The Education Gadfly Weekly

Ron Zimmer, Brian Gill, Kevin Booker, Stephane Lavertu, Tim Sass, and John Witte
RAND Education
March 2009

This longitudinal study seeks to answer four questions: What are the characteristics of students transferring to charter schools? What effect do charter schools have on test-score gains for students who transfer in from traditional public schools (TPSs), and vice versa? What is the effect of attending a charter high school on the probability of graduating and entering college? And what effect does the introduction of charter schools have on test scores of students in nearby TPSs? Though there are 8 states represented in the dataset, the actual data used are drawn from three states (Florida, Ohio, and Texas) and five large urban districts (Chicago, Denver, Milwaukee, Philadelphia, and San Diego). The findings are a mixed bag. For example, charter schools, for the most part, don't "skim off" the highest-achieving students but also don't tend to perform any better than TPSs (although performance does improve with the longevity of the school, as one would expect). To look at graduation rates, researchers focused on Florida and Chicago; in those two locales, there was a positive relationship between attendance at a charter middle school and the likelihood of graduating and enrolling in college. Finally, they found that charters have little competitive effects on nearby TPSs. In other words, their presence in the vicinity is unlikely to improve the quality of the TPS. While the study evaluated elementary, middle, and high school students, the findings are most reliable for middle and high schools. This is partly because the analysis was based on transfer students and elementary schools often have pupils (e.g. kindergarteners) who have never attended a non-charter school. This is a meaty report with loads more information, potentially useful to anyone with an interest in charter schools, albeit a lukewarm accolade for this education reform strategy. You can find it here.

John D. Bransford, Deborah J. Stipek, Nancy J. Vye, Louis M. Gomez, and Diana Lam, eds.
Harvard Education Press
February 2009

It's the age-old quandary of education research: how can interested parties connect high-level, oft-technical, and frequently dense academic research to the everyday work of teachers and schools?  This book is dedicated to understanding the relationship between education research and classroom practices, both in terms of how the two cultures communicate and the methodological and content issues faced by research. To segue from research to classroom and back, authors explore the roles of grant makers, state policymakers, school district administrators, and non-profit and for-profit education support organizations. Although each of these entities is important to disseminating and informing research, they rarely work together. What to do? Perhaps take a lesson from Japan, a country that apparently has done better at integrating research and practice. In a chapter about the Land of the Rising Sun, author Hidenori Fujita explores the mechanisms that allow research and teacher training to interact. It seems that closer relationships among the central government, education scholars, and classroom teachers allow for more fluid interaction between them and for "Japan [to] maintain an effective education system that functions as a learning organization." But the Japanese case may be inspiring in more than one way. Not only do practitioners and researchers communicate along well-oiled channels, but educational research in Japan is governed by a set of strict methodological protocols that standardize and perhaps improve its quality. U.S. education research has no such guidelines and is plagued by both haphazard design and issues of communication. But though Japan is enlightening, this book has few ideas to turn its own evidence into practice. Still, you can purchase it here.

Michael Gurian, Kathy Stevens, and Peggy Daniels
Jossey-Bass Publishing
2009

Single-sex education has garnered more attention recently (see here, for example), now that the U.S. Department of Education has published regulations making it legally viable, and as districts seek new ways to boost achievement and provide alternatives to parents. This handbook for administrators and teachers (and even the casual parent or wonk) is a great place to learn more. It looks at everything from the developmental stages of the sexes to practical teaching strategies for girls-only or boys-only lessons. As everybody knows, boys tend to develop more slowly than girls, meaning that Johnny may find a task much more difficult than Sally at age 6 or 7, which could lead Johnny to become frustrated and alienated in school. This negative attitude, explain the authors, only deepens as he ages. Perhaps he would fare better in classes attuned to boys only. For their part, girls are most apt to benefit from single-sex education in middle school, when they start feeling self-conscious about themselves, their friendships, and their appearance, especially in front of boys. Girls may often dumb themselves down so as not to appear too smart in front of boys. Switching to an all-girls classroom can ease those stresses. Readers will also find helpful guidelines on the mechanics of switching a school from co-ed to single-sex, getting parent buy-in, and advertising strategies to attract students. The authors make no secret of their preference for single-sex education but the handbook still offers an interesting overview of the nuances of this topic. You can find it here.

As we write, the fate of the District of Columbia voucher initiative (a.k.a. Opportunity Scholarship Program) hangs in the balance. Ambiguous, ambivalent remarks from President Obama's camp and Secretary Duncan certainly haven't helped to secure its future and its Congressional and interest-group enemies seem bent on ending it--with a possible reprieve for current beneficiaries. Many are outraged, as we believe they should be, even as others look forward to playing taps. Perhaps the foremost question that has resonated through these debates is, "are voucher programs like this one a good use of taxpayer money?"

