The Education Gadfly Weekly

States experimenting with online learning—and struggling with how this new delivery system will alter such familiar practices as seat-time requirements—would be wise to check out recent doings in the Granite State. This book offers a tutorial. Since 2008-09, New Hampshire high school students have been able to work with educators to create personalized learning plans—with course credit awarded for mastery, not time in class. Such credits can be earned year round through internships, online courses, overseas travel, or brick-and-mortar classes. Mentor educators set course-competency guidelines (based on Webb’s Depth of Knowledge levels), track progress, and conduct final assessments. Authors Fred Bramante (former New Hampshire Board of Education chair) and Rose Colby (former principal) offer a deep dive into the NH model—explaining the expected benefits to this policy change, including cost savings, increased curricular offerings, and a lower drop-out rate. (Remarkably, New Hampshire has seen an almost 20 percentage-point decrease in its dropout rate since 2008.)  Still, there are a few gaps. Notably, the authors don’t duly justify the rigor of their quality-control metrics for ensuring true mastery—the lynchpin for ensuring that New Hampshire’s program hasn’t, and doesn’t, devolve into a weak-kneed credit-recovery program rather than a bona fide competency model. Policymakers and educators in the Granite State are still honing their system; let’s hope they place this keystone soon.

Fred Bramante and Rose Colby, "Off the Clock: Moving Education from Time to Competency" (Thousand Oaks, California: Corwin, 2012).

Flashback to 2006: The struggling Hartford School District sheltered vast discrepancies in per-pupil spending from school to school due to its rigid funding structure. (Like most districts, Hartford funded schools based on inputs, like staff positions and materials.) In an effort to close such gaps (and improve accountability), in 2008 the district established a student-based budget (SBB) model—think weighted-student funding, which funds schools based on actual enrollments and pupils’ specific needs. This report from Public Impact evaluates the efficacy of this shift, based on school-budget data from 2004 to 2011 and principal interviews. Not only did SBB mean that schools received similar funding for similar students (the obvious goal), but principals also felt a greater sense of accountability and reported heightened transparency around school funding. (The redistributed dollars meant that 69 percent of schools received more funding under the new system, potentially coloring responses.) The results from Hartford’s SBB implementation have been mostly positive (in terms of redistribution of funds to needy students and upped accountability and transparency—Public Impact didn’t evaluate effects on student achievement). Still, drawbacks also exist: Hold harmless clauses, for example, keep schools with declining enrollment afloat; schools with fewer than 260 students remained eligible for an extra $265,000 annually. And about 30 percent of the budget consists of “special funding”—meaning that select schools (like magnets) get gobs more dollars. This report offers an interesting case study on SBB effectiveness—though a sober harbinger that weighted-student funding might not cure all our school-finance ills.

Achieve Hartford! and Public Impact, Funding a Better Education: Conclusions From the First Three Years of Student-Based Budgeting in Hartford (Chapel Hill, NC: Public Impact, 2012).

Before the real-estate bubble burst, there was a growing literature on the link between government regulation of housing and home prices. Tougher zoning restrictions, it seemed, drove up the cost of housing. This Brookings Institution report builds off this notion: Restrictive zoning regulations—such as those that limit the construction of high-rise apartments or other multi-family units in certain neighborhoods—not surprisingly create cities that are segregated by income and race. And that, in turn, produces unequal access to quality schools. By loosening or even eliminating restrictive zoning, cities may see housing-cost gaps narrow by as much as 63 percentage points and see school-achievement gaps narrow as a result, Rothwell writes. (In other words, less zoning results in less segregated neighborhoods, and less segregated schools.) In the meantime, district-choice plans, charter schools, and school vouchers can help offset the effects of zoning, the author argues. Unfortunately, in these tough economic times, districts are too often restricting school choice—by drawing tighter attendance zones around specialty schools or by denying bus service to them. That’s a poor way to save money. And if Rothwell teaches us anything, it’s that quality choices are still largely available only to those who can afford them—especially in cities with restrictive zoning.

Jonathan Rothwell, Housing Costs, Zoning, and Access to High-Scoring Schools (Washington, D.C.: Brookings Metropolitan Policy Program, April 2012).

Standardized testing, school closures, and a pineapple: Rick and Janie cover it all this week, while Amber wonders whether weighted-student funding made a difference in Hartford after all.

