Much of the criticism recently leveled at the College Board’s new framework for its Advanced Placement United States history course and exam is hysterical and undeserved. There’s also reason to suspect that some of the harshest critics may be motivated at least in part by the riches they have reaped by prepping high school kids for the old version of the test.
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Much of the criticism recently leveled at the College Board’s new framework for its Advanced Placement United States history course and exam is hysterical and undeserved. There’s also reason to suspect that some of the harshest critics may be motivated at least in part by the riches they have reaped by prepping high school kids for the old version of the test.
That’s not to say the new framework has no flaws. Both Rick Hess and Jeremy Stern have responsibly pointed them out. But the College Board has agreed to undertake revisions. And the sample exam they recently released is pretty good. Among its short questions, I spotted a few that were poorly worded and one that I judged unfair to Ronald Reagan’s foreign policy, but the overwhelming majority looked fine and the medium- and long-answer questions are plenty challenging, well-conceived, and unlikely to be answered successfully without a fair command of the essentials of American history.
But AP framework builders are caught between a rock and a hard place. The fundamental concept of Advanced Placement, after all, is to provide able-enough high school students with college-level coursework that, if successfully mastered, can actually yield them credit as they enter the ivy walls.
It works, too, though not nearly as easily as it once did. Back in the late middle ages, I was able to skip my entire freshman year of college, thanks to “three’s” and “four’s” on the quartet of AP exams I took in high school. These days, however, most colleges demand a “five” before granting any credit. (Why that particular kind of standards-raising has occurred at the same time as grade inflation has afflicted the colleges’ own courses is best examined another day. Surely the main reason is revenue greed: the more credit they grant upon entry, the less tuition their students end up paying, an economic threat that worsens as the population of AP course-takers balloons.)
But securing any sort of postsecondary credit for academic work done in high school means that the College Board (and anyone else devising “early college” strategies) must produce courses that resemble those that the students would otherwise take in college. Which means the content of such courses will be driven primarily by what college professors presently teach in their own lecture halls and seminar rooms. Which in turn means that every philosophical, pedagogical, and political fad to overwhelm the faculties of today’s post-modern campuses will creep into the courses taught to sixteen- and seventeen-year-olds before they even matriculate.
This is a problem for every discipline that makes its way into the AP course catalog, but nowhere is the problem more acute than in U.S. history. For the traditional introductory “survey” course in the subject that was once offered at nearly every college in the land has been replaced or distorted by what’s now academically fashionable and politically correct in university history departments and such national organizations as the American Historical Association (AHA).
And that’s not pretty. Here’s an excerpt from a recent New York Times op-ed by the AHA’s executive director, offered in defense of the AP framework.
[L]earning history means engaging with aspects of the past that are troubling, as well as those that are heroic. There was a time, for example, when historians didn’t worry much about the slave trade and the emergence of an economy based on forced labor. Historians likened the plantation to a “school,” and emancipated people as children let out of class too soon. Only slightly more than a half-century ago, historians began to “revise” that narrative, examining sources previously ignored or unseen, informed by new ideas about race and human agency….This essential process of reconsideration and re-evaluation takes place in all disciplines….And there’s the rub. Fewer and fewer college professors are teaching the United States history our grandparents learned—memorizing a litany of names, dates and facts—and this upsets some people. “College-level work” now requires attention to context, and change over time; includes greater use of primary sources; and reassesses traditional narratives. This is work that requires and builds empathy, an essential aspect of historical thinking.
Set aside briefly the matter of whether “empathy” is an “essential aspect of historical thinking,” and focus on the indisputable fact that “fewer college professors are teaching the United States history our grandparents learned.” Then accept the reality that the content of AP courses is, to a great extent, held hostage to what college professors are teaching. Finally, ask yourself whether the collegiate version of U.S. history—warts and all, with emphasis on the warts—is what you want kids to learn about the nation’s past while in elementary, middle, and high school. Might it not be more important for them to internalize basic chronology, fundamental events, key people, and major accomplishments than to agonize about the injustices and downtrodden of bygone years?
The empathy plague is afflicting our understanding of the country’s past far beyond the campus. Consider Andrew Ferguson’s description of the history exhibits recently installed in the National Archives building in downtown Washington.
