The Education Gadfly Weekly

In this report, ACT researchers show that “college and career readiness,” at least as defined by the ACT itself, is indeed an internationally competitive standard. (They speak of the level of preparation a student needs in order to succeed in a first-year, credit-bearing course at a two- or four-year institution.) To prove this point, researchers conducted a linking analysis of PISA scores for fifteen-year olds in reading and math and college and career readiness benchmark scores for fifteen-year-old tenth-graders taking ACT’s PLAN test. The purpose was to determine whether the standard of college readiness for U.S. students is competitive with those of other high performing nations. (In other words, if we succeed at getting our average student to college and career readiness, will we then be holding our own with the world’s academic leaders?) They find that the benchmarked scores in both reading and math fell within the average scores of most of the highest performing nations, and thus college and career readiness is in fact an internationally competitive standard. The researchers then unfortunately insinuate that, since the Common Core’s definition of college and career readiness was informed by that of the ACT, and the ACT and Common Core standards have been mapped onto one another, the Common Core standards are also internationally competitive. This conclusion might be true but it’s problematic on several levels: The ACT is attempting to compare assessment frameworks (ACT/PISA) with standards (Common Core); we don’t have tests, much less cut scores, for the Common Core yet; lots of folks (including Fordham) think that PISA leaves a lot to be desired, hence isn’t worthy of benchmarking; and ACT—though well respected in education—clearly has skin in the Common-Core game. Bottom line: this paper appears to be more about advocacy and self-promotion than research.

ACT, Inc., “Affirming the Goal: Is College and Career Readiness an Internationally Competitive Standard?” (Iowa City, Iowa: ACT, Inc., 2011).

A few months back, the Center on Reinventing Public Education (as part of an ED grant) assembled district, charter, and nonprofit leaders from public school “portfolio districts” for its Voluntary Public School Choice Directors Meeting. This paper offers an overview of the most pressing issues discussed at the two-day meeting—as well as some lessons pulled from it. Public school portfolio districts are those that offer students an array of diverse schools—from neighborhood to magnet to charter to contract schools—that are all held to account for performance. (Today, twenty urban districts qualify, including Denver, New York, Chicago, and New Orleans.) The paper focuses on five key issues discussed at the conference: how to manage the supply of schools, allocate resources, build fair and transparent enrollment systems, communicate effectively with parents, and invoke creative solutions for different learners. In order to frame each issue—and offer how-tos for dealing with each—panelist insights and best-practice case studies are presented. Panelists Tom DeWire from BCPS and Neil Dorosin of the Institute for Innovation in Public Schools explain, for example, how to build better assignment systems by first determining district priorities (magnet schools, socio-economic integration, geographic proximity, etc.) and then coordinating four streams of work: logistics, placement algorithm, parent communication, and system evaluation. One example of a best-practice case study comes out of Hartford, CT. The report explains Hartford’s tactics for parental communication—including community meetings and visits to libraries. Though much of this process seems straightforward, the interconnectivity of these elements makes fluid adoption of the portfolio approach difficult—and makes the lessons described in this paper all the more helpful.

Just weeks after Ed Sector’s “Portrait of School Improvement Grantees” comes this IES-funded report on the federal School Improvement Grants (SIGs). (For more information on SIG, look here and here.) While much of the information presented here mimics that delivered by Ed Sector, some valuable new insights emerge, especially regarding state differences. For example, Kentucky awarded funding to 105 of its 108 qualifying schools, while Illinois funded only ten of 738. Further, planned approaches to SIG evaluations vary dramatically between states. Eight plan to monitor their grants monthly, whereas thirty-three will do so on an annual basis. How states choose to evaluate their grantees range from conducting site visits, designating staff for monitoring, holding “check-in” meetings, and using electronic/online tools. As is common with many large-scale IES-funded reports, this report offers much data and little analysis, making policy implications difficult to determine. But the groundwork it lays—especially regarding state differences in funding distribution and implementation tactics—will surely provide helpful background and insight in future years as SIG begins to be evaluated.

Steven Hurlburt, Kerstin Carlson Le Floch, Susan Bowles Therriault, and Susan Cole, “Baseline Analysis of SIG Applications and SIG-Eligible and SIG-Awarded Schools,” (Washington, D.C.: American Institutes for Research, May 2011).

For the last couple of years—ever since the nation’s governors and state superintendents started working on common academic standards in reading and math—conservative education analysts have engaged in a spirited but polite debate about the wisdom of this development. The last month has seen the discourse turn nastier, with charges and counter-charges, name-calling, and quasi-apocalyptic warnings about federal bureaucrats wanting to “control your children’s minds.” Particularly at issue in this latest round of recriminations is Uncle Sam’s role in all of this; are we witnessing a federal take-over of our schools? A push for a federally-controlled national curriculum for all public schools?

Some of these concerns are not entirely unfounded; the Obama Administration and other supporters of the move to “common” national standards (Fordham among them) have made some unforced errors that have helped to fuel the paranoia. But for conservatives worried about federal interference in our schools, this debate is mostly a sideshow. What should really keep them up at night are the myriad proposals for reauthorizing the No Child Left Behind Act that would push Washington’s hand ever deeper into the day-to-day operations of America’s schools—proposals that are coming from both sides of the political aisle.