Amber's Research Minute

Funding a Better Education: conclusions from the first three years of student-based budgeting in hartford

Is digital learning education's latest fad or its future? What fundamental changes to the ways we fund, staff, and govern American schools are necessary to fulfill the technology's potential? Will policy tweaks suffice or do we need a total system overhaul—and a big change in the reform priorities that can bring this about? Who will resist—and do their objections have merit? Fordham is bringing together experts on all aspects of education policy—from governance to finance to human capital—to examine how policymakers can make digital learning a transformative tool to improve American education...and weigh the dangers that lie ahead.

The panel featured the governance expertise of the Hoover Institution's John Chubb, insights into teaching's future from Bryan Hassel of Public Impact, analysis of the costs of online learning from the Parthenon Group's Eleanor Laurans, and the cautionary perspective of Emory University's Mark Bauerlein.

Leonie Haimson—a vocal ed-reform critic—helped generate a media firestorm about testing recently when she posted about an absurd passage that was included on this year’s New York State eighth grade ELA test. The post itself generated more than 2,000 hits in its first few hours and led to a New York Daily News article entitled “Talking pineapple question on state exam stumps ... everyone!”

The citrus fruit that rocked education reform.  Photo by Richard North.

The passage on the exam needs to be read in full to be believed. It’s a perfect storm of bad writing, poor structure, and inexplicable questions. If you haven’t read it—and you should—it’s enough to know that the moral of the story—included in bold at the end—is this:

Moral of the story: Pineapples don't have sleeves.

Haimson and her fellow testing foes are right to call out this passage as ridiculous. And critics of accountability can and should play this role, helping surface problems and draw attention to the need for change.

But the real outrage among those of us who care deeply about accountability is why these problems aren’t being caught earlier. For too long, we have been focusing our attention on expanding the use of tests to more grades and more subject areas and increasing the consequences tied to the results of these tests without taking a hard look at the uneven quality of the tests themselves.

So let’s dig a little deeper. A lot of attention has been paid to the company that is responsible for the question (Pearson) and the length of time it has been around (seven years across exams used in Florida, Illinois, Delaware, New Mexico, Arkansas, and Alabama).

More interesting, however, is how this passage came to be included in the assessment in the first place. It turns out that the passage that was included on the state exams was not at all what the author himself had written. (See here and scroll down to the author’s—Daniel’s—reply.)

The original story was far shorter and was, frankly, far more interesting. (For one thing, the moral of the actual story—“Never bet on an eggplant”—actually makes some sense in the context of the original passage!) I am still not convinced it’s appropriate for a state test, but it comes much closer.

The author himself has no idea why the story was changed, though I’d be willing to bet it was to make the language somehow more politically correct. Whatever the reason, someone on the editorial staff made the change and then it passed through whatever stringent review process Pearson has in place without further edits to allow it to make sense again.

I’m sure this story will only add fuel to the anti-testing fire, and frankly, it’s hard to argue that it shouldn’t. After all, how can we possibly hold students accountable to such poorly written questions aligned to such poorly written prose?

In the end, though, I think this points to how sloppy testing companies—and no doubt some education reformers—have gotten in the rush to meet the demand for so many tests on such tight budgets. If we expect students and teachers to be held to higher standards, then we sure had best do the same for ourselves. And the starting point is taking the production of tests and test items much more seriously than we have to date.

Moral of the story: Never allow a pineapple to trump reason.

Updated April 26, 2011.

Digital learning is more than the latest addition to education reformers’ to-do lists, filed along with teacher evaluations, charter schools, tenure reform, academic standards, and the like. It’s fundamentally different: For digital learning to fulfill its enormous potential, a wholesale reshaping of the reform agenda itself is required, particularly in the realms of school finance and governance. But just as online education needs those reforms if it is to flourish, so does major education reform need digital learning, which can provide valuable solutions to some of the greatest challenges in this territory—beginning with the basic obsolescence of public education’s familiar delivery system.

Today, American education has the potential to be rebooted and accelerated by digital learning. Indeed, truly boosting student achievement—as well as individualizing instruction and creating high-quality options for children and families among, within, and beyond schools—will depend to a considerable extent on how deftly we exploit this potential, both in its pure form (full-time online instruction) and in various “blended” combinations of digital and flesh-and-blood instruction.

Serious obstacles block the road to realizing digital learning's potential. Photo by Brad Folkens

Making the most of these remarkable opportunities, however, hinges on our willingness—and capacity—to alter a host of ingrained practices. Fordham’s new volume, Education Reform for the Digital Era, offers a guide to that alteration, beginning with clarity about three major obstacles that today block the path.

