The Education Gadfly Weekly

Five years and thirty-six reports later, the researchers at the University of Arkansas’s School Choice Demonstration Project have written their last word on Milwaukee’s Parental Choice Program (MPCP) (some background here and here). Largely, the news is good for the nation’s oldest school-voucher enterprise. Eight new studies—written by Patrick Wolf, John Witte, Anna Jacob, and others—make plain that voucher students were more likely to graduate high school and enroll in a four-year college than their counterparts in the Milwaukee Public Schools (MPS). Voucher pupils also made significantly larger reading gains. Perhaps most tantalizing, the state’s new school-accountability requirements seem partly responsible for the progress. In 2010-11, the final year of data collection, MPCP students made significantly larger reading gains than their MPS peers—unlike previous years, when voucher students were merely on par with their public-school counterparts. (Achievement growth in math was about the same for MPCP and MPS students throughout the studied years.) Interestingly, the same year saw a host of additional testing and reporting regulations added to participating voucher schools. For example, voucher-bearing pupils had to take state assessments and their schools had to adopt formal graduation and promotion standards. Though analysts couldn’t “determine conclusively how big a role the accountability policy played,” their findings encourage the view that voucher programs shouldn’t be ruled by the market alone; transparency and results-based accountability are good for everyone.

School Choice Demonstration Project, Milwaukee Evaluation: Final Reports (Fayetteville, AR: University of Arkansas, February 2012).

The Pioneer Institute is no friend of the Common Core—which needs to be remembered when reading its latest missive. Released last week, this report claims that it will cost the nation $15.8 billion to implement the new standards over a seven-year period, with the lion’s share of those costs incurred during the first year. (Worse, the authors further remind readers that this is, at best, a “midrange” estimate.) The Institute projects a $10 million-plus invoice per school for professional development, technology, and textbooks and instructional materials in the first year alone—a number that strikes us as radically inflated, to put it kindly. To be sure, implementing the Common Core well will bring costs: Aligning materials, instruction, and assessments with new standards cannot be done on the cheap if it’s going to be done well. But Pioneer’s estimates are misleading. Not every dollar spent on CCSS will be “new money.” (It’s not as if we’re spending zip on professional development, textbooks, and the rest currently.) Nor do states need to follow the tired blueprint we’ve been modeling implementation off of to date—and that has too often failed to move the achievement needle. Examine Pioneer’s take on professional development, for instance. The authors project a one-time professional development cost of $5.26 billion across all states—a third of Pioneer’s total CCSS implementation estimate. Unfortunately, this fantastical number rests on two goofy assumptions. First, that the CCSS adopters should (and will) use our current and dramatically flawed PD-delivery model to prep teachers. Second, that all teachers—regardless of their strengths, subjects, or years of experience—need exactly the same level of (expensive and outmoded) training. That said, Pioneer does raise some legitimate concerns about CCSS implementation. (In particular, the authors question the assessment plans outlined by each assessment consortium and question whether they can deliver given the proposed budget.) Let’s hope these red flags spur innovation and cost-saving implementation—rather than serve as an excuse to walk away from what are stand-up standards. As for a saner, real-world estimate of Common Core implementation costs, stand by for others, Fordham included, to weigh in.

Pioneer Institute and American Principles Project, National Cost of Aligning States and Localities to the Common Core Standards (Boston, MA: Pioneer Institute and American Principles Project, February 2012).

This special edition of the Harvard Business Review explains America’s unready state for competing in the global marketplace. And it points an accusatory finger at our education system. U.S. public education—according to HBR authors—is “neither world class nor reflective of the large sums spent on [it].” It’s also a system that struggles to “produce employable workers.” In short, it’s broken. Luckily, there are solutions. In her education-specific article (the only one in the bunch), the Gates Foundation’s Stacey Childress (formerly an HBS professor) promotes the use of technology to improve and personalize content delivery. Suggestions from other contributors include calling on the business community and business schools to invest locally in schools (a call recently echoed by Governor Jindal) and to increase the number of apprenticeship and internship-type programs for high schoolers. At the higher-education level, authors pushed for curricula better aligned with the needs of employers. Those seeking a primer on U.S. competitiveness may wish to have a look. And to supporters of career-readiness efforts: This issue provides much fodder for a revamped approach to vocational and technical education as well.

