The Education Gadfly Weekly

There used to be a wry and mildly provocative blog called “Stuff White People Like.” Briefly popular in its heyday, it was described by the New Republic as a “piquant satire of white liberal cultural mores and hypocrisies.” The site’s creator stopped updating it a few years back after landing a book deal. But if it were still active, “opting out of tests” might have been right up there with craft beer, farmers’ markets, NPR, and Wes Anderson movies on that list of mores. Maybe hypocrisies, too.

A list compiled by the teachers’ union in New Jersey, where PARCC testing began earlier this month, claims that there have been more than thirty-five thousand test refusals statewide. On the order of one million young New Jerseyans are supposed to take the test, yet the state data documenting how many of them opted out won’t be available for at least a month. An informal analysis of the New Jersey Education Association (NJEA)’s list, however, shows that the highest numbers of test refusals are concentrated in communities that are affluent, left-leaning, and heavily white. 

A blue state with a Republican governor, New Jersey features a mix of affluent suburbs and pockets of deep and persistent urban poverty, including closely watched education reform hubs like Newark and Camden. Thus, the Garden State offers an interesting lens through which to view both the prerogatives and the politics of opting out and education reform. Assuming that the list compiled by the union is even directionally sound, it puts the state’s affluent white progressives potentially at odds with low-income and heavily Democratic families of color, since there is little evidence that such families are opting out in significant numbers.

My Fordham colleague Dominique Coote put the districts with the highest-reported unofficial numbers of refusals on a spreadsheet, which you can see here. As of the most recent update on March 20, fourteen districts had five hundred or more reported refusals. All but two of these have median household incomes above (usually well above) the state average. There’s no way to determine the political leanings of families of individual children who refuse the exams, but the communities with the most refusals—Cherry Hill, Livingston, and Princeton, for example—are suburban and strongly left-leaning. Only three of the fourteen top opt-out districts are Republican-majority; most are disproportionately Democrat, some extremely so. And yes, extremely white. Indeed, only one district with five hundred or more reported refusals, East Orange, is not majority white. 

Now take a look at the refusal numbers for districts that serve predominantly low-income, black, and Hispanic families—places like Newark, Camden, Paterson, and Trenton. Actually, you can't. They’re not among the approximately 250 districts on the NJEA list. Of the thirty-one so-called “Abbott Districts” in the state, named for the 1985 court case aimed at ensuring adequate education funding for schools serving poor children, only seven are on the NJEA list. East Orange, with 520 reported PARCC refusals, is the only Abbott District to see significant opt-outs. The other six range from thirty refusals in Hoboken to a single reported refusal in Long Branch.

Does that mean there are no opt-outs in other low-income districts? Not necessarily. Steve Wollmer, the NJEA’s communications director, tells me that the list represents an aggregate of media accounts, reports from NJEA members in schools, and parents registering their intention to refuse the test on NJ Kids and Families, a web site set up by the union to “give a voice and organizing platform” for opting out.

“The vast majority of opt-outs are taking place in non-urban, non-disadvantaged districts,” agrees Wollmer, “because parents tend to be better informed in those districts and tend to communicate among themselves a lot more.”

Fair enough. Still, if New Jersey is a litmus test, and the move to opt out of testing remains “a thing” chiefly among affluent, white, progressive, families, it puts them on a political collision course with the low-income families of color who have been the primary beneficiaries of testing and accountability in the reform era. Blacks, Latinos, and low-income kids have generally benefitted from test-driven accountability, particularly in the increased number of charters and school choice options, as well as some promising (but not necessarily causal) upward trends in NAEP scores and graduation rates during the accountability era. Test scores have created a powerful catalyst for reform—both educationally and politically—that disproportionately benefits low-income families.

“Kids who are not tested end up not counting,” observed Kati Haycock, president of the Education Trust, one of more than two dozen civil rights groups (including the NAACP, the Children’s Defense Fund, and the National Center for Learning Disabilities) that issued a call in January for the federal role in education to “be honored and maintained in a reauthorized Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA).” The statement specifically included annual statewide tests.

Yet a story on the liberal news service Alternet named opting out one of the biggest education stories of 2014, noting that "the whole school reform machine falls down without the data." That prompted Lynnell Mickelsen, a longtime progressive Democrat and Minneapolis blogger, to observe tartly, “So do the movements around climate change, civil rights, public health, banking reform, industrial safety, economic justice and more.” All but the most hardline anti-reform activists will acknowledge that, for all the faults of test-based outcomes data, such information has put into pitilessly sharp relief the dismal performance of schools serving the low-income children who traditionally are among the chief concerns of progressives. It is therefore odd “to cheer the loss of data when it comes to the systematic failure of children of color in our traditional public schools,” Mickelsen noted.

