The Education Gadfly Weekly

The Friedman-ism that “every crisis is an opportunity” has, in the eyes of many, found dramatic and fitting vindication in the city of New Orleans. In the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, the teachers union was washed away, while the city’s traditional public schools were almost entirely supplanted by a host of new charters, many of them answerable to a new state-level governing body. The value of these changes has been frequently quantified by test scores, college-attendance rates, and similar informative (yet reductive) data. Sarah Carr’s Hope Against Hope offers a rare view from the ground—one that humanizes education reform in the Bayou City. She profiles a trio of figures (a novice teacher, a veteran principal, and a high school student) as well as a handful of charter schools. The conflicts at the core of Carr’s book—between different measurements of and causes for student success (or failure) and between guarding community culture and finding pathways to the middle class—transcend the Big Easy. But do not look for conflict resolution here. Carr’s intent, instead, is to articulate vividly what’s at stake. Her vignettes, particularly her story of a popular and promising teen’s fateful night out (and subsequent incarceration), show how out-of-school factors can easily destroy students’ futures—simultaneously reminding readers that school quality is not the whole story and that intensive efforts to transform student culture (think the “no excuses” charter networks) may be exactly what’s needed. Carr’s portrait of New Orleans parents also complicates the debate: The moms and dads in Hope Against Hope are often suspicious of the new, disproportionately white, wave of reformers and educators, yet are pragmatic about the value of their schools—including the worth of the rigid structure of some NOLA charters. Readers willing to rethink their assumptions—and to have some preconceptions challenged—could do a lot worse than to sit down with this book.

SOURCE: Sarah Carr, Hope Against Hope: Three Schools, One City, and the Struggle to Educate America’s Children (New York: Bloomsbury Press, 2013).

With findings reminiscent of those from the Gates Foundation’s recent MET study or Chetty’s teacher-effectiveness research, this CALDER paper widens an already well-worn trail. Using a comprehensive, five-year dataset of student-test scores for beginning teachers in New York City, the authors find that early value-added results (though imperfect) are strong predictors of educators’ long-term effectiveness and that relative teacher performance (based on student test scores) remains fairly constant. Among math teachers whose performance was in the lowest quintile after their first two years on the job, 62 percent still performed in the bottom two quintiles in their third through fifth year and only 19 percent ended up in the top two quintiles. Similarly, if a school adopted a policy of firing the bottom 10 percent of new teachers (averaged over years one and two), it would rid itself of almost one third of the future lowest-performing teachers and absolutely none of the future top performers (according to years three, four, and five averages). They also find that value-added in years one and two explained 27.8 percent of the variance in average future performance (compared with only 2.8 percent explained by a number of combined “input” metrics including teacher demographics, credentialing scores, and competitiveness of undergraduate institution). The implications are clear: Cage-busting leaders should simply not keep the low performers around long enough to let them gain tenure.

SOURCE: Allison Atteberry, Susanna Loeb, and James Wyckoff, “Do First Impressions Matter? Improvement in Early Career Teacher Effectiveness” (Washington, D.C.: National Center for Analysis of Longitudinal Data in Education Research, February 2013).

Special-education funding is a thorny landscape, within which lie sundry footpaths whereby dollars are allocated via intersecting trails of state, local, and federal statutes and regulations. More difficult still is that few states offer trail maps for this complex terrain. Data are cumbersome; evaluations of program effectiveness are rarely undertaken. This is what makes this account from Minnesota’s Office of the Legislative Auditor so refreshing. The mixed-methods report explains the characteristics and costs of special education in the Gopher State, as well as the practical effects of the state’s special-ed requirements—and offers recommendations for the state legislature on how to lower special-education costs and streamline compliance regulations. In Minnesota, for example, the number of special-education students increased 11 percent between 1999–2000 and 2010–11, and spending on this group bumped up 22 percent (this while overall student enrollment dropped 3 percent). According to district leaders, this has meant that “school districts have had to divert a substantial portion of general education dollars and local operating levies to pay for special education expenditures.” The report offers the legislature a number of suggestions for how to counteract these trends. For example: Supply districts with comparative data on different staffing patterns and their costs. As special-education costs rise (even as disability identification in the nation continues to decline), more such mapping and bushwhacking must be done. Expect more from Fordham on this front in the upcoming months.

SOURCE: James Nobles, Jody Hauer, Sarah Roberts Delacueva, and Jodi Munson Rodriguez, Evaluation Report: Special Education (St. Paul, MN: Office of the Legislative Auditor, March 2013).

