The Education Gadfly Weekly

This report from Stanford’s Center for Research on Education Outcomes (widely known as CREDO) investigates, among other questions, whether it’s possible to predict the long-term academic success (or failure) of a charter school during its early years. The authors examined five years’ worth of data from more than 1,300 schools run by 167 charter-management organizations (CMOs) and 410 schools run by education-management organizations (EMOs). (Per CREDO, a CMO directly operates the schools in its network; an EMO contracts with a governing authority to operate the school.) To assess the quality of these outfits, CREDO paired charter-going students with “virtual twins” from their neighborhood district school. The analysts offer four key findings. First, initial signs of school quality are predictive of later performance: Roughly 80 percent of charter schools in the bottom quintile of performance during its first year of operation remain low performers through their fifth year. And 94 percent of schools that begin in the top quintile stay there over time. (Of course, we know from our experience as an Ohio charter authorizer that there are exceptions to this rule.) Second—as we’ve heard before—CMO quality varies greatly: Across the management organizations that were examined, 43 percent outpace the learning gains of their local district schools in reading and 37 percent do so in math. Yet a third have average gains that are worse in reading, and half do worse in math. Third, the quality of a replica charter is roughly the same as the flagship school—two-thirds of CMOs start new schools that are of the same or slightly better quality as the existing portfolio (troublesome because the lowest third of CMOs replicate more rapidly than strong ones). Fourth, EMO schools post significantly higher learning gains than those of CMOs, independent charter schools, or traditional public schools. Increasing the supply of quality charters—and sustaining quality over time—will require watchful charter authorizers that aren’t timid about shuttering poor-performing school—or not letting them start in the first place.

SOURCE: Emily Peltason and Margaret E. Raymond, Charter School Growth and Replication (Stanford, CA: Center for Research and Education Outcomes, January 2013).

After years of focus on lifting teacher quality, attention is—slowly—turning to the need to do the same for school leaders. This new report from the George W. Bush Institute (GWBI) adds to this freshening conversation: It offers recommendations for how states can take charge to improve the quality of school leadership. Drawing on survey responses from education departments in all fifty states and D.C., the report identifies four areas of focus: principal prep-program accreditation, licensure requirements, principal-effectiveness standards, and collection and dissemination of job-performance data. On all, states are lacking. For example, nineteen states couldn’t report how many principals are trained annually within their borders, and twenty-eight don’t collect job performance data. Further, only six require current principals to demonstrate effectiveness before renewing their licenses (typically done every five years or so). Two overarching policy recommendations arise. First, each state must clearly define what it means to be “effective” and regulate preparation and licensure programs accordingly. Second, states must develop data-collection systems that track principals from preparation to licensure to job placement, and use these data to close ineffective prep programs and revoke the licenses of incapable principals. Though the report is jargon-laden at times, its advice is sound.

SOURCE: Kerri Briggs, Gretchen Rhines Cheney, Jacquelyn Davis, and Kerry Moll, Operating in the Dark: What Outdated State Policies and Data Gaps Mean for Effective School Leadership (Dallas, TX: George W. Bush Institute Special Report, February 2013).

The National Math + Science Initiative (NMSI) and the Department of Defense’s education division (DODEA) have formed an honorable alliance: Through a grant from DODEA, NMSI has targeted schools with high concentrations of military-connected students in an effort to boost the number who pass AP exams and, ultimately, enroll in college. Implemented in twenty-nine public high schools (which educate 20,000 students total) in 2011–12, the program already serves fifty-two institutions and will expand to eighty in 2013–14. This report explains the year-one program findings. Participating schools saw a 64 percent increase in the number of passing scores on AP math, science, and English exams (nine times the average increase nationally) and an 85 percent increase in passing scores on AP math and science exams (more than eight times the average increase nationally). It achieved these gains via a tripartite strategy: First, it ran summer courses for existing AP and pre-AP teachers focusing on math, science, and English content. Second, it instituted Saturday study sessions for the schools’ AP students, conducted by “expert AP teachers” (though the report fails to define what “expert” means here). And third, it offered AP teachers and administrators small performance bonuses for student improvement. Promising indeed!