“Special report: Reinventing America,” Harvard Business Review 90, no. 3 (March 2012).

After decades of education schools’ oligarchic control over teacher licensure, alternative-certification pathways have gained traction in recent years. (Fordham has tracked and supported these pathways since the first such emerged in NJ.) Still, resistance to them remains. Many critics argue that alt-cert pathways cherry-pick their entrants. (Much has been written about TFA on this front). This paper by Tim Sass, a CALDER researcher and economics professor, analyzes three of Florida’s nine  alternate pathways to teacher licensure—none of which engage in heavy recruiting, and some of which require no coursework before or after licensure. Overall, the author finds that teachers who enter the profession with no education coursework under their belts are better at raising student achievement than either those from traditional teacher-prep programs or alt-cert programs requiring some formal coursework—though there is much variability in programs’ effectiveness. Sass also investigates prior coursework taken by teachers who enter through each pathway and produces an interesting finding: Alternatively certified science teachers took far more discipline-specific courses than those who have been traditionally trained, though the same cannot be said for math teachers. Of particular note is the strong performance by teachers certified by ABCTE—an “alternate route on steroids” that Fordham helped to birth. While surely not the final word on alternative certification, Sass’s offers further reason for the expansion of smarter alt-cert options.

Tim Sass, Certification Requirements and Teacher Quality: A Comparison of Alternative Routes to Teaching (Atlanta, GA: Georgia State University, 2011).

Mike and Rick break down the week’s news, from the prospects of John Kline’s ESEA reauthorization proposals to the college-for-all controversy. Amber analyzes the latest report on Milwaukee’s voucher program Chris wonders whether robbing a bank is enough to get a school bus driver fired.

Amber's Research Minute

The Comprehensive Longitudinal Evaluation of the Milwaukee Parental Choice Program

Amber's Weekly Poll

Which state has the strongest charter law as measured by the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools? (data from 2011)

Tune in next week to find out the answer!

What's Up With That?

School bus dispatcher was bank robbery getaway driver - WFTV.com

Many states, including Ohio, are moving toward more rigorous evaluation systems. We talked to DC teachers evaluated by DC's IMPACT evaluation system to hear their thoughts on how they're evaluated.

The Common Core State Standards Initiative landed in our midst with four great assets:

• Its content-and-skill expectations for grades K-12 in English and math are, by almost everyone’s reckoning, about as rigorous as the best state-specific academic standards and superior to most.


• It was developed outside the federal government, voluntarily by states, using private dollars. (The related assessments are another matter.) And both standards and assessments remain voluntary for states. 


• It opens the way, for the first time, to comparing student, school and district performance across the land on a credible, common metric—and gauging their achievement against that of youngsters in other countries on our shrinking and ever-more-competitive planet.


• Besides comparability, it brings the possibility that families moving around our highly mobile society will be able to enroll their kids seamlessly in schools that are teaching the same things at the same grade levels.

Ever since it landed, the Common Core has been the object of ceaseless attacks from multiple directions.

Ever since it landed, however, the Common Core has been the object of ceaseless attacks from multiple directions. The number of zealous assailants is small and, for a time, it all looked like a tempest in a highly visible teapot. That may yet turn out to be the case. But the attacks are growing fiercer; some recent recruits to the attack squad are people who tend to get taken seriously; and anything can happen in an election year. Remember the classic Peter Sellers movie, The Mouse That Roared? The Duchy of Grand Fenwick ended up triumphing over the United States of America. As you may recall, that happened in large part because the U.S. government contributed to its own defeat. In the present case, something similar could well transpire. Please read on.

