The Education Gadfly Weekly

Congressional Republicans have promised to overhaul the No Child Left Behind act this year; the big debate so far has been whether to maintain the law’s annual testing requirements. At a hearing on the issue last week, Lamar Alexander, chairman of the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions (HELP), was clearly sympathetic to arguments by several witnesses that Congress should keep the testing mandate but dump the rules that prescribe how states must hold schools accountable for test results. As he summarized it for Time in an interview after the hearing, “You have to have the annual test. You have to disaggregate it. You have to report it, so we know how schools and children and school districts are doing. But after that, it’s up to the states, who spend the money and have the children and take care of them and it’s their responsibility to devise what’s success, what’s failure and [what the] consequences [should be].”

That Uncle Sam might back off of its demands that states intervene in failing schools has some reformers on the left on full alert. Chad Aldeman of Bellwether Education Partners—an alumnus of the Obama administration—considers it an abdication of responsibility, especially considering the $15 billion a year the feds spend on our schools via the Title I program. His colleague Anne Hyslop goes even further, saying it “eviscerates the federal role.”

I strongly suspect that these folks are going to lose the argument, mostly because Alexander is committed to getting the federal government out from under its current role as the “national school board,” as he often puts it. (So is House Education Committee Chairman John Kline.) Furthermore, he won’t be able to get enough Republican votes—in either the Senate or the House—if his rewrite maintains a heavy-handed federal role in education. If there’s a new law enacted this year, it will almost surely remove the federal accountability mandates.

Which is OK. We at Fordham have argued for many years that transparency for results is a better trade-off for federal funding than prescriptive accountability rules. I still believe that to be true. But I’m ready to go even further: Let’s admit that we’re not really sure how to “do accountability” at the state level, either. In fact, top-down accountability rarely works to turn around the worst schools. But there’s a silver lining, because there’s something else that is actually working better.

Before I get to that, let me pause to define some terms, because they are important. Transparency, as I see it, refers to measuring student performance regularly—annually is how we’ve been going about it, and should continue doing—and making the results available to the public, as well as to educators and policy leaders. Ideally that means slicing and dicing the data every which way (by race, class, performance level, growth, etc.). It also means boiling the data down into some sort of judgment of each individual school, like an A–F rating.

Accountability, on the other hand, implies some sort of intervention in low-performing schools. The original NCLB formulation included a “cascade of sanctions” that were supposed to get progressively tougher. The more recent requirements for the School Improvement Grants (SIG) program offer states and districts a menu of options for dealing with failing schools—from the tough (school closure) to the rather insignificant (retooling the school’s instructional approach).

What’s important to know about both generations of interventions is that they rarely worked. As we at Fordham put it in a 2010 report, bad schools appear to be immortal. That’s mostly because truly impactful interventions are almost never tried. In the early days of NCLB, most schools in “corrective action” chose the “other” option of school improvement (as in, doing something other than closing the school, chartering it, laying off staff, etc.). And under SIG, most schools opted for the so-called “transformation” model, which was the squishiest. That’s too bad, because at least a couple of studies demonstrated significant achievement gains for schools subjected to true turnarounds—where at least half the staff were replaced.

It might be tempting to make states embrace these harder-edged interventions. But that’s likely to disappoint—at least for our worst-case schools—for two reasons. First, states often lack the political will to take tough-love actions like laying off staff or closing a school. Second, and perhaps more importantly, states generally lack the capacity to oversee faithful implementation of the more aggressive sanctions. Nor can states simply delegate the job to districts, since the districts are often part of the problem.

The only state-led reform that shows real promise, in my view, is Louisiana’s Recovery School District and, possibly, its clone in Tennessee. By plucking dire schools out of their districts, they sever the link to the dysfunctional systems, contracts, practices, etc. that made these schools low-performing in the first place. And by pairing these schools with high-quality charter operators, they inject the capacity—better staff, better curriculum, new resources—that had been missing.

But the RSD is one promising example in a country with fifty million students; it’s hardly dispositive. Neither is it a sure thing, as Michigan’s effort at replicating an RSD has demonstrated.

