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Opinion and News Analysis
Are bad schools immortal?
By Chester
E. Finn, Jr. and Amber
M. Winkler
Are bad schools immortal? Based on the results of our new
report of the same title, the glum answer appears to be “yes, most of the
time, dammit.” Over a five year time span, of more than 2,000 low-performing
public schools, about three-quarters stayed open—and stayed bad, at least as
gauged by the meager (bottom quartile) proficiency levels that their pupils
attain.
Even more troubling, this sorry track record is nearly as
weak in the charter-school sector as in the district sector, despite the well-rehearsed
charter-movement doctrine that “our bad schools don’t last—either they improve
or they close.”
Would that it were so. Seventy-two percent of the original
low-performing charter schools examined in this study were still operating, and
still low-performing, five years later, compared with 80 percent of district
schools. Bona fide performance turnarounds were exceptionally rare: Just 1.4
percent of district schools and less than 1 percent of charters earned that
accolade.
Study author David
Stuit, a partner at Basis Policy Research, tracked 2,025 low-achieving
schools (1,768 district-operated, 257 charters) from 2004 through 2009.1
The schools were located in ten states that collectively account for 70 percent
of all U.S.
charters. The overall outcome, as noted, is not what either charter zealots or
school-turnaround enthusiasts would hope to find. It’s sobering. But it’s also
intriguing in many ways, beginning with differences among the states. For
example:
1) Minnesota’s charter and
district sectors displayed both the paltriest signs of improved performance and
the lowest rates of closure, even though the Land of Ten Thousand Lakes
supposedly has the country’s best charter law (quoth the National Alliance for
Public Charter Schools).
2) In Arizona, a much larger proportion of weak
charter schools closed than did district schools. Six of the nineteen
low-performing AZ charters in 2004 had shut by 2009, representing 32 percent of
the sample. Just five of ninety-five low-performing district schools closed
during that period. Perhaps Arizona
no longer deserves to be labeled the “Wild West” of charter schooling.
3) In Florida, 23 percent of low-performing
charters closed versus 7 percent in the district sector. The corresponding
percentages in California
were eighteen and seven.
4) Ohio
has been significantly more successful in closing low-performing schools (both
district and charter) than the other nine states in the study. Thirty-five
percent of Ohio's
low-performing charters and 34 percent of its low-performing district schools
were closed (compared with 19 and 11 percent for the full 10-state sample).
We emerge from this study with two large takeaways for
policy makers and educators:
First, though the charter sector does a bit better than the
district sector at closing bad schools, it still has a long, long way to go
before it can truly be said to live up to the core assertion that its
governance and accountability arrangements lead to the demise of low
performers. Keeping bad charters from opening—and intervening in those that
deliver bad results—should be the mantra for authorizers.
That doesn’t mean it’s easy. We at Fordham know from
experience how difficult it is for authorizers, even conscientious ones, to
shut down bad schools. Ohio’s
charter “death penalty” is instructive here. A few years back, frustrated by
sponsors not doing their job, Buckeye legislators mandated automatic closure of
any charter school that fails to meet specific performance criteria over
several years. This is a mixed blessing. It strips authorizers of some
autonomy—diligent authorizers are better able to tailor specific interventions
or other remedies for low-performing schools than are one-size-fits-all
statutes. And the statute may let authorizers off the hook (by playing bad cop
when they don’t shut terrible schools themselves). But it also ensures that at
either the authorizer or the state does in fact hold schools to account for
persistently miserable academic outcomes. And so long as authorizers face
perverse incentives—such as the management fees they earn from bad schools as
well as good—this might be the best we can do.
Second, real transformation is truly rare in both
sectors—just twenty-six schools in our sample made it into the top half of
their states’ proficiency rankings within five years. (That’s a high bar, no
doubt, but it’s comparable to what federal School Improvement efforts are seeking.)
Bona fide transformations generally entail soup-to-nuts makeovers that replace the adults who work in a
school—including tenured teachers—and start afresh with a new team, new
curriculum, etc. This leads us to wonder whether Secretary Duncan’s emphasis on
this reform strategy is warranted, whether the billions of federal dollars
being channeled into weak schools may be largely wasted, and whether the many
would-be turnaround experts and consulting firms springing up around the land
to help states and districts spend those dollars are little more than dream
merchants.
