In recent years, policymakers and reform advocates have viewed State Education Agencies (SEAs) as the lead organizations for implementing sweeping reforms and initiatives in K–12 education—everything from Race to the Top grants and federal waivers to teacher-evaluation systems and online schools.
In recent years, policymakers and reform advocates have viewed State Education Agencies (SEAs) as the lead organizations for implementing sweeping reforms and initiatives in K–12 education—everything from Race to the Top grants and federal waivers to teacher-evaluation systems and online schools. But SEAs were not built—nor are they really competent—to drive such reforms, argue Andy Smarick and Juliet Squire in The State Education Agency: At the Helm, Not the Oar. And despite the best efforts of talented, energetic leaders, SEAs will never be able to deliver the reform results that their states need. This paper from the Thomas B. Fordham Institute suggests a new governance approach, organized around the “4 Cs”:
Control: Return SEAs to their core functions of channeling federal and state dollars to districts; adopting statewide standards and assessments; creating and maintaining data systems; and monitoring compliance with applicable laws.
Contract: Contract with other organizations that are better equipped to accomplish education work, while ensuring that performance agreements with those organizations delineate outcomes and consequences for poor performance.
Cleave: Leave tasks that are well outside SEAs’ core competencies—such as charter-school authorizing and generating educational innovation—to other government entities or nongovernmental organizations.
Create: Encourage state leaders, both inside and outside government, to create new entities to take on much-needed reform work.
Watch a presentation and discussion of the report event live on April 24 at 10:00 a.m. EDT:
State Education Agencies: The Smaller the Better?
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If you have questions about the book, please email Andy Smarick.
When it comes to state education agencies (SEAs), ed-reformers have fallen into a sorry rut.
As states have emerged as primary drivers of much-needed changes in K–12 practice and policy, the SEA has become the default agent-of-change for a vast number of initiatives concocted by policymakers in state capitals and Washington alike.
Want a new teacher-evaluation system and more rigorous certification standards? Want to crack down on school violence and bullying? Want better assessments of school performance and improved interventions for low-performers? Want to widen broadband access and encourage blended learning?
Hand it to the SEA.
Given that this agency is the state’s primary (or only) K–12 administrative unit, one can easily see why decision makers have had this impulse.
Yet the SEA was originally designed—and then acculturated over decades—to distribute dollars to local districts and monitor their compliance with a lengthening list of federal and state regulations and categorical funding streams. It was never intended to lead complex, contentious, large-scale reforms that require original thinking, nimble action and constant adaptability. In other words, it wasn’t intended to carry out a huge fraction of the responsibilities that have recently been thrust upon it.
In our new report, The New SEA: At the Helm, Not the Oar, we propose that this plain fact be recognized and alternative arrangements made.
This does not mean we think the SEA has no role in education reform, much less that we naively yearn to trust everything to “local control.” K–12 schooling is a public enterprise as well as a public good. It is enshrined in state constitutions, and state leaders are ultimately responsible for ensuring that all children within their borders acquire a satisfactory education. So the SEA, as the lead state agency for K–12 education, should play an important role, indeed should take the lead in some areas.
There are numerous examples of SEAs managing, through adroit leadership and cage-busting mindsets, to bring about big and valuable improvements. The Tennessee Department of Education has executed a promising strategy for implementing the Common Core State Standards. Under the leadership of Chris Cerf, the New Jersey Department of Education successfully pushed for the first tenure-reform legislation in one hundred years. Louisiana chief John White has introduced a potentially game-changing innovation through Course Choice.
Bravo for them and let’s have more of them. But driving major reforms through the SEA is generally ineffective—or, at the very least, inefficient. This won’t come as a surprise to anyone who has worked in one of these agencies or tracked their struggles to improve failing schools under NCLB, turn around the troubled districts that they’ve taken over, ensure that new educator evaluation systems end the “widget effect,” complete Race to the Top deliverables on time, or successfully administer federal School Improvement Grants.
There is a better way, one that keeps state governments in the reform driver’s seat but disperses the heavy lifting to a broader array of governmental and private entities. Following the “steer-not-row” maxim of Reinventing Government, the SEA will be responsible for less doing but more responsible for ensuring that important things get done by others.
