The Education Gadfly Weekly

The tenth anniversary of Hurricane Katrina provided a much-needed occasion to reflect on the progress of the city’s schools since the floodwaters receded. One of the most important questions is whether New Orleans can stand as a national model for those seeking to transform the education—and therefore the life outcomes—of low-income children of color. I’m not completely sold yet.

In the wake of the storm, New Orleans’s education system was rebuilt virtually from scratch. More than one hundred low-performing schools were placed under the jurisdiction of Louisiana’s Recovery School District (RSD), which was created in 2003 to take over and reverse the fortunes of chronically disappointing public schools throughout the state. At a stroke, the city’s public school system was functionally transformed; today it’s a virtually all-charter “replacement district.” More than 90 percent of New Orleans public school students attend a charter school, with the RSD overseeing 70 percent of the city’s overall K–12 student population.

When reform-friendly commenters and cheerleading journalists write about the NOLA transformation, it’s become de rigueur to offer a standard qualifier--words to the effect of, “We still have a long way to go, but…” In this formulation, poor overall reading and math proficiency based on standardized test scores is a mere speed bump before long and laudatory discussions of the remarkable growth demonstrated by the city’s charter schools and students since Katrina.

And to be clear, the growth really is remarkable. A study led by Tulane’s Douglas N. Harris found that the New Orleans reform efforts resulted in student learning gains of 0.4 standard deviations. “To put this 0.4 standard deviation in context, the black-white achievement gap is about the size of one standard deviation,” wrote Neerav Kingsland, the former CEO of New Schools for New Orleans and a key player in the city’s education revival. “Meaning in the years after Hurricane Katrina, New Orleans students and educators achieved an effect that is almost half the size of the black-white gap in this country,” he added.

Low-income students in New Orleans are without question getting a better education than they would have had Katrina never occurred. But before we anoint New Orleans as the beau ideal for urban education reform, let me pose this question: If you're a low-income person of color who wants a great public education for your child, is New Orleans where you want to be right now? The fairest answer I can think to offer is this: Maybe someday, but not yet. Cities with smaller but higher-performing charter sectors, such as Boston or New York or even Washington, D.C., would be my first choice.

Macke Raymond, the director of Stanford University’s Center for Research on Education Outcomes (CREDO), agrees. “First, pick a state with strong NAEP averages. Second, find a community where the average achievement is at or above the state average,” she told me in an interview. “Third, find a charter, if you can, that bests the community average.” Using this formula, New Orleans wouldn’t clear the first hurdle to become the go-to city for our theoretical low-SES family, since Louisiana is one of the poorest-performing states in the country on NAEP. And students in the Recovery School District, while gaining rapidly, still trail Louisiana’s statewide averages in math and reading.

The CREDO study released earlier this year showed that, in the aggregate, urban charter schools provide “significantly higher levels of annual growth in both math and reading” when compared to traditional public schools in the same regions. The effect was particularly notable for low-income students of color. The study noted that urban areas like Boston, Detroit, Indianapolis, Memphis, and Nashville “appear to provide their students with strong enough annual growth in both math and reading that continuous enrollment in an average charter school can erase the typical deficit seen among students in their region.”

To be clear, New Orleans charters' results were among the strongest in the CREDO study. But they’re still not achieving at the levels that will ensure their students success in college and an on-ramp into the middle class. An oft-repeated statistic in recent weeks is that prior to Katrina, 64 percent of public school students were attending “failing” schools; today it’s in the single-digits. Bravo. But to be blunt, there are acres of daylight between “not failing” and “excellent.”

Likewise, it is seldom asked whether New Orleans’s gains are a function of the structural changes put in place since Katrina, or whether a massive and non-replicable infusion of talent make it closer to a one-time event. This is a question asked by Harris himself, who described the effects he’s measured in New Orleans as “the ceiling of what's possible with this kind of approach.”

“I don't think you'd see the same effects in other places because the conditions here were distinctive. You have a lot of people from around the country wanting to come here to help in a way that you're not going to have in Detroit, for example. It's the center of school reform. So you have a lot of very talented people who want to be part of school reform who are going to come to New Orleans. If you want to build a tech company, you go to Palo Alto. If you want to be involved in school reform, you come to New Orleans, and that's not going to be true in other places. There's only one Silicon Valley,” he noted in an interview with Matt Barnum of the Seventy Four.

