The Education Gadfly Weekly

Jonah E. Rockoff and Benjamin B. Lockwood, Stuck in the Middle: How and why middle schools harm student achievement (Cambridge, MA: Education Next, Fall 2010)

Do middle schools hurt student achievement? Seems so. Jonah Rockoff and Ben Lockwood compare middle schools (grades 5-8 or 6-8) to K-8 configurations in New York City by examining student-level achievement data for students in grades 3 to 8 from 1998-99 to 2007-08. They find that English and math achievement falls the year a student starts at a middle school, compared to his or her counterpart who remained at a K-8 school. Transition to a new place obviously plays a role, so what’s more troubling is that the declines persist at least through eighth grade (the highest year in which they had data). Moreover, this “middle school achievement gap” cannot be explained by a scarcity of resources, since New York’s per-pupil expenditures are roughly the same in both types of schools. They did find some evidence, however, that grade size impacts achievement. Since middle schools combine students from multiple elementary schools, they typically have over 200 students in every grade, while the average cohort size in K-8 schools is seventy-five. Large numbers of pupils in the same grade negatively affects achievement, though not overwhelmingly. Rockoff and Lockwood also found that parents with children in middle schools tend to give their schools lower marks on education quality and school safety than those with children in K-8 settings. In the end, we don’t know whether academic declines such as these persist through high school and we also don’t know whether these findings would hold up in more rural or suburban locales. But we do know that these results put another nail in the coffin of the “middle school movement,” which held that pubescent adolescents needed a softer, gentler landing pad between elementary and high school. Maybe not.

James E. Ryan, Five Miles Away, a World Apart: One City, Two Schools, and the Story of Educational Opportunity in Modern America (New York, NY: Oxford University Press USA, 2010)

Should we give up on school integration? Among reformers, it’s been widely abandoned as politically infeasible; why not just focus instead on raising student achievement? That’s largely the thinking that has undergirded legal and political desegregation decisions since the 1970s: “save the cities, but spare the suburbs,” as University of Virginia’s James E. Ryan puts it in his provocative new book. Using the story of two Richmond high schools (one suburban, one urban, and only five miles apart), Ryan explains that urban and suburban schools, despite a spate of court cases, remain largely disconnected. In other words, we pump resources into urban schools (save the cities) “in ways that do not threaten the physical, financial, or political independence of suburban schools” (spare the suburbs). Ryan says this strategy won’t work. As the last fifty years have demonstrated, simply pouring money into poor areas, especially into poor schools, has had little success in actually alleviating poverty or raising achievement. That’s because we have never successfully addressed the fundamental political reality of poor urban areas: Poor parents do not pressure schools to serve their children better and urban districts do not have the same political clout as suburban ones at the state and federal levels. The only way in which these “education politics” will change, concludes Ryan, is if “school districts become more diverse by race and class.” The good news is that both urban and suburban neighborhoods are becoming more diverse, thanks in part to a booming Hispanic population and increasingly tolerant views about racially diverse neighborhoods. It’s certainly an uphill and politically tricky fight, but Ryan is convinced that cities, their environs, and the school districts therein need to take advantage of this opportunity, or the achievement gap will never be closed. 

It is no news that American public education is facing a fiscal crisis, one that is unlikely to get significantly better any time soon absent major structural changes in schools. It’s also facing mounting pressure to boost pupil achievement. But how do district and state leaders prepare for a world in which they must do more with less?

To answer that question, we joined forces with AEI’s Rick Hess to produce Stretching the School Dollar: How Schools and Districts Can Save Money While Serving Students Best, published this week by Harvard Education Press. The book is the culmination of a joint Fordham-AEI project that brought together ten policy papers—now the book’s ten chapters—penned by a varied set of authors and first presented for feedback in January 2010.

George W. Bush Institute’s James Guthrie and Vanderbilt’s Arthur Peng set the stage, declaring that “A 100-year era of perpetual per-pupil fiscal growth will soon slow or stop. The causes of this situation are far more fundamental than the current recession. Schools should start buckling their seat belts now.” Tracing the history of school spending, they show how adding more money and people, guided by the “supplement, not supplant” mantra, has brought the K-12 industry to today’s unsustainable state of affairs. Former Wall Street Journal reporter June Kronholz completes the picture by narrating what districts and states have done so far to trim costs and budget creatively. These measures, however, have not been enough.