We have developed a framework for evaluating which functions the SEA must continue to control, what it might contract out to partners, and what might be entirely cleaved from its portfolio. We also consider the kinds of organizations that are needed to fill the vacuum. This “4C Model” provides a tool for reformers to combat the “give-it-to-the-SEA” reflex, enabling policymakers and outside agents-of-change to develop better habits when it comes to assigning responsibility for their most important education initiatives:
SEAs should retain a core set of functions, most of which have three characteristics: First, they are long-term and unlikely to require or be affected by mid-course policy shifts. Second, they focus on outcomes, not process. And third, they include functions that demand transparency for public accountability, both for families and for taxpayers.
Obvious examples: SEAs should control the distribution of federal and state dollars, the adoption of statewide standards and assessments, creating and maintaining statewide data systems, and monitoring compliance with federal and state laws.
In some cases, the SEA must ensure that services are provided, but is ill suited to provide those services itself. So it should contract with other organizations that are better equipped to accomplish the work.
Under such an arrangement, the SEA authorizes outside organizations to take on these responsibilities, distributes funds to them, grants them significant authority and flexibility, and develops performance contracts by which to hold them accountable for meeting the state’s goals.
This process could be used for many services now carried out directly by SEAs, including professional development around standards implementation, educator certification, training associated with new evaluation systems, and much more.
SEAs currently perform tasks that lie far outside of their core competencies, such as intervening in failing schools, authorizing charter schools, and generating innovation. Such functions should be relocated to specialized new governmental or private entities that can develop the capacity to do this challenging work effectively.
If SEA functions are circumscribed by the first three C’s, the obvious next question is, what then fills the void that remains? We believe that state-level actors, both inside and outside government, should create new entities designed to take on reform work.
In the most reform-oriented cities, a vibrant ecosystem of nonprofit organizations, often led by an “intermediary” or “harbormaster,” is changing the face of K–12 delivery. These groups are taking on challenges related to school creation, human capital, facilities, advocacy, and much more, as the district transitions from public-education leviathan to one of many school operators. We need an analogous ecosystem at the state level.
Such organizations are emerging in some places. The Colorado Education Initiative (formerly the Colorado Legacy Foundation), the New York Regents Research Fund, Tennessee SCORE, and Louisiana’s Recovery School District are prototypes of the entities we envision.
Multiple benefits would result from separating most education-reform efforts from the SEA, whether via contracts or wholly independent organizations. External entities can pilot new approaches and differentiate the solutions to a host of challenges within their states. Exempt from cumbersome state procurement procedures, civil-service rules and pay scales, they can more readily attract talent and customize (and economize on) their purchases and outlays.
At the end of the day, the SEA is more likely to help improve student outcomes if, instead of serving as all-purpose regulator and provider, it functions as the sun at the center of a solar system of agile organizations with the capacity to meet the many challenges of education reform in the twenty-first century.
Andy Smarick is a partner at Bellwether Education Partners and a Bernard Lee Schwartz policy fellow at the Thomas B. Fordham Institute. He most recently served as deputy commissioner of education in New Jersey.
Juliet Squire is an associate partner at Bellwether Education Partners. She most recently worked at the New Jersey Department of Education, where she directed strategies for advancing technology-driven innovation and oversaw the state’s Race to the Top program.
Of all the responses to my “you’re-not-college-material” essay, there’s one I find most compelling—and worrying. Namely, kids who aren’t “college material” aren’t “career- and technical-education material” either. Springpoint’s JoEllen Lynch says it well:
It’s a myth that CTE meets the needs of low performing kids from low performing schools. So, it depends on what problem we are trying to solve. Are we just looking for more models for students who enter high school fully prepared, or are we trying to create models that will address the needs of kids who are not? I think many people feel that CTE is an answer for the unprepared; this notion is not based on data or an understanding of the demands of good CTE schools.
I stand corrected. Since I wrote my Slate piece, I’ve learned much more about high quality CTE programs, including one I visited in Fordham’s hometown of Dayton, Ohio (the Ponitz Career Technology Center). This high school (with close ties to Dayton’s excellent community college) is even selective, only accepting incoming freshmen who score proficient on Ohio’s math or reading tests and who stayed out of trouble in middle school.
Assuming that Dayton is not an outlier and that Lynch is correct, this raises an obvious question: if CTE is not “an answer for the unprepared,” what is?
