The Education Gadfly Weekly

Melissa Roderick, Jenny Nagaoka, Elaine Allensworth
Consortium on Chicago School Research
March 2008

Ed reformers sweat buckets over the achievement gap, but they pay less attention to the so-called "social capital gap" between those who are prepared to negotiate the winding path to higher education and those who aren't. This report suggests that many more high school graduates would make it to four-year colleges if only they had a little more basic, logistical assistance (in Chicago, at least). CCSR used data from their own survey and from Chicago Public Schools' postsecondary tracking system to examine "whether CPS students who aspire to four-year colleges are effectively participating in the college search and application process." What they found is disappointing but not too disheartening when one considers how relatively simple are the solutions. For instance, "the single most consistent predictor of whether students took steps toward college enrollment was whether their teachers reported that their high school had a strong college climate." Ordering some Ivy League pennants is no cure-all, but surely imbuing a school with a college-prep culture is easier than, say, overhauling its teaching corps or revamping its curriculum. (Educators looking for a model might visit a KIPP school.) The study also reveals that "Students who reported completing a FAFSA [i.e., the federal government's application for financial aid] by May... were more than 50 percent more likely to enroll than students who had not completed a FAFSA." This even after the authors controlled for differences in students' qualifications and support from teachers, counselors, and parents. One imagines this would be another relatively easy fix. Lots of ed research is so abstract and forward-looking that it's not likely to spur anyone to immediate action, but this report should. Read it here.

The Forum for Education and Democracy
April 2008

On the 25th anniversary of A Nation at Risk, this report berates current federal education policy, à la NCLB, for causing a backslide in academic progress. Yet its proposals are all Back to the Future. The authors of the report want a lot more money--they suggest pouring an additional $29 billion per year into public schools--even though there's no evidence that this will improve student learning. They bemoan the "federal strategy of attempting to improve schools through mandates and sanctions" and complain that "we have demanded results without transforming schooling." We should, it suggests, move from an accountability-based system to one focused more on equity and opportunity. That is, the report's authors believe the federal government ought to provide money without demanding increased student achievement. If that prescription sounds familiar, that's because we already tried it for decades, and it didn't work. If you must, read the report here. Even better, read this statement--drafted by Education Trust and other civil rights groups and signed by Fordham and many others--reaffirming A Nation at Risk's call for higher standards, here.

The benefits of a value-added approach to school accountability, one that measures the test-score gains of individual students from year-to-year, is that it doesn't unfairly penalize schools that enroll large numbers of disadvantaged students. But it has drawbacks. Take, for example, the news that Cincinnati Public Schools may, now that Ohio has instituted value-added as part of its system, be judged "effective," which is the second-highest of the Buckeye State's five-tiered rating system. Even though CPS graduates students whose test scores are far lower than those of pupils in a nearby suburban district, the two systems could be judged equal. On one hand, CPS might be doing fine work, but on the other hand, most students who leave with CPS diplomas are by no means prepared to go on to college or fill a demanding job. An "effective" label thus gives a "false positive" to the community and education leaders that all is well, when it's not. Reauthorizers, take note.

"Could CPS rank ‘effective'?," by Ben Fischer, The Cincinnati Enquirer, April 26, 2008 

In the Big Apple, teachers who are "excessed"--i.e., replaced with teachers deemed more effective by principals--are put into an "Absent Teacher Reserve," which currently houses some 600 educators, all of whom receive full salaries and benefits and cost the city $81 million this year. To be clear: These 600 teachers are paid for doing nothing. Most school leaders don't want them, and a new report found that half of them had not even applied for any teaching vacancies through New York's online system. Now, wisely, the city wants to begin laying off those who for twelve months or more have languished in the Reserve, working on screenplays and playing Tetris on their iPhones. United Federation of Teachers boss Randi Weingarten is predictably outraged, claiming that "the D.O.E. is abdicating its responsibility to help the teachers who, through no fault of their own, have lost their positions." The statement defies all logic. Two-hundred miles south, opponents of a new D.C. agreement, which gives Schools Chancellor Michelle Rhee power to reassign teachers at schools slated to close, are similarly off-base when they complain that it deprives educators at shuttering schools of the so-called "right" to follow transferring students. Do principals have no "right" to choose their own staffs? Do students have no "right" to competent teachers in their classrooms?

