The Education Gadfly Weekly

Results from the umpty-fourth Phi Delta Kappan (PDK)/Gallup survey of Americans regarding public education released today, and they include some important revelations.

• Support for the Common Core academic standards is strong and opposition weak (50 percent believe the standards will improve the quality of education; 8 percent hold they will decrease it).


• The public divides right down the middle (a 52-48 split) over including students’ academic results in teacher evaluations.


• For the first time, support for charter schools declined a bit since the previous survey (70 percent in favor in 2011, 66 percent this year), and it’s more partisan than before, with Republicans in favor at the 80 percent level, Democrats at 54.


• At the same time, support for vouchers is rising, with 44 percent now positive even though the PDK/Gallup folks relentlessly phrase their voucher question in the most off-putting way possible: Do you “favor or oppose allowing students and parents to choose a private school to attend at public expense?”


• Almost two thirds say they’d be willing to pay higher taxes to improve urban public schools. And a plurality (for the first time) says that “lack of financial support” is the biggest problem facing public schools. Yet when it comes to Uncle Sam solving that problem, a whopping majority (60 percent) says that balancing the federal budget is more urgent than improving the education system.


• But not for illegal immigrants! Almost three in five Americans oppose providing them with public education.


• Compared with four years ago, the 2012 presidential election finds Americans almost evenly divided as to which candidate would be better for public education. In 2008, it was Obama 46 percent, McCain 29 percent (and there were many “don’t knows”). Now it’s Obama 49 percent, Romney 44 percent—and most people seem to have settled their minds on this.

There’s more, of course, and you’ll want to dig in. Don’t expect survey results to settle anything but these are, at minimum, tantalizing and provocative.

SOURCE: William J. Bushaw and Shane J. Lopez, Public Education in the United States: A Nation Divided (Bloomington, IN: Phi Delta Kappan; Washington, D.C.: Gallup Organization, September 2012).

Spelunking into the labyrinthine depths of school accountability, Kevin Carey explores in this Ed Sector paper what an ideal system could and should look like. California’s endlessly vexed system serves as Carey’s entry-point, though his recommendations echo beyond the Golden State. Carey examines three central components of accountability—the kinds of information used, how it is best interpreted, and how it can most usefully promote student achievement. As he explains, sundry data are now available to link teacher and school performance with student success, not just in K-12 classrooms but in college and beyond. This allows accountability systems to focus on bottom-line outcomes, instead of imperfect proxy measures such as standardized tests. Still, there are limitations to what data can do. They can rate or rank schools (Carey cites Florida’s A-F scale as valuable in providing broad public information), but they cannot self-translate into “authentic action for reform”; they cannot show schools how to improve. To move beyond simply praising or scolding schools, Carey suggests creating an inspection system, modeled after England’s—a recommendation previously supplied by Ed Sector when Carey was there. His new model for accountability—strict adherence to outcomes data coupled with nuanced and thorough human analyses—provide sturdy pitons, thick cord, and a bright torch for those entering the dark cave of accountability.

SOURCE: Kevin Carey, Some Assembly Required: Building a Better Accountability System for California (Washington, D.C.: Education Sector, July 2012).

When the New York City Department of Education banned school-day bake sales and regulated vending-machine goodies as means to curb childhood obesity in the Big Apple, we raised eyebrows. Shouldn’t such decisions fall to school—not district or even state—leaders? This new study in the journal Pediatrics, however, has us doubting ourselves. It evaluated Body Mass Index (BMI) data for 6,300 fifth through eighth graders in forty states between 2004 and 2007, and found that students in states with “strong” anti-junk-food-and-sugary-drinks laws gained .25 fewer BMI units than students in states with no laws. (They were also less likely to be obese.) Laws were rated as strong if they had specific standards and requirements; they were weak if they used suggestive language (e.g., “recommend”). Further, students in states with consistent policies enacted across grade levels were the sveltest. The authors present a reasonable case for regulation of junk food in schools—and maybe even a case for state policies mandating such.

SOURCE: Daniel R. Taber et al., “Weight Status among Adolescents in States That Govern Competitive Food Nutrition Content,” Pediatrics 130 (2012): 437.

Mike and Education Sector’s John Chubb analyze Mitt Romney’s brand-new education plan and what RTTT will look like for districts. Amber considers whether competition among schools really spurs improvement.

