The Education Gadfly Weekly

Institute of Education Sciences
December 2009

Here we find new results from the Mathematics NAEP Trial Urban District Assessment, a.k.a. TUDA, which measures fourth and eighth-grade math (and, in other years, reading) in some of the nation’s large urban school districts. Eighteen districts participated in 2009. Between 2007 and 2009, we learn, the average math scores across these cities rose in both grades. But individual results for the eleven cities that participated in both 2007 and 2009 were fairly bleak: only Boston and Washington D.C. made gains in fourth grade and only Austin and San Diego did so in eighth; other cities had flat scores. The long-term data are more promising. Compared to 2003, the 2009 average math scores were higher in eight of ten participating districts in 4th grade and in nine districts in 8th grade. Although it’s difficult to spin one tale from this patchwork, one storyline worth mentioning is that TUDA is voluntary. Participation has steadily increased since its inception in 2003, even though the results usually bring bad news. You can find it here.

Craig D. Jerald
The Center for Public Education
July 2009

Hoping to calmly and critically evaluate the grandiose promises of the 21^st century skills movement, this paper systematically looks at three things: how changing world conditions have impacted skills requirements; which kinds of skills, based on this new world order, will be most important going forward; and what districts and schools should do about it. The world has become more automated and globalized, meaning jobs formerly done by humans in a specific location can now be admirably completed by computers half-way across the world. Further, argues Jerald, workplace success in the 21st Century relies on the layered interdependency of “foundational knowledge” (core academic content), “literacies” (ability to apply content), and “competencies” (ability to call on literacies), not on a simplistic skill set learned in the abstract. Finally, what are the implications of these findings for school districts and schools? Though he spends a mere two pages on this important question, Jerald does hit some key points. There can be no “either or” thinking about the relationship between skills and content knowledge; 21st century skills (or applied literacies and broad competencies, as Jerald calls them) are best taught within traditional disciplines and there is good reason to be skeptical of stand-alone lessons related to these skills; America’s expansive curriculum needs to be focused on fewer, deeper concepts; and athletics and extracurricular activities play an important role in developing many of these skills, thus classroom teachers shouldn’t be expected to bear responsibility for imparting these all on their own. Longtime skeptics will be heartened and fueled by this refreshing and thoughtful analysis. Read it here.

Miriam Kutzig Freedman
School Law Pro and Park Place Publications
2009

This little flipbook takes a critical look at special education in America and offers twelve suggestions to improve it. The author argues forcefully that the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) is no longer adequate (though it has played an important role heretofore) and that special ed itself needs an overhaul. She contends that IDEA has become too inclusive, now covering many children for whom it wasn’t meant and who don’t necessarily need special education. (Just 30 percent of kids currently covered by IDEA are estimated to have severe disabilities.) Moreover, today’s special ed regime serves to hold capable kids to lower standards, costs a lot of money, and encourages schools to give extra attention only to kids with diagnosed disabilities, which can mean less attention for others. Besides all that, the bureaucracy that has sprung up around IDEA has become overwhelming, as has the litigation, which further serves to pit parents against schools. Powerful stuff, and available for purchase here.

Education Sector
November 2009 

This latest report from Education Sector summarizes the operational challenges that face nonprofit charter management organizations (CMOs) as they attempt to grow and support their networks of charter schools.

The report profiles a who’s who of nationally recognized CMOs (Achievement First, KIPP, Uncommon Schools), highlights successes, and documents challenges (e.g., high student attrition, finding and retaining quality teachers and school leaders, putting CMOs – and their schools – on a path to financial sustainability). The challenges won’t be a surprise to anyone connected with charter schools, and an underlying message of the report is simply that when it comes to developing a sustainable CMO operation that provides a high quality education to poor urban students, CMOs are learning as they go. It is also apparent that successful networks identify potential problems early on and immediately make a course correction. The ability to identify problems and implement a successful correction strategy – just as in other domains – separates the truly excellent performers from the rest.

Growing Pains concludes with a number of recommendations aimed at policy makers, including eliminating requirements that every charter school have its own board of directors, eliminating caps (or using “smart caps,” see here), providing successful CMO networks access to facilities and expanding the federal Public Charter School Program grant to permit funding facilities, and allowing public schools that deliver results, including charters, to not just be equally funded, but receive funding to reflect their additional costs. Those interested in a brief history of the CMO movement as well as the entrepreneurial side of nonprofit education will find this report worth a read. A copy is available here.

