The Education Gadfly Weekly

This new report from the “Broader/Bolder” coalition seeks to topple support for education reform—but, instead, collapses upon itself with straw-man arguments. Authors Elaine Weiss and Don Long lead their sundry mob of anti-reformers against the recent reforms in three urban centers: D.C., NYC, and Chicago. At nearly a hundred pages long and packed with all of the pitchforks and torches it could find, three main points stood out. First, they attack reforms for being more expensive than maintaining the status quo—which is akin to saying a new roof costs more than a leaky roof. Of course it does. Second, the authors try to use NAEP scores to prove that the reforms have been ineffective, reformers’ promises “unfulfilled.” The problem they can’t quite get around, however, is that in many cases, scores have gone up, including both math and reading scores in New York City and Chicago and math scores in D.C. And when scores didn’t go up, they stayed the same. Finally, the authors claim that reforms are bad because they’re “disruptive.” For example, they attack teacher accountability measures for increasing teacher turnover—which, when districts raise expectations, will clearly happen and is, in fact, the point (particularly if the right teachers decide to go elsewhere). The authors’ relentless aversion to disruption, in fact, seems to belie their organization’s purported taste for “boldness”—just as their call for more “patient” reforms contradicts their eagerness to point out reformers’ “unfulfilled promises.” The Broader/Bolder crowd once made a splash by arguing for school reform plus anti-poverty measures. Now it’s clear that they’re really just another anti-reform group out to defend the education status quo.

SOURCE: Elaine Weiss and Don Long, Market-oriented education reforms’ rhetoric trumps reality (Broader, Bolder Approach to Education, April 2013).

Mirroring trends in twelfth-grade NAEP scores in other subjects, this second round of economics assessments shows that U.S. high school seniors are, on the whole, no better versed in the subject than they were in 2006. While those scoring at or above “basic” did rise from 79 percent in 2006 to 82 percent in 2012, there were no gains at or above the “proficient” level; the gender gap remains from '06, with boys outscoring girls by six points on average (on a 300-point scale); and private school pupils still best their public school peers by sixteen points. On the better news front, as we have seen in other subjects, Hispanic students’ scores ticked up: Those at or above “basic” increased from 64 to 71 percent over the six-year period, probably because they’re also reading better. Despite the generally gloomy data presented here, it’s a good thing that NAEP continues to assess kids in subjects beyond English and math. To ensure a comprehensive, content-based curriculum for all, we must recognize that all core subjects matter—and monitor our students’ progress in learning them.

SOURCE: National Center for Education Statistics, The Nation’s Report Card: Economics 2012 (Washington, D.C.: Institute of Education Sciences, 2013).

Mike and MinnCAN’s Daniel Sellers talk Pearson, Common Core dustups, and the President’s pre-K proposal. Amber highlights funding disparities between district and charter schools.

Amber's Research Minute

Nearly two years ago, Achieve and the National Research Council (NRC), together with two dozen states, a handful of heavy-hitter foundations, and several other organizations, teamed up to develop a set of K–12, “next generation” science standards for states to consider for adoption. Their hope was to strengthen science education by setting clearer and more rigorous expectations than those that guide instruction in this crucial subject in most states today.

The NRC initiated the process by developing a “framework” (National Research Council’s Framework for K–12 Education) setting forth the “key ideas and practices in the natural sciences and engineering that all students should be familiar with by the time they graduate from high school.” The Achieve team then embarked on a long process of building K–12 standards based on and faithful to that framework. They released two public drafts, received comments, made revisions, and then, the week before last, unveiled the final version of these “Next Generation Science Standards” (NGSS).

States are being encouraged to embrace and adopt these standards—and it’s no secret that most would benefit from far stronger standards for science than those they’ve been using. (When Fordham reviewed state science standards last year, only six earned an A or A-minus. The average grade across all states was a low-C, and twenty-six states earned a D or worse.).

At the present time, however, we urge states considering NGSS to exercise caution and patience, for three reasons.