Programs such as D.C.'s are under assault from many directions in part because participating private schools haven't openly provided the information--the test scores, the graduation rates, and the financial data--to answer this question. The public is wearying of this lack of transparency and opponents are using that weariness to their advantage.

Take Wisconsin and our home state of Ohio, for example, which together provide vouchers for more than 30,000 students. In both states, Democratic governors are pushing new policies that would up the ante on "accountability" for private schools participating in the voucher programs. In Ohio, Governor Ted Strickland would require that every pupil in a participating private school sit for the state test, even if just a single student receives a state voucher. But is this the best way to liberate important information from participating private schools? We explore this issue in "When Private Schools Take Public Dollars: What's the Place of Accountability in School Voucher Programs?" released on Tuesday by the Fordham Institute.

Put aside for now the question of whether voucher programs will continue to exist--most likely, they will, and they might even multiply, as they have in recent years. Turn instead to the matter of return on investment. One of the foremost criticisms of voucher programs (and their cousins, such as tax credit programs) is their relative lack of transparency. In an era that increasingly demands accountability from all recipients of public dollars and providers of goods and services in which the public has a short or long-term interest--nowhere is this truer than in K-12 education in the days of NCLB--private schools that receive voucher-bearing pupils have typically been accountable only to the marketplace. Money goes in--taxpayer money--and it may be that plenty of learning follows, but how is one to know?  

School-choice advocates have typically responded that these are private schools, meant to be different from public--isn't that the point of giving kids access to them?--and that parents, educators, and markets are the best gauge of their success. It is also said that if the public-accountability burden grows heavy, schools will refuse to participate such programs, thus defeating their very purpose. Critics, however, insist that public dollars spent to educate K-12 pupils demand public transparency and accountability no matter who operates the schools. In practice, most extant voucher programs end up with a set of compromises that follow no particular pattern and, more often than not, make scant policy sense.

Weary of this stale debate and the makeshift accountability arrangements that typically follow, we set out to determine whether a more sensible approach could be devised. To inform and assist us in that quest, we enlisted twenty experts from the school choice world--scholars, advocates, program administrators, and private school leaders.           

We placed a series of questions before them, split between two straightforward categories: "inputs" (e.g., teacher certification and qualifications, admissions policies, and discipline procedures) and "outputs" (e.g., academic performance and financial reporting, in particular). Most of the assemblage agreed that voucher programs should exercise a very light touch in the former area; participating private schools should not face new regulation of their day-to-day operations. They should generally be left to make their own decisions about staff, admissions, discipline, curriculum, and religion.

The experts also tended to agree about parental information and program evaluation. Everyone sees value in helping parents make informed choices by providing them with data about how well their children are performing. Most also believe that voucher programs as a whole should be rigorously evaluated by third-party analysts.

But the consensus broke down when it comes to making school results and financial audits transparent. Here the school choice movement remains fractured. At one end are those who would continue to "let the market rule," and resist public transparency or accountability around school-level results. At the other end, some would, in effect, treat private schools like charter schools and empower government or its agent to intervene if individual schools do not perform adequately. And lots and lots of variegated opinions in between.

Our own preferred solution is, indeed, somewhere in between, a relatively simple and (we hope) judicious middle path that will likely please no purists but that might just work. Picture a sliding scale: the more voucher-bearing students a school enrolls, the greater its obligations for transparency and accountability. Schools that continue to draw the majority of their revenues from private sources should be treated more like other private schools, while those that depend primarily on public dollars should be treated more like public schools.

This approach respects the autonomy of schools that participate in a limited way in voucher programs and connate forms of indirect public subsidy. Yet it also acknowledges that private schools that live predominantly on public funds--whether direct or indirect--are closer to being public schools, and thus should face increasing levels of public transparency and accountability. The transparency/accountability obligations of schools should also rise in proportion to the generosity of the voucher program itself. Private schools that are expected to make do on vouchers far smaller than the sums being spent on public school pupils in the community ought to bear a lighter burden than those whose students are more adequately aided.

No solution to so fractious a problem can be perfect. Ours is at least worth trying, certainly until more is known about student results, parent behavior, and school responses in the presence of vouchers and kindred funding systems--and until more states deploy higher standards and better tests. Nothing we recommend, however, would add to the "input" or operational burdens on private schools; it's all keyed to their performance. Particularly if private schools are shielded from regulation of their day-to-day affairs, we think this approach makes a lot of sense. Now the question is whether any policymakers want to experiment with it in the real world. It might not save the scholarships of 1,700 needy D.C. students, but it could benefit their successors.

