The Education Gadfly Weekly

This sixth paper in the Digital Learning Now! “Smart Series” details how archaic education-financing structures represent a fundamental barrier to innovation (whether that be digital learning or faithful implementation of rigorous standards) in today’s K–12 sector—and sets forth four “design principles” for a modern funding structure. None of these recommendations for restructuring school funding is new (indeed, they’re largely built off work Fordham produced in 2006), but they’re worthy all the same: To allow innovation to take hold, funding must be weighted, flexible, and portable. It also must be based on performance, the authors argue. (A good idea—though one challenging to implement.) This paper provides a solid primer on all four—including tangible examples of states and districts that have made these changes. San Francisco, for example, rolled out a weighted-student funding system in 2002 that provides dollars to schools based on student grade level, socioeconomic status, special needs, and English language proficiency. Each school is then responsible for creating a budget tailored to its specific needs, with the central office in charge of training and monitoring schools. Yet another helpful DLN paper, chockablock with smart, actionable policy recommendations.

SOURCE: John Bailey, Carrie Schneider, and Tom Vander Ark, Funding Students, Options, and Achievement (Tallahassee, FL: Foundation for Excellence in Education, April 2013).

Federal due-process requirements for special ed are far more onerous, costly, and stressful than they need to be. That’s the gist of this paper from the American Association of School Administrators (the first in what the AASA promises to be a series on retooling special-ed). After surveying 200 superintendents, the group found that every due-process complaint costs the district an average $10,500 in legal fees—and that many districts end up consenting to parental requests that they consider “unreasonable” or inconsistent with IDEA. The resulting recommendations are straightforward: Bring in third-party facilitators to guide any IEP meetings that are going poorly (in North Carolina, which utilizes facilitators in this way, fewer than 20 percent of facilitated IEP meetings end in adjudication) and, if IEP facilitation and optional mediation fail, hire an independent expert to evaluate students and act as an IEP-creator-of-last-resort. These are sensible proposals that will have significant effect in lawsuit-crazy cities like D.C. and NYC. Congress should consider AASA’s recommendations: IDEA needs an overhaul, and this is a good start.

SOURCE: Sasha Pudelski, Rethinking Special Education Due Process (Alexandria, VA: American Association of School Administrators, April 2013).

Despite sterling academic records and substantial financial-aid opportunities, high-achievers from poor families rarely even apply to America’s elite colleges and universities. In a previous study, researchers Caroline Hoxby and Christopher Avery attributed this to an information deficit: These kids (the researchers excluded kids who attend “feeder” schools) tend to reside in small towns located far from selective colleges and attend high schools with overworked, ill-prepared counselors and student bodies less attuned to selective college admissions. This follow-up study, conducted by Hoxby and Sarah Turner, examines one potential solution: thoughtful, tailored information about selective college admissions that is delivered to students’ doorsteps. In 2009, Hoxby and Turner established the Expanding College Opportunities (ECO) program, which randomly mailed college informational packets to thousands of high-ability seniors (12,000 of them in 2011–12). The main finding: Sending students informational materials—especially materials that offered clear financial-aid information—caused these youngsters to apply to and matriculate at colleges of greater selectivity at greater rates. Even more noteworthy, the packets cost just six bucks a pop to produce and mail. The upshot: Instead of languishing in (or dropping out of) a college beneath their abilities, they’ll seek out a campus suited to their gifts. If, as the authors suggest, ECO (or a kindred program) is scaled to reach all of the nation’s high-flying, low-income kids, it could seriously shrink the college-opportunity gap; here’s hoping.

SOURCE: Susanna Loeb and Matthew Kasman, “Principals’ perceptions of competition for students in Milwaukee schools,” Education Finance and Policy 8 (1): 43-73.

Dara and Daniela fume over the RNC’s Common Core action, consider the implications of Alabama’s move to the ACT, and clear the air over Florida’s teacher-evaluation mess. Amber probes Caroline Hoxby’s plan to close the college-admissions information gap facing high-achieving, low-income youngsters.

