Unsolved problems—and signs of hope—as 2012 dawns
Tear down these walls
Opinion | Chester E. Finn, Jr.

Specious on special ed
No one school can serve all types of special needs
News Analysis

Africans vs. African Americans
An intra-subgroup achievement gap
News Analysis

Creating Opportunity Schools: A Bold Plan to Transform Indianapolis Public Schools
Tony Bennett likes it, and so do we
Review | Terry Ryan and Bianca Speranza

Does Practice-Based Teacher Preparation Increase Student Achievement? Early Evidence from the Boston Teacher Residency
A long-term investment in teachers
Review | Laura Johnson

Striving for Student Success: A Model of Shared Accountability
One program that's on the right path
Review | Adrienne King

Santa Claus: The second coming of Christ?
Cross-country retrospectives
Education Gadfly Show Podcast | Hosts: Mike Petrilli and Chris Tessone

The case for more details in Ohio’s history standards
Exactly the sort of area where the state should meddle
Flypaper's Finest | December 19, 2011 | Emmy Partin

Closing the achievement gap—but at gifted students’ expense
A well-intentioned but misguided crusade
Flypaper's Finest | December 16, 2011 | Mike Petrilli and Rick Hess

Rethinking Education Governance: Chris Cerf, Keynote Address
The Commissioner’s takedown of the status quo
Gadfly Studios | December 7, 2011

There might be method to that madness
Enroll at MIT for free
Briefly Noted

Searching for a researcher
We’re looking for a research manager
Announcement

Does accountability work forever?
Find out at Fordham on January 5
Announcement

Do High Flyers Maintain Their Altitude? Performance Trends of Top Students
Are we short-changing the talented tenth?
Featured Fordham Publication

Opinion and News Analysis

Opinion: Unsolved problems—and signs of hope—as 2012 dawns
By Chester E. Finn, Jr.

The central problem besetting K-12 education in the United States today is still—as for almost thirty years now—that far too few of our kids are learning nearly enough for their own or the nation’s good. And the gains we’ve made, though well worth making, have been meager (and largely confined to math), are trumped by gains in other countries, and evaporate by the end of high school.

This much everybody knows. But unless we want to live out the classic definition of insanity (“doing the same thing over again with the expectation that it will produce a different result”), we need to focus laser-like on the barriers that keep us from making major-league gains. If we don’t break through (or circumnavigate) these barriers, academic achievement will remain stagnant.

The barriers I’m talking about are not cultural issues, parenting issues, demographic issues, or other macro-influences on educational achievement. Those are all plenty real, but largely beyond the reach of public policy. No, here I refer to obstacles that competent leaders and bold policymakers could reduce or eradicate if they were serious.

How much difference would that really make? It’s possible, of course, that we’re pursuing the wrong core strategies. Maybe standards-based reform has exhausted its potential (as Mark Schneider suggests in The Accountability Plateau). Perhaps choice and competition really cannot lift all boats. Possibly technology is overrated, alternate certification can never amount to much, teacher quality is doomed to mediocrity, principals don’t truly want authority, etc.

	From where I sit, the basic strategies aren’t ill-conceived. Rather, they’ve been stumped, stymied, and constrained by formidable barriers that are more or less built into the K-12 system as we know it.

Could be. But from where I sit, the basic strategies aren’t ill-conceived. Rather, they’ve been stumped, stymied, and constrained by formidable barriers that are more or less built into the K-12 system as we know it.

Those barriers aren’t accidents. They’ve been erected by adult interests, bureaucratic routine, structural rigidity, and political stalemate. And they function to keep anything in education from changing very much. Eight such barriers are especially troublesome. Uninterrupted, they are likely to keep us from making major gains. One ought not, however, despair. On several fronts, promising interruptions and interrupters are emerging. Whether they can muster what it will take to tear down these walls remains unknown.

First and foremost is the archaic governance of K-12 education. I’ve written elsewhere about this problem, but it’s so fundamental and ubiquitous that we tend not even to notice it, much less to think that anything could be done about it. Instead, we take for granted (like it or not) that we’re stuck forever with local control in the form of school districts, separate from the rest of government and run by school boards that are particularly vulnerable to capture by adult interests, as well as with a marble cake of federal, state, and local decisions, regulations, and funding streams.

There are beginning to be exceptions, however, that illustrate what could be possible. Mayoral control of the schools in D.C., New York, Chicago, and several other major cities is one example. State-operated “recovery” school districts in Louisiana, Tennessee, and Michigan are another. The “parent trigger” idea is a third.