So what, then, are we supposed to do about the very worst schools—those that are low-performing (in terms of proficiency rates) and whose students aren’t making significant gains over time, either? Look the other way? Give up on the children trapped inside them?

No. Thankfully, there is another strategy, and it’s working remarkably well: Allow students to escape the worst schools through the powerful mechanism of parental choice. All over the nation, in cities large and small, charter schools are growing steadily and serving a greater and greater share of public school students. Which means, conversely, that dysfunctional districts are losing more and more students to charters. Eventually, they are forced to shut down sorely under-enrolled schools—which tend to be the same low-performing schools that reformers want to address. In Chicago, Detroit, Kansas City, Philadelphia, Cleveland, and on and on, many such schools have finally gone away. And not because of top-down accountability, but because of the escape hatch called charter schools and the enrollment hemorrhage that they have caused for the worst district schools.

Of course, that’s only a win for kids if the new charter schools themselves are high-performing—which is by no means a given, especially in states like Ohio. We have to get the details right on charter school policy too, especially sound funding and the mechanisms of charter school authorizing.

Still, if reformers want the federal government to do something about failing schools, they should team up with the good folks at the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools and push for dramatically higher federal funding for charter schools, as well as smart policies to encourage the rapid replication of quality schools. Put the charter school engine on overdrive.

I’m not saying that we should give up on all efforts at top-down accountability. States should continue to experiment with various interventions in low-performing schools. That’s particularly important for rural and suburban communities where charters are unlikely to gain much of a foothold and in districts that aren’t totally dysfunctional or bereft of capacity. They just might need a bit of a nudge to overcome inertia or local political challenges; state actions can be constructive.

But let’s admit that we don’t know precisely what that should look like, and thus we definitely shouldn’t prescribe a particular approach from Washington. What Uncle Sam can do is demand transparency around results, plus put some major new investments into high-quality charter schools. That sounds like a federal role that both sides of the aisle could support and that might actually do some good. How about we give it a try?

Last week, Mike Petrilli issued a “stump speech challenge” asking his fellow education wonks to come up with talking points that members of Congress might use to bolster the case for annual testing.

Be careful what you wish for, Mike. Challenge accepted. Here’s my bid:

When you and I think back on our school days, we remember football games and school dances, the high school musical, and—if we’re lucky—that unforgettable teacher who put just the right book in our hands at just the right time. One who inspired us or opened our eyes to our own potential—and what was waiting for us in the world right outside the classroom window.

What will our children remember when they think back on their school days? I fear too many will just remember taking tests.  

And that’s not right.

At the same time, I hear an awful lot of cynicism about the efforts we’ve been making in the last few years to make our schools better. Some people say that all this testing is just a big game to label our schools a failure, privatize education, demonize teachers, and line the pockets of testing companies and textbook publishers. 

And that’s not right either.

So it’s time to have an honest, no-nonsense conversation about our schools, teaching, and, yes, testing. But let me warn you in advance: If you’re involved in education—whether you’re a teacher, parent, policymaker, or union leader—you might not like some of what I’m going to say. But it’s time to tell the truth about our testing and schools—the good, the bad, and the ugly.

Parents tell me their children take too many tests. Teachers complain that testing has taken the joy out of learning and made their jobs miserable. And I agree. It’s time we started listening to parents and teachers.

At the same time, I don’t know how any of us can look at our education system and think we don’t have a problem. A big problem. We’re seventeenth in the world in reading, twenty-seventh in math. The nation that put men on the moon and an iPhone in our pocket ranks twentieth in science. 

And that’s not just embarrassing, it’s dangerous.

Education made America great. But we’re not going to be a great nation very much longer with a third-rate education system. Why do you think we ended up with all those tests in the first place? We got lazy and complacent. Too many of us thought “Well, America’s schools may be lousy, but MY kid’s school is great and MY kid’s doing fine.” 

Well a lot of schools are not great and a lot of kids are not doing fine. How do we know? 

Testing.

Those tests we all love to hate were aimed at getting schools back on track, safeguarding our prosperity, and making sure our children are prepared to find good-paying jobs in a safe and stable country. 

