The Education Gadfly Weekly

Bad schools rarely die. This was the conclusion of Fordham’s 2010 report Are Bad Schools Immortal?, which discovered that out of two thousand low-performing schools across ten states, only 10 percent actually closed over a five-year period. On reflection, the finding was not too surprising: Shuttering schools nearly always sets off a torrent of political backlash, as authorities in Chicago, Philadelphia, and other urban districts have learned in recent years. And the reasons are understandable: Schools are integral parts of communities. They’re built into families’ routines and expectations, and closing them inevitably causes pain, disruption, and sadness, even when it’s best for students.

However, we also recognize that closing schools is sometimes necessary. In the charter sector, in particular, closure is an essential part of the model: Schools are supposed to perform or lose their contracts. That’s the bargain. And in the district sector, experience has taught us that some schools have been so dysfunctional, for so long, that efforts to “turn them around” are virtually destined to fail.

That doesn’t mean it’s easy to put bad schools out of their misery. Part of the difficulty is political, but it’s also a genuine moral dilemma: Are we sure that kids will be better off after their schools close? What is the quality of the remaining schools in their neighborhoods? Most importantly, do students gain or lose ground academically when their schools close and they are obliged to enroll somewhere else?

We know from personal experience how important, even agonizing, these questions are. In our role as a charter school authorizer in Ohio, we have blinked on a few occasions—choosing to keep marginal schools open because we worried that the children attending them might be even worse off if they had to move elsewhere. Were we right to do so?

To date, policymakers and practitioners have had precious little research to anchor their thinking and inform their decision making. We could only locate three relevant studies, and their conclusions differed on whether closures positively or negatively affected students.

The high stakes associated with school closures, and the paucity of prior research, led us to explore this terrain ourselves. The result is Fordham’s new study School Closures and Student Achievement: An Analysis of Ohio’s Urban Districts and Charter Schools, which brings to bear fresh empirical evidence on this critical issue. As it turns out, our home state of Ohio is fertile ground. Its large urban districts, referred to as the “Big Eight,” have faced sharply declining enrollment due to both shrinking populations and an influx of charter schools. Confronting the loss of more than fifty thousand pupils in just eight years, these districts have been forced to close scores of schools.

During the same period, dozens of charter schools have also closed for a variety of reasons, including financial difficulties and academic underperformance. In fact, Ohio’s automatic closure law, which is based on academic results, required twenty-three charters to close during the period of study.

Our study examined the achievement trends of 22,722 students in grades 3–8 who attended one of the 198 urban schools in Ohio that shut their doors between 2006 and 2012. These closures disproportionately affected low-income, low-achieving, and black students. To our knowledge, this is the first study to investigate separately the academic impact of closing charter schools. The study was conducted by Dr. Stéphane Lavertu of the Ohio State University and Dr. Deven Carlson of the University of Oklahoma, who used state records to examine the impact of closure.

Their most important finding is that school closure has significant positive impacts on the achievement of displaced students. The following figure displays the cumulative learning-gain estimates of displaced students by the third year after their schools closed. Displaced students from district schools that closed in urban areas gained, on average, forty-nine extra days of learning in reading relative to the comparison group; in math, it was thirty-four days. In the charter sector, students displaced from a closed school also made substantial gains in math—forty-six additional days—but did not make statistically significant gains in reading.

Figure 1: Impact of closure on displaced students, measured as cumulative student learning gains by the third year after closure

The analysts then focused on charter and district students who landed in higher-quality schools after closure, and there they found even larger cumulative learning gains. (We defined quality as a school’s contributions to student growth—its “value added,” in education parlance.) District students who landed in higher-quality schools gained an equivalent of sixty-nine extra days of learning in reading and sixty-three extra days of learning in math. When charter students moved to higher-quality schools, they gained an additional fifty-eight days of learning in reading and eighty-eight days of learning in math by the third year after their school closed.

We must register one caveat that tempers the positive findings on closures: When students displaced by closures enter their new schools, it is possible that they negatively impact the learning of students who had previously attended the school. Think of this as a possible “side effect” of the closure “treatment.” The study provides suggestive (but not conclusive) evidence that there might be minor side effects—the value-added scores of schools absorbing displaced students fall slightly. The net effect of closure remains an open empirical question.