Before diving into the No Child Left Behind debate, let’s mitigate some key concerns about a “national curriculum” with a review of the facts.

The effort to get states to agree to common standards started well before the 2008 election, with the Council of Chief State School Officers and the National Governors Associations leading the charge, largely with support from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. A year later, Secretary of Education Arne Duncan and his team created a Race to the Top application (thanks to funds earmarked for the competition by Congress) that would incentivize the adoption of their preferred reforms, including common standards. Suddenly what started out as a state-led (and privately-supported) effort had become tinged with federal involvement.

Team Obama went even further, setting aside $350 million to fund the development of tests linked to the common standards. Now the feds had gotten into the “national testing” business, too.

Perhaps the most fateful decision came in the fall of 2010, when, faced with the prospect of leftover stimulus funds, Arne Duncan decided to hand out, to the two groups of states charged with creating the common tests, millions of extra dollars to develop teacher-friendly materials to be used to help students reach the new standards. Now it appeared that the U.S. Department of Education might be trying to control “curriculum” itself—something it is expressly prohibited from doing.

All of this left many conservatives—in think tanks but also on Capitol Hill—with a sour taste. And it didn’t help when the Shanker Institute—named after legendary teacher-union leader—released a manifesto that some read as calling for a single national curriculum.

So is this a federal plot to control Johnny’s thoughts? No, not really. Consider this: States learned last fall whether they had won the federal Race to the Top competition; two-thirds of the forty-four Common Core adopters did not. Those states are free to bail out of the common standards effort at any time, but they haven’t. Why not? Perhaps it’s because their leaders (including rock-solid governors like Chris Christie, Mitch Daniels, and Scott Walker) actually believe the standards are quite good, and see the value in being able to make comparisons across state lines.

Critics like Cato’s Neal McCluskey, who says that the “nationalizers” are like “kidnappers” demanding ransom, charge that the Obama Administration and others want to link federal funding to state adoption of the common standards and tests. Nobody is proposing that, nor would Congress ever go along. Nor does anyone seriously think the U.S. Department of Education would succeed in enforcing a single curriculum on the nation’s 100,000 public schools.

	There’s a better way. We at the Thomas B. Fordham Institute call it 'reform realism,' and it's an approach to federal policymaking based on a few commonsense principles.

What many groups are proposing, however, external to this raucous and distracting “national curriculum” debate, is to get the federal government intimately involved in other crucial aspects of our schools. That’s where McCluskey and his colleagues ought to be directing their ire.

The influential liberal organization The Education Trust, for example, wants to require that school districts redistribute their most effective teachers in order to give poor kids an equitable shot at good instructors. That sounds laudable on its face but would embroil the feds in virtually every school board’s decision around teacher pay, placement, and transfers.

Or take a look at what former Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings is proposing in her role as education advisor to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. She wants to cement in place all of the No Child Left Behind act’s onerous one-size-fits-all regulations for another decade, and then some, with greater intrusion into high schools and federal mandates around teacher evaluations.

There’s a better way. We at the Thomas B. Fordham Institute call it “reform realism,” and it’s an approach to federal policymaking based on a few commonsense principles. First, the federal government should be much “tighter” about what states expect students to know and be able to do, and much “looser” about how states (and districts and schools) get there. If states don’t want to participate in the common standards that’s fine, but they do need to demonstrate that they are aiming high enough. (Most states to date have aimed way too low.) Second, federal policy should focus on transparency instead of “accountability.” Empower states and local communities by releasing mounds of information about how schools are performing and how much they are spending. And then step away. And third, if the feds can’t help but promote a particular reform idea, they should do it through carrots (via competitive grant programs, like Race to the Top) rather than sticks (via new mandates).

In other words, we want a much smaller federal role in education—albeit one that ensures that the benchmarks we use to measure our schools are rigorous and trustworthy.

We might never see eye to eye with all conservatives about national standards and tests. But we should be able to agree about reining in Washington’s involvement in other aspects of education. How about we drop the infighting and spend some of our energy working together on that?

Photo by Fort Worth Squatch

When it comes to teacher evaluations, states have been making good progress in creating relevant, deliberate, and rigorous appraisal systems that combine test data, classroom observations, and other smart metrics to weigh teacher effectiveness. But have you ever heard of too much of a good thing? New York City is now developing over a dozen pre- and post-course standardized tests for students in elementary through high school, the scores of which will constitute 40 percent of teachers’ evaluations. These tests are for subjects and grades not currently assessed by the statewide Regents system, thereby addressing a serious data shortfall under the present system. Surely tying student results to teacher ratings is a swell idea. But testing overload, and the resulting testing backlash, are serious causes for concern; we worry that this initiative could be the straw the breaks the camel’s back. Experimentation and variation in teacher evaluation models is certainly in order, but this particular version gives us pause.

