The Education Gadfly Weekly

Are schools responsible for students’ character development as well as their cognitive achievement? Is this best done via discrete “character development” programs or by creating an overall school culture that seamlessly fosters good behavior and sound values along with academics? In this new study, analysts examined the impact of seven popular character-education programs (with catchy titles like “Love in a Big World” and “Positive Action”). They randomly assigned eighty-four schools in six states to receive one of the school-based programs or to continue business as usual. More than 6,000 students in third grade were followed to the end of fifth grade, during which various outcomes were measured. But the bottom line of this 700-page evaluation is that “on average, the seven programs did not improve students’ social and emotional competence, behavior, academic achievement, and student and teacher perceptions of school climate.” Analysis of individual programs proved no more encouraging, nor did analysis of subgroups. In fact, some of the few statistically significant outcomes that did appear indicated detrimental impacts on students, such as lowering their engagement with learning and their feelings of safety. The analysts engage in much hypothesizing about these lackluster findings. Still and all, this evaluation, by no means exhaustive, yet still rigorous, should prompt questions about the purpose of “character education” and whether specialized programs of this sort are the best way to instill responsibility and ethical decision-making in children.

Social and Character Development Research Consortium, “Efficacy of Schoolwide Programs to Promote Social and Character Development and Reduce Problem Behavior in Elementary School Children,” (National Center for Education Research, Institute of Education Sciences, October 2010).

Part of the “Refocus Wisconsin” project commissioned by the Wisconsin Policy Research Institute, this issue paper is a smack in the face to the standard education regime far beyond the Badger State. After depicting the discouraging state of Wisconsin education, AEI’s Rick Hess and Olivia Meeks point to seven areas in need of improvement: teacher quality, curriculum, accountability implementation, excellence recognition, discipline and safety, charter school expansion, and interventions in low-performing schools. They then offer three feather-ruffling suggestions meant to address the structural barriers that impede dramatic leaps in K-12 productivity.  First, the “Gold Star Teachers” initiative would allow high-performing teachers to voluntarily take on additional students in exchange for greater compensation. This would give more students access to great teaching while reducing personnel costs. The second recommendation would create a bonded system of performance guarantees for charter operators. (Operators that failed to meet agreed-upon performance goals would owe considerable money back to districts.)  This would reduce district risk and encourage collaboration with outside operators. Finally, the authors propose “education spending accounts” that would allocate a chunk of per-pupil funds directly to parents to spend at their discretion—on tutoring, language classes, or other electives. The rationale: By introducing choice into the system, such accounts would stimulate healthy price competition and reduce the burden on districts to meet children’s varying educational needs. Though each comes with its own implementation challenges, all three suggestions are concrete enough to be feasible and amount to a fresh breeze through current, stale solutions.

Frederick Hess and Olivia Meeks, “Sounding the Alarm: A Wakeup Call with Directions” (Hartland, WI: Wisconsin Policy Research Institute, 2010).

AIR’s Gary Phillips has previously shown how U.S. states compare with countries around the world in math and science achievement—generally not well at all. In this new analysis, using NAEP, TIMSS, and PIRLS data, he demonstrates how widely discrepant are the academic expectations of these jurisdictions. In fact, for math, the expectations gap between states, at a whopping four grade-levels, is double the nation’s black-white achievement gap. For Fordham regulars, this story is old hat—our 2007 study, The Proficiency Illusion, also found state cut scores to vary greatly—and other research has shown most of them to be much lower than NAEP’s “proficiency” cut-off. But Phillips also goes on to suggest a new “benchmark method” of standard setting (which, he hints, could be used for determining the cut scores on new Common Core assessments). This method links state-based performance-level descriptors to those for international assessments, assuring both national and international comparability of state proficiency levels. In an America seeking to regain its international edge, this benchmarking idea is a good first step.

Gary W. Phillips, “International Benchmarking: State Education Performance Standards,” (Washington, DC: American Institutes for Research, October 2010).

Linda Darling-Hammond’s new paper hands the reader many good notions but few concrete recommendations. She explains the need for teacher assessments but bemoans those in use in America today. As she states, “current measures for evaluating teachers are not often linked to their capacity to teach.” Going forward, while she claims to favor value-added teacher assessments, she continues to push for qualitative methods (e.g., portfolio reviews and classroom observations) to determine teacher effectiveness—especially for beginner teachers. For those new to the classroom, she recommends development of a national performance assessment modeled after the National Board Teacher Certification program, and she also wants to follow these teachers over time. Through this early assessment and longitudinal tracking, Darling-Hammond argues, quality and consistency of data will be enhanced, allowing districts and school leaders to make better informed staffing decisions. While we agree that the teacher evaluation system needs an overhaul, we’re not convinced that Darling-Hammond’s approach is the way to do it.

