The Education Gadfly Weekly

This timely study represents the most comprehensive analysis of American teacher unions’ strength ever conducted, ranking all fifty states and the District of Columbia according to the power and influence of their state-level unions. To assess union strength, the Fordham Institute and Education Reform Now examined thirty-seven different variables across five realms:

1) Resources and Membership

2) Involvement in Politics

3) Scope of Bargaining

4) State Policies

5) Perceived Influence

The study analyzed factors ranging from union membership and revenue to state bargaining laws to campaign contributions, and included such measures such as the alignment between specific state policies and traditional union interests and a unique stakeholder survey. The report sorts the fifty-one jurisdictions into five tiers, ranking their teacher unions from strongest to weakest and providing in-depth profiles of each.

Download the state profiles (Click your state to download):

As Gadfly readers know—from his “farewell address,” if not before—the irreplaceable Checker Finn stepped down as the Thomas B. Fordham Institute’s president last week, handing me the reins and the opportunity of a lifetime. As Checker made clear, he’s not retiring, disappearing, or giving up the fight—just letting go of the day-to-day responsibilities of managing an increasingly complex organization. He will, as he wrote, have more time than ever for troublemaking. American education will be the better for it.

So what does this mean for Fordham? Let me assure friends and foes alike that “evolution” is the apt term. Don’t expect any abrupt changes. Checker has been delegating a lot of decisions to our seasoned, superb senior staff for years; that talented team, along with our top-notch board of trustees, will continue to steer a steady course in the years to come, both with our national work and our efforts in Ohio.

***

That’s not to say, however, that “abrupt change” isn’t needed in the education-reform movement. Let’s begin with that great, late philosopher Michael Jackson:

I'm starting with the man in the mirror
I'm asking him to change his ways
And no message could have been any clearer
If you wanna make the world a better place
Take a look at yourself, and then make a change

Those of us lucky enough to work every day at improving our schools need to start by looking in the mirror and making sure we have our own house in order. We need to ask: Are the policies we’re promoting likely to work in the real world? Do our various reforms fit well together? Do they create the space for excellent educators to do great work, while putting pressure on dysfunctional systems to change?

Some of my friends in the reform movement think this stance leaves us in a defensive posture, apologizing for the imperfections of the policies we’re pushing, which gives a pass to defenders of the status quo. They want to bring the fight to the system—to the unions (and their job protections); to the ed schools (and their unwillingness to stoop to “vocational training”); and to the school boards (especially ones that refuse to address vast inequities in their systems).

I understand this line of thinking, and for advocacy organizations, it probably makes sense. But not for think tanks, and certainly not for the Fordham Institute. (Keeping our think tank from morphing into an advocacy organization is a top priority—and the current Common Core fight certainly makes that hard at times.) We have the responsibility, and the luxury, to take the long view, to not obsess about the daily legislative or messaging fights, to follow the evidence wherever it leads. We seek to hold up a vision of effective school reform, even if at times that means criticizing reform efforts themselves. And heaven knows that our reforms, while well meaning, are far from perfect.

Those imperfections come in many shapes and sizes. We’ve studied and opined on them over the years, and we will continue to do so. They are rooted in confusion about the goals of education reform (College for all? Closing achievement gaps? Helping every child achieve his or her potential? Ending poverty?); disputes over who should do what (What’s the appropriate federal role? Can state education agencies handle all the tasks we’ve given them? Should we give up on districts?); and debates over the diagnosis of the problem itself (Teachers who can’t be fired? Too little competition? Too little autonomy? Too little support?).

What’s on my mind right now, though, is another elusive element: coherence. How can we make sure that the major elements of the policy agenda fit well together and are not working at cross-purposes? How can we enable educators to create coherent learning environments in their schools?

I fear that we’re failing the coherence test, and that’s putting all of our efforts (and progress) at risk.

What makes our policies incoherent? Simply put, there are a number of reform strands that are competing with one another:

