The Education Gadfly Weekly

The latest addition to the swelling chorus singing the tune that “governance is a major part of what’s wrong with American K–12 education” is University of Washington economist Katherine Baird, who has just published a perceptive and worthwhile book on how to harmonize our discordant school system. The author brings some unusual economics-style analysis to bear, including identification of the “two principal shortcomings” of today’s governance structure, which she dubs the “Principal-Agent Problem.” The “Principal” is “society as a whole, but parents and students in particular” (that is, those who benefit from the system), while the “Agent” is the mix of adult interests, structures, and organizations that run the system. The Agent is supposed to advance the interests of the Principal but mainly doesn’t, in part because the Agent has way too many levels, components, and competing interests. Baird’s remedy is to raise standards radically—national standards—and decentralize control of the system to the building level. (She insists that national standard-setting does not also require “the federal government to determine schools’ coursework, textbooks, hiring choices, or even instructional practices.”) There’s more to her analysis and prescription, of course, but the governance parts alone repay attention.

SOURCE: Katherine Baird, Trapped in Mediocrity: Why Our Schools Aren't World-class and What We Can Do About It (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, Inc., 2012).

That urban superintendents have short tenures—an average of three years—is well known in the education community. But little empirical research has been done to ascertain why or to determine whether this trend holds for suburban and rural supes, too. This study by Jason Grissom (Vanderbilt) and Stephanie Anderson (Washington University) seeks to do both. The authors analyze survey data (of both superintendents and school-board members taken during the 2005-06 school year), as well as administrative and student-achievement data for 100-plus randomly chosen California districts, to identify factors that predict whether superintendents will still be at their jobs three years later. Some of their findings—such as positive correlations between superintendent turnover and district poverty levels and between turnover and board-member dissatisfaction—are fairly intuitive. Others, however, are surprising: There was no significant relationship between turnover and student-achievement growth, for example. Further, district size was only associated with increased turnover in the biggest districts, with the largest 10 percent of districts averaging turnover rates 4.5 times higher than all others. Otherwise, turnover was no more likely in urban than rural districts. Nor does the study yield any evidence for the claim that superintendents generally move to districts with fewer disadvantaged students or higher academic achievement. As more attention is paid to the impact that district leaders have on student achievement, research of this stripe will become ever more relevant—and necessary.

SOURCE: Jason A. Grissom and Stephanie Andersen, “Why Superintendents Turn Over,” American Educational Research Journal 49, no. 6 (December 2012): 1146-1180.

This new paper adds another frigate to Richard Ingersoll’s flotilla of research papers on teacher turnover. Co-authored with Henry May, it spotlights the reasons why “qualified” math and science teachers—meaning those with a math or science degree—move to a new school or leave the profession. The authors analyzed data from the 2003-04 Schools and Staffing Survey (SASS) and the 2004-05 Teacher Follow-up Survey (TFS), unearthing some interesting findings. Contrary to popular wisdom, STEM teachers do not exit the profession at significantly higher rates than do educators of other subjects, nor do they seek non-education jobs at higher rates. Rather, they opt to remain within the education sector but in non-teaching roles, such as administration. That’s the good news. (Interesting sidebar: Though salary increases reduce turnover for science teachers, they have little effect on math-teacher attrition.) The bad news is that Ingersoll and May found higher attrition rates at high-poverty schools and those in urban areas because of their “organizational characteristics” (such as salary structure and teacher/faculty influence over school policies like student-performance standards, curriculum, and school-discipline policy). If policymakers want to get serious about keeping their math and science teachers around, fixing these organizational issues would seem to be the place to start.

SOURCE: Richard M. Ingersoll and Henry May, “The Magnitude, Destinations, and Determinants of Mathematics and Science Teacher Turnover.” Education Evaluation and Policy Analysis 34, no. 4 (2012): 435-464.

This policy brief by Nathan Levenson, Managing Director at the District Management Council and former superintendent of the Arlington (MA) Public Schools, offers informed advice to school districts seeking to provide a well-rounded, quality education to all children in a time of strained budgets. Levenson recommends three strategies:

1.     Prioritize both achievement and cost-efficiency.

Allocating scarce resources effectively means funding what works and obtaining ample information before making funding decisions, including information about what drives achievement—and drives  it cost-effectively.

2.     Make staffing decisions based on student needs, not adult preferences.

Districts should establish guidelines for what constitutes a full and fair workload for staff members, then staff accordingly. This may include “trading down” to less-expensive services of equivalent quality,  considering alternatives to maintaining class sizes, and closely monitoring insurance eligibility.

