The Education Gadfly Weekly

Within weeks of the release of the Common Core standards, publishers had already begun to market their “CCSS-aligned” textbooks and other curricular materials. What that label meant, however, was open to much debate. David Coleman and Sue Pimentel, who played central roles in developing the Common Core standards for English language arts, are now tackling the challenge of providing criteria by which to gauge curricular alignment with those standards. Their newly released criteria are intended to guide curriculum writers genuinely intent on aligning their materials to the CCSS and to act as a resource for teachers, schools, and districts as they navigate the already crowded market of supposedly aligned materials. While the guidelines do include criteria for everything ranging from writing and grammar to research, the bulk of the guidance is focused on reading. With these publishers’ criteria, Coleman and Pimentel are providing some necessary order to the Wild West of CCSS materials. But their good work has one big limitation: Their criteria don’t offer the kinds of specific examples that could help not only set the bar for curriculum developers, but also provide teachers and curriculum directors a touch point to better understand what such material should actually look like. Even so, these new criteria may serve to limit the number of publishers who can claim the CCSS-aligned label—and that is an important first step.

The unabridged version of this piece originally appeared on Fordham's Flypaper blog. To subscribe to Flypaper, click here.

David Coleman and Susan Pimentel, “Publishers’ Criteria for the Common Core State Standards in English Language Arts and Literacy, Grades K-2,” (Available online, June 2011).

David Coleman and Susan Pimentel, “Publishers’ Criteria for the Common Core State Standards in English Language Arts and Literacy, Grades 3-12,” (Available online, June 2011).

With its profiles of numerous districts and states successfully engaged in longer school days and/or years, this report from the National Center on Time and Learning and the Education Commission of the States is a boost for those pushing to keep intact—and even expand—learning time in this austere climate. It illustrates this with a few real programs (Massachusetts’ Expanded Learning Time Initiative) and initiatives (Oklahoma City’s move to a continuous school year) that have successfully upped hours of student learning. There’s a lot here. But the most useful section offers cost-effective strategies to retain and expand learning time and shows where these strategies are already working. Among them: Stagger staff schedules, use technology as a teaching tool, free schools from restrictive CBAs, and increase class sizes. (For more on each of these, I recommend our Stretching the School Dollar volume.) The report has an obvious agenda and distinct message. But, given the short-sighted and irresponsible cuts to learning time that are all-too-common in states and districts at present, it’s one that is worth heeding.

This brief from the American Enterprise Institute offers a unique spin on today’s debate over performance-based bonuses for teachers. The authors, both economists, use research pulled from North Carolina’s ABC accountability program to advocate for school-level, as opposed to individual, bonuses. (North Carolina’s program, which began in 1996-97, offers tiered bonuses to all faculty in schools that hit yearly growth targets.) The authors argue that school-level programs ease the problems associated with individual teacher incentives: competition for the best students, the difficulties in rating teachers of non-tested subjects and grades, and statistical noise inevitable with small student sample sizes. Going further, they explain that the right benchmarks for bonus eligibility can mitigate against any free-rider effects by motivating the best (who individually don’t need to work harder for the bonus) and worst teachers (who aren’t motivated by the promise of a reward that is too far out of reach). All worth pondering, but the brief alone doesn’t make a convincing case that the Tarheel program is working. For that, we’ll need to await the full paper, which is still under review. In the meantime, technical background to the study is available here.

Since the appearance of his May 2010 working paper, Matthew Chingos has quickly established himself as a go-to name for information on class-size research. And this Brookings paper, co-authored with Grover (Russ) Whitehurst, confirms that status. Building off a paper authored by Chingos for the Center for American Progress back in April, this piece offers a thorough literature review on class-size reduction (CSR), bringing us one step closer to a definitive analysis of the mixed-bag research of CSR. (Some research found positive effects in the early grades, other research found none, and still other research found that gains made by reducing class sizes were offset by the need to pull in lower-quality teachers to staff the newly created classes.) Further, Whitehurst and Chingos warn that CSR mandates and incentives (currently practiced in twenty-four states) are extremely costly: Decreasing the pupil/teacher ratio by just one student would cost $12 billion. Understanding that CSR is cherished by many, the authors recommend two approaches to the policy: First, lift CSR mandates. If that doesn’t work, target them to young, minority children who would most benefit. It may not be a sexy paper, but thorough it is.

Photo by Alberto G.

