The Education Gadfly Weekly

If the mid-2000s—characterized by a shift in charter-school advocacy from quantity to quality—marked the adolescence of the charter movement, today we must shepherd its move into adulthood. The third stage of the charter movement must focus on charter-authorizer quality—the single biggest driver of charter-school quality. This new report from esteemed governance thinker David Osborne explains why this shift in focus is necessary and how we can go about it. Cogent and concise, the report is a valuable resource for those dedicated to improving the performance of the nation’s 5,500-plus charter schools. The hard fact is that most people—and this includes lawmakers, policymakers, and others involved in setting education policy—have no idea what authorizers are, what they do, or why they matter. But if the charter movement is to improve (and competition heightened and taxpayer dollars saved), then authorizers must be supported—and held to account. They are the entities with the authority—as imperfect as it may be—to actually shut down and replace broken charter schools. Osborne’s paper illumines the need for better authorizers, the challenges of getting them, and how states can make progress in this important work. Among his recommendations: Invest in better measures of charter effectiveness, adequately fund authorizers, enforce five-year charter maximums, and truly hold authorizers accountable for schools’ success. May his work on this important topic motivate policymakers and advocates to recognize that the work of improving charter schools begins with improving their authorizers.

SOURCE: David Osborne, Improving Charter School Accountability: The Challenge of Closing Failing Schools (Washington, D.C.: Public Policy Institute, June 2012).

Much of the focus of contemporary education reform is on helping disadvantaged kids overcome the effects of poverty. This new book, by The Global Achievement Gap author Tony Wagner, doesn’t much go there. Instead, it gives advice to parents (presumably mostly affluent ones) about how to encourage their children’s creative juices. The premise is that America needs to foster more innovation and grow more entrepreneurs—both the STEM and social varieties—to remain globally competitive. Drawing on 150 interviews (and ten case studies of young innovators), Wagner argues that play, passion, and purpose must dominate one’s growth (through childhood and into college). The book is a lively read (helped by its companion videos, which can be accessed via QR codes throughout the text). And Wagner does make some valuable points, mostly aimed at higher education as well as parents. (K-12 education acts as an understudy.) He exalts disruptive innovation, calls for abolishing “publish or perish” tenure determinations for professors, concedes that content cannot be drowned in an effort to boost process skills, and posits an interesting charter-like reboot of college education. All worthy. But Wagner sort of skirts the class issues: The majority of young people profiled in his book have prosperous, supportive, and engaged parents. (He does profile two exceptionally gifted underprivileged youth—both also living in supportive homes.) Waldorf parents, Montessori moms, and Koala dads will find much to agree with in these pages, and good counsel regarding what they might do with and for their daughters and sons. There’s less here for K-12 educators who must educate (and teach to innovate) all sorts of kids from all sorts of circumstances.

SOURCE: Tony Wagner, Creating Innovators: The Making of Young People Who Will Change the World (New York, NY: Scribner, 2012).

Special-education students, it turns out, may stand to benefit if accountability systems cease to treat them as particularly special. States around the country jumped at the Obama administration’s NCLB waiver offer this year for many reasons, but the opportunity to streamline that law’s accountability requirements by lumping different subgroups together was certainly a draw. The practice raised the ire of many special-education advocates, however, who fear that that the needs of students with disabilities (SWDs) may get lost in the shuffle with the rise of “super subgroups” that lump these youngsters in with ethnic, socioeconomic, and linguistic minorities. The data in a new IES report, however, suggest that viewing SWDs separately may actually do them a serious disservice. The study analyzes how well schools with substantial special-education populations educate their students and assesses whether NCLB’s Adequate Yearly Progress (AYP) requirements led schools to adopt improved practices, thus bumping educational outcomes for their SWDs. For the forty states with relevant data (2008-09), 35 percent of schools were accountable for SWD test scores—up ten percentage points since 2005-06—meaning that they had enough disabled pupils to qualify for accountability under NCLB’s Title I and “subgroup” rules. Further, in 2008-09, just 14 percent of schools held accountable for their SWDs missed AYP solely because of the performance of these students. But what of the 65 percent of schools that aren’t held accountable for their special-education students at all, because there aren’t enough of them to comprise a unique subgroup? Perhaps super-subgroup proponents have a point after all. With luck, this project’s final report, which will explore the relationships between AYP (for SWDs), school practices, and student outcomes, can provide further clarity on the opaque topic of how well schools are serving these students.

