authentic, intelligible standard would.

There are at least two glaring problems with this analysis.

First, the Massachusetts standards she wrote (which the Common Core have since replaced) include very similar expectations, including a third-grade expectation that students “analyze how major events led from problem to solution” and a fourth-grade standard that asks students to “make judgments about setting, characters, and events and support them with evidence from the text.”

Second and even more critically, the “abstract and generic” standard Stotsky cites is actually one of ten “anchor” standards that are meant to be broad. The detailed grade-specific standards that follow clarify precisely what students should be able to do to demonstrate firm mastery of the “anchor.” In Kindergarten, for instance, the related grade-specific standard asks students to “identify characters, settings, and major events in a story.” By grade six, students are expected to

describe how a particular story’s or drama’s plot unfolds in a series of episodes as well as how the characters respond or change as the plot moves toward a resolution.

And by the end of high school, students are asked to

analyze the impact of the author’s choices regarding how to develop and relate elements of a story or drama (e.g., where a story is set, how the action is ordered, how the characters are introduced and developed)

These grade-specific standards are not only clearer and more explicit than the anchor standard, but they show a progression of knowledge and skills that is expected from year to year.

What Stotsky fails to acknowledge is the volume of guidance in the Common Core focused on clarifying the quality and complexity of texts teachers should assign at each grade level—including an appendix that exemplifies the kinds of great literature and literary nonfiction that students should be reading and analyzing to be prepared for college and beyond.

These are hardly the makings of “vague and general skills.” Indeed, they clarify the kind of higher-level literary analysis that students should do and how that analysis should build from grade to grade.

In the end, we—the Common Core supporters Stotsky decries—share many of her goals, chief among them to increase the rigor of reading and analysis in English language arts classes. While we can certainly disagree on the best way to achieve that end, we mustn’t lose sight of the goal itself—which is now being lost amidst the noise, fist pounding, and unnecessary ad-hominem attacks.

This article was updated on Thursday, June 20, for the Education Gadfly Daily.

New York City’s graduation rate dipped very slightly in 2012—information that was hailed as a win by Mayor Bloomberg, given that the class of 2012 was the first cohort not given the option to graduate with an easier-to-obtain “local diploma.”

The United Federation of Teachers has announced its support for former city comptroller Bill Thompson’s bid for mayor of New York City—the union’s first endorsement in a mayoral election in more than a decade. But have no fear, ye other candidates—Mayor Bloomberg has derisively dubbed the union endorsement a “kiss of death” (to which the union responded by likening Bloomberg’s approval as “worse than a zombie attack”). And Gotham politics continue.

Earlier this week, New Hampshire Superior Court judge John Lewis bucked U.S. Supreme Court precedent and ruled that the state’s tax-credit-scholarship program directed public money to religious schools, in violation of the state constitution’s Blaine Amendment—a provision banning government aid to “sectarian” schools that has its roots in the anti-Catholic bigotry pervasive in the late 1800s. (Blaine Amendments still exist in thirty-six other states.) Judge Lewis’s ruling marks the first time a tax-credit-scholarship program has been struck down on these grounds. Previously, the U.S. Supreme Court had determined that tax-credit-scholarship money never reaches the state treasury and thus cannot be considered public. An appeal in the Granite State is all but guaranteed.

Facing a $304 million deficit, Philadelphia’s public schools have pink-slipped 19 percent of its school-based workforce, including all 127 assistant principals and 1,200 aides. Sounds dismal, but bear in mind that a pink slip does not necessarily a fired teacher make. Superintendent William Hite Jr. called for “shared sacrifice” to save these jobs, and he is seeking additional funds from the state and the city—and contract concessions from the unions.

In a moving profile by the Washington Post’s intrepid Emma Brown, former valedictorians of D.C. schools relate their ego- and spirit-shattering discoveries that they were ill prepared for college. Students told stories of facing their first research paper, failing trigonometry (after having succeeded in the subject matter in high school), and being asked (for the first time) to express original ideas.

In a New York Times op-ed, Alice Crary and W. Stephen Wilson—professors of philosophy and mathematics, respectively—make the elegant, cogent case that supporters of the “reform” method of math education—who claim the mantle of “progressivism” and insist that teaching students standard algorithms discourages creative reasoning—have done a disservice to students and the progressivism they claim to champion. Rather, argue the authors, “just as there is good reason to believe that in biology and history [original] thought requires significant factual knowledge, there is good reason to believe that in mathematics it requires understanding of and facility with standard algorithms.”

What a difference a decade makes. For all the debate around vouchers and student loans, perhaps the most striking element of Mitt Romney's education agenda is how much it differs from the approach of No Child Left Behind, the defining policy of the George W. Bush years. That does not mean, however, that other Republicans necessarily agree with it. The GOP stance on education, and particularly federal education policy, is clearly shifting. But in any clear direction? And for the better?

To examine those questions, the Fordham Institute will bring together two former GOP education secretaries to discuss the Republican Party's direction on this vital issue.

What a difference a decade makes. For all the debate around vouchers and student loans, perhaps the most striking element of Mitt Romney's education agenda is how much it differs from the approach of No Child Left Behind, the defining policy of the George W. Bush years. That does not mean, however, that other Republicans necessarily agree with it. The GOP stance on education, and particularly federal education policy, is clearly shifting. But in any clear direction? And for the better?