• Autonomous and accountable schools: Adherents hold that schools—and especially their principals—are the key units of change, but that they need the right incentives and autonomy to succeed. Those incentives come mainly in the form of external accountability but also via competition. This approach is best illustrated by the charter schools movement as well as charter-like schools, via portfolio management and the like. It pulls in standards-based reformers (most of them supporters of the Common Core) and “Reinventing Government” types. In the real world, this group has arguably been much more successful at introducing accountability than meaningful autonomy, especially for schools in the district sector. These reformers resist prescriptive, formulaic teacher evaluations as a violation on principals’ autonomy; accountability hawks in this crowd tend to look askew at arguments that school quality should be determined by parents alone.
• Capacity building comes in many forms, but its fans generally argue that schools are doing about as well as can be expected, given what they have to work with. To be more effective, they need more know-how, resources, training, talent, and help. Popular remedies include investments in professional development, stronger teacher preparation, data-based decision making, and curricular reform. Folks in this camp tend to worry that “high pressure, low support” policies like test-based accountability will inevitably lead schools to take ineffective or unethical actions—like implementing drill-and-kill teaching strategies or simply cheating.
• Personalized learning focuses on customizing education for every student. The “unit of change” is the individual child. Key policies include Course Access, Education Savings Accounts, and the larger push for choice in education. Proponents of this reform tend to trust parents to make good decisions, though some are willing to concede the need for external accountability, too (at least transparency around outcomes so parents have good consumer information). Teachers don’t play a big role in the “theory of action” of this reform, other than as providers of educational services. Even “schools” are seen, by some in this camp, as anachronistic creatures of an earlier era. Students might get some of their personalized learning at a school, but they will also get it online, at community colleges, on the job, etc.
• Teacher effectiveness stresses the role of the classroom instructor, who is the key unit of change. It sees schools as mere bundles of teachers; to the extent that principals matter, it’s because of their role in recruiting and retaining great teachers and removing bad ones. Key policies include tenure reform, alternate routes to licensure, rigorous teacher evaluations, and differential pay systems. These folks may or may not support school choice or school accountability regimes, but they tend to be impatient with calls to merely hold principals accountable and let them handle the rest. And they give little attention to what “teacher effectiveness” means in delivery systems that don’t rely on a “teacher.”

Some of the items on this menu complement each other better than others, and most reformers support some combination of all of the above. But a few of these reforms are clearly in conflict.

There’s the classic confrontation between choice and standards—or, in this lexicon, “personalized learning” and “autonomous and accountable schools.” Plenty of supporters of school choice believe that any external accountability system amounts to second-guessing the decisions of parents, which is paternalistic at best and coercive at worst. Follow the anti–Common Core musings of Glenn Beck and his followers on Twitter and you’ll notice this “power to the parents” sentiment coming through strong.

Even wonks wrestle with whether there’s a role for “quality control” in the “personalized learning” paradigm. When it comes to Course Access, for instance, who determines whether a course is good enough or whether a student deserves credit? And when it comes to voucher and tax-credit programs that are supported with public dollars, is there a role for external accountability? (I believe we’ve come to a reasonable compromise on that.)

The sharpest conflict, though—and the one creating the most incoherence in our policies and in our schools today—is between the “teacher effectiveness” movement and efforts around “personalized learning” and “autonomous and accountable schools.” And though Common Core may be everyone’s favorite whipping boy, it’s my view that it’s the teacher-effectiveness reforms—particularly formulaic teacher-evaluation systems—that are causing the most trouble.

Let me clarify: I support efforts to improve teacher preparation; to create high-quality “alternate routes” into the classroom; to eliminate “last in, first out” policies; to reform tenure; to provide principals with training and models for how to evaluate teachers rigorously; and to empower those principals to terminate ineffective teachers. But taking the next step and prescribing formulaic evaluation systems—those that dictate precisely how principals must evaluate their instructors, including the exact role that student achievement must play—is a bridge too far.

That’s because these systems assume “one best model” of teaching; thus, they fly in the face of “personalized learning” and “autonomous and accountable schools.”

Regarding personalized learning: It’s one thing to tell schools (public, private, charter) that they will be evaluated against a common standard like the Common Core—which they are free to ignore if they don’t care much about their test scores or school grades. If you are an uber-progressive school or one that focuses on “competency-based education,” and if you are willing to explain your so-so test scores to your parents, then you have little to fear from standards, testing, and school accountability.

But it’s quite another thing to tell teachers that if they ignore the standardized tests and their students don’t make enough progress, their jobs could be in jeopardy. Suddenly, the square-peg/round-hole school faces a Hobson’s Choice: give up on its unique mission and adhere to the standards or risk serious consequences for its teachers. As a result, formulaic teacher evaluations have increased the stakes on the standards tremendously—which, by the way, makes them all the more politically unpalatable.

And regarding principal autonomy: how can reformers claim that prescriptive evaluation systems are anything but efforts to “principal-proof” our schools? Some are ready to admit this and to argue that it’s a smart strategy because so many principals are weak and unwilling or unable to distinguish among their teachers and act on the results. That may be so—but how are we ever going to recruit better leaders to our schools if we continue to diminish the role and authority of the principal? We should arm them with better evaluation models and then let them decide how best to apply them, holding them accountable for their schools’ results.

***

So how can we untangle this pretzel? How can we give educators room to chart their own course to improvement?

My preference is to ditch the formulaic teacher evaluations and keep the rest. But for friends and colleagues not willing to embrace that step, at the least we need to allow schools and school systems to choose from the menu rather than be forced to accept it all as a prix fix.

