The Education Gadfly Weekly

Like many, I’m convinced that what happens inside the classroom—curriculum and instruction—has as much of an impact (if not more) on student outcomes than structural reforms. For those who believe as I do, the revamped Elementary and Secondary Education Act has the potential to help states figure out how to hold schools accountable for student learning and what, if anything, to do about teacher evaluations. Let me throw out a few ideas.

“If you want more of something, subsidize it,” Ronald Reagan famously quipped. “If you want less of something, tax it.” During the No Child Left Behind era, test-driven accountability has too often stood Reagan’s maxim on its ear. Annual reading tests have practically required schools and teachers to forsake the patient, long-term investment in knowledge and vocabulary that builds strong readers, critical thinkers, and problem solvers. High-stakes accountability with annual tests that are not tied to course content (which reading tests are not) amounted to a tax on good things and a subsidy for bad practice: curriculum narrowing, test preparation, and more time spent on a “skills and strategies” approach to learning that doesn’t serve children well. Under the new ESEA, states will still have to test students annually, including in reading. But they have a lot more control over the way the results from those tests are turned into grades for schools. This could offer an opportunity to restore some sanity to schooling.

“If we wish to advance our students’ literacy, we must devote ourselves to increasing the breadth and depth of their domain knowledge,” Brown University reading expert Marilyn Jager Adams has observed. This is a good place for states to start thinking through their newly won freedom: Does what you are about to do in the name of accountability tax or subsidize student knowledge across the curriculum? Does it incentivize adding more social studies, science, art, and music to the school day, or does it encourage schools to do less?

The sooner schools see building knowledge across the curriculum as Job One in strengthening reading comprehension, the better. Years of treating reading as a discrete subject or a skill—teaching it and testing it that way—have arguably set reading achievement in reverse. You don’t build strong readers by teaching children to “find the main idea,” “make inferences,” and “compare and contrast.” You do it by fixing a child’s gaze on the world outside the classroom window.

Measuring inputs, not outputs, is the kind of thing that reform-oriented thinking typically eschews. But with states in the accountability driver’s seat, I could persuade myself that the time has come for at least some foresighted states to set subject matter targets and hold schools accountable for meeting them. This might help reverse the worst effects of the curriculum narrowing and testing mania we’ve seen in the No Child Left Behind era. Lisa Hansel of the Core Knowledge Foundation suggests that kids need 150 minutes per week of science, 150 of social studies, and sixty of the arts in elementary school. That sounds reasonable. “But I think it has to be 100 percent of students,” she adds. “Otherwise, we’ll continue to see reading and math remediation happening during the science, social studies, and art time.”

The other big tax on content-rich curriculum that needs to be repealed is teacher evaluation. “This is a big one,” writes Stephen Sawchuck at Education Week. States and districts can use federal funds to create teacher evaluation systems, but they’re not required to do so. “This is a big change from the Education Department's ESEA flexibility waivers, which required them to revamp these reviews and to integrate student achievement,” he notes. I’ve long argued that marrying reading tests to teacher evaluation ultimately demands bad practice because it forces teachers to emphasize reading “skills and strategies” of limited utility. Consider the Kafkaesque nature of a reading test. Unlike subject tests in math or science—where there is no mystery for teachers about what’s on the test, and hence how to prepare students—the “content” of a reading test is a random walk in the woods, though we know that reading is not a “skill,” per se. A student’s familiarity with the content “domain” can dramatically affect comprehension. Since teachers don’t know what content to teach, their only recourse is to teach “reading skills” of questionable utility, drill for the test, and pray. There’s no incentive to build knowledge in a particular domain—plants, astronomy, colonial America, the Harlem Renaissance—since there’s no guarantee that those subjects will come up on the reading test this year, next year, or ever. But increasing the breadth and depth of students’ domain knowledge is exactly how you build strong readers. States need to subsidize it —or at least stop taxing it.

To be sure, there is nothing in our current forms of direct evaluation that requires schools and teachers to abandon a broad, knowledge-laden curriculum to boost test scores; but it should be abundantly clear that if the field hasn’t gotten this message nearly fifteen years after No Child Left Behind, it’s not going to.

The best course is to abandon efforts to use tests to evaluate teachers—or, at the very least, stop using reading tests for those purposes. Reading is not a school-based subject or skill, like math or science, that lends itself to clear measures of teacher effectiveness. The moment you attempt to evaluate teachers through reading tests, which are de facto tests of background knowledge, you’re taxing good teaching and subsidizing bad.

To be sure, establishing minimum requirements for time spent on different subjects is far from a satisfying answer. It could easily become a bureaucratic exercise in filling out timesheets for compliance. But if states are clear on why these measures are needed, it could start to undo some of the damage inflicted by the blunt-axe of test-driven accountability. States could do worse than chiseling that expectation into their accountability regimes and making sure it sticks.