Wondering what Congress should be doing about pre-K, why Boston has switched to a new school-assignment system, or why an Alabama judge doesn’t seem to care about the separation of powers? Mike and Daniela are, too! Amber talks tenure reform—and Mike has a great new show to pitch Donald Trump.

Amber's Research Minute

“Do First Impressions Matter?Improvement in Early Career Teacher Effectiveness” by Allison Atteberry, Susanna Loeb, and James Wyckoff (Washington, D.C.: National Center for Analysis of Longitudinal Data in Education Research, February 2013)

Charter schools are booming. From zero charter laws and zero schools two decades ago, there are now more than two million students enrolled in 5,600 charter schools in more than forty states plus the District of Columbia. In seven cities (New Orleans; Detroit; Washington, DC; Kansas City; Flint; Gary; and St. Louis), at least 30 percent of public school students are enrolled in charter schools; in another eighteen cities, including five in our home state of Ohio, charters serve at least 20 percent of the public school–attending kids. It is safe to say that charters are no longer a boutique reform.

But for all of the progress on charter quantity, there’s been disappointingly little progress on charter quality. While there are hundreds of high-performing charter schools across the country serving some of the nation’s neediest students, there are an equal number of charters failing to deliver. It was in recognition of this mixed performance that the National Association of Charter School Authorizers (NACSA) launched its One Million Lives campaign in late 2012. (Fordham, a charter authorizer in the Buckeye State, is a proud NACSA member.)

In order to better understand charter school performance and how to improve it, we asked the crack research team at Public Impact to take a fresh look at the performance of charter schools in five U.S. cities—Albany, Chicago, Cleveland, Denver, and Indianapolis—chosen because they all have relatively large percentages of students enrolled in charter schools and are well known for their recent school-reform efforts. (We have a particular interest in Cleveland.)

Using building-level achievement data, we asked Public Impact to answer some basic questions.

First, how do charter school students in these five cities compare academically to their local district school–attending peers?

Second, how are charters in these cities doing in comparison to district schools across their states?

Third, and most interestingly, what might be the impact on student achievement in these cities’ charter schools if the lowest-performing 10 percent were closed while the top performers were given support to expand their market share by an equal percentage?

In Searching for Excellence, we found that charter schools in our five cities outperformed their home districts’ schools, which had similar levels of student poverty. However, charters in all five cities trailed their states overall—often by a wide margin. (The states, of course, have much lower levels of student poverty.)

Moreover, within each city, quality varied widely, with very high-performing charter schools and dismal ones.

The good news? The study’s simulation clearly points the way to improving the quality of charter schools overall:

• Close or replace low-performing schools and
• Expand or replicate high-performing schools.

(We already know that trying to turn around bad charters—like bad district schools—is usually a fool’s errand.)

If the bottom 10 percent of schools were closed in Cleveland, for example, while the top performers expanded by an equal percentage, within five years the city could have charter schools substantially outperforming the Cleveland Metropolitan School District and on par with Ohio’s statewide results.

In some cities, authorizers and charter supporters have begun building the systems needed to replace failing schools and replicate great ones. In Indianapolis, for example, authorizers including the mayor’s office and the statewide Indiana Charter Schools Board have prioritized scaling up schools that have been successful in Indianapolis and elsewhere, aided by funding from The Mind Trust’s Charter School Incubator. In Cleveland, the newly constituted Cleveland Transformation Alliance is looking into ways to improve charter quality by putting pressure on the laggards, while also adding new high quality schools.

This report makes clear why all authorizers should follow their lead.

A fierce school-choice debate rages in Alabama—but the threat to the Common Core standards has receded, for now. When it became clear that the Senate Education Committee would not approve a bill to revoke the Heart of Dixie’s commitment to the standards, the sponsor of the bill himself withdrew it from consideration. This is well and good. Now maybe they can get back to safeguarding the separation of powers—and implementing the Common Core.

South Dakota has the (dubious) honor of being the first state to explicitly authorize school employees to carry guns to work. State groups representing teachers and school boards expressed concern that the bill had been rushed to a vote, did not actually make schools safer, and ignored other approaches to safety, such as employing armed officers. In related news, a Texas school employee recently shot himself at a concealed-carry class for teachers.

Boston has approved a new school-assignment plan that reflects not just geography but also school quality—amounting to the greatest change in the way that the city assigns students in twenty-five years and “finally dismantling the remnants of the notorious [1970s] busing plan.” Mike Petrilli is optimistic; for his take, check out this week’s Education Gadfly Show podcast.