Self-centered Interest Groups

The many adult interests that live off U.S. public education are already doing their best to co-opt digital learning for their own ends—and to ensure that nobody uses it to threaten their power, membership, or revenue base. Two such groups are especially powerful.

First are local districts and their school boards, vigorously represented by the National School Boards Association (NSBA). This crowd would stifle the openness and global reach of digital learning in the name of district empowerment and local monopoly. According to Ann Flynn, NSBA’s director of education technology, online learning “should be something that school districts can control.”

Yet leaving local districts and boards in charge of digital instruction will retard innovation, entrepreneurship, collaboration, and smart competition, simultaneously stifling students’ ability to find—and be taught by—the very best educators around the globe. It will raise costs, undermine efficiency, block rich instructional options, restrict school choice and parental influence, and strengthen the hand of other interest groups—including but not limited to already-too-powerful teacher unions.

For wherever one finds school districts and boards, one almost always finds unions equally determined to prevent digital learning from shrinking their ranks or weakening their power bases. In many places, they have secured legislation limiting the scope of digital learning or have written clauses into their contracts to counter its growth. More surreptitiously, they’ve ensured that class-size mandates (costly and dysfunctional as they are in the brick-and-mortar world) still apply to online schools.

Yet staffing arrangements—how many and what sorts of people, with what skills and training and compensation—will be dramatically different for online learning than for traditional schools, as Bryan and Emily Hassel explain in their chapter. With the proliferation of high-quality online content, solid instruction in the “basics” will eventually become “flat”—available anywhere globally (and likely at no charge). Meaning that, yes, fewer teachers will be needed. But also that their effectiveness will matter even more than it does today, as the quality of a teacher will affect learning outcomes for many more students.

Organizational Capacity 

When all the pay stubs are tallied, we find over 3 million teachers and umpteen more “support staff” working in what is today the nation’s second-largest industry. Yet education’s bulked-up employment has had essentially no effect on overall student achievement. Instead, the added HR heft has contributed to the bureaucratization, lethargy, and routinization of the K–12 enterprise, buttressing its rigid procedures, internal fiefdoms, and tendency toward compliance rather than innovation.

In order to see real jumps in student achievement, results-linked quality control of curricula, educators, and programs needs to look dramatically different.

In order to see real jumps in student achievement, results-linked quality control of curricula, educators, and programs needs to look dramatically different. Our current system is laden with input regulations like textbook mandates, certification requirements, and notches on teachers’ professional-development belts. None of these has been shown to improve student achievement (and some have actually been shown to hinder it). In the digital-learning era, these become even more dangerous tokens of “quality,” as they work to hamper innovation.

In fact, as an analysis in the volume finds, it should cost taxpayers fewer dollars to educate each pupil in the online world. As digital learning evolves, its costs are apt to drop further. Which is not to say that the choices, priority adjustments, and trade-offs associated with it are obvious or easy, only that we face a rare opportunity and—considering our fiscal circumstances—likely need to wean K-12 education from its cash habit.

Fundamental Structural Flaws

This education revolution cannot truly succeed under the customary arrangements for financing schools nor within our current governance system.

To learn more, download Education Reform for the Digital Era (available in pdf and e-book format).

Today we fund education via rigid and formulaic distribution, not paying for students or schools, much less for learning. But it doesn’t have to be this way. In his chapter, Paul T. Hill shows how we can leapfrog our customary system of school finance to fund education, not institutions; move money as students move; and pay for unconventional forms of instruction. This new model would offer parents a choice of whole-school providers while also affording them resources with which to purchase tutoring or enrichment programs, from advanced math classes to piano lessons.

Now consider our agricultural-era devotion to “local control” of public education and ask how this arrangement can possibly work well when the delivery system itself is unbounded by district, municipal, or even state borders.

To be sure, as Rick Hess points out in the book, public officials have an obligation to exert curricular quality control—for which they in turn are accountable to voters and taxpayers—and must safeguard minors from “virtual menaces.” But that is not the same as retaining local districts in control of digital learning.  Instead, a state-based model, like the one described by John E. Chubb in the volume, could provide the scale necessary to support research and development, to allow for flexible programming, and to extend the reach of top-rate teachers.