Linda Darling-Hammond, “Evaluating Teacher Effectiveness: How Teacher Performance Assessments Can Measure and Improve Teaching,” (Washington, DC: Center for American Progress, October 2010).

Though the headline had it that New York State gubernatorial favorite Andrew Cuomo “Vows Offensive Against Labor Unions,” what he actually told the New York Times this week was much gentler. On the other hand, despite the power of the Empire State’s unions, Cuomo is surely not running as an old-fashioned tax-and-spend Democrat. In a 90-minute interview, he “for the first time laid out his strategy to isolate, destabilize, and ultimately defeat the tangle of entrenched interests that has left state government bankrupt, infamously dysfunctional, and mired in scandal.”

Historic budget deficits and angry, tax-weary citizens have a way, like guillotines, of focusing the mind and so the presumptive governor is already talking about “how to use a crisis.” This could prove to be an opportunity for Empire State education reformers. Cuomo says he will continue to tinker with the education aid formula—something begun in earnest by Republican George Pataki—and send more money to poorer districts. OK. But he also hints that he would cut overall spending in areas like education while taking a page from the Obama/Duncan play book and creating “pools of bonus money” (the Times’ phrase) that could be “won…in public competitions.” 

Given the fiscal condition in which New York finds itself, Cuomo has little choice but to talk tough about the budget, which means talking tough about labor. All of this, of course, is no music to the ears of the 600,000 strong New York State United Teachers. In August, NYSUT President Richard Iannuzzi told the Albany Times Union that “you know, he’s been a strong supporter of education, of labor and social justice in the past, but when we look at his positions now—especially on issues such as tax caps, constitutional convention and the size of the public work force—we have serious issues.” 

While this little dance continues (NYSUT surely wouldn’t support GOP challenger, Carl “I’ll take you out, buddy” Paladino), the state’s education reformers have been working the politics of the education issue. When Cuomo wanted to meet members of the hedge fund crowd, seeking donors for his campaign, he was consistently pointed to Joe Williams of Democrats for Education Reform. With these connections, the budget ax falling, new Race to the Top funding for change, and a progressive Education Commissioner and Regents Chairman, it may be a perfect storm for reform.

This piece originally appeared (in a slightly different form) on Fordham’s blog, Flypaper

A week before the mid-term elections, Arne Duncan and his team have taken a courageous stand: they’re against bullying children. “Bullying is a problem that shouldn’t exist,” the Secretary said without a hint of irony when announcing a new initiative to define anti-gay bullying as a civil rights violation. Nobody has anything good to say about schoolyard bullying and the news that several gay teenagers committed suicide after relentless teasing and taunting is tragic. But what on earth do Duncan et al. think they can do about this via civil rights enforcement? OK, they’ll provide “guidance” and conduct “site visits” and work with local districts on “improvement plans” and probably threaten to withhold federal dollars. But here’s a prediction: all of that rigmarole will yield very little progress on the anti-bullying front. It will, however, reinforce the compliance mentality of school officials. (Forget student achievement; better make sure those anti-bullying plans are up to date lest the investigators appear!) Duncan talks a good game about federal education policy being “tight-loose” (forceful about results, laid back about means) but we’re still waiting to see signs of loose.

“Anti-gay bullying may violate civil rights, Ed. Dept. warns,” by Christina A. Samuels, Politics K-12 Blog, October 26, 2010.

It’s not just a Left Coast thing. The hub-bub caused in Los Angeles when the LA Times disseminated individual teacher ratings is now raging in the Big Apple, as several new organizations have sought similar information on New York City instructors. NYC’s Department of Education says the public has a right to view these value-added ratings for 12,000 of the city’s elementary- and middle-school math and ELA teachers. And people we respect, like Eric Hanushek, agree. The United Federation of Teachers, not surprisingly, sued to block release of such information. A state Supreme Court hearing is scheduled for the week of Thanksgiving. This issue is a tough one, but here’s our bottom line: Such individual information is exceptionally valuable for teachers, principals, and parents, but not much good for anyone else. School and district leaders should see and use value-added rankings when making decisions about staffing. And parents should have the right to know how effective their own children’s teachers are—as well as the teacher down the hall. The public surely deserves aggregate data on teacher effectiveness at the building level and above. But releasing ratings of Ms. Jones and Mr. Smith to the media is inviting unnecessary trouble. We don’t say this often, but the unions are partly right on this one.

“Debate over value-added teacher ratings hits New York City,” by Liz Willen, Hechinger Report, October 22, 2010.