So what to do? Several authors focus on the ways schools and districts can operate more efficiently today. Mike Casserly of the Great City Schools shows how large districts have shared information to fine tune their operations and save millions, and Marguerite Roza explains how careful budget analysis can uncover enormous waste. Stacey Childress highlights three districts that have taken a strategic approach to their budgets, aligning spending with their core priorities, and a team from the Boston Consulting Group distills lessons learned in helping districts streamline.

A second set of authors focuses on new opportunities for tomorrow. John Chubb shows the cost-saving potential of technology—as both a complement to and, at times, a substitute for traditional models of schooling. Steve Wilson shows that rethinking the teaching profession offers perhaps the greatest potential to conserve resources while improving schools—in part through technology but also by tackling salary scales, benefits, performance pay, and more. He contends that many teachers could be paid more—and better supported through professional development—in ways that would save money overall and improve the quality of schools.

Finally, former Arlington (MA) superintendent Nate Levenson and Harvard’s Marty West tackle the political challenges. Historically, reform has been accomplished by buying off threatened parties with more resources; this course of action, of course, is now largely unrealistic. Levenson uses his experience to illustrate what a financially savvy leader can accomplish—and what pitfalls await those who whose decisions are fiscally smart but politically dumb. West explains why politics block reform, including some of the reforms explicated in this volume, and urges rethinking federal and state funding schemes, school board elections, collective bargaining agreements, and more.

It’s time for schools to find paths towards greater productivity, yet too many budget cuts to date presuppose that they should keep doing roughly the same thing, with essentially the same work force—just with a bit less money. That approach doesn’t hold much promise that schools can be both radically more effective and more efficient. Far more fundamental changes are called for.

The barriers to such change are certainly formidable, so it is not crazy for superintendents to focus first on what’s easiest and least controversial, including optimizing operations, analyzing costs, and flattening central office organization.

But today’s budget shortfalls are just a prelude. Districts cannot simply close a few school buildings, lower the costs of food services, or raise class sizes slightly and expect to put their fiscal challenges behind them. To address the imminent crisis of state budget deficits, insolvent pension funds, and national debt, much bolder moves are required. In fact, stopgap measures may well do more harm than good: They let a district survive until next year, or the year after, at which point the big structural changes will be that much harder to accomplish. And of course the losers are the children whose education suffers as a result of poor financial decisions made by adults. A much better strategy would be to think bold today. This book is a great place to start.

Fury Over Public Pensions Sparks Disclosure Lawsuits, by Jeannette Neumann, Wall Street Journal, September 4, 2010Opinion: How Government Unions Became So Powerful, by Amity Shlaes, Wall Street Journal, September 4, 2010

What if you got $100,000 or so every year for doing nothing in a terrible economy? That’s life for tens of thousands of public sector retirees—including former educators—who enjoy hefty pensions supported largely by the tax dollars of private sector workers. The catch is that those workers have seen their own pensions slashed or even eliminated. So it’s not surprising that a populist backlash can be spotted with the have-nots resentful of the haves. Public sector unions still seem oblivious, however, pushing as they are (through lawsuits and the like) to protect and even enhance their gold-plated pensions and retirement benefits. It’s bad enough that super-stretched taxpayers have to support the cushy retirements of former government employees, including many who stopped working in their 50s. But wait till the public and parents realize that class sizes are increasing and art and music programs being slashed because more and more education dollars are flowing into pension systems instead of classrooms. This debate could get a whole lot more heated yet.

