The Education Gadfly Weekly

Many proponents of private school choice take for granted that schools won’t participate if government asks too much of them, especially if it demands that they be publicly accountable for student achievement. Were such school refusals to be widespread, the programs themselves could not serve many kids. But is this assumption justified?

A new Fordham Institute study provides empirical answers. Do regulations and accountability requirements deter private schools from participating in choice programs? How important are such requirements compared to other factors, such as voucher amounts? Are certain types of regulations stronger deterrents than others? Do certain types schools shy away from regulation more than others?

Among the study’s major findings:

• Regulations that restrict student admissions and schools’ religious practices are more likely to deter school participation than are requirements pertaining to academic standards, testing, and public disclosure of achievement results;
• Curriculum and testing requirements ranked among the least important considerations for school leaders, with just 25 percent citing state assessment rules as very important in their decision to participate or not;
• Only 3 percent of non-participating schools cited governmental regulations as the most important reason to opt out;
• The reasons most cited by school principals for participating in voucher programs were expanding their mission in the community (87 percent), helping voucher-eligible families already enrolled in their schools (75 percent), and aiding needy children in the community (72 percent);
• About one-third of non-participating private schools cited a lack of eligible families in their vicinity as key to their decision to shun the program; and
• Catholic schools are most likely to participate in choice programs, regardless of the regulatory environment.

Watch the replay of the event based on the report:

Here follows a statement of principles on the three-sector approach to education reform, which urges charter school supporters to promote vouchers, too—and vice versa. Mike Petrilli and Checker Finn are among its original signers. Add your name today if you agree.

For 50 years, America has struggled to provide low-income students, especially those in inner cities, with high-quality schools. The consequence has been devastating: generational poverty, disenfranchised neighborhoods, and millions of boys and girls robbed of the American Dream.

But we have not been asleep at the switch. Over this half-century, some of our sharpest minds, strongest backs, and deepest pockets have attempted to solve the problem. Decades of effort have been poured into improving district-run schools. Two decades ago, work on a parallel track was launched through the passage of a tax-supported voucher program in Wisconsin and the option to create charter schools in Minnesota. The voucher program provided limited access for low-income parents to send their children to private schools, and the charter school legislation provided for the possibility of the development of new public schools with increased autonomy and accountability.

In spite of all of our best efforts, gains in district schools have been modest. Although chartering has produced many outstanding schools, numerous barriers have impeded the creation of a sufficient number of high-quality charter seats. Even with the expanded choice to the private sector, they also have produced modest results. So despite the expenditure of enormous personal and financial resources, it is still sadly true today that far too few needy boys and girls have access to great schools.

Those interested in improving the fortunes of these students should share a mindset: we must double down on our efforts to grow the number of high-quality schools available to low-income children. When so many obstacles stand between our young people and a lifetime of success, we simply cannot and must not support only one of the approaches that are available to us.

We strongly support a “three-sector” approach to reform and improvement.

We must push for transformational changes within traditional districts while working to strengthen the other two options.

There is controversy and opposition to each of the strategies, but those involving the private sector create the most angst, particularly those that involved publicly supported programs like vouchers and tax credits. Unfortunately, some of this resistance has come from within our own ranks—those supporting other efforts to improve the educational opportunities available to disadvantaged students.

We believe it is time for members of the reform community to reconsider their opposition to these programs and fully embrace the three-sector approach. Many things have changed since Milwaukee’s voucher program initiated this movement twenty years ago—when many people took hardened positions on this issue.

We know that the Supreme Court of the United States has declared these programs constitutional.

We know from numerous gold-standard studies that these programs help underserved students succeed, especially students of color.

We know that district reform has not led to the improvements needed.

We know that chartering has not created enough high-quality seats.

We know that smart accountability measures can ensure that public money and young lives are not invested in low-performing private schools.

We know that private schools have hundreds of thousands of empty seats available for low-income children today.

We know that these schools can use their additional freedom to engage a wider array of high-quality educators, offer distinctive programs, and make use of emerging technology.

We know that many families want and benefit from the cultural and faith-based elements of some of these schools.

Accordingly, we encourage the education-reform community to embrace the following principles of a three-sector approach.

