Can we be smarter about taking high-quality online and blended schools to scale—and to educational success? Yes, says this volume, as it addresses such thorny policy issues as quality control, staffing, funding, and governance for the digital sector. Read on to learn more.
Will the digital-learning movement repeat the mistakes of the charter-school movement? How much more successful might today's charter universe look if yesterday's proponents had focused on the policies and practices needed to ensure its quality, freedom, and resources over the long term? What mistakes might have been avoided? Damaging scandals forestalled? Missed opportunities seized?
Can we be smarter about taking high-quality online and blended schools to scale—and to educational success? Yes, says this volume, as it addresses such thorny policy issues as quality control, staffing, funding, and governance for the digital sector. In these pages, the authors show how current arrangements need to change—often radically—if instructional technology is to realize its potential.
Introduction, by Chester E. Finn, Jr. and Daniela Fairchild
Chapter One: "Teachers in the Age of Digital Instruction," by Bryan C. Hassel and Emily Ayscue Hassel
Chapter Two: "Quality Control in K-12 Digital Learning: Three (Imperfect) Solutions," by Frederick M. Hess
Chapter Three: "The Costs of Online Learning," Tamara Butler Battaglino, Matt Haldeman, and Eleanor Laurans
Chapter Four: "School Finance in the Digital-Learning Era," by Paul T. Hill
Chapter Five: "Overcoming the Governance Challenge in K-12 Online Learning," by John E. Chubb
As followers of the Common Core debate know all too well, when it comes to the veracity of publishers’ claims of “Common Core alignment,” the most we supporters have been able to offer in the way of advice is: “buyer beware.” You need only know that publishers slapped “Common Core Aligned!” stickers on previously published materials—almost before the standards themselves were finalized and definitely before any serious curriculum reviewing and rewriting could have been done—to realize that teachers were going to be faced with the unenviable task of wading through a morass of materials of varying degrees of quality and alignment in their attempt to find quality, well-aligned materials for their classrooms.
Because there is no agency tasked with trademark enforcement, any company can say its books and resources are Common Core aligned. And publishers seem determined to take advantage of this Wild West environment. Against this backdrop, someone needs to step in as sheriff—a role state departments of education are well suited to fill.
On March 5, the Louisiana Department of Education did just that with their release of a suite of tools aimed at supporting teachers as they align curriculum and instruction to the Common Core. Among those tools is a series of rubrics that leaders and teachers can use to evaluate ELA and math curricula, and tiered ratings of a number of the most popular and widely used CCSS-aligned English and math curricula.
While there are a number of other “alignment” tools teachers can use—including Achieve’s EQuIP rubric and the Tennessee state alignment tool—Louisiana is, I believe, the first state to review and provide summary judgments on the quality and alignment of curricula. State officials reviewed materials according to the appropriate rubric, provided detailed, annotated analyses of the resources, and rated each resource as Tier 1 (exemplifies quality), Tier 2 (approaching quality), or Tier 3 (not representing quality).
What’s perhaps most impressive is that state officials didn’t pull any punches. Some of the biggest names publishers—including McGraw Hill, Glencoe, and Pearson—were listed as Tier 3 resources.
This is a bold and important step forward and shows how state leaders can send powerful signals to the marketplace about what teachers and students in their states need to meet the demands of state standards.
That said, this work should be seen not as an end product but as an important first step. The rubrics and ratings, for instance, focus on curricular alignment rather than effectiveness. That is an appropriate starting point, but eventually teachers will need states to provide good information about curricular effectiveness in addition to standards alignment.
And in grades 3–12 ELA, the Louisiana rubric minimizes one of the most important shifts embedded in the CCSS ELA standards—an oversight that should be corrected if and when these resources are updated.
Despite a few shortcomings, discussed in greater detail below, the Louisiana Department of Education deserves praise for their efforts. Their curricular and CCSS-implementation guidance is emerging as a model that other states would be wise to follow. By both developing curricula and reviewing and rating externally created resources, Louisiana is providing educators with a range of options while leaving decisions over curriculum and instruction to local leaders and teachers. This is as it should be.
Most critically, the ELA rubrics clearly show that state officials understood critical ELA shifts and that publishers needed to demonstrate alignment to those shifts to earn top marks.
The rubric for grades 3–12 includes four “non-negotiable” criteria—all of which had to be met to earn a Tier 1 or Tier 2 rating:
These are important indicators of alignment and do clearly reflect the requirements of the Common Core literacy standards.
That said, there are at least two drawbacks to the Louisiana classroom support toolkit for ELA.
First, the Louisiana rubric judges the alignment of reviewed material to the Common Core but claims to provide information on the quality of the programs themselves. There is a critical difference, and judging the quality or effectiveness of a curriculum requires more than a subjective rubric—even a good one.
Second, the rubric gives only a brief head nod to the importance of building content and vocabulary to improving reading comprehension. Robert Pondiscio has argued that the Common Core literacy standards include the “57 most important words written in education reform. Ever.” Those are as follows:
By reading texts in history/social studies, science, and other disciplines, students build a foundation of knowledge in these fields that will also give them the background to be better readers in all content areas. Students can only gain this foundation when the curriculum is intentionally and coherently structured to develop rich content knowledge within and across grades.
