The Education Gadfly Weekly

With the end of the school year fast approaching and the annual testing window closing, we can make some preliminary judgments about what's signal and what's noise in the debate over parents opting their children out of state assessments. There have been missteps and lessons for those on both sides of the issue. Four have struck me hard.

1) Respect parental choice. Education reformers who support testing may not agree with parents' decision to opt out. But it's senseless to argue that parents know best when it comes to choosing their child's school, yet are ill-informed when it comes to opting out. Parental choice is like free speech; the test of your belief is whether you still support it when you dislike how it's used. My fellow U.S. News contributor Rick Hess writes that education reformers have dismissed test refusers as "conspiracy theorists and malcontents." That overstates things, but no matter. Those of us who value testing need to do a better job of explaining to unhappy parents what's in it for them. But we also must respect parental prerogative, whether or not we like where it leads.

2) Don't follow the money. Parents have every right and reason to be concerned with the deleterious effects of testing, particularly curriculum narrowing and excessive time given over to test prep. But the complaint that testing only benefits corporate interests is odd, to say the least. I can't name a single thing in a classroom, from smart boards and textbooks to juice boxes and No. 2 pencils, that isn't sold to schools at a profit. We're a capitalist country, and most Americans are fine with that. "The test prep industry is lucrative," writes anti-testing NPR reporter Anya Kamenetz, who also points to a report that calculated $669 million spent on tests in 45 states, or $27 per student. That's it? The desk on which your kid takes his tests (or carves his name) costs four times that amount.

3) Black test scores matter. If reformers risk alienating parents, the opt-out movement has its own problems with people of color and their interest groups. This week, a dozen civil rights groups issued a statement in support of testing, noting that when parents opt out, even over legitimate concerns, "they're not only making a choice for their own child, they're inadvertently making a choice to undermine efforts to improve schools for every child." Opt-out advocates simply dismissed this worried declaration. "Instead of stimulating worthy discussions about over-testing, cultural bias in tests, and the misuse of test data," responded the anti-reform Network for Public Education in the Washington Post, "these activists would rather claim a false mantle of civil rights activism." Seriously? If reformers need to respect parents' decision to opt out of tests, the opt-out activists might at least assume that groups like the NAACP, the National Urban League, and the National Council of La Raza are qualified to judge their members' interests.

4) Unions are driving discontent. I agree with my Fordham colleague, Mike Petrilli, who attributes larger numbers of test refusals in New York and New Jersey to unions in those states rallying allies, "especially left-leaning parents, to make a statement." I disagree, however, that parents everywhere else are fine with testing. It just might not yet have reached the level of urgency elsewhere.

It's still too soon to gauge whether the opt-out movement is a true groundswell of opposition, a union-driven blip on the radar, or something in between. Empirical data on the depth and breadth of test refusals are hard to come by. But if I had to predict, I'd guess the enduring impact of the opt-out impulse will be to force a measure of clarity on states and localities regarding the role of testing—and a gut-check moment for the education reform movement on its priorities.

Opt-out activists have correctly identified test data as the mother's milk of reform efforts. (That cuts both ways; robbing "the system" of your kid's test data robs you of an objective measure of your child's academic standing.) Those data have driven the contemporary reform movement, lending it the moral authority to push for higher standards, parental choice, and charter schools. The result has been a period of unprecedented school dynamism, especially in educationally neglected inner cities.

Test data also fueled the teacher accountability movement, perhaps the greatest overreach in the reform playbook and surely the source of much of the anger driving the opt-out movement. Hess observed that the reform agenda "was crafted with the troubles of the inner-city in mind…many suburban and middle-class parents have issues when those reforms are extended to the schools that educate their children." He's right. When well-loved teachers at popular suburban schools tell parents, fairly or not, that testing undermines their work and keeps them awake at night worrying about their jobs, reformers cannot expect those parents to sit idly by.

If reformers want the data that testing provides, they may simply have to abandon attempts to tie test scores to individual teachers. Personally, I think that's a fair exchange. Test scores in a single classroom can have at least as much to do with class composition, curriculum, and district-mandated pedagogies as teacher effectiveness. Uncoupling tests from high-stakes teacher accountability to preserve the case for higher standards, charters, and choice might be the reasonable way forward. Ultimately, there may be no other choice.

My advice to my fellow education reformers is to play the long game, remaining mindful of both the sunlight and disinfectant power of student achievement data on the one hand, and of our own rhetoric on parental prerogative and local control on the other. No one is more invested in student achievement than states, localities, and parents. The reform fight is for higher standards and good, transparent data. Preserve those at all costs. If it turns out that schools post mediocre scores and parents aren't spurred to act at least as energetically as they have to the excesses of testing, we are in far deeper trouble than we think.

