The Education Gadfly Weekly

It’s a big week for science geeks: Achieve is slated to release the long-awaited draft Next-Generation Science Standards (NGSS) tomorrow. Until then, we have the just-released nation’s report card for eighth-grade science to keep us occupied. Overall trends are positive: Scale scores ticked up two points since 2009. (Due to framework changes, we can’t compare data any further back than that.) The black-white achievement gap dropped one point, and the Hispanic-white gap narrowed by three points. All racial subgroups saw bumps in achievement. At the state level, sixteen jurisdictions improved their scale scores since 2009; no states averaged scores significantly lower than their 2009 marks. Further, we learn that those students who engage in hands-on science activities at least once a week and those who participate in science activities outside the classroom fair better on NAEP—an encouraging find for programs like Project Lead the Way. But there’s also cause for concern. Notably (staffers at PLTW and elsewhere should take note), we have not shown the ability to boost outcomes for our best and brightest. The percentage of students scoring “advanced” on the eighth-grade NAEP science test stagnated between 2009 and 2011—at a dismal 2 percent. (Compare this to the 8 percent of eighth graders scoring advanced in math.) All achievement groups are making gains save our top performers: The bottom quartile of students bumped three scale-score points, the top quartile just one point. The top-decile students, however, saw no significant improvement in scores. Now is an exciting—and potentially volatile—time for American science education. As the NGSS movement gets underway and more attention is brought to science education writ large, let these NAEP data—and their implications for America’s global competitiveness—help to guide the conversation. Expect more from us on this front in the coming days and weeks.

National Center for Education Statistics, The Nation’s Report Card: Science 2011 (Grade 8) (Washington, D.C.: United Stated Department of Education, 2012).

Three years ago, Grover “Russ” Whitehurst made the bold claim that the caliber of a state’s standards had no bearing on that jurisdiction’s student achievement. More recently, fellow Brookings scholar Tom Loveless used Whitehurst’s work to argue that the Common Core standards won’t move the needle on student achievement. There is, however, one small problem with applying the Whitehurst findings to the present situation: The Common Core standards didn’t exist in 2009. Enter this analysis by Michigan State University education professor Dr. William Schmidt (admittedly, a Common Core booster): After comparing states’ previous standards to those of the Common Core, Schmidt analyzed how students from each state fared on the 2009 NAEP math exam. The upshot? States whose own standards were closer to the Common Core boasted higher NAEP scores than those states with unaligned standards. (Schmidt also compared the Common Core standards to those in other high-performing nations and found them to be of similar substance and quality.) These correlations suggest that Common Core may be getting something very right in the way the standards are written and that spending the time and money necessary for smart implementation may well be exactly what our students need. But they’re only correlations. As Schmidt himself cautioned: “This does not prove anything…it’s a reasonable approximation of what might be possible.”

Dr. William Schmidt, Common Core State Standards Math: The Relationship Between High Standards, Systemic Implementation and Student Achievement (Lansing, MI: Michigan State University, 2012).

This pithy report from James Merriman’s New York City Charter School Center offers a look at the state of play among Big Apple charters. It brims with useful statistics framed around four central questions: Who are the students? What choices do charters provide? What are their results? And what is the outlook for their future? To (partially) answer these questions: 136 charters in NYC enroll 47,000 students, representing a 4 percent market share—though these schools are concentrated in Harlem, Central Brooklyn, and South Bronx. For perspective, 25 percent of students in Harlem attend charters. Seventy-five percent of students in charters are low income—comparable to district schools. Sixty percent are black, compared to 30 percent of district students, while 30 percent are Hispanic (versus 40 percent in district schools). Compared to district schools, the charter sector serves smaller percentages of SPED and ELL students and has higher average teacher- and principal-turnover rates. (But—kudos to the charters—they’ve got stronger pupil attendance!) On the achievement front, charters fare better at teaching students math; they’re on par with district schools for ELA and their ELL students appear more likely to pass the English-language-proficiency test and leave the ELL category. What’s more, this sector is slated for growth (assuming the political environment allows it): About half of Gotham’s charters are affiliated with CMO networks and most (60 percent) have been open less than five years. And under the current state cap, existing charters can add 24,000 seats and another 116 schools can open. As Merriman and his crew explain, “this report represents a modest first step toward a more informed and data-driven conversation about charter schools.” As they take the second step, they might consider adding some financial information. How do New York’s charters look on the revenue-and-expenditure side versus district schools, for example?

