The Education Gadfly Weekly

Unfailingly, Americans express distain with America’s underperforming public education system, while simultaneously raving about the education their own children receive from it. This new analysis by Jay Greene and Josh McGee takes a hatchet to that comforting illusion—showing that even wealthy suburban schools aren’t up to snuff in world terms. Working with the George W. Bush Institute, the two compared math and reading performance of nearly every U.S. school district to its respective state, the nation, and then also to other developed countries. The upshot: Complacent suburban parents should start getting a little angry at the state of our education system. None of America’s affluent, overwhelmingly white districts perform at a level that would place them in the top third of developed nations. And many do considerably worse: In math, ritzy Beverly Hills scores at the 53rd percentile relative to other developed nations, despite the fact that the scores from those countries include non-affluent schools. And posh Evanston, IL finds itself in the 48th percentile. (If you’re interested in seeing how your own district matches up, check out the report’s accompanying “Global Report Card,” an interactive online database of all the report’s findings.) To be sure, the analytic methods used here, while inventive, are shaky, as Greene and McGree acknowledge. They had to compare scores on different tests taken by students of different ages—and couldn’t mute all the statistical “noise” generated by these discrepancies. The question is: Do suburban parents want to wait for more rigorous data to become available before acknowledging that they, too, have a school problem?

Click to listen to commentary on Jay's and Josh's report from the Education Gadfly Show podcast

Jay P. Greene and Josh B. McGee, “When the Best is Mediocre,” Education Next, Vol. 12, No. 1 (Winter 2012).

Since the second quarter of 2009, U.S. GDP has nosed upward—yet unemployment rates haven’t budged. To understand the cause of this discrepancy, Brookings analysts explore the relationship between unemployment rates and educational attainment in America’s largest metro areas, both before and since the Great Recession. (While the researchers collected Census and Bureau of Labor Statistics data for all 366 U.S. metropolitan areas, the report mainly focuses on the largest 100 of these.) Unsurprisingly, analysts found that cities with decently educated workforces boast a lower unemployment rate than those with large “education gaps” (between the average schooling of the workforce living there and the average schooling needed to perform the jobs of the metro area). Madison, WI (home of Wisco), for example, has the lowest education gap of the largest 100 metro areas and only a 5.3 percent unemployment rate. Yet, in Modesto, CA, a city with one of the widest education gaps, the unemployment rate is 16.7 percent. Anyone skeptical of the role education plays in defining a city’s economic viability should take a gander at these pages. And it wouldn’t hurt for recent college graduates on the job hunt (and willing to move) to do the same.

Jonathan Rothwell and Alan Berube, “Education, Demand, and Unemployment in Metropolitan America” (Washington, D.C.: Metropolitan Policy Program at the Brookings Institute), September 2011.

This Science magazine article makes for a weak counterargument to those who extol single-sex education (including Wake County, which recently announced its intention to open two single-sex public schools). The authors declare that single-sex schooling (SSS) is an unproven reform—because they can find no empirical evidence establishing that it lifts student achievement—and thus should be scrapped. Thing is, that argument could just as easily be made in reverse. SSS was, effectively, illegal until 2006, when a re-interpretation of Title IX by the federal Office of Civil Rights began allowing single-sex public school classes. Thus, there is also no evidence that SSS hinders (or even holds constant) student achievement. (Co-ed schooling fits this bill too, as we barely have anything but it in the public sector.) Going further, the authors assert that SSS “increases gender stereotyping and legitimizes institutional sexism.” A tough claim to make in conjunction with the assertion of inadequate research on the effects of single-sex schooling on student achievement. We expected more from Science.

“The Pseudoscience of Single-Sex Schooling,” by Diane F. Halpern, Lise Eliot, Rebecca S. Bigler, Richard A. Fabes, et al., Science, 333(6050), September 23, 2011.