1. Our shared goal is to continuously increase the number of students in high-quality schools. We will attempt to achieve this aim through a sector-agnostic approach. High-performing schools of all types should be replicated and expanded. New schools with the promise of outstanding results should be created. Students should have access to high-performing private schools.
2. Policies should reflect this new vision, including equitable funding formulas that allow education dollars to be easily portable; facility rules enabling new and successful schools to access the space they need; application, enrollment, and assignment systems that facilitate true family choice; and the closure of persistently failing schools.
3. We should help develop robust support “ecosystems” that bring these new policies to life and help achieve our overarching goal. Nonprofit intermediary organizations can coordinate human-capital strategies, lead advocacy efforts, and fund new-school and school-growth strategies. Other organizations should provide meaningful assistance in a number of areas, including developing teachers and leaders, creating instructional supports, helping with facilities acquisition, providing back-office services, and more.
4. Only high-quality private schools should be allowed to participate in public programs. This means both “front-end” accountability (making decisions about which schools should be allowed to enter the programs) and “back-end” accountability (assessing a participating school’s performance and making decisions about its continuance in the program).
5. Private-school accountability systems should balance three sets of considerations. First, because it serves neither the public’s nor students’ interest if a child transfers from a failing, unsafe public school to a similarly struggling private school, low-performing private schools and those with unacceptable financial or operational practices should be excluded from participation. Second, because families prioritize school characteristics differently—and therefore come to different conclusions about what constitutes “high quality”—public determinations of exclusion should be reserved for only the most deficient schools. But to assist families in making the best decisions for their children, the academic, financial, and operational performance of participating schools should be highly transparent. Third, because the independence of private schools should be preserved so they can continue to make use of their autonomy and provide a variety of options, there should be clear limits on government rules influencing their programming. This should include protecting schools’ religious missions, enrollment practices, and staffing policies.

We think these principles will expand the options available to children, ensure these new options are deserving of public dollars and students, and preserve the unique character of the private-school sector. And at a higher level, we believe this approach will enable the reform community to take a sector-agnostic view of schools, focusing on performance rather than operators. This will greatly advance our efforts to continuously grow the number of disadvantaged children in high-performing schools—our shared and ultimate goal.

My Brother’s Keeper, a new Obama-administration initiative focused on boys and young men of color, appears to be off to a strong start. The ninety-day report features six “universal milestones” that are the heart of the task force’s work and recommendations:

1. Entering school ready to learn
2. Reading at grade level by third grade
3. Graduating from high school ready for college and career
4. Completing postsecondary education or training
5. Successfully entering the workforce
6. Reducing violence and providing a second chance

I have one more to place on that list: learn from ACT and the Common Core standards. Specifically, recognize that meeting the six milestones will require a much greater emphasis on building knowledge and vocabulary in early childhood and the early grades.
Let’s start with ACT, which offers both grim data and doable recommendations, and then move to the Common Core standards, which—if properly understood—offer sound guidance.

Many of us think of ACT as just a testing company, but it has a research arm that mines ACT test-score data and the broader literature to figure out how to improve educational outcomes. Chrys Dougherty, ACT senior research scientist, has produced three must-read briefs showing just how difficult it is for youth who are behind academically to catch up—and therefore how crucial it is to intervene early.

In his most recent brief, Dougherty shows that at least half of fourth- and eighth-grade Hispanic and African American students in the states whose data he analyzed are not doing well in reading—and almost none who are doing poorly catch up by the end of high school. Using longitudinal student-outcome data, ACT has established benchmark scores that indicate college readiness (or, for younger students, being on a trajectory to complete high school ready for college). Students who score at or above those benchmarks are “on track,” while students who score more than one standard deviation below them are “far off track.”

Drawing data from Dougherty’s new brief, let’s look at fourth- to eighth-grade results in reading on ACT Explore.
 

Note: These data are from Arkansas and Kentucky; see the brief for details. 

As Dougherty shows, the story is just as depressing as students move from eighth grade to the end of high school. Worse, keep in mind that these results are for both boys and girls, though it’s no secret that girls tend to do better in reading. In draft working papers, Dougherty and his colleagues have broken out results by gender, finding an even greater challenge for the boys and young men of color who are the focus of My Brother’s Keeper.