Comparisons between small-scale, selective chartering in cities that are starved for high-quality options (read: nearly every major city in America) and the efforts in a city like New Orleans— which is attempting to scale up to an entire system—are difficult to make and, moreover, fundamentally unfair. But given the limits of resources, especially talent, it is not unfair to suggest we are a long way from having the capacity to replicate in a satisfying and purposeful way what has been accomplished in Louisiana. And again, what has been accomplished remains modest in terms of student achievement. The strategic question for the charter sector might be which horse to back in the short- to medium-term: selective chartering or a district-wide replacement strategy? My money is still on the former.

Frankly, I don’t see a lot of upside for the charter sector in allowing its reach to exceed its grasp. In the main, Americans are broadly supportive of charter schools. An excess of ambition will do the sector no favors.

New Orleans is doing very well. But let’s think long and hard before trying to graft its approach onto other cities.

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Standardized tests are commonly blamed for narrowing the school curriculum to reading and math. That’s one reason Congress is considering changes in the law that could lead states to put less emphasis on test scores. But even if we abolished standardized tests tomorrow, a majority of elementary schools would continue to pay scant attention to subjects like history and science.

Consider this: In 1977, twenty-five years before No Child Left Behind ushered in the era of high-stakes testing, elementary school teachers spent only about fifty minutes each day on science and social studies combined. True, in 2012, they spent even less time on those subjects—but only by about ten minutes.

The root cause of today’s narrow elementary curriculum isn’t testing, although that has exacerbated the trend. It’s a longstanding pedagogical notion that the best way to teach kids reading comprehension is by giving them skills—strategies like “finding the main idea”—rather than instilling knowledge about things like the Civil War or human biology.

Many elementary students spend hours practicing skills-based strategies, reading a book about zebras one day and a story about wizards the next.

That’s a problem for all students: Spending hours finding the main idea can get pretty boring. But it’s a particular problem for low-income students, because they’re the least likely to acquire the kind of knowledge they need at home.

Skills are important. But as the cognitive scientist Daniel T. Willingham and others have demonstrated, you can’t improve reading comprehension just by practicing free-floating skills. For students to understand what they’re reading, they need relevant background knowledge and vocabulary.

The education theorist E. D. Hirsch Jr. has argued for thirty years that elementary schools need to focus on knowledge. Mr. Hirsch’s ideas were long dismissed as encouraging a reactionary cultural tradition, but they are now beginning to command new respect among education reformers. And that’s largely because of the new Common Core education standards, currently in effect in more than forty states and the District of Columbia.

While critics blame the Common Core for further narrowing curricula, the authors of the standards actually saw them as a tool to counteract that trend. They even included language stressing the importance of “building knowledge systematically.”

But that language has gone largely unnoticed. The standards themselves—and the Common Core-aligned tests that many students nationwide first took this past spring—don’t specify what knowledge students should learn in each grade, because they’re designed to be used across the country. And in the United States, a school’s curriculum is a matter of local control. Most educators, guided by the standards alone, have continued to focus on skills.

As Mr. Willingham has argued, all reading comprehension tests are really “knowledge tests in disguise.” Rather than assessing kids on material they’ve actually been taught, the tests give them passages and questions on a seemingly random assortment of topics. The more general knowledge a student has, the better her chances.

The old tests, which varied from state to state, were generally easier to game—for example, by eliminating obviously wrong multiple choice answers. The new tests ask students to read more sophisticated passages and then cite evidence from them in their answers. That’s hard to do if you don’t have enough knowledge to understand the passages in the first place.

The advantages of a knowledge-rich curriculum aren’t just a matter of speculation. A foundation started by Mr. Hirsch in 1986 has developed just such a curriculum, Core Knowledge Language Arts, which is used in elementary schools across the country. A recent pilot program in New York City showed that elementary students in public schools that used C.K.L.A. outperformed their peers in reading, science, and social studies.

More recently, we’ve seen evidence that a knowledge-focused curriculum can lead to better results on Common Core-aligned tests, which New York began using two years ago. Two high-performing charter networks in New York City, Success Academy and Icahn, both rely on a content-rich approach.

Some charter schools and traditional public school districts across the country have started to retool their methods. New York State has developed a free online curriculum that has been downloaded nearly twenty million times.

More schools may follow suit if scores from the spring tests, set to arrive this fall, plummet—even for many schools that were previously considered high-achieving. But engineering the switch from skills to knowledge will take real effort.

Schools will need to develop coherent curricula and adopt different ways of training teachers and evaluating progress. Because the federal government can’t simply mandate a focus on knowledge, change will need to occur piecemeal at the level of states, school districts, or individual schools.

While standardized tests didn’t cause the curriculum to narrow, they’re a useful reminder that some students have acquired much less knowledge than others. But if we want to finally begin to remedy that, we can’t just teach the skills the tests seem to call for.