"$81 Million for Reserve of Teachers," by Jennifer Medina, New York Times, April 29, 2008

"Rhee Gets Say Over Teacher Transfers," by V. Dion Haynes, Washington Post, April 29, 2008

Life gives you lemons, make lemonade. Life gives you students, make them teachers. That, at least, is the innovative policy used by Chalfonts school, in the U.K., which has dealt with teacher shortages by paying 16-, 17-, and 18-year-olds $10 for each 50-minute class they teach. Generally, the older pupils teach classes of 11- to 16-year-olds. According to The Guardian, "John Bangs, head of education for the National Union of Teachers, said there was ‘every argument for older pupils to mentor younger ones,' but they should not be used as ‘quasi-suppy staff.'" Yes--Gadfly actually agrees with the union on this one. It's unfortunate that Jonathan Clarke, Chalfonts's vice principal, has a staff shortage, and it's too bad that, as he says, his student teachers are actually better than the supply teachers he occasionally receives. But allowing untrained 16-year-olds to teach class is simply a recipe for sour lemonade and uneducated youngsters.

"School pays pupils to fill teaching gaps," by Jessica Shepherd, The Guardian, April 29, 2008

The requirement that states disaggregate test-score results by race is one feature of No Child Left Behind that receives near-universal praise. So dividing the data focuses communities on closing the achievement gap, for example, and it doesn't allow shiny test-score averages to hide the poor performance of particular student subgroups. But such a race-based approach has its problems, nonetheless, and it now appears that NCLB's chickens are coming home to roost. That's the inescapable conclusion from a recent exposé by the Sacramento Bee, which found 80 cases in California in which schools "got out of trouble" with NCLB by reclassifying the racial identity of their students. Will C. Wood Middle School Principal Jim Wong, for instance, had his staff ask the parents of four mixed-race children for permission to identify the youngsters as Caucasian. "You get a kid that's half black, half white. What are you going to put him down as?" Wong said. "If one kid makes the difference and I can go white, that gets me out of trouble." Wong's methods aren't admirable, they're even cynical, but he's undeniably responding to the incentives that NCLB provides. It's time to transcend NCLB's focus on race with a new focus on the performance of individual students.

"Schools reclassify students, pass test under federal law," by Laurel Rosenhall and Phillip Reese, Sacramento Bee, April 27, 2008

An essay that every high-school freshman should be required to read but isn't is "Politics and the English Language" by George Orwell. It begins with this line: "Most people who bother with the matter at all would admit that the English language is in a bad way, but it is generally assumed that we cannot by conscious action do anything about it."

So it was in 1946, and so it is today and worse. Most people now do most of their writing in emails, and so, we learn, various email formatting (a disdain for capitalization, an explosion of exclamation marks) will creep and be seamlessly integrated into other prose forums. Text-messaging students are already inserting emoticons--i.e., smiley faces, frowny faces, and other pictures that express generally the emotions that words might specifically--into their schoolwork. It is not unheard of to read in eighth-grade papers that "Plato lived b4 Aristotle."

Conventional wisdom holds that this slide is inevitable because language shapes itself. We don't shape it.

That claim is dubious and has also been around since at least 1946, when Orwell made mincemeat of it. He wrote that "an effect can become a cause, reinforcing the original cause and producing the same effect in an intensified form." The English language "becomes ugly and inaccurate because our thoughts are foolish, but the slovenliness of our language makes it easier for us to have foolish thoughts."

An example of this popped up the other day in the Wall Street Journal. Eric Gibson, the paper's Leisure & Arts features editor, wrote about the Whitney Biennial, a highly anticipated and roundly criticized art show. This go-round, however, derision was "directed at the exhibition's accompanying commentary instead of the art itself." The curators' descriptions were "widely (and accurately) dismissed as unalloyed gibberish."

For readers who didn't attend, Gibson offered some of the Biennial's most luscious fruits of bad writing ("...invents puzzles out of nonsequiturs to seek congruence in seemingly incongruous situations, whether visual or spatial...") and yearned for the time when art criticism and art writing were lucid and informative. He wrote, "It was Marcel Duchamp who unwittingly launched art criticism on its current path of willful obscurantism. His ‘Readymade' art--mass-produced commercial objects (most famously a urinal) that the artist removed from everyday utilitarian contexts and displayed in a museum--almost required this development."

A better portrayal of Orwell's wisdom would be hard to find. An effect (lousy writing about art) becomes a cause (new art fulfills the expectations of the lousy writing about it), and the two now-indistinguishable elements reinforce one another until walking into a gallery becomes about as enjoyable as listening to smooth jazz. And to think the whole thing began as an aesthetic enterprise!