First, although the standards themselves are said to be final, Achieve has not yet completed or released some important ancillary documents. These are promised over the next month or so and will address both the alignment of NGSS with the “Common Core” ELA and math standards and a discussion of high school “course sequences” in science that could be crucial in determining the extent to which NGSS itself will sufficiently impart “college and career readiness.” While these documents are not expected to add any science content to the recently released standards, they will provide context for states about the overlap between the Common Core and the science expectations, and they will help articulate content and course expectations and requirements for high school students, including advanced STEM students. This is manifestly important for the entire country, and we hope the promised document does the job.

Second, regardless of the quality of the NGSS, a majority of states are already consumed by the challenges of Common Core implementation and will want to weigh how many big changes they can realistically undertake in their K–12 systems at the same time. States are still aligning curriculum to the ELA and math standards, assessments are in the early pilot phase, and much remains to be done by way of preparing both educators and the general public for the major changes that lie ahead. In short: States still have a long road to go to ensure full, smart implementation of their English language arts and math standards. And as yet, there is no clarity as to how or when curriculum or assessments may be developed to accompany the NGSS.

Finally, even at this early stage of Fordham’s review—now underway—of NGSS, it appears that the final version suffers from some of the same challenges that were evident in the first and second public drafts. Five concerns are paramount:

• Is crucial science content missing, especially at the high school level? “Crucial” for what, you may wonder—which is one reason to await Achieve’s document on course alignment, as there’s a big difference between asserting that NGSS is sufficient for a broadly educated high school graduate and stating that it does the job of preparing one for rigorous, college-level work in STEM subjects. It appears that NGSS doesn’t do the latter. We’re digging deeper.
• Are the expectations detailed enough to inform curriculum and assessment development? Or are there gaps that leave implicit critical science knowledge and content that should be explicitly enumerated in a set of rigorous K–12 science standards? And will the assessment limits, which are meant only to inform test development, actually serve to place a ceiling on curriculum and instruction?
• How well is NGSS aligned with the Common Core math and English language arts standards that most states have already embraced? At present, it’s simply impossible to say, though we hope that forthcoming documents answer that question.
• Does the systematic integration of science “practices” throughout NGSS have the (unintended, we presume) effect of constraining and distorting pedagogy by mandating classroom activities, rather than articulating student outcomes?
• Are controversial subjects dealt with in a fair and even-handed manner? (Early signs indicate that, while evolution is well covered, the NGSS treatment of “climate change” slips from content into policy advocacy.)

First impressions aren’t everything. We intend to provide a full review and appraisal of NGSS, as we did of the Common Core. That summary evaluation will be available about two weeks, after our reviewers can access the final NGSS appendices discussed above. (Those documents are reportedly slated for release in mid-May, which would mean our final evaluation would be ready by early June.) Finally, in order to help states weigh the pros and cons of NGSS adoption, we plan to provide some state-specific comparisons.

At the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, we strongly favor rigorous, accurate, content-rich, and user-friendly standards in every part of the core K–12 curriculum, most definitely including science, and we favor their thorough implementation. We’re also mindful that several states have done quite a good job of this on their own and that NGSS is therefore not the only possible alternative available to states seeking to replace weak standards with better ones. Hence, nobody need rush to judgment regarding NGSS (which, after all, took three years to create) and nobody should be talked (or pressured) into hasty decisions that they might later regret regarding so critical an element of American education.

Tennessee’s Achievement Schools District (ASD) is the latest character onstage in the most interesting act of contemporary education reform: structural changes in the governance and operation of public schools.

For eons, the plot was the same: the district owns and operates all public schools in a geographic area. The subplot, at least in urban America, was that most of those schools weren’t delivering on the promise of public education.

Chartering, which crept on stage in 1991, subtly but importantly showed that entities besides districts could run public schools—and often run them better. Soon thereafter, Michigan and Massachusetts, adding dimension to the character, showed that non-district entities could also authorize (approve, monitor, renew, close) public schools.

