The Education Gadfly Weekly

Chris Lubienski and Sarah Theule Lubienski
National Center for the Study of Privatization in Education
Teachers College, Columbia University
January 2006

You may be asking yourself: Isn't this the 147^th study to examine the performance of public, private, and charter school students on the 2003 National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP)? Yup. (To catch up on previous episodes of "Charter School Research Death Match," click here, here, and here.) And didn't new test results that showed gains for charter schools come out just a few months ago? Yup. And didn't this Lubienski duo come out with a virtually identical study last year? Well, yes, but the New York Times inexplicably found their most recent paper newsworthy nonetheless. Here's what the study claims: "This analysis of US mathematics achievement finds that, after accounting for the fact that private schools serve more advantaged populations, public [district] schools perform remarkably well, often outscoring private and charter schools." After controlling for student and school-level variables, public schools "significantly outperform" Catholic schools, and trounce conservative Christian schools. Charter schools trail public schools in the fourth grade but outperform them by eighth grade. So is this study the death knell for the school choice movement? Hardly. As the Friedman Foundation's Greg Forster explained last year in a National Review Online critique of the original Lubienski & Lubienski study, because the NAEP data do not track individual students over time, it is impossible to establish a causal link between what's going on in the schools and the students' achievement results. As Forster points out, the authors admit as much in the study itself (check out page 37). Alas, the death match goes on - don't bet on the Big Lubienski. You can find the study here.
 

Jay P. Greene and Marcus A. Winters
Education Next
Spring 2006

Education dogma, and innumerable studies published in education journals, has long pegged school retention (holding back students who have not demonstrated understanding of grade-level academic material) as bad policy. This report posits that the dogma may be wrong. In 2002, Florida began requiring third graders to score at the Level-2 Benchmark (the equivalent of NCLB "Basic") on its state assessment test in order to be promoted to fourth grade. Thus, the report's authors were able to compare low-scoring third graders in 2002, who were subject to the new retention law, with low-scoring third graders the year before the law was enacted. They found that on subsequent tests, students identified for retention (whether or not they were actually retained or qualified for an exemption) fared better than youngsters for whom retention was neither a legal requirement nor a visceral threat. Students who were held back experienced the largest relative improvements. So, why have past studies linked student retention with negative consequences? Perhaps because those analyses typically evaluated subjective retention - wherein individual teachers decide about a particular student's readiness to advance - instead of objective policies, such as Florida's, which rely on test scores. Subjective policies consider intangible factors and give "no way to isolate the effect of being held back, much less to make reasonable conclusions about the effects of retention on a student's academic achievement or the probability of his dropping out." This Florida study provides useful information, but it certainly is not an exhaustive evaluation of the Sunshine State's program. The authors write: "The policy's greatest benefits could result not from retention itself, but rather from increased efforts on the part of teachers and even students to avoid being retained in the first place." You can find the report, here.

Has the trust - busting Joel Klein re-emerged to supplant the top-down know-it-all reformer? One can hope. Last month he announced that an additional 150 schools would be placed in his "autonomy zone" (besides the 58 schools there already), making them eligible for greater freedom from oversight. His aides promise to cut layers of bureaucracy and create a system "with schools at the top." And "The Chalkboard" reports that former Edison Schools executive Chris Cerf will help lead the reorganization effort. This all sounds promising. But as weary, veteran New York reformer Sol Stern told Gadfly, it won't matter unless principals are allowed to ditch the "workshop model" and whole language reading approaches - pushed by Klein thus far - in favor of something that actually works in the city's zillion classrooms.

