The Education Gadfly Weekly

Community colleges, which educate 45 percent of the country’s college students, are a key source of vocational education and a launching pad for students headed off to four-year institutions—and according to this report from the National Center on Education and the Economy, they are in crisis. A group of English language arts and math experts examined course materials (including syllabi, textbooks, graded exams, and assignments) in seven randomly selected community colleges in seven states. The authors found that most programs demand little to no use of math—and when they do, the math is almost exclusively at a middle school level. This finding flies in the face of the common reckoning that Algebra 2 is a prerequisite for success in college and career. They also find that instructors in applied math programs frequently devise their own materials, since students are so often not taught in elementary or secondary schools the specific skills needed to succeed in those courses. Further, math tests mainly focused on mastery of facts and procedures, rather than applying concepts and thinking mathematically. The ELA findings were equally grim: While the reading complexity of texts used in introductory courses hovers around the eleventh- and twelfth-grade level, these courses have high failure rates, suggesting that these texts are still too complex. What’s more, the instructors make little use of the texts verbatim, opting instead to use videos, outlines, and PowerPoint presentations to convey the critical points of the texts. Students are asked to do very little writing; and when they do write, the expectations for reasoning, logic, and even grammar are quite low. Colleges teaching middle school math and college students failing with high school–level texts? This is bad news all around, and begs the question: Is college worth the investment for these students at all?

SOURCE: National Center on Education and the Economy, What Does It Really Mean to Be College and Work Ready? The Mathematics and English Literacy Required of First Year Community College Students (Washington, D.C.: National Center on Education and the Economy, May 2013).

With backpacks full of student debt and too few job opportunities to go around, things are looking bleaker for today’s college graduates. So what to tell the next generation? According to this brief from the Brookings Institution (and some notable others), although college graduates still make more money over their lifetimes than their peers with only a high school diploma, one important fact receives far too little attention: Not all college degrees or graduates are equal. The authors look at variations in monetary returns to education along three dimensions: school selectivity, field of study and career, and graduation rates. The findings? First, selectivity matters; highly selective private schools have high returns on investment (ROIs). But among the less-selective options, public schools are the wiser call (because they are cheaper). Second, the authors highlight the earnings disparities between career tracks, noting that STEM majors far and away outpace others in terms of earnings potential. One telling example: The lifetime earnings of education or arts majors in the service sector are lower than the average earnings of a high school graduate. (Of course, that’s also a sorry commentary on teacher pay.) Third, students who stop along the way and fail to procure a degree incur costs without payoffs. Fewer than 60 percent of those who enter four-year schools end up finishing within six years—but the completion rate swells to 88 percent at the most selective schools. All told, this short study is a treasure trove of information with one overriding message: College is a good investment on average, but choose your major and college carefully—or consider your alternatives.

SOURCE: Stephanie Owen and Isabel Sawhill, Should Everyone Go To College?, CCF Brief #50 (Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution, May 2013).

After twenty years of charter schooling, the research literature is voluminous, but much of it is contradictory and confusing—not to mention politically motivated. With this in mind, Columbia University professor Priscilla Wohlstetter and her colleagues set out to separate the empirical wheat from the ideological chaff and review more than a decade of charter school literature to show how charters have progressed. While the authors can, through their synthesis of high-quality studies, tell us much about accountability (more schools close due to mismanagement than from their failure in the marketplace) and the unintended consequences of charters (re-segregation, but not widespread, and not unanticipated), the book is important especially for telling readers what we still don’t know about the charter sector. Consider the key issue of performance: Most charter research analyzes student achievement, but it generally consists of student snapshots and is devoid of the large-scale, random-control studies that are the gold standard. As a result, we’re left with contradictory evidence on how well charter students perform and inconclusive findings on how various factors like autonomy affect school outcomes. But by identifying this gap of knowledge, the authors map out new possibilities for research: How are charters using their autonomy, and what keeps them from exercising their freedom? Which academic programs are most successful at raising student achievement, and do they differ much from those offered at traditional schools? Now that charter movement is older and larger (2.3 million children currently being educated), questions such as these will become increasingly critical, and this guide will take future school-choice explorers far.

SOURCE: Priscilla Wohlstetter, Joanna Smith, and Caitlin C. Farrell, Choices and Challenges: Charter School Performance in Perspective (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Education Press, March 2013).

Mike and Dara chat about the open-source school district, mayoral hopeful Quinn’s G&T proposal, and teacher equivocation on Common Core preparedness. Amber’s got some bad news about the nation’s community colleges.