Before examining the assaults, however, let’s remind ourselves what the Common Core is not. It is no guarantee of stronger student achievement or school performance. Huge challenges await any (serious) academic standards on the implementation, assessment and accountability fronts. To get traction in classrooms, states that adopt these standards (and all but four say they’re doing so) must take pains with curriculum, teacher preparation, assessment, accountability and more. To yield real rigor (and comparability), the currently-under-development assessments must avoid numerous pitfalls and incorporate hard-to-achieve consensus on genuinely challenging issues (such as where to set the “cut score”).

In and of themselves, academic standards merely describe the end point to be reached and the major stops en route. They don’t get you there. But it's far better to have an education destination worth reaching, i.e. rigorous standards set forth with sufficient specificity, clarity, and rich content to provide real guidance to curriculum designers, classroom teachers, test developers and more. Few states have managed to do that on their own.

To be sure, other states could simply copy the best of those that already exist. But that’s more or less what the Common Core is: an amalgam of good standards put together by people who know a lot—and care a lot—about both content and skills.

So why the nonstop attacks against it? As best I can tell, they arise from six objections and fears.

First, a few earnest critics are convinced that the standards are substantively flawed, that the algebra sequence (or grade level) is wrong, the English standards don’t contain enough literature, the emphasis on “math facts” isn’t as strong as it should be, etc. This sort of thing has accompanied every past set of standards of every sort, and it’s perfectly legitimate. Insofar as such criticisms are warranted, the Common Core can be revised, states can add standards of their own, and jurisdictions that find the common version truly unsatisfactory can change their minds about using it at all.

Second, the Common Core will be difficult and expensive to implement. Many organizations are working hard to help states surmount these genuine challenges. Many philanthropists are kicking money into the effort. And some groups (Fordham included) are trying to cost it all out. Nobody denies that doing this right will be hard and costly (though some of those costs are already embedded in state and district budgets.) Of course, those who think the country is doing OK today have every reason to shirk that challenge and stick with what they’re used to.

Third, the Common Core won’t make any difference in student achievement—but may cause a politically-unacceptable level of student failure. As noted above, standards per se do not boost achievement. (Of course, standards per se don’t carry costs or failure rates, either. They don’t, by themselves, do much of anything!) And failure rates will worsen only if (a) the new assessments are truly rigorous and (b) schools neglect preparing their pupils to pass them.

Fourth, states have done as well, or better, on their own, and switching over to the Common Core will just mess them up. This criticism mostly emanates from Massachusetts, which has done a commendable job on its own and where the decision to adopt the Common Core was truly conflicted. Other states that prefer to go it alone, mostly notably Texas and Virginia, have simply declined to adopt the Common Core. Others are free to exit from it (though doing so would, for some, violate commitments they made in their Race to the Top proposals.)

We retain a deep (if, in my view, unwarranted) affection for “local control” in American education.

Fifth, “national” is not the right way to do anything in American education. We retain a deep (if, in my view, unwarranted) affection for “local control” in this realm and constitutional responsibility for education is undeniably vested in the states. Some folks dread the prospect of a “national curriculum.” (Some simply mistrust the Gates Foundation, which has bankrolled much of this work.) Others are incapable (perhaps willfully so) of seeing any distinction between “national” and “federal”, though we seem to have no difficulty making that distinction elsewhere in education. (E.g. National Governors Association, S.A.T., A.P., ACT.)

Sixth, and closely related to the blurring of national with federal is the expectation that Uncle Sam won’t be able to keep his hands off the Common Core—which means the whole enterprise will be politicized, corrupted and turned from national/voluntary into federal/coercive. This is probably the strongest objection to the Common Core and, alas, it’s probably the most valid, thanks in large measure to our over-zealous Education Secretary and the President he serves.