• With the hue and cry surrounding big policy issues like testing, school choice, accountability, and labor, too little bandwidth remains for district- and building-level ideas that can spark energy in new directions. In the pages of Education Next, Fordham Senior Visiting Fellow Peter Meyer tells the tangled story of one such innovation: New York City’s small high schools. An early fixation of philanthreformers like Walter Annenberg and Bill Gates, the broader movement away from colossal public schools and toward more manageable, specialized academies was for years widely viewed as a failed effort; students could be sorted into the redesigned schools, but curriculum and instruction always seemed to lag. New York’s effort, the brainchild of Mayor Michael Bloomberg and Chancellor Joel Klein, changed all that by providing institutional backing behind the initiative. Rather than scattering isolated seeds throughout an otherwise unaltered system, the city’s leaders directly engaged educators to develop a broad and resilient base of some two hundred schools. Maybe it shouldn’t be surprising that breaking up crowded behemoths into fun-sized institutions of learning increases graduation rates for low-income kids, but this tactic is an avenue to academic success that hasn’t been given the recognition it’s due. Thankfully, that’ll change later this year, when an expanded version of Meyer’s essay appears in Fordham’s new volume on upward mobility.
• The recent education triumphs of the commonwealth of Kentucky also deserve more attention. Yes, everyone knows that it’s the home of bourbon, bluegrass, raffish basketball coaches, and the Derby, but they might be surprised to hear that it’s also blossoming on the learning front. A recent Wall Street Journal story chronicled the state’s early and successful implementation of the Common Core. While legislatures across the country hemmed and hawed about whether even to adopt the standards, the Bluegrass State went to work. 2015 marks the fourth year of testing under the new regime, and the results to date are more than promising. The statewide graduation rate now beats the national average, up twelve points from the pre-Common Core era; the percentage of graduates deemed college- and career-ready has also seen a spike; and the list of schools in need of improvement has shrunk. Not bad at all.
• Not all early Common Core adopters have equally good news to report, however. Dedicated readers may remember Long Island high school principal Carol Burris, who authored a book in support of the standards only to abruptly flip-flop on them the very next year. Now she’s taking her unshakeable convictions and bounteous pension into retirement. We have no doubt that she’ll make good use of the extra hours in the day—the long, twilight struggle against high standards is an all-consuming one, and she’ll no doubt be busy penning editorials for the Answer Sheet blog and getting her clock cleaned in public debates. The Gadfly hereby wishes her many sunset years during which to remind her children, and her children’s children, what it was like in America when they were free to be failed by their schools. 

Cohabitation continues between the U.S. Department of Education and the National Institute for Early Education Research (NIEER). And they don't appear to be practicing birth control, because every year brings one or two new joint products. NIEER's hot-off-the-presses report—the tenth in its series of annual "state of preschool" data-and-advocacy scorecards—was again paid for via a multi-year sole-source contract from the National Center for Education Statistics, and was released at an event featuring none other than Arne Duncan.

Nobody is making any effort to conceal this romance (which is just as well if you believe in governmental transparency).

Its progeny, however, all seem to look alike. This report is more of the same: a celebration of various increases in state-funded early childhood programs, strong recommendations for yet more increases, sundry state-by-state comparisons, and individual state profiles. The only difference between it and the most recent one published by the Education Department itself is that NIEER's policy advocacy is naked while the federal versions at least wear diapers.

Aside from the question of whether Uncle Sam should be paying for this, my biggest issue continues to be NIEER's woeful definition of preschool "quality." At least eight of their ten "national quality standards" are input-centered, based on credentials, ratios, and such. Yes, they also want states to have "early learning standards," but these are so nebulous that all fifty-three state programs are said to have "comprehensive" ones in place—the only category among the ten for which every state gets a checkmark. And while the NIEER standards call for site visits at least every five years, they seem to settle for the mere act of visiting, not for rigorous monitoring of whether these programs actually accomplish anything. More like bean counting and box checking.

I do not doubt that this relationship will last, at least until the present contract between NIEER and NCES is concluded. It's evident that both parties welcome this efficient alignment of their agendas, and they're surely having fun together. But why hasn't anyone in Congress even asked whether celibacy might not be a sounder public policy?

SOURCE: W. Steven Barnett et al., “The State of Preschoool 2014,” National Institute for Early Education Research (May 2015).