Superintendents should be able to tell state education agencies, “The teacher evaluation system you developed is messing with my other reform efforts. Here’s how I want to make these pieces fit together—without giving up on accountability for adults but in a way that’s going to get much better results.” Or districts that have embarked on the teacher-accountability effort and don’t want to give up momentum should be allowed to delay Common Core implementation, if that would help. And schools with a focus on personalized learning should be giving special freedoms to try new ways of quality control.

In other words, if “we,” at the policy level, can’t cut the Gordian Knot, we should hand the scissors over to educators so they can do it themselves.

That calls for humility, flexibility, and trust—qualities in short supply lately, especially in Washington.

***

The incoherence problem isn’t the only challenge we face in the reform movement. But fixing it is a good place to start—and an indication of the kind of pragmatic, constructive work you can expect from the Fordham Institute in the years to come. We have always been and will always be the Education Gadfly—eager to ask the tough questions, follow the evidence, raise the alarm, and resist any dogma, whether from defenders of the status quo or from our fellow reformers. Our job, now more than ever, is to hold up a mirror to the reform movement and ask whether we need to “make a change.” When the answer is yes, let us have the courage to do so expeditiously. Will you join us?

Courts have been the sites of much edu activity lately—and we don’t just mean Vergara and its copycats. Last week, the D.C. Association of Chartered Public Schools filed a federal lawsuit against the District of Columbia, alleging that, since 2008, charters have received $770 million less in funding than traditional public schools, a violation of D.C. law. Meanwhile, the Louisiana Board of Education joined a lawsuit against Governor Bobby Jindal, challenging his decision to rid the Pelican State of the PARCC assessment. Wisconsin’s high court upheld Act 10, legitimizing its restriction of unions’ collective-bargaining rights. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit sided with a school district’s decision to reduce a tenured teacher’s hours by 50 percent without a hearing—reasoning that, under Connecticut law, the reduction didn’t trigger due-process rights. And, David Boies, who will be remembered as Al Gore’s lawyer in Bush v. Gore, Microsoft’s prosecutor in the Clinton Administration’s antitrust suit, and a lawyer that helped overturn California’s same-sex marriage ban, is joining Campbell Brown’s Partnership for Educational Justice to take up the fight against teacher tenure.

State lawmakers pushed through myriad edu bills during this year’s legislative sessions, which have now concluded in all by eight states. Pre-K, teacher evaluations, and school finance reform were the biggest topics of debate. Colorado, Ohio, New Jersey, and New York lessened the importance of test scores in teacher evaluations. Meanwhile, Illinois, California, Pennsylvania, and Nevada have changed (or plan to change) their funding allocations.

Poverty is commonly assumed to be largely a concern of urban and rural schools in the U.S. Suburban poverty, however, has risen significantly since 2000, according to a new Brookings report. Suburban families living under the federal poverty line now outnumber impoverished urban and rural families. Poverty has also clustered and concentrated in the last fourteen years, with 5 million more families now living in distressed (40 percent poor) and high-poverty (20 percent poor) neighborhoods. And, again, much of the new clustering is suburban, where the number of poor families living in distressed communities is up 139 percent—three times the growth seen in cities.

Mike talks with Andy Smarick about Governor Jindal’s legal war on PARCC, Wisconsin’s high-court take on union bargaining, and D.C. charter funding’s time in federal court. Amber doubles down on double dosing.

Amber's Research Minute

Spending More of the School Day in Math Class: Evidence From a Regression Discontinuity in Middle School by Eric Taylor, (Stanford, CA: Stanford University, June 2014).

Transcript

Mike Petrilli:             Hello. This is your host Mike Petrilli of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute. Here at the Education Gadfly Show and online at edexcellence.net. And now please join me in welcoming my cohost, the Russian hacker of education policy, Andy Smarick.

Andy Smarick:           1.2 million emails, passwords and going strong. How are you?

Mike Petrilli:             Wow! And this is a Russian crime ring that has stolen all these emails and passwords. 1.2 billion. Of course my response is, “Surely, it wasn’t mine. Surely mine … What are the odds that mine was one of those?”

Andy Smarick:           My wife and I have been the victim of two different mass hackings; one where we went to school and one where I used to have my payroll. Now when it happens to me, I’m like stand in line. I’ve been hacked so many times.

Mike Petrilli:             I did get hacked once with the one where they guy sends the email to all of your friends that I am on a trip in Croatia …

Andy Smarick:           You fell for that?

Mike Petrilli:             No, no. My email got hacked.

Andy Smarick:           Oh, wow.

Mike Petrilli:             What was interesting was to see which of my friends and family fell for it. To some degree it was like, well, they’re looking out for me. I know who’s interested in my safety, my wellbeing. On the other hand, I also know who needs to get a little bit hip to the internet.

