The Education Gadfly Weekly

Tom Loveless
Brookings Institution
December 2007

This report deserves your attention--and at 27 pages is thoroughly manageable, even at a busy time of year. Loveless and company tackle three "puzzles," i.e., "phenomena in education that, at first blush, do not make sense." And on two of these they shed valuable light. In part II, they examine the paradox that finds Americans prizing private schools even as private high-school enrollments stagnate. Their findings include financial considerations, yes, but also broader cultural and social forces. In part III, they look into the seemingly contradictory international evidence on "time and learning" and conclude that yes, more minutes of instruction per day (and more homework) do have a salubrious relationship with student achievement, at least in math. Where the study is more exasperating--insightful but also wrong-headed--is in its comments on NAEP. The valuable insights concern the thinness of mathematical content in NAEP's math frameworks and exams, and how NAEP's governing board and bevies of experts have seemingly compensated by setting lofty targets that students must hit on those exams to be deemed "proficient." Where the analysis slides off track is in its assertion that NAEP's proficient level is too high. Loveless invokes Gary Phillips's recent linking of NAEP and TIMSS results (in math and science only) to conclude that, because fewer than 100 percent of youngsters in places like Singapore are achieving at that level, it's nonsense to set it as the target for American pupils. Here the problem isn't NAEP or its achievement levels; it's NCLB and its foolish aspiration to 100 proficiency. Indeed, no matter how low one sets one's cut scores for proficiency, there will always be some kids who don't get there. The right question to ask is whether NAEP's "proficient" level, notably higher than those of most states, is the right place for American schools to aim to bring as many of their pupils as possible. Think what a different country this would be if, say, two-thirds of our kids were "NAEP-proficient" (like, say, Singapore) instead of today's one third. You may not agree. But you should read Loveless and think deeply, as he has done. Find it here.

Advocates for Children and Youth
December 2007

It's not just teachers who struggle to stay in failing schools. Their principals are also completing very short tours. Researchers examined principal turnover in small samples of low-performing, high-poverty schools in three Maryland districts--Baltimore City, Baltimore County, and Prince George's County--and found a relationship between turnover and student performance. In Baltimore City, 90 percent of the sample schools experienced at least one principal change in a five-year span. In Baltimore County, 57 percent of schools experienced two or more changes. Meanwhile, academic achievement at those schools was dismal. The quality of replacement principals is suspect, too: between 70 and 90 percent of them were first-time school leaders. To stanch the bleeding, Maryland governor Martin O'Malley recommended incentives, of upwards of $200,000 over four years, for principals at various failing schools. These issue briefs comprise a worthwhile snapshot of the relationship between turbid leadership conditions and failing schools. But they would benefit from some additional research into the actual correlation of principal turnover and test scores and why principals flee so quickly. You can find the three profiles and related analysis here.

Robin J. Lake, editor
Center on Reinventing Public Education's National Charter Research Project
December 2007

Looking for a great stocking stuffer? You could do worse than this report, which offers some enlightening thoughts and findings on charter schools. Breaking from the two previous editions, which focused mostly on external pressures facing charter schools, the 2007 report "explores what is going on inside charter schools themselves." Especially interesting are the chapters on principal leadership and teacher compensation. In the first, researcher Christine Campbell interviews New Leaders for New Schools co-founder Jonathan Schnur, who discusses the challenges of finding the highly capable managers necessary for leading successful, innovative charter schools. The teacher compensation paper asks why more charters haven't experimented with performance pay. The culprits: Restrictive state laws and stale thinking from principals and teachers who hail from traditional public schools. To get around such status-quoism, the paper recommends injecting "new blood" into the movement. Another chapter tackles the question of whether charter schools are "making the most of new governance options." Again the authors conclude that, given their relative freedoms compared to traditional public schools, charters could and should be stepping farther outside the box, exploring options like teacher cooperatives, public-private partnerships, and new school board arrangements. The volume also includes a chapter on charter school safety, by CRPE honcho Paul Hill and his colleague Jon Christensen, and one on "smart charter school caps," by Education Sector's Andy Rotherham. Wrap it up, put a bow on it, and make that special someone ecstatic come Christmas morning. Get it here.