SOURCE: Jenifer Harr-Robins, Mengli Song, Steven Hulburt, Cheryl Pruce, Louis Danielson, Michael Garet, James Taylor, and Jonathan Jacobson, The Inclusion of Students With Disabilities in School Accountability Systems: Interim Report (Washington, D.C: Institute for Education Sciences, May 2012).

Kathleen Porter-Magee makes her podcast debut, debating reading requirements with Mike and explaining why the new science standards need improvement. Amber wonders whether upper-elementary teachers outshine their K-2 peers.

Amber's Research Minute

School Based Accountability and the Distribution of Teacher Quality Among Grades in Elementary School by Sarah C. Fuller & Helen F. Ladd - Download PDF

For all the talk of gaps in achievement, opportunity, and funding between ethnic and racial groups in American education, a different divide may also be splitting our schools and our future. In his acclaimed and controversial recent book, Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010, scholar/pundit/provocateur Charles Murray describes a widening class schism. On Tuesday, June 26, he will deliver a lecture on what that divide means for U.S. schools and education policy.

What does it portend for student achievement? For diversity within schools and choices among them? Is our education system equipped to serve a society separated by social class?

Setting a high bar for academic performance is key to international competitiveness. Photo by EO Kenny.

There is a reason big, modern countries care about education: Decades of experience and heaps of research have shown a close tie between the knowledge and skills of a nation's workforce and the productivity of that nation's economy.

One way to ensure that young people develop the skills they need to compete globally is to set clear standards about what schools should teach and students should learn—and make these standards uniform across the land. Leaving such decisions to individual states, communities, and schools is no longer serving the U.S. well.

We know from multiple sources that today's young Americans are falling behind their peers in other countries when it comes to academic performance. We also know that U.S. businesses are having trouble finding the talent they need within this country and, as a result, are outsourcing more and more of their work.

One major reason for this slipshod performance is the disorderly, dysfunctional way we've been handling academic standards for our primary- and secondary-school students. Yes, an effective education system also requires quality teachers, effective administrators, and a hundred other vital elements. But getting the expectations right, and making them the same everywhere, is important and getting more so.

Rewarding Mediocrity

Every state has gone through the motions of developing standards in core subject areas such as reading, math, and science, but few have done it with care and rigor. The Fordham Institute has been evaluating these state standards for fifteen years, and our findings are grim. In science, the subject our reviewers most recently appraised, just twelve states and the District of Columbia earned A's or B's. More than twice that number have standards that deserve grades of D or F.

Read The State of State Science Standards 2012.

Uncle Sam is partly to blame for pressing in ways that reward low standards. The No Child Left Behind Act of 2002, for example, coerces states into deeming the maximum number of kids "proficient" on their tests, but leaves it up to the individual states to determine what score qualifies as passing.

Some argue that Washington could solve the problem by butting out. But the issues plaguing American education—low achievement, poor technical skills, too many dropouts, etc.—are nationwide, and so is the challenge of economic competitiveness. The federal government's screwy incentives are just part of the problem, and straightening them out needs to be part of a larger solution.

Perhaps most damaging to our international scores and economic competitiveness has been our reluctance to follow the example of nearly every other successful modern country and establish rigorous national standards for our schools and students. States, districts, schools, and individuals would, of course, be free to surpass those expectations—but not to fall below them.

We need rigorous national standards because we live in a mobile society where a fourth grader in Portland, Maine, may find herself in fifth grade in Portland, Oregon, just as a high school senior in Springfield, Illinois, may enter college in Springfield, Massachusetts. We need them because our employers increasingly span the entire country—and globe—and require a workforce that is both skilled and portable. This is no longer a country where children born in Cincinnati should expect to spend their entire lives there. They need to be ready for jobs in Nashville and San Diego, if not Singapore and São Paulo.

Yet our education system hasn't kept pace with these fundamental changes. It is still organized as if we were living in 1912.

Opponents contend that different youngsters need to learn different things in different ways, and that national standards will go too far in homogenizing curriculum and standardizing instruction. I would argue that good teachers, the imaginative use of technology, and widening school choice will allow for ample individualization.

A First Step

Just as important, uniform standards don't need to originate in Washington. Indeed, forty-five states have recently signaled they will shift over to new so-called Common Core standards for English language arts and math developed by a consortium of governors and state-level school chiefs. (A similar project is now under way in science, with no federal involvement whatsoever.)

To be sure, much progress in education can be made through choice and competition. But decentralization also makes it easier for states and school districts to lower their expectations, pander to interest groups such as teacher unions, and hide their own mediocrity.

In time, we'll be able to compare the achievement of the states that adopted the Common Core with those that chose to go it alone. But setting the right expectations is at least a first step in giving our entire K-12 education system the makeover it sorely needs.