Amber's Research Minute

Count us as among those surprised and alarmed by the Republican National Committee’s ill-considered decision to adopt a resolution decrying the Common Core standards as a “nationwide straitjacket on academic freedom and achievement.” There’s little doubt that this action will bestow a degree of legitimacy upon the anti-standards coalition—and put pressure on Republican governors and legislators to fall in line.

Which is something approaching tragedy. It was Republicans, even conservatives, who first blazed the trail toward higher standards and rigorous accountability in education—the likes of Ronald Reagan, Bill Bennett, Lamar Alexander, and Jeb Bush. To cede this ground to Democrats is an enormous policy and political mistake.

We’ve said it before and we’ll say it again: The Common Core standards are worth supporting because they’re educationally solid. They are rigorous, they are traditional—one might even say they are “conservative.” They expect students to know their math facts, to read the nation’s founding documents, and to evaluate evidence and come to independent judgments. In all of these ways, they are miles better than three-quarters of the state standards they replaced—standards that hardly deserved the name and that often pushed the left-wing drivel that Common Core haters say they abhor.

No, they’re not perfect. They can be undermined by curriculum directors who assign teeny-bopper romances, sports bios, and car-repair manuals instead of the good stuff. (So can every single set of state standards in the land.) And yes, the Obama administration coerced states to adopt Common Core standards via the lure of Race to the Top dollars. Pass a resolution, as ALEC did, expressing outrage at that.

Get it off your chest, but then get on with the serious business of making America’s schools competitive for the twenty-first century. The really troubling part of the RNC resolution, in fact, is not its justifiable outrage at the Obama administration’s role in the Common Core; it’s the RNC’s inane argument against standards-based reform writ large, with its alleged goal of “conforming American students to uniform (‘one size fits all’) achievement goals,” and to “standardize and control the education of our children so they will conform to a preconceived ‘normal.’”

Republicans used to stand for standards. We’re confident that once GOP governors and legislators have a chance to give this language a look, they will again.

This prediction will puzzle, upset, and maybe infuriate a great many readers—and, of course, it could turn out to be wrong—but enough clues, tips, tidbits, and intuitions have converged in recent weeks that I feel obligated to make it:

I expect that PARCC and Smarter Balanced (the two federally subsidized consortia of states that are developing new assessments meant to be aligned with Common Core standards) will fade away, eclipsed and supplanted by long-established yet fleet-footed testing firms that already possess the infrastructure, relationships, and durability that give them huge advantages in the competition for state and district business.

In particular, I predict (as does Andy Smarick) that the new ACT-Aspire assessment system, which is supposed to be ready for use in 2014 (a full year earlier than either of the consortium products) and which some states are considering as their new assessment vehicle, will be joined by kindred products to be developed and marketed by the College Board. And the two of them will dominate the market for new Common Core assessments.

One straw in the wind: Alabama’s announcement last week that it is foreswearing both consortia and will use the ACT assessment system. And, of course, both Kentucky and New York have already concocted and deployed their own versions of Common Core assessments—possibly but not necessarily interim models.

Although the College Board and ACT have traditionally focused on the high-school-to-college transition, both also have experience earlier in the K–12 sequence. ACT Explore is aimed at eighth and ninth graders, ACT Engage goes down to sixth grade, and ACT “WorkKeys” is a significant player in determining career-readiness. The College Board’s Pre-SAT test is typically taken in tenth grade. Its “Readiness Pathway” assessment program reaches down to eighth grade, and its “Springboard” program to sixth—with “alignment” guides already prepared for Common Core standards in both English language arts and math for grades six through twelve.

So it’s not too big a stretch for either organization to dip deeper into the K–12 curriculum and assessment business, and it’s no stretch at all for their chief test-administration partners—Pearson in the case of ACT, ETS for the College Board. Each has ample experience in devising and administering tests from the early grades onward. (In fact, Pearson already has pre-K assessments.)