The opposition to KIPP DC’s plan to build a new high school is indicative of challenges that most charter schools face: Its future neighbors resent the fact that their children won’t have admissions preference. Thus far, the mayor has not put the land up for public sale—but KIPP is undeterred: They already have an architect, a building design, an artist’s rendering of the proposed campus, and a plan to open the doors to students by summer of 2014.

On Monday, to the boos of a clamorous crowd of teachers, students, and parents, New York City’s Panel for Educational Policy rejected a proposal to place a moratorium on school closures—and, early the next morning, voted to close twenty-two low-performing schools. As school districts around the country face these hard choices, Andy Smarick weighs in with a refreshingly nuanced perspective.

Alabama governor Robert Bentley signed into law a comprehensive school-choice bill that will equip those parents who wish to send their kids to another public or private school with tax credits—but not before a series of events too ridiculous to even be termed a farce.

Farce doesn't even begin to describe what happened last week in Alabama.

Two weeks ago, the Alabama House and Senate, both controlled by Republican supermajorities, passed the Alabama Accountability Act, giving parents with children in failing schools a tax credit for tuition at private schools. Naturally, organizations such as the Alabama Education Association (AEA), opposed as they are to letting students escape even the worst of public schools, howled that the measure violated state law. But this time, rather than at least having the decency to sue once the legislation was signed, the AEA decided to lawyer up before it even reached the governor’s desk.

Initially, the bill was called the School Flexibility Act and did not include tax credits. After the House and Senate passed different versions of the bill, the conference committee added the tax-credit provision and changed the name. The restructured and renamed legislation then passed 51-26 in the House and 22-11 in the Senate on party-line votes.

Horrified after realizing that a program increasing options for children trapped in failing schools had passed, the AEA sued. It asked a state judge to enjoin the governor from signing the legislation—claiming that the conference committee violated the state’s Open Meetings Act when it inserted the tax credit without sufficient deliberation. The judicial gods smiled on the AEA when the case went before Circuit Judge Charles Price, who had previously achieved momentary fame by declaring that a fellow judge could not display the Ten Commandments in his courtroom or begin sessions with prayer. After a brief hearing, Price agreed with the AEA, ruling that the state legislature could not send the bill to the governor and scheduling a hearing for mid-March over whether the legislature violated the Open Meetings Act. The state attorney general then appealed to the state Supreme Court.

The litigation raised two basic questions about the separation of powers. The first is whether the courts have the authority to oversee the procedures that the legislature establishes for itself. Typically, courts have ruled that, as a matter of separation of powers, they are not allowed to exercise this kind of oversight. But even if the Alabama courts were to intrude into the internal workings of the state legislature, it should be a question raised only after a bill has actually become law. After all, until a bill has been signed, no one can claim to have been harmed and, therefore, no one has standing.

The second and more significant question is whether the courts have the authority to actually stop a legislature from sending a bill to the governor to be signed. Passing a bill and sending it to the governor to be signed (or vetoed) are obviously exercises of legislative power. Legislative power is not granted to courts—that’s why they are courts and not legislatures. By definition, under a system of separation of powers, courts cannot have such power.

Of course, Price’s actions did raise some humorous possibilities: What if the legislature sent the legislation to the governor anyway? Would Price have dispatched marshals to block thoroughfares between the statehouse and governor’s office? Would he send marshals to confiscate all the governor’s pens?

Fortunately, the absurdity ended on Wednesday. “HB84 may or may not ever become law. Hence, the underlying dispute is not ripe for adjudication,” wrote the justices of the Alabama Supreme Court, lifting the temporary restraining order and allowing legislative staff to send the bill to Governor Bentley—which he then signed on Thursday morning. But the brazenness of this attempted unconstitutional power grab serves as a reminder of the cards that the unions and their supporters will play to keep children in their failing schools.

Joshua Dunn is an associate professor of political science at the University of Colorado–Colorado Springs and co-author of Education Next's Legal Beat column. A version of this article appeared on Fordham’s Choice Words blog.

In his State of the Union address, President Obama called for making preschool available to every child in America. But questions abound: Is universal preschool politically and fiscally feasible—or even educationally necessary? Should we be expending federal resources on universal pre-K or targeting true Kindergarten-readiness programs for the neediest kids? How robust is the evidence of lasting impacts? And what exactly is the president proposing?

In his State of the Union address, President Obama called for making preschool available to every child in America. But questions abound: Is universal preschool politically and fiscally feasible—or even educationally necessary? Should we be expending federal resources on universal pre-K or targeting true Kindergarten-readiness programs for the neediest kids? How robust is the evidence of lasting impacts? And what exactly is the president proposing?