This issue is important for a number of reasons, chiefly that one of the most significant lessons about reading instruction in the NCLB era is that we, perhaps unintentionally, focused elementary reading instruction on skills-heavy, content-light curricula that forced systematic content development in literature, history, science, and the arts to the take a back seat to instruction and practice of isolated reading skills.
In the Common Core era, it’s critical that we signal to educators and to publishers that CCSS alignment means not that we are focusing on different skills but rather that we are refocusing our attention on systematically building content knowledge through the grades.
There are some references to content in the ELA rubric—for instance, the requirement for “quality texts” asks that those texts help “build content knowledge.” But such references are insufficient. It would be better to include a separate “non-negotiable” for grades K–5 (or K–8) that specifically requires coherent text selection aimed at building content and vocabulary. (One wonders how many of the Tier 1 and 2 curriculum would remain if coherent content building were explicitly required under a separate criterion?)
While Louisiana isn’t the first state to offer CCSS-aligned curriculum materials, or to develop rubrics that help educators wade through the morass of CCSS-aligned materials, they are the first to call out—clearly and unambiguously—publishers whose alignment claims do not match the reality of the material they offer. As the first into the breech, John White will no doubt get pushback from publishers whose bottom lines will suffer when word gets out that they have more work to do to meet the content and rigor demands of the Core. State leaders across the country would do well to share the work Louisiana has already done, to learn from it, and to build on it in the years and months to come.
The Common Core drama continues in Florida: after much coquetry, the Sunshine State has officially opted to abandon PARCC in favor of commissioning a new exam aligned to its new (Common Core-heavy) state standards. The contract went to American Institutes for Research (AIR), beating out overtures from the likes of ACT, Pearson, and McGraw-Hill. We’re all for a competitive assessment marketplace, but we’re also skeptical that anyone but PARCC and Smarter Balanced has had the time and resources to develop a truly Common Core-aligned test.
In an amendment to the state’s education budget, Wyoming became the first state to officially block adoption of the Next Generation Science Standards—ostensibly because the NGSS teach climate change. In our state-by-state analysis of the NGSS, we found that these new “national” standards for science are not superior to enough states’ existing science standards to warrant full-throated support. However, they are certainly of higher quality than Wyoming’s existing science standards. The Cowboy State is shooting itself in the foot. (If they don’t like NGSS, they should Xerox California’s or D.C.’s science standards.)
Mike and Brickman consider whether “college for all” is the right goal, whether a competitive assessment marketplace will be good for Common Core implementation in the long run, and whether Wyoming is better off without the Next Generation Science Standards. Amber drops a line about online learning.
"The Relative Benefits of Live versus Online Delivery: Evidence from Virtual Algebra I in North Carolina," by Jennifer Heissel, Working Paper, Association for Education Finance and Policy. (Please email us for the link: [email protected].)
Join us for this important, nonpartisan event about digital learning and where it will take education in Ohio -- and the nation -- in the years to come. National and state-based education experts and policymakers will debate and discuss digital learning in the context of the Common Core academic standards initiatives, teacher evaluations and school accountability, governance challenges and opportunities, and school funding and spending.
Since 2000, the Brown Center has released an annual report taking on three important issues in education policy. In this thirteenth installment, author Tom Loveless presents analysis on the PISA-Shanghai controversy (in brief: by failing to take Shanghai’s Hukou laws into account, the test significantly overstates the city’s performance), Common Core implementation to date (Loveless finds that early-adopter states are showing bigger gains on NAEP, though we believe that it is far too early to draw conclusions), and homework in American schools (an update of a 2003 report on the same topic). The homework issue is particularly thorny, as anti-homework crusades—while in and out of the media spotlight—have maintained for the last decade that kids are being buried in piles of burdensome and ineffective homework. To discover if this is true, Loveless employs three methods. First, he looks at NAEP data from 1984–2012—specifically, at a survey question that asks nine-, thirteen-, and seventeen-year-olds how much time they spent on homework the day before. He found that the homework load has remained stable since 1984 (except among nine-year-olds, more of whom are doing some homework than were before) and that only a small percentage of students report more than two hours of homework per night (5–6 percent for age 9, 6–10 percent for age 13, and 10–13 percent for age 17). Second, Loveless looked at the Higher Education Research Institute’s annual survey of college freshmen, which has since 1986 queried students about how they spent their time in their final year of high school. The survey found that only 38.4 percent of students reported spending six or more hours per week on studying and homework, behind working for pay (40.9 percent), exercise or sports (53 percent), and socializing (66.2 percent). Third, he looked at the Met Life survey, which queried parents on their children’s homework loads in 1987 and 2007; he found that there was little change over the two-decade span in how parents perceived the quality and quantity of homework (the proportion giving poor ratings to either quantity or quality did not surpass 10 percent). In all, Loveless cautions that the “homework horror stories” in the press amount to nothing more than anecdotes that do not reflect the larger picture—and ought to be taken with a grain of salt.
SOURCE: Tom Loveless, 2014 Brown Center Report on American Education: How Well Are American Students Learning? (Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution, March 2014).