But we pushed it too far and too hard. There’s an old saying that to a hammer, everything is a nail. And in education reform, everything is a test. That’s taking a terrible toll on our schools, our teachers, and our children. 

Education reform has brought energy and dynamism to education. Today, we have some terrific new charter schools and real choice for millions of parents. Some of our best, brightest, and most idealistic young people are committing years—and often their entire careers—to helping our most disadvantaged children. These are good things. They must continue.

America needs education reform. What we do not need is to turn urgency and energy into recklessness. When good teachers leave the classroom, when children come home in tears and parents get anxious—when testing becomes the reason we send children to school—something has gone very, very, wrong.

Testing gives all of us, and especially parents, important information about how our kids are doing and what’s working in schools. The trouble is that we’re using those tests to make snap judgments about schools and teachers. And that’s not what they’re for. We’re trying to make vast decisions with half-vast data. 

So let’s make a deal.

Let’s keep testing every child every year. But let’s use tests for the purpose they were intended: to tell us how our children—all of our children—are doing. But we’ve got to get out of the business of using tests of children to judge teachers, because it’s starting to damage our schools.

Let’s keep the federal government from acting like the national school board. The best thing testing gives us is information. It should be up to parents and local community members, not Washington, to look at that information and decide what to do with it. If we use tests to decide which teachers to keep and which to fire, is it any surprise that teachers spend all their time teaching to the test? What would YOU do if your mortgage, car payments, and groceries for your family were riding on your students’ test scores?

Let’s end the blame game. Let’s stop using tests as a blunt instrument to punish schools and shame bad teachers. If teachers view tests as information about how students are doing—not how THEY are doing—they can get back to the business of teaching, not teaching to the test.

But in return, we need to ask more—much more—of our schools and teachers.

Teachers, you’re used to asking tough, challenging questions. But I have some tough, challenging questions for you.

If we get Washington to stop using tests to judge your performance, will you not just accept but actually embrace higher standards for yourself, your school, and the students you teach?   

Will you, your leaders, and unions help insure that the best teachers go to the neediest schools and students?

Will you accept that the job is hard, the hours long, and that the answer cannot always be, “Trust the teachers and send more money?”

Will you do what it takes to become a true profession—not merely a labor force—and demand the highest level of performance from yourselves and your peers?

Will you be honest with your brothers and sisters who simply don’t have what it takes to be effective in the classroom?  

Will you accept that charters and school choice are an important part of the education system and—when done right—can be engines of excellence and innovation that make all of us better?

One of the biggest complaints I hear about standards and testing is that one size does not fit all and that children are all different. I agree. But if one size doesn’t fit all, why should one kind of school fit all? Let’s get teachers out from under the burden of testing, but let’s allow every parent everywhere to choose the school that’s best for their children. Let’s let teachers teach and parents choose—public, private, charter, and, yes, even religious schools. If a religious school can prove that it can get kids to meet higher standards in reading and math, why should it concern us that they also instruct kids in their respective faiths? Let parents choose.    

Americans have always trusted teachers. But now we need to trust them to raise their game and be the true professionals we need to build a strong and secure America.

At the same time, education reform needs to be more than just test-and-punish. The energy and dynamism needs to go toward making education a truly research-driven profession. Choice and charters empower parents, but if we’re asking teachers to take the lead in improving their performance and policing themselves, then we also need reformers to hold bad charter schools’ feet to the fire and get rid of those who take the public’s money and do nothing for kids. We also need to make charter schools places of sustained and sustainable excellence, true laboratories of education innovation.

Education reform has turned our schools into battlegrounds. We fight over test scores and standards, what our children learn, and whether we have the right people teaching our children. I don’t know how to fix our schools. But I know this: It’s not going to happen by making teachers the enemy.

I simply do not believe our schools are filled with lazy teachers punching the clock and doing nothing more than what their union contracts demand. Neither do I believe that choice and charters and testing is about the 1 percent trying to privatize education and enrich themselves on the public’s dime.

The story of American education is the story of good people trying and too often failing. It’s the story of people seeing injustice and trying like hell to fix it. These two groups need each other more than they know. And America needs them both. If we want to have the best education system on earth, then we need to accept that education reform is something we must do with teachers, not TO teachers. 