Andy Smarick:           That’s right. But you also know who deserves to be in your will. They care about you.

Mike Petrilli:             Nice. Okay, Andy. Lots to talk about today. This is kind of a big deal, my first …

Andy Smarick:           I was about to say congratulations.

Mike Petrilli:             Thank you.

Andy Smarick:           Just as I was walking into the building, I saw poor Checker Finn, out on the curb with all of his stuff out there. Mike ascends and then boots him out.

Mike Petrilli:             His weird false idols, Divishnu, and other things that are in his office. We did move Checker out of his office to a smaller office. It looks like an antiquities museum. The stuff kind of freaks us all out a little bit.

Andy Smarick:           Checker has amassed a lot of interesting things over 50 years in the business.

Mike Petrilli:             He has. No, no, no. He did step down as President. He is still on staff, will still be going strong. Probably cause more trouble than ever, because he doesn’t have to deal with the day-to-day stuff of raising money.

Andy Smarick:           Less staff meetings, that right.

Mike Petrilli:             But it is an honor to become President …

Andy Smarick:           Congratulations.

Mike Petrilli:             … of the Fordham Institute. Thank you. Of course, I have been the president of this podcast for eight or nine years.

Andy Smarick:           Has it been that long that it’s been going on?

Mike Petrilli:             Yes.

Andy Smarick:           Wow.

Mike Petrilli:             And you’ve been listening all that time.

Andy Smarick:           Well, I’ve been on for quite some time. I didn’t realize it was that long.

Mike Petrilli:             Absolutely. Okay, guys. Let’s get going.

Andy Smarick:           Let’s roll.

Mike Petrilli:             Let’s play, Pamela. It’s a special, everyone’s lawyering up edition, of the Education Gadfly. Let’s play Pardon the Gadfly.

Pamela Tatz:             Last week, the Louisiana Board of Education voted to join a lawsuit against Governor Jindal challenging his executive order last month that barred the state from administering the Common Core-aligned PARCC test. Who has the authority to decide whether the state will ditch PARCC and the Common Core?

Mike Petrilli:             Andy, what the bleep is going on down there in Louisiana?

Andy Smarick:           It is a cluster. I have never seen anything like this before. It’s one thing to file lawsuits, but there are these ethics charges against people, there are audits going on, people worried about their reputations. It’s gone from bad to ugly to gory.

Mike Petrilli:             I understand Bobby Jindal wants to President or Vice-President at least, and he’s decided he’s going to be the Tea Party candidate because his policy wong shtick wasn’t working, okay. I think that’s horrible and bad for the kids of Louisiana. Of course I’m a supporter of Common Core. I sort of get all of that. He can stand up. He can oppose the Common Core. What he may not have expected was that his own Board of Education pushed back, and his own Board of Regents pushed back, the Republicans in the legislature pushed back.

Andy Smarick:           His hand-chosen State Chief, John White.

Mike Petrilli:             Yes, pushed back. David Vitter, running to replace him, has pushed back. I would think that, hey, Bobby, you’ve done enough. You have shown the Tea Party you’re with them, so say, hey, I gave it my all. But instead, he’s going to go after poor John White with ethics charges. He’s going to file lawsuits. This is madness. Stop the madness.

Andy Smarick:           I agree. I consider myself a friend of John White, so I’m biased in this too. There’s this wonderful Jonathan Swift line. It’s something along the lines of you know true genius enters the world when the dunces are in the confederacy against him. I think that Jindal was betting on the idea that he can say, when he’s running for office, that all these other people who are aligned against me, this is just proof that they all have it wrong, that I’m willing to be on and on with it.

Mike Petrilli:             Yeah, except that he appointed many of them, and he helped elect many of them …

Andy Smarick:           Well, there’s that small …

Mike Petrilli:             … and he’s worked with many of them on other parts of his agenda. I don’t know. It’s hard to watch. Look, long-time listeners of the show, you should know that one key figure in all of this is Stafford Palmieri, who was on the show, …

Andy Smarick:           Former Fordham.

Mike Petrilli:             … former Fordham, and is now Jindal’s Policy Director. I have not had a chance to talk to her recently. I would love to find out what the heck is going on. I would just say, look, you’ve made your point. Enough is enough. We’re now, what, nine months away from when they’re supposed to give the PARCC test?

Andy Smarick:           That’s right.

Mike Petrilli:             I don’t know what they’re going to do if they don’t give that PARCC test instead. Give the test! Give it up!

Andy Smarick:           I don’t know. I think this issue is a poker sweepstake. He’s pot committed. He’s put all of his chips in on this hand, and I don’t think that you can retreat with dignity here. This may go on.

Mike Petrilli:             Maybe he can lose in court with some dignity. Okay, topic number two in our special edition on everyone’s lawyering up.