New York City Charter School Center, The State of the NYC Charter School Sector (New York, NY: New York City Charter School Center, 2012).

Checker joins Mike on the podcast to recount his recent investigation of Asian gifted education and predict the outcome of California’s waiver gambit, while Amber has some issues with a recent report on the Common Core’s potential.

Amber's Research Minute

William Schmidt Common Core State Standards Math: The Relationship Between High Standards, Systemic Implementation and Student Achievement - Download the Powerpoint

Boarding my plane from Singapore after a fascinating, whirlwind reacquaintance with that small nation’s remarkable education system, I encountered this Wall Street Journal headline: “Education Slows in U.S., Threatening Prosperity.” Reading on, I learned that Harvard economists Claudia Goldin and Lawrence Katz have performed a provocative—and seemingly alarming—set of calculations to answer the question: How much more education are Americans getting than their parents did?

There’s still an increment, it turns out, but it’s been shrinking: from two years more schooling (by age thirty) for those born in 1955 down to just eight months more for those born in 1980. The implication, quoth the Journal reporters: “Without better educated Americans, economists say, the U.S. won’t be able to maintain high-wage jobs and rising living standards in a competitive global economy.”

America's tendency to supersize may not be a good recipe for education.  Photo by velkr0.

This isn’t exactly news. Nor is the Goldin-Katz analysis the first time we have observed that the U.S. is no longer leading the planet when it comes to the quantity of education that its population receives. But is more education—more hours and days, more years and degrees—the cure for what ails us? Or are we already pigging out on the educational equivalent of fast food—fattening but not nutritious—and will supersizing our portions just make matters worse?

If we accept the Goldin-Katz view of what’s wrong with U.S. education, we will inevitably demand more preschool, more full-day Kindergarten, more high school graduations, more college attendance, more college and postgraduate degrees, etc. Supersizing is the standard American response. Indeed, it’s already on the election-year menu with both parties demanding that student-loan interest rates be made to stay low so that more people can afford more tertiary education. Not much talk about quality, though.

Singapore is one of those places that’s been going a mile a minute in boosting both the quality and the quantity of formal education that its population receives. For example, the proportion of Singaporeans aged twenty-five to thirty-nine that completed secondary school (meaning tenth grade) jumped from 25 percent in 1980 to 96 percent in 2010. At the same time, Singapore students beat almost everyone else in the world on international assessments of math and science knowledge.

To an American, however, it’s surprising how little rush there is to supersize Singaporean education. Kindergarten is optional. (The primary schools start at age six or seven.) And only about one in four young Singaporeans currently qualifies for the “junior colleges” (basically grades eleven and twelve) that are the usual path into the country’s four universities. Government policy is headed toward placing 30 percent of the age cohort in public universities; for now, as many as 40 percent of secondary graduates head into career-oriented “polytechnics” that resemble the best of American community colleges and some 20 percent attend the Institute of Technical Education, which emphasizes “hands-on” training.

Singapore relies on its education system to drive its economy without compromising on quality.  Photo by edwin11.

There is, to be sure, public pressure to increase the number who can enter Singapore’s universities—and some private and non-Singaporean institutions have opened to accommodate some of that demand. (Other students travel overseas for their tertiary education.) But basically nobody is saying that every young person should go to university. And remember: this in an education-obsessed country with no other resources to speak of save its highly skilled populace.