Knowing that being ready for college means having acquired an enormous store of academic knowledge, vocabulary, and skills, Dougherty’s first recommendation for school and district leaders is to

Teach a content-rich curriculum in the early grades. Ensure that all students receive a content- and vocabulary-rich curriculum beginning in the early years, spanning a range of subject areas including not only English language arts and mathematics, but also science, history, geography, civics, foreign language, and the arts.... Such a curriculum—the basis for preparing students long term for college, careers, and informed citizenship—is valuable for all students but is likely to be especially beneficial for students from at-risk demographic groups, who are more likely to arrive from home with limited knowledge and vocabulary.

Let’s assume the task force heeds Dougherty’s advice and adds “teach a content-rich curriculum in the early grades” to its list of recommendations. Where could it find out what that looks like? Answer: the Common Core State Standards for English language arts and literacy. Not in the individual standards but in the narrative that accompanies them. There, the task force will find something absolutely essential but so far AWOL from its report: an understanding that reading comprehension comes not just from mastering reading skills but also from learning a great deal of academic subject matter and vocabulary.

The task force emphasizes having parents talk to their children more (and in more encouraging ways), improving reading skills instruction, and having children read more. These are necessary but insufficient recommendations. To accelerate knowledge and vocabulary acquisition, which will greatly boost the odds of meeting the task force’s milestones, parents and educators need to be as efficient as possible and start as early as possible.

The Common Core explains how. Start with the standards’ research appendix:

Word acquisition occurs up to four times faster…when students have become familiar with the domain of the discourse and encounter the word in different contexts….Hence, vocabulary development for these words occurs most effectively through a coherent course of study in which subject matters are integrated and coordinated across the curriculum and domains become familiar to the student over several days or weeks.

Then, take a look at Common Core’s blueprint for a coherent course of study in K–5, where we learn that “texts—within and across grade levels—need to be selected around topics or themes that systematically develop the knowledge base of students. Within a grade level, there should be an adequate number of titles on a single topic that would allow children to study that topic for a sustained period.” Even better, we learn how to build knowledge before children can read: “Children in the early grades (particularly K–2) should participate in rich, structured conversations with an adult in response to the written texts that are read aloud, orally comparing and contrasting as well as analyzing and synthesizing.”

Everyone on the task force is busy, so I’ll boil it down. Parents shouldn’t just talk more; they should also read aloud more. And parents and teachers shouldn’t read aloud just one book on a topic; they should pick a topic and spend a couple of weeks reading aloud and discussing several books on that topic. If they do, many more boys of color will enter school ready to learn and will then come to read at grade level.

Lisa Hansel is the communications director for the Core Knowledge Foundation. A version of this article originally appeared on the Core Knowledge Blog.

The other week, School Choice Ohio sued the Cincinnati and Springfield school districts for their failure to comply with a public-records request. School Choice Ohio works to inform eligible families about the state’s EdChoice (voucher) program—that is, it seeks to tell students who attend Ohio’s worst schools that they have the opportunity to escape. To do this, the organization asks for student directory information from the districts, who are required by law to comply. Cincinnati and Springfield have refused, perhaps because they don’t want families to know that they have other options. Imagine the ruckus that liberals would make if public agencies opted to not inform folks who are eligible for food stamps, subsidized housing, or ObamaCare. This is no different.

On May 22, the school board for the Dallas Independent School District endorsed Superintendent Mike Miles’s Teacher Excellence Initiative (TEI), which will revamp the district’s teacher evaluations and implement performance pay, effective in 2014–15. Under the new plan, 50 percent of a teacher’s evaluation will be based on performance, as gauged by observations; 35 percent will come from student data; and 15 percent will be drawn from student surveys. The plan mimics the one Miles put in place in Colorado Springs, with the support and enthusiasm of his teachers. While it’s true that Dallas has miles to go before it can sleep (sorry!), kudos to Miles and his school board for their bold leadership.