This essay was originally published by the Wall Street Journal as part of a debate with Jay P. Greene on the value of national standards .

In July 2011, the National Research Council released its Framework for K-12 Science Education, intended to serve as the basis for a new set of “next generation” science standards (NGSS) for primary-secondary-school science in the United States. Since then, twenty-six states came together, working with Achieve and a vast team of writers, to develop those new standards. They hope to do for science what the Council of Chief State School Officers and the National Governors Association did for English language arts and math: develop expectations that are at least as clear and rigorous as the best state standards and that many states may adopt in common, presumably then to be joined by common assessments. Unfortunately, a careful review of version 1.0 indicates that this laudable but ambitious goal remains a considerable distance away.

There's still work to be done on the NGSS. Photo by Andrew Magill.

It’s important for the country that the NGSS endeavor yields a high-quality result, which is why we set out to scrutinize the first draft. (It was released for public comment in May. A revised draft is expected late this year with the final standards due in 2013.) We assume that, like the Common Core State Standards initiative that preceded it, many changes will be made on the basis of constructive feedback and recommendations.

We at Fordham have a long history of evaluating state, national, and international standards in science and other core subjects. Indeed, we’ve reviewed state science standards three times: in 1998, in 2005, and again during the past year. While a few states have done a good job, most have not. In our most recent science review, twenty-six of them earned D or F grades. Just seven were in the A range.

If U.S. students boasted strong science achievement, the quality of a state’s standards might not matter so much. Unfortunately, as the latest NAEP results show yet again, young Americans know very little about this vital subject. Fewer than one third of eighth graders met NAEP’s “proficient” standard. And even the most casual look at TIMSS or PISA results confirms that they lag far behind the world’s leading nations.

That is why it is so important that Achieve and its partners get the NGSS right. These standards will function in a number of places as the foundation upon which the rest of the science-education system is built. And getting them right can point curriculum writers, assessment developers, teachers, and administrators in sound directions and set our nation on a path towards improved science achievement.

To that end, the clearest and most rigorous of today’s state, national, or international science standards could provide worthy guides and models for the NGSS drafters. And so, of course, might the NRC’s Framework.

Particularly because of the intended link between that framework and the NGSS drafting process, we asked one of the nation’s most respected scientists, biologist Paul R. Gross, to evaluate it with an eye toward how strong a foundation it would provide the NGSS authors. In his analysis, Dr. Gross found much to praise (and Fordham awarded the Framework a solid B+). But he also noted that

if the statue within this sizable block of marble were more deftly hewn, an A grade would be within reach—and may yet be for the standards writers, so long as their chisels are sharp and their arms strong.

Why strong arms and a sharp chisel? Because along with much solid science, Dr. Gross found within the NRC Framework some worrisome tendencies that could easily mislead standards-writers and yield an unsatisfactory product.

Paul Gross also led the Fordham team that just finished reviewing the first draft of the NGSS. And it appears, regrettably, that its drafters ignored the potential pitfalls that he had flagged.

Consequently, they stumbled into three big ones:

• They went overboard on “scientific practices,” seemingly determined to include some version of such practices or processes in every standard, whether sensible (and actionable, teachable, assessable) or not. This led to distorted or unclear expectations for teachers and students and, often, to neglect of crucial scientific content.


• At the same time, paradoxically, the drafters left too much to curriculum developers by omitting (or leaving implicit) much crucial science content. This happens because much content is over-summarized; many standards lack the detail that is indispensable for their use in curriculum planning; and essential prior content sometimes vanishes. It may be assumed but nowhere is it explicitly stated.


• The alignment between the NGSS draft and the Common Core math standards is weak. There are only infrequent and vague references to important mathematics content that is often necessary to support rigorous science standards, especially in physical science in the upper grades. At the same time, however, the NGSS sometimes reference or expect the use of math content or procedures earlier in the grade sequence than the Common Core provides. That means, for states that adopt both the CCSS math standards and the NGSS, students may be unprepared for the math that their science lessons require—even as, in other places, they may possess mathematical prowess that the science standards fail to exploit for the benefit of more sophisticated and complete scientific knowledge.

The NGSS authors have much work still to do to ensure that the final draft is a true leap forward in science education.

In short: Our reviewers judge that the NGSS authors have much work still to do to ensure that the final draft is a true leap forward in science education. Fortunately, they have ample time to make the necessary changes.

To that end, our reviewers offer four recommendations:

• Eliminate scientific “practices” statements where they are empty, distracting, or not readily assessable.