In what the New York Times generously described as “baby steps,” the Empire State’s appalling legislature last week passed several spending reforms designed to close the state’s $3.2 billion budget deficit. Education was not the biggest story, but teacher pension changes loomed large--and, for the most part, the unions won again. Most of the bill’s provisions protect veteran teachers at the expense of their younger peers. For example, new teachers (those hired after January 1) will contribute a larger share of their salaries to the retirement system. On the other hand, it slightly raises the retirement age (from 55 to 57). Meanwhile, other state employees saw their retirement age rise to 62. Why the discrepancy? ''We need the early retirement,” the head of the state teachers union told the AP. ''Teachers just don't make it to 62. It's a tough job.'' And there’s more: The plan bars school systems (and local governments) from offering 401k-type plans; Governor Paterson agreed to a “no layoffs” guarantee for the next year; and school districts are forbidden to change their health insurance benefits. Also included is a provision limiting private contractors, shifting those roles to public employees. While the pension changes overall will limit state costs--Patterson and House Speaker Sheldon Silver claim $30 to $50 billion over 30 years, roughly a 23 percent annual reduction--the pension bill is projected to increase 155 percent in the next three years. This ain’t pension reform. It’s patching a broken system with chewing gum.

“NY’s new pension plan cuts costs, helps unions,” by Michael Gormley, Associated Press, December 3, 2009

“'Reform' landmines: Pension bill’s ugly sweeteners,” by John Faso, New York Post, December 3, 2009

By 2011, if the states stick to their policy guns, all eighth graders in California and Minnesota will be required to take algebra. Other states are sure to follow. In recent years, the conventional wisdom of American K-12 education has declared algebra to be a “gatekeeper” to future educational and career success. So onecan scarcely fault policy makers for insisting that every youngster pass through that gate, lest too many find their futures dimmed. It’s also well known that placing students in remedial classes rarely ends up doing them a favor, especially in light of evidence that low-performing students may learn more in heterogeneous classrooms. 

But are all eighth graders truly prepared to succeed in algebra class? Might they--some of them, at least--be better off in ability-grouped math classes? Anybody raising such questions in the education world will be in the minority. Instead, many schools and districts have chosen to abolish low-level tracks and courses. Many have done away with all forms of tracking. But did they really believe that such seemingly simple changes in policy and school organization would magically transform struggling learners into middling or high-achieving ones? And were they oblivious to the effects that such alterations might have on youngsters who were already high-performing? Those were the questions we asked Brookings scholar Tom Loveless to answer in Fordham’s latest study, Tracking and Detracking: High Achievers in Massachusetts Middle Schools. 

The analysis looks at tracking in one of the leading states in “reforming” that traditional practice and scrutinizes the changes that occurred in the Bay State between 1991 and 2009. Of particular interest was how tracked and untracked schools measured up when it came to producing high-achieving students.

The short answer is…tracked schools did better, but there aren’t many of them left. Loveless finds that most middle schools have done away entirely with tracking in English language arts, science, and social studies, though this practice endures in math, albeit with fewer tracks than two decades ago. Further, “detracking”--reducing the number of subject-area courses offered in a given grade in a given school--may adversely affect high-achieving youngsters in math. (That’s not the case in English; history and science achievement were not analyzed.) Massachusetts middle schools with more tracks have significantly more math pupils performing at the advanced and proficient levels and fewer students at the needs improvement and failing levels. What’s more--and this is important--a mirror image appears for detracked schools: They have more failing and needs improvement math students than do schools with two or three tracks. In fact, a declining number of failing math students is linked to each additional track in the school, i.e., schools with just one track have the most failing math students (26 percent) while schools with three or more tracks have many fewer (14 percent).

Nor is that all. Loveless also found that, when schools’ socioeconomic statuses are held constant, each additional track in eighth-grade math (up to three) is associated with a 3 percentage-point rise in students scoring at the advanced level. That means the advantage for a school offering three tracks instead of one is associated with a 6 percentage-point gain in the number of students performing at high levels.

That may not overwhelm you but it could have considerable impact. The average middle school in Massachusetts can boast just 18 percent of its pupils at the advanced level in math--and many schools have no students who reach such altitudes. Increasing the proportion of high achievers by six percentage points--that’s eighteen kids in an eighth-grade class of 300--could have a dramatic impact on other students, as well as on the school’s culture. At a time when the United States needs every academic high-flyer we can find or produce to buttress our domestic and international prospects, that’s certainly cause for concern. 

But as they say, plus ça change…Even as tracking has waned, American education seems to have picked up more politically acceptable alternatives in the form of school choice, individualized learning, and differentiated instruction. In other words, even if schools say they’ve gotten rid of tracking, they haven’t gotten rid of the problems that gave rise to it nor have they abolished the need to solve those problems for the children’s own sakes. Most Americans recognize that children are distinct individuals who bring very different backgrounds, temperaments, cognitive attainments, and earlier academic achievements with them to school. They deserve schools that respect and respond to such differences.