Let’s face it. Three major actions by the Obama administration have tended to envelop the Common Core in a cozy federal embrace, as have some ill-advised (but probably intentional) remarks by Messrs. Duncan and Obama that imply greater coziness to follow.

There was the fiscal “incentive” in Race to the Top for states to adopt the Common Core as evidence of their seriousness about raising academic standards.

Then there’s today’s “incentive,” built into the NCLB waiver process, for states to adopt the Common Core as exactly the same sort of evidence.

(In both cases, strictly speaking, states could supply other evidence. But there’s a lot of winking going on.)

The third federal entanglement was the Education Department’s grants to two consortia of states to develop new Common Core-aligned assessments, which came with various requirements and strings set by Secretary Duncan’s team.

This trifecta of actual events is problematic in its own right, not because the federal government is evil but because Washington has become so partisan and politicized and because of angst and suspicion that linger from failed efforts during the 1990’s to generate national standards and tests via federal action.

What’s truly energized the Common Core’s enemies, however, has been a series of ex cathedra comments by President Obama and Secretary Duncan. Most recently, the Education Secretary excoriated South Carolina for even contemplating a withdrawal from the Common Core. Previously, the President indicated that state eligibility for Title I dollars, post-ESEA reauthorization, would hinge on adoption of the Common Core. Talking with the governors about NCLB waivers earlier this week, he stated that “if you’re willing to set, higher, more honest standards then we will give you more flexibility to meet those standards.” I don’t know whether he winked. But everybody knew what standards he was talking about.

It will, of course, be ironic as well as unfortunate if the Common Core ends up in the dustbin of history as a result of actions and comments by its supporters. But in March 2012 there can be little doubt that the strongest weapons in the arsenal of its enemies are those that they have supplied.

As everyone in the education world already knows, several news media organizations won a lawsuit that forced the New York City Department of Education to release many of the teacher-level value-added scores it has been collecting as part of its accountability system. The result? The public unveiling of confusing, unreliable, and—apparently—error-riddled data.

Before we go further down the teacher evaluation path, now is a good time for education reformers to pause and ask themselves whether this kind of top down effort is really what will lead our schools to excellence?

The question is not whether student achievement data should be used as one of several measures of teacher effectiveness, but rather how those data should be used and who is ultimately in the driver’s seat.

Critics of using test data argue that it’s unfair; that standardized tests are imperfect and therefore cannot be used to determine whether students have learned what they should have, and certainly not whether teachers have taught what they were supposed to.

Teachers ultimately should be held accountable for how well they are able to drive achievement in their classrooms.

Such arguments are misguided for lots of reasons, chief among them that there is, in no profession, a perfect measure of effectiveness. And teachers ultimately should be held accountable for how well they are able to drive achievement in their classrooms.

But these critics are correct on a larger point: no matter how well developed the tool, it needs to be reality checked. Of course, the one thing critics—teacher unions foremost among them—hate more than giving Departments of Education the power to determine who should be hired, fired, or promoted is letting principals make those decisions. As just one example, in a 2010 New York Times “Room for Debate” article, Richard Kahlenberg of the Century Foundation explained Albert Shanker’s opposition to allowing principals to make firing decisions:

Who should make the decision about which teachers are fired? Not the principals, Shanker argued. They might play favorites and fire excellent teachers with whom they personally clashed. Besides, how would a principal trained in physical education or history know what makes an excellent French teacher?

But, in order to dramatically improve student performance, we simply must create a system where teachers are free to teach and leaders are obligated to lead. To that end, it’s time for education reformers to get out of the business of trying to improve the civil service rules of our broken education bureaucracies and get back into the business of empowering educators—including school leaders—to get results for kids.

Test score results, while imperfect, are useful data points. But it’s up to the principals to use those results—or not—to make school-level staffing decisions. Because, in the end, it’s the school leader who needs to determine who are the most and least effective teachers in his/her school, and it’s the leader who needs to work with teachers and the school community to drive student learning. By creating a system that, by labeling teachers for them, essentially tells principals which teachers should be kept and which should go, we are absolving principals of responsibility for evaluating their own teachers. And we’re allowing them to escape responsibility for the role they play in ensuring school-level student achievement and growth.

