The Education Gadfly Weekly

Steven R. Nelson, James C. Leffler, and Barbara A. Hansen
Northwest Regional Educational Laboratory
2009

With politicians calling daily for more “evidence-based” policies, “data-driven” performance tracking, and other uses of statistics, this report is particularly timely. And for producers and funders of research, this report addresses two central dissemination questions: How does research evidence factor into politicians and educators’ decision making? And how do they choose which research to look at? The authors conducted focus groups and personal interviews with sixty-five teachers, administrators, school board members, state legislators, congressional staffers, and deputy state superintendents. Recognizing the small size and selectivity of their sample, they do not offer grandiose conclusions, but they did find some interesting anecdotal material. Decision-makers want research to be more accessible (easier to read, find, and digest) and more specific and practical (e.g., location-based case studies with actionable recommendations--a tall order!). And politicians tend not to trust research, knowing that statistics can be manipulated. But here’s a bit of a surprise: Policymakers are most likely to get their research through intermediaries. In other words, when faced with a policy decision about which they want to find out more, they’ll go to a source they trust, an organization or individual who points them in the right direction or interprets the evidence for them. This report leaves the research-producer with much to ponder: How to make one’s work more accessible? What intermediaries will recast it for decision makers? Can the source of the research be its own intermediary? Read it here (pdf).

William J. Hussar and Tabitha M. Bailey
National Center for Education Statistics
September 2009

This, the latest in a long-running NCES series, projects America’s education future based largely on its past. The number crunchers forecast increases in nearly every sector, from Pre-K to graduate school, between now and 2018. Elementary and secondary enrollment will swell 9 percent. The bulk of these increases will occur in southern and western states--due to migration, legal and illegal immigration, and a 1990s-2000s high birthrate--while enrollment will decrease in the northeast. These additional students also mean that we’ll have more high school graduates (though perhaps not an improved graduation rate)--3.1 million in 2018 compared to 2.8 million in 2006. The number of teachers will grow, too, to 3.7 million from 3.2, further reducing the teacher-student ratio (from 15.2 to 14.2 students per teacher). Of course with more students and teachers comes more spending; despite recessionary burdens, school spending will reach $626 billion in 2018, compared to $461 billion in 2006, while per pupil expenditures will jump to $11,600. Will this really happen? Or will other pressures on the public fisc produce a different trajectory from what one sees when basing the future on the past? You won’t get an answer to that here. But you’ll get a lot of numbers. Read them here (pdf).

The tragic and violent death of Chicago honors student Derrion Albert raced across YouTube and internet news. Just weeks after Chi Town announced a $30-million initiative to curb school violence, Albert’s death was yet another reminder that there’s much work to be done. But what about his school, Fenger High? According to teacher Deborah Lynch, there is an explanation: Fenger was a “turnaround” school, recently stripped of its faculty and staff and opened under new management. According to Lynch, turnarounds are literally the “deadliest reform of all” because “no one at Fenger this year [had] known their kids for more than three weeks.” Teachers didn’t know families and siblings, or about problems at home or other issues that might have been roiling under the surface. She makes a good point, of course--teachers do form relationships with students during the course of daily interactions with them, something that cannot be done in three weeks. And maybe those terminated teachers, despite failing in the academic realm, could have used this familiarity to spot danger before it exploded. But she goes too far when she recommends that Chicago stop spending money on teacher development and instead use it to reduce class sizes and add personnel. What a simple, unproven, and short-sighted solution to a tragic challenge.

“Safety at Fenger yields to 'reform,'” by Deborah Lynch, Chicago Sun-Times, October 2, 2009

At Sam Placentino Elementary School in Holliston, Mass., a significant number of parents enroll their kids in programs that are basically guaranteed to reduce their child’s state test scores. In an interesting twist on the idea of parental choice, the school offers three separate pedagogical tracks: traditional, Montessori, and French immersion. With mounting data from state MCAS tests, though, the school found that the traditional track outperformed the other two. Rather than shut those tracks down, the district chose to let parents make the choice: The school continues to offer the other tracks, while frankly admitting that they may not see test score improvements, at least in the earlier years. They offer anecdotal evidence that the alternative pedagogy instills a love of learning and that students’ scores will catch up in middle school. While there doesn’t appear to be any hard data to back up those claims, the school’s decision to offer the alternative programs is at least innovative and honest: Be transparent, and let the parents choose what they want. In a small, homogeneous suburb like Holliston, this program gives us a potential glimpse into how parents value tests versus other education desiderata.