Cue RiShawn Biddle of Dropout Nation. He was not happy with my “college-material” essay, arguing that it earned me a one-way ticket out of the school-reform movement. I was guilty, in his words, of “declaring that we should subject children from the communities that have suffered the worst from the nation’s education crisis—and from the racialism that has been the Original Sin of both American public education and the nation—to low expectations.”
Biddle would argue that nobody should enter high school unprepared. I don’t disagree; that’s absolutely a worthy aspiration. But wishing doesn’t make it so. Consider the facts.
According to the National Assessment of Educational Progress, just 36 percent of students nationally are proficient in math at the end of eighth grade; roughly the same proportion is proficient in reading. Assuming that “proficient” on the NAEP is roughly akin to “on track for college and career readiness” (a safe assumption), that means about half to two-thirds of America’s students are currently entering high school unprepared.
But it gets worse. The corresponding numbers for black and Hispanic students are tragic: just 14 percent of blacks and 21 percent of Hispanics are proficient in math at the end of eighth grade; for reading, it’s 17 percent and 22 percent, respectively. And how about the big urban districts that are the focus of much of school reform? Consider Cleveland: only 9 percent of its eighth graders are proficient in math, and 11 percent are proficient in reading. In other words, one in ten entering freshmen is on track for success in college or career.
Yes, that’s an outrage that we should do our damndest to set right. So let’s assume that we redouble our efforts at school reform in preschool through the eighth grade: Push the pedal to the metal. High-quality early-childhood education. Excellent instruction in phonics and the fundamentals of mathematics. A content-rich elementary-school curriculum. Great teachers in the schools that need them most. Challenging courses for everybody in middle school. Many more high-quality choices. (Cleveland is trying earnestly to do all of these things, by the way.)
Do Biddle and others really think we can ramp up the number of “prepared” ninth-grade students in big cities from 10 or 20 percent to 100 percent? I don’t, and I don’t think that means I must turn in my reform credentials. It just makes me realistic—and somewhat competent at math.
So let’s assume, then, that for the foreseeable future many of our high schools are going to have a heck of a lot of entering students who are prepared for neither a true college-prep curricular route nor a high-quality CTE program. The high school will do its best, but in all likelihood, a great many of these young people will graduate (if they graduate) with low-level skills that won’t leave them prepared for college or a well-paying career. What should we do with these students while they are in high school? What education offerings would benefit them the most?
Do we have the stomach to face up to these painful questions? It seems to me we avoid them. Instead, we encourage such students to muddle through “on-level” quasi-academic courses in large comprehensive high schools. Eventually, they drop out or get labeled as “over-age and under-credit.” At that point, various credit-recovery (or dropout-recovery) initiatives kick in. If the students are diligent and lucky, they squeeze out a credential. And then?
That’s hardly a strategy, a system, or a solution. And keep in mind that in some big urban districts, we’re talking about upwards of 80 or 90 percent of today’s kids—and, for all of our reforming, big fractions of tomorrow’s, too!
Here is where I’m supposed to lay out my grand solution for this vexing problem. Would that I could, but in truth, I don’t know what to do for these students beyond beefing up the elementary and middle schools so as to minimize their numbers. Does anyone? If it’s not college prep, not CTE, not the feckless “muddle-through” approach we have now, what is it? Education innovators: I’m all ears.
The Carnegie Corporation’s Michele Cahill and Leah Hamilton, veterans of Joel Klein’s Department of Education in New York City, responded to a challenge posed by Petrilli with a thoughtful alternative view.
In Mike’s post on Monday, he asks if our schools have “an answer” for students who are unprepared for high school—a group that makes up, as he says, as much as 80–90 percent of students. He also points out, correctly, that all that many districts offer these students is a chance to muddle through four years (or more) in a large, comprehensive high school, in hopes of earning a diploma that by no means signals readiness for college or a career. It is an indictment of our educational system that many do not achieve even that.
Fortunately, there are models out there that show that it is indeed possible to structure high schools to do much more for underprepared students. A recent book by Greg Duncan and Richard Murnane, Restoring Opportunity: The Crisis of Inequality and the Challenge of American Education, for example, describes what the authors call “high schools that improve life chances,” pointing in particular to small, nonselective high schools created in New York City by the Department of Education and New Visions for Public Schools. Explicitly designed according to a set of design principles that stress academic rigor and personalization, attention to youth development, strong community partnerships, and accountability for results, these schools have produced powerful results for students—many of whom fall squarely within the cohort of the “underprepared.”
