The Education Gadfly Weekly

Imagine you are a first-year social studies teacher in a low-performing urban high school. You are hired on Thursday and expected to teach three different courses starting Monday. For the first two weeks, you barely eat or sleep, and you lose fifteen pounds you didn’t know were yours to lose. For the first two months, your every waking minute is consumed by lesson prep and the intense anxiety associated with trying to manage students whose conception of “school” is foreign to you. But you survive the first semester (as many have done) because you have to and because these kids depend on you. You think you are through the worst of it. You begin to believe that you can do this. Then, the second semester begins…

Your sixth-period class is a nightmare, full of students with behavior problems that would challenge any teacher. But as hard as sixth period is, your third-period class is the most frustrating and depressing, because (for reasons only they are privy to) the Powers That Be have seen fit to place every type of student imaginable into the same classroom: seniors, juniors, sophomores, freshmen, kids with behavior issues, kids with attention issues, kids with senioritis, kids who have taken the class before and passed it but are taking it again because the registrar’s office is incompetent. And, of course, a few kind, sweet, innocent kids. Who. Cannot. Read.

This is impossible.

Or so you tell the Powers That Be. Your seniors can do the worksheets you assign them in twenty minutes, or roughly the time it takes your slower kids to write their names. Your high flyers already know who the Romans and the Greeks were, but the rest of the class is lost. How can you possibly teach all these kids at the same time?

Differentiate your instruction, young man.

Or so say the Powers That Be, who play the education game far better than you. So you try.

Hello! Rocketship Education? Can you send me thirty-one laptops with the latest research-based adaptive learning programs?

No dice.

Hi there! Ms. Granger? Would you mind lending me your Time-Turner so I can teach each of my classes thirty-one times and make sure each of my students gets the lesson he or she would most benefit from receiving? HUGE fan of yours, by the way, Ms. Granger.

Differentiation. The solution to all problems. The Holy Grail of effective practice! What is it, exactly? Mixed group work? Harder worksheets for the more advanced kids? Optional diorama projects? All of the above?

According to Carol Tomlinson, differentiated instruction is “an approach to teaching that advocates active planning for student differences in classrooms.” But what differences? Any differences? All differences?

No matter. Regardless of what it means to differentiate, doing so has clear benefits, say the Powers That Be:

1. Struggling to control your class? Let them choose their own adventure! What could go wrong?
2. Struggling to motivate your students? Give each of them a different assignment and hold them to different standards. They’ll never notice.
3. Struggling to craft a rigorous, coherent, well-aligned, scaffolded, data-driven, creative, and above all engaging lesson plan for each of your three classes between the hours of 6:00 p.m. and 11:00 p.m.? Triple your workload! Nothing drives quality like overwhelming quantity.

Then again, perhaps you have misunderstood somehow. Perhaps differentiation is really just a fancy way of saying that you should know your students and try to design interesting lessons that meet them halfway. Which is arguably just a roundabout way of saying you should be a good teacher. Which, coming from the Powers That Be, is really just a slightly devious and politically correct way of saying you should just deal with it already, OK?

But if that’s all it means to differentiate, shouldn’t someone say so? After all, it would be one thing if there were research showing that different children really do have different learning styles. Or that struggling readers benefit from being given easier reading assignments than their more advanced peers. Or that stone-faced teachers have historically made a habit of ignoring their students’ individual needs and quirks.

But since no such research actually exists, perhaps you would be better off just teaching the best lesson you can to as many kids as you can coerce coax into paying attention. Perhaps, instead of flirting with multiple-personality disorder by attempting to be all things to all children, you should do what seems sensible and reasonable under the circumstances. Perhaps you should do what works for you, since anything that doesn’t is highly unlikely to work for the kids. And perhaps you’d have a fighting chance of actually finding something that works if the Powers that Be, or the parents they so cunningly placate, made some minimal effort to differentiate kids before they entered the classroom.

The author was unceremoniously laid off after his first year of teaching. He now plays the role of education gadfly, a far easier task than teaching well.

Almost every article and column written about the nascent GOP presidential campaign mentions Tea Party opposition to immigration reform and the Common Core—and most candidates’ efforts to align themselves with the Republican base on these two issues. (A Google News search turns up more than 11,000 hits for “Common Core” and “immigration” and “Republican.”)

When it comes to immigration reform, it’s easy to understand what the hard-right candidates oppose: any form of amnesty for people who entered the country illegally.