Second, our dysfunctional system of school finance puts the brakes on just about every reform while perpetuating inequity. We don’t fund learning, we fund programs. We don’t fund kids, we fund adult job slots. We don’t fund schools, we fund district-wide categoricals. We don’t blend the money from multiple sources into a single, flexible stream; rather, we leave it in discrete programs and silos, each with its own rules, uses of funding, and accounting obligations.

Here, too, small cracks can be seen in the glacier. Several states (notably Michigan, Indiana, and Vermont) have shifted their funding systems to mostly state dollars. Voucher programs, though still limited (but growing!), enable at least some of the money to accompany individual kids to the schools of their choice. A few cities have devolved as much budgetary authority as they can—district-wide teacher contracts are a huge constraint here—to the building level. Waivers can be sought (though seldom are) from states and Washington that allow enterprising superintendents to combine and redirect some of the categorical funds. And a few brave school-finance experts are probing deep into district budgets to see how much things really cost and where the dollars really flow.

Third, our academic standards are too low almost everywhere. It’s not just that too little is being achieved; it’s that too little is expected. Even where a state’s standards look great on paper—a few do—its “cut scores” for passing the tests aligned with those standards are rarely ambitious, and NCLB hasn’t helped one bit on that front. Fordham and others have been documenting these problems forever.

The silver lining in this cloud is widespread adoption of the Common Core State Standards for math and reading, and work now underway to produce a kindred set of multi-state standards for science. The Common Core itself turned out well, superior to the academic standards of most states and more or less on par with the best of them. The big questions now are whether it will be properly implemented, which means accompanying it with suitable curricula, assessments, and more—and whether public officials will have the fortitude to stick with it after scads of their current students turn out to be no match for it. Several state education leaders—Ohio’s Stan Heffner and Massachusetts’s Mitch Chester come to mind—are already walking the Common Core walk. In other jurisdictions, it may still be mostly talk.

Which brings us to weak-kneed accountability, the fourth great barrier to real achievement gains. About half the states have high school graduation tests that one must pass to qualify for a diploma but nearly all of these are easy—eighth- or tenth-grade content with low passing scores and multiple make-up opportunities. A few states have “promotional gates”—achievement benchmarks that determine whether you get to move on to the next grade. Many states give ratings or labels to schools according to their academic results and NCLB has added the (“made” or “failed”) AYP designation for schools and districts. Still and all, there are precious few tangible consequences for the adults in the system; it isn’t that demanding for the kids; and schools that find themselves subject to “interventions” or “reconstitutions” usually end up with the minimum-hassle version.

Whether the state consortia now developing Common Core-aligned assessments will be able to agree on demanding “cut scores” is an open question, to be followed by whether individual states using those tests will let those cut scores make any real difference in promotion, graduation, teacher retention (or reward), school reconstitution, and all the rest. Yes, there’s movement toward tying teacher evaluations and pay more tightly to student learning, but we’re still in the earliest stages of that ambitious project and there is much resistance to it.

Fifth, though choice programs of every sort are proliferating—virtual, charter, hybrid, voucher, and more—and though it can be demonstrated that more than half of all U.S. pupils now attend schools that they or their parents chose via one means or another, the facts remain that too many of those choices are mediocre (or worse), that the kids in greatest need of better options are least apt to be able to access them, and that our “schools of choice” for the most part labor under too much input-and-process regulation coupled with insufficient resources.

The best of the CMOs and a handful of one-off schools show that quality is possible, but even they face great difficulty replicating success and expanding their networks. The best state charter laws show that the regulatory and resource challenges can be tackled. But we’ve got a long way to go.

We can forge a path to a brave new education world.
Photo by Daniel Ramirez

Sixth, although instructional technology holds enormous promise to transform education—in both its fully virtual and blended forms—it is stoutly opposed by the usual interest groups, is pushed (perhaps too hard) by politically connected profit seekers who care little about academic achievement, is ill-suited to existing governance and financing arrangements, and is shackled by absurd regulatory provisions that make scant sense even in a brick-and-mortar environment. The Digital Learning Council and others (including the Foundation for Excellence in Education and Fordham itself) are showing where and how paths through these thickets could be cut but politicians and policymakers will have to do the heavy cutting.

Seventh, our human resource practices and policies are sorely antiquated and anti-quality, particularly as regards teachers, whether one is looking at seniority provisions, uniform pay schedules, overly rich pension-and-benefit plans, licensure-and-certification rules, or a hundred other parts of public education’s HR system. There have been bold moves in several states to limit the scope of collective bargaining (a pillar of archaic HR practices), to modernize benefit structures, to make employment hinge more on effectiveness than on credentials and seniority, and to evaluate teachers (and sometimes principals) more on the basis of student achievement. But, once again, we have a very long way to go.