Nor are they going to take the easy path (as England and Hong Kong have done in recent decades and as the U.S. started to do long ago) and put fancier labels onto existing institutions. They are not, for example, going to pretend that their polytechnics are really universities, as we have done with hundreds of ex-teachers colleges and quondam “normal schools.” They regard that kind of maneuver as both an affront to quality control at the university level and damaging to the real-world job-preparation work that the polytechnics specialize in.

The United States, of course, tends to reject both the benefits and the detriments of Singapore-style central planning in the education space, at least when it comes to planning from Washington. But the new Goldin-Katz data, combined with OECD trend data, make clear that our system (or non-system) isn’t doing a very good job of propelling more people onward to get more education than their parents got. And we know from plenty of other data (TIMSS, PISA, etc.) that the quality of much of what they’re getting isn’t so great, either, especially when viewed in international perspective.

Any number of reform initiatives are seeking to tackle one or the other problem. Some are focused on raising academic standards, others on keeping more people in the education system longer and seeing that they emerge with credentials. Some insist that the two goals are complimentary—and the mantra that “everyone should emerge from high school both college and career-ready” tends to blur the distinction and terminate the discussion.

Are our presidential candidates crazy to yammer about cheap loans to make college more affordable for all?

But what will we do when we face hard trade-offs, such as the likely discovery that higher graduation standards will lead to a higher failure (and dropout) rate? Our track record in this regard leaves much to be desired. Even much-envied Massachusetts, which has done a commendable job of getting almost all who stay in school over the medium-high bar set by MCAS, has worrisome dropout rates, particularly among minority youngsters, and has been loath to raise its high school exit-bar to the level of true college readiness.

Are our presidential candidates crazy to yammer about cheap loans to make college more affordable for all? I understand that nobody (except maybe Rick Santorum) is going to campaign for the White House by urging fewer young Americans to go to college. But if more do in fact go and stay, will they really be getting a good education there? Or just a bigger bag of fries? What if, instead, more of them simply emerged career ready from our secondary schools, which already last two years longer than the norm in Singapore? Wouldn’t a whole lot of time and money be saved and a lot of heartache and dashed aspirations avoided?

I don’t expect these dilemmas to be resolved in Washington—though it would be fascinating to hear them discussed by Messrs. Obama and Romney in an upcoming debate. But it’s something our states had better come to grips with—including how they finance their P-20 education systems. It’s clear that rising tertiary education costs paid by consumers—and heavy debt burdens on many who enter and persist in college—are part of the problem. But only part. Maybe more attention to quality would do greater good.

Has Connecticut witnessed “meaningful education reform,” as its governor claimed this week? Both reformers and teacher-union leaders have answered yes, which leaves Gadfly scratching his head. So what happened? Democratic lawmakers and Gov. Dannel P. Malloy agreed to legislation that somewhat toughens teacher evaluations, enhances transparency in school spending, provides Connecticut’s (few) charter schools the most money they’ve ever seen, and empowers the state with more latitude to turn around poor performing schools. With progress, however, comes concession. Performance evaluations that determine whether teachers receive tenure will be piloted in just a handful of districts, and they lack the bite of the reforms proposed by Malloy three months ago. The legislation also confines the education commissioner to intervene in only twenty-five of the lowest-achieving schools over three years and limits his ability to turn them around. (The bill limits private management to just six of the twenty-five schools and prohibits for-profit providers from taking over any school.) And unions retain their ability to bargain over the impact of these changes. Still, the steps are substantial for a Democratic governor and a Democratic legislature. The Nutmeg State has made room for more accountability and greater school choice. That counts for something.

“In Connecticut, Compromise on Education Package,” by Peter Applebome, New York Times, May 8, 2012.