Andy Smarick:           Sponsored by the American Trial Lawyers Association.

Mike Petrilli:             Yes, thank you.

Pamela Tatz:             Wisconsin’s high court just affirmed the constitutionality of Act 10, the controversial law passed back in 2011 that, among other things, restricted collective bargaining rights of states’ teachers unions. Will it spread to other states? Is this good for ed reform?

Andy Smarick:           Had you asked me three months ago or six months ago, I would have said, “No, this is an outlier. It will stay in Wisconsin. It will go no farther.” But what is happening currently with the teachers union and Vergara and how they are digging their heals in and becoming more and more stubborn on these issues, I’m wondering if there’s going to be an increasing backlash to unions and they are unwittingly actually giving the fuel to the fire of these kinds of pieces of legislation and then lawsuits.

Mike Petrilli:             Yeah. It’s a really good point. Look, it’s already spread. Michigan passed a law that was somewhat similar. Indiana did it, I think mostly through executive order, at least diminishing the authority of unions, teacher unions, to bargain. All these issues, there’s a whole bundle of them. It’s what can you collectively bargain over? There’s the tenure issue. There’s the LIFO issue. Those are different issues, but they’re kind of this bundle, as you say, Andy. Look, if this turns out to be a wave election for Republicans, like many people think it will be, you could see even more Republican supermajorities in state legislatures, and a lot of those states would be more than happy to take it to the teachers unions.

Andy Smarick:           We’re seeing a perfect storm, potentially, here for the history buffs out there. Midterm elections for the President’s party are always bad. The second midterm election of a sitting President’s party are particularly bad, going all the way back to the …

Mike Petrilli:             Well, though ’98 was an exception, perhaps because of impeachment.

Andy Smarick:           That’s right, because of impeachment. But in every other one, it usually is a bloodbath. When you combine that with the fact that the teachers unions, by digging in, are giving a lot of the base a reason to lash out at organized labor. Unless the unions have decided to do a course correction, they may be on the wrong side of this.

Mike Petrilli:             Okay. Topic number three in our special lawyering up edition.

Pamela Tatz:             The D.C. Association of Chartered Public Schools has filed a Federal lawsuit against the District of Columbia, alleging that the government has underfunded the Charters to the tune of almost a billion dollars, in violation of D.C. law. Do these Charters deserve equal funding? Does it matter that the DCPS spends an exorbitant amount of money?

Andy Smarick:           I love that question. Are you going to argue against fair funding?

Mike Petrilli:             I really struggle with this, Andy. I’ll be honest. If you had to pick, of all of the places in the country where we should have a fight over Charter funding, I’m not sure I’d start with D.C.

Andy Smarick:           Right, I hear you.

Mike Petrilli:             Look, it is true, that compared to DCPS they get shafted. There is a local ordinance that says they’re supposed to get share funding. Looking at it, they’ve got a case. But they get so much more money than Charter schools anywhere else.

Andy Smarick:           Probably three times as much maybe in some places in California.

Mike Petrilli:             Yeah, yeah. They get preschool funding. They get facilities funding, which I’m in favor of, but it gets you back to this old question again about equity versus adequacy.

Andy Smarick:           Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Mike Petrilli:             Right? You can make the same … Look, we know, we have a system that has these vast inequities in education funding across districts, between districts and Charters, and frankly, Andy, it’s not fixable. Right? There will always be inequities, I believe, because of our system of taxation, because of local control, for all these reasons. Then you start to say, well, if rich people are always going to be able to spend a bazillion dollars on their own schools, and there’s really no way to stop that, then you get to this point where you say, what we really got to focus on is making sure that there’s no school that is funded at such a low level they can’t provide good services to their kids.

Andy Smarick:           I think the politics of this may turn out to be the most interesting thing. It is one thing for a court to hear a case when the Charter sector is, say, 2%, 5% of a market share. Then the court can kind of say, well, yeah, you’re getting underfunded, but it’s really not that many kids. We really need to protect the district and make sure that all the equities there are taken care of.

Now that the Charter sector in D.C. is serving almost a majority of students, it’s not like the court is … We cannot assume that they are going to defer and always do what the district wants anymore. The Charter sector can come in and say increasingly we are serving a higher number of kids. We are growing, the district is getting smaller. We need to get ahead of this thing, make sure we have the resources we need.

Mike Petrilli:             Although I don’t even know, Andy, that that stuff would come up in a lawsuit, per se. The court’s going to look at the law. I guess there are some constitutional issues that the plaintiffs have raised, but mostly it just says, look, there’s this law that D.C., I think the D.C. Council, I assume, has passed that says that Charter schools are supposed to get equal funding. Are they living up to that law or not? You don’t even have to address the constitutional questions. It’s not really up to the court to figure out all the other ramifications, or the politics or anything like that. You just say, look, are you living up to that law or not?

