The Education Gadfly Weekly

Over the past half-decade, the Center for Reinventing Public Education has emerged as the premier expert on (and proponent of) “portfolio” districts—those that manage an array of school options, some run by the district, others by external entities. The latest on this topic from CRPE focuses on the political dynamics behind decisions to close underperforming schools within a district’s portfolio (as well as how each individual stakeholder group is affected by closures, whether done right or wrong). Using New York City, Chicago, Denver, and Oakland as case studies, the report offers smart recommendations based on actual examples of what works—and doesn’t—when executing school closures. Among them: Remember that school reform—and school closure—is inherently political; districts must have a savvy leader (think Michael Bennet in Denver rather than Cathie Black in New York City). And remember that closures must engage the community. To win stakeholders over, show them data about the school’s finances, student achievement, safety, facility use, and more. Bring them on field trips to high-performing schools to illustrate what their school could become (a tactic used with success in Oakland). District officials or charter authorizers struggling with the decision to shutter low-performing schools—and the inevitable political fallout that comes with it: Give this report a thorough read. It offers objective and thoughtful ways forward.

Sam Sperry, Kirsten Vital, Cristina Sepe, and Paul Hill, Better Schools Through Better Politics: The Human Side of Portfolio School District Reform (Seattle: WA: Center for Reinventing Public Education, March 2012).

The call for socioeconomically integrated schools is growing louder, and this volume, edited by the Century Foundation’s Richard Kahlenberg, explains why. He contends that socioeconomic integration is more than a politically palatable and legally permissible way to achieve racial integration: It is also an effective strategy for raising the academic achievement of both low-income and minority students—and one that could save districts dollars as it raises academic achievement without the need to pump copious extra funds into schools with concentrated poverty. That doesn’t mean it’s easy: In one chapter, Harvard doctoral candidate Marco Basile estimates that, in order to halve economic segregation, a quarter of all low-income students would need to transfer to affluent schools while a quarter of more-affluent students would need to enroll in schools located in more-disadvantaged neighborhoods. This swap, he estimates (using some questionable assumptions), would produce a per-student lifetime benefit of $33,010. But how to get affluent families to volunteer for such an experiment in “trading places”? Several authors argue for encouraging voluntary integration through the expansion of “controlled-choice” programs, and make astute suggestions for enhancing such efforts’ political feasibility. Unfortunately, though Kahlenberg’s thoughts on controlled choice have merit, he misses the mark when it comes to broader issues of choice. In the concluding chapter, he takes a swipe at the value of charter schools as an effective intervention for low-income students, questioning the scalability and cost-effectiveness of schools like KIPP that serve this population (predominantly in minority communities). What he needs to understand, though, is that “controlled choice” will be far more politically viable if it can coexist with, rather than compete with, charters and other forms of choice. Bottom line: For those who regard racial integration as an important education value, this book offers a strategy on how to bring it about legally. Unsurprisingly—considering the author roll—the book is stronger on the positives of this strategy than on the problems that accompany it.

Richard D. Kahlenberg, ed., The Future of School Integration: Socioeconomic Diversity as an Education Reform Strategy (Washington, D.C.: The Century Foundation, 2012).

School-turnaround efforts aren’t new. But—thanks in large part to the feds’ latest round of school-improvement grants (SIG) and this week’s CEP report on the program—they’ve recently garnered much press. Unfortunately, precious little is known about whether these efforts (federally funded or not) affect actual student achievement. That research dearth is slowly shrinking. A longitudinal evaluation of Chicago’s turnaround efforts in thirty-six schools between 1997 and 2010 offers good news for the school-turnaround believer. The study, conducted by UChicago’s Consortium on Chicago School Research and the American Institutes for Research, found that, while turnaround results were slow to develop, they were dramatic four years after interventions began—at least at the elementary level: Targeted elementary schools closed the test-score gap between themselves and the system average by half in reading and by almost two-thirds in math. (Researchers were unable to analyze test scores at the high school level, so evaluated attendance and ninth-grade readiness instead; they reported no real improvements for turnaround schools in either.) We’ve long harbored doubts about the efficacy of turnarounds, but this report bangs a slight crack in our cynicism—at least for initiatives that are given multiple years to gain traction.

Marisa de lat Torre, Elaine Allensworth, Sanja Jagesic, James Sebastian, and Michael Salmonowicz, Turning Around Low-Performing Schools in Chicago (Chicago: Consortium on Chicago School Research, February 2012).