Three cheers for California’s governor, state superintendent, and state board chair, for applying for a waiver from the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (aka No Child Left Behind) that doesn’t totally kowtow to Washington. While Jerry Brown, Tom Torlakson, and Mike Kirst deserve plenty of criticism for their indifference to education reform—kicking charter supporters off the state board, cozying up to the teacher unions—on this one they deserve kudos for bravery and federalism. In a nine-page request (still in draft form for another month) they ask Arne Duncan to allow California to use its own accountability system, the Academic Performance Index (API), and to scrap AYP. But they refuse to meet one of Duncan’s conditions for such flexibility: namely, the creation of a statewide teacher evaluation system. As Kirst bluntly put it, "We're saying we just can't pay for it." Moreover, he continued, "We do not see anything in the law about state mandates for teacher evaluation." Finally, a state willing to call out the administration on the dubious legality of its waiver policy. (And a true-blue state at that!) To be clear: California’s request shouldn’t automatically be approved. There are legitimate questions about API and whether it’s demanding enough (and sensitive enough to subgroup performance). As with the other states, Duncan has a right to negotiate over the particulars. But he doesn’t have a right to demand in return the creation of a teacher evaluation system not mentioned in the law. It may well be a good idea—but under the U.S. Constitution the executive branch must persuade the legislative branch before it becomes law!

“California Readies Own Waiver Request,” by Alyson Klein, Education Week—Politics K-12 blog, May 4, 2012.

This post originally appeared in a slightly different form as a post on the Flypaper blog.

Cleveland Mayor Frank Jackson told the Columbus Dispatch back in 2007, about his city’s rapidly declining population, that, “Our problem is families with children. People are making their choices based on education, and if I am able to make our school district a district of choice where people want to put their children because of excellence, then I can guarantee you that our population reduction will come to a halt.” In the last decade, Cleveland’s school age population has shrunk by 10,000 children, and those left behind are largely poor, minority, and struggling academically.

Ensuring a bright future for Cleveland and its education system requires taking chances.  Photo by Laszlo Ilyes.

It is in the hope of stemming the loss of families and children that the mayor has proposed his bold school-reform plan that seeks to turn the city’s educational fortunes around. There are many worthy parts to his plan (see here for details), and one of the boldest sections calls for changes to how charter schools operate and are treated in Cleveland. First, high-performing charters would be welcomed as equals and even be offered a share of local tax-levy revenue. This arrangement would be the first of its kind in America and is truly path breaking. Second, the plan calls for a Transformation Alliance that would have the authority to veto proposed start-up charter schools that don’t meet yet-to-be-determined criteria for quality.  

While many in the state’s charter community support the overall direction of the mayor’s plan, no one, including Fordham, likes the provision giving the Transformation Alliance (and its yet unidentified members) veto authority over the start-up of new schools. We’ve learned as a charter-school authorizer since 2005 (Fordham currently authorizes eight schools that serve about 2,300 students) that making determinations about who should and shouldn’t be allowed to open new schools is one of the hardest and most important decisions that an authorizer makes. It is not something politically appointed bodies usually do very well even if it is done with the best of intentions.

The work of an authorizer is hard because it literally demands trying to peer into the future and make bets about who should and shouldn’t be allowed to open new schools. These decisions are based on the people involved (leadership and governance); their academic plans (curricular and programmatic); their resources and budget assumptions; their experience (have they opened successful schools previously or been involved in a successful school?); and market demand. When Fordham takes applications for charter-school sponsorship from prospective school operators we will only issue contracts to those applicants that we believe have “a high likelihood of success” in opening new schools.

As a result, we have dozens of prospective school operators contact us each year, a dozen or so actually go through the detailed Fordham charter-application process, and this year we agreed to sponsor just three new schools. We hold such a high-bar for prospective operators for two primary reasons. First, we have learned from experience that opening and running a successful charter school is one of the hardest things to do in American education. Many think they can do it well, but few really can. Second, it is far harder to close a struggling school (and disrupt the education of students and the lives of teachers) than it is to say "no" to a prospective operator that you think simply isn’t up to the task of opening and sustaining a successful charter school.

We believe the charter community has a responsibility to offer a workable solution to this real problem.