Amber's Research Minute

What Does It Really Mean to Be College and Work Ready? The Mathematics and English Literacy Required of First Year Community College Students by National Center on Education and the Economy, (Washington, D.C.: National Center on Education and the Economy, May 2013)

What's next? This panel brings together a group of "big thinkers" to hash out a plan for education governance in the twenty-first century. What should the structure look like? Who should helm the wheel? And how can we bring these thoughts into action? Paul Hill, Kenneth Meier, Jon Schnur, and Paul Pastorek will engage in a roundtable discussion to think through these questions.

Last month, I asked why schools ignore so many good ideas. Have we not gotten the incentives right? Is it poor leadership? Do we have an ineffective system for disseminating promising practices? Or are superintendents, principals, and educators simply overwhelmed by the avalanche of advice that lands on their desks and in their inboxes? Might there be a way to help them sift the wheat from the chaff, then make good use of the former?

I believe there is. Let me introduce the open-source school district.

Imagine a virtual school district, charged with developing and constantly updating a strategy for addressing the needs of fictitious students.

Imagine the creation of a virtual school district. It wouldn’t have any actual students, teachers, buses, or facilities, but it would have a school board, a superintendent, and a central-office staff. (The superintendent and staff would be paid real salaries and be housed in a real office; the school board would be made up of various “education experts” or maybe “stakeholders” who, like real school board members, would volunteer their time.) It would be given a demographic profile—say, an inner-ring suburban district of 10,000 with a fair amount of racial and socioeconomic diversity. It would inherit the student achievement results, policies, and practices of a typical district. We’d situate it in an actual state, too.

This “school district” would be charged with developing and constantly updating a strategy for improving achievement and otherwise addressing the needs of its fictitious students. The board and superintendent might start by laying out a schedule for the year in which they would look at different key topics every month. Maybe in September, they would tackle a plan for implementing the Common Core. In October, they would look at teacher and principal evaluations. In November, they would consider how to improve students’ non-cognitive skills. And so forth.

It would develop policies, procedures, and plans—aligned with the latest and greatest research and thinking available

The “central office” would have staff working in roles similar to real districts: an assistant superintendent for curriculum and instruction, a chief human-resources person, a budget director, etc. These people might serve a faux district, but they would develop real plans to present to their superintendent and board. And—this is key—they would have tremendous resources to tap in helping them put these plans or policies or budgets together. Namely, they would have a big research budget and/or access to professionals at a think tank like the American Institutes of Research to help them sift through all of the relevant research, ideas, promising practices, and vendor pitches.

Imagine what might happen if such a “school district” took off. First, it would develop policies, procedures, and plans that would be as robust as technocratically possible—aligned with the most sophisticated research and thinking available. These policies, procedures, and plans could then be swiped (or adapted) by real school districts for their own use. Second, it would provide small vendors of excellent products, think tankers with promising ideas, and advocacy groups brimming with sound suggestions with a national platform by which to spread the word. Everyone would know that if you wanted your policy or nostrum or solution to spread, you had to convince the OSSD that it was worth embracing.

Of course, this would only work if actual school-board members, superintendents, central-office staff, and principals knew about it and found it helpful. It would be critical to get them involved—not just as recipients of the “content” produced by the OSSD but as producers themselves. (This is what makes it “open source.”) They could join digital communities with others in their roles (all of the superintendents or HR managers, etc.) and interact with OSSD staffers as they develop their work products. If practicing educators had an idea or product or policy or practice that worked, they could share it with the virtual educator—and thus, the entire network. They could also watch the school board in action via a live stream or after the fact via video.

Everyone would know that if you wanted your policy or nostrum or solution to spread, you had to convince the open-source school district that it was worth embracing

At minimum, an OSSD would be a fascinating experiment and would probably produce some excellent materials. It wouldn’t be perfect—every state is different, for instance, so real-live district folks would have to adapt materials and approaches for their own contexts. Furthermore, there would be no way to replicate the true push and pull of local politics with which real districts must contend. (How to come up with a model teacher-union contract, for instance, in the absence of a teacher union?) One could also imagine all manner of lobbying, cajoling, and political pressure being placed on this fake district if its decisions affected the “real” marketplace. Board members and staff would need to be chosen carefully. Everything would need to be totally transparent.

I suspect that those of us in the idea-generating business would be sobered by the experience. We would gain a better appreciation of the huge amount of conflicting advice and pressure that school districts and their leaders face. In fact, the most interesting part of the experiment would be seeing how the OSSD handles competing priorities and a policy environment that is anything but coherent. It might help us better understand which state and federal policies are helping districts improve and which are getting in the way.

And yes, this assumes that school districts still have a major role to play for the foreseeable future. While that may not be the case in some of our big cities, I think the familiar structures will endure throughout most of the country and its suburbs and small towns. And it’s the small- to medium-sized districts—which serve nearly half of the nation’s public school students—that could benefit the most from this initiative, as they don’t have the scale to have much central-office capacity on their own.