To examine those questions, the Fordham Institute will bring together two former GOP education secretaries to discuss the Republican Party's direction on this vital issue.

Eight years ago, Mariah Carey’s “We Belong Together” was Billboard’s top song, Pluto was still a planet, and the National Council on Teacher Quality began work on its comprehensive evaluation of the nation’s 2,400 educator-preparation programs housed in 1,130 higher-education institutions. This Tuesday marked the culmination of that gargantuan effort (a partnership with U.S. News and World Report). Of the secondary programs evaluated at more than 600 higher-education institutions, just four—Ohio State, Lipscomb, Furhman, and Vanderbilt—received top honors (four stars); zero elementary programs earned the same accolades. Across both levels, 14 percent of programs were placed on a “Consumer Alert” list for earning zero stars. Appallingly, 64 percent of California’s seventy-one elementary programs earned the lowest rating. Why? In 1970, in an overwrought effort to strengthen teachers’ content knowledge, California “all but prohibited the traditional education degree,” requiring candidates to obtain subject degrees as undergraduates and limiting their pedagogical coursework to a maximum of one year—to disastrous results. NCTQ based its rankings on eighteen criteria in four main areas: rigor of candidate selection, quality of content-area preparation, amount of professional skills the program teaches, and the impact of a program’s graduates. Along with the overall rankings, NCTQ provides detailed data on how programs fare across each of its eighteen criteria, offering page after page of sobering analyses in an attempt to bring order to the “Wild West” of teacher-preparation programs. As expected, the report has not been universally well received. To that, Gadfly notes: Haters gonna hate. This study (and the continued follow-up work of NCTQ) will have lasting impact on policy and practice—perhaps more so than any study in the past decade. Snaps!

SOURCE: Julie Greenberg, Arthur McKee, and Kate Walsh, Teacher Prep Review: A Review of the Nation’s Teacher Preparation Programs, 2013 (Washington, D.C.: National Council on Teacher Quality, June 2013).

In this new NBER working paper, Jason Grissom and colleagues explore the implications of involuntary teacher transfers (or those in which educators are shuffled from one school to another without say) in Miami Dade County’s public schools. Specifically, analysts examined which types of schools made use of—and accepted teachers from—the transfer policy, “the characteristics of transferred teachers and their replacements, and whether the transfers affected productivity, at least in terms of teacher absences and value added. First, they examined involuntary transfers from 2009 through 2012, finding that seventy-three (of 370) of the district’s schools transferred at least one teacher in at least one of those years, totaling 375 teacher transfers. Schools that used the policy tended to be far lower achieving and tended to serve higher percentages of African American students and those with free-and-reduced-price-lunch than schools that did not. The involuntarily transferred teachers were sent to higher-achieving schools than those they left (on average, they were moved from D to B schools on Florida’s A–F grading system). With regards to teacher characteristics, the booted educators were relatively experienced, with 60 percent having five or more years of teaching under their belts and only 8 percent having one year or less. They were absent more often than other teachers—and in mathematics, they had significantly lower value-added scores than those who were not transferred. Importantly, their replacements tended to be younger, less experienced, and generally higher performing (though the sample size for this particular analysis was small). Finally, the authors found some suggestive evidence that involuntarily transferred teachers were less effective than their colleagues in both the school they departed and the one that received them, and they were also less effective than the average new hire in the receiving school. And curiously (not!), the odds of their being placed in an untested grade or subject were about twice as large for an involuntary transfer as for other teachers in the school. Many reformers say that leaders need flexibility to allocate teachers as they see fit—to make lemonade out of lemons, if you will. But why not be done with the lemons?

SOURCE: Jason A. Grissom, Susanna Loeb, and Nathaniel Nakashima, “Strategic Involuntary Teacher Transfers and Teacher Performance: Examining Equity and Efficiency,” NBER Working Paper No. 19108 (Cambridge, MA: National Bureau of Economic Research, June 2013).

There are a number of laudable statistics found in this year’s Diplomas Count: At 75 percent, the U.S. graduation rate in 2010 hit its highest point since 1973—the most recent year for which data are available—marking an 8 percentage point boost from ten years earlier. Further, Hispanics boasted a 16 percentage-point rate improvement; African Americans, a 13 percentage-point bump, which halved the white-Hispanic graduation-rate gap and cut the white–African American gap by 30 percent during that same time period. Yet this year’s report focuses on a depressing corollary point: We’re failing our youth who have already dropped out. Currently, 1.8 million young adults, or 6.5 percent of those aged sixteen to twenty-one, are neither enrolled in school nor have they received their diploma. And we have no comprehensive public-policy strategy to bring these youth back to school or get them college- or career-ready. Still, the report profiles a handful of dropout-recovery programs—run by districts, CMOs, or nonprofits—that are working to reengage would-be students. It’s tough stuff: One Boston-based nonprofit brought 501 of the 867 students it contacted back to the classroom in 2011–12, for example. Among them, fewer than 100 graduated at the end of the year. The message? Progress is good, but there’s no rest for the weary.

SOURCE: Education Week, Diplomas Count 2013: Second Chances: Turning Dropouts into Graduates (Bethesda, MD: Editorial Projects in Education, June 2013).