In the early 1990s, the National Endowment for the Humanities and Department of Education moved to create a set of national history standards, which ended up being controversial for their content and presentation of material. (NEH chairman Lynne Cheney, who helped launch and pay for this initiative, later called the resulting standards “grim and gloomy” because they favored political correctness over accurate historical presentation.) Could this happen again? A new group of experts (unnamed, as of yet) from eighteen states recently gathered to discuss common standards for social studies. And red flags are rightfully being raised. For starters, this initiative is not one borne of the states themselves—as were the ELA and math common-core standards. Further, this focus on the amorphous and interdisciplinary “social studies” is sure to block any disciplinary rigor or intellectual integrity from entering the would-be standards. As Lynne Munson of Common Core points out, the group’s “sole product so far is a one-sentence definition of social studies—so concerned with inclusiveness that it contains eleven commas.” If and when states come together to create smart and specific U.S. history, or economics, or world history, or civics standards, count Gadfly on board. But to these vague umbrella standards, he says, “Buzz off.”

In this report, ACT researchers show that “college and career readiness,” at least as defined by the ACT itself, is indeed an internationally competitive standard. (They speak of the level of preparation a student needs in order to succeed in a first-year, credit-bearing course at a two- or four-year institution.) To prove this point, researchers conducted a linking analysis of PISA scores for fifteen-year olds in reading and math and college and career readiness benchmark scores for fifteen-year-old tenth-graders taking ACT’s PLAN test. The purpose was to determine whether the standard of college readiness for U.S. students is competitive with those of other high performing nations. (In other words, if we succeed at getting our average student to college and career readiness, will we then be holding our own with the world’s academic leaders?) They find that the benchmarked scores in both reading and math fell within the average scores of most of the highest performing nations, and thus college and career readiness is in fact an internationally competitive standard. The researchers then unfortunately insinuate that, since the Common Core’s definition of college and career readiness was informed by that of the ACT, and the ACT and Common Core standards have been mapped onto one another, the Common Core standards are also internationally competitive. This conclusion might be true but it’s problematic on several levels: The ACT is attempting to compare assessment frameworks (ACT/PISA) with standards (Common Core); we don’t have tests, much less cut scores, for the Common Core yet; lots of folks (including Fordham) think that PISA leaves a lot to be desired, hence isn’t worthy of benchmarking; and ACT—though well respected in education—clearly has skin in the Common-Core game. Bottom line: this paper appears to be more about advocacy and self-promotion than research.

ACT, Inc., “Affirming the Goal: Is College and Career Readiness an Internationally Competitive Standard?” (Iowa City, Iowa: ACT, Inc., 2011).

A few months back, the Center on Reinventing Public Education (as part of an ED grant) assembled district, charter, and nonprofit leaders from public school “portfolio districts” for its Voluntary Public School Choice Directors Meeting. This paper offers an overview of the most pressing issues discussed at the two-day meeting—as well as some lessons pulled from it. Public school portfolio districts are those that offer students an array of diverse schools—from neighborhood to magnet to charter to contract schools—that are all held to account for performance. (Today, twenty urban districts qualify, including Denver, New York, Chicago, and New Orleans.) The paper focuses on five key issues discussed at the conference: how to manage the supply of schools, allocate resources, build fair and transparent enrollment systems, communicate effectively with parents, and invoke creative solutions for different learners. In order to frame each issue—and offer how-tos for dealing with each—panelist insights and best-practice case studies are presented. Panelists Tom DeWire from BCPS and Neil Dorosin of the Institute for Innovation in Public Schools explain, for example, how to build better assignment systems by first determining district priorities (magnet schools, socio-economic integration, geographic proximity, etc.) and then coordinating four streams of work: logistics, placement algorithm, parent communication, and system evaluation. One example of a best-practice case study comes out of Hartford, CT. The report explains Hartford’s tactics for parental communication—including community meetings and visits to libraries. Though much of this process seems straightforward, the interconnectivity of these elements makes fluid adoption of the portfolio approach difficult—and makes the lessons described in this paper all the more helpful.

Just weeks after Ed Sector’s “Portrait of School Improvement Grantees” comes this IES-funded report on the federal School Improvement Grants (SIGs). (For more information on SIG, look here and here.) While much of the information presented here mimics that delivered by Ed Sector, some valuable new insights emerge, especially regarding state differences. For example, Kentucky awarded funding to 105 of its 108 qualifying schools, while Illinois funded only ten of 738. Further, planned approaches to SIG evaluations vary dramatically between states. Eight plan to monitor their grants monthly, whereas thirty-three will do so on an annual basis. How states choose to evaluate their grantees range from conducting site visits, designating staff for monitoring, holding “check-in” meetings, and using electronic/online tools. As is common with many large-scale IES-funded reports, this report offers much data and little analysis, making policy implications difficult to determine. But the groundwork it lays—especially regarding state differences in funding distribution and implementation tactics—will surely provide helpful background and insight in future years as SIG begins to be evaluated.

Steven Hurlburt, Kerstin Carlson Le Floch, Susan Bowles Therriault, and Susan Cole, “Baseline Analysis of SIG Applications and SIG-Eligible and SIG-Awarded Schools,” (Washington, D.C.: American Institutes for Research, May 2011).