Most kids don’t willingly ask their grandfathers to retell his “endearing” story about how he used to trudge uphill to school every day through ten feet of snow. But last Thursday, students jumped at the opportunity to interview their older relatives as part of StoryCorps’s “Great Thanksgiving Listen,” and have uploaded more than thirty-seven thousand stories to date. Apart from giving kids a reason to avoid post-feast dish duties, StoryCorps aimed to bolster the collection of verbal histories it’s been gathering for the last decade. With applicability to history, government, civics, and journalism curricula, students and teachers were encouraged to participate in collecting their family’s narratives, which will be archived in the American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress. For those expecting stories of slushy drudgery, the results were surprisingly rewarding. Students heard tales of living through the Great Depression and the personal battles of growing up in poverty- and violence-afflicted neighborhoods. So while you spent Thanksgiving in an insulin-induced coma, your niece was learning how to be both a historian and a journalist.

Those who can’t teach can study law, business, or medicine at Harvard—because teacher training is basically rocket science. That’s the spirit behind Harvard University’s new teacher training program, which enrolls students in a three-year fellowship combining pedagogy with mentor-guided practice in middle school and high school. The program is being hailed as a souped-up version of Teach For America (whose enrollment numbers are declining), despite the Harvard TFA recruitment manager’s insistence that the two programs can coexist. The program is free to fellows thanks to $18 million from anonymous donors. Hey, it’s their money. But if that’s what it costs to adequately prepare a handful of teachers, we’re doomed. Perhaps Harvard’s considerable brain power and vast resources might be applied figuring out how to make mere mortals successful in the classroom.

Could the key to economic development lie in training our workforce while they’re still young and impressionable? Massachusetts Governor Charlie Baker has made that great leap of faith in his recent plan to expand career education, workforce training, and economic development. The plan would bring together leaders from government, business, and education to address workforce needs using the strapping youths of high school and collegiate STEM, vocational, and CTE programs. There’s also the added bonus of upward mobility: Check out those head-turning starting salaries and the increased rate of postsecondary education attendance. All eyes should be focused on Massachusetts to see what comes of Baker’s proposals.

This study examines whether information supplied about a student’s ability helps inform that student’s decision to enroll in Advanced Placement classes. Specifically, the information “signal” is the “AP Potential” message on the student’s PSAT Results Report, as written by the College Board. Students who score at a certain cut point on the PSAT get a message that says, “Congratulations! Your score shows you have potential for success in an at least one AP course!” or else a message that says, “Be sure to talk to your counselor about how to increase your preparedness.”

Students in Oakland Technical High School who took the PSAT in 2013 made up the sample of roughly five hundred sophomores. The intervention was as follows: Right before and after they received their PSAT results that included one of the AP Potential messages above, they were given a survey that asked them (1) how they perceived their academic abilities and their plans relative to attending college; (2) the number of AP courses they plan to take; (3) whether they would take the SAT; (4) the probability that they’d pass the exit exam; and (5) the probability that they’d graduate high school.

Analysts found that the AP signal contained information that led students to revise their beliefs about their ability and future academic plans from the first survey to the second. Specifically, the PSAT is a “negative information shock” on average, meaning that students tended to adjust down their beliefs about their ability. Students who got bad news revised their beliefs down by .286 points on a five-point scale, whereas those who got good news increased their beliefs about their academic ability by only .187 points. Of all the beliefs surveyed, however, expectations around AP course enrollment were most affected by the new information. Students who upwardly revised their expectations in response to the new information enrolled in more AP classes compared to those who did not revise expectations.

The authors also found that students at the margins who were surveyed (a group for which three-quarters were minorities) and told they had AP Potential enrolled in and passed approximately one more AP class the following semester—and were more likely to take and pass one or more AP exams. But these patterns did not hold for non-surveyed students, suggesting that filling out the survey itself increased the salience of the information and made for an “intensified treatment.” Yet students near the margin who didn’t get the AP Potential signal took fewer AP classes, even though both groups were nearly identical in ability. So there is both an upside and a downside to the intervention, depending on whether the message to students is positive or negative. Perhaps we should just deliver the good news?

SOURCE: Naihobe Gonzalez, "Information Shocks about Ability and the Decision to Enroll in Advanced Placement: Evidence from the PSAT," Mathematica (October 2015).

Is there such a thing as too much parental involvement in a student’s education? Lack of parental involvement is often cited anecdotally as an impediment to student achievement. On the other hand, so-called “helicopter parents” can run their children’s education like drill sergeants. The goal is educational and occupational success, but there is increasing concern that such intense involvement could instead lead to dangerous dead ends. A new study in the latest issue of the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology adds much-needed data to the discussion. (Disclaimer: The study is from Germany, so mind the culture gap.)