The Washington Post's Jay Mathews is ready to close the book on vouchers. While he supports them himself, he thinks "[t]his nation of public school backers just won't go for vouchers." But hold the eulogizing for just a sec. Simply because D.C.'s program is on the block doesn't mean there's not hope beyond the Beltway. Consider the growing ranks of African-American legislators who support school choice. In South Carolina, State Senator Robert Ford recently introduced a bill to give students tax credits or tuition grants. His rationale is who will benefit the most: poor African-American students who are stuck in failing schools. "Public education is hurting our kids," he explained. "All of us have been defending the system. It's time to stop. I'm not pussyfooting with this anymore." Wisconsin State Representative Jason Fields also continues to fight the unpopular fight in his state, as do several African-American legislators in Georgia. And who knows--maybe the right approach to accountability might attract even more support, or at least fend off attempts to strangle the movement. 

"Saying 'When' on D.C. School Voucher Program," by Jay Mathews, Washington Post, March 23, 2009

"Public money for private schools?," by Roddie Burris, Charlotte Observer, March 23, 2009

Conventional wisdom says that most states and school districts will make budget cuts in the most boneheaded manner possible: lay off their young teachers, eliminate art and music classes, decimate sports programs, and so forth. And evidence from the current recession indicates that this conventional wisdom is usually right. But as John Edwards might have said, it doesn't have to be that way.

Consider New Mexico, where legislators from both sides of the aisle are proposing commonsense changes to the state's pension systems in order to save money and respond to dismal market conditions. Under the reforms, public employees, teachers included, would have to work 30 years before becoming eligible for retirement (up from 25), would see a greater share of their paychecks go to the retirement fund, and would make larger contributions to the state's health care system for retirees.

"We just have to have a system where people work longer and contribute more for that system to make it fly," said the state's House Republican Leader, Tom Taylor. The Democratic sponsor of the bill went one step further: "If we don't do something to bring these plans into some sense of being funded completely, then I don't think the Legislature has any other option than to go to defined contribution plans--401(k)."

Those are fighting words to the unions, of course, which want Governor Bill Richardson to veto the measure. The head of the state's AFT affiliate told the Associated Press: "This budget forces school employees to pay for education cuts with their own pension funds, a truly unconscionable political decision at a time when these working people are cash strapped, struggling to stay in their homes and feed their families."

But is it any less "unconscionable" to expect taxpayers, many of whom have seen their own 401(k)s go through the basement and are struggling mightily themselves, to continue to support incredibly generous defined-benefit retirement plans for people in their early 50s? Would the AFT be open to the obvious alternative solution: trimming benefits for today's retirees? That would at least hold "working people" harmless.

These are uncomfortable conversations, to be sure, but ones that have been long delayed. While the market crash is forcing legislators to face the issue, it didn't create the problem, which is structural. House Leader Taylor put it succinctly: "You just can't design a system where you work a shorter period of time than you are retired. It doesn't take an actuary to figure that one out."

How long until legislators in other states figure this out, too?

What do outer space and Appalachia have in common? They're both topics that students could encounter in reading comprehension passages on typical state tests. And they illustrate E.D. Hirsch's big beef with such assessments: they mean to test students' reading abilities, but they really test students' knowledge on randomly-chosen topics. Hirsch complains in the Times that "Teachers can't prepare for the content of the tests and so they substitute practice exams and countless hours of instruction in comprehension strategies like 'finding the main idea.'" These strategies inevitably fail to boost reading achievement and waste time that could be used to develop children's vocabulary and knowledge. But there's a solution: reading tests tied to each state's content standards in literature, science, history, geography, and the arts. Of course, that won't work in many states, as their standards are so vague. Still, as Hirsch explains, "we need to move from teaching to the test to tests that are worth teaching to." In with passages about the Boston Tea party; out with those on the Mexican axolotl.

"Reading Test Dummies," E.D. Hirsch, New York Times, March 22, 2009

When the federal government starts talking in billions, is it too much to ask that the money be well spent? Apparently so. In the rush to get funds out to states and districts ASAP, education stimulus dollars are being dispersed via a tangle of federal formulae. The result is that some districts in states like Wyoming, which face no budgetary woes, are getting larger checks than those in states like Utah, whose budgets are in the tank. "These formulas were the best vehicle for getting these emergency economic recovery funds out to school districts as quickly as possible, to help them immediately stave off layoffs," explained a spokeswoman for Representative George Miller. The Administration doesn't see much of a problem, either. "In this case, people are just extraordinarily thankful for these unprecedented resources," explained Secretary Duncan. "So I'm aware of these disparities, but we've received zero complaints." No kidding! Keep in mind that the Secretary speaks mostly to educators. We suspect that if he conversed with taxpayers who are themselves "under water," he might spot some concerns about bailing out school districts that are just doing just fine.

