The Education Gadfly Weekly

“Planting healthy content seeds will lead to a bumper crop of good readers,” noted Fordham’s Peter Meyer eight moons ago in reference to second-year results from New York City’s Core Knowledge Language Arts (CKLA) pilot reading program. Year three results, released this week, are equally compelling. Some background: CKLA is meant, through early reading instruction and content-rich “read-alouds,” to introduce all students—low-income students specifically—to the “core” common knowledge needed to navigate society. The pilot reading program tracks 1,000 students in twenty low-income schools in the Big Apple. Ten of these are implementing E.D. Hirsch’s “core knowledge” pedagogy (which stresses nonfiction reading, content knowledge, and decoding skills) while the other ten (with like demographics) employ reading strategies of the “balanced literacy” sort. Besides tracking scores on pre- and post-tests, this study gathered teacher and administrator survey data and conducted site visits at four CKLA schools, confirming teachers’ fidelity to the Core Knowledge program. CKLA students across all studied grades (Kindergarten through second) boasted larger gains than their comparison-group peers, and students with lower base achievement saw larger gains. Core Knowledge had the greatest impact on Kindergarteners; fidelity to the program resulted in reading gains fivetimes greater than those experienced by students taught via other reading strategies. (Likewise, Core Knowledge students scored higher on science and social studies content-based tests than those using other reading strategies.) After three years of positive results—and New York State’s imminent implementation of the Common Core, which also favors Core Knowledge-like reading instruction—it might be time for the district to jettison its other strategies and programs for early reading instruction, at least in the schools that poor kids attend.

Research and Policy Support Group, Evaluating the NYC Core Knowledge Early Literacy Pilot: Year 3 Report (New York, NY: New York Department of Education, March 2012).

Last December’s PISA results released a cacophony of opinions, commentaries, and best-practice analyses on what America can learn from the world’s high achievers. This report from Australia’s Grattan Institute is a welcome melody amidst the clamor. It explores the key traits of four of the world’s highest-performing (and fastest-rising) education systems—Hong Kong, Korea, Shanghai, and Singapore—and explains what other countries (the U.S. included) might learn from them. The answer isn’t “more testing.” These high-achieving systems focus on strong teacher-induction and -mentoring programs, quality principal preparation, and school autonomy. They all have strong central curricula—the cornerstone to reforming teaching, according to the Hong Kong Education Bureau’s deputy secretary. Also notable is the acceptance of trade-offs in each system. Teachers in Shanghai, for example, spend much less time in the classroom—and more in lesson prep—than educators in most other nations. (For context, they spend nearly twenty fewer hours a week on instruction than U.S. teachers.) On the other hand, they teach about forty pupils per class. The report’s most trenchant addition to comparative-education literature, however, is perhaps its most obvious: The authors reason that the four systems excel not because of the policies they enact but because of how good they are at implementingthem in actual schools. Add this to your library of international comparative analyses—it’s well worth the citation. Ben Jensen, Amelie Hunter, Julie Sonnemann, and Tracey Burns, Catching Up: Learning from the Best School Systems in East Asia (Australia: Grattan Institute, 2012)

Several weeks back, Education First—a national education-policy and strategic-consulting firm—released the first of three reports intended to guide states through the challenges of implementing the Common Core. It focused exclusively on the existence of state implementation plans. Now the second report is out, co-penned by Education First and Achieve, and offering a useful if imperfect rubric and self-assessment tool to help states measure the quality of those plans. (The final installment will report on state progress towards meeting the benchmarks identified in this rubric.) The rubric describes the elements of “exemplary,” “strong,” “emerging,” and “inadequate” plans for state-level standards implementation in a number of realms. Among the most useful elements is an outline of “key instructional shifts” that ELA and math teachers will face as they begin to move instruction to the Common Core (which defines the differences between the CCSS and current state standards better than most of the current “crosswalk comparisons” available from states). And in the teacher-evaluation section, the authors make the important link between targeted professional-development activities and holding educators accountable for CCSS-aligned outcomes. All valuable. But not perfect. For example, the rubric specifically demands that states develop their own curriculum frameworks modeled after the CCSS in order for their plans to gain “exemplary” status. But given scarce resources, states may be better served developing such frameworks collaboratively—or piggybacking off others’ efforts. On balance, however, the rubric is a useful frame that can help guide state-level implementation planning. State policy leaders: Give it a thorough read. Education First and Achieve, Inc., Common Core State Standards Implementation Rubric and Self-Assessment Tool (Seattle, WA: Education First; Washington, D.C.: Achieve, Inc., March 2012)