But what does it mean when Ted Cruz, or Rand Paul, or Bobby Jindal says he “opposes” the Common Core? Reporters* might ask them:

1. Do you mean that you oppose the Common Core standards themselves? All of them? Even the ones related to addition and subtraction? Phonics? Studying the nation’s founding documents? Or just some of them? Which ones, in particular, do you oppose? Have you actually read the standards?
2. Or do you mean that you oppose the role that the federal government played in coercing states to adopt the Common Core? Fair enough, but don’t you share that exact same position with every Republican in Congress and every other Republican running for president, including Jeb Bush?
3. Do you mean that you think states should drop out of the Common Core? States like Iowa? Isn’t that a bit presumptive, considering that you’re not from Iowa and the state’s Republican governor wants Common Core to stay? 
4. If you do think that states should reject the Common Core, which standards should replace them? Do they need to be entirely different, or just a little bit different?  And could you cite a specific example of a standard that needs to be “different?”
5. Or do you mean that you oppose the way Common Core has been implemented? If so, everywhere, or just in some states? Or just in some schools? You are running for president; do you think the president of the United States has a role in fixing Common Core implementation?
6. Do you mean you oppose any standards in education that cross state lines? Several years ago, the governors came to an agreement about a common way to measure high school graduation rates. Do you oppose that, too?
7. Or do you mean that you oppose any standards, even those set at the state level? Since states have the constitutional responsibility to provide a sound education, don’t you think they should be clear about what they expect students to know and be able to do in the basic subjects?
8. Or do you mean that you oppose standards that aim to get young people ready for college or a good-paying career? Do you think that’s too high a standard? What standard would you prefer?
9. Tell us again: Why do you oppose the Common Core?

* These are good questions to ask Republican senators, too, who will almost surely rail against the Common Core when the Elementary and Secondary Education act comes to the Senate floor later this year.

• President Obama released his 2016 budget proposal this week, and the media welcomed it with loads of over-analysis. Yet Congress has no use for it.  One Republican House member went so far as to call it “laughable.” It won’t guide legislation for the next twelve months, regardless of what it says about testing or charter schools or anything else. Moreover, the Republicans’ aversion is based on far more than partisanship. The $4 trillion budget is packed with new taxes, yet still isn’t balanced—a major problem when the government is already borrowing money for the programs we have. The White House called it the “beginning of a negotiation.” Translation: It’s unreasonable, and they know it.
• On Monday, comments closed on the Department of Education’s proposed regulations designed to improve the quality of teacher-preparation programs. Two noteworthy changes would be the collection and distribution of more meaningful data on program quality and the withholding of TEACH grants if programs aren’t up to par. Both are worthwhile upgrades, considering the grisly state of U.S. teacher training. Not surprisingly, the major teacher and professor advocacy groups opposed the regulations, including the American Federation of Teachers and the American Association of Colleges for Teacher Education, complaining that the regs are too test-reliant and onerous. The real news, however, came in the form of strong support from Deans for Impact and Art Levine of the Woodrow Wilson Group.
• The Washington Post reports that Washington, D.C. schools might start granting GED earners high school diplomas. The test, which has been around since the 1940s, assesses competency in math, science, social studies, reading, and writing. Recent revisions have made the GED more rigorous; granting test takers high school diplomas would ostensibly eliminate the “stigma” that makes it harder for GED graduates to get a job or pursue higher education. But not everyone is sold. School board member (and Fordham friend) Ruth Wattenberg worries about raising academic standards for a high school diploma on the other hand while saying on the other, ‘Oh, look: Here’s a back door you can go through.” This is what makes “competency-based education” such a perplexing issue.
• In late December, Ohio Governor John Kasich publicly pledged to “fix the lack of regulation on charter schools.” This week, the work began with high-priority legislation aimed at doing just that. House Bill 2 addresses vital issues including transparency, sponsor/school relationships, board roles, and accountability. The governor’s budget, previewed on Monday, proposes a number of changes aimed at incentivizing good sponsor practices and penalizing poor performance (among many other K–12 education proposals). Fordham’s own Chad Aldis said these efforts are “placing Ohio’s charter sector on a new and better path.” With the right players all working together to improve educational quality for students in Ohio’s charter schools, the entire sector is on course for some truly monumental positive change.