[Alongside a display of the Magna Carta] the rest of the museum’s content is shaped by the interests and views of academic historians. These days historians are consumed by their indignation at American injustice….Historians have been so busy correcting these omissions that they’ve lost the thread of the main story they’re supposed to be correcting.
Recall how few Americans ever learned that “main story.” When Diane Ravitch and I wrote What Do Our 17-Year-Olds Know? in 1987, we found—from NAEP data—that most of them could not even place the Civil War in the correct half-century. They were essentially clueless about the central developments of the country’s past and remain so today. The percentage of kids deemed “proficient” on the National Assessment in U.S. history is among the lowest on all subjects tested by NAEP—and hasn’t budged the decades.
The College Board defends its AP course content—in this and other fields—by saying that the Advanced Placement course is supposed to be taken on top of previous instruction in the subject. In other words, they expect school kids to have studied U.S. history before they get to the AP course. Swell if true. But how many high-school students take U.S. history twice? And how satisfactory is the grounding they get from whatever history they studied during K–8 “social studies”?
The trickle downward of university curricular mischief into our schools and other institutions continues unabated, and it’s not a problem that the College Board alone can solve. There are some heartening clues, however, that its leadership wants to do what it can. College Board president (and Common Core standards developer) David Coleman makes no secret of his admiration for E. D. Hirsch, Jr.’s commitment to “Core Knowledge.” And in a wonderful and timely bit of irony, the College Board’s forthcoming renovation of the SAT tests—markedly more influential than the AP (and perhaps the Common Core itself) in shaping what kids have to learn in school if they want to go to a good college—includes enough attention to the seminal documents of American history and the ideas they embody to give pause to Chinese authorities who really don’t want their kids learning about democracy and freedom while preparing to seek entry to a U.S. university.
Reports the Los Angeles Times:
“Including content from America's founding documents in a revised U.S. college entry exam has drawn attention in China, with worries the materials may impose the American values system on students,” China’s official New China News Agency said last week….
“The vital issues central to these documents—freedom, justice, and human dignity among them—have motivated numerous people in the United States and around the globe,” the College Board said in a statement.
But those are the exact values that the Chinese Communist Party has deemed as threatening to its rule; Chinese activists who have tried to promote such values have been silenced or jailed. Human rights advocate Xu Zhiyong, who initiated the New Citizens Movement to promote such values, was sentenced in January to four years in prison.
The news agency’s report cited commentary published recently in the South China Morning Post, a Hong Kong newspaper, about the SAT changes. Author Kelly Yang argued that the new focus on civil liberties may “change the mind-set and world view of an entire generation of Chinese youth.”
“If the new SAT succeeds, it will be the first time America is able to systematically shape the views, beliefs and ideologies of hundreds of thousands of Chinese students every year, not through a popular television show or a politician's speaking tour, but through what the Chinese care about most—exams,” she wrote.
Bravo for the College Board for finding a way to cause more Chinese young people to understand the foundations of democracy. And by all means help your kid prep for the new SAT. As for the new AP in U.S. history, however, once we recognize that, despite its many virtues, its framers had to curtsy before the dubious gods to which most academic historians now pray, the proper work of watchdogs and critics going forward is to press for proper history to be taught in the colleges themselves. They should team up with such worthy outfits as the American Council of Trustees and Alumni and the James Madison Program. They might even suggest that professors assign Bill Bennett’s superb three-volume history text, America: The Last Best Hope. Considering the woeful state of the profession, it’s likely many don’t even know it exists.
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With the release last month of the latest round test scores, Success Academy founder and CEO Eva Moskowitz is now a bona fide national-education-reform celebrity. She is also the latest in a line of educator-activists—like Michelle Rhee or Diane Ravitch—who embody, for supporters and opponents alike, one “side” of the education-reform debate. As a result, discussions about the stellar results posted by her schools have generated much more heat than light. Allies are eager to elevate her to exemplar status and critics desperate to prevent her from receiving even a modicum of credit for her students’ success.
The argument breaks down along predictable lines. For advocates of charter schools and education reform more generally, Success Academies demonstrate what can be accomplished when a strong leader with a laser-like focus on student achievement can do when she is free to hire the best teachers for the neediest students.
Critics of charter schools and reform are equally confident that Moskowitz is, in effect, running a scam: skimming the easiest-to-teach students, pushing out the ones who prove difficult later, and claiming all the while to be doing better work than the city’s other educators who are forced to operate without her considerable advantages and educational slight-of-hand.