Whenever I review compelling research, I end up mentally pairing it with a corresponding work of literature. Maybe it’s the liberal arts student in me (or maybe it’s because I flunked stats and require an alternative frame of reference). Take for example this study of comparative school funding and performance in Nashville, which brought Dickens to mind almost immediately. Compiled by the education advisory firm Afton Partners on behalf of the Tennessee Charter School Center, it makes perfectly clear that for this city’s charters, it’s both the best of times and the worst of times. “Mean academic performance for all grades is significantly higher for charter-managed schools,” it reads, “though MNPS [Metropolitan Nashville Public Schools] spent approximately $100 more per pupil on district-managed schools.”

A measly c-note may not sound like much—in this instance, it’s the difference between roughly $9,800 and $9,700 annually—but that discrepancy only represents one chapter of this twisted tale of two funding standards. The per-pupil analysis doesn’t include a $73 million gap in capital support between district schools and charters. Meanwhile, those same neglected charters are reporting mean scores on the APF (Academic Performance Framework, a statewide metric that includes test scores, graduation rates, college readiness, and other data) that are 56 percent higher than their district-managed counterparts. Metro Nashville charters are fulfilling great expectations in other respects, too, accounting for a disproportionate chunk of the city’s best schools and being held up as a model for other states. So why are they forced, like Oliver Twist, to beg for more?

The solutions put forward in the study seem promising, if sketchy. Among other measures, it pushes for the creation of a longer-term district operating plan and a review of grant allocation practices. It’s hard to know whether these recommendations would suffice, but if Nashville stands pat, its kids will increasingly come to inhabit a bleak schoolhouse of the city’s own devising: Over the next ten years, charter enrollment in Tennessee’s capital is expected to expand by over ten thousand students while district schools lose close to four thousand. Let’s hope these awkward revelations wake up the Scrooges who have thus far denied equal funding to all schools. Otherwise, we can only hope they’ll be visited by spirits in the night.

SOURCE: “MNPS Expenditures and Academic Outcomes: Long Term Opportunities for the District,” Tennessee Charter School Center (April 2015).

This book, an updated edition of Stanford professor Jo Boaler’s seminal 2008 work of the same name, tackles an important if familiar issue: The United States has a mathematics problem. On the 2012 iteration of PISA, the international test administered by the OECD, we ranked thirty-sixth out of sixty-five countries in math performance—and twenty-seventh out of thirty-four among OECD members. More ominously, 70 percent of students attending two-year colleges require remedial math courses—which only one in ten successfully passes.

Boaler argues that American math education is ineffective for three reasons: First, classroom learning is too passive, with teachers lecturing from the blackboard instead of actively interacting with their students. Second, instruction doesn’t emphasize understanding and critical thought, leaning instead on memorization and regurgitation. And third, the contexts in which content is taught don’t reflect the way math is used in everyday life. Take for example the following textbook question: “A pizza is divided into fifths for five friends at a party. Three of the friends eat their slices, but then four more friends arrive. What fractions should the remaining two slices be divided into?” When, in real life, would you need this, when you could just order more pizza? This flawed approach leaves students ill prepared to use what they’ve learned in new situations, leading to both failure on assessments and widespread aversion to mathematics.

Boaler also expertly illustrates that this problem goes beyond poor scores on assessments. America’s math problem endangers the country’s future global competitiveness. For example, she cites research by Cal State/Northridge’s Julie Gainsburg, which concludes that “[t]he traditional K-12 mathematics curriculum, with its focus on performing computational manipulations, is unlikely to prepare students for the problem-solving demands of the high-tech workplace.” 

Boaler praises the Common Core State Standards for their inclusion of mathematical practices such as problem solving, sense making, perseverance, and reasoning. These “ways of being mathematical” are of critical importance for students trying to become successful in math. As she concludes in one chapter, “it is impossible to know exactly which mathematical methods will be most helpful in the future, [therefore] it is so important that schools develop flexible thinkers who can draw from a variety of mathematical principles in solving problems.”

As a former math teacher, I found this book to be a delightful mix of moments of familiarity (“Been there, tried that.”) and moments of clarity (“I really wish I had known that back when…”). And unlike other texts that attempt to define and describe effective math instruction but only serve up platitudes and trite techniques, it offers practical ways to help all math learners. Boaler may not be a popular figure among teachers and reformers who favor a more traditional approach, but everyone else should find her work interesting, readable, and actionable.

SOURCE: Jo Boaler, What's Math Got to Do with It?: How Teachers and Parents Can Transform Mathematics Learning and Inspire Success (New York: Penguin Book, 2015).