Natalie Wexler writes about public education in Washington, D.C., at DC Eduphile and Greater Greater Washington.

Editor’s note: This post originally appeared in a slightly different form in the New York Times.

Monkey Business Images Ltd/Monkey Business/Thinkstock

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A school district should never go broke. But unfortunately, they can, and do. Take Pennsylvania’s beleaguered Chester Upland School District. Teachers will once again work for free as the district faces a $22 million deficit, which the Washington Post reports could grow to $46 million. The district of approximately three thousand students was first tagged as “financially distressed” in 1994, and since then, its enrollment has declined by nearly 60 percent even as special education costs have risen substantially. Neither of these developments came as a surprise. Yet the district still overspent its coffers by $45 million between 2003 and 2012, despite millions in few-strings-attached bailouts by the state over the same period. In 2012, Chester Upland ran out of money completely and the teachers agreed to work without pay; that same year, the state finally enacted legislation to do something other than hand out more cash. Under Act 141, the state could declare small districts in financial distress, allow them to apply for loans, and appoint a chief recovery officer (CRO) to oversee finances.

Since 2010, Chester Upland has received $75 million (an enormous sum, considering that its yearly budget is somewhere around $120 million); and yet its deficit persists. Only now is Governor Tom Wolf proposing direct interventions in the form of appointing a financial turnaround specialist, requiring the district to submit to a financial audit, and mandating significant changes to district spending.

Compare Chester Upland to Philadelphia, twenty miles up Interstate 95. In 1998, then-Superintendent David Hornbeck threatened to shut down the financially strapped district and filed lawsuits to force the state to provide additional funding. The state responded with an emergency bailout Two years later, it enacted a law allowing it to replace the local board with a School Reform Commission (SRC), though only in “first-class” districts (those serving cities with at least one million residents, which only included Philadelphia). The state department of education then signed a “Declaration of Distress” for Philadelphia, and since then, several hundreds of millions of dollars have flowed into the district. Yet even these haven’t saved Philadelphia schools from financial trouble; the district projects a deficit of nearly $85 million at the end of FY 2016.

Chester Upland and Philadelphia are two sides of the same policy coin. Our recent brief Who Should Be in Charge When School Districts Go into the Red? outlines a tiered system of strategic, proactive interventions for districts in distress. The first tier gives local leaders collaborative supports to manage finances; for example, an outside expert or a review committee comes in to identify areas of overspending. These low-level, non-punitive interventions are triggered at the first indication of potential distress. Should leaders prove unwilling or unable to follow the expert advice, the district enters the second phase, during which a state-appointed financial manager has complete control over district spending. The third tier is a complete administrative takeover of the district--the superintendent and board are removed, and an appointed leader or panel controls all district operations. Large grants or long-term loans are contingent on districts entering this final phase and replacing their leadership.

Pennsylvania’s policies run against our recommendations. They are not tiered, they are not proactive, and they certainly are not strategic. Chester Upland operated with a deficit for far too long, and its leaders received emergency infusions of cash without a requirement that they address underlying problems. When finances went from bad to worse, it finally received a large emergency loan and a CRO, but without a substantial change in leadership. The superintendent and board remain, as do the spending problems. Even with the CRO, there is little oversight on how state money was spent, and an audit is only proposed at this point. Governor Wolf’s actions with Chester Upland are too little, too late. Although he is arguably compensating for a slow-moving legislature that has yet to enact any smart policies, Chester Upland needed to be fully managed by outside experts years ago.

At the same time, Philadelphia has the SRC, which replaced the board, to plan and manage its finances. Yet in the past fifteen years, while the district has regularly run deficits in the hundreds of millions, it has more than once relied on stopgap loans or one-time infusions of revenue. Since the takeover, it has also seen six SRC chairs and seven superintendents.

School districts need concrete policies in place that identify signs of financial risk and trigger a well-defined series of interventions of increasing severity when those signs are found. Leaders must first be given assistance on how to project future costs and adjust accordingly. External advisors can also give district leaders political cover to make unpopular decisions. But before districts reach the “years of failure” mark (and before they amass millions in bailout funds), leaders must be replaced by the state. Complete financial meltdowns like the one in Chester Upland can be averted via strategic, proactive interventions that leave little room for “let’s wait and see.”