A better portrayal of Orwell's wisdom would be hard to find, indeed, unless one chose to search for it in America's k-12 schools, where a dearth of knowledge and ideas and a muddle of obscure sentences have been roundly reinvigorating each other's awfulness for quite some time. (Will Fitzhugh, founder of the Concord Review, has long made this argument.)

It's true that the 2007 NAEP writing scores of both eighth and twelfth graders are better than the 2002 scores of those groups. But anyone who puts much stock in that test shouldn't--that much of use can be gleaned from subjective, rubric-based evaluations, by sundry different evaluators, of written material is unlikely--and those who insist will be disappointed to know that while marks are rising, still just 33 percent of eighth graders and 24 percent of twelfth graders were judged "proficient" on the 2007 exam.

The few good writers to emerge from k-12 will enter college and have the life drained from their papers by professors who require that they contain sentences fit for the Whitney Biennial. Thus, lots of American college graduates neither think nor write clearly.

And yet, there is hope: Orwell believed "that the process is reversible." But the remedy requires recognition of the problem. In k-12, districts and states should therefore realize that strong writers develop usually after reading the work of the strongest writers and by writing frequently themselves, neither of which pursuits is widely practiced in public schools where bland textbooks dominate and essay tests are verboten.

Simply put, this has to change, because a nation of uninspired writers will beget a nation of uninspired thinkers.

Gadfly has generally supported experiments that pay students for good attendance or test scores. And Baltimore's "Stocks in the Future," which gives middle school students up to $80 to invest in the stock market and lets them keep their earnings, is a model of what smart pay-pupils-for-performance programs should look like. It not only dangles dollars in front of youngsters, but it uses the money to spur interest in the material being taught--those who spend more time studying the ins and outs of Wall Street will learn more and have a better shot at making more money, too. What's key is that Baltimore is not inserting, willy-nilly, a monetary incentive where one may be inappropriate, or where it may undermine other positive incentives that already exist. Some ill-conceived student-pay programs do those things. But by tying dollars to economics education, or by, for example, rewarding improved English test scores with free books, schools use incentives wisely. Seems like an idea worth putting stock in.  

"Schools Use Cash as an Incentive to Boost Attendance and Scores," by Sean J. Miller, Christian Science Monitor, April 29, 2008

Like Goldilocks's search for the perfectly sized chair in the classic children's fable, educators have long sought the perfectly sized school.

Some have pushed for tiny schools. Ohio's KnowledgeWorks Foundation, for example, recommended in its 2002 report Dollars and Sense: The Cost Effectiveness of Small Schools the creation of public high schools with a mere 200 students and elementary schools with 100 students (see here). The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation famously invested millions to start new, small high schools and break large ones into miniature units.

Results, however, have not inspired awe, and so the critics of small size as an instructional aid remain unconvinced. Fordham board member Diane Ravitch has long noted the limitations of smaller schools, especially that such schools are not able to offer a bountiful buffet of courses. Her critiques are well worth considering, and one can consider away here, here, and here.
 
But schools with fewer students have their benefits. One of the selling points for charter schools is that, because they are generally smaller than traditional district schools, they provide both a safer and more nurturing environment for students. Nationally, the average charter school enrolls about 560 students while the traditional district school has about 900. Studies indicate that teachers and principals in charters report fewer safety problems and that many good charters have the feel of a "community" or "family." Achieving such environments is undeniably easier when schools (or units within a school) are not megalopolises.  

In Ohio, where we have hands-on experience with charters as a sponsor (a.k.a., authorizer), school-size data pose the question of whether charter schools can be too small. More than half of Ohio's 314 charters serve fewer than 150 children and 75 percent serve fewer than 300. The Buckeye State is also home to a handful of enormous charters (many of them "virtual" schools), meaning that nearly half of all state charter outlays go to the 40 largest schools, while 154 charters have operating budgets of less than $1 million a year.

From a financial perspective, size matters. The Ohio School Facilities Commission, for example, will fund no buildings for traditional school districts that enroll fewer than 350 pupils. And Moody's Investors Service, dealing with national data, concludes that effectively funding charter school facilities requires at least 300-500 students, a number it called "an important threshold, because below this figure, the loss of even a few students can negatively impact debt-service coverage."