Mike and the Heritage Foundation’s Lindsey Burke step outside to debate the place of climate science in standards and whether John Kline’s ESEA proposals stand a chance, while Amber looks at the relative merits of a four-day school week.

Amber's Research Minute

Does Shortening the School Week Impact Student Performance? Evidence from the Four-Day School Week - Download the PDF

Is there a racist behind every tree in the American education forest? That’s the spin a lot of people have given to last week’s massive trove of federal data on school discipline and sundry other topics. “Black students face more harsh discipline” headlined the New York Times. “Minority students face harsher punishments,” quoth the Associated Press. “An educational caste system” stormed the head of the country’s largest coalition of civil-rights groups.

The federal data (from 2009-10) cover a multitude of issues but what caught most eyes was the finding that black and Latino students are suspended or expelled from school in numbers greater than their shares of the overall pupil population. “The undeniable truth,” declared Education Secretary Arne Duncan, “is that the everyday educational experience for many students of color violates the principle of equity at the heart of the American promise.” Declaring that the new data paint “a very disturbing picture,” Assistant Secretary (for Civil Rights) Russlynn Ali proudly informed the media that her office has “launched 14 large-scale investigations into disparate discipline rates across the country.”

Ponder the phrase: disparate discipline rates. This arises from the doctrine of “disparate impact,” a sly phrase coined as a means of boosting civil rights in the realm of employment law. It means, in effect, that discrimination may be afoot—and enforcement called for—whenever a seemingly neutral or universal policy gives rise to disparities (by race, gender, etc.) in whatever benefit or harm that policy leads to. But it’s by no means limited to employment any longer. 

At the Education Department’s Office of Civil Rights (OCR), the enforcers hunt for disparities in sundry realms of education from college admissions to Advanced Placement course access, as well as discipline and more. If they find that something good or bad isn’t getting bestowed across the entire eligible population in proportion to the basic demographics of that population, they sense “disparate impact” at work, which is invariably accompanied by at least a hint that discrimination must be the cause of it.

Such hints swiftly get picked up, echoed, and amplified. That’s what Wade Henderson, CEO of the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, was about when he  thundered that the OCR data “points [sic] to mass and systemic discrimination in our public education system” and it’s the Education Department’s duty to “investigate school districts…and take appropriate enforcement action.”

Ms. Ali, one senses, also sees that as her duty.

The primordial problem with this whole line of analysis, of course, is that an infinity of good and bad things get unevenly distributed across populations for reasons that have absolutely nothing to do with the kinds of discrimination that are banned in our laws and Constitution. People who aren’t very smart are disproportionately rejected by the Princeton admissions office. People who aren’t very tall seldom make it onto varsity basketball teams. (It often appears that white and Asian students—pace Jeremy Lin—don’t either.) Those who can’t hear very well seldom play violin in the school orchestra. And on and on.

As for school discipline, there’s a reason for it. It’s to make naughty, disruptive, or disorderly kids behave or exit, both for their own good and for the good of the school as an educational institution. Enforcement ranges from keeping kids safe (from weapons and fighting, for example) to creating a calm, respectful atmosphere in which those who are serious about learning can study without disturbance. Discipline, in other words, isn’t only about those being disciplined. It’s even more important for everybody else.

Discipline, in other words, isn’t only about those being disciplined. It’s even more important for everybody else.

The Wall Street Journal’s invaluable editorial writer, Jason Riley, picked up on this in a perceptive March 10 column titled “What about the kids who behave?” “The Obama administration’s sympathies,” he wrote, “are with the knuckleheads who are disrupting class, not with the kids who are trying to get an education. But is racial parity in disciplinary outcomes more important than school safety? Going easy on the students who behave badly—especially in inner-city schools where the problem is pronounced—is an odd way of advancing black education and closing the learning gap. Black kids already tend to be stuck in dropout factories with the most inexperienced teachers. Must they be consigned to the most violent schools as well?”