Extensive studies of these same schools by two independent teams of researchers, one from Duke and MIT and one from MDRC, found that it is indeed possible to provide adolescents—even those who enter high school substantially behind—with a challenging curriculum that enables them to catch up, get on track, and graduate ready for college. The key, they explained, is a school environment in which students feel safe, respected, and engaged with results and in which adults hold students to high expectations.
Both of us were deeply involved in developing New York’s small schools and in establishing the central support systems that made them possible and sustained them, during the years when we worked in the New York City Department of Education in the administration of Chancellor Joel Klein. More recently, we drew heavily on those experiences to create Opportunity by Design, an initiative of Carnegie Corporation of New York that is enabling a select group of urban districts to design new secondary schools that serve all students, particularly those who are underprepared and need to accelerate and recuperate their learning. To guide their work, the districts are working with a set of design principles that encapsulate what has been learned in New York City and other high-performing schools.
We believe these “new designs for new schools” will produce a set of schools that show districts across the country that high schools can provide underprepared young people with the supports they need to graduate from high school, go to college, place out of remedial courses, and stay in college for at least two semesters at substantially higher rates than are commonly achieved today. The stakes are particularly high today as we raise standards for high-school students in schools across the country. We need to see many more investments in efforts to create new high-school designs aligned to design principles, as well as in learning resources that specifically target the needs of underprepared high-school students. Young Americans depend on our nation’s high schools to prepare them for productive work and for the postsecondary education that is increasingly necessary for all but the most marginal jobs. We cannot afford to let them down.
Michele Cahill and Leah Hamilton are vice president of national programs and program director, respectively, at the Carnegie Corporation of New York.
InBloom, a nonprofit that warehoused and managed student data for many public-school districts, is tapping out after being beaten to a pulp by data-privacy hawks. The mission of the organization, seeded by the Gates Foundation and Carnegie Corporation, was to help streamline how educators accessed student records—but the idea of children’s information being transferred to a third-party vendor caused some parents and schools to recoil and eventually led several states to pull out. The company has been a lightning rod for the mounting tension between the education software market and those concerned about student-data privacy. Now that inBloom is down for the count, what direction will data-driven learning take? Only time will tell.
The National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) has decided that, when determining eligibility to participate in sports at all Division I and Division II colleges and universities, it will not regard as valid the coursework completed by aspiring student athletes at twenty-four virtual charter schools managed by K12, Inc. (High-school students wanting to play big-league college sports must demonstrate that they meet the NCAA’s academic qualifications.) The NCAA stated that the courses were “out of compliance” with the organization’s requirements for nontraditional courses, leaving K12 huffing that those standards are “vague” and the NCAA’s review process “unclear.” While this is surely true, it’s also hard for the public to judge whether those K12 courses are legit or just “clicks for credits.” The online-learning field still hasn’t answered the many accountability and transparency questions that it must address. Perhaps this decision will spur it to do so.
A direct-mail survey conducted by the Black Alliance for Educational Options and the Louisiana Federation for Children found that support for Louisiana’s voucher program among participating parents is overwhelming: 91.9 percent were satisfied with their child’s current school, 98.7 percent said their child feels safe at their current school, and 97.6 percent said they and their child feel welcome. With all the legal drama around this program, it’s good to bear in mind that it’s helping families every day.
Mike and Victoria, our resident British-American, take Shakespeare’s birthday as an opportunity to discuss the place humanities has in K–12 education. They also tackle inBloom’s demise and the NCAA’s smack down of online-learning giant K12. Dara considers what happens when landmark education reforms actually hit the ground.
“Collective Bargaining Agreement Provisions in the Wake of Ohio Teacher Evaluation System Legislation,” by W. Kyle Ingle, P. Christian Willis, and James Fritz, presented at the Annual Meeting of the Association for Education Finance and Policy, San Antonio, TX, March 2014.