"Some Rich Districts Get Richer as Aid is Rushed to Schools," by Sam Dillon, New York Times, March 22, 2009

John D. Bransford, Deborah J. Stipek, Nancy J. Vye, Louis M. Gomez, and Diana Lam, eds.
Harvard Education Press
February 2009

It's the age-old quandary of education research: how can interested parties connect high-level, oft-technical, and frequently dense academic research to the everyday work of teachers and schools?  This book is dedicated to understanding the relationship between education research and classroom practices, both in terms of how the two cultures communicate and the methodological and content issues faced by research. To segue from research to classroom and back, authors explore the roles of grant makers, state policymakers, school district administrators, and non-profit and for-profit education support organizations. Although each of these entities is important to disseminating and informing research, they rarely work together. What to do? Perhaps take a lesson from Japan, a country that apparently has done better at integrating research and practice. In a chapter about the Land of the Rising Sun, author Hidenori Fujita explores the mechanisms that allow research and teacher training to interact. It seems that closer relationships among the central government, education scholars, and classroom teachers allow for more fluid interaction between them and for "Japan [to] maintain an effective education system that functions as a learning organization." But the Japanese case may be inspiring in more than one way. Not only do practitioners and researchers communicate along well-oiled channels, but educational research in Japan is governed by a set of strict methodological protocols that standardize and perhaps improve its quality. U.S. education research has no such guidelines and is plagued by both haphazard design and issues of communication. But though Japan is enlightening, this book has few ideas to turn its own evidence into practice. Still, you can purchase it here.

Michael Gurian, Kathy Stevens, and Peggy Daniels
Jossey-Bass Publishing
2009

Single-sex education has garnered more attention recently (see here, for example), now that the U.S. Department of Education has published regulations making it legally viable, and as districts seek new ways to boost achievement and provide alternatives to parents. This handbook for administrators and teachers (and even the casual parent or wonk) is a great place to learn more. It looks at everything from the developmental stages of the sexes to practical teaching strategies for girls-only or boys-only lessons. As everybody knows, boys tend to develop more slowly than girls, meaning that Johnny may find a task much more difficult than Sally at age 6 or 7, which could lead Johnny to become frustrated and alienated in school. This negative attitude, explain the authors, only deepens as he ages. Perhaps he would fare better in classes attuned to boys only. For their part, girls are most apt to benefit from single-sex education in middle school, when they start feeling self-conscious about themselves, their friendships, and their appearance, especially in front of boys. Girls may often dumb themselves down so as not to appear too smart in front of boys. Switching to an all-girls classroom can ease those stresses. Readers will also find helpful guidelines on the mechanics of switching a school from co-ed to single-sex, getting parent buy-in, and advertising strategies to attract students. The authors make no secret of their preference for single-sex education but the handbook still offers an interesting overview of the nuances of this topic. You can find it here.

Ron Zimmer, Brian Gill, Kevin Booker, Stephane Lavertu, Tim Sass, and John Witte
RAND Education
March 2009

This longitudinal study seeks to answer four questions: What are the characteristics of students transferring to charter schools? What effect do charter schools have on test-score gains for students who transfer in from traditional public schools (TPSs), and vice versa? What is the effect of attending a charter high school on the probability of graduating and entering college? And what effect does the introduction of charter schools have on test scores of students in nearby TPSs? Though there are 8 states represented in the dataset, the actual data used are drawn from three states (Florida, Ohio, and Texas) and five large urban districts (Chicago, Denver, Milwaukee, Philadelphia, and San Diego). The findings are a mixed bag. For example, charter schools, for the most part, don't "skim off" the highest-achieving students but also don't tend to perform any better than TPSs (although performance does improve with the longevity of the school, as one would expect). To look at graduation rates, researchers focused on Florida and Chicago; in those two locales, there was a positive relationship between attendance at a charter middle school and the likelihood of graduating and enrolling in college. Finally, they found that charters have little competitive effects on nearby TPSs. In other words, their presence in the vicinity is unlikely to improve the quality of the TPS. While the study evaluated elementary, middle, and high school students, the findings are most reliable for middle and high schools. This is partly because the analysis was based on transfer students and elementary schools often have pupils (e.g. kindergarteners) who have never attended a non-charter school. This is a meaty report with loads more information, potentially useful to anyone with an interest in charter schools, albeit a lukewarm accolade for this education reform strategy. You can find it here.