What I am proposing, then, is a New Deal for teachers. Keep the tests, but use them to help children and inform parents—not hurt schools and terrorize teachers. 

If it weren’t for tests, too many of our kids would still be stuck in lousy schools—yes, there are too many lousy schools—and we’d be hearing the same old tired excuses about poverty, about parents, and about how “those kids” are just hard to teach. 

We can’t go back to the bad old days when we thought our schools were great, but the reality was that they were only great for some children. But we must go back to the days when school meant more than testing.

• National school choice week is upon us—a time to push for high-quality choices, march across the country, and wear yellow scarves. It’s also a week when stories about choice, charters, and the like get much deserved attention. Such is the case in New York, where Governor Andrew Cuomo recently bucked teachers’ unions and announced a grand education-reform agenda. Proposed changes include more charter schools, tougher teacher evaluations, and, most impressively, a tax-credit scholarship program designed to allow low- and middle-income New Yorkers to attend private schools. As our very own Checker Finn observed, Cuomo may very well be the first Democratic governor to propose a private school choice program. A bruising political battle is sure to come, but for now, choice advocates have ample cause to celebrate.
• The U.S. Department of Education is out to prove yet again how tone-deaf it is. Maine is the most recent state in danger of suffering from the department’s unlawful practice of revoking NCLB waivers over teacher evaluations—an issue not mentioned once in ESEA. Arne Duncan wants student tests scores to be a more significant factor in the state’s teacher evaluations. Is that so? The Nation’s Superintendent might want to watch the video from Tuesday’s Senate hearing on ESEA reauthorization, where lawmakers across the political spectrum expressed their distaste for mandating such evaluations from Washington. Duncan should take the hint and get out of the teacher-evaluation oversight business. Now.

The debate over annual testing has taken center stage as Congress considers reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA). Assessments provide critical information for parents and legislators on student progress, but when does annual testing become overtesting? And will it survive reauthorization? Watch Fordham's Mike Petrilli and AEI's Mike McShane discuss testing and accountability in the wake of the Senate hearing on the new ESEA.

A testing renaissance is looming. So say experts Sir Michael Barber and Peter Hill in this comprehensive and timely essay. The latest in a series on what works in education, this paper argues for the need to dramatically alter the way we approach educational assessment. Barber and Hill begin by addressing the purpose of testing broadly, then lay out a compelling case for change, contending that the current K–12 system is broken and that the availability of new technologies provides a unique opportunity for dramatically changing how we think about assessments. Potential benefits of the impending transition to computerized tests include the ability to better assess students’ higher-order thinking; obtain faster, more accurate student results; assess a wider range of student performance; and more effectively use test data to inform classroom instruction and improve student learning. The essay concludes with a “framework for action” offering suggestions for how policymakers and educators can best prepare for the transition. Recommendations include building teacher capacity for next-generation assessments, allowing for local customization of implementation, and establishing clear and consistent communication throughout the assessment transition. While it comes as no surprise to hear testing-giant Pearson singing assessments’ praises, amidst rampant claims of inefficiency and over-testing, a change in thinking in America is long overdue. This spring, millions of students across the country will take next-generation assessments aligned to more rigorous academic standards for the first time. As the authors emphasize, these new computer-based and adaptive tests are designed to measure knowledge and skills required for real-world success and represent a “significant milestone” in the assessment field. Yet while next-generation tests have the potential to better prepare students for the demands of college and career, quality is critical. A true “assessment renaissance” will only be realized if the new tests are of high quality and closely aligned to academic standards and curriculum. To that end, Fordham is currently conducting a study exploring the issue of test quality and content alignment. Stay tuned this summer for the skinny.

SOURCE: Peter Hill and Michael Barber, “Preparing for a Renaissance in Assessment,” Pearson (December 2014).