This year’s Technology Counts (the fifteenth of its kind from Education Week) is a handy guide to the latest issues surrounding digital learning and will serve both novice and wonk. The collection of ten articles (plus a nifty infographic detailing student, parent, and teacher views on digital ed) covers the major policy issues faced by this nascent movement. (These are mirrored by our own work in this arena.) One article addresses the need for a new funding model for online learning: Most state-run schools, for example, are paid for via a line item on the legislative budget—leaving year-to-year financing subject to politics (and meaning that funding is based on estimated rather than actual enrollments). Others probe issues of governance in online learning. Single-district digital education is on the rise, Ed Week reports—a worrying trend, especially if it hinders students from accessing the best content from other state, national, or international providers. Still others take on the need for more robust data systems and stronger accountability for digital learning. On that front, the authors offer four recommendations: require students to test in person; frequently assess course efficacy, intervening when necessary; collect more data; and use the same accountability measures for both traditional and virtual students in order to allow for side-by-side comparisons. Sensible (if obvious) solutions—but none that aren’t already being implemented by some of digital education’s strongest providers.

Education Week, Technology Counts 2012: Virtual Shift (Bethesda, MD: Editorial Projects in Education, March 2012).

Mike Petrilli takes the Fordham Institute in new directions

Despite pressures to upgrade the teaching and learning of “STEM” subjects (science, technology, engineering, mathematics), state standards for science, although often revised, remain, on average, mediocre—undemanding, lacking crucial science content, and chockablock with pedagogical and sociological irrelevancies. That’s the conclusion of Fordham’s most recent review of state science standards to which I contributed. To be sure, there are outliers: A handful of states have done justice to the importance and economic urgency of real science, to the needs of teachers as well as students. But a dreary low-C average for fifty states reveals their continuing failure to deal satisfactorily with standards for K-12 science.

America's state standards continue to disrespect Darwin's contribution to science.  Photo by Kevan Davis.

There are, of course, multiple reasons for the low marks. Among these, the saddest and least justifiable is what the authors call “Undermining Evolution.”

Evolution science (grown over 150 years far beyond geology and biology) is by no means the whole of natural science. But it is a very important topic among the thirty or so that must be taught and learned in a school science program. It is central to all life science and one of its most active fields. Yet the reviewers find that, in many states, evolution is weakly, incompletely, even erroneously presented—unlike elements of other currently active areas such as modern physics or cell biology. Evolution is singled out in high-minded calls for “critical thinking,” for “strengths and weaknesses”—as though it were less reliable, less scientific, than the others! Basics of evolutionary biology are sometimes covered while the E-word itself, evolution, is avoided, or mentioned reluctantly in connection with high school (but not elementary or middle school) work.

Particularly dismaying is how rarely state standards indicate that evolution has anything to do with us, Homo sapiens. Even states with thorough coverage of evolution, like Massachusetts, avoid linking that controversial term with ourselves. Only four states—Florida, New Hampshire, Iowa, and Rhode Island—discuss human evolution in their current standards. This isn’t just a Bible Belt issue. Even the bluest of blue states don’t expect their students to know that humans and apes share ancestry.

Why? The answer is not the first one that springs to mind: religion. To be sure, religion—biblical literalism—is one part of the thrust to undermine standards for evolution. But politics is the other, probably more important element. A focused combination of politics with religion, in pursuit of (or opposed to) governmental action, is vastly more effective than either one alone.

A focused combination of politics with religion, in pursuit of (or opposed to) governmental action, is vastly more effective than either one alone.

Those eager to deny evolution for religious reasons are not just Christians who steer by every word of scripture. They include some (not all) fundamentalists of all three Abrahamic faiths, plus a very few anti-science academics. Understandably, the literalists don’t want children taught in school what must be falsehoods from their perspective. By themselves, however, religious anti-evolutionists would wield scant power over state decisions. Real power comes by politicizing the arguments and switching them from scripture to more stylish notions: “scientific alternatives,” “critical thinking,” or—most commonly—“strengths and weaknesses of [Darwin’s] theory.” When these are pressed by politicians dissing “Darwinism,” a downgrading of science is underway.

As the report notes, 2011 alone saw eight anti-evolution bills introduced in six state legislatures. Just this Monday, the Tennessee Senate passed a bill that would allow teachers to help students "understand, analyze, critique and review in an objective manner the scientific strengths and scientific weaknesses of existing scientific theories" like evolution. Last month, the Indiana Senate approved a measure that would allow the teaching of creationism. States from Oklahoma to New Hampshire have already considered similar legislation this year.