SOURCE: National Math + Science Initiative, Progress Report to Department of Defense Education Activity (Dallas, TX: National Math + Science Initiative, for the Department of Defense Education Activity, January 2013).

Mike and Kathleen are disappointed by the most recent Next Generation Science Standards and by Alabama’s decision to withdraw from the Common Core testing consortia…But if Amber’s discussion of a study on charter performance didn’t cheer them up, news of her recent engagement did!

Amber's Research Minute

Charter School Growth and Replication by Emily Peltason and Margaret E. Raymond (Stanford, CA: Center for Research and Education Outcomes, January 2013)

While nobody should be satisfied with America's overall performance in science education, it's possible to make it even worse. Photo by Atli Harðarson

(Updated February 7, 2013 for the Education Gadfly Weekly)

The public-comment period ended last week on draft 2.0 of the forthcoming “Next Generation Science Standards,” under development by Achieve, umpteen other organizations, and some two dozen states and promised for release in final form next month. Once released, states will be invited to consider adopting them, much like the Common Core for English and math.

Now ‘til March is not much time to repair this important, ambitious, but still seriously troubled document. The drafters might be wise to take more.

We at the Fordham Institute have a long history of reviewing state science standards, and last week, we submitted our review, feedback, and comments on NGSS 2.0. A team of nine eminent scientists, mathematicians, and educators, prepared our analysis. You can find the full review here, including team members’ bios on page 8. (We previously reviewed Draft 1.0, and Dr. Paul R. Gross, the distinguished biologist who heads the team, also reviewed the National Research Council “framework” on which NGSS is based.)

If states are going to make rational decisions to replace their own science standards with NGSS, it’s only right to insist that NGSS be stronger—clearer, with better content, more rigorous, and more easily applied by teachers—than the standards that states have come up with on their own.

Fortunately for the NGSS team, that’s a low bar. In our most recent review of state science standards, published just a year ago, the Fordham team determined that the clarity, content, and rigor of most state K–12 science standards were mediocre to awful. The review assigned grades of C or worse to three quarters of the states. (Ten flunked altogether.)

Still and all, science education in America is no wasteland. Our reviewers also awarded “honors” grades (B or better) to a quarter of the states for their K–12 science standards. Tens of thousands of our ablest high school students every year earn high marks on Advanced Placement exams in physics, chemistry, and biology. On the 2011 TIMSS science assessment, among fifty-six jurisdictions participating at the eighth-grade level, just twelve produced stronger results than the United States. Remarkably, three of those were U.S. states! (Massachusetts surpassed Taiwan, Minnesota rivaled Finland, and North Carolina was strong, too.) And, of course, at the post-secondary level, the U.S. continues to house many of the world’s premier institutions of scientific research, and their scholars continue to win an impressive share of Nobel prizes and other key awards in scientific fields.

So while nobody should be satisfied with America’s overall performance in science education, it's also important to keep in mind that, when one sets out to overhaul that system, it's possible to make it even worse—particularly if, in our effort to raise standards for all students, we wind up lowering them for our best and brightest.

NGSS 2.0 falls into that trap. But that’s not all that’s wrong with it. If the drafters really want their final product to deserve widespread adoption, they still need to solve eight critical problems:

• In an effort to draft “fewer and clearer” standards to guide curriculum and instruction, NGSS 2.0 (like NGSS 1.0) omits quite a lot of essential content. Among the most egregious omissions are most of chemistry; thermodynamics; electrical circuits; physiology; minerals and rocks; the layered Earth; the essentials of biological chemistry and biochemical genetics; and at least the descriptive elements of developmental biology.

• As in version 1.0, some content that is never explicitly stated for the earlier grades seems to be taken for granted in the standards for later grades—where it won’t likely be found in students’ heads if the early-grade teachers aren’t prompted by the standards to teach it.

• Real science invariably blends content knowledge with core ideas, “crosscutting" concepts, and various practices, activities, or applications. Well and good. But NGSS 2.0 imposes so rigid a format on its standards that the recommended “practices” dominate them. The authors have forced practices on every expectation, even when they confuse more than clarify. For example, high school students are asked to “critically read scientific literature and produce scientific writing and/or oral presentations that communicate how DNA sequences determine the structure and function of proteins, which carry out most of the work of the cell.” Here as elsewhere, the understanding of critical content—which should be the ultimate goal of science education—becomes secondary to arbitrary and peripheral activities such as “critical reading” and “oral presentation.”