These findings have two implications for policymakers. First, they should not shy away from closures as one way to improve urban education; they are a viable alternative to “turnarounds.”  As Andy Smarick and others have argued, fixing a chronically low-performing school is often more wishful thinking than promising strategy. Although successful school turnarounds are not impossible, Smarick is correct when he writes, “Today’s fixation with fix-it efforts is misguided.” This study adds hard evidence that shutting down low-quality schools could better serve students’ interests than endless (and fruitless) efforts to improve them.

Second, policymakers have to grapple with the mechanism of closing schools—whether they ought to shutter schools via top-down decisions or the marketplace. Interestingly, save for Ohio’s automatic closure law that was applied to a handful of charters, state policy did not directly shutter the schools in this study. Rather, population loss and the proliferation of school choice forced districts to close unneeded schools, while most charters closed due to stagnant enrollment, financial difficulties, or a combination of both.

In other words, Ohio’s experience with urban school closures was primarily market-driven. Families voted with their feet, and weaker schools withered and eventually died. And it worked. Most students—though not all—landed in higher-quality schools and made gains after closure. Could Ohio have done even better for its students, had school authorities closed schools more aggressively and strategically? Perhaps.

Though fraught with controversy and political peril, shuttering bad schools might just be a saving grace for students who need the best education they can get.

A vast amount of contemporary education policy attention and education reform energy has been lavished on the task of defining and gauging “college readiness” and then taking steps to align K–12 outcomes more closely with it. The ultimate goal is for many more young people to complete high school having been properly prepared for “college-level” work.

The entire Common Core edifice—and the assessments, cut scores, and accountability arrangements built atop it—presupposes that “college-ready” has the same definition that it has long enjoyed: students prepared to succeed, upon arrival at the ivied gates, in credit-bearing college courses that they go right into without needing first to subject themselves to “remediation” (now sometimes euphemized as “developmental education”).

But this goes way beyond Common Core. Advanced Placement courses also rest on the understanding that an “introductory college-level course” in a given subject has a certain set meaning and fixed standards. The people at ACT, the College Board, and NAGB have sweat bullets developing metrics that gauge what a twelfth grader must know and be able to do in order to be truly college-ready—again, in the sense of having solid prospects of succeeding in credit-bearing college courses in one subject or another.

Lying beneath all this are a thousand sad sagas of students who complete high school near the top of their class, having met all graduation requirements and gotten good grades, only to discover upon arrival in college—even community college—that they are not prepared to succeed. (That’s why so many colleges and universities, particularly the open-admission kind, administer their own placement tests to incoming students. High school success is enough for entry, but it just won’t cut it when it comes to readiness for college-level academics.)

All of which has led to the embarrassment and expense and frustration of widespread on-campus remediation. Matriculating students by the kazillion (it really does reach 75 percent in some colleges) are sent into high-school-level—even middle-school-level—courses that yield them no credit toward a college degree and often lead to discouraged kids dropping out. Such courses also cost plenty, whether that cost is borne by students (with loans!), parents, or taxpayers. When successful, though, they really do qualify students to tackle credit-bearing, college-level courses that can yield a degree of some worth in the real world.

The idea of graduating more “college-ready” kids from high school is intended to lighten the remediation burden, soup up the K–12 curriculum, shift graduation expectations from course completion to standards attainment, make college attendance and completion closer to universal (especially for poor and minority kids), bring overdue alignment to the junction between K–12 and higher education, and ultimately reduce the costly, dysfunctional exasperation of millions of college students taking classes that yield no college credit. Make the K–12 system do it right the first time!

But what if “college-ready” no longer means that you actually have to be prepared to succeed in credit-bearing college courses? Or if “credit-bearing courses” are so diluted that more people appear “prepared” to succeed in them, even though such success means less than it once did?