The accountability formula should be pretty simple: hold principals accountable for the results of their schools. Give them the tools (including access to teacher-level achievement data), resources, and autonomy they need to make staffing decisions and to set the school culture. In other words: we need to stop trying to bypass principals in our effort to foster high classroom-level achievement; we need to stop trying to principal-proof our schools.

A version of this post originally appeared on the Common Core Watch blog.

My heart hurts for the community of Chardon, in northeast Ohio. I know people who live there, and they are in deep shock and pain over Monday’s shooting at Chardon High School. I send my deepest condolences to everyone impacted by these events. As both a professional observer of Buckeye State public education and as a mom, two things stand out from Monday’s tragedy. First, there has been a tremendous focus here in Ohio on anti-bullying efforts. Many people initially assumed that bullying was the cause of Monday’s shooting—an assumption that has been largely dispelled. The suspect told law enforcement officials that he chose the victims randomly, and the prosecutor in the case believes his story. We absolutely need to address bullying in (and out of) school. But children, like all of us, can be deeply troubled and in need of help, even when they are treated kindly by others. Second, it appears as if the school, its staff, and its students did everything right when it came to responding to the situation. It is a Fordham mantra that no school can be everything to every student, but we all agree that all schools have a major responsibility to keep students safe and sound when they are in their charge. Emergency response drills and preparedness plans are important. Yes, they take away from “time on task” and force us to confront some of our worst fears, but they simply cannot and should not be overlooked. The leadership and staff of the Chardon school district deserve to be commended for understanding this, and likely preventing far greater tragedy. In this time of mourning, it is worth noting, once again, the vital importance of caring, professional educators.

“Ohio school shooting: Drills, cell phone use paid off,” Cleveland Plain Dealer, Wednesday, February 29, 2012

“Suspected Chart shooter’s appearance in Geauga County Juvenile Court offers little insight on his mindset,” Cleveland Plain Dealer, Wednesday, February 29, 2012

GOP Rep. John Kline’s ESEA reauthorization bills slipped out of the House Education and the Workforce Committee on a party-line vote, but will likely stall in their current state. The time for posturing has passed: If Congress wants any role in education policy, it’s got to start compromising.

The dithering on Capitol Hill was in stark contrast to the activity at the Education Department, which received NCLB waiver applications from twenty six more states and D.C. by its Tuesday deadline. While the merits (and, indeed, the constitutionality) of the feds’ waiver program are far from settled, Congress has given states few alternatives.

It’s a welcome surprise to find a GOP candidate willing to talk about education, but Rick Santorum seems to be bringing all the wrong kinds of attention to important policies worthy of thoughtful support (home schooling) and skepticism (universal higher ed).

The National Association of Charter School Authorizers' latest brief in its Cyber Series is yet another bit (byte?) to add to the mounting evidence that best practices for charter authorizing provide a useful framework for overseeing online schools.

Congratulations are due to Robin Lake, the newly announced successor to Paul Hill as head of the Center on Reinventing Public Education (CRPE) at the University of Washington-Bothell. Congrats are due to Paul, too, for building such a stellar organization and team. We have worked closely with CRPE and both of those fine scholars in multiple ways over many years. We've come to admire and respect (and occasionally envy) the organization they and their colleagues have built and the insights—sometimes controversial but never unfounded, mean-spirited or ad hominem—they have brought to some of the most important challenges in K-12 education. Paul isn't riding off into any sunset—an eased-back Hill will still produce more than three ordinary individuals—and Robin is no neophyte to the challenges and opportunities that await CRPE. A round of applause for them both, please!