Eighth and finally, our preoccupation with “at risk” populations and with achievement gaps defined as the distance between demographic groups has led to the benign neglect of millions of kids, including but not limited to gifted students and high-achieving learners. America will never solve its international-competitiveness problem just by raising the bottom of the achievement distribution. Though a number of states and districts are trying to enlarge their Advanced Placement programs and to reward top students with college financial aid and other initiatives aimed at high achievers, it’s also the case that tight budgets have shrunk gifted-and-talented programs in many places. (And Congress has zero-funded the only federal initiative that tries to encourage such activities.) Note, too, that widening access to AP and such isn’t necessarily a good thing for the “talented tenth” who were already taking those courses and passing those exams.

With these eight problems unsolved—and more that could be added to the list—as well as gridlocked policymaking in Washington and open warfare in many state capitals, is there reason to be optimistic about the future of K-12 education?

I say yes, albeit cautiously. What gives me the greatest hope today is the emergence—and steadfastness—of a new cadre of change-minded people in positions of influence (think Jeb Bush, the “Chiefs for Change,” Joel Klein, Wendy Kopp, Kevin Huffman, Michelle Rhee, and yes, Arne Duncan) and the birth of a number of new-and/or-improved advocacy organizations, mostly operating at the state level (think 50CAN, Advance Illinois, PIE-Network, Democrats for Education Reform, Students First, Stand for Children, BAEO, the American Federation for Children, Parent Revolution). They’re still no match for the protectors of the status quo—i.e. bulwarks of the barriers enumerated above—but they’re slowly gaining. Let us wish them much clout in the New Year and beyond.

News Analysis: Specious on special education

One size does not fit all.
Photo by Neeta Lind

Tension has long been visible between charter-school proponents and some within the special-education community. The short version goes like this: Charter schools, which are typically mission-oriented, small, and underfunded, find it hard to service every sort of disability within their classrooms appropriately. So they counsel some youngsters to seek other service providers better attuned to their particular needs. This practice riles many SPED advocates. It angers districts, too, as they are most often obligated to educate these high-need—and often high-cost—students. We understand the complaints, but consider the practicalities: No individual school (regular or charter) can serve every type of disability. Large districts can create specialized programs at particular schools (say, for students with severe autism, or those with Down Syndrome); small districts team up with other LEAs or “Intermediate Units” to do the same. If a school cannot provide the necessary resources to ensure a student’s success, then that school might not be the best place for the child and other options need to be considered. That goes for all public schools—including charters.

News Analysis: Africans vs. African Americans

Look a little bit closer.
Photo by Jen and a camera

Seattle’s recently released student-achievement results were “very, very alarming,” according to Michael Tolley, one of Seattle Public Schools’s leaders. He’s right, of course. For example, the city found that black youngsters who do not speak English in the home (mostly immigrants and refugees) tested higher than those blacks who do speak English at home (and are, presumably, U.S.-born)—by as much as 26 percentage points in math and 18 percentage points in reading. These results invite many questions, but here’s one tangible takeaway: Our data-reporting subgroups may be cut too crudely. Since 1990, blacks have ticked thirty-six points higher on NAEP’s fourth-grade math assessment (compared to whites’ twenty-nine point increase). This slow narrowing of the achievement gap is present across fourth- and eighth-grade math and reading. Yet Seattle’s data call into question how these gains are being made. Are descendants of slaves making the same progress as first-generation African immigrants? Maybe, maybe not. To better target services to our neediest children, we’ll need more of these higher resolution data. Kudos to Seattle for starting the trend. Other districts with large African and Caribbean immigrant populations, like Montgomery County, Maryland, would be wise to do some similar unpacking of their numbers and categories.

Short Reviews

Review: Creating Opportunity Schools: A Bold Plan to Transform Indianapolis Public Schools
By Terry Ryan and Bianca Speranza

Through this report (prepared by Public Impact), The Mind Trust proposes a dramatic transformation of public education in Indianapolis, akin to the structural changes that have taken place in New Orleans and New York City. It observes that great schools across the country share a set of core conditions that enable them to help all students achieve. Among these core conditions are the freedom to build and manage their own teams, refocus resources to meet actual student needs, hold schools accountable for their results(and close those that don’t perform), and create a system of school choice that empowers parents to find schools that they want their children to attend. To create success in the public schools of Indianapolis (IPS), the Mind Trust proposes these bold moves: shift funding from the central office to schools; give high-performing schools autonomy over staffing, budgets, and curriculum; provide parents with more good choices; unite all public schools under a new banner of quality called Opportunity Schools; and allow the mayor and the City-County Council to appoint the IPS school board,. We at Fordham are cheering for the Mind Trust and its reform-minded allies. Not only will their success or failure resonate in Indiana but also across the Midwest and probably beyond.