In the era of Race to the Top, waivers, and waivers of waivers, the role of state education agencies (SEAs) has increased dramatically: taking on school turnarounds, teacher-evaluation systems, and now Common Core implementation. Many argue that SEAs need "more capacity" to do these new jobs successfully. But what if we are asking departments of education not only to do too much but also to do things that they weren't built to do—and probably cannot do well? Should we shrink the SEA and its role and empower other entities to lead state-level reform instead?
Join the Thomas B. Fordham Institute for a discussion on the role of state education agencies and their leaders in the education-reform ecosystem.
PANELISTS
Deborah A. Gist - Commissioner, Rhode Island Department of Education
Mark Murphy - Secretary of Education, Delaware Department of Education
Andy Smarick - Bernard Lee Schwartz Policy Fellow, Thomas B. Fordham Institute & Partner, Bellwether Education Partners
MODERATOR
Chester E. Finn, Jr. - President, Thomas B. Fordham Institute
How is Common Core implementation faring, four years after these challenging standards were unveiled and embraced? Education Week attempts to answer this with an investigative report covering the key challenges that states and districts face: politics, assessments, teacher preparation, spending, curricula, accommodations, and tests for the severely disabled. Ed Week concludes that the next year will be critical for the success of the standards. The first three topics—political pushback, assessments, and teacher prep—seem especially vital. The growing resistance to the standards has been well publicized. Ed Week reports, however, that the battle lines are constantly changing and the ultimate effect this will have on implementation is necessarily unclear. Equally important is this year’s rollout of new assessments from the two consortia, PARCC and Smarter Balanced. Field-testing is underway, and a number of the compromises they have made—due primarily to time and resource constraints—cause many to wonder how well the final products will compare to the consortia’s initial promises to the Department of Education that funded them. At the same time, the status of teacher preparation is a big question mark, both in terms of ed schools and on-the-job professional development. The former aren’t sure what to do with the Common Core, while on-the-job training is spotty. To be sure, this special report is “data-lite”: like much investigative reporting, the authors focus on a handful of local examples (as did our recent look at district-level implementation). The national picture remains far from clear. And the Common Core remains very much a work in progress.
Education Week, Vision Meets Reality: The Common Core in Action (Washington, D.C.: Education Week, April 21, 2014).
After a controversial change to a state law, what happens on the ground? This piece, from last month’s meeting of the Association for Education Finance and Policy, delves into one such case. In 2012, Ohio lawmakers approved the Ohio Teacher Evaluation System (OTES), which requires evaluations be based on student-academic-growth measures, formal observations, and classroom walkthroughs. This study examines whether local teacher-collective-bargaining agreements negotiated after OTES was adopted allow the evaluation results to be used in personnel decisions (the authors called this “bridging”)—or if they protect experienced or tenured teachers’ jobs regardless of their evaluation scores (“buffering”). The authors found that all of the fifteen contracts they studied are essentially bridging when it came to evaluation policies, meaning that the contracts match well with state law and allow principals to use growth measures, observations, and walkthroughs when evaluating teachers. However, results were quite different when it came to actually using OTES to make decisions: the researchers discovered that four of five contracts are buffering when they examined a variety of specific provisions. For example, most contracts contain buffering provisions that keep seniority as a consideration when making reductions in force. Some even keep seniority as the primary or sole means of deciding who is laid off first, in spite of state law to the contrary. Regarding transfers, only three districts have bridging contracts that give administrators discretion to fill vacancies; most keep seniority as a consideration, and none explicitly require the use of OTES scores in transfer decisions. For tenure decisions, only three districts include OTES in their procedures for removing poorly performing teachers. Finally, only three districts have bridging provisions for compensation, meaning they consider teachers’ OTES scores when deciding how much to pay them. While this doesn’t seem promising for OTES implementation, these fifteen districts are the first to renegotiate their contracts after the adoption of the new system. Many more districts have yet to negotiate their new agreements. The findings do indicate that these districts are clearly hesitant to codify the use of OTES when making personnel decisions. By excluding OTES from their contracts, they might be undermining something they don't like (perhaps with the prodding of the teacher union), or—less nefariously—avoiding something they don't yet trust.
W. Kyle Ingle, P. Christian Willis, and James Fritz, “Collective Bargaining Agreement Provisions in the Wake of Ohio Teacher Evaluation System Legislation,” presented at the Annual Meeting of the Association for Education Finance and Policy, San Antonio, TX, March 2014.