Whether such measures pass or fail (as most do), they can still have real effect on classroom teaching, on textbook content and selection, as well as on the curriculum as taught. All this political activity and the sense of popular support that it engenders can easily discourage teachers from teaching evolution, or from giving it proper emphasis—if only by signaling that it’s a highly controversial subject. Teachers, understandably, fear controversy and potential attack by parents. Meanwhile, for this and many other reasons, science performance of our children against their overseas peers remains average to poor.

The common anti-evolution claims are no more than talking points, less cogent even than the talking points of politics. The primary scientific literature has disposed of them all, as any serious reader can discover. Their real purpose is simply to cast doubt on evolution as a shaper of life forms. But there is no reasonable doubt that Earth is four billion years old and that life’s diversity emerged over eons in steps, usually small, driven by such (evolutionary) mechanisms as genetic change and natural selection.

The undermining of evolution recalls a 1989 point made by the polymath and fiction writer Isaac Asimov. It was long believed, he noted, that the earth is flat. Accumulating evidence then showed that it must be a sphere. Centuries later, it was shown that Earth is not quite a perfect sphere. It bulges ever so slightly at the equator and flattens slightly at the poles. But it would obviously be absurd to think or teach that a spherical Earth is as wrong as a flat Earth. That would be dismissing reality with a triviality. Nibbling with trivial arguments at the heels of evolution is similarly absurd. But it does tend to undermine science education.

Dr. Paul R. Gross is an emeritus professor of life sciences at the University of Virginia.

In language that tried to capture the sweep of 1983’s A Nation at Risk, a Council on Foreign Relations task force warned this week that the nation’s poor educational outcomes represent a threat to national security, in addition to dampening America’s competitiveness in the global economy. The panel, chaired by former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and former New York City schools Chancellor Joel Klein, blamed the “innovation deficit” and the very structure of an ailing system of public education that de-emphasizes the values of choice and competition so prized in nearly every other sector of American life. While calls for common standards, school choice, and foreign language skills aren’t unusual today, what matters here is who is doing the calling. As the Wall Street Journal noted, it’s a testament to how far the choice movement has come that such recommendations are endorsed by so-established a group as the CFR. Dissents from task force members, especially those from American Federation of Teachers president Randi Weingarten, cheered the report’s embrace of national standards but complained that choice and competition have undermined public education and haven’t worked “in a scalable and sustainable way.” But we can provide high-quality public and private options if Weingarten were to step aside and allow statehouses to experiment with some of the report’s bolder suggestions.

"Panel Says Schools’ Failings Could Threaten Economy and National Security," Associated Press, March 20, 2012

The Harrison (CO) School District’s compensation plan, profiled in a recent Fordham report, represents another of yet a few compensation plans that totally redesign the actual teacher salary schedule. In this way, it joins Denver and Washington, D.C. in designing and implementing complete overhauls in how teachers are paid. These three districts are different from the dozens and dozens of other teacher compensation changes, most supported by the federal TIF program, which simply left the old schedule in place and added bonuses on top of them for teachers who worked in high poverty schools, in subjects where there are shortages (e.g., math and science) or for improving student achievement. Though such bonuses programs are needed and represent augmentations to how teachers are paid, the real breakthroughs will come when the overall salary schedule is redesigned, as Harrison has done.

The real breakthroughs will come when the overall salary schedule is redesigned, as Harrison has done.

The Harrison plan reflects the kind of new teacher salary schedule I have been recommending for nearly two decades—one that drops the current years of experience that trigger the bulk of salary increases and replaces them with metrics that reflect a teacher’s instructional expertise and impact on student learning (see my new book, Improving Student Learning When Budgets Are Tight, Corwin, 2012). Cincinnati was the first district to try such a new schedule, but the program collapsed as glitches in the new evaluation system emerged. It proposed to pay teachers largely on the basis of a performance-based evaluation score; though the compensation element was dropped, the evaluation system is still operating in the district, with teachers with higher scores producing more student learning gains.

The new Harrison plan provides salary bands, with each salary band linked to an effectiveness metric, so the higher the effectiveness score, the higher the salary. In this way the new schedule provides the highest salaries to teachers who are the most effective in producing student learning.

The effectiveness scores, like those being developed in many states and districts across the country, are derived from measures of both a teacher’s instructional practice and multiple measures of impact on student performance. Such multiple measures will generally lead to relatively stable and defendable effectiveness scores, which can be used in a salary schedule; I’d also tie tenure to an effectiveness level.