Amber's Research Minute

Heterogeneous Competitive Effects of Charter Schools in Milwaukee

For all the talk of gaps in achievement, opportunity, and funding between ethnic and racial groups in American education, a different divide may also be splitting our schools and our future. In his acclaimed and controversial recent book, Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010, scholar/pundit/provocateur Charles Murray describes a widening class schism. On Tuesday, June 26, he will deliver a lecture on what that divide means for U.S. schools and education policy.

What does it portend for student achievement? For diversity within schools and choices among them? Is our education system equipped to serve a society separated by social class?

Admission to what was until recently "America's best high school" (as named by U.S. News & World Report) is again under assault from multiple directions. Seven teachers at Fairfax County's acclaimed Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology allege that the school's famously rigorous selection process has been eased, such that it's no longer enrolling the ablest and best-prepared pupils.

Recent high-profile complaints against TJ overlook widespread failings in American public education.

A federal civil rights complaint filed by a former Fairfax County School Board member asserts that entry criteria at TJ, as the school is known, in conjunction with the district's clumsy handling of "gifted and talented" education in earlier grades, rig the enrollment against black and Latino kids. At the same time, a law professor is pressing his claim that black students are favored over white students in the admissions process.

Any of these allegations could be true. But both complaints about TJ overlook two widespread failings in American public education that give rise to such grievances while also jeopardizing the nation's long-term economic competitiveness.

First, we've been neglecting the education of high-ability youngsters. States, districts, and individual schools, pressed by federal policies and metrics, have concentrated attention and resources on low-achieving and other "at-risk" youngsters, while paying scant heed to the fate of smart, eager pupils. Uncle Sam hasn't helped in recent years by zero-funding the one program intended to strengthen "gifted and talented," or G/T, education for poor and minority students. While struggling to raise the floor in K-12 education, we've failed to lift the ceiling.

Second, this negligence (coupled with our wariness of "elitism") has produced a dearth of places and pursuits for able youngsters, both at the elementary and secondary levels. The demand for rigorous G/T programs and high schools like TJ vastly outstrips the supply.

What we've done instead is expand access to Advanced Placement courses and encourage more kids to take them. Not a bad move, but, when done in isolation, it can lead to youngsters turning up in AP classrooms who are ill-prepared for such academic challenges, very likely because their previous instruction wasn't strong enough. (There's evidence, too, that these courses don't always challenge the brightest kids.)

When access to rigorous programs is limited, or entry into them is handled simplistically (e.g., a child's score on a single test), plenty of kids who might benefit don't get drawn into the pipeline that leads to later success at the AP level and in schools like TJ—of which there aren't enough, either.

Youngsters with educated, motivated moms and dads also tend to find their way into the right classrooms and schools, even if that entails an expensive private education. The victims are the poor and those whose parents don't know how to "work the system"—girls and boys whose life prospects would improve most from such opportunities.

Our forthcoming book provides a pioneering look into the underexamined world of selective public high schools. We found just 165 of them, lumpily distributed across the land. (Virginia has two, D.C. four, Maryland five—all in Baltimore.) And we learned that, despite their reputations as havens for rich kids, their students are almost as poor as the general public high school population. (Rich families truly have other options.) African-American youngsters are "over-represented" in these high schools, and Asian-American youngsters heavily over-represented. Both white and Latino kids are under-represented.

That doesn't mean every school on our list is a demographic microcosm of its community. Like TJ, many are not. It does mean, however, that selective-admission high schools as a group are impressively diverse in both ethnic and socio-economic terms.

We also learned that they handle admissions in many different ways. A few (mainly in New York) rely exclusively on test scores. Others, TJ among them, resemble selective colleges in the breadth of factors they consider and the pains they take when evaluating individual students' likelihood of thriving there. They are selective, however, both because their academic expectations and standards are (usually) lofty and because the U.S. education system hasn't generated nearly enough such schools to accommodate today's demand from well-prepared and fully qualified kids—demand that would further intensify if it included the many youngsters from every sort of background who could have been prepared and qualified if they had been better served early on.

Perhaps the big question for Fairfax decision-makers isn't whether TJ discriminates, but why there's only one TJ.

This essay was originally published in the August 22, 2012 edition of the Washington Examiner. For more on this issue, register to attend or webcast "Exam Schools: The Ups and Downs of Selective Public High Schools," this Friday (8/24) at 9AM EDT.