Part of the “Refocus Wisconsin” project commissioned by the Wisconsin Policy Research Institute, this issue paper is a smack in the face to the standard education regime far beyond the Badger State. After depicting the discouraging state of Wisconsin education, AEI’s Rick Hess and Olivia Meeks point to seven areas in need of improvement: teacher quality, curriculum, accountability implementation, excellence recognition, discipline and safety, charter school expansion, and interventions in low-performing schools. They then offer three feather-ruffling suggestions meant to address the structural barriers that impede dramatic leaps in K-12 productivity.  First, the “Gold Star Teachers” initiative would allow high-performing teachers to voluntarily take on additional students in exchange for greater compensation. This would give more students access to great teaching while reducing personnel costs. The second recommendation would create a bonded system of performance guarantees for charter operators. (Operators that failed to meet agreed-upon performance goals would owe considerable money back to districts.)  This would reduce district risk and encourage collaboration with outside operators. Finally, the authors propose “education spending accounts” that would allocate a chunk of per-pupil funds directly to parents to spend at their discretion—on tutoring, language classes, or other electives. The rationale: By introducing choice into the system, such accounts would stimulate healthy price competition and reduce the burden on districts to meet children’s varying educational needs. Though each comes with its own implementation challenges, all three suggestions are concrete enough to be feasible and amount to a fresh breeze through current, stale solutions.

Frederick Hess and Olivia Meeks, “Sounding the Alarm: A Wakeup Call with Directions” (Hartland, WI: Wisconsin Policy Research Institute, 2010).

Linda Darling-Hammond’s new paper hands the reader many good notions but few concrete recommendations. She explains the need for teacher assessments but bemoans those in use in America today. As she states, “current measures for evaluating teachers are not often linked to their capacity to teach.” Going forward, while she claims to favor value-added teacher assessments, she continues to push for qualitative methods (e.g., portfolio reviews and classroom observations) to determine teacher effectiveness—especially for beginner teachers. For those new to the classroom, she recommends development of a national performance assessment modeled after the National Board Teacher Certification program, and she also wants to follow these teachers over time. Through this early assessment and longitudinal tracking, Darling-Hammond argues, quality and consistency of data will be enhanced, allowing districts and school leaders to make better informed staffing decisions. While we agree that the teacher evaluation system needs an overhaul, we’re not convinced that Darling-Hammond’s approach is the way to do it.

Linda Darling-Hammond, “Evaluating Teacher Effectiveness: How Teacher Performance Assessments Can Measure and Improve Teaching,” (Washington, DC: Center for American Progress, October 2010).

Are schools responsible for students’ character development as well as their cognitive achievement? Is this best done via discrete “character development” programs or by creating an overall school culture that seamlessly fosters good behavior and sound values along with academics? In this new study, analysts examined the impact of seven popular character-education programs (with catchy titles like “Love in a Big World” and “Positive Action”). They randomly assigned eighty-four schools in six states to receive one of the school-based programs or to continue business as usual. More than 6,000 students in third grade were followed to the end of fifth grade, during which various outcomes were measured. But the bottom line of this 700-page evaluation is that “on average, the seven programs did not improve students’ social and emotional competence, behavior, academic achievement, and student and teacher perceptions of school climate.” Analysis of individual programs proved no more encouraging, nor did analysis of subgroups. In fact, some of the few statistically significant outcomes that did appear indicated detrimental impacts on students, such as lowering their engagement with learning and their feelings of safety. The analysts engage in much hypothesizing about these lackluster findings. Still and all, this evaluation, by no means exhaustive, yet still rigorous, should prompt questions about the purpose of “character education” and whether specialized programs of this sort are the best way to instill responsibility and ethical decision-making in children.

Social and Character Development Research Consortium, “Efficacy of Schoolwide Programs to Promote Social and Character Development and Reduce Problem Behavior in Elementary School Children,” (National Center for Education Research, Institute of Education Sciences, October 2010).

AIR’s Gary Phillips has previously shown how U.S. states compare with countries around the world in math and science achievement—generally not well at all. In this new analysis, using NAEP, TIMSS, and PIRLS data, he demonstrates how widely discrepant are the academic expectations of these jurisdictions. In fact, for math, the expectations gap between states, at a whopping four grade-levels, is double the nation’s black-white achievement gap. For Fordham regulars, this story is old hat—our 2007 study, The Proficiency Illusion, also found state cut scores to vary greatly—and other research has shown most of them to be much lower than NAEP’s “proficiency” cut-off. But Phillips also goes on to suggest a new “benchmark method” of standard setting (which, he hints, could be used for determining the cut scores on new Common Core assessments). This method links state-based performance-level descriptors to those for international assessments, assuring both national and international comparability of state proficiency levels. In an America seeking to regain its international edge, this benchmarking idea is a good first step.

Gary W. Phillips, “International Benchmarking: State Education Performance Standards,” (Washington, DC: American Institutes for Research, October 2010).