William H. Schmidt, et al
December 2007

It's been a less-than-stellar few weeks for U.S. performance on international benchmarks (PIRLS, PISA, etc.), and the hits just keep on coming. Not only are other countries producing higher-performing students; they are also doing a better job of preparing math teachers for their middle grades. Michigan State's Bill Schmidt, with collaborators from five other countries (Bulgaria, Germany, Mexico, South Korea, and Taiwan), found that American math teachers arrive in middle schools with less mathematical and pedagogical know-how than their peers in other countries. Aspiring teachers in the U.S. cover in college only 43 percent of advanced math topics; in South Korea and Taiwan, they study 79 and 86 percent, respectively, of such topics. This study is the tip of a future iceberg; Schmidt now heads the Teacher Education and Development Study in Mathematics, which will include 19 countries and survey aspiring teachers in alternative certification programs. Read the MT21 study here.

The New York Times Magazine just published its "7th Annual Year in Ideas," and sandwiched between Wave Energy and Wikiscanning one finds Weapon-Proof School Gear. The gear in question is the backpack; Mike Pelonzi and Joe Curran have invented a bullet-proof variety. For the past several years, these two firearms instructors have shot guns at bulletproof materials, trying to discover which would be both lightweight and cheap and, thus, appropriate for insertion into a fourth-grader's backpack. The inventors won't divulge what stuff they finally picked, but they say it's capable of stopping bullets from 97 percent of the guns used in school shootings--and knives, too. Scott Poland leads the crisis response team of the National Association of School Psychologists and dismisses the idea of Weapon-Proof School Gear. "Do you know how fast a bullet travels?" he asks. Nonetheless, 1,000 of the new backpacks have been sold, prompting this thought: What, exactly, is becoming of American k-12 education?

"Weapon-Proof School Gear," by Patrick K. Walters, New York Times Magazine, December 9, 2007

George Will doesn't much like the federal government, and he certainly doesn't much like the federal government getting involved in education. So it comes as no surprise that he doesn't like No Child Left Behind. More precisely, he loathes it.

He's a smart guy who's often right. In this case, however, he's just partly right. He's right that "NCLB was supposed to generate information that would enable schools to be held accountable for cognitive outputs commensurate with federal financial inputs." Yet much of that information is not trustworthy--such as the law's absurdly implemented "persistently dangerous schools" tally. And there's no denying that even the law's most important measures--assessments of student learning in reading and math--are open to abuse. Will cites the Thomas B. Fordham Institute's own Proficiency Illusion study to show how, under the law, "most states retain the low standards they had before; some have defined proficiency down."

But it's hard to believe that his solution--letting states choose to ignore the law, as a way station to getting the feds out of k-12 education altogether--would make things better. He contends that "America always is more likely to have a few wise state governments than a wise federal government"--and that's why he supports Michigan Congressman Peter Hoekstra's proposal to let states receive their NCLB funds via block grants--with no strings attached.

To be sure, he's correct that "a few" state governments have acted wisely in this domain. According to Fordham Institute research, precisely three states--Massachusetts, California, and South Carolina--are home to both solid academic standards and rigorous academic tests. Together their students account for about 17 percent of America's 53 million school-age children. What about the other 83 percent?

More representative is Mr. Hoekstra's Michigan, whose academic standards received a D the last time we reviewed them (among other problems, the state didn't ask its students to learn about any particular individuals from American history), and whose third-grade reading test passing score is set at the 16th percentile--meaning that virtually all students except those with "issues" will pass it. They barely need to read.

While NCLB may be inciting the Michigans of the world to keep their standards low (so as to meet the law's fairyland mandate of "universal proficiency" by 2014), it's far from clear that repealing or gutting that law will encourage the Wolverine State or its peers to suddenly raise the bar dramatically. They had low standards before NCLB, and they would probably have low standards after. That wouldn't be Hoekstra's preference, or Will's, but it's apt to be the continued course of action of the powers that be in Lansing and the interest groups that rattle their cages.