This piece originally appeared (in a slightly different form) on Fordham’s Flypaper blog. To subscribe to Flypaper, click here.

Review: Does Practice-Based Teacher Preparation Increase Student Achievement? Early Evidence from the Boston Teacher Residency
By Laura Johnson

Teacher-residency programs, which couple graduate-education coursework with K-12 classroom-teaching experience, have a certain cachet these days. But do they work? While such programs have for many years demonstrated higher retention rates among their graduates, this paper digs into the details of the Boston Teacher Residency (BTR) to see whether quality is there, too. The upshot: yes, but it takes a while. Using fourth- and eighth-grade state achievement data, the researchers determined that BTR graduates are significantly less effective in math during their first couple of years than are other new teachers (both alternatively certified and traditionally trained). This pattern held for each of BTR’s seven cohorts. On the ELA front, BTR teachers performed comparably to other new teachers in their first couple years. By the fourth and fifth years, however, BTR teachers surpassed other veteran teachers (of similar or greater experience levels) in both subjects. What’s more, BTR teachers were more likely to stay with the profession: The five-year retention rate for program alumni was 24 percentage points higher than the district average for those hired in 2004-05 and 2006-07. Looking at input measures (increasing the population of minority teachers and filling hard-to-staff positions), the residency program fares well, too. Still, the research came with many caveats, beginning with a very small sample size. As a preliminary investigation, this paper offered many interesting insights and raises even more questions—specifically around residency programs’ individual components, system effects, and costs. So, researchers, have at it!

Review: Striving for Student Success: A Model of Shared Accountability
By Adrienne King

Coordinated social-service programs are gaining steam—after Geoffrey Canada’s Harlem Children’s Zone, think Obama’s new Promise Neighborhoods and the AFT’s proposed initiative in rural West Virginia. These “cradle-to-career” partnerships link myriad groups and programs in order to provide wraparound services (from prenatal care run by a neighborhood clinic to mentoring coordinated through the local United Way chapter). But questions of accountability loom large. (As the saying goes, when everyone is accountable, no one is.) This brief from Ed Sector profiles the Strive Partnership of Cincinnati-Northern Kentucky, a program that does a pretty good job of managing this shared accountability, and distills recommendations for others looking to initiate similar wraparound-service partnerships. To ensure quality, the brief states, programs of this kind must have metrics and performance targets in place (for each program partner as well as the whole) and a system for collecting and reporting data. (Other things, like strong and sustained leadership, are also helpful.) Most importantly, there must be a ringleader—an “intermediary organization” charged with overseeing the whole program, tracking the efficacy of each of the program’s components, and defunding those that don’t work. In the case of the Cincinnati-Northern Kentucky initiative, the Strive Partnership (itself a professionally staffed organization) serves that purpose. As more and more cities implement their own versions of “strive partnerships” and “promise neighborhoods,” these questions of accountability will mushroom. Ed Sector deserves credit for starting the discussion.

From The Web

The Education Gadfly Show Podcast: Santa Claus: The second coming of Christ?

This last 2011 installment of the Gadfly Show won’t disappoint, with Mike joined by Chris Tessone (formerly of Dollars and Sen$e fame). The two reflect on the past year in education reform before getting serious about charters, special education, and the achievement-gap truth. Amber splashes cold water on the teacher-residency model and Chris Irvine sees Santa-red.

Flypaper's Finest: The case for more details in Ohio’s history standards
By Emmy Partin

Hearken back to junior high and high school for a moment. What “historical documents” were you taught in social studies and American history classes? The U.S. Constitution? Your state’s constitution? What about the Declaration of Independence or the Federalist Papers?...I was taught all of these important historical texts, multiple times, from seventh grade through twelfth. So I was surprised to see a bill moving through the Ohio legislature that would require schools to teach what I thought were standard fare for Ohio’s students. In fact, at first blush it seemed implausible to me that many schools weren’t already doing so.