"Schools Chancellor to Give Principals More Autonomy," by David M. Herszenhorn, New York Times, January 20, 2006

Washington state is again enmeshed in a testing imbroglio. Should high school seniors have to pass the Washington Assessment of Student Learning (WASL) to graduate? Neal Starkman, a Seattle Post-Intelligencer guest columnist, has a solution to appease all sides of the debate. "It's a degree for students who fail the WASL. It's the A.G. degree - Almost Graduated." Starkman's plan is simple. "Here's how it works: I'm a student who doesn't take tests well, principally because I can't read or write.... I take the WASL and I flunk it. Then I take it again and I flunk it. Then someone reads it to me and mouths the answers, and I flunk it. So what happens to me?" Well, you receive your Almost Graduated degree, and you feel just fine. In seriousness, legislatures across the nation face pressure to back down from graduation exam requirements and allow multiple re-takes, alternative exams, and exemptions. Recall, please, that standards can't effect positive change if they collapse at the first signs of pushback, and weak-tea tests that waste everyone's time are worse than no tests at all. Note to lawmakers: Be firm about your accountability demands, and you'll see results. Or you might as well offer an A.G. degree.

Floridians are keeping a watchful eye on South Carolina these days, for two reasons. First, former University of Florida coach Steve Spurrier jumped to the University of South Carolina last year and has the Gamecocks bearing down on the overrated Gators. And now, just when the Florida Supreme Court is tackling the state's successful education reform programs, the South Carolina legislature is close to passing the nation's most significant expansion of school choice in some years, including a much-improved charter school program. A year-long struggle to establish a statewide charter school district has finally cleared the senate. Barring complications in the house, where the bill was introduced, Governor Mark Sanford should have it on his desk for signing tomorrow.

South Carolina's original charter law, passed in 1996, put authorizing authority in the hands of local districts, period. Not surprisingly, it has failed to create many new schools, since most districts hate charters. In rural Lee County, for example (where adult illiteracy exceeds 40 percent), the district for two years has refused to grant a charter to MLD Academy, a values-based school with a back-to-basics approach, despite an order by the circuit court to do so.

If the bill passes, the new statewide charter authorizer - the South Carolina Public Charter School District - would be housed in the state education agency, but overseen by an independent 11-member board.

"The appointed board will be pro-charter," David Church, executive director of the South Carolina Association of Public Charter Schools, tells Gadfly. The house and senate are still working out who will appoint the members, but Tom Davis, the governor's deputy chief of staff, shares Church's confidence.

The Center for Education Reform disagrees. It frets that the new authorizer is too close to the state education agency. Moreover, CER claims that new schools will be grossly underfunded. "The new school district... limits funding for charter schools to approximately 60 percent of monies currently allotted to other public charter schools," according to its press release.

Not so, says the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools." State chartered schools, explains its release, "will receive a package of state funding providing resources comparable to what current charters get."

Davis goes a step further. He points out that there are more than 100 different funding sources that charters in the Palmetto State ought to have access to now, but don't. Under existing law, that money flows to local districts, but sizable portions never wind up in charter bank accounts; instead, they are retained by and diverted to traditional public schools. Under the new law, those funds will flow directly to the South Carolina Public School Charter District and then directly to the district's charter schools. (No more than 2 percent of those funds will be retained by the district for expenses.)

"The governor will watch those dollars very carefully," Davis tells Gadfly. "He will make certain that all of the money intended for the charter schools ends up in the charter schools." 

Even if charters are funded at their current levels, however, there are still funding concerns. (See Charter School Funding: Inequity's Next Frontier.) "The next order of business," says President Nelson Smith of the National Alliance for Public Charter School in his press release, will be to "push state leaders to address the unconscionable gap in funding between charters and other public schools."

This may only be the beginning. Another bill pending before the house has reform advocates equally excited. House Bill 4489 would give students the opportunity to attend any public school in South Carolina, even those outside the district.

Says Church, "We've broken the dam on school choice" in our state.

State house watcher John Frank, a reporter for the Charleston Post and Courier, gives HB4489 a fighting chance. So, too, education editor Leroy Chapman of The State, South Carolina's largest paper. The bill would cap the number of students who could take advantage, so Davis isn't thrilled with it. But, he notes, it's a positive step.