What neither side is willing or able to admit, however, is how little we really know about why Moskowitz’s students seem to be doing so much better than so many of the other children in New York City—far better even than her charter school peers. And make no mistake; students at Success Academies were substantially more likely to be rated academically proficient than their peers across New York City. This was true in every grade level tested and for both math and English language arts.
Rather than try to explain those results in partisan or ideologically convenient terms, I want to try to lay out what we know and do not know about Success Academy. This, in turn, will hopefully help illuminate what we still need to learn if we want to explain—or hope to reproduce—the impressive test scores of Eva Moskowitz’s students.
Creaming
What we know
The Success Academies are charter schools to which students—or their families—must apply. It is therefore possible that SA students are not perfectly representative of students in NYC overall, or of students in the schools’ surrounding neighborhoods.
Indeed, we have some measures of student characteristics that demonstrate that Success Academies are not perfectly representative. Below are the demographics of the seven oldest Success Academies (those for which school-progress report data are available) compared to the city as a whole.
Seven oldest Success Academies | Citywide | |
Black or Hispanic | 95.9% | 68.9% |
English learners | 6.6% | 13.6% |
SPED | 14.0% | 17.5% |
What we do not know
Even the demographic information that is most commonly collected from and reported about students offers only a crude picture of the academic advantages or disadvantages that they have independent of their school. Whether students are classified as having special-education needs, for example, tells you very little about the severity of their disabilities. We also do not collect reliable, accessible data about student characteristics—like conscientiousness or IQ—that may have substantial, direct implications for academic success, and which may not be distributed equally among students who do or do not apply to charter schools.
Measured differences in student characteristics between schools may also reflect school practices as much as they indicate student characteristics. So, for example, we do not know if Success Academies have fewer English learners in part because they help students reach English proficiency more rapidly, as Moskowitz has claimed. There is also evidence that charter schools are less likely than district schools to enroll students with disabilities and less likely to place students in special education or keep them there.
Attrition
What we know
Cohorts at Success Academies often shrink substantially over the years. The first SA school—Harlem 1—opened with seventy-three first-grade students for the 2006–07 school year. This year, however, Harlem 1 tested only thirty-two eighth-graders. In other words, the inaugural cohort of first-graders at Harlem 1 shrank by more than half—56 percent—before the end of eighth grade.
Cohort shrinkage at Success Academies is the norm, though it is not always so extreme. Harlem 4, for example, opened with seventy-eight first-graders in 2008 but tested only fifty-four in 2014, a decline of 30 percent. In 2011, the four Harlem Success Academies collectively tested 323 third-grade students in English language arts. In 2014, those four schools together tested only 259 sixth-graders, a decline of 20 percent in three years. Success Academies tested 753 third-graders in 2013, but only 681 fourth-graders in 2014, a drop of almost 10 percent.
Net drops in enrollment like this may be uncommon and suggest that Success Academies are not replacing students as quickly as they leave. However, it is not unusual for students in New York City to leave their schools; slightly more than 10 percent of elementary-age children do so every year, with black, Hispanic, and poorer students doing so more frequently.
What we do not know
Which students are leaving Success Academies and why? There have been claims that Success Academy schools are especially likely to push out students with special needs or with behavior problems, but we do not have good evidence on overall patterns of attrition—how are Success Academy students replaced, if at all—or how those patterns are different from those at other schools in the city.
Peer effects
What we know
If Success Academy is successful in attracting and retaining high-achieving students, it could have an impact on scores of even lower-achievers. In at least some situations, students appear to benefit from being surrounded by stronger or more-advantaged students, while weaker students have been found to be detrimental to the learning of their classmates by reducing the quality of classroom time. Other authors have concluded that girls are particularly advantaged by the presence of stronger students.
Notably, however, other studies—including studies of charter schools—find that peer effects do not seem to matter. Some researchers have found, for example, that “peer effects…play no role in explaining charter effectiveness.” Instead, they suggest that whether a charter school is effective depends almost entirely on its approach to instruction and student behavior.
What we do not know
The exact magnitude of peer effects are difficult to measure, and probably not consistent across contexts, so it is difficult to say with certainty how much students in Success Academies are benefitting from the composition of their student body—or whether Moskowitz’s schools attract higher-potential kids in the first place. Are students motivated to work harder when their peers are more hard-working and conscientious? These mechanisms are not well understood in general and have not been carefully studied at Success Academies in particular.