I’m not imagining this scenario. It’s beginning to play out in the unreal world of American higher education, including perhaps the most surprising place of all: the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, site of the much-lauded “Massachusetts education miracle.” Take, for example, recent actions from the Bay State’s Board of Higher Education. Among its myriad questionable decisions, the state now permits a 2.7 high-school GPA to substitute for passing a college-administered placement test. In practice, this means that high school teachers will set the “college-ready” bar every time they give students a grade of B-minus or better. Worse, a kid with a D in math but good grades in photography, gym, and basket weaving could easily end up with a 2.7 GPA and find himself in a credit-bearing college math course. And we haven’t even mentioned the wide variability in grading standards from classroom to classroom, school to school, district to district, and state to state. So much for Common Core—and every other attempt to forge uniform academic standards.

If you’re not already ill, consider what happened when they did something similar in Florida’s twenty-eight “open-access” institutions of higher education:

Alarmed by the high dropout and failure rates for college students who start out in remedial classes, Florida lawmakers voted last year to make such courses, and even the related placement tests, optional for anyone who…earned a [high school] diploma….The optional-remediation law is forcing professors in college-level composition classes to spend time on basic sentence structure, while mathematics teachers who were ready to plunge into algebra are going over fractions.

Not only is middle school content finding its way into college classrooms, college credit is being awarded for learning it!

Talk about “defining deviancy down”!

Worse, this dumbing down—always with the noblest of intentions, of course—carries the imprimatur of advocacy groups like Complete College America, headed by respected former Indiana Commissioner for Higher Education Stan Jones and generously supported by the likes of Gates, Carnegie, Helmsley, and Lumina. These folks staunchly support the Common Core, too, “college-ready” and all (and some of them support our work at Fordham). Is it possible they don’t see the contradiction between “college-ready” and “corequisite remediation,” one of the five big “game changers” being pushed by Dr. Jones and his team (and being snapped up by at least three states, according to their website)?

Their intentions really are noble. We know that placement exams aren’t perfect, and some kids who could do credit-bearing work are being put into remediation, where they get demoralized. But those are students near the college-ready bar, not functioning at the level of middle school math. And this problem can be tackled by adding relevant information to the college’s course placement decisions, not by substituting meaningless GPAs for on-campus placement.

What, you may reasonably wonder, is “corequisite remediation” besides gobbledygook? Here’s the key sentence: “Make enrollment in college-level courses the default for many more students.”

Which means, of course: Do not send them to remediation, no matter how ill-prepared they may be for college-level work as traditionally defined. Put them in credit-bearing courses anyway.

Yes, some students (and some professors) will rise to that challenge. But what’s the surest way to make this “default” strategy succeed, and thereby prove that it was a great reform? You don’t need a college education to answer that one! Just teach fractions and sentence structure to students in courses that you label “college-level”—even though they’re not. Dumb ‘em down. Cheapen the currency. And again defraud the students (and anyone who might someday contemplate employing them) into believing that they really were prepared for college and are now getting a college education, even though neither of those statements is actually true.

Recent days have brought further evidence that the “everyone should go to college” campaign remains powerful, not just in the United States but in many other parts of the world. And all this insistence comes with practically no attention paid (as editors of The Economist noted the other week) to whether anybody is actually learning anything in college. There’s a strong possibility that that sought-after degree is more “signaling credential” than evidence of a well-stocked brain.

There’s already concern about the integrity and value of the college degree. This isn’t just because there are so many more of them, but also because of mounting evidence that many people earning them still have troubling gaps in their skills and knowledge. More and more employers now seek either postgraduate degrees or entirely different kinds of credentials having more to do with demonstrated competency than with credits earned. Research also shows certain degrees—in specific fields and/or from specific institutions—to be far more valuable than others. The last thing American education needs—and a potentially mortal wound to other reform efforts—is to further cheapen the meaning of “college-educated.” Which cannot be severed entirely from the meaning of “college-ready.”

Aside from generalized fretting over “curricular narrowing,” educators and education policy types have been so consumed in recent years by the crises of the moment—the fracases over Common Core, the new assessments (and their opt-outers), the worrying achievement reports that may follow in the autumn, and how all that does or doesn’t intersect with NCLB reauthorization—that practically nobody has focused on “social studies” courses like history, geography, and civics. (Yes, there have been pot-shots aplenty at the AP framework for U.S. history, but little or no attention to what’s happening in earlier grades.)