• Bring into the revision process a few independent scientists, not previously involved with the drafting, to check every standard in their disciplines for errors and ambiguities (including assessment challenges) and to recommend corrections for any that they find.


• For the indispensable parts of natural science that require the use of mathematics, get one or more advisors who are well-versed in both the science and its component mathematics, and who also know the CCSS-M, to revise the relevant standards.


• Make sure that the next version includes a single, clear, fully searchable document that can be read and used by school-district specialists and classroom teachers. The complex “web module” and multiple documents of the first draft may be useful to some but will prove difficult to apply in the final stages of curriculum design and classroom instruction at the district and school levels.

To repeat: It’s important for America’s and our children’s futures that this come out well. NGSS1.0 got the process started. But NGSS2.0 need to be a lot better.

Rejecting Iowa's waiver: political courage or political suicide? Photo by US Department of Education.

With barely four months to go until Election Day, every single Obama administration decision is inevitably viewed through the prism of presidential politics. Which is why Secretary of Education Arne Duncan’s rejection of a request from Iowa for flexibility under the Elementary and Secondary Education Act is particularly perplexing. Do Duncan and the White House politicos not understand that he’s handing Mitt Romney a handy campaign issue in an up-for-grabs state? What’s most remarkable is the reason the administration is turning down Iowa’s waiver request: Because the state legislature refuses to enact a statewide teacher-evaluation plan. As you may recall, such evaluations are one of the mandates (er, conditions) placed on states that want flexibility from ESEA’s broken accountability requirements. And as many of us have argued, such conditions are patently illegal. There’s nothing in ESEA that indicates that the Secretary has the authority to demand such conditions be met in order for waiver requests to be approved. Expect Governor Romney to talk up this issue the next time he’s in the Hawkeye State as yet another example of executive overreach and federal micromanagement. Iowans love their schools and their teachers; it’s not going to be hard to paint this as a classic case of Washington bureaucrats gone wild.

A version of this article appeared as a blog post on Flypaper.

RELATED ARTICLE: “Iowa Turned Down for ESEA Waiver,” by Alyson Klein, Politics K-12—Education Week, June 21, 2012.

Healthcare stole the show, but don’t forget that the Supreme Court handed down a decision this session with education implications. Knox v. SEIU, which restricted public-employee unions’ ability to extract political contributions from non-members, was a narrow ruling. Here’s hoping it signals that the high court is open to further protections for non-union teachers against onerous union dues and other fees.

Speaking of SCOTUS, yesterday marked the ten-year anniversary of Zelman v. Simmons-Harris, the Supreme Court decision that upheld the constitutionality of school vouchers. Gadfly is glad to see Republicans in Pennsylvania honoring the occasion by pushing a budget that would double funding for the state’s tax-credit-scholarship program, while GOP legislators in Mississippi and New Hampshire commemorated it by passing new private-school-choice programs.

Governor John Kasich signed Ohio’s third-grade reading requirement into law on Monday. Requiring reading proficiency in order to get promoted into fourth grade has paid dividends in Florida; let’s hope youngsters in the Buckeye State reap similar rewards.

New York-based Relay Graduate School of Education is pioneering an innovative approach to educator education, trading in pedagogical theory for a super-practical and practice-based curriculum; other ed schools would do well to take note of this creative reimagining of teacher prep, rather than scrambling to shield their own methods and results from public view.

The Wall Street Journal devoted a special section on Monday to the “Big Issues of Education,” including important debates on national standards and teacher evaluation.

For all the talk of gaps in achievement, opportunity, and funding between ethnic and racial groups in American education, a different divide may also be splitting our schools and our future. In his acclaimed and controversial recent book, Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010, scholar/pundit/provocateur Charles Murray describes a widening class schism. On Tuesday, June 26, he will deliver a lecture on what that divide means for U.S. schools and education policy.

What does it portend for student achievement? For diversity within schools and choices among them? Is our education system equipped to serve a society separated by social class?

For all the talk of gaps in achievement, opportunity, and funding between ethnic and racial groups in American education, a different divide may also be splitting our schools and our future. In his acclaimed and controversial recent book, Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010, scholar/pundit/provocateur Charles Murray describes a widening class schism. On Tuesday, June 26, he will deliver a lecture on what that divide means for U.S. schools and education policy.

What does it portend for student achievement? For diversity within schools and choices among them? Is our education system equipped to serve a society separated by social class?