Retirement plans, much like recurring dreams and fantasy football rosters, are a captivating topic to those directly involved, but pretty much deadening to the rest of us. That’s unfortunate, because the state of our public pensions is a mess that we’re eventually going to have to reckon with. According to the Pew Charitable Trusts, the total budgetary shortfall facing this country’s public-sector retirement systems exceeded $900 billion in FY2012, and teacher-related costs may be the largest single contributor to that figure. The authors of this stark NCTQ report estimate that teacher pensions now account for a half-trillion dollars in unfunded liabilities. A price tag that colossal can be tough to contextualize, but don’t miss the trees for the forest here—this debt is no mere abstraction to the hundreds of districts feeling its squeeze. Metropolises like Chicago and Philadelphia have undergone cataclysmic waves of layoffs, while some smaller districts have been so awash in red ink that they’ve simply been dismantled, leaving both jobless employees and dislocated students in crisis. With the stakes that high, it’s crucial that state officials begin to take steps toward retrenchment, and NCTQ has been issuing calls for responsibility for years. Doing the Math follows close on the heels of prior research, and its remedies are unchanged from earlier iterations: Switch over from defined benefits packages to 401(k)s, allow employees a greater measure of fairness and flexibility in exchange for diminished security, and face up to a realistic appraisal of investment returns. No, it won’t be easy persuading teachers to forego the seemingly unbeatable guarantee of defined benefits, but look a bit closer and you’ll discover that those parachutes are often made of fool’s gold. Less than one-fifth of teachers actually stay in the job long enough to gain eligibility for full benefits; those who leave early are denied access to employer contributions and, in some states, can’t even collect the entire amount they’ve paid in. The system is rigged against its employees, who chase after absurdly long vesting periods in pursuit of a backloaded reward. Rectifying these practices will be a heavy lift—the report identifies a whopping total of seven states (out of fifty, plus the District of Columbia) that offer their teachers a fully portable plan, to go along with just nine whose pension systems are adequately funded—but it’s the only way to give this less-than-riveting story a happy ending.

SOURCE: Kathryn M. Doherty, Sandi Jacobs, and Martin F. Lueken, “Doing the Math on Teacher Pensions: How to Protect Teachers and Taxpayers,” National Council on Teacher Quality (January 2015).

A new study in Educational Researcher explores changes in New York’s teacher workforce since the Empire State implemented a number of policies to improve the quality of its new teachers. Beginning in 1998, the state increased the general and content-specific coursework requirements needed for certification and raised the number of hours of required field experience. It also eliminated ad hoc alternative certification pathways like “transcript review” in favor of programs with formal requirements and discontinued emergency and temporary licenses. The authors examine whether these policy changes had an impact on who entered the teaching workforce. Their dataset, comprising SAT scores, administrative data, and licensure and personnel files, looked at two groups between 1985 and 2010: 220,332 individuals who received their entry-level certification; and from within that group, a subset of 151,747 who received certification and were hired in their first teaching positions. They found that, prior to 1999 and the new policies, the average academic abilities of new teachers were low and consistently falling. Once the new policies were adopted, the SAT scores of both the certified group and those who were hired improved substantially, with the latter enjoying the largest gains. For example, between 1999 and 2010, the share of certified teachers drawn from the bottom third of SAT test-takers decreased by 7 percent, while the share from the top third increased by 13 percent. These gains occurred across the state, in all subjects, at both rich and poor schools, and for teachers of all ethnicities. But the improvements were driven by particularly large increases in SAT scores in certain areas and for certain teachers. New York City’s gains were larger, and occurred earlier, than those of the rest of the state. In 1999, 43 percent of new teachers in the nation’s largest school district came from the bottom third of the SAT distribution; by 2010, that number dropped to 24 percent. Improvements were also more pronounced in hard-to-staff subjects (math, science, special education, and bilingual education) than in elementary and other secondary subjects. Schools that enroll more poor students also showed more prominent effects, as did minority teachers compared to white and Asian teachers. The authors rule out hypotheses that the trends are the result of changes in the labor market, concluding that they really are most likely due to the collection of state policies enacted in the late ‘90s to improve the new teaching workforce. While researchers are still determining just how strongly SAT scores are related to student achievement, as a proxy for the changing qualifications of the workforce, they show a very marked improvement in the past fifteen years.

SOURCE: Hamilton Lankford, et al., "Who Enters Teaching? Encouraging Evidence That the Status of Teaching Is Improving," Educational Researcher, Vol. 43 No. 9 (December 2014).