The Education Gadfly Weekly

This report by the Center on Education Policy looks at student progress in the years since the implementation of the federal No Child Left Behind Act in 2001. 

Specifically, it examines whether states are increasing student achievement and closing achievement gaps that exist between students of different races, ethnicities, incomes, and genders.   In order to determine this CEP gathered data on state tests from 2002 to 2009 for grades four, eight, and high-school tested grades, along with NAEP data from 2005-2009.

The analysis points to several trends.

Achievement gaps are large and persistent. Gaps between white and African American students remain, with African American students scoring 20 to 30 points lower than their white peers in 2009.  Furthermore, Asian students also performed highly on state achievement tests, ousting white students in most states.

For most student groups, gaps on state tests have narrowed since 2002.  Gaps on state tests narrowed more often for African American and Latino students than it did for low-income and male students.  Another fact worth noting is that achievement gaps narrowed in a majority of states between African American and white students, and between Latino and white students. 

While progress in narrowing the gap is encouraging, continuing at the current rate of progress would take many years to close the gap. Although gaps between subgroups have been narrowing across the country they are doing so at different rates.  Latino/white student gaps have narrowed more rapidly than any other subgroup, while progress in narrowing the gap between boys and girls has evolved at a much slower pace.  While the progress is encouraging there is much more work to be accomplished.

The report also breaks down achievement results for each state.  In Ohio, eighth grade math results were encouraging and demonstrated that all major subgroups made gains, except for Asian students who remained unchanged.  However, the results for eighth grade reading proficiency were somewhat different.  At the basic proficiency level most subgroups reported a gain, however declines in progress were reported among above-proficient and advanced levels.  In math the gap narrowed in all tested grades for all the major subgroups.   To read more about Ohio’s results or to check out how others states are performing, find the report on CEP’s website here.

Slow and Uneven Progress in Narrowing Gaps
Center on Education Policy
December 2010

In this policy brief, TNTP lauds Race to the Top for spurring more statewide reform last year in education “than in the previous two decades,” attributing its success to the clear priorities and guidance for applicant states, and the transparency established by making applications available for public review.

However, TNTP criticizes the ambiguity and subjectivity involved in the review process, and identifies several areas that must be improved should RttT be reauthorized for a third round:

1. Lack of differentiation in some areas of scoring, such as in the “Great Teachers and Leaders” section, where 86 percent of second-round applicants received high points and no state received low points. 
2. General rating inflation, especially from Round 1 to 2.
3. Deviation from the scoring guidance.
4. Excessive influence of outlier ratings on final scores, most notably for state like Louisiana, which many commentators believed deserved an award.
5. Inconsistent scoring from state to state. For example, Illinois enacted five pieces of education reform legislation and secured participation from districts representing 81 percent of students in the state.  Ohio secured significantly less participation from districts representing only 62 percent of students in the state, and had not enacted legislation to the degree of Illinois.  In this section Ohio outscored Illinois by six points. 

TNTP suggests that these issues allowed for possibly less-deserving states to win at the expense of states truly committed to reform. 

States were also not rewarded for their depth of commitment to education reform.  States such as Colorado and Louisiana took significant steps to solidify reform policies through legislation, but their application scores do not reflect this commitment.  Ohio and Hawaii, on the other hand, made no legislative commitments as part of their applications, yet still managed to secure awards.

TNTP recommends that if Race to the Top is repeated the Department of Education should establish a cross-application review process where applicant reviews are analyzed by other reviewers according to a consistent standard.  This will reduce the subjectivity, inflation, and inconsistency that affected applicants adversely. Also, Secretary Duncan should make the final executive decision based on the peer scores and ensure that the contest’s outcomes match its reform priorities. 

Read it here.

Resetting Race to the Top: Why the Future of Competition Depends on Improving the Scoring Process
The New Teacher Project (TNTP)
December 2010

The education community has long emphasized that “one size does not fit all” for students, but what about for teachers? In a new white paper, The Promise of Cafeteria-Style Benefits for Districts and Teachers, researchers from CRPE propose customizing teachers’ benefit plans as a cost-stabilizing measure for districts. Currently, most districts offer teachers a single benefit plan with two options: opt-in or opt-out.  “Cafeteria-style” benefit plans, however, would give each teacher a set amount of money to spend on a wide variety of benefits, allowing the teacher, for example, to purchase a dental but not an optical plan. The teacher would keep any unspent money as a cash bonus.

The paper proposes three funding models for such plans:

• Model 1: The district’s per-teacher benefit contribution consists of a baseline dollar amount which increases by a given percentage each year. The baseline dollar amount is negotiated in advance and may not be re-negotiated from year to year, but the yearly percentage increase may be re-negotiated.
• Model 2: The district’s per-teacher benefit contribution consists of a percentage of the teacher’s salary. Salaries may be negotiated from year to year, but the percentage reserved for benefits may not.
• Model 3: The district’s per-teacher benefit contribution consists of a fixed dollar amount, which may be negotiated from year to year.