• Although the drafters made a commendable effort to integrate “engineering practices” into the science rather than treat engineering as a separate discipline, their insistence on finding such practices in connection with so many standards sometimes leads to inappropriate or banal exercises—and blurs the real meaning of “engineering.”

• The effort to insist on “assessment boundaries”—which narrow the focus of a standard by setting a ceiling on the content that can be assessed—in connection with every standard often leads to a “dumbing down” of what might actually be learned about a topic, seemingly in the interest of “one-size-fits-all” science that won’t be too challenging for students. Given that what gets tested is generally what gets taught, this will invariably limit how far and how deep advanced students (and their teachers) might go. (The vague assertion that the problem can be dealt with via “advanced” high school courses helps almost not at all.)

• A number of key scientific terms (e.g., “model” and “design”) are ill defined and/or inconsistently used.

• Even as the amplitude of new appendices attached to NGSS 2.0 adds welcome explanation of what is and isn’t present and why, it also produces a structure that most users, especially classroom instructors, will find complex and unwieldy. Will a fifth-grade teacher actually make her way to Appendix K to obtain additional (and valuable) information about science-math alignment and some pedagogically useful examples? Will the final version of NGSS omit some of the intervening appendices that have more to do with the philosophical, political, and epistemological leanings of project leaders than with anything of immediate value to real schools?

• Although the “alignment” of NGSS math with Common Core math is improved, the drafters seem to have consciously limited the amount of math-dependent science that students need to learn. This weakens the science and leads, once again, to a worrisome dumbing down, particularly in high school physics—which, as the reviewers remind us, “is inherently mathematical.” It must also be noted that Appendix K, valuable as it is in making the science-math alignment clear for grades K–5, is essentially AWOL from the middle and high school grades, where it is most needed.

Hope springs eternal. The NGSS team made some worthy improvements between drafts one and two (though they ignored most of our advice), and they have an opportunity—a final opportunity, it appears—to make further repairs.

We surely hope that they do so. While we did not review NGSS 2.0 with an eye toward grading it, we intend to evaluate the final version much as we did state standards—and provide states with a side-by-side that they may use in connection with adoption decisions. We sincerely hope that NGSS 3.0 fares well in such a comparison—but to get to that point, some major modifications will need to be made. And we urge the drafters to take as much time as necessary to accomplish that, for the present draft is problematic in more ways than it is strong.

The more Republicans talk about education, the better they do with voters. But the party seems oblivious. Photo by Photomatt28

As the Republican Party searches its soul and its ranks for policies, strategies, and leaders that can restore it to fighting strength at the national level, few expect education reform to loom large among the issues needing close attention. Yet it’s hard to get very far on such central challenges as economic growth and international competitiveness without paying close heed to the capacity of America’s workforce in the medium term?—?and to the prowess of our scientists, inventors, and entrepreneurs over the long haul.

Keep this in mind, too, as any pollster will tell you: The more Republicans talk about education, the better they do with voters. 

A number of GOP governors, past and present, have figured this out, among them Jeb Bush, Mitch Daniels, Bobby Jindal, John Kasich, Chris Christie, Scott Walker, and Rick Snyder. And plenty of education reform is underway at the state and, sometimes, local levels.

The national party, however, appears somewhere between oblivious and brain-dead on this topic. Observe, for example, a Congress that’s many years overdue in revamping and reauthorizing such core federal education programs as No Child Left Behind and the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act.

No, it’s not just a GOP problem. Gridlock and institutional dysfunction are at work. But Republicans face a quintet of distinctive dilemmas on the education front.

First, the Obama Administration has stolen much of their former thunder. Vouchers remain a GOP preserve in Washington (though no longer in some state capitals), but charter schools, rigorous teacher evaluations, ranking schools on the basis of performance, even versions of merit pay are as apt to trip off the tongue of Education Secretary Arne Duncan as from the mouth of any Republican. Yes, this means the GOP has won the “war of ideas,” but at the cost of removing clear distinctions between the parties.