My husband, also an Ohio public school alum (from a quote-unquote better district than I attended), had a different reaction when I told him about the legislation. He guessed at least two-thirds of students learn virtually nothing about the Federalist Papers in high school. And he said he wasn’t taught anything about the Ohio Constitution in K-12. Huh, maybe there ought to be a law…

Flypaper's Finest: Closing the achievement gap, but at gifted students’ expense
By Mike Petrilli and Rick Hess

President Obama’s remarks on inequality, stoking populist anger at “the rich,” suggest that the theme for his reelection bid will be not hope and change but focus on reducing class disparity with government help. But this effort isn’t limited to economics; it is playing out in our nation’s schools as well.

The issue is whether federal education efforts will compromise opportunities for our highest-achieving students. One might assume that a president determined to “win the future” would make a priority of ensuring that our ablest kids have the chance to excel.…

Gadfly Studios: Rethinking Education Governance: Chris Cerf, Keynote Address

If you missed our governance conference at the beginning of December (or if you’re looking for the perfect video to pair with your holiday gift wrapping), check out this keynote-speech video of New Jersey Education Commissioner Chris Cerf. He hits hard against our current governance model and offers some keen insights into what needs changing, and why... Watch the video here.

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Extras

Briefly Noted: There might be method to that madness

• Virginia lawmakers are shaking angry fists at Five Ponds Publishing—a textbook company that refuses to submit its products for state review before marketing to districts. Who is right? We at Fordham have long criticized state textbook adoption practices, yet we also remember, not so long ago, when a slew of Virginia textbooks were found to include completely erroneous passages about black battalions in the Confederate army. Maybe publishers need this kind of scrutiny.
• First came Carnegie Mellon’s open courseware initiative, through which Joe American could access course content online from this elite (and expensive) school. Next we had Stanford’s free online classes. Now MIT is going one step further. The school will begin issuing certificates for subject mastery of the free online courses that it offers. Big changes are afoot in higher education—here’s looking to K-12 to follow suit.
• Speculation can now shift to commentary: Los Angeles teachers have officially approved their new labor contract, with provisions that district schools can exercise charter-like autonomy, effectively working around the contract. Fantastic idea. But it comes with a price tag: a three-year moratorium on LAUSD’s Public School Choice program, which allowed outside charters and nonprofits to take over failing LAUSD schools.
• Since 1992, 15 percent of the nation’s charter schools have closed their doors, according to the latest from the Center for Education Reform. But of those, only 18 percent (or 2 percent of all charters) closed due to academic reasons. Starker results even than our own findings from low-performing charters. Expect a full review of the CER analysis in January.
• Big ups to Florida, which announced this week that it would raise the bar for passing its state assessments. Ohio, will you follow suit?
• Indiana’s far-reaching voucher program is under attack in the courts. The first judicial ruling is expected in about a month.
• Over at The Atlantic, John Bailey asks a telling question: At a time when we just need more and better teachers in the classroom, why spurn any effort to bring them in, including from the for-profit sector?
• Connecticut is on an education-reform role. The latest? Its largest city, Bridgeport, snagged former NOLA supe Paul Vallas as its interim leader.
• Enrolling your child in a quality pre-K program (whether public or private) in New York City is a cutthroat endeavor—and there’s no guarantee that the hard work will land a decent placement. What’s a middle-class Manhattanite to do? If they’ve got the will, banding with other parents to create a pre-K co-op program seems to be the next best option.

Announcement: Searching for a researcher

You: A dedicated, smart, and friendly person with stellar writing and editing skills; keen research skills of both the qualitative and quantitative sort; and a gift for management. Us: A national leader on all things education reform, seeking a new research manager. Could be a heavenly match. Learn more, including how to apply, here.

Announcement: Does accountability work forever?

Love it or hate it, the No Child Left Behind era can boast some substantial bumps in student achievement in math—much like those seen in Texas after its own accountability push in the 1990s. But is this well drying up? Come to Fordham Live on January 5, 2012 from 8:30 to 10:00AM to find out. We’ll hear from an impressive set of panelists: Charles Barone, Eric Hanushek, Sandy Kress, and Marc Schneider, author of our recent paper, The Accountability Plateau, which dives into this topic. Click here to learn more about the event.

Featured Fordham Publication: Do High Flyers Maintain Their Altitude? Performance Trends of Top Students

This groundbreaking study from Fordham is the first to examine the performance of America’s highest-achieving children over time at the individual-student level. Produced in partnership with the Northwest Evaluation Association, it finds that many high-achieving students struggle to maintain their elite performance over the years and often fail to improve their reading ability at the same rate as their average and below-average classmates. The study raises troubling questions: Is our obsession with closing achievement gaps and “leaving no child behind” coming at the expense of our “talented tenth”—and America’s future international competitiveness? Read on to learn more.