Riley correctly added that data such as these create an even stronger argument for school choice—charters, vouchers, and more—to enable low-income families whose kids are serious students to escape intolerable schools for better ones. (Let’s hope Ms. Ali’s enforcers don’t bully the charter and private schools into disciplinary submission, too.) On some parts of the choice agenda—charters in particular—the Obama-Duncan administration has been positive. It’s been death on vouchers, though, even in inner-city Washington D.C., due in no small part to its pals in the teacher unions.

Apropos of which, another much-discussed pattern in the new OCR data is the presence of lesser-paid teachers in heavily minority schools. Again, the civil rights folk imply that this signals discrimination against black and brown kids. (“Give ‘em the cheap teachers.”) But in the real world it almost certainly stems from the fact that—as Riley noted—inner-city schools have, on average, less experienced teachers, hence teachers with relatively lower salaries. Why? Many reasons, of course, including the disruptive and insufficiently disciplined atmosphere in some such schools, but also because—thanks, once more, to the teacher unions—veteran instructors enjoy contractual provisions that allow them to choose their schools and for some reason (badly behaved students, perchance?) more than a few shun inner-city postings. We shall see whether Mr. Duncan and Ms. Ali manage to move teachers around against their will to overcome this particular “disparate impact.” (There’s a big loophole in the spending-comparability requirements of the Title I program which, if closed, would prod such re-assignments.) Or if they push hard against discipline policies aimed at keeping inner-city (and other) schools orderly enough that those who do teach in them will come back.

They’ll be under plenty of pressure to do that. At the UCLA-based Civil Rights Project, for example, long-time activist Gary Orfield is calling for “stepped-up enforcement actions by the Office for Civil Rights to respond to the stark disparities in discipline, not to mention the many other indicators of injustice and inequity. For example, the number of "disparate impact" interventions has been disappointing… OCR should actively investigate the pronounced disparities revealed by the data. Where unjustifiable policies are to blame, OCR should use its enforcement authority as well as technical assistance resources to spur schools and districts to replace the ineffective policies with less discriminatory ones.”

Expect much more of this sort of thing—and don’t be surprised if Ms. Ali is quietly soliciting it!

One more point. The OCR data themselves emerged from an overhauled version of a long-standing biennial survey of schools and districts serving about 85 percent of U.S. students. They’re self-reported, however, and susceptible to error and misinformation at every level. Examine closely the results for any given district or school and you’re apt to find stuff that doesn’t make sense on its face. Consider, for example, the absurdity of the Seattle Public Schools reporting that they spent just $323.53 per pupil on instructional-staff salaries in 2009—about $2,623.14 less than the neighboring Shoreline School District. It was probably a misplaced decimal point—but it made it into the national data set, the averages and, presumably, the “disparities.”

Is such information robust enough to sustain enforcement actions? It obviously is in the eyes of Orfield, Henderson and others. The prior question, however, is whether “disparate impact” is a reasonable basis for such actions in the first place. What if it is simply true—regrettable, but true—that some kids or groups of kids break school rules more often than others?

Fordham's latest report is a "how-to" guide for teacher compensation reform.

Pop quiz: Which school district is furthest ahead in designing and implementing a workable teacher evaluation system? Washington, D.C., with its IMPACT system? Denver, Colorado, with PRO-COMP? You’re getting warmer…

The correct answer, according to a brand-new paper from the Fordham Institute, is very likely the Harrison (CO) School District. Harrison is a high-poverty district of about 10,000 students near Colorado Springs. It has confronted the triple challenge of determining what elements are most valuable in a teacher’s overall performance (including but not limited to student growth on standardized tests), applying that determination to the district’s own teachers (all of them!), and then reshaping the teacher-salary system (with the teacher union’s assent!) to reward strong performance. Excellent teachers earn substantially more—and do so earlier in their careers—than their less effective peers.