Would not all that energy and money be better spent to
strengthen the accountability (and sponsorship) systems that lead to shutting
down and replacing bad schools? We think so. After all, accountability for
individual district and charter schools cannot happen in isolation—it needs to
be part of a system-wide approach. States, for instance, can help school
leaders enforce accountability mechanisms by constructing user-friendly systems
that identify low performers, insisting that student achievement play a part in
teacher evaluations, and defining what it means to be college and career ready.
The states should then align high school exit and college entrance requirements
to this user-friendly system.
One parting thought. Many reformers have argued
(including ourselves, at times) that turnarounds seldom work because the schools
remain burdened by the same old dysfunctions that made them bad in the first
place: union contracts, central office bureaucracies, hiring regulations that
send the best teachers elsewhere, etc. Yet charter schools, for the most part,
don’t face those stumbling blocks. So if bad charters can’t turn themselves
around, why do we suppose that bad public schools—still tied down by these
constraints—will be able to do any better?
1. Dr. Stuit was unable to
undertake a “value added” analysis, so the analysis relies on absolute
proficiency scores on state tests. Note, too, that, we’re tough graders. To be
deemed a “turnaround,” a school in its state’s lowest decile (i.e., proficiency
at or below the 10th percentile) at the beginning of the period had to surpass
the 50th percentile within five years. That means a school might have made
substantial progress (e.g., 2nd to 49th percentile) yet not qualify as
turned-around.
Opinion: Do's and don'ts from Chinese education
By Amber
M. Winkler
From all of last week’s pontificating (see here,
here, here)
around about the latest
PISA results, one unmistakable message emerged: Shanghai is leaving the
U.S.—and pretty much all of the planet—in the dust. Out of sixty participating
countries and five other jurisdictions, its 15-year-old students had the
highest average scores on international math, reading, and science tests last
year. In math, they scored nearly a full standard deviation above the
OECD average. We waste time questioning the validity of the Shanghai
results—PISA’s sampling and data analysis is supervised by some of the most
respected methodologists in the business (moreover, TIMSS
and PISA are highly correlated in terms of
rankings). Instead, let’s turn to three other observations prompted by
this new “Sputnik
moment.” First, authoritarian regimes can force educational change in ways that
are unthinkable in democracies but that may actually boost academic
performance. Second, the educational envy between China and the U.S. is
mutual—we’re just slower to make changes. And third, despite our vastly
different governments and cultures, there may yet be a few lessons that America
can learn from China.
1. Authoritarian Nations Do what Democracies Don’t. According to Lessons from
PISA for the United States, Shanghai’s municipal government has put
in place a host of policies and practices designed to orchestrate educational
gains. Under the “school renovation” initiative, it unabashedly closed or
merged its lowest-performing schools with its highest-performing ones (of which
there are apparently enough). It also transferred—involuntarily, mind you—a
number of outstanding urban school teachers and principals to low-performing
rural schools and a number of rural staff to high-performing urban sites in
order to learn the ropes. Under “commissioned administration,” they can assign
a good public school to take over a bad one. It’s easy to see how such steps might
benefit kids, at least those in formerly bad schools—and how we may even be
under-estimating China’s ability to get things done. If only they’d
been enacted without the strong arm of the state!
2. Reciprocal Envy. China
has historically emphasized exams, dating back to its Civil Examination system
(which selected state officials based on their test scores) in roughly 600 AD.
This respect for exams endures today. Although the rap on China is that its
test-score obsession leads the country to churn out super test-takers who
deftly regurgitate facts and perform computations but aren’t necessarily learners,
the PISA results suggest otherwise, at least in Shanghai. For better or worse, PISA
does not measure content knowledge and factual recall; it measures “application
of knowledge…to problems within a real-life context.” PISA-meister Andreas
Schleicher connected the dots when he remarked “…for
me the real significance of these results is that they refute the commonly held
hypothesis that China just produces rote learning.”