Whew! Reshape the financing and governance of public education? On top of new HR arrangements for teachers and improved quality control of content? Yes, it’s a tall order and a major reformulation of America’s education-reform agenda. It doesn’t erase the need for rigorous standards, tough accountability, vastly improved data systems, better teacher evaluations (and training, etc.), stronger school leaders, and much else that reformers have been struggling to bring about. But it says, in effect, that far more than those reforms are needed in order to bring U.S. public education into the modern era.

"This plan is aggressive," warned School District of Philadelphia Chief Academic Officer Penny Nixon at a Tuesday press conference announcing a massive reform of the city’s K-12 education. Good. Changes are desperately needed: Philly's public schools face massive deficits, declining enrollment, and rank among the worst of large urban school districts. Unfortunately, aggressive plans often entail mindless slashing of schools and headcount so that "business as usual" can continue elsewhere. To their credit, Philadelphia’s policy leaders—embodied in a board jointly appointed by the governor and mayor—are mostly resisting that fatal temptation. While forty of the district’s 249 schools would be closed by next fall, the goal is to bolster parental choice, prizing the development of "high-performing seats" wherever they can be found over protecting the legacy school district. Encouragingly, the district also plans to restructure employee benefits, saving $156 million of the projected $218 million deficit for next fiscal year. A proposed 7 percent reduction in per-pupil payments to charters is worrying, though. Still and all, the School Reform Commission deserves credit for making smart structural changes to the way Philly will operate in the future.

“Phila. School District plan includes restructing and school closings," by Kristen A. Graham, Philadelphia Inquirer, April 24, 2012.

A recent Hewlett Foundation study made the surprising discovery that computers are "capable of producing scores similar to human scores" when grading student essays. While no one's calling for R2D2 to teach freshman composition (even supporters acknowledge that computers can't evaluate high-level writing skills), Common Core English standards include an increased emphasis on persuasive writing that could drown teachers in essays that are time-consuming and costly to score. While critics are quick to dismiss the idea, educators should be eager to refine and advance technology that frees them to spend more time on other aspects of teaching.

President Obama met the 2012 National Teacher of the Year on Tuesday, and the White House highlighted all the State Teachers of the Year in an accompanying press release. These fine educators certainly deserve the spotlight—and the case of Massachusetts teacher champ Jason Breslow deserves particular attention. Only two weeks after learning of his award, Mr. Breslow, who taught math at a South Boston high school, lost his job because of his lack of seniority. As much as Mr. Breslow and his fellow honorees merit praise, the system they work in has earned much worse.

Three hundred U.S. school districts have turned to Disney over the last two years, not to book senior trips to Disney World, but for help running their schools. School districts have proven to be top clients for Disney's growing consulting business; while consultants have a history of providing schools Mickey Mouse advice at Richie Rich prices, it’s encouraging that districts are recognizing that they need to boost their customer service in the face of greater competition.

The other big education news in Philly shouldn’t overshadow an encouraging development for Catholic education. The Philadelphia Archdiocese announced on Monday that it will join an online clearinghouse with the district and charter schools to provide information about available city education options—and make standardized-test data available on that site. Embracing accountability and marketing performance may be just the recipe for saving America’s urban Catholic schools.

Is digital learning education's latest fad or its future? What fundamental changes to the ways we fund, staff, and govern American schools are necessary to fulfill the technology's potential? Will policy tweaks suffice or do we need a total system overhaul—and a big change in the reform priorities that can bring this about? Who will resist—and do their objections have merit? Fordham is bringing together experts on all aspects of education policy—from governance to finance to human capital—to examine how policymakers can make digital learning a transformative tool to improve American education...and weigh the dangers that lie ahead.

The panel featured the governance expertise of the Hoover Institution's John Chubb, insights into teaching's future from Bryan Hassel of Public Impact, analysis of the costs of online learning from the Parthenon Group's Eleanor Laurans, and the cautionary perspective of Emory University's Mark Bauerlein.

Is digital learning education's latest fad or its future? What fundamental changes to the ways we fund, staff, and govern American schools are necessary to fulfill the technology's potential? Will policy tweaks suffice or do we need a total system overhaul—and a big change in the reform priorities that can bring this about? Who will resist—and do their objections have merit? Fordham is bringing together experts on all aspects of education policy—from governance to finance to human capital—to examine how policymakers can make digital learning a transformative tool to improve American education...and weigh the dangers that lie ahead.