“Three to Choose,” by Lisa Kocian, Boston Globe, October 4, 2009

It might actually happen. Planets and stars are beginning to align. Some sort of national education standards may actually become a reality.

It’s a heavy lift, to be sure, but the National Governors Association and the Council of Chief State School Officers, in partnership with Achieve, ACT, and the College Board, have embarked on just such an undertaking.

Known as the “Common Core State Standards Initiative (CCSSI),” the goal of this state-led initiative is to develop academic standards in reading/writing/listening/speaking and mathematics for grades K-12. (Science may eventually follow). On September 21st, they released their first public draft of “college and career-ready” standards for the end of high school. 

How good are these? How do they compare with other widely respected standards, frameworks and benchmarks at the national and international levels? We at Fordham resolved to find out. The result is our new report, Stars By Which to Navigate? Scanning National and International Education Standards in 2009.

Its judgments are those of four top-notch experts. W. Stephen Wilson and Sheila Byrd Carmichael led the mathematics and English language arts reviews, advised by Richard Askey (math) and Carol Jago (ELA).

Briefly, here’s what they found:

• PISA strikes out. Neither in reading (literacy) nor in math does its content deserve better than a grade of “D.” This is no promising benchmark for American K-12 education.

• NAEP fares better, with a “C” for its math framework and “B” grades in reading and writing. But it ought to be better than it is.

• TIMSS does really well in math, earning an “A.” (Math and science are all that TIMSS touches.)

• The draft Common Core end-of-high-school standards in math are better than PISA and NAEP, not as good as TIMSS. Our reviewers give this draft a “B” and offer suggestions for improving the final version.

• The draft Common Core standards in reading-writing-speaking-listening also earn a “B” from our reviewers--as well as much advice for strengthening and augmenting them.

That last point needs amplification, for the Common Core drafters faced a bona fide dilemma. If they tried to set standards for the whole of English language arts, they would invite unwinnable battles over reading lists, authors, multiculturalism, and such. If, on the other hand, they confined themselves to the essential “skills” associated with reading, writing, speaking and listening, they could count on complaints that “this isn’t really English” and “reading cannot be taught sans content.”

So they made a prudential judgment. The actual standards they set forth are indeed limited to key skills but they carefully explain the types and levels of reading materials (including but not limited to literature) that they judge to be suited to those skills; they offer a few well-chosen illustrative passages; they underscore the inter-dependence of skills and content; and they state clearly that these standards need to be accompanied by a rich, content-based curriculum. But they don’t supply that content themselves. Someone else will need to, else states adopting these standards could find themselves with highly skilled but sorely ignorant young people.

Others are reviewing the draft Common Core standards and comments are pouring in. (You can find the standards--and submit your own comments--at http://www.corestandards.org until October 21.) They’re also being reviewed by a high-status twenty-five-member “validation panel” named by the partner organizations and asked to “Validate the sufficiency of the evidence supporting each college- and career-readiness standard” and to recommend deletion of any standard that doesn’t have sufficient evidence--and to suggest others.

Watch for trouble from this direction. Few members of the validation panel are true content experts and more than a few have axes to grind or turf to defend or ideologies to push. (Consider, for example, that two OECD hierarchs--including the head of low-ranked PISA--have been put on this group. No, not a soul from TIMSS.)

The biggest problem with the validation panel--if indeed it is accorded real clout by the chiefs and governors--is that its very existence rests on an unwarranted conceit that undergirds the CCSSI project itself, namely that the common-core standards must be “evidence based.”

Most of them are not and cannot be, at least not today, given the state of research into what skills and knowledge are truly necessary to succeed in college and the workplace. Most such research is soft and impressionistic, based more on surveys and opinions--or the simple fact that some other country that does well on international assessments expects its young people to have such-and-such a skill or competency. It’s well worth knowing those things, but this isn’t “evidence” of the sort that passes muster with hard-eyed social scientists looking for “validity.” That type of evidence (a.k.a. “true predictive studies”) must take place over the long‐term with common-core standards-aligned assessments in place and student performance tracked over time.