A better solution is to move towards national standards and tests--rigorous, comprehensive, and state-of-the-art. It need not be a federal project--it probably shouldn't be--but could result from state collaboration. Uncle Sam might provide some seed money (or the Gates Foundation could), and maybe offer incentives (money, regulatory relief) for states to sign up. Jurisdictions that demonstrate that their own standards surpass the rigor of the national ones would qualify, too. (So Massachusetts, California, and South Carolina could keep their own classy standards.)

Will would probably argue that this approach "increases the probability of continent wide mistakes." Perhaps. But our clumsy state-by-state approach to k-12 standards and tests has led to continent wide mistakes, too. Isn't it time to try something different?

Universities have long complained that far too many of their incoming students are ill-prepared for the rigors of college; the problem is particularly acute for low-income and minority students. Several institutions are actually doing something about it. The University of California (Davis, Berkeley, San Diego), Stanford, the University of Chicago, the University of the Pacific--all have set up charter high schools in recent years to help students get the skills and knowledge necessary for higher-education success. Gadfly says bravo. The more connections between k-12 schools and universities, the better. Such partnerships often result in more rigorous high-school curricula while helping university-based educationists to see for themselves what works in the classroom and what doesn't. (Dare one hope that such knowledge will catalyze change in the ed schools?) So far, the results are promising. When East Palo Alto Academy, a charter high school set up in part by Stanford faculty, was opened in 2001, its ninth-graders couldn't write more than several sentences or do basic multiplication and division. Now, test scores are rising, and many students are responding favorably to the beefed-up curriculum. "We're showing those gains," said Linda Darling-Hammond, a Stanford professor who helped establish the school. "But it's been a process." Indeed--a process one hopes will continue.

"Colleges set up charters as pipeline for students," by Laurel Rosenhall, Sacramento Bee, December 8, 2007

2007 may be known as the year when the "soft bigotry of low expectations" made a comeback. It started with Education Week's dubious "Chance-for-Success Index" (motto: demography is destiny) and is finishing with another doozy from Michael "No Excuse Left Behind" Winerip. The New York Times columnist read a recent ETS study about student academic achievement and came to the startling conclusion that families matter. This is news? Winerip's unique (and uniquely irrational) contribution is to argue, first, that student learning is largely "beyond the control" of schools, and second, that "high quality day care and paid maternity leave" could "make a difference" were it not for "government's inadequate support." Yet factors beyond schools' control, according to ETS and Winerip, include student absenteeism and how much television youngsters watch. Tell that to schools such as KIPP and Amistad, which track students down when they don't show up and crowd out TV time with tons of homework. As for Winerip's optimism about day care and maternity leave: where's the evidence that they help close achievement gaps? Show us some numbers and Gadfly might flit onto that bandwagon. In the meantime, how about trying to improve the schools?

"In Gaps at School, Weighing Family Life," by Michael Winerip, New York Times, December 9, 2007

A version of this editorial appeared as an op-ed in the December 11, 2007, Columbus Dispatch.

Why are so many charter schools mediocre? What went wrong? In reflecting on the Ohio experience, particularly in the charter-saturated terrain around Dayton, and taking maximum advantage of the benefit of hindsight, I've spotted 10 contributing factors. I offer them as a navigation aid for state decision makers and community leaders in Columbus and other Ohio cities--with the important caveat that Buckeye State charter schools, by and large, are presently doing as well as nearby district schools and that the state is blessed with a handful of outstanding charters that anyone would be proud to send their kids to and spend their tax dollars on.

1) Lax authorizing. Beginning with the Ohio Department of Education and continuing into today's sponsorship bazaar, negligence, haste, and greed have characterized too many of the entities charged with ensuring the competence and viability of would-be school operators, then monitoring their performance and intervening when results are weak. Quantity trounced quality, timidity trumped courage, and politics overpowered wisdom.

