The Education Gadfly Weekly

This set of papers from Mass Insight may start the most honest conversation about school turnarounds to date: In order to fix failing schools, it reminds us, collective-bargaining agreements must be fundamentally redesigned. To that end, the report package provides useful guidelines as to how states, districts, unions, and advocates can negotiate and draft CBAs that advance turnaround efforts. It also identifies contract elements that must be bargained to clear room for turnaround success. For example, instead of CBAs that reward seniority and allow a centralized, inefficient authority to make all school-based decisions, the authors push for contracts in which key decisions are made by school leaders and staff in exchange for accountability. To attain this revamped CBA model, the authors outline several approaches to negotiation (e.g., “living contracts” and third-party facilitation) as well as suggestions for specific contract modifications. The report even provides sample language for model contracts. One interesting proposal (seen today in places like New Haven, CT) allows individual schools to amend their district-wide CBAs, exempting them from certain bureaucratic roadblocks, and allowing them to create their own contracts, to which their teachers voluntarily commit (they remain members of the local union, however). There’s much important information in the five short papers for districts seeking to gain turnaround traction.

Rebecca Weinberg, Michael Contompasis, Dalia Hochman, and Meredith Liu, “Negotiating for Change: Modifying Collective Bargaining Agreements for School Turnaround,” (Boston, MA: Mass Insight Education, June 2011).

When it comes to school funding, this latest Center for Education Policy survey report shovels more bad news onto the already massive mound. A sample of 450 districts finds that about 70 percent faced funding cuts in 2010-11; of those, 85 percent cut jobs for teachers or other staff. When asked what next year holds, 60 percent of districts expecting decreased revenues are planning layoffs in response. The survey also delves specifically into district management of federal stimulus dollars—and emerges with some disheartening results. Districts mostly spent their ARRA money on protecting fringe benefits and administrative staff while firing teachers in non-core subjects and slashing investments in technology and instructional materials. Further, “reform initiatives” suffered: Two-thirds of those with decreased funding also reined them in (though the authors never define what they include in those initiatives). Unfortunately, the survey’s format raises more questions than it answers, giving no sense of the depth of cuts or the scale of new investments. And forget about questions regarding productivity enhancement. Nearly every district will be affected by the funding cliff next year, but, from this survey, it’s hard to tell how many districts have retooled and cut baseline spending and how many are just laying off teachers and waiting out this financial storm.

ACT scores are increasingly popular criteria for college acceptance, and are often used—mainly through the ACT’s own “College and Career Readiness” reports—as gauges of college readiness. But how well do they really reflect student achievement in high school, and how well do they predict success in college? This NBER working paper separates the four subject tests that comprise the ACT composite score—mathematics, English, reading, and science. It finds that higher scores on the mathematics and English exams are correlated with higher high school and college GPAs and with lower college dropout rates, while reading and science scores provide virtually no predictive power regarding student success. (These findings are robust, even when controlling for student demographics, college majors, and the selectivity of the colleges that students attend.) Going further, the authors conclude that, in considering students’ composite ACT scores rather than their math and English scores, colleges are “undermatching” some students, meaning that selective colleges are not admitting the highest-performing students possible. The authors determine that, if colleges looked only at math and English scores, as many as 55 percent of students would attend different colleges without significantly disrupting the racial and gender distribution of students in those schools, and top colleges could reduce their dropout rates by 5 to 7 percent. This analysis is important; but look quizzically at its conclusions. Instead of explaining why the other subjects may be poor predictors of college success (science is deprioritized on college campuses and reading itself is a prerequisite for English), it recommends that only math and English composite scores be used in college admissions. A sad curricular narrowing that would be, indeed.

Eric P. Bettinger, Brent J. Evans, and Devin G. Pope, “Improving College Performance and Retention the Easy Way: Unpacking the ACT Exam,” (Cambridge, MA: National Bureau of Economic Research, June 2011).