3.     Manage special education spending for better outcomes and greater cost-effectiveness.

How money is spent matters more than how much is spent; that’s true for special education, too. Districts can reduce their special-education costs by ensuring that all children read at grade level; hiring a few behaviorists in lieu of many paraprofessionals; and staffing according to service hours, rather than numbers of students served.

To learn more, download and read the full policy brief.

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

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

Finland—the tiny land of reindeer, snow, and saunas—burst onto the American education scene in the past decade as the unlikely poster child for the anti-reform movement. Hardly a week goes by that someone doesn’t implore reformers to learn from this nation with low poverty, high achievement, and virtually no standardized tests—and abandon our support for standards- and accountability-driven reform. After all, Finland’s education system today is characterized by few top-down regulations, broad teacher autonomy, and virtually no centralized accountability. Given its success on international assessments, it must follow that U.S. schools would do better if we copied the Finland model.

Finland: Land of reindeer, snow, and a world-famous education system. Photo from RukaKuusamo.com

Right?

Not exactly.

First, there has been some recent evidence that Finland’s successes may not be as miraculous as once thought (it slipped on the recent TIMSS math test). But more than that, to understand what is going on in Finland, a good place to start is with a November 2010 McKinsey study entitled, “How the world’s most improved school systems keep getting better.”

As part of their research, the McKinsey team studied twenty school systems around the world that had seen “significant, sustained, and widespread gains in student outcomes as measured by international and national assessments.” Among the most interesting findings of the report was the difference between the reforms needed to move a system from fair to good performance and the policies needed to support good systems working to become great. More specifically, systems moving from poor to fair rely far more heavily on policies that “tightly control teaching and learning processes from the center because minimizing variation across classrooms and schools is the core driver of performance improvement at this level.” Systems seeking to progress from good to great, by contrast, “provide only loose guidelines on teaching and learning processes because peer-led creativity and innovation inside schools becomes the core driver for raising performance at this level.”

What does that have to do with education reform in America? A lot, actually.

As the McKinsey study indicated, school systems that aren’t working very well don’t suddenly head for greatness by merely “trusting teachers” and loosening control and regulations. And Finland is no different. In fact, the autonomy and decentralization we see in Finland today came after more than two decades of tightly controlled, centrally driven education reform that systematically adjusted curriculum, pedagogy, teacher preparation, and accountability. It was only after this top-down systemic reform moved Finland from poor to good that its education leaders shifted to a more flexible approach. And so, as we look to emulate Finland, we should ask ourselves whether our state and district school systems more closely resemble the Finland of yesterday or today.

A brief history of education reform in Finland

In the 1960s, Finland’s education system looked far different. Achievement was uneven and not all students had equal access to quality schooling. In 1968, as part of a nationwide focus on better preparing students to compete in the knowledge economy, the Finnish Parliament enacted legislation to create a new basic education system built around development of a common “comprehensive” school for grades 1 through 9—a system that spread to every municipality in the land by 1977. Three things characterized the new Finnish standard:

1.      The development and adoption of a mandatory national curriculum that ensured all students were held to the same rigorous standards;

2.      Dramatic changes in teacher preparation and certification requirements; and

3.      A central state inspectorate that evaluated school-level teaching and learning.

National Curriculum

In order to ensure that every student was taught the same rigorous content, the central government (working with teachers) developed a national curriculum that was the cornerstone of the comprehensive school system—and that was for many years mandatory for all schools in that system. Cited in a 2010 OECD report, one high-level education administrator explained how challenging this move from a loosely governed system of independent schools to a system of government-run schools was.

…There were lots of municipalities that were not eager to reform their system, which is why it was important to have a legal mandate. This was a very big reform, very big and complicated for teachers accustomed to the old system. They were accustomed to teaching school with selected children and were simply not ready for a school system in which very clever children and not so clever children were in the same classes. It took several years, in some schools until the older teachers retired, for these reforms to be accepted.

That’s hardly the story of a reform system built on teacher autonomy and professionalism. Instead, it sounds a lot like the debates we are having right now over Common Core and state accountability systems.

Teacher Certification and Preparation

A critical part of Finnish school reform was a nationwide effort to improve teacher quality. Policymakers understood its importance in driving student achievement, and they invested heavily in it. In the early years, that investment included professional development aimed at existing teachers, but Finland also took the long view and expended even more effort on improving its talent pipeline. For instance, they made it far harder to get a teaching job: possession of a master’s degree is now a precondition of classroom employment.

But perhaps even more importantly, teacher education in Finland is strongly content driven. Even primary teachers majoring in education need to minor in at least two content areas—and their content-specific education is delivered not by the teacher-preparation program but by the relevant university content department. (A math minor, for instance, takes her math courses in the math department.)