There have been a number of studies over the last forty years looking at parents’ aspirations for their children, which is a useful way for psychological and sociological researchers to measure parental involvement. However, the current study’s authors noted two gaps in previous research. First, temporal ordering of effects was not generally considered (i.e., it was assumed that parents’ involvement led to certain academic outcomes in the future, but the current research supposes that kids’ past achievement could lead to more/different parental involvement in the future). Moreover, little effort was made to separate parental aspiration (“We want our child to obtain this grade”) from parental expectation (“We believe our child can obtain this grade”). Often only one or the other question was considered, or both were conflated into one measure. The current study not only looked at those questions separately, but made the difference between them its subject. Remember that point; it’s important later.

The researchers carried out a five-year study with 3,530 students and their parents in Bavaria. It included the annual German math test for the kids and a survey for the parents. Parental aspiration and expectation were measured via separate questions as worded above, both on a scale of 1–6 . While a majority of parents in the first year expressed aspirations that matched their expectations, more than 30 percent of parents reported significantly higher aspiration than expectation for their children—a gap called “overaspiration.” Parental overaspiration was negatively correlated with students’ math achievement in that first year.

Resurveying parents on expectation and aspiration each year attempted to account for temporal ordering (“resetting” expectations and aspirations before the test each year); overaspiration did tend to lessen over time. But it never disappeared entirely. Remember that overaspiration is the gap between aspiration and expectation. And despite some tempering, many parents continued to have far higher aspirations for their children’s success than expectations that their children actually would reach that aspired-to score. Call it hope, call it delusion, call it whatever you want: Overaspiration persisted throughout the study. We know that high expectations are generally good for kids, but the mismatch seems to have cut against both parent and child in this study, characterized by the researchers as “poisonous” to math achievement.

These findings appear to apply to students regardless of achievement level. The German education system includes separate schools for students on three “tracks” based on their entry-level academic ability, and the aspiration study included proportional numbers of students from all three tracks. The findings were the same. Bearing in mind that previous studies conflated expectation and aspiration data, the researchers also ran the same differentiated analysis with comparable variables in another data set—from the Educational Longitudinal Study conducted in the U.S. by the National Center for Educational Statistics from 2002 to 2004—that closely replicated the findings from Germany.

The researchers raise a number of questions needing further study, especially regarding the way aspirations and expectations are made manifest between parents and children (not to mention the possibility of a similar effect between teachers and students), but this study seems to suggest that parental involvement may have limited effectiveness on academic outcomes if it isn’t based on a realistic balance of expectation and aspiration.

SOURCE: Kou Murayama et al., “Don’t Aim Too High for Your Kids: Parental Overaspiration Undermines Students’ Learning in Mathematics,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology (November 2015).

A new AEI report argues that private schools have a problem: They need more space. As more states use vouchers, tuition tax credits, and education savings accounts to help families access private education, schools will need to scale up and create new seats for incoming students. And the best way to do this, writes author Michael McShane, is to explore new funding mechanisms that will give the schools the necessary resources to handle growing enrollments.

One solution is for private schools to seek bond financing to help offset expansion costs. Public school districts already tap these financial instruments for capital projects because they expose investors to very little risk and the district itself pays less in interest than if it were to get a loan for the same amount from the bank (such financing for educational organizations is often tax-exempt). In 2012, the Colorado Educational and Cultural Facilities Authority (CECFA) gave $9 million to the Catholic Educational Capital Corporation, which then offered it to Iona Prep, an all-boys high school in New York, to help purchase real estate that would allow it to open an elementary school. CECFA is not a state agency, but it is able to provide bond financing for educational and nonprofit organizations both inside and outside of Colorado. So far, it has offered more than $6 billion in bonds to museums, sports facilities, charter schools, alternative high schools, and performance spaces.

Venture financing is also an option. Charter schools receive a significant amount of venture capital from organizations like New Schools Venture Fund and the Charter Schools Growth Fund. But private schools have yet to fully tap this well. The Drexel Fund, a venture funding organization for private and particularly faith-based schools, has pledged to “concentrate near-term investments in six states that provide the most advantageous environment for new, high-quality, financially sustainable private schools.” Private schools have an opportunity to partner with organizations like the Drexel Fund to replicate successful school models and test new initiatives.

McShane also recommends involving the private sector. He points out that benefits corporations (“B-Corps”) could be especially helpful to schools that are legally required to advance a social mission. In this sense, a B-Corp is a sort of nonprofit/for-profit hybrid, able to support private schools via fundraising, real estate purchases, and lease agreements. One notable example is AltSchool, a private model specializing in personalized learning that has raised over $100 million to create “micro-schools” (a class of schools that combines elements of traditional schoolhouses, blended learning, home schooling, and private schooling). 

Above all, we need more and better schools. Unfortunately, school creation can be daunting and financially risky. And the current funding arrangement for private schools doesn’t allow for sufficient creation and expansion of high-quality schools. The demand is here, but as McShane puts it, there is a “kink in the supply hose.” Schools grappling with funding issues will need to pursue creative solutions if there is any hope of unraveling the kinks in the current supply chain.

SOURCE: Michael Q. McShane, “Funding Growth, Expanding Opportunity: Novel Funding Mechanisms for Schools of Choice,” American Enterprise Institute (September 2015).