This week, NPR’s Morning Edition featured a two-part dive into the challenges surrounding Common Core implementation. In the first segment, reporter Cory Turner describes how tough it is to find high-quality curriculum that’s actually aligned to the new standards, a challenge made even more arduous by the “snake-oil-salesman” tactics employed by textbook publishers. The second segment turns to the strategies that schools and districts are using to find usable curriculum or build it from the ground up—and the misguided pull to just blame the standards for this problem (and many others).

Today’s “Room for Debate” feature in the Times addresses the questions of tracking and ability grouping. Fordham buddy Rick Hess makes a compelling argument that we should stop ignoring the needs of our best and brightest; economist Bruce Sacerdote offers empirical evidence that ability grouping is good for everyone. (Two other contributors disagree.) Gifted-education advocates: check it out!

On this week's podcast: A lunch fight, a School Choice Ohio lawsuit, the DOE's My Brother's Keeper initiative, and Amber reviews NCTQ's Roll Call report.

Amber's Research Minute

Many proponents of private school choice take for granted that schools won't participate if government asks too much of them, especially if it demands that they be publicly accountable for student achievement. Were such school refusals to be widespread, the programs themselves could not serve many kids. But is this assumption justified?

A new Fordham Institute study provides empirical answers. Do regulations and accountability requirements deter private schools from participating in choice programs? How important are such requirements compared to other factors, such as voucher amounts? Are certain types of regulations stronger deterrents than others? Do certain types schools shy away from regulation more than others?

These are just some of the questions that David Stuit, author of the Fordham study, will discuss with a panel featuring John Kirtley of Step Up for Students (Florida), Larry Keough of the Catholic Conference of Ohio, and Paul Miller of the National Association of Independent Schools.

Private-school choice programs are one valuable way of delivering high-quality education to low-income kids. Some choice proponents, however, fear that government will saddle participating schools with stifling regulations, making them leery of accepting voucher students at all. So how burdensome are the regulations in place today? The Friedman Foundation dives into the issue in a new report, which measures the regulatory impact of state statutes on twenty-three choice programs across twelve states. Aside from a few outliers, researcher Andrew Catt finds that strong government regulations on private schools were already in place prior to the introduction of these choice programs—and that adopting choice programs did not add much to the regulatory burden. Regulations that were implemented after choice programs were enacted dealt mostly with paperwork or reporting. (Regulations on bigger issues, such as testing and curriculum, were generally already in place.) In other words, in most states at least, school-choice programs haven’t led to a crushing regulatory burden on private schools. And thanks to the innovative methodology developed by Catt for this paper, we have a sophisticated way to track whether that remains the case over time.

Andrew D. Catt, Public Rules on Private Schools: Measuring the Regulatory Impact of State Statutes and School Choice Programs (Washington, D.C.: Friedman Foundation, May 2014).

Are America’s urban schoolteachers working hard or hardly working? This new report from the National Council on Teacher Quality (NCTQ) uncovers some troubling evidence that points toward the latter, at least for a non-trivial subset of teachers. The analysts examined teacher-attendance data from forty large districts in 2012–13, finding that teachers in these districts were absent, on average, eleven days out of the school year. (The analysis excluded long-term absences, such as those accrued due to maternity leave or serious illness.) In fairness, eleven days is slightly less than the average number of absences allowed under these districts’ personnel policies. The averages, however, mask considerable variation across and within school districts. Across this group of districts, two Ohio cities—Cleveland and Columbus—suffered the most severe teacher-absentee problems. Cleveland’s teachers were absent an average of sixteen days, while in Columbus, they averaged fifteen. Indianapolis (six days) and the District of Columbia (seven) had the lowest average number of days absent. Within districts, too, the analysts discovered both “chronically absent” teachers (eighteen or more days absent) and those with near-perfect attendance. In Cleveland, for example, 6 percent of the teachers had “excellent” attendance—bless their hearts—while a staggering 34 percent were “chronically” absent. We can’t be sure why some districts have more acute problems with teacher absenteeism than others. But it is evident that urban districts need to do a better job of ensuring their teachers come to work. The academic stakes are high: those kids need all hands on deck.

Nithya Joseph, Nancy Waymack, and Daniel Zielaski, Roll Call: The Importance of Teacher Attendance (Washington, D.C.: National Council on Teacher Quality, June 2014).