Second, courses devoted to pedagogy are grounded in content as much as in theory. As the OECD report explains,

Traditional teacher preparation programmes too often treat good pedagogy as generic, assuming that good questioning skills, for example, are equally applicable to all subjects. Because teacher education in Finland is a shared responsibility between the teacher education faculty and the academic subject faculty, there is substantial attention to subject-specific pedagogy for prospective primary as well as upper-grade teachers.

This clear focus on ensuring that teachers are content experts is critical.

Emulating Finland

When one looks quickly at today’s Finnish education system without understanding its history, one sees a different story. That’s because the mid-1990s brought a considerable loosening of regulation by government. In particular, the national curriculum was pared down, becoming more of a guide than a script, and the inspectorate was eliminated, thus giving schools far more autonomy. The teacher certification and preparation reforms, however, remain strong as ever.

These changes represent an evolution. Yes, Finnish educators now enjoy broad autonomy over curriculum and instruction, and schools are largely self-governed. But this happened only after decades of reform aimed at raising standards for both students and teachers and ensuring that teachers had the capacity to thrive under a more decentralized system. Finland followed the McKinsey playbook, whether by design or not. When it had many struggling schools and teachers with weaker training, its reforms were characterized by tighter control with an emphasis on standards and outcomes. Once the teacher workforce—over more than two decades—was better prepared to teach the content articulated by the curriculum, and once student learning had improved, the state loosened its control.

More than that, though, Finnish leaders had the patience to see the reforms through. The national curriculum took five years to develop, and the teacher workforce took even longer to prepare. But the state didn’t waver from its resolve to get it right.

Ultimately, Finland’s success is built atop a series of hard choices, rigorously implemented. The closer you look, however, the more you realize that Finland’s approach works not because it is a universal template of success but, instead, because it is a Finnish solution to which they are committed. Americans shouldn’t be looking to slavishly copy these exact hard choices; rather, we should be looking to the spirit with which they were made and the Finns' resolve to see them through.

A version of this article appeared in Fordham’s Common Core Watch blog.

Are our national education-reform priorities cheating America's intellectually ablest girls and boys? Yes—and the consequence is a human-capital catastrophe for the United States. It's not as dramatic or abrupt as the fiscal cliff. But if we fail to pay attention, one day we'll be very sorry.

You don't have to search hard for evidence that teachers and school systems are neglecting gifted students. Photo by Krissy.Venosdale

In a recent New York Times column, I explained how America could benefit from more schools and classes geared toward motivated, high-potential students. Here, I want to look more deeply at why such initiatives are unfashionable, even taboo, among today's education reformers.

We'd like to believe that every teacher can do right by every child in each classroom. But let's be serious: How many of our three million–plus teachers are up to this challenge? The typical class is profoundly diverse in ability, motivation, and prior attainment. In most cases, instructors—under added pressure from state and federal accountability regimes—end up focusing on pupils below the "proficient" line, at the expense of their high achievers.

You don't have to search hard for evidence that teachers and school systems are neglecting gifted students. Take, for instance, our longstanding failure to get more than a few percent of U.S. students scoring at or above the National Assessment's "advanced" level—in any subject or grade level. Study the data showing how far our students' scores lag behind those of many competitor countries. Consider the ongoing need of high-tech employers to import highly educated personnel from abroad.

Then look at the unmet demand for "gifted and talented" schools and classrooms (and teachers suited to them). For many years, Washington's only sign of interest in this portion of the K–12 universe was the Jacob K. Javits Gifted and Talented Students Education Program. Since 2004, however, Congress has steadily decreased funding for the program; last year, that contribution dropped to $0. And despite plenty of evidence that America is failing to nurture its gifted students, the problem fails to awaken much interest from education leaders and philanthropists. Why is this so?

Consider these possible explanations.

First, there's nervousness about elitism. This is fed by the small percentages of low-income black and Hispanic youngsters in many gifted-and-talented classrooms and specialized schools. In reality, however, this underrepresentation reflects the education system's own failure to identify such kids and counsel them into a sufficiency of classrooms, schools, and programs—a failure that inevitably advantages upper-middle-class youngsters with pushy, well-educated, well-connected parents.

Second, there's the widespread belief—originating on the left but no longer confined there—that "equity" should be solely about income, minority status, handicapping conditions, and historical disenfranchisement. Most of American society does not seem to believe that giftedness constitutes a "special need" or that inattention to it violates some children's equal rights.

Third, there is a mistaken belief that high-ability youngsters will do fine, even if the education system makes no special provision for them. This mindset is particularly convenient in a time of budget crunches, when districts feel pressured enough just focusing on low-achieving kids at failing schools.