Think this idea has promise? Do you represent school boards, or superintendents, or central office staff? Or do you have money to give away? Let’s talk.

Few school systems have embraced the opportunity presented by crisis quite like the one in Reynoldsburg, Ohio. Just five years ago, when the economy collapsed, the Reynoldsburg district was cutting deep into its staff budget and establishing buffers such as a $500 pay-to-play activity fee for families. Exasperated parents fled to neighboring districts, and voters repeatedly rejected the district’s levy requests. Pupil enrollment fell by 10 percent from 2008 to 2012, and once-crowded schools found themselves with extra space.

But while many other districts succumbed to hand wringing at similar moments of despair, Reynoldsburg’s leaders responded with innovation. They slashed central-office staff and sent more resources to individual schools, empowering principals with key decision-making authority. They developed “themes” at schools, with a particular focus on science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM), and they established more charter schools and enhanced school choice throughout the district. Most unusually, they bartered with a community college, a hospital, a preschool, and a dance company to utilize its extra space in ways that benefitted its own students.

But perhaps most importantly, write Ellen Belcher and Terry Ryan in their informative profile of the district for the Fordham Institute, Limitless, Education, the Reynoldsburg Way, the 6,300-student district embraced a much-discussed but seldom-practiced approach to administration: portfolio management.

Under this arrangement, principals have the authority to design unique academic programs, and they get to make the calls and employ people who are the right fit for their schools. The superintendent acts as portfolio manager, adding and enhancing programs that work and dropping those that don’t.

While large urban districts such as Denver, New York, and New Orleans get attention for the portfolio strategies they have developed, Reynoldsburg has emerged as a sleeper in the movement and a leader among suburban districts that have tried it. Portfolio guru Paul Hill told Belcher and Ryan that Reynoldsburg “is the leader in a new trend—innovative suburban districts taking advantage of all the talent available in a metro area, but avoiding big-city gridlock.”

There’s a reason such an approach has caught on with a few reform-minded districts: It’s attractive to families as well as educators. Parents are not a monolithic bunch, and smart educators have recognized that no one school can be all things to all children. But in a time of tight budgets, that means school leaders must make trade-offs. What’s attractive to families and teachers at one school may be unattractive to those at another. And while Reynoldsburg only has one high school, it created options by organizing that school into four very different academies—one focused on STEM subjects; another on art and design; another immersed in business, leadership, and law; and still another dedicated to health science and human services.

Reynoldsburg’s forward-looking superintendent and board deserve much credit for innovating—and then sticking with it. They had gotten nowhere by asking voters to pay more for a school system that was driving away families. Now, after the district has transformed its approach to education delivery, it has reversed its enrollment slide and this year attracted 180 students from neighboring districts via open enrollment. And the state has rated Reynoldsburg “Excellent with Distinction.” How all that happened is the subject of Belcher and Ryan’s excellent case study, a candid tour of the district’s fourteen schools and a helpful map for the portfolio approach, writ small.

A version of this article originally appeared in the Ohio Gadfly Daily.

Our Gadfly readers won’t be surprised that in India, where a quarter or more public school teachers are absent at any given time, the demand for quality education among the poor has created a thriving market of private schools. Some think tanks, such as the Economist-profiled Centre for Civil Society, and provincial governments are running voucher experiments—with encouraging results. But as the Economist points out, the Indian government, which has proven to be innovative in some areas like health care, remains mulish in its opposition to private schools, designing rules apparently aimed at their eradication. For the sake of their nation’s children, we urge them to reevaluate.

A new NCTQ study finds that during the Great Recession, forty of the fifty largest school districts froze or cut teacher pay at least once between 2007 and 2012. Still and all, teacher pay did rise, if only slightly, over that five year period. The trends were “on par with almost all of the comparable professions” they assessed. Fascinatingly, Chicago clocked in with the highest pay raises (6.5 percent).

Christine Quinn, a front-runner for mayor of the Big Apple, has proposed addressing inequities in that city’s excellent but far too small gifted-and-talented program by creating 8,700 new spots over nine years. Additionally, she suggested allowing students from disadvantaged backgrounds to seek admission by way of teacher recommendations, rather than test scores. The first of those ideas is indisputably sound. The second might be worth trying on a pilot basis, vulnerable as it is to favoritism and manipulation.

After a simple chemistry experiment caused her to harmlessly blow off the lid of a plastic bottle, Florida teen and honor-roll student Kiera Wilmot was expelled from school, charged as an adult with felony possession of a weapon, and taken to a juvenile detention facility. Scientists across the country and blogosphere have come to her defense, recounting tales of their own scientific mishaps and reproaching a system seemingly bent on destroying curiosity and punishing risk-taking.