Under the Harrison Plan, salaries for all teachers depend not on paper credentials or years spent in the classroom, but on what actually happens in their classrooms. “Step increases” based on longevity have been eliminated, as have cost of living raises. And professional development is tailored by evaluations to help teachers improve.

Harrison’s evaluation process is divided into two parts, with “performance” and “achievement” each representing half of a teacher’s overall score.

Performance is gauged via multiple observations of the teacher-in-action over the course of the school year. Some of these are conducted by the principal, others by external evaluators from other schools within Harrison. According to the report’s author, Superintendent Mike Miles, “All of the [observation] criteria are central to being an effective teacher. Who would disagree that preparation, use of data to inform instruction, quality instruction, and classroom environment are essential to being an effective teacher?"

Achievement is measured using student test results. The tests used depend on the grade level and academic subject. For example, state test results, results on the district’s quarterly exams, and scores on the district’s semester exams may each account for up to 25 percent (of the half that relates to achievement). The Harrison Plan is crafted to avoid putting too much emphasis on any one test. This means that state test results, for example, represent just one-eighth of a teacher’s overall evaluation. Student growth is what is mainly measured—and all test results used are norm-referenced or value-added. Finally, one-eighth of a teacher’s achievement score is tied to her school’s overall state rating, and one-eighth to progress toward a personal goal that she sets in concert with her supervisor. 

How does this work for subjects like art? The measurement for an elementary art teacher includes her students’ performance on the spring art project, results of the semester exams, and two art assessment sets, which include performance tasks. Art teachers face the same level of rigor in their evaluations as do the English and Math teachers.

When all is said and done, each Harrison teacher receives one of five ratings: Novice, Progressing, Proficient, Exemplary, and Master. Compensation rises with each rating gain and such gains, in turn, hinge on stronger performance and student achievement results. The district hopes to have more than 80 percent of its staff at the Proficient level or higher in the next few years. High-performing teachers in Harrison make more money faster than teachers in other Colorado districts. Down the road in Colorado Springs, for example, a new teacher takes about twelve years to reach $48,000, while in Harrison a strong performer can get there after just three years.

Note, though, that Harrison teachers receive little other money—no bonuses, stipends, or extra-duty pay, nor any increases tied to simple longevity or degrees earned. Compensation is based on performance, as are HR actions like professional development, probationary status, and dismissal decisions.

How much does this cost? The Harrison Plan was designed and implemented during a time when the district’s $107 million budget shrank by $12.5 million. The Daniels Fund in Colorado provided an $800,000 grant to develop the plan, but it’s designed to be self-sustaining—no need to seek new dollars—even as many of the district’s high-performing teachers see a spike in their salaries. According to Miles, “A pay-for-performance system cannot be sustainable if the plan is designed simply to provide teachers with more money.” The fact is, teacher pay is based on performance and in any given year some teachers will see a significant bump (up to $10,000), while others will not.

Miles, a former U.S. State Department diplomat and Army Ranger and current Broad Fellow, has led the Harrison district since 2006. Just two years into the implementation of the district’s pay-for-performance plan, he acknowledges that he can’t prove that it alone is driving Harrison’s successes. But successes there have been. For example, the district’s most recent average ACT scores were up two full points over the previous year; one elementary school’s third grade scored 100 percent proficient on Colorado’s state reading test.

Miles is adamant that raising student achievement can’t happen without excellent teachers—and that the district’s best teachers deserve the recognition and financial rewards that this plan offers. It also demonstrates that creating better teacher-evaluation systems is not as daunting as many think. In fact, Miles hopes that Harrison’s tale can “inspire others by our success and spare them the mistakes we made. While school districts vary widely and state laws differ, our philosophy is transferable and our approach is replicable.”

That hope is already beginning to be fulfilled, as such education eminences as Michelle Rhee and the National Council on Teacher Quality weigh in with accolades for the Harrison plan.

The chronicling of the Harrison Plan is an important contribution to the efforts underway in districts and states across the country to create high-quality teacher evaluation systems and rigorous teacher performance plans of their own. As Miles concludes,

At a time when districts are being prodded, incentivized, or forced to adopt pay-for-performance plans, we hope this ‘how-to’ guide will be a useful template that allows districts to seize the opportunity to recognize and reward teachers who are succeeding in the classroom.