Fourth, the definition of "gifted" itself has been hazy. We have concrete numbers regarding kids who live in poverty or suffer from disabilities. We even know that 10 percent of the population is left-handed. But how many students are gifted? There's little agreement on this key point. Some people talk about "the talented tenth," others about the "top one percent." The Templeton Foundation is bent on finding the one person in a million (its own estimate) who qualifies as a genius. Meanwhile, some prefer to advance the woolly claim that everybody is gifted in some way—a notion that doesn't help matters, at least in policy circles.

Fifth, the field of gifted education lacks convincing research as to what works. My coauthor, education expert Jessica Hockett, and I became more aware of this problem when researching our recent book Exam Schools: Inside America's Most Selective Public High Schools. We found just two smallish studies focusing on the actual effectiveness of selective-admission public high schools. (Those two studies found scant advantage for the selective-admission schools.)

This means the burden of proof is now on such schools and their backers to generate data and analyses. In the past, these schools have been able to trade on reputations, friends in high places, and evidence of strong demand. Maybe that was sufficient yesterday, but not in today's world of rigorous evaluations and comparisons.

Sixth, whether due to elitism, angst, or a shortage of resources, the gifted-education world has been meek when it comes to lobbying and special pleading—not to mention heavier-handed political engagement, such as financial contributions and doorbell-ringing on behalf of friendly candidates.

Seventh, and finally, we return to bad ideas in Educatorland. I noted earlier the wishful proposition that "differentiated instruction" would magically enable every teacher to succeed with every kid in a mixed classroom. This is a close cousin of other false beliefs—for instance, that tracking, even ability grouping, is inherently pernicious; that competition is bad for kids; that selective admission should be forbidden in public schools; and that every opportunity should be open to every child regardless of actual preparedness, prior attainment, or other qualifications. Another culprit is the "multiple intelligences" claim that everyone learns differently and is surely gifted in some way, even if some forms of intelligence aren't reflected in test scores. One could easily extend this list of bad ideas.

Some are convinced that such ideas have merit. Of this, however, I'm certain: They rule our education system, and they are bad for gifted children. And those likeliest to be short-changed are poor kids and those without savvy, obsessive (and generally upper-middle-class) parents. There are too many bright students whose families don't have the information or means to navigate the system, prep their children for admission into gifted programs, lean on the political system, or, if need be, move to another district or into the private sector.

I'm not worried about my three granddaughters, all of whom (I will posit) have immense potential. Their parents can navigate this system and, if they need backup, my wife and I and sundry others are available for additional pushiness, navigation help, or resources. But how many millions of high-potential young people lack such supports and are therefore falling by the wayside? Today's education system is missing the motivation to find and counsel and push them, much less to do right by them in class, much less to provide them the additional help they may need outside school. If you stick with the "talented tenth" view of giftedness, we're talking about roughly 5.5 million school-age kids. How many of them do you suppose are currently being educated to the max?

Whose responsibility is it to tackle this problem? It's hard to picture many liberals getting worked up about the plight of smart kids—even those who are poor—for fear of being labeled elitists. For them, "lifting the floor" will continue to be the top education priority, along with micromanaging the system. Instead, conservatives should take up this cause, and Republicans should heed the advice of David Brooks:

What exactly happens to the ambitious kid in Akron at each stage of life in this new economy? What are the best ways to rouse ambition and open fields of opportunity? ... Let Democrats be the party of security, defending the 20th-century welfare state. Be the party that celebrates work and inflames enterprise. Use any tool, public or private, to help people transform their lives.

That ambitious kid in Akron—and millions more like her—are ready, willing, and able to transform their own lives; to benefit from America's long (but now waning) promise of upward mobility; and to boost the country's futures along the way. But they and their families can't do it on their own. For better and worse, it's our public education system that must serve as the primary engine of their advancement and opportunity—and it's conservatives who should press the system to take this responsibility as seriously as the education of children who can barely read.

It's morally correct. It's educationally sound. It's economically beneficial. And to paraphrase Henry Kissinger, it has the additional advantage of being politically shrewd. 

A version of this article appeared in Fordham’s Flypaper blog.

In the biggest non-surprise of 2012, the U.S. Department of Education rejected California’s request for an ESEA waiver after the Golden State refused to play by Arne Duncan’s rules (i.e., agreeing to the conditions he demanded) in return for greater flexibility. The next move is California’s—do we smell a lawsuit?