2) Unfussy consumers--and not just in Ohio. Many families are desperate to find a refuge for their kids from unsafe, unfriendly, dysfunctional district schools. Such considerations understandably take precedence over academic performance. That's compounded by meager information about school effectiveness, a dearth of truly outstanding schools, a shortage of effective advisors and brokers, and the propensity of student-hungry charters to make claims that they don't necessarily live up to.

3) Mediocre school operators. Only a handful of independent (a.k.a. "mom and pop") charters have the scale, resources, and sustainability to deliver high-quality education year in and year out--and authorizers haven't been good at winnowing them. Especially disappointing is the slipshod performance of large-scale regional and national operators, which haven't given Ohio children their best efforts. A few are simply profiteers. Others, including some with excellent results elsewhere, have settled for weak school leaders and second-rate teachers.

4) Too few support organizations and charter-friendly civic structures. Ohio lacks the school resource centers and help-groups that some states boast and, at the policy/political level, it has lacked quality-focused, pro-charter advocacy groups. The universities have shunned charters, not helping with the talent pipeline and professional development, let alone with school authorizing. And the state's business leadership, with honorable exceptions, has sat on its hands when it comes to school choice in general and charters in particular. (Most major newspapers, by contrast, have been game to give this education-reform experiment a fair chance.)

5) Rust-belt geography. It's easier to run high-quality charter schools on the coasts and in a handful of hot cities in between where talented people and zealous education reformers want to be.

6) Localism. Partly out of parochialism, partly out of parsimony, and partly out of the sheer difficulty of landing distant talent, most Ohio charters have drawn their leaders and teachers from the local market. That has sometimes made for slim pickings, worsened by low pay and compounded by inadequate budgets (see #8, below).

7) Trusting overmuch in "market-forces." Too many Ohio charter operators appear to believe that as long as parents are content with a school, it's good enough. This leads to scant emphasis on academic results, a worse problem when the customers aren't fussy.

8) Inadequate finances. Ohio charters are under-funded, plain and simple, by several thousand dollars per pupil per year compared with adjoining district schools. They don't get facilities funding, either (though the state is spending billions on new district schools), and they depend for transportation on often-uncooperative district busing operations.

9) A hostile political environment. This has worsened over the past year but even when most state officials were well-disposed to charters, a plague of union-initiated lawsuits and angry local school systems created insecurity, ill-will, and a bunker mentality among charters while scaring off potential supporters, operators, and school staffers.

10) Cumulative policymaking. Ohio's charter laws now resemble an archeological dig where layers of civilization have been jumbled over the centuries. Ten years of statutory amendments has not just created a maze that high-priced attorneys need many hours to find their way through; it has also led to some truly dysfunctional policies and practices. A thorough cleaning is needed, but in a charter-hostile political environment that could mean sacrificing the baby as well as its soiled bathwater.

I'll readily admit that, in hindsight, we should have made some different decisions in Ohio and the current political situation makes it harder to recover. But the problems remain solvable and now it's time for tackling them (see here).

Robin J. Lake, editor
Center on Reinventing Public Education's National Charter Research Project
December 2007

Looking for a great stocking stuffer? You could do worse than this report, which offers some enlightening thoughts and findings on charter schools. Breaking from the two previous editions, which focused mostly on external pressures facing charter schools, the 2007 report "explores what is going on inside charter schools themselves." Especially interesting are the chapters on principal leadership and teacher compensation. In the first, researcher Christine Campbell interviews New Leaders for New Schools co-founder Jonathan Schnur, who discusses the challenges of finding the highly capable managers necessary for leading successful, innovative charter schools. The teacher compensation paper asks why more charters haven't experimented with performance pay. The culprits: Restrictive state laws and stale thinking from principals and teachers who hail from traditional public schools. To get around such status-quoism, the paper recommends injecting "new blood" into the movement. Another chapter tackles the question of whether charter schools are "making the most of new governance options." Again the authors conclude that, given their relative freedoms compared to traditional public schools, charters could and should be stepping farther outside the box, exploring options like teacher cooperatives, public-private partnerships, and new school board arrangements. The volume also includes a chapter on charter school safety, by CRPE honcho Paul Hill and his colleague Jon Christensen, and one on "smart charter school caps," by Education Sector's Andy Rotherham. Wrap it up, put a bow on it, and make that special someone ecstatic come Christmas morning. Get it here.