Two weeks ago, when the House Education and the Workforce committee marked-up two major ESEA reauthorization bills, Democrats and their allies screamed bloody murder. Ranking member (and former chairman) George Miller called the bills “radical” and “highly partisan” and said they would “turn the clock back decades on equity and accountability.” A coalition of civil rights, education reform, and business groups said they amounted to a “rollback” of No Child Left Behind.

Perhaps Representative Miller and his allies are "conservatives" on education after all. Photo by George Miller.

Miller put forward his own bills, which most of the self-same groups quickly endorsed, and which, Miller argues, “eliminates inflexible and outdated provisions of No Child Left Behind and requires states and [districts] to adopt strong but flexible and achievable standards, assessments, and accountability reforms.”

So let’s see how Miller and company do at “eliminating inflexible and outdated provisions of NCLB” and requiring “strong but flexible” accountability systems. The package…

• Requires states to expect “all” students to reach college and career readiness eventually. (Didn’t we learn from NCLB that calling for “universal proficiency” merely pushes states to lower the bar?)
  
  
• Tightens the screws on NCLB’s “subgroup accountability,” requiring schools to hit targets on dozens of indicators in order to avoid stigmas and sanctions. (Why not let states develop new ways to ensure that vulnerable kids don’t get overlooked—but without all the complexity?)
  
  
• Makes failure even more likely by adding student growth and graduation rates to the mix (along with proficiency rates).
  
  
• Potentially subjects a high number of schools to federally prescribed interventions. Rather than restrict the proportion of schools that must face the strictest sanctions to 5 or 10 percent, as Lamar Alexander’s legislative package and the Administration’s own Blueprint do, the sky is once again the limit under the Miller approach.
  
  
• Micromanages the way that state accountability systems include students with disabilities, setting inflexible rules about how many students can take alternate assessments.
  
  
• Establishes an enormous unfunded mandate by requiring states to translate examinations for every language group of 10,000 students or more. In larger states, this could mean the development of dozens of new assessment formats.
  
  
• Penalizes school districts for doing more with less by keeping intact the “maintenance of effort” requirement—which substitutes Congress’s priorities over state legislatures’ and county councils’ when it comes to spending limited state/local resources.
  
  
• Mandates that states and districts redistribute “effective” teachers from middle class to poor schools, even though recent research indicates that the “teacher effectiveness gap” may not exist.
  
  
• Keeps in place the “Highly Qualified Teachers” mandate, even though its focus on paper credentials has been completely discredited.
  
  
• Creates or reinstates myriad pet programs that Congress has already defunded, often with support from the Obama Administration.

So if Republicans are “radical,” Miller and his allies must be “conservative” because they essentially want No Child Left Behind to stay the same.

John Kasich “begged” the Ohio Board of Education this week to support Cleveland Mayor Frank Jackson’s education overhaul plan. After the SB 5 disappointment, here's hoping the Ohio governor's softer approach can help make a promising policy come to pass, then last.

The Archdiocese of New York is responding to budget woes by rethinking how it governs its schools. Restructuring is just one of several ways to keep these vital institutions alive, but the nation’s public schools would do well to note the Church’s willingness to undertake education governance reform.

A bill to reconsider adoption of the Common Core standards died in Utah's legislature this week. We’ve always said that states should feel free to drop out of the common standards effort at any time. Still, we’re glad that the Beehive State—for now—didn’t.

Teens and twenty-somethings are increasingly risk-averse and sedentary, according to a recent New York Times op-ed. Is it just a lousy economy, or should schools shoulder some of the blame, perhaps for rewarding lassitude, discouraging competition, and shunning risk?