Test prep
What we know
“Test prep,” a term of some ambiguity, generally refers to teaching practices that prepare students to score well on tests without developing their knowledge or understanding of the skills or concepts being tested.
There is some evidence that test prep is relatively ineffective at boosting students’ test scores. The Measures of Effective Teaching Project, for example, found that “test-prep” practices were only weakly (though positively) correlated with value-added measures of teacher effectiveness.
What we do not know
We do not know how Success Academies prepare their students for state testing, or the extent to which their teachers rely on “test prep” as opposed to instruction aligned with state standards and tests. We also do not know whether more class time is devoted to test prep at Success Academies than at other schools in New York City (or elsewhere). More generally, existing evidence on the effectiveness of test prep is far from definitive.
School culture and instructional effectiveness
What we know
Success Academy self-identifies as a “no-excuses” school, an approach generally associated with increased instructional time, strict rules for student behavior, selective teacher hiring, “data-driven” instruction, “high expectations,” and a focus on traditional math and reading skills.
There is evidence that “no-excuses” schools effectively boost student achievement in at least some contexts. The most effective charter schools are often “no-excuses” schools, and the approach seems to be effective in raising test scores when implemented in district (i.e., non-charter) middle schools.
Moskowitz also describes her schools’ approaches to reading instruction as drawing heavily from “balanced literacy.” That approach has a controversial history in New York, and there is some evidence that it is relatively ineffective, so it is also notable that Moskowitz emphasizes that her schools have modified balanced literacy in significant ways.
What we do not know
We know relatively little about Success Academy’s school culture and instructional practices and how they differ from those in other schools in the city. It would also be useful to know more about the schools’ instructional approach to math, and the extent to which math and reading instruction at Success Academies is supplemented by—or crowds out—instruction in other content areas like science and history.
Conclusion
The various factors potentially contributing to Success Academies’ remarkably high test scores are not mutually exclusive; it may well be they are all at work to one degree or another.
Nor are these factors necessarily independent of one another. Strict “no-excuses” policies toward behavior may affect the type of students who are attracted to—or leave from—Success Academy schools, for example, or the charter application process may contribute to a student body that is somehow better suited to the schools’ instructional approaches.
What may be most important to note is that these issues are not, for the most part, unique to Success Academies. Charter schools of all kinds routinely boast—or are accused of exploiting—these very same factors. Any credible account of Moskowitz’s apparent success needs to explain not only why her students test so well, but also why they test so much better than even students at other, seemingly-similar charter schools.
Given how little we know about Success Academies, we should be very cautious about leaping to conclusions—positive or negative—about the factors contributing to their students’ success.
Paul Bruno has taught middle school science at district and charter schools in Oakland and Los Angeles, California.
The Florida Education Association, state school boards, and the Florida PTA have filed a lawsuit in a Florida court challenging the state’s Tax Credit Scholarship Program (for the second time this summer). The suit argues that the program violates clauses in the state constitution that require educational uniformity and bar state aid to religious organization. There are multiple problems here. First, the plaintiffs should be ashamed that they’re advancing a narrow agenda by jeopardizing the program's 69,000 participants—largely poor and minority students seeking a better education. Second, the U.S. Constitution permits tax credits for donations to religious organizations; if this challenge goes all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court, Blaine Amendments might be in trouble. The big question is the uniformity clause, which mandates a single, uniform state education system. Hopefully, the Florida Supreme Court interprets the state constitution in a way that doesn’t harm tens of thousands of disadvantaged youngsters.
On Sunday, The New York Times’s Motoko Rich penned a news analysis asking why more men don’t go into teaching. A good question; but she gave a suspect answer. She blamed, among other things, low teacher pay. Inexplicably, she cited perhaps the lowest figure one can find—claiming that the median annual salary for elementary school teachers in the U.S. is a paltry (and hard-to-believe) $40,000. The Gadfly objects! More reliable NCES data show the average salary (not the median) is a much more palatable $56,384. Let’s not make teaching appear less appealing than it actually is.