Today’s hot-off-the-presses NAEP results should refocus us, at least briefly, because they’re anything but hot. In truth, they’re chilling.

NAEP tested eighth graders in all three subjects last year, and the reports are just out. The bottom line: “In 2014, eighteen percent of eighth graders performed at or above the Proficient level in U.S. history, 27 percent performed at or above the Proficient level in geography, and 23 percent performed at or above the Proficient level in civics.”

Which is to say that three quarters of the kids are less than proficient, a worse showing than in reading and math (both now around 36 percent proficient among eighth graders). And they’re not getting better, even while there’s been modest improvement in both subjects at the center of standards-based reform. And, as always, the news gets more complicated—but not much better—when the student population is disaggregated. Although individual racial subsets do show gains (masked in the overall scores by the phenomenon known as “Simpson’s Paradox”), it remains the stark fact that “proficient” black and Latino youngsters numbered only in the single digits in 2014.

Overall, these data mean that the overwhelming majority of American fourteen-year-olds cannot correctly answer questions like this one:

Which of the following is a belief shared by most people of the United States?

A.    The country should have a single political party.

B.     The country should have an official religion.

C.     The government should be a democracy.

D.    The government should guarantee everybody a job.

Particularly as another election season heats up, it’s not crazy to ask whether we Americans truly know enough to govern ourselves wisely.

If that thought is too cosmic or depressing, you can instead reflect on the challenge awaiting our high schools (and colleges) as these kids walk through their doors. But since nobody is paying any attention to history, geography,y or civics, it’s hard to imagine those institutions successfully rising to that challenge.

Thanks, NAEP, for another freezing shower.

• There are no fearsome beasts or rings of fire, but Marc Tucker’s newest jeremiad for Education Week is an apocalyptic prophecy worthy of a revival tent. Speculating on the origins of our collapsed standards, Tucker settles on four horsemen of academic mediocrity: grade inflation, the eroding prestige of the teaching profession, a standards movement hijacked by the accountability movement, and the consumer transformation of colleges and universities. Taken together, he claims, these factors have produced four decades of educational stagnation and a climate in which colleges teach high school math—and high schools teach grade grubbing. As Fordham’s own Chester Finn reminds us, we’ve been dumbing down our expectations for decades, and the results justify some doom saying.
• Like the rose that grew from concrete, the inimitable Dan Willingham has taken his talents over to the Washington Post’s Answer Sheet blog for a five-part series on reading. His terrific posts, of which three have been published so far, advance arguments from his new book. They will also raise points familiar to fans of Fordham’s own literacy guru, Robert Pondiscio. In the first, Willingham mounts a defense of the Common Core standards as a powerful catalyst for early literacy. By building a strong base of knowledge in subjects like science, social studies, and geography, he writes, the standards prepare young readers for a world of diverse texts. Robert’s been banging that drum so long (often by referring to Willingham’s research) that we only let him talk about baseball now. Editors at major newspapers: Who’s interested in an ongoing column focused on civics education and the National League East?
• In a perfect long read for the weekend, Commonwealth Magazine offers a thorough and bracing take on the New York Mets of state education outcomes, Massachusetts. After enacting landmark reform legislation more than twenty years ago and passing a sorely needed update in 2010 (note to Congress: Renew your education laws), the state famously leapt from middling academic performance to front-runner status. It still oversees pockets of persistently disappointing school failure, however, in economically troubled cities like Lawrence and Springfield. The article provides a great look at the new Republican governor’s efforts to deal with the familiar issues of poverty, high-stakes testing, and turnaround schools.

Education technology in general—and digital games specifically—can be easily dismissed as yet another Next Big Thing that’s doomed to disappoint. If your standard prescription for schools and teaching is high standards, rigorous instruction, and rich curriculum, you might be tempted to roll your eyes at Greg Toppo’s new book on the potential of digital games to change K–12 education, The Game Believes in You. Toppo is no pie-eyed fanboy nattering on about digital natives, paradigm shifts, innovation, and disruption. The national education reporter for USA Today and a former classroom teacher, Toppo makes a compelling case for games as not merely engaging, (the default setting for mere enthusiasts and marketers) but cognitively demanding. A well-designed game is fun, but it’s rigorous fun.