No one disputes that great teachers are essential. But how do we get more of them—do we find them or make them? In this book, an elaboration of her New York Times Magazine cover story, Chalkbeat’s Elizabeth Green roundly refutes the narrative that the teaching ability is like a “gene,” contending instead that teaching skills can be taught. The author retraces the history of pedagogical research—from education psychologist Nate Gage through math pedagogy expert Deborah Ball—to illustrate the institutional resistance to instruction-centered reforms. Though scholars, policy makers, and educators are obsessed with quality teaching, the myth of the teaching gene silences efforts to study and improve teachers’ techniques. New instructors, working in isolation, continually reinvent the wheel, with little success. But perhaps that’s starting to change. Some researchers are beginning to systematically observe and record teachers’ methods, allowing successful approaches to emerge. (For instance: Lemov’s taxonomy and Ball’s “This Kind of Teaching.”) This book bears good news for the American education community: if effective pedagogy can be learned, we needn’t wait for great teachers to come to the profession—we can start improving the ones we have.

SOURCE: Elizabeth Green, Building a Better Teacher: How Teaching Works (and How to Teach It to Everyone) (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, July 2014).

Education governance puts most people to sleep. The topic is arcane, sort of boring and, above all, seemingly immutable. If you can’t do anything about a problem, why agonize over it, or even spend time on it?

Of course, some people don’t even see it as a problem. They just take it for granted, like the air surrounding them, the sun rising in the morning, and the Mississippi flowing south. It just is what it is.

That’s wrong-headed. The governance mess is a large part of the reason that so many education problems are impossible to solve. As Mike Petrilli and I wrote three years ago about “our flawed, archaic, and inefficient system for organizing and operating public schools”:

[America’s] approach to school management is a confused and tangled web, involving the federal government, the states, and local school districts—each with ill-defined responsibilities and often conflicting interests. As a result, over the past fifty years, obsolescence, clumsiness, and misalignment have come to define the governance of public education. This development is not anyone’s fault, per se: It is simply what happens when opportunities and needs change, but structures don’t. The system of schooling we have today is the legacy of the nineteenth century—and hopelessly outmoded in the twenty-first.

Perhaps the foremost failing of that system is its fragmented and multi-polar decision making; too many cooks in the education kitchen and nobody really in charge. We bow to the mantra of “local control” yet in fact nearly every major decision affecting the education of our children is shaped (and mis-shaped) by at least four separate levels of governance: Washington, the state capitol, the local district, and the individual school building itself. And that’s without even considering intermediate units (such as the regional education-service centers seen in Texas, New York, Ohio and elsewhere), the courts (which exert enormous influence on our schools), or parents and guardians, and the degree to which all of their decisions influence the nature and quality of a child’s schooling.

At Fordham, we’ve done our best to call attention to the governance problem and suggest possible solutions, but we’ve never had a comprehensive answer to the legitimate question, “If you don’t like the current governance arrangement, what exactly would you do instead if you could?”

Now riding in from the far northwest with a coherent and compelling alternative are Paul Hill and Ashley Jochim, whose new book, A Democratic Constitution for Public Education, is timely, elegant, and systematic.

Their central insight is that education governance needs a proper constitution, much as the American colonies did, and that it’s time to replace a messy, failed, de facto arrangement with a clear sorting-out of duties, powers, limits—and checks and balances.

Their main focus is at the community level, where they preserve and revitalize the concept of local control while both freeing educators to do their best and holding them to account for their results. One might say they get “tight-loose” right. School boards as we know them are replaced by locally elected “Civic Education Councils” with clearly delineated responsibilities (and limits), and the “central office” as we know it is replaced by a CEO arrangement that oversees but does not run a network of more or less autonomous schools. In fact, schools get a “bill of rights” so that their autonomy doesn’t gradually get sapped by an overweening CEO or meddlesome council.

Hill and Jochim also take pains to recast both state and federal roles. Following the principle that everyone should be accountable to someone, the state’s main job, besides setting standards and learning objectives, is to monitor the performance of the local councils and intervene (or replace them or take schools away from them) when they mess up. (States, having sovereign constitutional responsibility for education, are accountable to their citizens and voters, not to Uncle Sam.)

As for the feds, the Department of Education becomes “a provider of ideas, examples, data, and research, not a prescriptive national ministry.” Regulation-heavy categorical programs are replaced by “backpack” funding of needy kids whose education costs Washington helps to bear.

The whole arrangement is designed to meet five criteria that the authors deem essential for a viable K–12 governance system. It must be “efficient, equitable, transparent, accountable and democratic.”