To exploit technology’s potential effectively, this paper from the Boston Consulting Group (BCG) argues, schools must integrate it within a “closed-loop” system—one that has a deeply aligned set of educational objectives, standards, curricula, assessments, interventions, and professional development. To prove this point, they highlight some universities and school systems that are incorporating technology into such a closed-loop approach. Victoria, Australia is said to be the best example of this at scale. And Carnegie Mellon’s Open Learning Initiative (OLI), also lauded, embeds frequent assessment and real-time, continuous feedback into its courses. The paper ends with a set of basic (and reasonably vague) recommendations for shifting from our current approach to education to a technology-based closed-loop one, focusing on teacher empowerment, student engagement, and research and infrastructure development. A titillating paper geared to the savvy follower of digital learning, this is not. But it is a helpful resource for those just dipping their feet into the refreshing waters of digital learning.

Allison Bailey, Tyce Henry, Lane McBride, J. Puckett, “Unleashing the Potential of Technology in Education” (Boston, MA: The Boston Consulting Group, Inc., 2011).

The Obama administration’s new waiver plan doesn’t officially repeal the No Child Left Behind Act, but it is tantamount to making large-scale amendments to it. Which it does unilaterally, without even a thumbs-up from Congress.

Though the specific conditions that the White House and Secretary Duncan are attaching to statewide “flexibility waivers” are consistent with the administration’s long-standing “blueprint” for reauthorizing NCLB, and also happen to be conditions that I think generally have merit, they amount to changing the law, not just waiving it. This raises constitutional as well as statutory issues—though the administration’s response, not surprisingly or implausibly, has been that “if a do-nothing Congress won’t act to solve problems, we’ll solve them ourselves as best we can.”

Yet the changes themselves—at least their timing and high-profile release—are motivated at least as much by election-year political considerations as by policy. This is not the first example, and surely won’t be the last, of appealing to key constituencies by undoing, suspending, or waiving government practices that they find onerous and unpleasant. Consider the non-deportation of illegal aliens who haven’t committed crimes. Hispanic (and other immigrant) voters will surely applaud this move and likely thank the administration in November 2012.

Last week’s announcements mean that teachers and parents (and school-board members and administrators) also now can breathe a sigh of relief at the suggestion that the president and his education secretary are taking the heavy hand of unrealistic achievement targets, embarrassing school labels, and unwanted accountability burdens off their frail shoulders.

And they’re partly right, for the promised waivers, once issued, really do ease some of the most painful parts of NCLB—provisions that analysts and critics have pointed to for a very long time as needing revision.

But they’ll be only partly right. For the administration is also imposing its own preconditions on states for waiver eligibility. Three in particular, all of which are wrenching and controversial in their own right, and at least one of which could result in an election-year firestorm:

• Teachers and principals will be concerned about the obligation of states to develop evaluation systems for them that incorporate measures of student progress.
• A variety of groups will be upset over the plan to impose “rigorous interventions to turn schools around” only on a small number of really low-performing schools and let merely mediocre schools escape the turnaround lash.
• The greatest potential for political controversy, however, is the requirement that states seeking waivers “have already adopted college- and career-ready standards” in math and English language arts, which is preceded (in the White House document) by reference to the Common Core State Standards Initiative. This will surely be viewed by Common Core skeptics as entangling Title I with that heretofore state-driven initiative and creating new federal incentives for states to embrace its “national” standards. I happen to think the Common Core standards are generally worth embracing, but I also understand that much of what’s good about them is their separateness from Uncle Sam. That distance is now disappearing.

One who might notice is the governor of Texas, who detests everything about the Common Core and has kept his state out of it—and who just happens to be Barack Obama’s likeliest opponent in the 2012 election.

This piece originally appeared (in a slightly different format) on Fordham’s Flypaper blog as well as on the National Review Online’s The Corner blog and the National Journal’s education blog. To subscribe to Flypaper, click here.