If the mid-2000s—characterized by a shift in charter-school advocacy from quantity to quality—marked the adolescence of the charter movement, today we must shepherd its move into adulthood. The third stage of the charter movement must focus on charter-authorizer quality—the single biggest driver of charter-school quality. This new report from esteemed governance thinker David Osborne explains why this shift in focus is necessary and how we can go about it. Cogent and concise, the report is a valuable resource for those dedicated to improving the performance of the nation’s 5,500-plus charter schools. The hard fact is that most people—and this includes lawmakers, policymakers, and others involved in setting education policy—have no idea what authorizers are, what they do, or why they matter. But if the charter movement is to improve (and competition heightened and taxpayer dollars saved), then authorizers must be supported—and held to account. They are the entities with the authority—as imperfect as it may be—to actually shut down and replace broken charter schools. Osborne’s paper illumines the need for better authorizers, the challenges of getting them, and how states can make progress in this important work. Among his recommendations: Invest in better measures of charter effectiveness, adequately fund authorizers, enforce five-year charter maximums, and truly hold authorizers accountable for schools’ success. May his work on this important topic motivate policymakers and advocates to recognize that the work of improving charter schools begins with improving their authorizers.

SOURCE: David Osborne, Improving Charter School Accountability: The Challenge of Closing Failing Schools (Washington, D.C.: Public Policy Institute, June 2012).

Much of the focus of contemporary education reform is on helping disadvantaged kids overcome the effects of poverty. This new book, by The Global Achievement Gap author Tony Wagner, doesn’t much go there. Instead, it gives advice to parents (presumably mostly affluent ones) about how to encourage their children’s creative juices. The premise is that America needs to foster more innovation and grow more entrepreneurs—both the STEM and social varieties—to remain globally competitive. Drawing on 150 interviews (and ten case studies of young innovators), Wagner argues that play, passion, and purpose must dominate one’s growth (through childhood and into college). The book is a lively read (helped by its companion videos, which can be accessed via QR codes throughout the text). And Wagner does make some valuable points, mostly aimed at higher education as well as parents. (K-12 education acts as an understudy.) He exalts disruptive innovation, calls for abolishing “publish or perish” tenure determinations for professors, concedes that content cannot be drowned in an effort to boost process skills, and posits an interesting charter-like reboot of college education. All worthy. But Wagner sort of skirts the class issues: The majority of young people profiled in his book have prosperous, supportive, and engaged parents. (He does profile two exceptionally gifted underprivileged youth—both also living in supportive homes.) Waldorf parents, Montessori moms, and Koala dads will find much to agree with in these pages, and good counsel regarding what they might do with and for their daughters and sons. There’s less here for K-12 educators who must educate (and teach to innovate) all sorts of kids from all sorts of circumstances.

SOURCE: Tony Wagner, Creating Innovators: The Making of Young People Who Will Change the World (New York, NY: Scribner, 2012).

Special-education students, it turns out, may stand to benefit if accountability systems cease to treat them as particularly special. States around the country jumped at the Obama administration’s NCLB waiver offer this year for many reasons, but the opportunity to streamline that law’s accountability requirements by lumping different subgroups together was certainly a draw. The practice raised the ire of many special-education advocates, however, who fear that that the needs of students with disabilities (SWDs) may get lost in the shuffle with the rise of “super subgroups” that lump these youngsters in with ethnic, socioeconomic, and linguistic minorities. The data in a new IES report, however, suggest that viewing SWDs separately may actually do them a serious disservice. The study analyzes how well schools with substantial special-education populations educate their students and assesses whether NCLB’s Adequate Yearly Progress (AYP) requirements led schools to adopt improved practices, thus bumping educational outcomes for their SWDs. For the forty states with relevant data (2008-09), 35 percent of schools were accountable for SWD test scores—up ten percentage points since 2005-06—meaning that they had enough disabled pupils to qualify for accountability under NCLB’s Title I and “subgroup” rules. Further, in 2008-09, just 14 percent of schools held accountable for their SWDs missed AYP solely because of the performance of these students. But what of the 65 percent of schools that aren’t held accountable for their special-education students at all, because there aren’t enough of them to comprise a unique subgroup? Perhaps super-subgroup proponents have a point after all. With luck, this project’s final report, which will explore the relationships between AYP (for SWDs), school practices, and student outcomes, can provide further clarity on the opaque topic of how well schools are serving these students.

SOURCE: Jenifer Harr-Robins, Mengli Song, Steven Hulburt, Cheryl Pruce, Louis Danielson, Michael Garet, James Taylor, and Jonathan Jacobson, The Inclusion of Students With Disabilities in School Accountability Systems: Interim Report (Washington, D.C: Institute for Education Sciences, May 2012).