Yet, while we have doubts about the proposed Transformation Alliance and the scope of its authority, we fully understand, appreciate, and share Mayor Jackson’s frustration with the current system of charter-school quality control in his city, and indeed across the state. Cleveland is rife with dozens of low-performing charter schools, sponsored by nine, going on eleven, separate charter authorizers, many of which are only in it for the money. We believe the charter community has a responsibility to offer the mayor and the city of Cleveland a workable solution to this real problem.

As mayor of Ohio’s second-largest city, Jackson is right to demand better from the state’s charter community, and a fine starting point would be to give him some say about who, besides the district, can authorize schools in Cleveland. Using real data about actual school performance and doing all this in the sunshine, he and the Transformation Alliance, might advise the Ohio Department of Education regarding future Cleveland sponsors. They might even get to pick and choose, provided that a reasonable number of independent authorizers are always chosen. But it does the children of Cleveland no favor to continue with boundless authorizing of mediocre (or worse) schools. Maybe quality charter authorizers working together with the mayor can help Cleveland reverse its decline, while giving children and families better school choices. It is certainly worth a try.

A slightly different version of this editorial originally appeared on the Ohio Gadfly Daily blog.

This week, Tennessee capped the number of foreign workers on visas that charter schools in the Volunteer State can hire. Critics have called the bill xenophobic and discriminatory (which is true), but the Gadfly also thinks it's unfair for a different reason: Part of what makes charter schools worth having in the first place is the freedom and flexibility to hire who they need without onerous and unnecessary governmental regulation.

In a special report, The Washington Monthly describes a new reform wave poised to break upon America’s school systems, the combined effect of Common Core State Standards and rapid advances in education technology. The future depicted here is appealing—rigorous instruction aligned to demanding standards and assessed by sophisticated computerized tools that will increasingly blur the line between games and tests—but, as the Wall Street Journal noted yesterday, it’s no sure thing. Much hard work remains before we can know whether this wave turns into a destructive tsunami—or if it's little more than the tide.

After reviewing 2,500 entries, the Hewlett Foundation awarded $100,000 in prizes yesterday to winning three teams that designed software capable of effectively grading student writing. While computerized essay grading promises to benefit teachers and students, equally exciting is the competition itself: None of the winning teams came from education backgrounds, a tantalizing sign of what the technology sector, given incentive and encouragement, is capable of delivering.

Just behind Thomas Jefferson High School and a good fifty-two spots ahead of NYC’s prestigious Stuyvesant in this year’s US News rankings of the country’s top high schools sits a noteworthy name: BASIS Tucson, the nation’s top-ranked charter school. Unlike the selective-admission schools that abound on the list, BASIS provides top-flight education without considering students’ past performances. Here’s hoping that students in the nation’s capital will enjoy a similarly great opportunity this fall.

Mike Cohen, president of Achieve, speaks at Embracing the Common Core: Helping Students Thrive to the specifics of PARCC (the assessment consortia Ohio joined last fall) and warned that the implementation of the new standards in ELA and math will not be easy and that districts should start the implementation process now.

Download his presentation here.

Mike Cohen, president of Achieve, speaks at Embracing the Common Core: Helping Students Thrive to the specifics of PARCC (the assessment consortia Ohio joined last fall) and warned that the implementation of the new standards in ELA and math will not be easy and that districts should start the implementation process now.

Download his presentation here.

Three years ago, Grover “Russ” Whitehurst made the bold claim that the caliber of a state’s standards had no bearing on that jurisdiction’s student achievement. More recently, fellow Brookings scholar Tom Loveless used Whitehurst’s work to argue that the Common Core standards won’t move the needle on student achievement. There is, however, one small problem with applying the Whitehurst findings to the present situation: The Common Core standards didn’t exist in 2009. Enter this analysis by Michigan State University education professor Dr. William Schmidt (admittedly, a Common Core booster): After comparing states’ previous standards to those of the Common Core, Schmidt analyzed how students from each state fared on the 2009 NAEP math exam. The upshot? States whose own standards were closer to the Common Core boasted higher NAEP scores than those states with unaligned standards. (Schmidt also compared the Common Core standards to those in other high-performing nations and found them to be of similar substance and quality.) These correlations suggest that Common Core may be getting something very right in the way the standards are written and that spending the time and money necessary for smart implementation may well be exactly what our students need. But they’re only correlations. As Schmidt himself cautioned: “This does not prove anything…it’s a reasonable approximation of what might be possible.”