Hey, by the way, let’s get those laws passed in other states, too. That’d be awesome if we had a law in Ohio that said, hey, Charter schools have to get equal funding compared to district schools and you guys figure out how to make it happen. That would be very interesting.

Andy Smarick:           It would be. This gets complicated because the formula is one thing, but then part of the argument is that DCPS is getting in-kind services from other agencies in the city, so you could make the argument that the funding formula is being fairly administered. It’s all these extra add-ons that turn out to be inequitable.

Mike Petrilli:             I see, I see, I see. All right.

Andy Smarick:           We shall se.

Mike Petrilli:             Okay, that’s all the time we’ve got for Pardon the Gadfly. Now it’s time for everyone’s favorite Amber’s Research Minute. Amber, welcome back to the show.

Amber Northern:      Thank you, Mike.

Mike Petrilli:             Back from a week off at the beach.

Amber Northern:      Man! It rained three solid days, though. Three solid days. I’m not very tanned.

Andy Smarick:           You look relaxed, though.

Amber Northern:      I’m relaxed. I mean, how many movies, how many shops can you go to when it rains?

Mike Petrilli:             Well, okay. Look, I know it’s tough, but imagine if you had two small children along with you and it rained.

Amber Northern:      Yes, that’s right.

Mike Petrilli:             Then you’d be pulling your hair out.

Amber Northern:      Quick plug for a movie. We saw Get On Up. You heard about this movie?

Mike Petrilli:             Get On Up.

Amber Northern:      Get On Up.

Andy Smarick:           Never heard of it.

Amber Northern:      You got to go see it.

Mike Petrilli:             James Brown?

Amber Northern:      James Brown life story.

Andy Smarick:           Get On Up.

Mike Petrilli:             Who plays in it?

Amber Northern:      It was awesome.

Andy Smarick:           I do.

Amber Northern:      Some guy you’ve never heard of, but who was phenomenal.

Mike Petrilli:             Really?

Amber Northern:      Yeah. Got to see it.

Andy Smarick:           But I could play him.

Mike Petrilli:             Your dance moves.

Andy Smarick:           He was an inspiration.

Amber Northern:      You know, there’s like two lines in that. Get on up. I’m a sex machine. That’s it.

Mike Petrilli:             That’s right.

Andy Smarick:           That’s the whole song.

Amber Northern:      He just repeats it over and over. The whole movie theater’s like doing the little jive.

Andy Smarick:           That’s awesome.

Amber Northern:      We’re digging it. It was a great song.

Mike Petrilli:             See? See, and if it had not rained, you would have missed that.

Amber Northern:      I know. There were some highlights.

Mike Petrilli:             Look on the bright side, Amber. Okay, what you got for us this week?

Amber Northern:      We got a new study out by Eric Taylor out of Stanford. It examines whether a double dose of math for low performers … meaning you take one remedial class, you take one grade level math class … improves math achievement. He looks at student data from ‘03-‘04 through 2013 in Miami Dade County Public Schools. He tracks the outcomes of middle school students who score just below and just above a predetermined cutoff score on the previous spring state assessment.

Mike Petrilli:             Does this mean a discontinuity analysis?                    

Amber Northern:      [inaudible 00:12:32] discontinuity, Michael Petrilli. Woohoo! He got it.

Andy Smarick:           Impressive, Mike Petrilli.

Amber Northern:      All right. So the kids just below are, obviously, taking the double dose; just above, you’re just taking the regular course. He found that students taking the double dose made significantly higher gains on math assessments compared to those students who were just above the cutoff score and didn’t double dose.    

Yet over time, the gains diminished. One year after returning to a single math schedule, just a third to a half of the gain remained. Two years later, the gain was about one-fifth to one-third of the original. Once students finished high school, there was little evidence of achievement differences between the groups. This was kind of an interesting little thing he looked into. Treated students were no more likely to have completed Algebra I by the end of ninth grade or to have completed Algebra II by the end of high school.

Then he starts talking about fadeout and it’s similar to other intervention. Fadeout’s like reducing class size. He’s got this nice discussion section about what other courses they weren’t exposed to like Art. I think some of the kids, he looked at it and there fewer kids taking foreign language, obviously, because there was this crowd out.

It was an interesting study. Then you’ve got another few studies that show the opposite, that actually show a double dose in Algebra and it did actually show kids enrolling in college enrollment at higher rates and completing. I just feel like this is not the last word on double dosing. But it showed a fadeout.

Mike Petrilli:             It showed a fadeout. Let me ask the obvious question. They said, okay, you get a big jump if you do double dosing, but then once you stop double dosing, you get a fadeout. Why not keep double dosing?