So, have the
Chinese (at least the Shanghainese) mastered rote learning and creative
thinking? That’s how OECD interprets developments there—though others argue
otherwise. Authors of the PISA report declare that China has come to value
student-centered learning and now offers
children more and more flexible course offerings. It’s been a slow process,
given the country’s tradition of direct instruction, but the use of “slogans” (dare
I say propaganda?) helps here, too. The latest slogan? “Return class time to
students.”
As we
marvel (and, for some, wring hands) at Shanghai’s awesome scores, the Chinese envy
our comprehensive approach to education, emphasis on student-as-learner, and
variegated course offerings. But they’re quicker than we are to incorporate
borrowed ideas and practices.
3. Shanghai Tutorial. Suspend for a
moment legitimate outrage at China’s tendency to oppress its citizens and
you may spot a few lessons that Americans might benefit from learning. First
is a reverence for education—Shanghai’s slogan is “First-rate city, first-rate
education”—that dates back to Confucius,
who reportedly said, “Learn as though you would never be able to master it;
Hold it as though you would be in fear of losing it.”
Second,
the Chinese have deployed some smart interventions. Consortia of strong and
weak, old and new, and public and private schools are established with one
exceptionally strong school at the core, which is charged with sharing best
practices. Virtually all teachers are subject-matter experts, not
generalists; effective classroom practitioners gain a higher “professional
status;” and China has common curriculum standards. It also has a rigorous
framework for teaching that includes small groups of instructors engaged in
lesson preparation and teaching demonstrations. And in a
policy alien to Americans, municipalities in China funnel more money and better
teachers to “key schools” which serve high-performing students. In America,
we’re more apt to channel extra bucks to schools serving low-performing pupils—and
leave our high achievers to make their way on their own. With China focusing
resources on its best and brightest, we ignore our own high-achievers
at our peril.
The
Chinese are also exceptionally transparent when it comes to school-level
accountability. They routinely rank schools and publish school ratings and
other educational measures. Surely greater transparency around school, teacher,
and student performance would do U.S. education some good.
The final lesson is a bit of a paradox. Chinese
students are more likely than their U.S. counterparts to attribute academic
success and failure to their own effort or lack thereof. This, of course, is
the attitude we’d like to see in more American youngsters. But it also
illustrates an irony in China’s education system: Its students are more likely
to take responsibility for their own education even as they inhabit a country
that does not value individual rights.
News Analysis: Inside the Black box
To date, Gadfly has remained
uncharacteristically mum about the selection of magazine executive Cathie Black
as Gotham’s new schools chancellor. Yes, he’s had his little buggy
palpitations. But, everyone deserves the benefit of the doubt. At Fordham, we
agree with Mayor Bloomberg that school district CEOs need strong management
skills, which Black apparently has in spades. But they also must exhibit sound
policy judgment and stellar communication skills. A recent interview with the New
York Daily News gives us a glimpse at Black’s prowess on those score. The
topic was the moral and political quagmire surrounding the potential release of
NYC teachers’ effectiveness ratings (determined through value-added data).
Black’s comments indicated a thoughtful novice—but also one contemplating the
question for the first time. "I look at it two
ways,” she said. “As a parent, I believe you would want to know if your child
is being taught by someone who's at the bottom of the barrel. On the other
side, you know, you're also dealing with someone's reputation, their
professional opportunities ... So I think it's something that we want to weigh
very carefully." “Good point,” says Gadfly. “But, you are the one in
charge, making the decisions. What will you do?” Black waffled through the rest
of the interview. She went on to say that she may be court-mandated to release
the data. But wouldn’t if she didn’t have to. Or maybe would. But then again,
maybe not… We’ll have to stay tuned to find out how this Debate of One turns
out. In the meantime, Gadfly beseeches other “education mayors”: Won’t you
please find someone who is both a strong manager and has thought about
education, at least a little bit, to lead your schools?
News Analysis: Trigger happy
Last week, parents at McKinley Elementary
School in Compton, Los Angeles set potentially unprecedented change in motion.
They presented the school, and its district, with a petition signed by 61
percent of McKinley’s parents demanding that the district cede managerial
control over the school to Celerity Education Group—a CMO. According to a
California state law passed earlier this year, the district must abide by the
parents’ wishes. For parents of McKinley students, fewer than 25 percent of
whom perform at grade level in math and reading in 5th grade, this initiative
is a way to overcome the forces of unionized bureaucracy. But now that the
flare gun has been fired, what next? Plans on how to recruit and keep highly
effective teachers and bump up curricular content, all while ensuring strong
accountability mechanisms (more than just a petition), have been left unvetted.