Second, the Tea Party and its congressional acolytes aren’t helping, with their futile calls to “abolish the Education Department” or “just let the parents decide.” Though elements of those ideas have great merit and, carefully crafted, might even prove enactable, mindless sloganeering of this sort scares educators, delights Democrats, and comes across as far too radical for most parents?—?who turn out to be a rather traditional lot when it comes to their children’s schools.

Third, it’s tricky to rein in teacher unions without demonizing the country’s three million classroom instructors, mostly earnest, caring, hardworking and not-very-well-paid members of the middle class who (like latinos) might even vote Republican if the party didn’t appear to hate them. 

Fourth, the federal budget plainly needs reining in, too, but if defense isn’t to weaken and entitlements remain untouchable, there’s nowhere to go but “discretionary domestic spending,” which includes just about all of the education action. 

Finally, there is the dilemma of what to do?—?indeed how even to talk?—?about the “Common Core” academic standards for English and math that are generally superior to what states came up with on their own but are decried by some on the right as the camel’s nose of nationalization and federal control of the schools. (Obama and Duncan made this worse by wrapping themselves too tightly around the new standards, which in fact arose from the voluntary coming-together of most states.) 

Despite these dilemmas, there are compelling reasons for the GOP and its leaders to engage the education issue. Herewith some suggestions:

Beat the drum of economic competitiveness and its education prerequisites. These include STEM schools (science, technology, engineering, and math), gifted-and-talented programs, and other opportunities for acceleration (e.g., “early college”). Here, the Democrats have backed themselves into a corner with their obsession with “closing achievement gaps”?—?surely important but not the sum of our educational objectives, either.

Demand more bang from the education dollar. The surest way to do this, as in every other field, is by deploying technology to make the system more productive. Online and “blended” learning (school days divided between teacher-led classes and learning-via-computer) have the additional benefit of customizing instruction and fostering choice, particularly in locales where schools are small and far apart. Federal agencies other than the Education Department could even be helpful here. Imagine math-and-science MOOCs (massive open online courses) for high school students taught by scientists at the NIH, NASA, Centers for Disease Control, etc. 

Insist on more school choices for more kids, including those who live in smug suburbs. But also insist that the choices be effective schools. Shut down the bad ones, whether district-operated or charter?—?and stare down everyone (both the profit-hungry plutocrat and jobs-centered union heavyweight) who presses to keep them open despite persistent educational failure.

When it comes to federal policy, get the “tight-loose” balance right. No Child Left Behind, we now know, got it backwards, laying heavy regulation from Washington upon states, districts, and schools regarding the means of education while being almost totally laid back about the ends. The GOP should reverse this, embracing rigorous?—?and common?—?academic standards and the means of assessing (and comparing) performance across the land, but liberating schools (and states and districts) to operate as they think best.

It’s time, in education as in many other spheres, for the party of Lincoln to craft a new platform for itself.

Apply the principles of transparency and comparability to school finances, too. Today it’s impossible to find out how much money the education system spends on a given child, even a given school, much less what that money is spent on. It’s harder still to compare how those dollars flow in Springfield, Ohio, with their amounts and uses in Springfield, Illinois —?and Springfield, Massachusetts, Georgia, Tennessee, etc. It’s time America had a uniform system of financial accounting for its education system.

These are more than talking points. They’re important emphases and policy directions. Some will prove more immediately popular with the electorate than others, but this is no time for hollow slogans and policy-via-focus-groups. Rather, it’s time, in education as in many other spheres, for the party of Lincoln to craft a new platform for itself, one that would make the United States a better place to live for a long time to come.

A version of this essay appeared in the Weekly Standard.

Plenty of folks in the education business seek the limelight. Not all deserve it—at least, not for doing good. But some individuals and groups that do great good for kids, teachers, and schools prefer to do so quietly, even invisibly. And two such entities are merging as Gene Wilhoit—previously of the Council of Chief State School Officers and, arguably, the most important force behind the Common Core standards—joins Sue Pimentel and Jason Zimba’s crackerjack (but small and quiet) team at Student Achievement Partners, which might be the most valuable enterprise in the land when it comes to defending, improving, explaining, and implementing the Common Core. Neither Wilhoit nor SAP is a glutton for publicity—but the work they’ve done, and continue to do, deserves respect and gratitude.