Dear Gadfly,

In her critique of “The School Improvement Grant Roll Out in America’s Great City Schools”, Daniela Fairchild badly mangles our findings, and then compounds the error by drawing a conclusion that cannot be supported by any information in the report.

Ms. Fairchild says that one learns from the report “that districts seem to be less aggressive with their turnaround efforts post ARRA.” She bases this claim on the assertion that the number of transformation schools, the most flexible of the reform models, jumped from 24 percent to 74 percent, pre- to post ARRA. Conversely, she indicates that the number of schools undergoing tougher reforms plummeted. But the route she took to arrive at a “pre-ARRA” figure of 24 percent was to take the total number of schools that were implementing some sort of turnaround strategy in the five years prior to ARRA, add the number of schools that were closed for academic reasons during this time, subtract the number of these schools that subsequently reopened, and then take the total number of schools that had only removed the principal and divide it by this number.

Unfortunately, all of this arithmetic does not result in a valid estimate of the number of schools pursuing the transformation model prior to ARRA.  In terms of pre-ARRA turnaround efforts, we only asked narrowly about the replacement of principals in order to gauge districts’ perspectives on how well this strategy worked in the past--NOT to report the number of districts who were pursuing this model wholesale prior to ARRA. 

Meanwhile, the 74 percent is a more straightforward case of misreading the data: The report clearly states that 74 percent of schools nationwide use the transformation model while only 54 percent of the Great City schools use this model. So, neither of these numbers—24 or 74—are accurate and comparing them makes even less sense. In fact, there are no before and after data in this survey that would allow one to reasonably determine any increase or decrease in the use of the transformation model--or any of the SIG models.  To conclude from this tortured reading of the report that urban schools are more interested in pocketing the money than in pursuing real reform is not only snarky and unfounded but a disservice to your readers.

Michael Casserly

Executive Director,

Council of the Great City Schools  

Many states, including Ohio, are moving toward more rigorous evaluation systems. We talked to DC teachers evaluated by DC's IMPACT evaluation system to hear their thoughts on how they're evaluated.

Many states, including Ohio, are moving toward more rigorous evaluation systems. We talked to DC teachers evaluated by DC's IMPACT evaluation system to hear their thoughts on how they're evaluated.

Five years and thirty-six reports later, the researchers at the University of Arkansas’s School Choice Demonstration Project have written their last word on Milwaukee’s Parental Choice Program (MPCP) (some background here and here). Largely, the news is good for the nation’s oldest school-voucher enterprise. Eight new studies—written by Patrick Wolf, John Witte, Anna Jacob, and others—make plain that voucher students were more likely to graduate high school and enroll in a four-year college than their counterparts in the Milwaukee Public Schools (MPS). Voucher pupils also made significantly larger reading gains. Perhaps most tantalizing, the state’s new school-accountability requirements seem partly responsible for the progress. In 2010-11, the final year of data collection, MPCP students made significantly larger reading gains than their MPS peers—unlike previous years, when voucher students were merely on par with their public-school counterparts. (Achievement growth in math was about the same for MPCP and MPS students throughout the studied years.) Interestingly, the same year saw a host of additional testing and reporting regulations added to participating voucher schools. For example, voucher-bearing pupils had to take state assessments and their schools had to adopt formal graduation and promotion standards. Though analysts couldn’t “determine conclusively how big a role the accountability policy played,” their findings encourage the view that voucher programs shouldn’t be ruled by the market alone; transparency and results-based accountability are good for everyone.

School Choice Demonstration Project, Milwaukee Evaluation: Final Reports (Fayetteville, AR: University of Arkansas, February 2012).