Never mind the mounting evidence of failed
school turnarounds. Fair warning to McKinley parents (and
to others excited about spreading the California initiative elsewhere):
Pulling the “parent trigger” is barely
the beginning of turning around your child’s school.
Short Reviews
Review: Learning about Teaching: Initial Findings from the Measures of Effective Teaching Project
By Janie
Scull
In the fall of 2009, the Gates Foundation
commenced an epic task: the Measures of Effective Teaching (MET) project.
Through thousands of hours of videotaped and live classroom observations,
student and teacher surveys, and information on student achievement gains,
foundation analysts labored to uncover the best indicators of teacher
effectiveness, the goal being to craft systemic and reliable evaluation
processes and feedback mechanisms for the future. The preliminary findings of
this massive initiative are now available. And if they’re a sign what’s to
come, teacher evaluations will be in for a major makeover. This preliminary report
analyzes two of the project’s five measures of teacher effectiveness—student
scores (on both state and external
tests) and student survey responses. There were four take-aways: First, a
teacher’s past success in producing student gains is highly predictive of that
teacher’s ability to do so again. Second, teachers who, according to their
students, “teach to the test” do not produce the highest value-added scores for
said students; rather, instructors who help their students understand math
concepts and reading comprehension yield the highest scores. Third, student
perceptions of their teachers are remarkably telling and remain stable across
groups of students and across classes taught by the same teacher. Most
reflective of teacher effectiveness is students’ perceptions of whether their
teacher controls the classroom and challenges them with rigorous work. The
analysts end by noting that a combination of these methods provides teachers a
more accurate, detailed, and targeted evaluation. These findings are just the
beginning of MET. Check back in late spring
for the final report—including analyses of classroom observations.
Review: Value Added of Teachers in High-Poverty Schools and Lower-Poverty Schools
By Amanda
Olberg
This working paper from the National Center for
Analysis of Longitudinal Data in Education Research (CALDER) hits the reader
with some dogma-shattering conclusions. It compares the effectiveness of
teachers in high-poverty elementary schools to that of teachers in
lower-poverty schools in Florida and North Carolina over four years, from
2000-2001 to 2004-2005. The authors find that teachers in high-poverty schools
are only somewhat less effective on average than their peers at lower-poverty
schools. Yet the devil is in the details: Though the averages aren’t much
different, the variance is great. At high-poverty schools, teachers performing
in the lowest decile perform much worse than their counterparts in low-poverty
schools. (In other words, struggling teachers in poor schools are much worse
than struggling teachers in wealthy ones.) Here’s another intriguing finding:
differences in teacher effectiveness arise not from years of experience or
educational attainment, but from differences in the marginal return or payoff
from increases in experience—meaning that teachers in lower-poverty schools
improve more for each year of experience than those in high-poverty schools. To
some extent, this suggests, teachers in high-poverty schools are worse because
they have been teaching in a high-poverty school. Whoa!
From The Web
The Education Gadfly Show Podcast: Rick! Pull up your pants!
Mike and Rick are feeling the holiday spirit as they explain
Fordham’s new
report, lament school turnaround efforts, and discuss Cathie Black: The
Education Novice. Amber asks for students’ perspectives and Chris gets
“Urkeled.”
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Click to listen to the podcast on our website. You can also download the podcast here or subscribe on iTunes here.
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Flypaper's Finest: Stuff is going down down South
By Liam
Julian
During the Florida gubernatorial campaign, most
voters were paying attention to then-candidate Rick Scott’s past—as head of a
hospital chain that paid $1.7 billion in fines in the largest Medicare fraud
case in history. Now that Scott is the governor-elect, those voters
(and the press) are turning their focus to the policy plans he
released several months ago….
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Click to read the rest on Flypaper.
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Flypaper's Finest: Class warfare, Republican-style
By Chester
E. Finn, Jr.
Politicians
clearly revel in class warfare. Democrats always rage at the well-to-do
and try to present themselves as champions of the less prosperous. (See current
goings-on in Congress regarding federal income and estate taxes.)