At least as importantly, these organizations know how to give tests to millions of people. They have the infrastructure and the test security. They have the systems for scoring and reporting. Perhaps above all, they have the relationships and the trust of thousands of school systems, dozens of states, and millions of parents. Plenty of states already use ACT products as part of their existing assessment systems. And both organizations are long established, well led, deep-pocketed, and pretty sure to be around a decade or two from now.

As yet, the new consortia have none of those things. They’re struggling with organizational structures, governance, post-federal financing, test-development agonies, uncertain costs, conflicting views of “cut scores,” and all manner of other puzzles.

Those would be significant challenges were there no competition, but ACT has made no secret of its intention to seek states’ Common Core assessment contracts—and Alabama may turn out to be the first of many to sign up. The College Board hasn’t (to my knowledge) announced itself yet, but testing insiders know that it’s lately been on a hiring binge—even luring key assessment developers from ACT—that surely points in this direction.

Will the ACT and College Board versions of Common Core assessments be true “next-generation” tests that probe deeper understanding and more sophisticated (“higher-order”) skills in more revealing ways? Will they be “adaptive” (via computer or otherwise) to kids at different levels of achievement or will they, like most of today’s tests (see discussion here at the seventeen-minute point), do a weak job of differentiating performance at the top and at the bottom of their range of difficulty? I do not know. But I do know that all of these accoutrements carry dollar costs that state assessment budgets may not be able to bear—and veteran testing firms are accustomed to cutting their cloth to fit the wearer’s dimensions.

I assume that scores and scales on the new assessments will be comparable across states (as are current ACT and SAT scores), but individual states will likely set their own “cut points” for purposes of grade-to-grade promotion and high school graduation. That’s tricky, however, if you’re serious about bona fide “career and college readiness,” which is a meaningless concept if it differs by state; what’s more, the new standards aren’t really worth the bother unless “proficiency” levels for every grade cumulate to a desired end-point by senior year. (I predict that, as with consortium-developed assessments, the ACT and College Board folks will recommend grade-specific proficiency scores that do cumulate in the intended way, but individual states will decide for themselves what signifies readiness for promotion and graduation.)

If I’m right that ACT and College Board scarf up much state business, there won’t be a lot left for the consortia—and they may founder. That would, of course, represent a considerable waste of federal dollars. On the other hand, it would remove from the Common Core debate (at least until NCLB-reauthorization time, if that day ever comes) the specter of Arne Duncan and Barack Obama clutching those standards to the federal bosom.

Besides, the consortia could remain useful, even if they don’t do assessments themselves. Neither ACT nor the College Board will want to alienate the many state leaders who have been earnestly advancing the consortium work, and these groups could readily convert into advisory and coordinating bodies that help member states implement and make sense out of the results on the new tests—and advise test developers and standard-setters alike on how their products work in the real world.

Time will tell. I might be jumping to premature prediction—and you may interpret these entrails differently than I do. Letters to the editor are cordially invited.

The National Education Association is suing Florida for its teacher-evaluation policy; specifically, the fact that the Sunshine State engages in the shady practice of evaluating teachers based on students or subjects that they don’t teach. Florida state superintendent Tony Bennett noted that there is currently a law under consideration that would call for “evaluating teachers only on the students and subjects they teach”; this should certainly pass.

Tennessee governor Bill Haslam, for the second time in as many years, killed his own voucher proposal when it became clear that his state’s legislators were interested in taking it to scale. The Wall Street Journal, in a scathing rebuke, accused Haslam of cynically trying to “appease unions while claiming to support school choice.” That’s about right—and as foolish a move by a Republican official to throttle choice as is the RNC’s assault on standards.

On Tuesday, New York students completed their first day of new Common Core–aligned tests, after controversy over whether they had been taught the necessary content (a legitimate beef) and a blitz of advertisements from the NYC education department forewarning parents about lower test scores to come. That last action made sense; too bad the ads are misleading about the Common Core’s intent.