Amber Northern:      Yeah, that’s right. I do believe he looked at a double dose again, but because of the kids, and don’t quote me on this, but I think he lost some of the sample as he kept tracking and wasn’t able to say definitely …

Mike Petrilli:             Schools don’t tend to do that. They do this one year, and then that’s it? That’s the idea?

Amber Northern:      That’s right.

Mike Petrilli:             Interesting.

Andy Smarick:           Interesting. The opportunity cost question is an interesting one. What do they lose by getting this additional, secondary dose of math, whether it is foreign language stuff? What are the costs of that compared to the benefits?

Amber Northern:      That’s right.

Mike Petrilli:             We’ve published some work by Nate Levenson that says in the special education world, double dosing is something that looks highly effective. If you’ve got a student who basically has some kind of learning disability, that rather than do team teaching or have a lot of expensive aides, that they might just need more time with the reading or more time with math, and that can be quite effective.

Amber Northern:      The research on extended day is pretty compelling, right?

Mike Petrilli:             Yeah. And I’m sure, look, it matters what do you with that time? Are the classes good? Are the teachers good? What’s happening during that time?

Andy Smarick:           And this was only in math, right?

Amber Northern:      Only in math.

Andy Smarick:           The interesting question, because all the research I know of says that reading games are so much harder to get because it’s just cumulative knowledge, you have to get so many hours. I wonder if there’s less of a fadeout effect when you do double dosing of reading because it just builds up your hours, your words, and so forth.

Mike Petrilli:             That’s a good question. Of course, look, I bet everything fades out, right?

Amber Northern:      Yeah.

Andy Smarick:           Sure.

Mike Petrilli:             There’s probably not a single reform that doesn’t fade out to some degree. That’s something we have to accept.

Amber Northern:      It’s not harming the kids, right?

Mike Petrilli:             Unless, the tradeoff, unless they’re missing something. But you know, if they’re missing underwater basket weaving, it’s probably not a huge problem.

Amber Northern:      Right.

Mike Petrilli:             Which I, by the way, got an A-plus in.

Andy Smarick:           Impressive again.

Mike Petrilli:             Thank you. All right, thank you, Amber. That is all the time we’ve got for this week’s show. Until next week …

Andy Smarick:           I am Andy Smarick.

Mike Petrilli:             And I’m Mike Petrilli, the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, signing off.

Male:                          The Education Gadfly Show is a production of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute located in Washington D.C. For more information, visit us online at edexcellence.net.

This timely study represents the most comprehensive analysis of American teacher unions' strength ever conducted, ranking all fifty states and the District of Columbia according to the power and influence of their state-level unions. To assess union strength, the Fordham Institute and Education Reform Now examined thirty-seven different variables across five realms:

1) Resources and Membership
2) Involvement in Politics
3) Scope of Bargaining
4) State Policies
5) Perceived Influence

The study analyzed factors ranging from union membership and revenue to state bargaining laws to campaign contributions, and included such measures such as the alignment between specific state policies and traditional union interests and a unique stakeholder survey. The report sorts the fifty-one jurisdictions into five tiers, ranking their teacher unions from strongest to weakest and providing in-depth profiles of each.

When private-school voucher programs first began, they generally relied on parental choice as the sole quality control mechanism. As these programs have grown in popularity and scope, scrutiny of their use of public funds has increased and test-based accountability measures are being added. That is the case for Milwaukee’s Parental Choice Program, which added high-stakes testing requirements to its voucher program in 2009. Starting with the 2010–11 school year, private schools participating in the voucher program were required to administer the reading and math portions of state tests to voucher students and to make the results publicly available. Prior to the policy, the schools were required to test students but not report the results and could use a standardized test of their choosing. To estimate the policy’s impact on student-achievement outcomes, authors looked at the test scores of 437 seventh- and eighth-grade voucher students over a three-year period—two years before the reform and one year after—and compared this group to a similar group of Milwaukee public school students. (They were able to compare the pre- and post-policy scores because although voucher students’ scores were not publicly available prior to the 2010–11 school year, the researchers were already conducting a legislatively mandated evaluation of the voucher program). The authors found that voucher students made significant gains in their math and reading scores during the policy’s inaugural year, as compared to their district peers. The policy change had a positive impact on African American students in both reading and math; Hispanic, white, and Asian students, however, only made gains in math. Citing multiple robustness tests, the authors convincingly argue that the improvements were caused by the policy, rather than by other factors such as concurrent reforms or students exiting the voucher program. But they also offer a few caveats: The results have limited applicability to students in other grades, other cities, and other voucher programs. And, because the researchers could only look at one year of data post-reform, the improvement could be a mere one-year bump, not the beginning of a sustained improvement.

SOURCE: John F. Witte, et al., “High-Stakes Choice Achievement and Accountability in the Nation’s Oldest Urban Voucher Program,” Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis, June 9, 2014.