The latest shock to hit American schools and education reformers is the revelation that teachers and administrators have been fiddling with test scores in Atlanta and, evidently, in D.C., Baltimore, and half a dozen other locales.

In Georgia, where a state investigation implicated 178 individuals in the Atlanta public schools for cheating on or allowing cheating on the 2009 round of state assessments, Governor Nathan Deal declared that “when test results are falsified and students who have not mastered the necessary material are promoted, our students are harmed, parents lose sight of their child's true progress, and taxpayers are cheated.” He’s right, of course. But, as destructive as the actual cheating is the cry from many directions that the remedy for it is to do away with testing or radically reduce our reliance on its results as markers of student and school performance.…

Unfortunately, CNN.com, which originally published this piece, wouldn’t let us run more than 150 words of it here. To read the full essay, find it here on the CNN.com opinion page.

Educational entrepreneur Chris Whittle, former head of Edison Schools, has targeted a new consumer base. While Edison Schools sought to run outsourced district and charter schools, this new Whittle venture—Avenues: The World School—aspires to build a network of twenty elite private schools with similar curricula in places like London and Shanghai. Whittle has reportedly raised $75 million from two private equity firms; recruited over 1,200 applicants for Avenues’s first campus in lower Manhattan; and brought on board some big names in elite education (the school’s co-leaders ran Exeter and Hotchkiss). And this all before the school can boast a completed building or curriculum. (It’s slated to open for the 2012-13 year with full-freight tuition in the $40,000 range.) Whittle hasn’t always succeeded in the past with exceptionally ambitious plans, but if this model prospers and delivers results, it could revolutionize the way itinerant upscale families—or those interested in a cosmopolitan education—interact with schooling.

“The Best School $75 Million Can Buy,” by Jenny Anderson, New York Times, July 8, 2011.

Can a school-culture culture really be called “no excuses” if it accepts low student achievement—even if that low student achievement masks laudable incremental gains? Paul Tough says no. Yet this is precisely the rhetoric espoused by some in the reform community. Instead of exulting in its successes, the reform movement is increasingly defensive and given to excuses. Defending the Bruce Randolph School (which doubled its writing proficiency rates since 2007—but only to 15 percent), Jonathan Alter explained that Randolph “should not be compared to other Colorado schools in affluent neighborhoods.” Tough is right: While improvement should be acknowledged, 15 percent writing proficiency still stinks. Instead of getting defensive, reformers should find some humility—and a willingness to change their plans and methods. KIPP sets an estimable example here; when that organization learned that only 33 percent of its alums graduate from college—not bad, for kids from tough circumstances, but a far cry from KIPP’s goal of 75 percent—it didn’t hide behind poverty or whatever. It instead vowed to double-down efforts to reach its stated goal. We need more of that mentality.

“No, Seriously: No Excuses,” by Paul Tough, New York Times Magazine, July 7, 2011.

“KIPP, UNCF and CFED Launch Partnership for College Completion,” by Staff, United Negro College Fund, June 22, 2011.

New federal data, collected by ED’s Office of Civil Rights (OCR) and then analyzed by ProPublica, find that low-income and minority students in America’s schools have unequal access to experienced teachers, early education, school counselors, and rigorous courses. OCR surveyed 72,000 schools in 7,000 decent-sized districts, grabbing information on AP, science, and math course offerings and enrollments; ability grouping and tracking; teacher experience and quality; student demographics; etc. There’s much important—if sobering—content within this dataset (and the corresponding ProPublica dataset, which links the OCR data to income). Focusing specifically on access to rigorous courses, jurisdictions like Maryland, Kansas, and Oklahoma offer particularly unequal access for wealthy and low-income students. Florida, on the other hand, enrolls roughly the same percentages of students in AP courses in its high- and low-income districts. Ohio lands in the middle of the pack. While its wealthy districts boast AP enrollment around 40 percent, Akron, Dayton, and Columbus only enroll 7 percent of their students in APs. Questions of how these data can and will be used by both OCR and others still loom. If they move from transparency to jawboning and then to enforcement, a backlash will inevitably follow. But right-thinking people will find these data eye-opening and, we hope, worth trying to alter.

“Some States Still Leave Low-Income Students Behind; Others Make Surprising Gains,” by Sharona Coutts and Jennifer LaFleur, ProPublica, June 30, 2011.

“Federal Data Shed Light on Education Disparities,” by Nirvi Shah, Education Week, July 1, 2011.

Civil Rights Data Collection, U.S. Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights, 2009-10.