The Pioneer Institute is no friend of the Common Core—which needs to be remembered when reading its latest missive. Released last week, this report claims that it will cost the nation $15.8 billion to implement the new standards over a seven-year period, with the lion’s share of those costs incurred during the first year. (Worse, the authors further remind readers that this is, at best, a “midrange” estimate.) The Institute projects a $10 million-plus invoice per school for professional development, technology, and textbooks and instructional materials in the first year alone—a number that strikes us as radically inflated, to put it kindly. To be sure, implementing the Common Core well will bring costs: Aligning materials, instruction, and assessments with new standards cannot be done on the cheap if it’s going to be done well. But Pioneer’s estimates are misleading. Not every dollar spent on CCSS will be “new money.” (It’s not as if we’re spending zip on professional development, textbooks, and the rest currently.) Nor do states need to follow the tired blueprint we’ve been modeling implementation off of to date—and that has too often failed to move the achievement needle. Examine Pioneer’s take on professional development, for instance. The authors project a one-time professional development cost of $5.26 billion across all states—a third of Pioneer’s total CCSS implementation estimate. Unfortunately, this fantastical number rests on two goofy assumptions. First, that the CCSS adopters should (and will) use our current and dramatically flawed PD-delivery model to prep teachers. Second, that all teachers—regardless of their strengths, subjects, or years of experience—need exactly the same level of (expensive and outmoded) training. That said, Pioneer does raise some legitimate concerns about CCSS implementation. (In particular, the authors question the assessment plans outlined by each assessment consortium and question whether they can deliver given the proposed budget.) Let’s hope these red flags spur innovation and cost-saving implementation—rather than serve as an excuse to walk away from what are stand-up standards. As for a saner, real-world estimate of Common Core implementation costs, stand by for others, Fordham included, to weigh in.

Pioneer Institute and American Principles Project, National Cost of Aligning States and Localities to the Common Core Standards (Boston, MA: Pioneer Institute and American Principles Project, February 2012).

This special edition of the Harvard Business Review explains America’s unready state for competing in the global marketplace. And it points an accusatory finger at our education system. U.S. public education—according to HBR authors—is “neither world class nor reflective of the large sums spent on [it].” It’s also a system that struggles to “produce employable workers.” In short, it’s broken. Luckily, there are solutions. In her education-specific article (the only one in the bunch), the Gates Foundation’s Stacey Childress (formerly an HBS professor) promotes the use of technology to improve and personalize content delivery. Suggestions from other contributors include calling on the business community and business schools to invest locally in schools (a call recently echoed by Governor Jindal) and to increase the number of apprenticeship and internship-type programs for high schoolers. At the higher-education level, authors pushed for curricula better aligned with the needs of employers. Those seeking a primer on U.S. competitiveness may wish to have a look. And to supporters of career-readiness efforts: This issue provides much fodder for a revamped approach to vocational and technical education as well.

“Special report: Reinventing America,” Harvard Business Review 90, no. 3 (March 2012).

After decades of education schools’ oligarchic control over teacher licensure, alternative-certification pathways have gained traction in recent years. (Fordham has tracked and supported these pathways since the first such emerged in NJ.) Still, resistance to them remains. Many critics argue that alt-cert pathways cherry-pick their entrants. (Much has been written about TFA on this front). This paper by Tim Sass, a CALDER researcher and economics professor, analyzes three of Florida’s nine  alternate pathways to teacher licensure—none of which engage in heavy recruiting, and some of which require no coursework before or after licensure. Overall, the author finds that teachers who enter the profession with no education coursework under their belts are better at raising student achievement than either those from traditional teacher-prep programs or alt-cert programs requiring some formal coursework—though there is much variability in programs’ effectiveness. Sass also investigates prior coursework taken by teachers who enter through each pathway and produces an interesting finding: Alternatively certified science teachers took far more discipline-specific courses than those who have been traditionally trained, though the same cannot be said for math teachers. Of particular note is the strong performance by teachers certified by ABCTE—an “alternate route on steroids” that Fordham helped to birth. While surely not the final word on alternative certification, Sass’s offers further reason for the expansion of smarter alt-cert options.

Tim Sass, Certification Requirements and Teacher Quality: A Comparison of Alternative Routes to Teaching (Atlanta, GA: Georgia State University, 2011).