The district’s monopoly grip on public education was broken.

Over the past two decades, chartered schools got more and more stage time, breaking into nearly every state and growing to capture larger market shares in America’s cities: 10, 15, 20, 30 percent in some areas.

Then the plot added a new twist, as state departments of education were empowered to take over individual schools and even entire districts.

This didn’t go so well. State agencies didn’t know what to do with the schools and districts they took over. Low performance continued, and this character embarrassingly slunk offstage, at least in most performances.

But this role wasn’t a total loss. It provided more evidence that public schools could be operated, monitored, and governed in various ways.

We’ve not reached the end of the play yet (and may never), but so far the high point was swift post-Katrina expansion of Louisiana’s Recovery School District. This state-controlled body has the authority to take over low-performing schools and their facilities and close them, run them, or hand their operations to someone else. But it’s not the state education department. It’s a specialized entity, a sort of virtual district, answerable to the state.

Now the dominant force in New Orleans, with a hand in schools educating four of every five kids in the Crescent City, the RSD has been instrumental in fundamentally—and hopefully forever—changing our understanding of the delivery of public schooling.

No one is better positioned to understand and explain the arc of this story, reveal its complications, pick out its nuances, and suggest its possibilities than Nelson Smith. The original executive director of the D.C. Public Charter School Board, former president of the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools, current senior advisor to the National Association of Charter School Authorizers, and much more, Smith understands chartering and school governance inside and out.

So when a new character bounds onto the stage and you need an expert critic at your side to help make sense of it all, Nelson’s your guy.

This is why Fordham asked him to write the story of Tennessee’s relatively new Achievement School District (ASD), a semi-clone of the RSD. In this excellent short paper, Smith offers a combination of history, reporting, and analysis; it is straightforward, sober, but quite hopeful.

The reader walks away understanding not just the ASD’s struggles, vulnerabilities, and potential, but also its context. This is invaluable to those interested in dramatically improving urban schooling, but especially for those, like me, who are convinced that the traditional urban district structure should’ve been banished from the theater a long time ago.

The paper takes us through the history of structural school-improvement strategies, then describes the genesis of the ASD. Created in the Race-to-the-Top-application era to convince federal proposal-scorers that Tennessee was serious about its failing schools, the ASD was charged with, well, doing exactly that.

With powers similar to Louisiana’s RSD but different in important ways, Tennessee’s ASD can take over schools and run them or team up with third-party operators.

If you want details on how schools are made eligible for takeover or how they exit ASD control, you’ll get them.

More interesting to me, though, was learning how Chris Barbic—former superstar charter-network leader and first and current ASD head—shaped the new body through imaginative approaches to growth, operator recruitment, school matching, community engagement, human capital, and more. I’m a big Barbic fan, so I’m probably biased, but his success in landing superb school operators, expanding his portfolio slowly, and avoiding unnecessary fights is quite impressive.

At this point, I’m of the mind that the ASD/RSD model, though it is a giant leap in our evolving understanding of public school governance and operation, is not the long-term solution for what city kids need. Such bodies are designed to have a statewide reach, and their control of schools is meant to be temporary. I believe we need a new school-delivery and governance model that is city-specific and city-driven and that such a system should replace the district, not work around it. The RSD, in practice, is close to that, but the ongoing battle over local recapture of taken-over schools will continue until the district is permanently decommissioned.

But these are arguments at the margins. The RSD is infinitely superior to the failed urban district and, though the ASD is still the understudy, thanks to Barbic’s tutelage, we may soon see its name in lights.

A version of this piece originally appeared on Flypaper.

The multinational textbook-publisher-testing conglomerate named Pearson has been a fixture in this week’s education news. Most significantly, an error on its part led 2,700 New York City students to be told, erroneously, that they were ineligible for seats in the city’s gifted and talented programs.