Charter schools in most states receive no facilities funding. Twelve of the seventeen states we examined in our 2005 charter-school finance study offered no facilities funding to their charter schools, and only the District of Columbia sought parity with district schools. Charters must therefore cover their facility costs from their operating budgets, which on average are at least 20 percent smaller than district school budgets. Size matters here, too, because this funding challenge is only compounded when enrollments are low. Tiny schools with budgets of $1 million or less must use their money to pay for an acceptable building while also establishing an effective education program: paying for teachers, school leaders, professional development, curriculum, books, technology, food service, etc.

In short, small charter schools face huge budgetary challenges. They have little margin for error and seemingly minor losses of enrollment or increases in their operating costs (e.g., health insurance, heating oil) may mean swiping needed dollars from classroom instruction.

That appears to have an impact on the educational bottom line. Academic achievement results from Ohio show that smaller charter schools performed worse than larger ones in 2006-2007. Two-thirds of those serving 100 or fewer children were rated Academic Emergency or Academic Watch. By contrast, less than half the schools larger than 100 pupils fell into those lower rating categories.

Is it that these small charters are new and haven't yet had time to grow? Apparently not. When one examines only schools that have been open for at least five years, the same unhappy picture emerges: Fully 64 percent of charters with enrollments of 150 or less were rated Academic Emergency or Academic Watch. (This excludes "drop-out recovery" schools.) By contrast, 43 percent of Ohio's charter schools with enrollments of 151-300 students landed in those categories, as did 44 percent of those with more than 300 students. The largest schools are the least likely to put forth dismal numbers. Only 8 percent of schools with enrollments greater than 300 were rated Academic Emergency in 2006-2007.

Many factors contribute to the success or failure of a school. Size is just one and not necessarily the most important. Goldilocks found a chair that was just right, but there is no "just right" size for a school. We believe, though, based on our experience in Ohio, that for long-term sustainability and academic success, a charter school has better odds if it enrolls at least 300 students.

Yes, there are happy exceptions, superb little schools that make it because philanthropy augments the state dollars. Broadly speaking, though, small-school aficionados and charter proponents alike should heed the data and recognize that, unless a school is mighty special, being small brings more grief than gain.

Melissa Roderick, Jenny Nagaoka, Elaine Allensworth
Consortium on Chicago School Research
March 2008

Ed reformers sweat buckets over the achievement gap, but they pay less attention to the so-called "social capital gap" between those who are prepared to negotiate the winding path to higher education and those who aren't. This report suggests that many more high school graduates would make it to four-year colleges if only they had a little more basic, logistical assistance (in Chicago, at least). CCSR used data from their own survey and from Chicago Public Schools' postsecondary tracking system to examine "whether CPS students who aspire to four-year colleges are effectively participating in the college search and application process." What they found is disappointing but not too disheartening when one considers how relatively simple are the solutions. For instance, "the single most consistent predictor of whether students took steps toward college enrollment was whether their teachers reported that their high school had a strong college climate." Ordering some Ivy League pennants is no cure-all, but surely imbuing a school with a college-prep culture is easier than, say, overhauling its teaching corps or revamping its curriculum. (Educators looking for a model might visit a KIPP school.) The study also reveals that "Students who reported completing a FAFSA [i.e., the federal government's application for financial aid] by May... were more than 50 percent more likely to enroll than students who had not completed a FAFSA." This even after the authors controlled for differences in students' qualifications and support from teachers, counselors, and parents. One imagines this would be another relatively easy fix. Lots of ed research is so abstract and forward-looking that it's not likely to spur anyone to immediate action, but this report should. Read it here.

The Forum for Education and Democracy
April 2008

On the 25th anniversary of A Nation at Risk, this report berates current federal education policy, à la NCLB, for causing a backslide in academic progress. Yet its proposals are all Back to the Future. The authors of the report want a lot more money--they suggest pouring an additional $29 billion per year into public schools--even though there's no evidence that this will improve student learning. They bemoan the "federal strategy of attempting to improve schools through mandates and sanctions" and complain that "we have demanded results without transforming schooling." We should, it suggests, move from an accountability-based system to one focused more on equity and opportunity. That is, the report's authors believe the federal government ought to provide money without demanding increased student achievement. If that prescription sounds familiar, that's because we already tried it for decades, and it didn't work. If you must, read the report here. Even better, read this statement--drafted by Education Trust and other civil rights groups and signed by Fordham and many others--reaffirming A Nation at Risk's call for higher standards, here.