I have four major cautions and suggestions for the Harrison plan:

First, the system provides seven different effectiveness levels and thus seven salary bands. Psychometrically, it is difficult to have more than five such levels and the district will need to convince teachers that a one-point score difference should translate into placement into a higher or lower effectiveness level, and thus large salary difference. I have recommended that states and districts use a five-point scale.

Second, I would put a few experience steps inside each salary band so that teachers can earn a modest salary increase while working to enhance their effectiveness to the next higher level. But the top step in any salary band should be significantly below the first step in the next higher salary band so the prime signal is that higher salaries are earned by becoming more effective.

Third, I would add some salary for earning higher degrees but only degrees in the area of licensure. Though research shows that miscellaneous education units and degrees do not make a teacher more effective, research also shows that course work and degrees directly related to the area of licensure—e.g., a math or science degree for math and science teachers respectively—do improve teacher effectiveness. So totally throwing out rewards for degrees is tossing out an incentive that if controlled can help improve teacher effectiveness.

Finally, I would add incentives to the base salary schedule for: teaching in high need/high poverty schools, teaching in an area experiencing teacher shortages like math and science, and bonus programs based directly and solely on boosting student learning.

A redesigned salary schedule that provides the largest pay increases on the basis of demonstrated increases in an individual teacher’s effectiveness should be the form of the basic salary schedule of the future. If it were augmented with the above three incentive programs, a district would have a salary schedule that sent the right signals—get better at teaching, work in high poverty schools, get a license in subjects of high need like math and science, and produce increased student learning—and would finally align how teachers (as well as administrators) are paid with the core goals and needs of the education system.

Allan Odden, Director, Strategic Management of Human Capital

Professor Emeritus, Education Leadership and Policy Analysis, University of Wisconsin-Madison

• Arne Duncan was only missing a "Mission Accomplished" banner on Monday when he announced that the Administration’s School Improvement Grants program is succeeding. CEP's latest reports find that state officials tend to agree (expect a full review in two weeks) and Duncan's data are certainly encouraging, but it is far too early (and potentially costly) to suspend skepticism of a $3 billion program that still shares many traits with a "black hole."

• The nation's graduation rate edged upwards by 3.5 percentage points from 2001 to 2009 according to a new report released by the Alliance for Excellent Education, America’s Promise Alliance, Civic Enterprises, and the Everyone Graduates Center at Johns Hopkins. An encouraging statistic—assuming that the recent boom in credit recovery programs doesn’t mean that many of those diplomas aren’t worth the paper they’re printed on.

• A new survey of teachers brings both good and bad tidings for the Common Core State Standards Initiative. Bad news first: More than 1 in 5 teachers have never even heard of the standards. The good news? Only 22 percent report feeling "very prepared" to teach to them. Bear with us: That’s a positive because it means teachers know they have more to learn before their Common Core-aligned lessons are ready for prime time—and might be getting the message that these standards represent a real step up from what they’ve been using to date.

• The Gadfly will be on Spring Break next week, fanning his wings on a beach in Barbados. We’ll be back on April 5…if not before.

Mike Petrilli takes the Fordham Institute in new directions

Mike Petrilli takes the Fordham Institute in new directions

Over the past half-decade, the Center for Reinventing Public Education has emerged as the premier expert on (and proponent of) “portfolio” districts—those that manage an array of school options, some run by the district, others by external entities. The latest on this topic from CRPE focuses on the political dynamics behind decisions to close underperforming schools within a district’s portfolio (as well as how each individual stakeholder group is affected by closures, whether done right or wrong). Using New York City, Chicago, Denver, and Oakland as case studies, the report offers smart recommendations based on actual examples of what works—and doesn’t—when executing school closures. Among them: Remember that school reform—and school closure—is inherently political; districts must have a savvy leader (think Michael Bennet in Denver rather than Cathie Black in New York City). And remember that closures must engage the community. To win stakeholders over, show them data about the school’s finances, student achievement, safety, facility use, and more. Bring them on field trips to high-performing schools to illustrate what their school could become (a tactic used with success in Oakland). District officials or charter authorizers struggling with the decision to shutter low-performing schools—and the inevitable political fallout that comes with it: Give this report a thorough read. It offers objective and thoughtful ways forward.