“The social gulf between the Opt-Outers and low-income parents of color is pretty huge,” Mickelsen observed in an email to me. So too the gap between how those groups view what’s at stake. “Over the last few years at various forums, I’ve heard a few labor organizers try to tell parents that tests are designed to make black kids look stupid,” she noted. “I don’t know how many black parents are buying that, though.  I’ve also heard labor and anti-testers argue that schools could have far more music, gym, art and field trips if all the money spent on testing was spent on those things. Which is pretty shameless, since the costs of testing aren’t high enough to cover any of that.”

So, does the opt-out movement have a race problem?

"It could be a race problem but it's definitely a respect problem,” says Derrell Bradford, the African American executive director of NYCAN. “There is a pretty strong undertow beneath the opt-out wave. And the force of it is one where some people don't think testing, or Common Core, is the right fit for their child, so they don't think it's the right fit for anyone's child.”

To be sure, anti-testing ferment comes in many flavors. Unions don't like having members evaluated on the basis of test scores (a not unreasonable concern); parents don’t care for curriculum narrowing and the pressure placed on children to perform; conservative lawmakers conflate testing and Common Core to rail against federal overreach; and nobody likes test prep, which has turned many classrooms serving rich and poor alike into joyless grindstones. 

Recall that Arne Duncan was fiercely criticized for observing that Common Core opposition was being driven by “white suburban moms” who suddenly had to face the fact “their child isn’t as brilliant as they thought they were, and their school isn’t quite as good as they thought they were.” It’s hard not to be reminded of Duncan’s remark when considering the list of New Jersey PARCC refuseniks. 

Personally, I think Duncan was half right. White suburban moms certainly appear to be primary drivers of the opt-out movement. To the degree that such are responding to curriculum narrowing and other deleterious effects of test-driven accountability, I’m deeply sympathetic. 

But I’m equally sympathetic to the low-income parents who think that testing reveals how badly they have been failed.

What is undeniable is that those most likely to be negatively affected by the opt-out impulse are low-income children of color, for whom testing has been a catalyst for attention and mostly positive change. Bradford sees the conflict as “a study in power in American politics.” Even though the opt-out impulse may unite the far right and the progressive suburban left, he notes, it's really a combined effort by people who are largely white and affluent. “Three suburban moms in Indiana decide they don't like Common Core and all hell breaks loose. But when 250,000 minority kids languish in New York's worst schools, any proposed change is too much, too fast, and too punitive,” he concludes. “I don't blame people for who they are, but you cannot miss the message here unless you willingly choose to.”

Last week, I complained that Eva Moskowitz and other reformers weren’t being fair when they described schools as “persistently failing” because they didn’t get many of their students to the ambitious levels built into the Common Core. This is how I concluded:

The move to higher standards means that we need to recalibrate our rhetoric and, more importantly, our approach to school accountability. In the low-standards days, it was perfectly legitimate to call out schools that couldn’t get all or most of their students to minimal levels of literacy and numeracy. It simply doesn’t work to similarly defame schools that don’t get all of their students “on track for college and career.” It’s a much higher bar and a much longer road.

But reform critics aren’t any better when it comes to playing games with the new standards. Diane Ravitch and Valerie Strauss, for example, continue to peddle the notion that the Common Core is developmentally inappropriate because it expects all students to be able to read simple passages by the end of kindergarten. Perhaps without knowing it, they’re making the same mistake as Moskowitz and others: misunderstanding the standards’ aspirational nature.

The core problem is the assumption that, by simply setting standards, policymakers expect “all students” to meet them. That might have been the case in the past, when we set the standards bar at an extremely low level—and yes, it was signaled by NCLB’s crazy declaration that all children would be “proficient” by 2014. But it certainly should not be the case now, or for the foreseeable future.

Here’s what the Common Core is designed to communicate: If your children are meeting the standards, it means they are believed to be on track for college and career readiness by the end of high school—real readiness, the kind that doesn’t require remediation on campus. If they aren’t meeting the standards, it means that they are off track. That doesn’t mean they are “failing,” or even “below average.” But it does mean they need to accelerate their progress if they are likely to be able to take bona fide college courses upon entry or have the best possible shot at a well-paying job.

It’s like learning that your child’s body mass index (BMI) is above the healthy range. If you want him or her to have a long and healthy life, you need to work at bringing it down over time in a proven and safe way. (If below the healthy range, of course, that means bringing it up, and not just with ice cream.)

The BMI isn’t perfect. It doesn’t measure everything that is important about health, or even healthy weight. And it is adjusted over time as researchers learn more. Nor would anyone in public health expect all American kids to attain a BMI in the healthy range anytime soon, if ever. But we do hope to see the population moving in that direction—and there’s ample cause for concern when (as today) so many are moving in the opposite direction.