Earlier this year, Mexico’s reform-minded president Enrique Peña-Nieto signed a bill establishing uniform standards for hiring teachers, merit-based promotions, and the infrastructure for a census of the country’s education system. Now, brandishing metal rods and sticks, a group of dissident teachers are busy blocking traffic and teaming up with armed vigilantes. Yikes.

In the latest chapters of the Common Core saga, Alabama lawmakers have tabled a bill to kick the standards out of the Heart of Dixie, while their fate is still up in the air in Indiana and in Michigan. The rhetoric of those opposed to the standards is getting goofy. Extreme leftist ideologies? Biometric technology to read students’ facial expressions? We thought April Fools’ Day was over.

After a two-year impasse, Hawaii—the state with the nation’s strongest teacher union—finally has a teacher contract that, among other things, bases half of teachers’ evaluations on student test scores and pay raises on those evaluations. And it came not a moment too soon, as the Aloha State has been at “high risk” of saying sayonara to its Race to the Top funding since 2011.

An ACT survey found that, while 89 percent of high school teachers believe the students who finished their courses were well or very well prepared for college-level work in their subjects, just 26 percent of college instructors believe the same. Houston, we have a problem.

Russ Whitehurst’s latest in Brookings’s fantastic “Chalkboard” blog underscores a clear and compelling point on teacher evaluations: Whether you are in favor or against “value-added” systems, such scores can only be tabulated for a very, very small fraction of teachers—10 percent, by his reckoning. We eagerly await Brookings’s forthcoming report on the topic.

This new report from the “Broader/Bolder” coalition seeks to topple support for education reform—but, instead, collapses upon itself with straw-man arguments. Authors Elaine Weiss and Don Long lead their sundry mob of anti-reformers against the recent reforms in three urban centers: D.C., NYC, and Chicago. At nearly a hundred pages long and packed with all of the pitchforks and torches it could find, three main points stood out. First, they attack reforms for being more expensive than maintaining the status quo—which is akin to saying a new roof costs more than a leaky roof. Of course it does. Second, the authors try to use NAEP scores to prove that the reforms have been ineffective, reformers’ promises “unfulfilled.” The problem they can’t quite get around, however, is that in many cases, scores have gone up, including both math and reading scores in New York City and Chicago and math scores in D.C. And when scores didn’t go up, they stayed the same. Finally, the authors claim that reforms are bad because they’re “disruptive.” For example, they attack teacher accountability measures for increasing teacher turnover—which, when districts raise expectations, will clearly happen and is, in fact, the point (particularly if the right teachers decide to go elsewhere). The authors’ relentless aversion to disruption, in fact, seems to belie their organization’s purported taste for “boldness”—just as their call for more “patient” reforms contradicts their eagerness to point out reformers’ “unfulfilled promises.” The Broader/Bolder crowd once made a splash by arguing for school reform plus anti-poverty measures. Now it’s clear that they’re really just another anti-reform group out to defend the education status quo.

SOURCE: Elaine Weiss and Don Long, Market-oriented education reforms’ rhetoric trumps reality (Broader, Bolder Approach to Education, April 2013).

Mirroring trends in twelfth-grade NAEP scores in other subjects, this second round of economics assessments shows that U.S. high school seniors are, on the whole, no better versed in the subject than they were in 2006. While those scoring at or above “basic” did rise from 79 percent in 2006 to 82 percent in 2012, there were no gains at or above the “proficient” level; the gender gap remains from '06, with boys outscoring girls by six points on average (on a 300-point scale); and private school pupils still best their public school peers by sixteen points. On the better news front, as we have seen in other subjects, Hispanic students’ scores ticked up: Those at or above “basic” increased from 64 to 71 percent over the six-year period, probably because they’re also reading better. Despite the generally gloomy data presented here, it’s a good thing that NAEP continues to assess kids in subjects beyond English and math. To ensure a comprehensive, content-based curriculum for all, we must recognize that all core subjects matter—and monitor our students’ progress in learning them.

SOURCE: National Center for Education Statistics, The Nation’s Report Card: Economics 2012 (Washington, D.C.: Institute of Education Sciences, 2013).