Dr. William Schmidt, Common Core State Standards Math: The Relationship Between High Standards, Systemic Implementation and Student Achievement (Lansing, MI: Michigan State University, 2012).

This pithy report from James Merriman’s New York City Charter School Center offers a look at the state of play among Big Apple charters. It brims with useful statistics framed around four central questions: Who are the students? What choices do charters provide? What are their results? And what is the outlook for their future? To (partially) answer these questions: 136 charters in NYC enroll 47,000 students, representing a 4 percent market share—though these schools are concentrated in Harlem, Central Brooklyn, and South Bronx. For perspective, 25 percent of students in Harlem attend charters. Seventy-five percent of students in charters are low income—comparable to district schools. Sixty percent are black, compared to 30 percent of district students, while 30 percent are Hispanic (versus 40 percent in district schools). Compared to district schools, the charter sector serves smaller percentages of SPED and ELL students and has higher average teacher- and principal-turnover rates. (But—kudos to the charters—they’ve got stronger pupil attendance!) On the achievement front, charters fare better at teaching students math; they’re on par with district schools for ELA and their ELL students appear more likely to pass the English-language-proficiency test and leave the ELL category. What’s more, this sector is slated for growth (assuming the political environment allows it): About half of Gotham’s charters are affiliated with CMO networks and most (60 percent) have been open less than five years. And under the current state cap, existing charters can add 24,000 seats and another 116 schools can open. As Merriman and his crew explain, “this report represents a modest first step toward a more informed and data-driven conversation about charter schools.” As they take the second step, they might consider adding some financial information. How do New York’s charters look on the revenue-and-expenditure side versus district schools, for example?

New York City Charter School Center, The State of the NYC Charter School Sector (New York, NY: New York City Charter School Center, 2012).

It’s a big week for science geeks: Achieve is slated to release the long-awaited draft Next-Generation Science Standards (NGSS) tomorrow. Until then, we have the just-released nation’s report card for eighth-grade science to keep us occupied. Overall trends are positive: Scale scores ticked up two points since 2009. (Due to framework changes, we can’t compare data any further back than that.) The black-white achievement gap dropped one point, and the Hispanic-white gap narrowed by three points. All racial subgroups saw bumps in achievement. At the state level, sixteen jurisdictions improved their scale scores since 2009; no states averaged scores significantly lower than their 2009 marks. Further, we learn that those students who engage in hands-on science activities at least once a week and those who participate in science activities outside the classroom fair better on NAEP—an encouraging find for programs like Project Lead the Way. But there’s also cause for concern. Notably (staffers at PLTW and elsewhere should take note), we have not shown the ability to boost outcomes for our best and brightest. The percentage of students scoring “advanced” on the eighth-grade NAEP science test stagnated between 2009 and 2011—at a dismal 2 percent. (Compare this to the 8 percent of eighth graders scoring advanced in math.) All achievement groups are making gains save our top performers: The bottom quartile of students bumped three scale-score points, the top quartile just one point. The top-decile students, however, saw no significant improvement in scores. Now is an exciting—and potentially volatile—time for American science education. As the NGSS movement gets underway and more attention is brought to science education writ large, let these NAEP data—and their implications for America’s global competitiveness—help to guide the conversation. Expect more from us on this front in the coming days and weeks.

National Center for Education Statistics, The Nation’s Report Card: Science 2011 (Grade 8) (Washington, D.C.: United Stated Department of Education, 2012).