gsheldon/iStock Editorial/Thinkstock

• The myth of America’s teacher shortage, like your older brother’s stories about alligators in the sewers and malevolent hitchhikers stalking the roadways, poses an intriguing question: If we’re going to invent fanciful stories for our own amusement, why do they have to be scary ones? In an in-depth piece for Chalkbeat Indiana, Shaina Cavazos debunks ominous reports of a teacher deficit in the Hoosier State with a lot of the same data and arguments that contradict the broader notion of a national shortage. While some districts are facing a lack of qualified applicants, our education schools are still pumping out way more graduates than there are open positions for them to fill. Longer-term trends—the perennial difficulty of attracting young educators to rural areas and the gradual retirement of the Baby Boom workforce—generally account for those anecdotal reports of professional scarcity, but macro-level teacher employment has actually increased over the last ten years. Maybe now we can get back to more pressing problems, like exorcising the ghost of Elvis Presley.
• Nobody likes the fellow who shows up early for work every day. Smug at his desk, he’s already dutifully responding to his emails while the rest of us stagger in from the horrors of school drop-offs and dysfunctional public transportation. Arnold Anderson, on the other hand, must be the most beloved teacher in his school (at least among his colleagues): The New Jersey teacher managed to hold on to his job after tallying more than a hundred tardy notices in just two years! The arbitrator in the case, even while allowing him to remain employed on technical grounds, groused that Anderson’s students deserved his “very best efforts for the entire period, and not merely that remaining portion of the period following [his] chronically late arrivals.” Anderson, meanwhile, blamed his breezy approach to punctuality on an excessive love of breakfast. Maybe he can enjoy an IHOP platter on the way to his night shift whenever the state comes to its senses and fires him.
• The benefits of a college education are numerous and well publicized. A four-year degree from a competitive school confers enormous employment and earning advantages to its owner, and the excitement of higher learning can open the minds of students to life paths they’d never previously considered. But as Fordham has preached for years, and as the New Yorker’s John Cassidy reaffirms, this country is making a disastrous mistake if it relies solely on the promise of college to combat growing inequality or enhance our competitiveness in the world economy. Put very simply, the wage premium of college graduates has been eroding for years, and our single-minded “college-for-all” focus has led us to neglect worthy alternatives like CTE and workplace apprenticeships. And even if four-year programs were the right option for every American child, our K–12 system has shown absolutely no capacity to prepare them for it.

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

Most of the sturm und drang over Common Core has centered on the politics of the standards’ creation and adoption. The bigger problem—much bigger—was always going to be implementation. This new brief from the Education Trust offers a glimpse of how it’s going. Alas, the answer is not very well.

An analysis of middle school classroom assignments finds that most “do not reflect the high-level goals” set by Common Core. This, the report suggests, demonstrates where teachers are in their understanding of the higher standards. Among the sobering data points: A mere 6 percent of the assignment fell into the high range of Education Trust’s analysis framework, and fewer than 40 percent of assignments were aligned with grade-appropriate standards at all. “It’s time for an honest conversation about where we are in implementing the standards,” the report concludes.

Hear, hear—but some important caveats must be noted. The study was conducted at six middle schools spread across two urban districts in two states. Given Education Trust’s focus on equity and the achievement gap, this is not surprising; however, it may not be representative of K–12 education at large. It’s also interesting that more than half of the assignments reviewed came from science and social studies classes, and only one-third from English language arts. While 55 percent of assignments were connected to a text (a good thing, from the author’s perspective) “only 16 percent of assignments required students to use a text for citing evidence as support for a position or claim.” That sounds alarming, but Common Core takes pains to stress the importance of adopting curriculum “intentionally and coherently structured to develop rich content knowledge within and across grades.” In other words, reading assignments aimed at “mere” factual recall and knowledge development are not necessarily a flaw; they could be a feature of good CCSS implementation. Is this what’s happening in the six urban schools the researchers examined? Probably not, but we should be cautious before dismissing as inadequate and unaligned text-based questions that “ask for recalling or retelling of basic facts rather than prompting for inferences, structural analysis, or author critiques.” Yes, Common Core famously valorizes close reading. But it does not follow that every reading has to be a close reading. A much deeper dive into the context of each assignment (a very heavy research lift) would be needed to separate cognitively enriching wheat from busywork chaff.

Those caveats aside, it is likely that what Education Trust has surfaced is evidence that standards are a lot easier to change than the habits and practices of teachers. The prevalence of “short chunks of text,” graphic organizers, and note-taking devices leads the authors to conclude that “these structures appeared to be highly valued by teachers across all schools, grade levels, and content areas.” They are therefore quite right to wonder if this indicates that schools are “abandoning the need for students to engage over longer periods with whole novels and extended nonfiction,” as Common Core demands. The available evidence, however limited, certainly suggests that it will take more than the adoption of higher standards to drive a stake through the heart of the skills-driven, paint-by-numbers approach to literacy instruction. Old habits die hard.