Earlier this week, Ohio Governor John Kasich unveiled his education reform plan. Among its many features are an expansion of private school vouchers and Ohio’s first-ever charter school facility funding. Perhaps most promising, the governor proposed a $300-million Innovation Fund to kick-start projects aimed at reshaping how schools deploy technology and human resources. In a town-hall meeting, Fordham's Terry Ryan told the governor and a rapt audience that the Innovation Fund is "very exciting...There's a lot of untapped energy out in the field that's waiting to take charge and take control of the opportunities."

As school districts begin to come to terms with the fact that they will not be able to maintain their current spending levels, Stanford scholar Eric A. Hanushek warns that budgetary belt-tightening will not inevitably lead to efficient choices. He writes, “If school districts had a line item in their budgets for ‘waste, fraud, and abuse,’ we could just reduce that to deal with budget pressures. Unfortunately, we do not find such itemized inefficiency.” Hanushek argues, and the American public agrees, that forging a link between teacher quality and teacher salaries would be the soundest, most efficient, and longest-term solution to budgetary woes.

Joining Utah, Alabama announced that it won’t participate in either of the Common Core testing consortia. While the Yellowhammer State will apparently still implement the Common Core standards, if it wants to find out how its students are doing on those standards, it will have to make its own assessment arrangements. This comes as no huge surprise: The consortia have always been fragile, and there has been pushback against Common Core in conservative Alabama. This choice leaves PARCC with twenty-two members and Smarter Balanced with twenty-four. While we hope these numbers won’t fall further, we’re not betting the house on it.

The Gadfly welcomes the Brookings Chalkboard, a new, once-a-week edu-blog featuring quality writings from Brown Center scholars. Russ Whitehurst’s clear-eyed look at the ineffectiveness of Head Start is particularly timely and refreshing. We hope there are many more posts to come.

The United States faces a shortage of high-quality school leaders at a time when it is more apparent than ever that principals are key to attracting and retaining teacher talent and driving the improvement of student learning.

While districts hire principals, states control the entry point to the principalship, overseeing the preparation and licensure of school leaders. Yet, to date, there has been no one central repository of information on state policies impacting principal preparation, licensure, tenure, and data collection to monitor the outcomes of those policies.

The Bush Institute's new report, Operating in the Dark: What Outdated State Policies and Data Gaps Mean for Effective School Leadership, is a first-of-its-kind compilation of state-reported data on how the 50 states and the District of Columbia are using their authority to increase the supply of high-quality principals.

Please join us for a presentation of the study's findings and a panel discussion, moderated by Fordham's Chester E. Finn, Jr., on how states can strengthen the rigor of the principal preparation program approval process and establish licensure requirements that validate and confirm that principals are indeed ready for the job and effective once employed as school leaders. The panelists will also discuss the role of the states in collecting data on principal effectiveness once school leaders are on the job and using that data to increase the supply of high-quality principals available for hire.

The United States faces a shortage of high-quality school leaders at a time when it is more apparent than ever that principals are key to attracting and retaining teacher talent and driving the improvement of student learning.

While districts hire principals, states control the entry point to the principalship, overseeing the preparation and licensure of school leaders. Yet, to date, there has been no one central repository of information on state policies impacting principal preparation, licensure, tenure, and data collection to monitor the outcomes of those policies.

The Bush Institute's new report, Operating in the Dark: What Outdated State Policies and Data Gaps Mean for Effective School Leadership, is a first-of-its-kind compilation of state-reported data on how the 50 states and the District of Columbia are using their authority to increase the supply of high-quality principals.

Please join us for a presentation of the study's findings and a panel discussion, moderated by Fordham's Chester E. Finn, Jr., on how states can strengthen the rigor of the principal preparation program approval process and establish licensure requirements that validate and confirm that principals are indeed ready for the job and effective once employed as school leaders. The panelists will also discuss the role of the states in collecting data on principal effectiveness once school leaders are on the job and using that data to increase the supply of high-quality principals available for hire.