Teachers Ignore Openings, by Barbara Martinez, Wall Street Journal, September 3, 2010

You might have thought that closing New York City’s infamous rubber rooms meant that our largest school system is no longer paying teachers to do nothing. You’d be wrong. Though disciplined teachers are now placed in administrative positions while their cases are sorted out, tenured teachers who lose their jobs because of downsizing are still guaranteed full pay and benefits—with no deadline by which they must find another job. The district and union reached an accord in 2008—that the district would encourage (and in 2009 require) principals to hire from the “reserve pool” (instead of new teachers), even offering to offset the cost of a higher-salaried tenured teacher over a newbie, but excessed teachers would never be forced on principals. But no deadline for pool time was ever set. Unsurprisingly, most of the 1,800 individuals in this position are taking full advantage. Fifty-nine percent of them have not even applied for a single job through the DOE recruitment site nor attended any DOE-sponsored job fairs, never mind that 1,200 positions are currently open. The Big Apple is the only city in the country that guarantees pay to tenured employees indefinitely; most, like Chicago, give excessed teachers one year to find another job. Needless to say, the annual $100 million this costs New York in salaries can hardly be afforded even in plush times. The union’s solution is to force principals to hire these teachers, but NYC schools chief Joel Klein is standing strong for principal autonomy, as well he should. The union needs a jolt of reality: Paying tenured teachers who aren’t teaching means firing tons more untenured ones who are, while principals leave vacancies and the district’s coffers are further emptied. That’s a lose-lose for everyone.

James E. Ryan, Five Miles Away, a World Apart: One City, Two Schools, and the Story of Educational Opportunity in Modern America (New York, NY: Oxford University Press USA, 2010)

Should we give up on school integration? Among reformers, it’s been widely abandoned as politically infeasible; why not just focus instead on raising student achievement? That’s largely the thinking that has undergirded legal and political desegregation decisions since the 1970s: “save the cities, but spare the suburbs,” as University of Virginia’s James E. Ryan puts it in his provocative new book. Using the story of two Richmond high schools (one suburban, one urban, and only five miles apart), Ryan explains that urban and suburban schools, despite a spate of court cases, remain largely disconnected. In other words, we pump resources into urban schools (save the cities) “in ways that do not threaten the physical, financial, or political independence of suburban schools” (spare the suburbs). Ryan says this strategy won’t work. As the last fifty years have demonstrated, simply pouring money into poor areas, especially into poor schools, has had little success in actually alleviating poverty or raising achievement. That’s because we have never successfully addressed the fundamental political reality of poor urban areas: Poor parents do not pressure schools to serve their children better and urban districts do not have the same political clout as suburban ones at the state and federal levels. The only way in which these “education politics” will change, concludes Ryan, is if “school districts become more diverse by race and class.” The good news is that both urban and suburban neighborhoods are becoming more diverse, thanks in part to a booming Hispanic population and increasingly tolerant views about racially diverse neighborhoods. It’s certainly an uphill and politically tricky fight, but Ryan is convinced that cities, their environs, and the school districts therein need to take advantage of this opportunity, or the achievement gap will never be closed. 

Jonah E. Rockoff and Benjamin B. Lockwood, Stuck in the Middle: How and why middle schools harm student achievement (Cambridge, MA: Education Next, Fall 2010)

Do middle schools hurt student achievement? Seems so. Jonah Rockoff and Ben Lockwood compare middle schools (grades 5-8 or 6-8) to K-8 configurations in New York City by examining student-level achievement data for students in grades 3 to 8 from 1998-99 to 2007-08. They find that English and math achievement falls the year a student starts at a middle school, compared to his or her counterpart who remained at a K-8 school. Transition to a new place obviously plays a role, so what’s more troubling is that the declines persist at least through eighth grade (the highest year in which they had data). Moreover, this “middle school achievement gap” cannot be explained by a scarcity of resources, since New York’s per-pupil expenditures are roughly the same in both types of schools. They did find some evidence, however, that grade size impacts achievement. Since middle schools combine students from multiple elementary schools, they typically have over 200 students in every grade, while the average cohort size in K-8 schools is seventy-five. Large numbers of pupils in the same grade negatively affects achievement, though not overwhelmingly. Rockoff and Lockwood also found that parents with children in middle schools tend to give their schools lower marks on education quality and school safety than those with children in K-8 settings. In the end, we don’t know whether academic declines such as these persist through high school and we also don’t know whether these findings would hold up in more rural or suburban locales. But we do know that these results put another nail in the coffin of the “middle school movement,” which held that pubescent adolescents needed a softer, gentler landing pad between elementary and high school. Maybe not.