Sam Sperry, Kirsten Vital, Cristina Sepe, and Paul Hill, Better Schools Through Better Politics: The Human Side of Portfolio School District Reform (Seattle: WA: Center for Reinventing Public Education, March 2012).

The call for socioeconomically integrated schools is growing louder, and this volume, edited by the Century Foundation’s Richard Kahlenberg, explains why. He contends that socioeconomic integration is more than a politically palatable and legally permissible way to achieve racial integration: It is also an effective strategy for raising the academic achievement of both low-income and minority students—and one that could save districts dollars as it raises academic achievement without the need to pump copious extra funds into schools with concentrated poverty. That doesn’t mean it’s easy: In one chapter, Harvard doctoral candidate Marco Basile estimates that, in order to halve economic segregation, a quarter of all low-income students would need to transfer to affluent schools while a quarter of more-affluent students would need to enroll in schools located in more-disadvantaged neighborhoods. This swap, he estimates (using some questionable assumptions), would produce a per-student lifetime benefit of $33,010. But how to get affluent families to volunteer for such an experiment in “trading places”? Several authors argue for encouraging voluntary integration through the expansion of “controlled-choice” programs, and make astute suggestions for enhancing such efforts’ political feasibility. Unfortunately, though Kahlenberg’s thoughts on controlled choice have merit, he misses the mark when it comes to broader issues of choice. In the concluding chapter, he takes a swipe at the value of charter schools as an effective intervention for low-income students, questioning the scalability and cost-effectiveness of schools like KIPP that serve this population (predominantly in minority communities). What he needs to understand, though, is that “controlled choice” will be far more politically viable if it can coexist with, rather than compete with, charters and other forms of choice. Bottom line: For those who regard racial integration as an important education value, this book offers a strategy on how to bring it about legally. Unsurprisingly—considering the author roll—the book is stronger on the positives of this strategy than on the problems that accompany it.

Richard D. Kahlenberg, ed., The Future of School Integration: Socioeconomic Diversity as an Education Reform Strategy (Washington, D.C.: The Century Foundation, 2012).

School-turnaround efforts aren’t new. But—thanks in large part to the feds’ latest round of school-improvement grants (SIG) and this week’s CEP report on the program—they’ve recently garnered much press. Unfortunately, precious little is known about whether these efforts (federally funded or not) affect actual student achievement. That research dearth is slowly shrinking. A longitudinal evaluation of Chicago’s turnaround efforts in thirty-six schools between 1997 and 2010 offers good news for the school-turnaround believer. The study, conducted by UChicago’s Consortium on Chicago School Research and the American Institutes for Research, found that, while turnaround results were slow to develop, they were dramatic four years after interventions began—at least at the elementary level: Targeted elementary schools closed the test-score gap between themselves and the system average by half in reading and by almost two-thirds in math. (Researchers were unable to analyze test scores at the high school level, so evaluated attendance and ninth-grade readiness instead; they reported no real improvements for turnaround schools in either.) We’ve long harbored doubts about the efficacy of turnarounds, but this report bangs a slight crack in our cynicism—at least for initiatives that are given multiple years to gain traction.

Marisa de lat Torre, Elaine Allensworth, Sanja Jagesic, James Sebastian, and Michael Salmonowicz, Turning Around Low-Performing Schools in Chicago (Chicago: Consortium on Chicago School Research, February 2012).

This year’s Technology Counts (the fifteenth of its kind from Education Week) is a handy guide to the latest issues surrounding digital learning and will serve both novice and wonk. The collection of ten articles (plus a nifty infographic detailing student, parent, and teacher views on digital ed) covers the major policy issues faced by this nascent movement. (These are mirrored by our own work in this arena.) One article addresses the need for a new funding model for online learning: Most state-run schools, for example, are paid for via a line item on the legislative budget—leaving year-to-year financing subject to politics (and meaning that funding is based on estimated rather than actual enrollments). Others probe issues of governance in online learning. Single-district digital education is on the rise, Ed Week reports—a worrying trend, especially if it hinders students from accessing the best content from other state, national, or international providers. Still others take on the need for more robust data systems and stronger accountability for digital learning. On that front, the authors offer four recommendations: require students to test in person; frequently assess course efficacy, intervening when necessary; collect more data; and use the same accountability measures for both traditional and virtual students in order to allow for side-by-side comparisons. Sensible (if obvious) solutions—but none that aren’t already being implemented by some of digital education’s strongest providers.

Education Week, Technology Counts 2012: Virtual Shift (Bethesda, MD: Editorial Projects in Education, March 2012).