Bottom line number one: American education needs to care more about taking all of its students to the next level and less about how we get them there. Anna Penny, a former teacher in New York City, said as much in the New York Daily News this past summer: “Anyone who has ever taught knows that kids progress at dramatically different speeds in different subjects. When our schools resist tracking even when it's clearly needed, they wind up valuing homogeneous classrooms over effective ones.”

Bottom line number two: In the name of equity, gap closing, political correctness, and leaving no child behind, American education has been a bit too willing to neglect its higher-performing students and the school arrangements that best meet their needs. A recent report by the National Association for Gifted Children finds that eighteen states can’t even tell us how many children have been identified as gifted within their borders. Further, the vast majority of gifted children are placed in regular classrooms (no surprise, given Loveless’s findings), places with teachers not ordinarily trained in gifted education. In fact, thirty-six states don’t require regular teachers to have training in gifted education at any point in their careers, nor do most teacher-preparation programs include coursework on gifted learners. That’s obviously unfortunate for high-achieving youngsters and the ill-equipped teachers who teach them, but it’s also damaging to our long-term national interest. 

Progressive friends, forgive us for borrowing your phrase, but you were right. When it comes to educating children, as when selling shoes, one size does not fit all.

The Partnership for 21st Century Skills (P21) has some powerful supporters, including the NEA, Cisco, Intel, and Microsoft. Fourteen states have also climbed aboard its effort to refocus American K-12 education on global awareness, media literacy and the like--and to defocus it on grammar, multiplication tables and the causes of the Civil War. Its swell-sounding yet damaging notions have been plenty influential--but the unmasking and truth-telling have begun, thanks in large part to a valiant little organization named Common Core. And new research validates this and other skeptics’ criticisms. Today the contest resembles David vs. Goliath--but remember who ultimately prevailed in that one. 

“Motives of 21st-Century-Skills Group Questioned,” by Stephen Sawchuk, Education Week, December 4, 2009 (subscription required)

It’s no secret that schools of education teach all manner of nonsense. So when the University of Minnesota’s College of Education and Human Development launched its Race, Culture, Class, and Gender Task Group, we might well have expected trouble. But the reality is worse than that. “Cultural competence” should henceforth frame the entire teacher preparation curriculum, the task force asserts, and aspiring educators must “be able to discuss their own histories and current thinking drawing on notions of white privilege, hegemonic masculinity, heteronormativity, and internalized oppression” and “articulate a sophisticated and nuanced critical analysis” of the American Dream, including “the history of demands for assimilation to white, middle-class meaning and values.” Or as ace journalist Katherine Kersten, who investigated these new changes, puts it, “teacher candidates must embrace--and be prepared to teach our state's kids--the task force's own vision of America as an oppressive hellhole: racist, sexist and homophobic.” Further, to ensure that the message doesn’t erode with time, once graduates go into the classroom their supervisors are supposed to undergo “a training session disguised as a thank you/recognition ceremony/reception at the beginning of the year.” Whenever you think it couldn’t get worse…

“Editorial: At U, future teachers may be reeducated,” by Katherine Kersten, Minneapolis-St Paul Star Tribune, December 2, 2009

“University of Minnesota Under Fire for Task Force's Discrimination-Based Teacher Education Plan,” by Diane Macedo, FoxNews, December 9, 2009

Is success genetic or environmental? For educators trying to change the prospects of disadvantaged youth, new research on this timeless question might have wide-ranging implications. Previous research on genetic “vulnerability” hypothesized that certain people (roughly a quarter of all humans) are genetically more prone to depression, anxiety, or sociopathic, antisocial, or violent behavior if they experience a particularly traumatic event or childhood. But, according to David Dobbs, these genetically vulnerable folks may actually have “heightened genetic response to all experience.” They call these folks “orchids,” who like their floral namesake, are volatile and nurture-dependent; for them, a supportive and happy environment will produce a super-successful rocket scientist while a disruptive or dysfunctional one may yield a bully or drug addict. These folks are the high-flyers--and also the most troubled denizens--of our society. (The other 75 percent of humans are “dandelions,” who without these “risk” genes can thrive in any kind of family or home situation. They are steady, stable, and survive life’s rough patches with resilience.) What does mean for education? That for the 25 percent of students who are “orchids,” perhaps the ones who act out the most in class, exhibit symptoms of ADHD, or bully others, positive experiences in school might have the potential to override or at least offset the negative ones outside of it fueling this behavior. That’s good news for schools catering the most troubled and disadvantaged youth.