College readiness has become the cause célèbre for many education reformers and policy pundits. High-performing charter networks like KIPP and Achievement First chant the “college-ready” mantra to their students daily. Within his first six months in office, President Obama announced a desire to have 60 percent of young Americans be college educated. Yet a recent analysis by Complete College America finds that, despite valiant efforts to increase our college-enrollment rates (which have upped from 36 percent to 41 percent of young Americans over the past decade), our college-completion rates have stagnated—and are unacceptably low. In Texas, for example, 79 percent of public-college students enrolled at a community college—yet fewer than 5 percent of those individuals earned their associate degree on time. And the numbers for four-year colleges are no better: Only a quarter of Lone Star students enrolling in a bachelor’s program graduated in four years. Double that time frame and 60 percent of those who matriculated graduated. Better preparing students for the rigors of post-secondary academic work will do much to up these numbers. But these findings raise another important question: With this many college dropouts, are we right to pursue the “college for all” strategy singularly? Preparing students for trade programs and apprenticeships (or the military) may prove just as valuable to shoring up a strong middle class and giving decent futures to individuals. We suspect that many who were pushed into college, only to realize a year (and many dollars) later that it isn’t for them, might agree that “and career-readiness” is a worthy pursuit.

“College Graduation Rates Are Stagnant Even as Enrollment Rises, a Study Finds,” by Tamar Lewin, New York Times, September 27, 2011. “Obama Urges Students to Set Their Sights on College,” by Mark Landler, September 28, 2011. Complete College America, “Time is the Enemy” (Complete College America, 2011).

Nearly 10 percent of parents are opting to “redshirt” their Kindergarten-eligible sons and daughters, waiting an extra year to start their schooling. The underlying assumption of the decision is that a more emotionally and mentally mature youngster will have a leg-up on his or her weaker peers. (Recall that Gladwell made this argument about Canadian hockey players in Outliers.) But, according to neuroscientists Sam Wang and Sandra Aamodt, these parents are wrong. Older Kindergarteners may start out slightly ahead, but their younger classmates catch up in math and reading quickly—and these “redshirted” students actually perform worse by high school. This is a strong argument for starting school early, especially for the youngsters who don’t interact with older children or challenging content at home (the two main spurs of cognitive development, according to Wang and Aamodt). But don’t raise that “early-Kindergarten-for-all” placard, just yet. Child development can be catalyzed through all sorts of avenues outside school. And engaged parents deserve the right to choose whether four or five is the right age for little Susie to take her first school-bus ride.

Click to listen to commentary on redshirting Kindergarten from the Education Gadfly Show podcast

“Delay Kindergarten at Your Child’s Peril,” by Sam Wang and Sandra Aamodt, New York Times, September 24, 2011.

This week, Mike, Rick, and guest co-host Dave DeSchryver talk about Argentina, Mexico, waterfalls, money, and, of course, elections. We have an interview with a real political insider (a?Gadfly Show?convert, to boot!), and News of the Weird is soooo dramatic. All in 20 minutes! You go on the air with the podcast you have, not the podcast you want.?

Unfailingly, Americans express distain with America’s underperforming public education system, while simultaneously raving about the education their own children receive from it. This new analysis by Jay Greene and Josh McGee takes a hatchet to that comforting illusion—showing that even wealthy suburban schools aren’t up to snuff in world terms. Working with the George W. Bush Institute, the two compared math and reading performance of nearly every U.S. school district to its respective state, the nation, and then also to other developed countries. The upshot: Complacent suburban parents should start getting a little angry at the state of our education system. None of America’s affluent, overwhelmingly white districts perform at a level that would place them in the top third of developed nations. And many do considerably worse: In math, ritzy Beverly Hills scores at the 53rd percentile relative to other developed nations, despite the fact that the scores from those countries include non-affluent schools. And posh Evanston, IL finds itself in the 48th percentile. (If you’re interested in seeing how your own district matches up, check out the report’s accompanying “Global Report Card,” an interactive online database of all the report’s findings.) To be sure, the analytic methods used here, while inventive, are shaky, as Greene and McGree acknowledge. They had to compare scores on different tests taken by students of different ages—and couldn’t mute all the statistical “noise” generated by these discrepancies. The question is: Do suburban parents want to wait for more rigorous data to become available before acknowledging that they, too, have a school problem?