Has South Carolina taken its playbook from Governor Jeb Bush of Florida, who recently penned a Wall Street Journal article (subscription required) giving his five rules of school reform? Possibly. Governor Sanford is certainly following Bush's first rule. "Say what you're going to do and then do what you said you would."

President Bush's revamped second-term education agenda came into sharper focus on Tuesday night: improve math and science achievement, quoth he. This quest, however, while well intended and much needed, is likely to be impeded by the chief legacy of the President's own first-term education agenda: the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB).

The U.S. math/science crisis is the source of well-warranted anxiety about our economic competitiveness in a "flattening" and globalized world, and stems from two related problems. Too few young Americans are prepared for - and actually take - advanced courses in high school and college; and too few of their teachers have mastered these subjects themselves.

No Child Left Behind made some headway on these fronts, first by demanding explicit academic standards and an end to the "soft bigotry of low expectations," and second, by insisting upon a "highly qualified teacher" in every classroom. It has yielded some important successes. Our public schools and those who run them are focused as never before on narrowing the stubborn achievement gaps between black and white, and rich and poor. States have also tightened their requirements for teachers, requiring them to demonstrate subject-matter knowledge before entering the classroom. These reforms are starting to pay off; the latest National Assessment results show reading and math scores edging up for low-income, African-American, and Hispanic fourth graders.

But NCLB has also yielded some troublesome results. Because it judges schools solely by students' prowess in reading and math, other subjects - including science - are being ignored. And because it focuses laser-like on children scoring below the "proficient" level, it tempts schools to ignore higher-achieving students - abetting an inexcusable waste of human potential.

NCLB also creates perverse incentives for states to set low standards and dumbed-down tests, which is happening. In a review of state math standards that the Fordham Foundation published last year, for example, a panel of mathematicians found that only six states had standards that were clear, coherent, and relatively rigorous. Of these, just three - California, Massachusetts, and New Mexico - set passing scores on their eighth grade math tests anywhere near the "gold standard" of proficiency as determined by the National Assessment of Educational Progress. That leaves 47 states with weak math standards, low passing scores, or both.

These flaws in NCLB undermine the President's big new idea, training an additional 70,000 teachers to lead Advanced Placement courses in high-poverty high schools. It's a swell objective. But if low-income students never learn basic science in elementary or middle school, and if nobody gets challenged in math beyond a middling notion of "proficiency," how can they succeed in rigorous A.P. classes in high school?

The President's answer is another federal program, a small one, called "Math Now," designed to boost the rigor of math courses in grades K-8. But so long as schools' accountability is pegged to low levels of achievement, these other efforts will be mainly symbolic. Incentives work - and the vast majority of schools will continue to teach precisely what is needed to pass the tests that actually count.

What about the critical shortage of qualified math and science teachers? (A shortage created largely by the unions' ignoring the law of supply and demand and insisting that physics teachers be paid the same as phys ed teachers and math instructors the same as music teachers.) Here, the White House offers a constructive proposal that explicitly maneuvers around an NCLB-created obstacle. Bush's "adjunct teacher corps" would encourage 30,000 math and science professionals to become high school teachers, at least part time, at least for a while. Importantly, these individuals would not be subject to NCLB's own "highly qualified teachers" requirements, including the mandate that such instructors be "fully certified." This exemption will keep math/science experts from having to return for meaningless ed-school degrees (or slog through those same courses at night in the name of some "alternative certification" program). But why not just fix the NCLB law itself?

None of these challenges is insurmountable. NCLB is up for renewal next year; with active leadership from the White House, its essential elements could be preserved while its glitches get fixed. Congress could add science to the accountability equation; judge schools by the learning gains of all their students, not just those at the bottom; and open the door to "highly qualified teachers" who never set foot in a school of education. It could even create national standards and tests in math and science, rather than leaving these essential pieces to the whims of fifty states.