And that’s OK with us. If we’ve learned anything from twenty-plus years of experience with NAEP and NAGB and state academic standards and their evaluation, it’s that academic standards depend on expert judgment, not faux social science (nor can their development wait for longitudinal data to buttress them). Expert judgment is what the common core drafters brought to bear and what our reviewers of those drafts brought to bear. Turns out that the drafts, within their limits, are pretty good, better in fact than many of us expected. They could and should be better--and there’s tons of work ahead, including “backward-mapping” them from the end of high school through grades K-8; building aligned assessments that will give them traction; and developing the curricular materials (especially in reading/writing etc.) that will bring them to life in the classroom. Let’s hope that important work isn’t wrecked by an inherently fruitless quest for “validation,” carried out by people with very different agendas.

Step away from the snickerdoodles. Banish the brownies--and the blondies. This is the Big Apple, not the Big Glazed Apple Cinnamon Fritter. In a nod to healthier living, the New York City Department of Education has effectively banned bake sales--that ubiquitous fundraising staple of soccer teams, debate clubs, and school bands. The change is part of the city’s new wellness policy, which also regulates vending machine products and student-run school stores items. “We have an undeniable problem in the city, state and the country with obesity,” explains DOE office of school support services chief. “During the school day, we have to focus on what is healthy for the mind and the body.” And he means that literally. Bake sales are still allowed after 6 pm and once a month by parent associations, but never during lunch. See no evil, there is no evil? We shouldn’t be surprised by these efforts from a municipal administration that has gone to great lengths to publish calorie counts, ban trans-fats and additives, and encourage healthier living. But will walk-a-thons fly as the next fundraising trend? 

“A Crackdown on Bake Sales in City Schools,” by Jennifer Medina, New York Times, October 3, 2009

Steven R. Nelson, James C. Leffler, and Barbara A. Hansen
Northwest Regional Educational Laboratory
2009

With politicians calling daily for more “evidence-based” policies, “data-driven” performance tracking, and other uses of statistics, this report is particularly timely. And for producers and funders of research, this report addresses two central dissemination questions: How does research evidence factor into politicians and educators’ decision making? And how do they choose which research to look at? The authors conducted focus groups and personal interviews with sixty-five teachers, administrators, school board members, state legislators, congressional staffers, and deputy state superintendents. Recognizing the small size and selectivity of their sample, they do not offer grandiose conclusions, but they did find some interesting anecdotal material. Decision-makers want research to be more accessible (easier to read, find, and digest) and more specific and practical (e.g., location-based case studies with actionable recommendations--a tall order!). And politicians tend not to trust research, knowing that statistics can be manipulated. But here’s a bit of a surprise: Policymakers are most likely to get their research through intermediaries. In other words, when faced with a policy decision about which they want to find out more, they’ll go to a source they trust, an organization or individual who points them in the right direction or interprets the evidence for them. This report leaves the research-producer with much to ponder: How to make one’s work more accessible? What intermediaries will recast it for decision makers? Can the source of the research be its own intermediary? Read it here (pdf).

William J. Hussar and Tabitha M. Bailey
National Center for Education Statistics
September 2009

This, the latest in a long-running NCES series, projects America’s education future based largely on its past. The number crunchers forecast increases in nearly every sector, from Pre-K to graduate school, between now and 2018. Elementary and secondary enrollment will swell 9 percent. The bulk of these increases will occur in southern and western states--due to migration, legal and illegal immigration, and a 1990s-2000s high birthrate--while enrollment will decrease in the northeast. These additional students also mean that we’ll have more high school graduates (though perhaps not an improved graduation rate)--3.1 million in 2018 compared to 2.8 million in 2006. The number of teachers will grow, too, to 3.7 million from 3.2, further reducing the teacher-student ratio (from 15.2 to 14.2 students per teacher). Of course with more students and teachers comes more spending; despite recessionary burdens, school spending will reach $626 billion in 2018, compared to $461 billion in 2006, while per pupil expenditures will jump to $11,600. Will this really happen? Or will other pressures on the public fisc produce a different trajectory from what one sees when basing the future on the past? You won’t get an answer to that here. But you’ll get a lot of numbers. Read them here (pdf).