Although these models are not likely to save districts money, they may introduce a new level of stability to districts’ yearly budgets. The first model, for example, would allow a district to estimate the probable rise in healthcare costs over the next several years and negotiate a corresponding, yearly percentage increase in benefit spending. In exchange for accepting more risk in the event of a healthcare cost spike (risk usually shouldered by districts), teachers would receive more options when selecting benefits.

In nearly every teacher contract negotiation in Ohio, benefits—particularly healthcare benefits—are a point of contention. The issue has factored significantly, for example, in the year-long negotiations around the Cincinnati Public Schools (CPS) contract. With leaner budgets ahead, Ohio districts would do well to reconsider their traditional practices in many areas, including the provision of benefits to teachers. As this paper suggests, a thorough revision of benefits policies could produce a rare win-win for teachers and districts. Read the report here.

The Promise of Cafeteria-Style Benefits for Districts and Teachers
Noah Wepman, Marguerite Roza, and Cristina Sepe
Center on Reinventing Public Education (CRPE)
December 9, 2010

After a year of “tedious” negotiations, strong recommendations from The New Teacher Project, and a considerable amount of hype (mostly from board members or union officials, so consider the source) that the contract was “historic” and “the most progressive home-grown reform” in the country, a new teacher contract for Cincinnati Public Schools has been ratified.

The draft agreement between Cincinnati Public Schools and the 2,300-member Cincinnati Federation of Teachers makes some positive steps in the right direction, yet falls short in several areas – specifically those related to personnel policies. To be fair, the blame for this shouldn’t fall squarely on the Queen City; Ohio law prevents Cincinnati – and any other district seeking reforms – from going the distance on groundbreaking policy ideas.  

As far as this contract, goes, here’s a breakdown of positive elements and areas that fall short, as well as components for which success will depend on implementation.

The good

Performance-based awards are available at the school, team, and individual level and are based partially on student achievement and growth, as well as available to teachers taking on increased workloads (e.g., teacher evaluators).

An additional two days have been added to the school year. Among schools designated as high need, there may be opportunities to further increase the school year, lengthen school days, etc.

As Superintendent Mary Ronan noted, parts of the contract are “fiscally responsible” – at least more so than before. Teachers made serious concessions for healthcare and will pay roughly twice as much. The contract also puts a freeze on cost-of-living increases.

Despite the fact that state law prescribes a minimum step-and-lane salary schedule (and rewards credentials and years of experience over effectiveness), the contract stipulates that teachers on intervention can’t move on the salary schedule until being removed from intervention. Whether intervention status will be applied in a meaningful way will depend, but at minimum, the poorest performers will have their compensation frozen. Further, teachers in intervention can’t apply for a school transfer unless approved by a peer review panel (decent attempt to mitigate the “dance of the lemons” trend).

The good-ish (but ultimately could go either way)

A new teacher evaluation system will be co-designed by the district and CFT (we’ll learn more about how it’s developing this spring). The contract promises that student achievement will be a factor in evaluations, although to what degree remains to be seen. And the criteria and procedures for attaining tenure have yet to be mapped out. Hopefully the new evaluation system will be bold in these areas.

Treatment of schools is differentiated and based on performance (exemplary campuses may need “less monitoring” while other campuses targeted for redesign might be required to adopt specific interventions). It lays the groundwork – at least conceptually – for performance-based, portfolio-type management of schools that has been successful elsewhere.

Language specifying maximum student-teacher ratios and caps in various grades has been removed. The new contract attempts to give greater flexibility to schools and teams to determine appropriate class sizes. The contract is still riddled with language about the benefits of small class size, and the schools may continue pushing class sizes down. But the contract at least allows for greater freedom in this realm. 

The bad

Though the concept of designating schools for redesign/turnaround is a good one, teachers displaced from one of these poorly performing schools still have “surplus” rights over other teachers – in other words, they can “bump” other qualified teachers who are applying to open positions.

Seniority-based reductions-in-force, and forced hiring (instead of mutual-consent hiring) still remain intact (though to be fair, the former is an artifact of state law which ties Cincinnati’s hands). However, the contract could have eliminated seniority-based hiring or bumping without running up against state law.

Comprehensive evaluations will only happen every five years. If the overhauled evaluations are robust and innovative, they will be limited in their usefulness in part because of infrequency. Annual evaluations still exist, but at minimum only one classroom observation is required for one of these interim performance review evaluations (PREs).