It’s not hard to argue that many school-district budgets remain bloated, even after a few tough years of recession. With a major increase in spending since the mid 1990s, and a meteoric rise in the number of adults on the personnel rolls, surely most of our schools still have some cushion to get them through the current malaise. Moreover, the belt-tightening gives innovative leaders a chance to rethink the entire education enterprise in order to get much better results at much lower cost.

Ryan and Romney are right that the Medicare goliath must be slain if we are to avoid a future in which there's no money to pay for education for decades to come.  Photo by monkeyz_uncle

That’s the theory. In reality, Americans say that lack of money is the greatest challenge facing public education today. And few districts seem to be availing themselves of the opportunity to rethink and restructure. Far more widespread is simply slashing: laying off young teachers, shuttering programs.

This only feeds the country’s palpable apprehensions about “national decline”—and the sense that we’re no longer investing in the future.

Enter President Obama, who went after Mitt Romney over the education implications of Paul Ryan’s budget plan this week, tersely distinguishing himself from his opponent in a speech yesterday: “He doesn’t think our children’s education is worth investing in. I do.”

This is a smart political strategy, designed to shore up his union base no doubt—the teachers who might not have liked Race to the Top but sure as heck don’t want to experience the federal budget cuts promised by Ryan. But it’s also not crazy from a substantive point of view. At a time when we’re running a trillion-dollar deficit, are we really sure that education is the place where cuts should come first?

But that doesn’t mean Obama is pristine on the “invest-in-the-future” front, either. For while he may want to spend billions more right now to prop up teachers’ jobs and keep class sizes from rising (billions borrowed from China, by the way), he has little to offer when it comes to protecting education budgets in the future. On that score, Romney and Ryan are the ones playing grown-ups when it comes to worrying about our kids.

The basic challenge—this is hardly news—is that America is aging and, as a result, is spending a lot of money on healthcare and retirement expenses. These expenses will go up and up in coming decades; they’re built into our demography. Unless economic growth can outpace the cost increase, however, that means less money for everything else—education included, along with national parks, mass transit, the arts, you name it.

So let’s say you want to protect the education budget and other investments in the young—in the future—at both the federal and state levels. The first thing you need to do is constrain public outlays for the old—which mostly means holding the line on healthcare spending. And the second thing you need to do is encourage maximum economic growth. Get both of these things right and you avoid Armageddon.

Now hold on, you say, there are other options. You can go after the defense budget. You can raise taxes on the rich. That’s true, and these might help at the margins, at least for a while. But as the chart below shows, defense spending is hardly putting pressure on education spending—healthcare is. And as many economists will tell you, if you tax the rich too aggressively, you’ll drive down economic growth. You might slice the pie more evenly but a smaller pie means less for everyone. (And taxing the rich won’t raise nearly enough revenue, anyway.)

Notes: Sources here, here, and here. Education spending is all government outlays for K-12 and higher education. Healthcare spending is all expenditures, public or private.

Which brings us back to the real options:

• Rein in healthcare spending. President Obama says the Affordable Care Act will do that, but there are many skeptics. Ryan’s approach—capping the amount of healthcare that government will pay for—by voucherizing Medicare and block-granting Medicaid—would almost surely do more to drive down healthcare spending, making room for education and everything else. Yes, this would lead to some form of “rationing,” at least for the publicly paid-for services. But you can either “ration” healthcare or you can “ration” education (and all other social spending). Take your pick. (And if you’re a governor, you can’t invest in education if your budget is increasingly squeezed by Medicaid—which is only growing larger under Obamacare.)


• Grow the economy. There’s a debate to be had here, too, with Democrats urging investments in infrastructure and public employee salaries and benefits, and Republicans calling for a simplified pro-growth tax code and a bunch of deregulation. A mix of the two is probably the right prescription—but higher taxes over the long-term would almost certainly backfire.

Just as Scott Walker’s purportedly “anti-educator” reforms freed up money in his state for more spending in the classroom, so would Paul Ryan’s “radical” reforms free up money for education nationwide—at least in the long-run.

In this case, both presidential tickets have it half right. Obama is correct to urge investments in education today; Paul-Ryan-cum-Ayn-Rand should find his domestic discretionary cuts elsewhere. But Ryan and Romney are right that the Medicare goliath must be slain if we are to avoid a future in which there’s no money to pay for education—or anything else—for decades to come.

Gentleman, for the sake of America’s future, how about you adopt each other’s best ideas and call it a day? 

A version of this originally appeared on the Flypaper blog.