Toppo makes a convincing case that savvy teachers have always used games to involve kids in learning. He’s at his best describing games like DragonBox, a “lovely, mysterious, and a bit off-center” diversion that seems unusually good at getting pre-schoolers—yes, pre-schoolers—to think algebraically. Likewise, what is a multi-level game if not an adaptive assessment that kids want to participate in? But the most compelling argument running through the book is the infinite malleability of well-designed games. If differentiated instruction is the fool’s gold standard of effective teaching, games hold out the promise of a new and rich seam of the real thing. “A well-designed game sits and waits...and waits,” he writes. “It doesn’t care if that wearisome math problem takes you fifteen seconds or four hours. Do it again. Take all day. The game believes in you.” It also knows students and their abilities better than anyone. The right game, Toppo makes clear, can be something close to a perfect differentiation and assessment engine.

The “well-designed” bit is, of course, the rub—and where the mischief begins. In a chat about the book at Fordham, Toppo quipped, "I really hope that gaming is not the Next Big Thing in education. Because the Next Big Thing in education always sucks. It always fails. I hope it's the Next Small Thing, and it just keeps going under the radar. Keep it away from the real rule-makers." Wise fellow. Many educational fads start out as compelling insights, then collapse beneath the weight of enthusiasts’ cheers and the hucksters’ attempts to cash in. 

I came to The Game Believes in You as a skeptic. I finished it as an agnostic—I’m willing to be convinced that well-designed games have much to teach those Toppo calls “the real rule-makers” about differentiation, assessment, and curriculum—not just student engagement.

SOURCE: Greg Toppo, The Game Believes in You: How Digital Play Can Make Our Kids Smarter (New York: Palgrave Macmillian, 2015).

A February study from the Center for Education Data and Research aims to determine if National Board Certified Teachers (NBCTs) are more effective than their non-certified counterparts. Established in 1987, National Board Certification is a voluntary professional credential designed for experienced teachers in twenty-five content areas. Certification is awarded through a rigorous portfolio assessment process consisting of four components: content knowledge; differentiation in instruction; teaching practice and classroom environment; and effective and reflective practices. These components are analyzed via teacher “artifacts,” including videos of classroom lessons, student work, and reflective essays. Across the country, more than 100,000 teachers, or roughly 3 percent of the teacher workforce, are National Board Certified.

This study examines data out of Washington State, which boasts the fourth-highest number of NBCTs in the country. Washington provides financial incentives for teachers to earn board certification, including bonuses of up to $5,000 for teachers working in high-need schools. The study finds that, compared to average teachers with similar experience, NBCTs produce additional student learning gains on state exams that correspond to about 1–2 additional weeks of middle school reading instruction. In middle school math, the results indicate a whopping five weeks of additional learning compared to non-NBCTs with similar experience. In other words, NBCTs post strong “value-added” results. The researchers also find that teachers with higher scores on the national board assessment program are more effective than those with lower scores: An increase of one standard deviation in teacher assessment scores corresponds to 3–5 weeks of student learning gains (though this varies across certification areas).

An interesting component of national board certification is the option for teachers to “bank” their scores—if a teacher fails to earn NBCT certification on their first attempt, they are permitted to keep their scores in areas where they did well and resubmit their work in areas where they performed poorly. When researchers took a closer look at teachers who don’t achieve certification after their first attempt, they found no evidence that initially unsuccessful NBCTs are more effective than non-NBCTs—except in the case of middle school math, where initially unsuccessful NBCTs are still more effective than those who never earn certification. Even more fascinating: Initially unsuccessful NBCTs are less effective than NBCTs who successfully earn certification on their first attempt. This leads the researchers to conclude that, although variations exist depending on the type of national board certification, a teacher’s first attempt at national board certification “contains more useful information about teacher effectiveness than subsequent attempts.” Nevertheless, the big takeaway here is that NBCTs are more effective overall than non-NBCTs. Whether the student achievement gains are worth the program’s significant cost is a question for another day.

SOURCE: James Cowan and Dan Goldhaber, “National Board Certification and Teacher Effectiveness: Evidence from Washington.” Center for Education Data & Research (February 2015).