In Italy, where job prospects for the young are few and far between, the possibility of landing a rare teaching gig at a public school set off a frenzied rush of applicants. Their Education Ministry has not held certification exams since 1999 (citing budget concerns), opting instead to fill “vacancies with temporary hires, making aspiring teachers and unions furious.” This certainly puts our own problems in perspective.

Education leaders panicking over the Common Core’s shift to online assessments should print out, highlight, underline, and memorize this recent publication from Digital Learning Now!, the third in a series aimed at preparing schools for the Common Core and personalized digital learning. The paper provides two sets of recommendations: one for state and districts making the shift to Common Core and one for the state testing consortia building the assessments.

In a month characterized by tragedy and loss, the Foundation for Child Development provides us with a breath of fresh air: Child well-being, despite rising poverty, is up more than 5 percent since 2001. The improvements were “driven primarily by the children themselves”: They are less likely to do drugs or become parents themselves, and their educational attainment levels are higher. Now we need their educational achievement to match.

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

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

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

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

That urban superintendents have short tenures—an average of three years—is well known in the education community. But little empirical research has been done to ascertain why or to determine whether this trend holds for suburban and rural supes, too. This study by Jason Grissom (Vanderbilt) and Stephanie Anderson (Washington University) seeks to do both. The authors analyze survey data (of both superintendents and school-board members taken during the 2005-06 school year), as well as administrative and student-achievement data for 100-plus randomly chosen California districts, to identify factors that predict whether superintendents will still be at their jobs three years later. Some of their findings—such as positive correlations between superintendent turnover and district poverty levels and between turnover and board-member dissatisfaction—are fairly intuitive. Others, however, are surprising: There was no significant relationship between turnover and student-achievement growth, for example. Further, district size was only associated with increased turnover in the biggest districts, with the largest 10 percent of districts averaging turnover rates 4.5 times higher than all others. Otherwise, turnover was no more likely in urban than rural districts. Nor does the study yield any evidence for the claim that superintendents generally move to districts with fewer disadvantaged students or higher academic achievement. As more attention is paid to the impact that district leaders have on student achievement, research of this stripe will become ever more relevant—and necessary.

SOURCE: Jason A. Grissom and Stephanie Andersen, “Why Superintendents Turn Over,” American Educational Research Journal 49, no. 6 (December 2012): 1146-1180.

This new paper adds another frigate to Richard Ingersoll’s flotilla of research papers on teacher turnover. Co-authored with Henry May, it spotlights the reasons why “qualified” math and science teachers—meaning those with a math or science degree—move to a new school or leave the profession. The authors analyzed data from the 2003-04 Schools and Staffing Survey (SASS) and the 2004-05 Teacher Follow-up Survey (TFS), unearthing some interesting findings. Contrary to popular wisdom, STEM teachers do not exit the profession at significantly higher rates than do educators of other subjects, nor do they seek non-education jobs at higher rates. Rather, they opt to remain within the education sector but in non-teaching roles, such as administration. That’s the good news. (Interesting sidebar: Though salary increases reduce turnover for science teachers, they have little effect on math-teacher attrition.) The bad news is that Ingersoll and May found higher attrition rates at high-poverty schools and those in urban areas because of their “organizational characteristics” (such as salary structure and teacher/faculty influence over school policies like student-performance standards, curriculum, and school-discipline policy). If policymakers want to get serious about keeping their math and science teachers around, fixing these organizational issues would seem to be the place to start.

SOURCE: Richard M. Ingersoll and Henry May, “The Magnitude, Destinations, and Determinants of Mathematics and Science Teacher Turnover.” Education Evaluation and Policy Analysis 34, no. 4 (2012): 435-464.

The latest addition to the swelling chorus singing the tune that “governance is a major part of what’s wrong with American K–12 education” is University of Washington economist Katherine Baird, who has just published a perceptive and worthwhile book on how to harmonize our discordant school system. The author brings some unusual economics-style analysis to bear, including identification of the “two principal shortcomings” of today’s governance structure, which she dubs the “Principal-Agent Problem.” The “Principal” is “society as a whole, but parents and students in particular” (that is, those who benefit from the system), while the “Agent” is the mix of adult interests, structures, and organizations that run the system. The Agent is supposed to advance the interests of the Principal but mainly doesn’t, in part because the Agent has way too many levels, components, and competing interests. Baird’s remedy is to raise standards radically—national standards—and decentralize control of the system to the building level. (She insists that national standard-setting does not also require “the federal government to determine schools’ coursework, textbooks, hiring choices, or even instructional practices.”) There’s more to her analysis and prescription, of course, but the governance parts alone repay attention.

SOURCE: Katherine Baird, Trapped in Mediocrity: Why Our Schools Aren't World-class and What We Can Do About It (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, Inc., 2012).