Add those reforms to the president's new proposals - which dovetail with a bipartisan reform agenda already spearheaded by senators Lamar Alexander and Jeff Bingaman - and we'd have a powerful formula for math and science success in the 21^st century. Alternatively, we can keep tinkering and grumping and hoping that the education systems of our economic competitors remain similarly stagnant. (Don't bet on it.) The choice is ours.

The Boston Teachers Union is out to quash chah-dah schools using its big gun - the union contract. Its recently released 32-page contract proposal now being negotiated includes a request that the school system spend $100,000 a year to recruit charter families back to district schools. That money would pay for two letters, mailed to charter parents twice a year, which tout the virtues of traditional public schools. It would also cover transportation costs to bring charter parents to a week of district school open houses. "The school department has not done enough to retain kids and recruit kids," says union boss Richard Stutman. "We're trying to light a fire under them." Here's a radical thought: try giving parents a real reason to come back to your schools. Bells and whistles are nice, but quality education is a better bet. You might start by scrapping the other 31 pages of your contract proposal.

"Teachers' union eyes charter school students," by Tracy Jan, Boston Globe, January 27, 2006

Chris Lubienski and Sarah Theule Lubienski
National Center for the Study of Privatization in Education
Teachers College, Columbia University
January 2006

You may be asking yourself: Isn't this the 147^th study to examine the performance of public, private, and charter school students on the 2003 National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP)? Yup. (To catch up on previous episodes of "Charter School Research Death Match," click here, here, and here.) And didn't new test results that showed gains for charter schools come out just a few months ago? Yup. And didn't this Lubienski duo come out with a virtually identical study last year? Well, yes, but the New York Times inexplicably found their most recent paper newsworthy nonetheless. Here's what the study claims: "This analysis of US mathematics achievement finds that, after accounting for the fact that private schools serve more advantaged populations, public [district] schools perform remarkably well, often outscoring private and charter schools." After controlling for student and school-level variables, public schools "significantly outperform" Catholic schools, and trounce conservative Christian schools. Charter schools trail public schools in the fourth grade but outperform them by eighth grade. So is this study the death knell for the school choice movement? Hardly. As the Friedman Foundation's Greg Forster explained last year in a National Review Online critique of the original Lubienski & Lubienski study, because the NAEP data do not track individual students over time, it is impossible to establish a causal link between what's going on in the schools and the students' achievement results. As Forster points out, the authors admit as much in the study itself (check out page 37). Alas, the death match goes on - don't bet on the Big Lubienski. You can find the study here.
 

Jay P. Greene and Marcus A. Winters
Education Next
Spring 2006

Education dogma, and innumerable studies published in education journals, has long pegged school retention (holding back students who have not demonstrated understanding of grade-level academic material) as bad policy. This report posits that the dogma may be wrong. In 2002, Florida began requiring third graders to score at the Level-2 Benchmark (the equivalent of NCLB "Basic") on its state assessment test in order to be promoted to fourth grade. Thus, the report's authors were able to compare low-scoring third graders in 2002, who were subject to the new retention law, with low-scoring third graders the year before the law was enacted. They found that on subsequent tests, students identified for retention (whether or not they were actually retained or qualified for an exemption) fared better than youngsters for whom retention was neither a legal requirement nor a visceral threat. Students who were held back experienced the largest relative improvements. So, why have past studies linked student retention with negative consequences? Perhaps because those analyses typically evaluated subjective retention - wherein individual teachers decide about a particular student's readiness to advance - instead of objective policies, such as Florida's, which rely on test scores. Subjective policies consider intangible factors and give "no way to isolate the effect of being held back, much less to make reasonable conclusions about the effects of retention on a student's academic achievement or the probability of his dropping out." This Florida study provides useful information, but it certainly is not an exhaustive evaluation of the Sunshine State's program. The authors write: "The policy's greatest benefits could result not from retention itself, but rather from increased efforts on the part of teachers and even students to avoid being retained in the first place." You can find the report, here.