This report from Stanford’s Center for Research on Education Outcomes (widely known as CREDO) investigates, among other questions, whether it’s possible to predict the long-term academic success (or failure) of a charter school during its early years. The authors examined five years’ worth of data from more than 1,300 schools run by 167 charter-management organizations (CMOs) and 410 schools run by education-management organizations (EMOs). (Per CREDO, a CMO directly operates the schools in its network; an EMO contracts with a governing authority to operate the school.) To assess the quality of these outfits, CREDO paired charter-going students with “virtual twins” from their neighborhood district school. The analysts offer four key findings. First, initial signs of school quality are predictive of later performance: Roughly 80 percent of charter schools in the bottom quintile of performance during its first year of operation remain low performers through their fifth year. And 94 percent of schools that begin in the top quintile stay there over time. (Of course, we know from our experience as an Ohio charter authorizer that there are exceptions to this rule.) Second—as we’ve heard before—CMO quality varies greatly: Across the management organizations that were examined, 43 percent outpace the learning gains of their local district schools in reading and 37 percent do so in math. Yet a third have average gains that are worse in reading, and half do worse in math. Third, the quality of a replica charter is roughly the same as the flagship school—two-thirds of CMOs start new schools that are of the same or slightly better quality as the existing portfolio (troublesome because the lowest third of CMOs replicate more rapidly than strong ones). Fourth, EMO schools post significantly higher learning gains than those of CMOs, independent charter schools, or traditional public schools. Increasing the supply of quality charters—and sustaining quality over time—will require watchful charter authorizers that aren’t timid about shuttering poor-performing school—or not letting them start in the first place.

SOURCE: Emily Peltason and Margaret E. Raymond, Charter School Growth and Replication (Stanford, CA: Center for Research and Education Outcomes, January 2013).

After years of focus on lifting teacher quality, attention is—slowly—turning to the need to do the same for school leaders. This new report from the George W. Bush Institute (GWBI) adds to this freshening conversation: It offers recommendations for how states can take charge to improve the quality of school leadership. Drawing on survey responses from education departments in all fifty states and D.C., the report identifies four areas of focus: principal prep-program accreditation, licensure requirements, principal-effectiveness standards, and collection and dissemination of job-performance data. On all, states are lacking. For example, nineteen states couldn’t report how many principals are trained annually within their borders, and twenty-eight don’t collect job performance data. Further, only six require current principals to demonstrate effectiveness before renewing their licenses (typically done every five years or so). Two overarching policy recommendations arise. First, each state must clearly define what it means to be “effective” and regulate preparation and licensure programs accordingly. Second, states must develop data-collection systems that track principals from preparation to licensure to job placement, and use these data to close ineffective prep programs and revoke the licenses of incapable principals. Though the report is jargon-laden at times, its advice is sound.

SOURCE: Kerri Briggs, Gretchen Rhines Cheney, Jacquelyn Davis, and Kerry Moll, Operating in the Dark: What Outdated State Policies and Data Gaps Mean for Effective School Leadership (Dallas, TX: George W. Bush Institute Special Report, February 2013).

The National Math + Science Initiative (NMSI) and the Department of Defense’s education division (DODEA) have formed an honorable alliance: Through a grant from DODEA, NMSI has targeted schools with high concentrations of military-connected students in an effort to boost the number who pass AP exams and, ultimately, enroll in college. Implemented in twenty-nine public high schools (which educate 20,000 students total) in 2011–12, the program already serves fifty-two institutions and will expand to eighty in 2013–14. This report explains the year-one program findings. Participating schools saw a 64 percent increase in the number of passing scores on AP math, science, and English exams (nine times the average increase nationally) and an 85 percent increase in passing scores on AP math and science exams (more than eight times the average increase nationally). It achieved these gains via a tripartite strategy: First, it ran summer courses for existing AP and pre-AP teachers focusing on math, science, and English content. Second, it instituted Saturday study sessions for the schools’ AP students, conducted by “expert AP teachers” (though the report fails to define what “expert” means here). And third, it offered AP teachers and administrators small performance bonuses for student improvement. Promising indeed!

SOURCE: National Math + Science Initiative, Progress Report to Department of Defense Education Activity (Dallas, TX: National Math + Science Initiative, for the Department of Defense Education Activity, January 2013).