The panel featured the governance expertise of the Hoover Institution's John Chubb, insights into teaching's future from Bryan Hassel of Public Impact, analysis of the costs of online learning from the Parthenon Group's Eleanor Laurans, and the cautionary perspective of Emory University's Mark Bauerlein.

States experimenting with online learning—and struggling with how this new delivery system will alter such familiar practices as seat-time requirements—would be wise to check out recent doings in the Granite State. This book offers a tutorial. Since 2008-09, New Hampshire high school students have been able to work with educators to create personalized learning plans—with course credit awarded for mastery, not time in class. Such credits can be earned year round through internships, online courses, overseas travel, or brick-and-mortar classes. Mentor educators set course-competency guidelines (based on Webb’s Depth of Knowledge levels), track progress, and conduct final assessments. Authors Fred Bramante (former New Hampshire Board of Education chair) and Rose Colby (former principal) offer a deep dive into the NH model—explaining the expected benefits to this policy change, including cost savings, increased curricular offerings, and a lower drop-out rate. (Remarkably, New Hampshire has seen an almost 20 percentage-point decrease in its dropout rate since 2008.)  Still, there are a few gaps. Notably, the authors don’t duly justify the rigor of their quality-control metrics for ensuring true mastery—the lynchpin for ensuring that New Hampshire’s program hasn’t, and doesn’t, devolve into a weak-kneed credit-recovery program rather than a bona fide competency model. Policymakers and educators in the Granite State are still honing their system; let’s hope they place this keystone soon.

Fred Bramante and Rose Colby, "Off the Clock: Moving Education from Time to Competency" (Thousand Oaks, California: Corwin, 2012).

Before the real-estate bubble burst, there was a growing literature on the link between government regulation of housing and home prices. Tougher zoning restrictions, it seemed, drove up the cost of housing. This Brookings Institution report builds off this notion: Restrictive zoning regulations—such as those that limit the construction of high-rise apartments or other multi-family units in certain neighborhoods—not surprisingly create cities that are segregated by income and race. And that, in turn, produces unequal access to quality schools. By loosening or even eliminating restrictive zoning, cities may see housing-cost gaps narrow by as much as 63 percentage points and see school-achievement gaps narrow as a result, Rothwell writes. (In other words, less zoning results in less segregated neighborhoods, and less segregated schools.) In the meantime, district-choice plans, charter schools, and school vouchers can help offset the effects of zoning, the author argues. Unfortunately, in these tough economic times, districts are too often restricting school choice—by drawing tighter attendance zones around specialty schools or by denying bus service to them. That’s a poor way to save money. And if Rothwell teaches us anything, it’s that quality choices are still largely available only to those who can afford them—especially in cities with restrictive zoning.

Jonathan Rothwell, Housing Costs, Zoning, and Access to High-Scoring Schools (Washington, D.C.: Brookings Metropolitan Policy Program, April 2012).

Flashback to 2006: The struggling Hartford School District sheltered vast discrepancies in per-pupil spending from school to school due to its rigid funding structure. (Like most districts, Hartford funded schools based on inputs, like staff positions and materials.) In an effort to close such gaps (and improve accountability), in 2008 the district established a student-based budget (SBB) model—think weighted-student funding, which funds schools based on actual enrollments and pupils’ specific needs. This report from Public Impact evaluates the efficacy of this shift, based on school-budget data from 2004 to 2011 and principal interviews. Not only did SBB mean that schools received similar funding for similar students (the obvious goal), but principals also felt a greater sense of accountability and reported heightened transparency around school funding. (The redistributed dollars meant that 69 percent of schools received more funding under the new system, potentially coloring responses.) The results from Hartford’s SBB implementation have been mostly positive (in terms of redistribution of funds to needy students and upped accountability and transparency—Public Impact didn’t evaluate effects on student achievement). Still, drawbacks also exist: Hold harmless clauses, for example, keep schools with declining enrollment afloat; schools with fewer than 260 students remained eligible for an extra $265,000 annually. And about 30 percent of the budget consists of “special funding”—meaning that select schools (like magnets) get gobs more dollars. This report offers an interesting case study on SBB effectiveness—though a sober harbinger that weighted-student funding might not cure all our school-finance ills.

Achieve Hartford! and Public Impact, Funding a Better Education: Conclusions From the First Three Years of Student-Based Budgeting in Hartford (Chapel Hill, NC: Public Impact, 2012).