No consequences for poor evaluations. While the CFT and district will be fleshing out criteria for tenure in the coming months, the contract doesn’t create a necessary route for dismissing ineffective teachers.

Overall, the contract has some positive elements and opens the door for an innovative new teacher evaluation system, meaningful performance pay, and changes to tenure. Until we see these components fleshed out fully, it’s premature to call it the most “progressive” contract in the nation (though in Ohio, maybe).

A version of this article first appeared on Flypaper, Fordham’s blog.

A recent report from our colleagues at the Fordham Institute’s headquarters in Washington, D.C., Are Bad Schools Immortal?, shows the folly of school turnaround efforts – only 1.4 percent of district schools and less than 1 percent of charters that have undergone turnaround efforts have done so successfully. And if the statistics aren’t bleak enough, expert opinion is even gloomier.

Ronald Brady concluded in 2003 that “Success is not the norm…the intervention experience is marked more by valiant effort than notable success.” More recently, Andy Smarick, former Fordham staffer and now senior official in New Jersey’s education department, spent a year studying and reporting on the failure of school turnaround efforts and concluded glumly, “The history of urban education tells us emphatically that turnarounds are not a reliable strategy for improving our worst schools.”

Despite all this, in Ohio Fordham (which authorizes charter schools in the Buckeye State) is working closely with board members of a Dayton elementary charter school to try to turn that school around. The school has failed to make any academic gains for the last three years. Moreover, it could well face automatic closure under state law at the end of the 2010-11 school year if it is again rated F and fails to make growth in reading and math according to the state’s value-added metrics.  

Why not just shutter this school? (It’s not because Fordham doesn’t have the spine to do it – we’ve closed schools before and were a primary driver behind Ohio’s stringent charter-school closure law.) But there are three compelling reasons Fordham is struggling with a turnaround effort that is statistically doomed to failure.

First, if the school closes, its 500 children would be tossed into a sea of failure that provides them few better opportunities. More than 40 percent of the 14,000 children in Dayton’s K-8 schools (charter and district) attend one that is rated F. Twenty-five percent attend a school rated D; 28 percent attend one rated C; and just 5 percent of K-8 school age kids attend a school rated B. There is no public K-8 school in Dayton rated A. Simply put, Dayton’s educational landscape is flooded by low-quality schools.

Second, this snapshot is unlikely to change soon as there are no signs the district schools are on a path toward improving and Dayton is not a hotbed for high-quality charter start-ups. Some charter students are served by local charter management organizations and some of the national education management groups like National Heritage Academies (NHA), Edison Learning, and Imagine Schools. The performance of these models, at least in Dayton, is mixed. Dayton does not have any national high-flyer models like KIPP, Uncommon Schools, Building Excellent Schools or Aspire, and none of these models seem excited about coming to Dayton anytime soon.

Third, Fordham staff and board members believe that the people involved at the board level and in the building can create a plan for a turnaround that can work. The loyalty and commitment of those involved is to the community and to the children in the school. The school has recruited a crackerjack educator as school leader who has served as principal of the city’s high-performing Catholic high school. Edison Learning, which currently operates the school, has committed to helping out any way that it can, even agreeing to leave the building entirely if that is deemed the best solution by those on the ground. There is a genuine commitment to making the school work.

Statistically speaking, this may not be enough, but in Dayton it’s the best shot we’ve got. Everyone involved appreciates how hard a turnaround is, but closing the building and walking away seems an even worse option.

A version of this article first appeared on Flypaper, Fordham’s blog.

This report by the Center on Education Policy looks at student progress in the years since the implementation of the federal No Child Left Behind Act in 2001. 

Specifically, it examines whether states are increasing student achievement and closing achievement gaps that exist between students of different races, ethnicities, incomes, and genders.   In order to determine this CEP gathered data on state tests from 2002 to 2009 for grades four, eight, and high-school tested grades, along with NAEP data from 2005-2009.

The analysis points to several trends.

Achievement gaps are large and persistent. Gaps between white and African American students remain, with African American students scoring 20 to 30 points lower than their white peers in 2009.  Furthermore, Asian students also performed highly on state achievement tests, ousting white students in most states.

For most student groups, gaps on state tests have narrowed since 2002.  Gaps on state tests narrowed more often for African American and Latino students than it did for low-income and male students.  Another fact worth noting is that achievement gaps narrowed in a majority of states between African American and white students, and between Latino and white students. 

While progress in narrowing the gap is encouraging, continuing at the current rate of progress would take many years to close the gap. Although gaps between subgroups have been narrowing across the country they are doing so at different rates.  Latino/white student gaps have narrowed more rapidly than any other subgroup, while progress in narrowing the gap between boys and girls has evolved at a much slower pace.  While the progress is encouraging there is much more work to be accomplished.