"The Science of Success," by David Dobbs, The Atlantic, December 2009

Education Sector
November 2009 

This latest report from Education Sector summarizes the operational challenges that face nonprofit charter management organizations (CMOs) as they attempt to grow and support their networks of charter schools.

The report profiles a who’s who of nationally recognized CMOs (Achievement First, KIPP, Uncommon Schools), highlights successes, and documents challenges (e.g., high student attrition, finding and retaining quality teachers and school leaders, putting CMOs – and their schools – on a path to financial sustainability). The challenges won’t be a surprise to anyone connected with charter schools, and an underlying message of the report is simply that when it comes to developing a sustainable CMO operation that provides a high quality education to poor urban students, CMOs are learning as they go. It is also apparent that successful networks identify potential problems early on and immediately make a course correction. The ability to identify problems and implement a successful correction strategy – just as in other domains – separates the truly excellent performers from the rest.

Growing Pains concludes with a number of recommendations aimed at policy makers, including eliminating requirements that every charter school have its own board of directors, eliminating caps (or using “smart caps,” see here), providing successful CMO networks access to facilities and expanding the federal Public Charter School Program grant to permit funding facilities, and allowing public schools that deliver results, including charters, to not just be equally funded, but receive funding to reflect their additional costs. Those interested in a brief history of the CMO movement as well as the entrepreneurial side of nonprofit education will find this report worth a read. A copy is available here.

Institute of Education Sciences
December 2009

Here we find new results from the Mathematics NAEP Trial Urban District Assessment, a.k.a. TUDA, which measures fourth and eighth-grade math (and, in other years, reading) in some of the nation’s large urban school districts. Eighteen districts participated in 2009. Between 2007 and 2009, we learn, the average math scores across these cities rose in both grades. But individual results for the eleven cities that participated in both 2007 and 2009 were fairly bleak: only Boston and Washington D.C. made gains in fourth grade and only Austin and San Diego did so in eighth; other cities had flat scores. The long-term data are more promising. Compared to 2003, the 2009 average math scores were higher in eight of ten participating districts in 4th grade and in nine districts in 8th grade. Although it’s difficult to spin one tale from this patchwork, one storyline worth mentioning is that TUDA is voluntary. Participation has steadily increased since its inception in 2003, even though the results usually bring bad news. You can find it here.

Miriam Kutzig Freedman
School Law Pro and Park Place Publications
2009

This little flipbook takes a critical look at special education in America and offers twelve suggestions to improve it. The author argues forcefully that the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) is no longer adequate (though it has played an important role heretofore) and that special ed itself needs an overhaul. She contends that IDEA has become too inclusive, now covering many children for whom it wasn’t meant and who don’t necessarily need special education. (Just 30 percent of kids currently covered by IDEA are estimated to have severe disabilities.) Moreover, today’s special ed regime serves to hold capable kids to lower standards, costs a lot of money, and encourages schools to give extra attention only to kids with diagnosed disabilities, which can mean less attention for others. Besides all that, the bureaucracy that has sprung up around IDEA has become overwhelming, as has the litigation, which further serves to pit parents against schools. Powerful stuff, and available for purchase here.

Craig D. Jerald
The Center for Public Education
July 2009

Hoping to calmly and critically evaluate the grandiose promises of the 21^st century skills movement, this paper systematically looks at three things: how changing world conditions have impacted skills requirements; which kinds of skills, based on this new world order, will be most important going forward; and what districts and schools should do about it. The world has become more automated and globalized, meaning jobs formerly done by humans in a specific location can now be admirably completed by computers half-way across the world. Further, argues Jerald, workplace success in the 21st Century relies on the layered interdependency of “foundational knowledge” (core academic content), “literacies” (ability to apply content), and “competencies” (ability to call on literacies), not on a simplistic skill set learned in the abstract. Finally, what are the implications of these findings for school districts and schools? Though he spends a mere two pages on this important question, Jerald does hit some key points. There can be no “either or” thinking about the relationship between skills and content knowledge; 21st century skills (or applied literacies and broad competencies, as Jerald calls them) are best taught within traditional disciplines and there is good reason to be skeptical of stand-alone lessons related to these skills; America’s expansive curriculum needs to be focused on fewer, deeper concepts; and athletics and extracurricular activities play an important role in developing many of these skills, thus classroom teachers shouldn’t be expected to bear responsibility for imparting these all on their own. Longtime skeptics will be heartened and fueled by this refreshing and thoughtful analysis. Read it here.