What's next? This panel brings together a group of "big thinkers" to hash out a plan for education governance in the twenty-first century. What should the structure look like? Who should helm the wheel? And how can we bring these thoughts into action? Paul Hill, Kenneth Meier, Jon Schnur, and Paul Pastorek will engage in a roundtable discussion to think through these questions.

What's next? This panel brings together a group of "big thinkers" to hash out a plan for education governance in the twenty-first century. What should the structure look like? Who should helm the wheel? And how can we bring these thoughts into action? Paul Hill, Kenneth Meier, Jon Schnur, and Paul Pastorek will engage in a roundtable discussion to think through these questions.

Community colleges, which educate 45 percent of the country’s college students, are a key source of vocational education and a launching pad for students headed off to four-year institutions—and according to this report from the National Center on Education and the Economy, they are in crisis. A group of English language arts and math experts examined course materials (including syllabi, textbooks, graded exams, and assignments) in seven randomly selected community colleges in seven states. The authors found that most programs demand little to no use of math—and when they do, the math is almost exclusively at a middle school level. This finding flies in the face of the common reckoning that Algebra 2 is a prerequisite for success in college and career. They also find that instructors in applied math programs frequently devise their own materials, since students are so often not taught in elementary or secondary schools the specific skills needed to succeed in those courses. Further, math tests mainly focused on mastery of facts and procedures, rather than applying concepts and thinking mathematically. The ELA findings were equally grim: While the reading complexity of texts used in introductory courses hovers around the eleventh- and twelfth-grade level, these courses have high failure rates, suggesting that these texts are still too complex. What’s more, the instructors make little use of the texts verbatim, opting instead to use videos, outlines, and PowerPoint presentations to convey the critical points of the texts. Students are asked to do very little writing; and when they do write, the expectations for reasoning, logic, and even grammar are quite low. Colleges teaching middle school math and college students failing with high school–level texts? This is bad news all around, and begs the question: Is college worth the investment for these students at all?

SOURCE: National Center on Education and the Economy, What Does It Really Mean to Be College and Work Ready? The Mathematics and English Literacy Required of First Year Community College Students (Washington, D.C.: National Center on Education and the Economy, May 2013).

With backpacks full of student debt and too few job opportunities to go around, things are looking bleaker for today’s college graduates. So what to tell the next generation? According to this brief from the Brookings Institution (and some notable others), although college graduates still make more money over their lifetimes than their peers with only a high school diploma, one important fact receives far too little attention: Not all college degrees or graduates are equal. The authors look at variations in monetary returns to education along three dimensions: school selectivity, field of study and career, and graduation rates. The findings? First, selectivity matters; highly selective private schools have high returns on investment (ROIs). But among the less-selective options, public schools are the wiser call (because they are cheaper). Second, the authors highlight the earnings disparities between career tracks, noting that STEM majors far and away outpace others in terms of earnings potential. One telling example: The lifetime earnings of education or arts majors in the service sector are lower than the average earnings of a high school graduate. (Of course, that’s also a sorry commentary on teacher pay.) Third, students who stop along the way and fail to procure a degree incur costs without payoffs. Fewer than 60 percent of those who enter four-year schools end up finishing within six years—but the completion rate swells to 88 percent at the most selective schools. All told, this short study is a treasure trove of information with one overriding message: College is a good investment on average, but choose your major and college carefully—or consider your alternatives.

SOURCE: Stephanie Owen and Isabel Sawhill, Should Everyone Go To College?, CCF Brief #50 (Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution, May 2013).

After twenty years of charter schooling, the research literature is voluminous, but much of it is contradictory and confusing—not to mention politically motivated. With this in mind, Columbia University professor Priscilla Wohlstetter and her colleagues set out to separate the empirical wheat from the ideological chaff and review more than a decade of charter school literature to show how charters have progressed. While the authors can, through their synthesis of high-quality studies, tell us much about accountability (more schools close due to mismanagement than from their failure in the marketplace) and the unintended consequences of charters (re-segregation, but not widespread, and not unanticipated), the book is important especially for telling readers what we still don’t know about the charter sector. Consider the key issue of performance: Most charter research analyzes student achievement, but it generally consists of student snapshots and is devoid of the large-scale, random-control studies that are the gold standard. As a result, we’re left with contradictory evidence on how well charter students perform and inconclusive findings on how various factors like autonomy affect school outcomes. But by identifying this gap of knowledge, the authors map out new possibilities for research: How are charters using their autonomy, and what keeps them from exercising their freedom? Which academic programs are most successful at raising student achievement, and do they differ much from those offered at traditional schools? Now that charter movement is older and larger (2.3 million children currently being educated), questions such as these will become increasingly critical, and this guide will take future school-choice explorers far.

SOURCE: Priscilla Wohlstetter, Joanna Smith, and Caitlin C. Farrell, Choices and Challenges: Charter School Performance in Perspective (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Education Press, March 2013).