So to Ravitch and Strauss I say: Please stop claiming that the standards expect “all” students to read by the end of kindergarten. It’s wrong. The standards are simply meant to indicate to parents and educators that kids are “off track” if they haven’t met that milestone yet. It’s a warning light, not a death sentence. Thankfully, kindergartners have plenty of time to catch up. Let’s focus on smart instructional strategies to help them get there.

photo credit: Jeremy Brooks via Flickr

• The Columbia Journalism Review ran a good takedown by Alexander Russo of some unconscionably lazy reporting from the national media on the political controversy surrounding the rollout of Common Core-aligned tests. Esteemed outlets like the Washington Post, PBS NewsHour, and the New York Times have made a rampaging giant of the anti-standards pygmy, forecasting a nationwide revolt against PARCC exams that just hasn’t materialized. Hey, we get it: Conflict moves more newspapers (or, uh, pixels) than consensus. And those parents and teachers irresponsibly keeping kids from participating in the assessments absolutely deserve to be called out. But let’s try have a sense of proportion.
• Amazingly, though, the opt-out movement isn’t the most overblown education nonstory in recent memory. That dishonor belongs to the absurd Pearson kerfuffle. Some parents had a cow this week over the news that the testing company monitors social media for potential security breaches (if a student shares exam materials over the web, it could compromise assessments across the country and, by extension, the vital school-level information we glean from them). But this is an industry-wide best practice—companies are trawling through publicly available data for instances of very real cheating, not installing listening devices in our cheese. The whole episode makes you wonder: If these anxious parents are so concerned about their kids’ privacy, why do they let them have Twitter accounts? And do they not understand the concept of “social” media?
• In an apparent instance of an April Fool’s gag that went live a week early, the Wall Street Journal brings us the story of a group of New Yorkers indulging in the fantasy of adult preschool. Supervised by a so-called “play concierge,” (which is evidently a real job in an age when the honorable video store clerk must walk the bread line) the class of thirtysomethings spends a night each week making crafts and having Show and Tell rather than wearing pants and having self-respect. Maybe these guys could take the money they’ve ploughed into this farce—a five-week course costs as much as $999—and put it towards a fund for low-income and minority kids who would actually benefit from pre-K.

As Common Core gathers speed in forty-three states and DC, what does it mean for high-ability students and gifted-and-talented education?  Some contend that higher standards for all mean gifted education is no longer necessary for some. Others insist that increasing the rigor of classes will automatically serve high achievers well. Some claim that differentiated instruction does the trick, while others worry that the country’s ablest students will lose what little claim they presently have on curriculum and instruction suited to their needs.

Who’s right?

Watch this discussion on what the Common Core portends for gifted students and their teachers, moderated by Fordham’s own Chester E. Finn, Jr.

Report Release: Common Core and Gifted Education: Myths, Opportunities, and Strategies for Success By Jonathan Plucker

PANELISTS
	Tricia Ebner Gifted Intervention Specialist and ELA teacher, Lake Middle School NBCT, PARCC ELC  @TebnerEbner
	Jonathan Plucker Raymond Neag Endowed Professor of Education, University of Connecticut   @JonathanPlucker
	Rena Subotnik Director, Center for Psychology in Schools and Education, American Psychological Association

MODERATOR
	Chester E. Finn, Jr. Distinguished Senior Fellow and President Emeritus, Fordham Institute

Here’s the top-line takeaway from the Center for Research on Education Outcomes’s (CREDO) comprehensive Urban Charter Schools Report, which is meant to measure the effectiveness of these schools of choice: For low-income urban families, charter schools are making a significant difference. Period.

CREDO looked at charter schools in forty-one urban areas between school years 2006–07 and 2011–12. Compared to traditional public schools in the same areas, charters collectively provide “significantly higher levels of annual growth in both math and reading”—the equivalent of forty days of additional learning per year in math and twenty-eight additional days in reading. As a group, urban charters have been particularly good for black, Hispanic, and English language learner (ELL) subpopulations. Indeed, putting the word “urban” before the phrase “charter school” is becoming somewhat redundant. As Sara Mead recently pointed out, urban students comprise only a quarter of students nationally, but more than half (56 percent) of those enrolled in charters. Thus, perhaps the most encouraging finding in the study is that the learning gains associated with urban charter schools seem to be accelerating. In the 2008–09 school year, CREDO found charter attendance producing an average of twenty-nine additional days of learning for students in math and twenty-four additional days of learning in reading. By 2011–12, it was fifty-eight additional days of math and forty-one of reading.