In the “old days,” the GOP delighted in going after
“welfare queens” and drivers of “welfare Cadillacs” and such,
representing themselves as champions of employed, responsible taxpayers.…
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Click to read the rest on Flypaper.
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Gadfly Studios: Reform school, with Tony Bennett
In this short video, Tony Bennett, Indiana
Superintendent of Public Instruction, weighs in on teacher quality, school
choice, and accountability—and explains what to expect from the Hoosier State.
Extras
Briefly Noted: From sea to shining sea
- The Hoover Institution’s Koret Task Force
released its best
and worst of 2010 this week. See what topped their lists. (Hint: Race to
the Top made both the best and worst categories.)
- Nearly 52 percent of students attend a school of
choice. Want to know what those options are and what political, policy, and
procedural barriers impede expansion? Just ask Bruno
Manno.
- Flags are being thrown left and right (or west
and east). At issue is special-education funding and accountability, which are
seeing pushback from Hawaii
to Georgia
to New
York City.
- The public has been weighing in on education a
lot lately. According to two recent AP polls, Americans overwhelmingly feel
that it’s too
difficult to fire bad teachers and that student motivation is to blame for
the nation’s weak achievement. Oh, they’re also not
willing to raise taxes for education spending.
- Is competition good for public schools? In a word: yes. Cassandra M.D. Hart and David Figlio explain
why in the most recent Education Next.
Letter to the Gadfly: The price of a Chinese education
By Yuan Tian
The news about Shanghai-students' scores on the
PISA result has left
most U.S. educators stunned. But, there
should no difficulty in understanding why Chinese students did so well on their
exams. It comes down to one word: practice.
As a student in China, I was told since my first day
of elementary school to focus on my studies, to achieve high scores on all
tests, and to go to a respected university. Similarly, teachers are instructed
to cover only the content needed to guarantee their students obtain
scores worthy of university admittance. The reason is simple: A solid
university education means a good job in the future, according to China's
societal judgment.
My participation in the Chinese educational system came
with a price—I paid for my acceptance into a good college with twelve years
without free choice or the ability to develop personal interests. Each day, from
elementary school to senior high school, I only did that which teachers asked of
me. There was neither extra time nor energy for me to think about my real
interests after a daily regime of four to five hours of homework. Twelve years
of hard practice succeeded in one way. I earned a good score on the
national standardized exam for university admission. But this effort gave
me little else.
Fortunately, my life began to change after I matriculated
into college. I am able to take electives. But, the downside has been that I completely
distanced myself from the content knowledge I gained in the past, which was
tainted by my many years of practice. Accumulating the knowledge necessary to
succeed at China’s national standardized exam had become a goal for me. Once I
had passed the exam, there was no reason for me to continue developing my
knowledge in those subjects further—and regrettably, I didn’t.
I don't know whether the younger generation is luckier than
my generation in having access to tests like the PISA and to education that
place higher value on breadth and creativity. However, if China continues to
emphasize test results, there is nothing changed from the old educational
system. The assessment remains the implicit end goal, rather than a way of
measuring the capacity of students to learn and be educated citizens. No test
results are worthy of our attention if they become the only focus of
schooling, at the expense of producing well-rounded, thoughtful,
independent-minded people.
Yuan Tian is a first-year master’s degree
student in Philanthropic Studies at the Center on Philanthropy at Indiana
University.
Announcement: NCTQ wants you!
The National Council on Teacher Quality is
looking for a smart, analytical, persistent, and detail-oriented team leader to
manage a national review of education schools—supervising remote analyses,
organizing data collection systems, and solving the thorniest of evaluation
problems. Interested? Learn more here. To apply, send your
resume here by December 20.
Fordham's featured publication:
America brims with education data and these days it seems
like everyone in education claims to be guided by data. In A Byte at the
Apple, leaders and scholars map the landscape of data providers and users
and explore why what's supplied by the former too often fails to meet the needs
of the latter. It documents the barriers to collecting good information and
explores potential solutions—even a future system where a "backpack"
of achievement information would accompany every student from place to place.
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