What about feasible? They’re not naïve. They understand that changing education governance is a “long, bumpy road” and don’t expect it to happen in one fell swoop. They usefully point to partial examples of these kinds of changes already being made in various parts of the country. They cite the reworking of school governance in half a dozen cities (e.g., New York) the emergence of a couple of “recovery” districts, portfolio districts, and a bit more. The authors do a swell job of describing obstacles, possible transition stages, and ways that the new arrangement, once enacted, could backslide (as some would say the U.S. Constitution has done!). It has to be said that one doesn’t end the book with a high level of confidence that Hill and Jochim’s “democratic constitution” can be put into place and sustained. But one ends it thoroughly persuaded that it should be. So please awaken from the governance slumber and read it!

SOURCE: Paul T. Hill and Ashley E. Jochim, A Democratic Constitution for Public Education (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2014).

I’m no testing hawk. I’ve written plenty at Fordham and elsewhere that’s critical of test-driven ed-reform orthodoxy. Accountability is a sacred principal to me, but testing? It’s complicated—as a science, a policy, and a reform lever. Anya Kamenetz’s new book The Test is not complicated. She strikes a strident anti-testing tone right from the start. “Tests are stunting children’s spirits, adding stress to family life, demoralizing teachers, undermining schools, paralyzing the education debate, and gutting our country’s future competitiveness,” writes Kamenetz, an education reporter for National Public Radio. If you’re looking for the good, the bad, and the ugly on testing, well, two out of three ain’t bad.

Part cri de couer, part parenting manual (she may hate testing, but Kamenetz still wants her daughter—and your kids—to do well) The Test is particularly tendentious on the history of standardized tests. “Why so many racists in psychometrics?” she asks (her prose is often glib and always self-assured). “I’m not saying anyone involved in testing today is, de facto, racist. But it’s hard to ignore the shadow of history.”

What is easy for Kamenetz to ignore almost entirely is that some of the strongest support for testing comes from civil rights activists who have used test scores to dramatically alter the education landscape and highlight achievement gaps, all in the name of equality. But this runs counter to her argument that testing “penalizes diversity.” Kati Haycock may have once led affirmative-action programs for the University of California system, but her Education Trust is a “conservative-funded advocacy group in DC.” The Heritage Foundation’s Samuel Casey Carter offers “a mishmash of anecdotal evidence and conservative faith,” yet The Test is larded with Kamenetz’s own mishmash of anecdotal evidence and liberal homilies. A story from her own mother-in-law about a culturally biased test question is “possibly apocryphal,” Kamenetz admits. But she still offers it as “a great illustration of what bias looks like on a test.” 

Kamenetz offers lots of advice on opting out of tests for parents who are, I think, quite reasonably concerned about the deleterious effect of testing on their children’s schooling. Here’s the advice I wish she’d offered: March into the principal’s office with a simple demand. “Don’t waste a minute on test prep. Just teach our kids. The second you turn learning time into test prep, our kids are staying home!” Imagine if Kamenetz and her fellow progressive Brooklyn public school parents did exactly that—teachers and parents could have the hands-on, play-based, child-centered schools of their dreams, and test day would be just another day at school. Unless, of course, the test scores came back weak. Then Kamenetz might write another, more complicated book. And that’s the one I want to read.

SOURCE: Anya Kamenetz, The Test: Why Our Schools are Obsessed with Standardized Testing–But You Don’t Have to Be (New York: PublicAffairs, 2015).

How do we get new and better private schools of choice? That’s the question AEI’s Michael McShane and a cadre of researchers and practitioners dive into in this new edited volume. The book and a corresponding conference acknowledge that “better is not good enough.” Indeed, for far too long, supporters of school choice have been content with merely providing alternatives to district school options on the assumption that choice was a sufficient guarantor of quality. Instead, this book calls for a “nimble, agile, and market-driven” system of schools. Among the high points is Andy Smarick’s look at what has worked in chartering: incubation (leadership pipelines, start-up capital, strategic support, and political advocacy) and network building. He also reprises his call for “authorizers” to oversee publicly funded private schools. McShane agrees that this model could “provide oversight without stifling the set of options available for school choice.” Perhaps. But private schools, from Catholic schools to those providing alternative curriculum, often see themselves as working toward ends that are more than academic. Could they maintain their distinctive flavor in a marketplace that could devalue their mission? New and Better Schools is a smart look forward in private school choice programs and a thoughtful critique of how and where these programs have not thrived.

SOURCE: Michael Q. McShane, New and Better Schools: The Supply Side of School Choice (Lanham, Maryland: Rowman & Littlefield, 2015).