Photo by Dermot O'Halloran

This past Monday, as the nation celebrated its 235th birthday, the National Education Association tallied another milestone—well, mile-pebble: It inched toward accepting student achievement as a legitimate marker of teacher performance. Yet, in its newly crafted policy statement, convention delegates added the caveats that all tests must be “developmentally appropriate” and “scientifically valid”—and that no test in place today meets this threshold. Some union watchers—like the Kremlin-watchers of old—detect an important shift. But don’t go gaga: The organization’s secretary-treasurer proclaimed that “NEA is and always will be opposed to high-stakes, test-driven evaluations.” Nor is the new policy statement binding on the union’s state and local affiliates. Some of these, notably Michigan, have already made clear that they want nothing to do with it. Fellow gadfly Mike Antonucci put it best: “You can add this to the list of things that NEA supports, but doesn’t really believe exist—like good charter schools, Republicans who support public education, and workers who freely choose not to join a union.”

This set of papers from Mass Insight may start the most honest conversation about school turnarounds to date: In order to fix failing schools, it reminds us, collective-bargaining agreements must be fundamentally redesigned. To that end, the report package provides useful guidelines as to how states, districts, unions, and advocates can negotiate and draft CBAs that advance turnaround efforts. It also identifies contract elements that must be bargained to clear room for turnaround success. For example, instead of CBAs that reward seniority and allow a centralized, inefficient authority to make all school-based decisions, the authors push for contracts in which key decisions are made by school leaders and staff in exchange for accountability. To attain this revamped CBA model, the authors outline several approaches to negotiation (e.g., “living contracts” and third-party facilitation) as well as suggestions for specific contract modifications. The report even provides sample language for model contracts. One interesting proposal (seen today in places like New Haven, CT) allows individual schools to amend their district-wide CBAs, exempting them from certain bureaucratic roadblocks, and allowing them to create their own contracts, to which their teachers voluntarily commit (they remain members of the local union, however). There’s much important information in the five short papers for districts seeking to gain turnaround traction.

Rebecca Weinberg, Michael Contompasis, Dalia Hochman, and Meredith Liu, “Negotiating for Change: Modifying Collective Bargaining Agreements for School Turnaround,” (Boston, MA: Mass Insight Education, June 2011).

When it comes to school funding, this latest Center for Education Policy survey report shovels more bad news onto the already massive mound. A sample of 450 districts finds that about 70 percent faced funding cuts in 2010-11; of those, 85 percent cut jobs for teachers or other staff. When asked what next year holds, 60 percent of districts expecting decreased revenues are planning layoffs in response. The survey also delves specifically into district management of federal stimulus dollars—and emerges with some disheartening results. Districts mostly spent their ARRA money on protecting fringe benefits and administrative staff while firing teachers in non-core subjects and slashing investments in technology and instructional materials. Further, “reform initiatives” suffered: Two-thirds of those with decreased funding also reined them in (though the authors never define what they include in those initiatives). Unfortunately, the survey’s format raises more questions than it answers, giving no sense of the depth of cuts or the scale of new investments. And forget about questions regarding productivity enhancement. Nearly every district will be affected by the funding cliff next year, but, from this survey, it’s hard to tell how many districts have retooled and cut baseline spending and how many are just laying off teachers and waiting out this financial storm.

ACT scores are increasingly popular criteria for college acceptance, and are often used—mainly through the ACT’s own “College and Career Readiness” reports—as gauges of college readiness. But how well do they really reflect student achievement in high school, and how well do they predict success in college? This NBER working paper separates the four subject tests that comprise the ACT composite score—mathematics, English, reading, and science. It finds that higher scores on the mathematics and English exams are correlated with higher high school and college GPAs and with lower college dropout rates, while reading and science scores provide virtually no predictive power regarding student success. (These findings are robust, even when controlling for student demographics, college majors, and the selectivity of the colleges that students attend.) Going further, the authors conclude that, in considering students’ composite ACT scores rather than their math and English scores, colleges are “undermatching” some students, meaning that selective colleges are not admitting the highest-performing students possible. The authors determine that, if colleges looked only at math and English scores, as many as 55 percent of students would attend different colleges without significantly disrupting the racial and gender distribution of students in those schools, and top colleges could reduce their dropout rates by 5 to 7 percent. This analysis is important; but look quizzically at its conclusions. Instead of explaining why the other subjects may be poor predictors of college success (science is deprioritized on college campuses and reading itself is a prerequisite for English), it recommends that only math and English composite scores be used in college admissions. A sad curricular narrowing that would be, indeed.

Eric P. Bettinger, Brent J. Evans, and Devin G. Pope, “Improving College Performance and Retention the Easy Way: Unpacking the ACT Exam,” (Cambridge, MA: National Bureau of Economic Research, June 2011).