“Mitt Romney says class sizes don’t matter,” warns an ad released by President Obama’s campaign this week, hard on the heels of a new White House report decrying lost teaching jobs that will allegedly swell classes around the country. As the election heats up, the Obama camp clearly sees class size and teacher layoffs as promising lines of political attack and important ways to energize powerful labor allies less than thrilled with many of the White House’s education priorities over the last four years. Unfortunately for the Dems, however, strident infomercials and gloomy white papers can’t undo the now-awkward but still-sound remarks of Mr. Obama’s education secretary on the issue. “Class size has been a sacred cow and we need to take it on,” Arne Duncan correctly said in 2011, a year after arguing that “districts may be able to save money without hurting students, while allowing modest but smartly targeted increases in class size.” The point of this is not to play Politifact. The Obama administration should be commended for challenging interest groups and liberal dogmas in questioning the cost-effectiveness of continually shrinking classes. Sacrificing that record for cheap political points is not only disingenuous (and a potential opening for the Romney camp to cast the president as a flip flopper): It does students and voters a disservice by setting an important debate back four years.

RELATED ARTICLE: “Obama renews call to save teachers’ jobs citing White House report on bigger class sizes,” Associated Press, August 18, 2012.

The Archdiocese of Philadelphia announced this week that it is preparing to take the radical step of turning twenty-one of its schools over to independent management. Seventeen high schools and four special-education schools will come under the control of the recently formed Faith in the Future Foundation, which plans to bring a “more metrics-driven management structure” to a school system hemorrhaging money and enrollment. Other experiments in Catholic education, including those in New York, have given some schools more autonomy, but those arrangements generally kept ultimate control within the diocese. Archbishop Charles J. Chaput admitted to reporters that the parochial-school system needs more than fine-tuning and conceded that former Cigna Corporation chief executive Edward Hanway and his new foundation can “provide a level of creativity we wouldn’t be able to achieve on our own, and a broader level of community participation.” Indeed, Faith in the Future is developing university partnerships and digital-learning initiatives that other Catholic-school systems have been slow to embrace. Perhaps more importantly, it is probably better positioned than the Church to raise private dollars and appeal to a Catholic community agitated by dozens of school closures and a roiling clergy sex-abuse scandal. God willing, it will also be able to find an effective, dynamic Catholic-school governance model that can be replicated in other cities.

RELATED ARTICLE: “Archdiocese hands over school management to independent foundation,” by Kristen Graham, Philadelphia Inquirer, August 21, 2012

A version of this analysis appeared on the Choice Words blog.

What a difference five years makes: In 2007, 97 percent of eligible teachers earned tenure in New York City; this year, only 55 percent were so rewarded. For decades, unions have defended tenure by pointing out that strong-willed districts can simply deny it to mediocre candidates. New York, to its credit and the benefit of hundreds of thousands of students, is doing just that. Gadfly just hopes districts around the country will have the gumption to follow Gotham’s lead.

Last Sunday’s Los Angeles Times featured a truly frightening look at the influence of the Golden State’s “fourth branch of government”: the California Teachers Association. The CTA’s political clout is hardly a surprise but the Times’s history of its strong arming and backroom deal-making provides sobering perspective on how California ended up in such a dreadful budget bind.

After reading Paul Tough’s thoughtful and thorough look at President Obama’s anti-poverty policies, Gadfly can’t help but conclude that no one really knows what to do about extreme poverty.

Forget the housing crisis: School districts now want to try their hands at reckless borrowing. Education faces daunting fiscal challenges, no doubt, and the public understands that tough cuts are necessary, but some districts, in Southern California and around the nation, are pushing the inevitable pain off onto future generationswith reckless bonds that mortgage the education of future generations. Such action not only wastes the present opportunity for systemic reform: It also means the inevitable day of reckoning will be twice as brutal.

For all the talk of gaps in achievement, opportunity, and funding between ethnic and racial groups in American education, a different divide may also be splitting our schools and our future. In his acclaimed and controversial recent book, Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010, scholar/pundit/provocateur Charles Murray describes a widening class schism. On Tuesday, June 26, he will deliver a lecture on what that divide means for U.S. schools and education policy.

What does it portend for student achievement? For diversity within schools and choices among them? Is our education system equipped to serve a society separated by social class?