Many students across the nation continue to perform poorly in mathematics. In response to this chronic underachievement, schools have tried numerous interventions, including “double doses” of math class for students who lag behind academically. “Double dosing”—most commonly utilized in middle and high schools—can be an extension of time in an existing math class or assigning struggling students to two independent math courses (one remedial, one comprised of grade-level content). In either case, the goal is to improve student outcomes through additional “time on task.” In this new study, the author analyzes student data from 2003–04 through 2012–13, provided by the Miami-Dade County Public Schools (M-DCPS), to observe whether students’ participation in two distinct math classes improves outcomes. The study examines the outcomes of middle school students scoring just below and just above the predetermined cut-off score on the previous spring’s state assessment.[1] Findings indicate that students taking a double dose of math made significantly higher gains on math assessments compared to those students who were just above the cut-off score but did not receive a double dose. Yet over time, these gains diminish. Only one year after returning to a single math class schedule, gains fell to one-half to two-thirds the original amount. Two years post double-dose, gains shrunk further to only one-fifth to one-third of the original. These results indicate that double dosing provides students a big-time short-term boost; however, there is no guarantee that short-run gains will persist in the longer term.[2] Additionally, there are trade-offs associated with double dosing. The author appropriately notes that additional time in math classes diminishes time devoted to other subjects, assuming the length of the school day is fixed. Whether those trade-offs are worth it is something school administrators will want to consider.

SOURCE: Eric Taylor, Spending More of the School Day in Math Class: Evidence From a Regression Discontinuity in Middle School (Stanford, CA: Stanford University, June 2014).

[1] Students scoring below the cut-off score are identified as candidates for the double-dose schedule. However, a variety of factors determine students’ final schedules, and as a result, not all candidates are double dosed.

[2] These declining gains contradict the findings of a 2013 study focused on ninth-grade algebra students in Chicago Public Schools that finds “substantial longer-run impacts of intensive double-dose algebra” on future education outcomes.

Common Core–aligned testing will start this spring, and the majority of students will take the new exams on computers. But are younger children ready for this change? This study from NCES—two studies really—waded into the topic, but ended up staying in the shallow end of the pool. First, the researchers conducted a usability study, which evaluated how sixty fourth-grade students handled computer tools and features (using a writing-test platform administered to eighth and twelfth graders as part of NAEP 2011) and surveyed the students’ prior experiences and perceptions of using computers. They found that the kids had little to no difficulty in identifying many navigation features, such as the “play,” “volume,” and “next” buttons, but had trouble with writing tools (“copy,” “paste,” “highlighter”) and reading the general directions. (It is notable that of the sixty students surveyed, 93 percent had a computer at home and 100 percent had access to a computer at school.) Those findings informed the design of the second study: a pilot writing assessment administered in 2012 to a (non-nationally representative) sample of 13,000 fourth graders. Students were asked to complete either two 30-minute writing tasks or three 20-minute writing tasks. However, the study didn’t report on well students performed on NAEP paper-and-pencil tests versus computerized tests. The closest it got was in providing information on word count, finding that fourth graders wrote on average 159 words per response on the 2010 NAEP paper-and-pencil writing test, while the pilot-study fourth graders wrote only 110 words (even though they were given ten minutes more). Though the findings on usability could be helpful for teachers tasked with preparing students for the upcoming Common Core tests, when it comes to how younger students will perform on computerized assessments, this study prompted more questions than it answered.

SOURCE: National Center for Education Statistics, Lessons Learned from the 2012 Grade 4 Writing Computer-Based Assessment (WCBA) Study (Washington, D.C.: National Center for Education Statistics, July 2014).

In 2001, a North Carolina court granted unitary status to the Charlotte-Mecklenburg school district, which effectively ended a thirty-year policy of race-conscious school assignment. The authors of this paper look at whether the ruling caused families to move to areas with a higher proportion of same-race residents, thereby increasing segregation in the district’s neighborhood-zoned schools. Examining data from over 100,000 elementary students in the years 1999–2009, the analysts found little overall increase in segregation. The number of white relocations didn’t increase (remaining at 5–10 percent), and although white families were twice as likely to move to a whiter zone in the years following the ruling than before it, the same went for nonwhite families. In other words, the proportion of families moving in the direction of the whiter schools increased for all races, keeping increased segregation at bay. This positive outcome is not enough to satisfy the authors of the paper, though, who still bemoan the reversal of race conscious enrollment policies—and who decide to editorialize instead of sticking to the facts.

SOURCE: David D. Liebowitz and Lindsay C. Paige, “Does School Policy Affects Housing Choices? Evidence from the End of Desegregation in Charlotte-Mecklenburg,” American Educational Research Journal 51(4), 2014: 671–703.