Ohio has just weathered three weeks of legislative committee hearings over a bill to repeal the Common Core. Nowhere have we seen a larger and more diverse group of unlikely allies coming out in support of the standards. School districts of all sizes and types—as well as charter schools—argued against the multiyear chaos proposed in the bill; Chris Minnich of the Council of Chief State School Officers patiently answered “how’d you do that?” questions; parents, community service groups, and teachers spoke in person or submitted written pleas to stop the politicization of education; philanthropy and social-justice groups argued the need to maintain high standards for all Ohio students; and employers warned that “the real fear should be that our kids won't be able to compete.” Yes, an unlikely group, but perhaps just the right mix because repeal in Ohio appears less likely than when this circus began.
Last night, pro–pension reform State Treasurer Gina Raimondo won Rhode Island’s Democratic gubernatorial primary. And pro–charter schools Cumberland mayor Dan McKee won the Democratic primary for lieutenant governor. Both without any union endorsements. All this in a deep blue state!
Michelle and Alyssa discuss the lack of male teachers, Bill Gates’s Big History Project, and rating schools with classroom grades. Amber tells us whether school superintendents are vital or irrelevant.
“School Superintendents: Vital or Irrelevant?,” by Matthew M. Chingos, Grover J. Whitehurst, and Katharine M. Lindquist, The Brookings Institution (September 2014).
Hoping to gather lessons from recent teacher-evaluation reforms, a new report by Bellwether Education Partners analyzes four years of teacher-evaluation data from seventeen states and D.C. It is more a policy analysis than an empirical study. Keeping that in mind, these are the four key findings: First, states have largely moved away from binary ratings of teachers to four- and five-tier ratings. Second, states are using more extensive protocols for teacher observations, like the Charlotte Danielson framework that provides more detailed, formative feedback. Third, overall, districts are not factoring student growth into evaluation ratings. Many states vaguely mandated the inclusion of value-added models, but didn’t specify how or when districts should use growth in teacher evaluations. Further, some states allow district administrators to change certain teachers’ growth ratings from the state, causing very uneven implementation. In Delaware, for example, 12 percent of teachers statewide in 2012–13 were deemed “unsatisfactory” but eligible for an upgrade to a higher “satisfactory” label; the percentage of teachers subsequently receiving such an upgrade ranged widely from 32 to 90 percent across districts. Fourth, districts in the seventeen states studied generally don’t use evaluation results to inform staffing decisions. Only a tiny percentage of teachers are let go because of results—and most aren’t rewarded, financially or otherwise, for excellent ratings. In short, the analysts find that states have made some changes to the evaluation instruments themselves, but have done next to nothing with the results. Going forward, Bellwether recommends that states give evaluation systems a chance to gain traction before weakening them.
SOURCE: Chad Aldeman and Carolyn Chuong, “Teacher Evaluations in an Era of Rapid Change: From 'Unsatisfactory' to 'Needs Improvement',” Bellwether Education Partners (August 2014).
In an era of increased teacher-effectiveness data, school leaders have unprecedented potential to be more strategic about their decision-making. Unfortunately, it’s not always easy for principals to access, analyze, and apply this information. A recent study released by Vanderbilt University’s Peabody College examines common hurdles to effective data use and suggests ways in which districts can better support principals to guide critical staffing decisions (e.g., hiring, placement, professional development, and retention, which together they dub “talent management decisions”). Based on hundreds of site visits, surveys, and interviews with principals in six urban school districts and two charter management organizations (CMOs) that have invested substantially in these improvements, analysts offer many practical recommendations. Among them: hold principals accountable for effective data use, differentiate principal training and support by specific data need, consolidate district statistics into a single dashboard (organized by talent-management decision type), and provide principals with ongoing access to multiyear information. Although a handful of the report’s final recommendations feel more aspirational than easy-to-implement, overall, Vanderbilt’s report provides districts and CMOs with helpful and concrete recommendations on how to help principals use effectiveness data to identify and retain the best teachers in our classrooms. Teacher quality is the most important school-based factor influencing student learning. Regardless of whether teacher-effectiveness data is drawn from classroom observations, value-added estimates, or student, parent, or peer surveys, it’s essential to provide principals with access to comprehensive effectiveness data and sufficient training, and support for how to use it well.
SOURCE: Patrick Schuermann, et al., “Supporting Principals to Use Teacher Effectiveness Data for Talent Management Decisions,” Vanderbilt Peabody College (May 2014).