After the GED was redesigned to reflect the Common Core standards, it had double the passing points (one to denote high school equivalency and one to signal college readiness)—and its price doubled, to boot. In response, a number of states are checking out alternative high school–equivalency exams. New York jumped ship last month, contracting with CTB/McGraw Hill. Of course states are right to seek cost efficiency. We only hope that the alternatives they find are of equal quality and rigor. As everyone’s mother once said, sometimes you get what you pay for. That’s true of assessments, too. And nobody needs more “equivalency” tests that aren’t really equivalent.

This sixth paper in the Digital Learning Now! “Smart Series” details how archaic education-financing structures represent a fundamental barrier to innovation (whether that be digital learning or faithful implementation of rigorous standards) in today’s K–12 sector—and sets forth four “design principles” for a modern funding structure. None of these recommendations for restructuring school funding is new (indeed, they’re largely built off work Fordham produced in 2006), but they’re worthy all the same: To allow innovation to take hold, funding must be weighted, flexible, and portable. It also must be based on performance, the authors argue. (A good idea—though one challenging to implement.) This paper provides a solid primer on all four—including tangible examples of states and districts that have made these changes. San Francisco, for example, rolled out a weighted-student funding system in 2002 that provides dollars to schools based on student grade level, socioeconomic status, special needs, and English language proficiency. Each school is then responsible for creating a budget tailored to its specific needs, with the central office in charge of training and monitoring schools. Yet another helpful DLN paper, chockablock with smart, actionable policy recommendations.

SOURCE: John Bailey, Carrie Schneider, and Tom Vander Ark, Funding Students, Options, and Achievement (Tallahassee, FL: Foundation for Excellence in Education, April 2013).

Federal due-process requirements for special ed are far more onerous, costly, and stressful than they need to be. That’s the gist of this paper from the American Association of School Administrators (the first in what the AASA promises to be a series on retooling special-ed). After surveying 200 superintendents, the group found that every due-process complaint costs the district an average $10,500 in legal fees—and that many districts end up consenting to parental requests that they consider “unreasonable” or inconsistent with IDEA. The resulting recommendations are straightforward: Bring in third-party facilitators to guide any IEP meetings that are going poorly (in North Carolina, which utilizes facilitators in this way, fewer than 20 percent of facilitated IEP meetings end in adjudication) and, if IEP facilitation and optional mediation fail, hire an independent expert to evaluate students and act as an IEP-creator-of-last-resort. These are sensible proposals that will have significant effect in lawsuit-crazy cities like D.C. and NYC. Congress should consider AASA’s recommendations: IDEA needs an overhaul, and this is a good start.

SOURCE: Sasha Pudelski, Rethinking Special Education Due Process (Alexandria, VA: American Association of School Administrators, April 2013).

Despite sterling academic records and substantial financial-aid opportunities, high-achievers from poor families rarely even apply to America’s elite colleges and universities. In a previous study, researchers Caroline Hoxby and Christopher Avery attributed this to an information deficit: These kids (the researchers excluded kids who attend “feeder” schools) tend to reside in small towns located far from selective colleges and attend high schools with overworked, ill-prepared counselors and student bodies less attuned to selective college admissions. This follow-up study, conducted by Hoxby and Sarah Turner, examines one potential solution: thoughtful, tailored information about selective college admissions that is delivered to students’ doorsteps. In 2009, Hoxby and Turner established the Expanding College Opportunities (ECO) program, which randomly mailed college informational packets to thousands of high-ability seniors (12,000 of them in 2011–12). The main finding: Sending students informational materials—especially materials that offered clear financial-aid information—caused these youngsters to apply to and matriculate at colleges of greater selectivity at greater rates. Even more noteworthy, the packets cost just six bucks a pop to produce and mail. The upshot: Instead of languishing in (or dropping out of) a college beneath their abilities, they’ll seek out a campus suited to their gifts. If, as the authors suggest, ECO (or a kindred program) is scaled to reach all of the nation’s high-flying, low-income kids, it could seriously shrink the college-opportunity gap; here’s hoping.

SOURCE: Susanna Loeb and Matthew Kasman, “Principals’ perceptions of competition for students in Milwaukee schools,” Education Finance and Policy 8 (1): 43-73.