For all the talk of gaps in achievement, opportunity, and funding between ethnic and racial groups in American education, a different divide may also be splitting our schools and our future. In his acclaimed and controversial recent book, Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010, scholar/pundit/provocateur Charles Murray describes a widening class schism. On Tuesday, June 26, he will deliver a lecture on what that divide means for U.S. schools and education policy.

What does it portend for student achievement? For diversity within schools and choices among them? Is our education system equipped to serve a society separated by social class?

Results from the umpty-fourth Phi Delta Kappan (PDK)/Gallup survey of Americans regarding public education released today, and they include some important revelations.

• Support for the Common Core academic standards is strong and opposition weak (50 percent believe the standards will improve the quality of education; 8 percent hold they will decrease it).


• The public divides right down the middle (a 52-48 split) over including students’ academic results in teacher evaluations.


• For the first time, support for charter schools declined a bit since the previous survey (70 percent in favor in 2011, 66 percent this year), and it’s more partisan than before, with Republicans in favor at the 80 percent level, Democrats at 54.


• At the same time, support for vouchers is rising, with 44 percent now positive even though the PDK/Gallup folks relentlessly phrase their voucher question in the most off-putting way possible: Do you “favor or oppose allowing students and parents to choose a private school to attend at public expense?”


• Almost two thirds say they’d be willing to pay higher taxes to improve urban public schools. And a plurality (for the first time) says that “lack of financial support” is the biggest problem facing public schools. Yet when it comes to Uncle Sam solving that problem, a whopping majority (60 percent) says that balancing the federal budget is more urgent than improving the education system.


• But not for illegal immigrants! Almost three in five Americans oppose providing them with public education.


• Compared with four years ago, the 2012 presidential election finds Americans almost evenly divided as to which candidate would be better for public education. In 2008, it was Obama 46 percent, McCain 29 percent (and there were many “don’t knows”). Now it’s Obama 49 percent, Romney 44 percent—and most people seem to have settled their minds on this.

There’s more, of course, and you’ll want to dig in. Don’t expect survey results to settle anything but these are, at minimum, tantalizing and provocative.

SOURCE: William J. Bushaw and Shane J. Lopez, Public Education in the United States: A Nation Divided (Bloomington, IN: Phi Delta Kappan; Washington, D.C.: Gallup Organization, September 2012).

Spelunking into the labyrinthine depths of school accountability, Kevin Carey explores in this Ed Sector paper what an ideal system could and should look like. California’s endlessly vexed system serves as Carey’s entry-point, though his recommendations echo beyond the Golden State. Carey examines three central components of accountability—the kinds of information used, how it is best interpreted, and how it can most usefully promote student achievement. As he explains, sundry data are now available to link teacher and school performance with student success, not just in K-12 classrooms but in college and beyond. This allows accountability systems to focus on bottom-line outcomes, instead of imperfect proxy measures such as standardized tests. Still, there are limitations to what data can do. They can rate or rank schools (Carey cites Florida’s A-F scale as valuable in providing broad public information), but they cannot self-translate into “authentic action for reform”; they cannot show schools how to improve. To move beyond simply praising or scolding schools, Carey suggests creating an inspection system, modeled after England’s—a recommendation previously supplied by Ed Sector when Carey was there. His new model for accountability—strict adherence to outcomes data coupled with nuanced and thorough human analyses—provide sturdy pitons, thick cord, and a bright torch for those entering the dark cave of accountability.

SOURCE: Kevin Carey, Some Assembly Required: Building a Better Accountability System for California (Washington, D.C.: Education Sector, July 2012).

When the New York City Department of Education banned school-day bake sales and regulated vending-machine goodies as means to curb childhood obesity in the Big Apple, we raised eyebrows. Shouldn’t such decisions fall to school—not district or even state—leaders? This new study in the journal Pediatrics, however, has us doubting ourselves. It evaluated Body Mass Index (BMI) data for 6,300 fifth through eighth graders in forty states between 2004 and 2007, and found that students in states with “strong” anti-junk-food-and-sugary-drinks laws gained .25 fewer BMI units than students in states with no laws. (They were also less likely to be obese.) Laws were rated as strong if they had specific standards and requirements; they were weak if they used suggestive language (e.g., “recommend”). Further, students in states with consistent policies enacted across grade levels were the sveltest. The authors present a reasonable case for regulation of junk food in schools—and maybe even a case for state policies mandating such.

SOURCE: Daniel R. Taber et al., “Weight Status among Adolescents in States That Govern Competitive Food Nutrition Content,” Pediatrics 130 (2012): 437.