Tom Loveless
Brookings Institution
December 2007

This report deserves your attention--and at 27 pages is thoroughly manageable, even at a busy time of year. Loveless and company tackle three "puzzles," i.e., "phenomena in education that, at first blush, do not make sense." And on two of these they shed valuable light. In part II, they examine the paradox that finds Americans prizing private schools even as private high-school enrollments stagnate. Their findings include financial considerations, yes, but also broader cultural and social forces. In part III, they look into the seemingly contradictory international evidence on "time and learning" and conclude that yes, more minutes of instruction per day (and more homework) do have a salubrious relationship with student achievement, at least in math. Where the study is more exasperating--insightful but also wrong-headed--is in its comments on NAEP. The valuable insights concern the thinness of mathematical content in NAEP's math frameworks and exams, and how NAEP's governing board and bevies of experts have seemingly compensated by setting lofty targets that students must hit on those exams to be deemed "proficient." Where the analysis slides off track is in its assertion that NAEP's proficient level is too high. Loveless invokes Gary Phillips's recent linking of NAEP and TIMSS results (in math and science only) to conclude that, because fewer than 100 percent of youngsters in places like Singapore are achieving at that level, it's nonsense to set it as the target for American pupils. Here the problem isn't NAEP or its achievement levels; it's NCLB and its foolish aspiration to 100 proficiency. Indeed, no matter how low one sets one's cut scores for proficiency, there will always be some kids who don't get there. The right question to ask is whether NAEP's "proficient" level, notably higher than those of most states, is the right place for American schools to aim to bring as many of their pupils as possible. Think what a different country this would be if, say, two-thirds of our kids were "NAEP-proficient" (like, say, Singapore) instead of today's one third. You may not agree. But you should read Loveless and think deeply, as he has done. Find it here.

William H. Schmidt, et al
December 2007

It's been a less-than-stellar few weeks for U.S. performance on international benchmarks (PIRLS, PISA, etc.), and the hits just keep on coming. Not only are other countries producing higher-performing students; they are also doing a better job of preparing math teachers for their middle grades. Michigan State's Bill Schmidt, with collaborators from five other countries (Bulgaria, Germany, Mexico, South Korea, and Taiwan), found that American math teachers arrive in middle schools with less mathematical and pedagogical know-how than their peers in other countries. Aspiring teachers in the U.S. cover in college only 43 percent of advanced math topics; in South Korea and Taiwan, they study 79 and 86 percent, respectively, of such topics. This study is the tip of a future iceberg; Schmidt now heads the Teacher Education and Development Study in Mathematics, which will include 19 countries and survey aspiring teachers in alternative certification programs. Read the MT21 study here.

Advocates for Children and Youth
December 2007

It's not just teachers who struggle to stay in failing schools. Their principals are also completing very short tours. Researchers examined principal turnover in small samples of low-performing, high-poverty schools in three Maryland districts--Baltimore City, Baltimore County, and Prince George's County--and found a relationship between turnover and student performance. In Baltimore City, 90 percent of the sample schools experienced at least one principal change in a five-year span. In Baltimore County, 57 percent of schools experienced two or more changes. Meanwhile, academic achievement at those schools was dismal. The quality of replacement principals is suspect, too: between 70 and 90 percent of them were first-time school leaders. To stanch the bleeding, Maryland governor Martin O'Malley recommended incentives, of upwards of $200,000 over four years, for principals at various failing schools. These issue briefs comprise a worthwhile snapshot of the relationship between turbid leadership conditions and failing schools. But they would benefit from some additional research into the actual correlation of principal turnover and test scores and why principals flee so quickly. You can find the three profiles and related analysis here.