The Opportunity Gap: Is Your State Providing Equal Access to Education, ProPublica, June 2011.

Within weeks of the release of the Common Core standards, publishers had already begun to market their “CCSS-aligned” textbooks and other curricular materials. What that label meant, however, was open to much debate. David Coleman and Sue Pimentel, who played central roles in developing the Common Core standards for English language arts, are now tackling the challenge of providing criteria by which to gauge curricular alignment with those standards. Their newly released criteria are intended to guide curriculum writers genuinely intent on aligning their materials to the CCSS and to act as a resource for teachers, schools, and districts as they navigate the already crowded market of supposedly aligned materials. While the guidelines do include criteria for everything ranging from writing and grammar to research, the bulk of the guidance is focused on reading. With these publishers’ criteria, Coleman and Pimentel are providing some necessary order to the Wild West of CCSS materials. But their good work has one big limitation: Their criteria don’t offer the kinds of specific examples that could help not only set the bar for curriculum developers, but also provide teachers and curriculum directors a touch point to better understand what such material should actually look like. Even so, these new criteria may serve to limit the number of publishers who can claim the CCSS-aligned label—and that is an important first step.

The unabridged version of this piece originally appeared on Fordham's Flypaper blog. To subscribe to Flypaper, click here.

David Coleman and Susan Pimentel, “Publishers’ Criteria for the Common Core State Standards in English Language Arts and Literacy, Grades K-2,” (Available online, June 2011).

David Coleman and Susan Pimentel, “Publishers’ Criteria for the Common Core State Standards in English Language Arts and Literacy, Grades 3-12,” (Available online, June 2011).

With its profiles of numerous districts and states successfully engaged in longer school days and/or years, this report from the National Center on Time and Learning and the Education Commission of the States is a boost for those pushing to keep intact—and even expand—learning time in this austere climate. It illustrates this with a few real programs (Massachusetts’ Expanded Learning Time Initiative) and initiatives (Oklahoma City’s move to a continuous school year) that have successfully upped hours of student learning. There’s a lot here. But the most useful section offers cost-effective strategies to retain and expand learning time and shows where these strategies are already working. Among them: Stagger staff schedules, use technology as a teaching tool, free schools from restrictive CBAs, and increase class sizes. (For more on each of these, I recommend our Stretching the School Dollar volume.) The report has an obvious agenda and distinct message. But, given the short-sighted and irresponsible cuts to learning time that are all-too-common in states and districts at present, it’s one that is worth heeding.

This brief from the American Enterprise Institute offers a unique spin on today’s debate over performance-based bonuses for teachers. The authors, both economists, use research pulled from North Carolina’s ABC accountability program to advocate for school-level, as opposed to individual, bonuses. (North Carolina’s program, which began in 1996-97, offers tiered bonuses to all faculty in schools that hit yearly growth targets.) The authors argue that school-level programs ease the problems associated with individual teacher incentives: competition for the best students, the difficulties in rating teachers of non-tested subjects and grades, and statistical noise inevitable with small student sample sizes. Going further, they explain that the right benchmarks for bonus eligibility can mitigate against any free-rider effects by motivating the best (who individually don’t need to work harder for the bonus) and worst teachers (who aren’t motivated by the promise of a reward that is too far out of reach). All worth pondering, but the brief alone doesn’t make a convincing case that the Tarheel program is working. For that, we’ll need to await the full paper, which is still under review. In the meantime, technical background to the study is available here.

Since the appearance of his May 2010 working paper, Matthew Chingos has quickly established himself as a go-to name for information on class-size research. And this Brookings paper, co-authored with Grover (Russ) Whitehurst, confirms that status. Building off a paper authored by Chingos for the Center for American Progress back in April, this piece offers a thorough literature review on class-size reduction (CSR), bringing us one step closer to a definitive analysis of the mixed-bag research of CSR. (Some research found positive effects in the early grades, other research found none, and still other research found that gains made by reducing class sizes were offset by the need to pull in lower-quality teachers to staff the newly created classes.) Further, Whitehurst and Chingos warn that CSR mandates and incentives (currently practiced in twenty-four states) are extremely costly: Decreasing the pupil/teacher ratio by just one student would cost $12 billion. Understanding that CSR is cherished by many, the authors recommend two approaches to the policy: First, lift CSR mandates. If that doesn’t work, target them to young, minority children who would most benefit. It may not be a sexy paper, but thorough it is.