The report also breaks down achievement results for each state.  In Ohio, eighth grade math results were encouraging and demonstrated that all major subgroups made gains, except for Asian students who remained unchanged.  However, the results for eighth grade reading proficiency were somewhat different.  At the basic proficiency level most subgroups reported a gain, however declines in progress were reported among above-proficient and advanced levels.  In math the gap narrowed in all tested grades for all the major subgroups.   To read more about Ohio’s results or to check out how others states are performing, find the report on CEP’s website here.

Slow and Uneven Progress in Narrowing Gaps
Center on Education Policy
December 2010

In this policy brief, TNTP lauds Race to the Top for spurring more statewide reform last year in education “than in the previous two decades,” attributing its success to the clear priorities and guidance for applicant states, and the transparency established by making applications available for public review.

However, TNTP criticizes the ambiguity and subjectivity involved in the review process, and identifies several areas that must be improved should RttT be reauthorized for a third round:

1. Lack of differentiation in some areas of scoring, such as in the “Great Teachers and Leaders” section, where 86 percent of second-round applicants received high points and no state received low points. 
2. General rating inflation, especially from Round 1 to 2.
3. Deviation from the scoring guidance.
4. Excessive influence of outlier ratings on final scores, most notably for state like Louisiana, which many commentators believed deserved an award.
5. Inconsistent scoring from state to state. For example, Illinois enacted five pieces of education reform legislation and secured participation from districts representing 81 percent of students in the state.  Ohio secured significantly less participation from districts representing only 62 percent of students in the state, and had not enacted legislation to the degree of Illinois.  In this section Ohio outscored Illinois by six points. 

TNTP suggests that these issues allowed for possibly less-deserving states to win at the expense of states truly committed to reform. 

States were also not rewarded for their depth of commitment to education reform.  States such as Colorado and Louisiana took significant steps to solidify reform policies through legislation, but their application scores do not reflect this commitment.  Ohio and Hawaii, on the other hand, made no legislative commitments as part of their applications, yet still managed to secure awards.

TNTP recommends that if Race to the Top is repeated the Department of Education should establish a cross-application review process where applicant reviews are analyzed by other reviewers according to a consistent standard.  This will reduce the subjectivity, inflation, and inconsistency that affected applicants adversely. Also, Secretary Duncan should make the final executive decision based on the peer scores and ensure that the contest’s outcomes match its reform priorities. 

Read it here.

Resetting Race to the Top: Why the Future of Competition Depends on Improving the Scoring Process
The New Teacher Project (TNTP)
December 2010

The education community has long emphasized that “one size does not fit all” for students, but what about for teachers? In a new white paper, The Promise of Cafeteria-Style Benefits for Districts and Teachers, researchers from CRPE propose customizing teachers’ benefit plans as a cost-stabilizing measure for districts. Currently, most districts offer teachers a single benefit plan with two options: opt-in or opt-out.  “Cafeteria-style” benefit plans, however, would give each teacher a set amount of money to spend on a wide variety of benefits, allowing the teacher, for example, to purchase a dental but not an optical plan. The teacher would keep any unspent money as a cash bonus.

The paper proposes three funding models for such plans:

• Model 1: The district’s per-teacher benefit contribution consists of a baseline dollar amount which increases by a given percentage each year. The baseline dollar amount is negotiated in advance and may not be re-negotiated from year to year, but the yearly percentage increase may be re-negotiated.
• Model 2: The district’s per-teacher benefit contribution consists of a percentage of the teacher’s salary. Salaries may be negotiated from year to year, but the percentage reserved for benefits may not.
• Model 3: The district’s per-teacher benefit contribution consists of a fixed dollar amount, which may be negotiated from year to year.

Although these models are not likely to save districts money, they may introduce a new level of stability to districts’ yearly budgets. The first model, for example, would allow a district to estimate the probable rise in healthcare costs over the next several years and negotiate a corresponding, yearly percentage increase in benefit spending. In exchange for accepting more risk in the event of a healthcare cost spike (risk usually shouldered by districts), teachers would receive more options when selecting benefits.

In nearly every teacher contract negotiation in Ohio, benefits—particularly healthcare benefits—are a point of contention. The issue has factored significantly, for example, in the year-long negotiations around the Cincinnati Public Schools (CPS) contract. With leaner budgets ahead, Ohio districts would do well to reconsider their traditional practices in many areas, including the provision of benefits to teachers. As this paper suggests, a thorough revision of benefits policies could produce a rare win-win for teachers and districts. Read the report here.

The Promise of Cafeteria-Style Benefits for Districts and Teachers
Noah Wepman, Marguerite Roza, and Cristina Sepe
Center on Reinventing Public Education (CRPE)
December 9, 2010