Click to listen to commentary on Jay's and Josh's report from the Education Gadfly Show podcast

Jay P. Greene and Josh B. McGee, “When the Best is Mediocre,” Education Next, Vol. 12, No. 1 (Winter 2012).

Since the second quarter of 2009, U.S. GDP has nosed upward—yet unemployment rates haven’t budged. To understand the cause of this discrepancy, Brookings analysts explore the relationship between unemployment rates and educational attainment in America’s largest metro areas, both before and since the Great Recession. (While the researchers collected Census and Bureau of Labor Statistics data for all 366 U.S. metropolitan areas, the report mainly focuses on the largest 100 of these.) Unsurprisingly, analysts found that cities with decently educated workforces boast a lower unemployment rate than those with large “education gaps” (between the average schooling of the workforce living there and the average schooling needed to perform the jobs of the metro area). Madison, WI (home of Wisco), for example, has the lowest education gap of the largest 100 metro areas and only a 5.3 percent unemployment rate. Yet, in Modesto, CA, a city with one of the widest education gaps, the unemployment rate is 16.7 percent. Anyone skeptical of the role education plays in defining a city’s economic viability should take a gander at these pages. And it wouldn’t hurt for recent college graduates on the job hunt (and willing to move) to do the same.

Jonathan Rothwell and Alan Berube, “Education, Demand, and Unemployment in Metropolitan America” (Washington, D.C.: Metropolitan Policy Program at the Brookings Institute), September 2011.

This Science magazine article makes for a weak counterargument to those who extol single-sex education (including Wake County, which recently announced its intention to open two single-sex public schools). The authors declare that single-sex schooling (SSS) is an unproven reform—because they can find no empirical evidence establishing that it lifts student achievement—and thus should be scrapped. Thing is, that argument could just as easily be made in reverse. SSS was, effectively, illegal until 2006, when a re-interpretation of Title IX by the federal Office of Civil Rights began allowing single-sex public school classes. Thus, there is also no evidence that SSS hinders (or even holds constant) student achievement. (Co-ed schooling fits this bill too, as we barely have anything but it in the public sector.) Going further, the authors assert that SSS “increases gender stereotyping and legitimizes institutional sexism.” A tough claim to make in conjunction with the assertion of inadequate research on the effects of single-sex schooling on student achievement. We expected more from Science.

“The Pseudoscience of Single-Sex Schooling,” by Diane F. Halpern, Lise Eliot, Rebecca S. Bigler, Richard A. Fabes, et al., Science, 333(6050), September 23, 2011.

To exploit technology’s potential effectively, this paper from the Boston Consulting Group (BCG) argues, schools must integrate it within a “closed-loop” system—one that has a deeply aligned set of educational objectives, standards, curricula, assessments, interventions, and professional development. To prove this point, they highlight some universities and school systems that are incorporating technology into such a closed-loop approach. Victoria, Australia is said to be the best example of this at scale. And Carnegie Mellon’s Open Learning Initiative (OLI), also lauded, embeds frequent assessment and real-time, continuous feedback into its courses. The paper ends with a set of basic (and reasonably vague) recommendations for shifting from our current approach to education to a technology-based closed-loop one, focusing on teacher empowerment, student engagement, and research and infrastructure development. A titillating paper geared to the savvy follower of digital learning, this is not. But it is a helpful resource for those just dipping their feet into the refreshing waters of digital learning.

Allison Bailey, Tyce Henry, Lane McBride, J. Puckett, “Unleashing the Potential of Technology in Education” (Boston, MA: The Boston Consulting Group, Inc., 2011).