SOURCE: “Checking In: Do Classroom Assignments Reflect Today’s Higher Standards?,” The Education Trust (September 2015).

A new working paper by American University public policy professor Seth Gershenson examines whether a “match” of students and teachers by race has any effect on teacher expectations of students. What is the result, for example, of white instructors teaching black students versus white students? What about other racial combinations?

Gershenson used nationally representative survey data from the Educational Longitudinal Study of 2002 (ELS) for U.S. students who were in tenth grade in 2002. There were over sixteen thousand student-teacher matches, which included various demographic data about the students and teachers. And each student’s tenth-grade math and English teachers reported their expectations for that student’s educational attainment, with possible responses ranging from those not finishing high school to those completing a four-year degree.

To ensure that any differences were systematic rather than random—which would suggest that teacher beliefs are at least partly explained by student demographics—Gershenon designed his study carefully. For example, he made use of various demographic variables to rule out systematic sorting (whereby, for instance, low-ability math students may be routinely assigned to white math teachers). The ELS administration was also set up so that a student’s two teachers offer their assessments at the same point in time. And the design built on a methodology that has been used in prior studies by other respected scholars.

The key finding is that non-black teachers have significantly lower educational expectations for black students than do black teachers when evaluating the same students. For example, when a black student is evaluated by a black teacher and a non-black teacher, the latter is about 30 percent less likely than the former to expect that student to complete a four-year college degree. These effects are larger for black male students and math teachers. When looking at the average effects across all students, there are small differences relative to racial mismatches; but these small average effects are mostly driven by the much larger effects among black students.

Gershenon writes in a related blog post that biases in expectations are generally unintentional and an “artifact of how humans categorize complex information,” pointing again to the need for a more diverse teaching force.

It’s a strong study with a startling finding, but it also underlines the need for a longitudinal study to measure, for example, which teacher’s prediction holds true for a given student. Are the lower expectations unfairly pessimistic, or are the higher expectations unrealistically hopeful?

SOURCE: Seth Gershenson, Stephen B. Holt, and Nicholas Papageorge, “Who Believes in Me? The Effect of Student-Teacher Demographic Match on Teacher Expectations,” W.E. Upjohn Institute for Employment Research, Working Paper 231 (July 2015).

A new analysis from Matthew A. Kraft at Brown University links the characteristics of laid-off teachers to changes in student achievement. The analysis was conducted in Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools (CMS), which laid off just over a thousand teachers as a result of the Great Recession in 2009 and 2010. Since North Carolina is one of five states where collective bargaining is illegal, a discretionary layoff policy was used rather than the more common “last-hired, first-fired” (sometimes referred to as LIFO—last in, first out) method. CMS identified candidates for layoffs based on five general criteria: duplicative positions, enrollment trends, job performance, job qualifications, and length of service.

Kraft estimates the effects of these layoffs on student achievement by using both principal observation scores (which directly informed layoffs) and value-added scores (which were not used to make layoff decisions). This enabled him to compare the impact of a teacher layoff based on subjective and objective measures of effectiveness. The good news for CMS students is that, overall, laid-off teachers received lower observation scores from principals and had lower value-added scores in math and reading compared to their counterparts who weren’t laid off. Kraft found that math achievement in grades that lost an effective teacher decreased between .05 and .11 standard deviations more than grades that lost an ineffective teacher.

The difference between laying off a senior teacher versus an early-career teacher was substantially smaller and statistically insignificant, suggesting that effectiveness was not a function of experience. That said, some of the most effective teachers were not only veterans, but teachers who returned to teaching after retiring (sometimes called “double dippers” because they draw a pension and a salary). Unfortunately, these teachers were among the first to be laid off— an unwise decision from an achievement standpoint (though perhaps not from a financial one) since they were substantially more effective than the average CMS teacher (their evaluation scores were two-thirds of a standard deviation higher than the district average).

Three key takeaways emerge: 1) principal evaluations and value-added scores both have predictive validity, while seniority alone has little predictive power when it comes to the impact of teacher layoffs on student achievement; 2) if achievement is to take precedence, schools should prioritize performance over seniority when staff reductions become necessary; and 3) policymakers should allow school leaders to use discretion when deciding which teachers to lay off rather than setting rigid rules around reduction-in-staff procedures.

Matthew A. Kraft, “Teacher Layoffs, Teacher Quality, and Student Achievement: Evidence from a Discretionary Layoff Policy,” Education Finance and Policy (August 2015).