Not all that glitters is gold, of course. There’s no inherent magic to the word “charter” on the front door of a school. The relative success of urban charters in the aggregate makes all the more frustrating the failure of some charters in places like El Paso, Fort Worth, Las Vegas, and Phoenix, which not only fail to match the results of their district counterparts, but significantly underperform them. The new study underscores several challenges and suggests that the sector’s weaker performers form “sister city” relationships with stronger near-neighbors. Orlando and Fort Myers, for example, might want to emulate the work of Miami’s charter sector with ELL students, “who see the equivalent of 112 additional days of learning per year in math relative to their peers in TPS.” Another question to be asked—especially in places like San Francisco, Boston, Newark, Washington, D.C., and New York, where charter pupils seem to do particularly well compared to district schools—is the degree to which charters’ apparent success is a function of comparisons to weak traditional schools.

But if you are the low-income parent of a child in one of those places, such questions might not interest you very much. If your child is black, Hispanic, or an ELL in particular, here’s what you need to know: Charter schools are making a significant difference. Period.

SOURCE: “Urban Charter School Study Report on 41 Regions,” Center for Research on Education Outcomes (March 2015).

A new study published in the American Education Research Journal asks, “What Works in Gifted Education?” Five gifted education and curriculum researchers assess the impact of differentiated English language arts units on gifted third graders. The units—one on poetry and one on research—“reflect more advanced, complex, and abstract concepts,” as well as concepts normally introduced in the fourth and fifth grades. Analysts explain that “even advanced learners vary in their readiness levels, interests and preferred learning profile and learn best when these differences are accommodated.” (Differentiated instruction can be broadly conceived as modifying at least one of three key elements of curriculum: content, process, and product. The evaluated units primarily focus on the former.)

Researchers randomly assigned gifted classrooms to treatment and comparison conditions such that roughly 1,200 students from eighty-five gifted classrooms across eleven states participated in year one of the study, one thousand in year two, and seven hundred in year three (though the number of classrooms and states changed each year). The three years (2009–2012) comprised the three cohorts. All classes were pre-assessed using the Iowa Test of Basic Skills so that they could control for prior achievement, which is important because schools use different methods to identify gifted children. Authors also measured fidelity of implementation and found it to be moderate to high (teachers had access to webinars to explain how to teach the unit).

The results showed significant increases favoring the treatment group for every cohort/year combination. And whether students were in a pull-out or self-contained gifted setting did not impact their learning.

There was, however, one red flag: The outcome assessment was designed by the researchers themselves, as the data showed that students had topped out of standardized ELA tests prior to the study. So although analysts took care not to refer specifically to the content in the units and instead based items on third-grade standards across multiple states, it is likely that the treatment group benefited from a customized assessment that aligned more closely to the differentiated units.

Moreover, an important and touchy question looms: How does one design a well-crafted differentiated unit, ensure fidelity of implementation, and reliably demonstrate that it makes a difference for talented kids? Yes, all kids deserve customized learning plans—even the gifted ones. But right now, we don’t have good enough assessments to reliably measure their—or our—progress in meeting that goal.

SOURCE: Carolyn M. Callahan et al., “What Works in Gifted Education: Documenting the Effects of an Integrated Curricular/Instructional Model for Gifted Students,” American Education Research Journal, Vol. 52, No. 1 (February 2015).

The National Conference of State Legislatures has put together a nice primer on accountability for private school choice programs. Twenty-three states, one Colorado district, and the District of Columbia presently have such programs, including “traditional” tuition vouchers, education savings accounts, scholarship tax credits, and personal tax credits or deductions. Accountability requirements for schools participating in such programs vary widely. Most states require: 1) a measure of school quality (whether via student assessment data or outside accreditation), 2) determination of financial strength and sustainability, and 3) meeting minimum seat-time requirements. Once private schools are permitted to accept voucher students and public dollars begin to flow, the range of accountability measures—and the consequences of failing to meet them—broadens. Programs differ by the tests they require participating students to take (the same state assessments as their public school peers or tests of the schools’ own choosing), how and to whom test results are reported, whether outside accreditation can substitute for testing, and the level and timing of sanctions related to low performance. NCSL’s report provides an overview of the varying ways that these accountability measures function in Louisiana, Indiana, and Wisconsin. As we concluded in Fordham’s private school choice policy toolkit last year, “private schools must maintain their autonomy and the qualities that make them worth choosing,” but a “sound balance” is needed between that autonomy and the need for taxpayers to know that their education dollars are being spent on “bona fide educational achievement.” NCSL’s report provides helpful context for state legislatures trying to thread that needle while working to initiate private school choice programs or improve existing programs.

SOURCE: Josh Cunningham, “Accountability in Private School Choice Programs,” National Conference of State Legislatures (February 2015).