The Friedman-ism that “every crisis is an opportunity” has, in the eyes of many, found dramatic and fitting vindication in the city of New Orleans. In the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, the teachers union was washed away, while the city’s traditional public schools were almost entirely supplanted by a host of new charters, many of them answerable to a new state-level governing body. The value of these changes has been frequently quantified by test scores, college-attendance rates, and similar informative (yet reductive) data. Sarah Carr’s Hope Against Hope offers a rare view from the ground—one that humanizes education reform in the Bayou City. She profiles a trio of figures (a novice teacher, a veteran principal, and a high school student) as well as a handful of charter schools. The conflicts at the core of Carr’s book—between different measurements of and causes for student success (or failure) and between guarding community culture and finding pathways to the middle class—transcend the Big Easy. But do not look for conflict resolution here. Carr’s intent, instead, is to articulate vividly what’s at stake. Her vignettes, particularly her story of a popular and promising teen’s fateful night out (and subsequent incarceration), show how out-of-school factors can easily destroy students’ futures—simultaneously reminding readers that school quality is not the whole story and that intensive efforts to transform student culture (think the “no excuses” charter networks) may be exactly what’s needed. Carr’s portrait of New Orleans parents also complicates the debate: The moms and dads in Hope Against Hope are often suspicious of the new, disproportionately white, wave of reformers and educators, yet are pragmatic about the value of their schools—including the worth of the rigid structure of some NOLA charters. Readers willing to rethink their assumptions—and to have some preconceptions challenged—could do a lot worse than to sit down with this book.

SOURCE: Sarah Carr, Hope Against Hope: Three Schools, One City, and the Struggle to Educate America’s Children (New York: Bloomsbury Press, 2013).

With findings reminiscent of those from the Gates Foundation’s recent MET study or Chetty’s teacher-effectiveness research, this CALDER paper widens an already well-worn trail. Using a comprehensive, five-year dataset of student-test scores for beginning teachers in New York City, the authors find that early value-added results (though imperfect) are strong predictors of educators’ long-term effectiveness and that relative teacher performance (based on student test scores) remains fairly constant. Among math teachers whose performance was in the lowest quintile after their first two years on the job, 62 percent still performed in the bottom two quintiles in their third through fifth year and only 19 percent ended up in the top two quintiles. Similarly, if a school adopted a policy of firing the bottom 10 percent of new teachers (averaged over years one and two), it would rid itself of almost one third of the future lowest-performing teachers and absolutely none of the future top performers (according to years three, four, and five averages). They also find that value-added in years one and two explained 27.8 percent of the variance in average future performance (compared with only 2.8 percent explained by a number of combined “input” metrics including teacher demographics, credentialing scores, and competitiveness of undergraduate institution). The implications are clear: Cage-busting leaders should simply not keep the low performers around long enough to let them gain tenure.

SOURCE: Allison Atteberry, Susanna Loeb, and James Wyckoff, “Do First Impressions Matter? Improvement in Early Career Teacher Effectiveness” (Washington, D.C.: National Center for Analysis of Longitudinal Data in Education Research, February 2013).

Special-education funding is a thorny landscape, within which lie sundry footpaths whereby dollars are allocated via intersecting trails of state, local, and federal statutes and regulations. More difficult still is that few states offer trail maps for this complex terrain. Data are cumbersome; evaluations of program effectiveness are rarely undertaken. This is what makes this account from Minnesota’s Office of the Legislative Auditor so refreshing. The mixed-methods report explains the characteristics and costs of special education in the Gopher State, as well as the practical effects of the state’s special-ed requirements—and offers recommendations for the state legislature on how to lower special-education costs and streamline compliance regulations. In Minnesota, for example, the number of special-education students increased 11 percent between 1999–2000 and 2010–11, and spending on this group bumped up 22 percent (this while overall student enrollment dropped 3 percent). According to district leaders, this has meant that “school districts have had to divert a substantial portion of general education dollars and local operating levies to pay for special education expenditures.” The report offers the legislature a number of suggestions for how to counteract these trends. For example: Supply districts with comparative data on different staffing patterns and their costs. As special-education costs rise (even as disability identification in the nation continues to decline), more such mapping and bushwhacking must be done. Expect more from Fordham on this front in the upcoming months.

SOURCE: James Nobles, Jody Hauer, Sarah Roberts Delacueva, and Jodi Munson Rodriguez, Evaluation Report: Special Education (St. Paul, MN: Office of the Legislative Auditor, March 2013).