“Planting healthy content seeds will lead to a bumper crop of good readers,” noted Fordham’s Peter Meyer eight moons ago in reference to second-year results from New York City’s Core Knowledge Language Arts (CKLA) pilot reading program. Year three results, released this week, are equally compelling. Some background: CKLA is meant, through early reading instruction and content-rich “read-alouds,” to introduce all students—low-income students specifically—to the “core” common knowledge needed to navigate society. The pilot reading program tracks 1,000 students in twenty low-income schools in the Big Apple. Ten of these are implementing E.D. Hirsch’s “core knowledge” pedagogy (which stresses nonfiction reading, content knowledge, and decoding skills) while the other ten (with like demographics) employ reading strategies of the “balanced literacy” sort. Besides tracking scores on pre- and post-tests, this study gathered teacher and administrator survey data and conducted site visits at four CKLA schools, confirming teachers’ fidelity to the Core Knowledge program. CKLA students across all studied grades (Kindergarten through second) boasted larger gains than their comparison-group peers, and students with lower base achievement saw larger gains. Core Knowledge had the greatest impact on Kindergarteners; fidelity to the program resulted in reading gains fivetimes greater than those experienced by students taught via other reading strategies. (Likewise, Core Knowledge students scored higher on science and social studies content-based tests than those using other reading strategies.) After three years of positive results—and New York State’s imminent implementation of the Common Core, which also favors Core Knowledge-like reading instruction—it might be time for the district to jettison its other strategies and programs for early reading instruction, at least in the schools that poor kids attend.

Research and Policy Support Group, Evaluating the NYC Core Knowledge Early Literacy Pilot: Year 3 Report (New York, NY: New York Department of Education, March 2012).

Last December’s PISA results released a cacophony of opinions, commentaries, and best-practice analyses on what America can learn from the world’s high achievers. This report from Australia’s Grattan Institute is a welcome melody amidst the clamor. It explores the key traits of four of the world’s highest-performing (and fastest-rising) education systems—Hong Kong, Korea, Shanghai, and Singapore—and explains what other countries (the U.S. included) might learn from them. The answer isn’t “more testing.” These high-achieving systems focus on strong teacher-induction and -mentoring programs, quality principal preparation, and school autonomy. They all have strong central curricula—the cornerstone to reforming teaching, according to the Hong Kong Education Bureau’s deputy secretary. Also notable is the acceptance of trade-offs in each system. Teachers in Shanghai, for example, spend much less time in the classroom—and more in lesson prep—than educators in most other nations. (For context, they spend nearly twenty fewer hours a week on instruction than U.S. teachers.) On the other hand, they teach about forty pupils per class. The report’s most trenchant addition to comparative-education literature, however, is perhaps its most obvious: The authors reason that the four systems excel not because of the policies they enact but because of how good they are at implementingthem in actual schools. Add this to your library of international comparative analyses—it’s well worth the citation. Ben Jensen, Amelie Hunter, Julie Sonnemann, and Tracey Burns, Catching Up: Learning from the Best School Systems in East Asia (Australia: Grattan Institute, 2012)

Several weeks back, Education First—a national education-policy and strategic-consulting firm—released the first of three reports intended to guide states through the challenges of implementing the Common Core. It focused exclusively on the existence of state implementation plans. Now the second report is out, co-penned by Education First and Achieve, and offering a useful if imperfect rubric and self-assessment tool to help states measure the quality of those plans. (The final installment will report on state progress towards meeting the benchmarks identified in this rubric.) The rubric describes the elements of “exemplary,” “strong,” “emerging,” and “inadequate” plans for state-level standards implementation in a number of realms. Among the most useful elements is an outline of “key instructional shifts” that ELA and math teachers will face as they begin to move instruction to the Common Core (which defines the differences between the CCSS and current state standards better than most of the current “crosswalk comparisons” available from states). And in the teacher-evaluation section, the authors make the important link between targeted professional-development activities and holding educators accountable for CCSS-aligned outcomes. All valuable. But not perfect. For example, the rubric specifically demands that states develop their own curriculum frameworks modeled after the CCSS in order for their plans to gain “exemplary” status. But given scarce resources, states may be better served developing such frameworks collaboratively—or piggybacking off others’ efforts. On balance, however, the rubric is a useful frame that can help guide state-level implementation planning. State policy leaders: Give it a thorough read. Education First and Achieve, Inc., Common Core State Standards Implementation Rubric and Self-Assessment Tool (Seattle, WA: Education First; Washington, D.C.: Achieve, Inc., March 2012)