The Education Gadfly Weekly

The best compliment I can pay a fellow education blogger is to confess professional jealousy. So I’d like to close out 2015 by saluting the education blogs and columns that made me green with envy.

I’m a fan of Tim Shanahan and devour every word he writes. My favorite Shanahan post in 2015 was his evisceration of a silly piece in the Atlantic on the “joyful, illiterate kindergarteners of Finland” that—cliché alert—depicted the typical American kindergarten as a worksheet-happy hothouse. “The silly dichotomy between play and academic instruction was made up by U.S. psychologists in the 1890s,” he wrote. “It hangs on today among those who have never taught a child to read in their lives.” He singled out Nancy Carlsson-Paige, an early childhood professor, who is happy to tell anyone with a microphone that there’s no solid evidence in favor of teaching reading in kindergarten. “You can make that claim,” Shanahan concluded, “as long as you don’t know the research.”

I get jealous when somebody makes a smart observation about something hidden in plain sight, like Andy Rotherham did with his March column in U.S. News & World Report (where I’m also a contributor) pointing out that education reform is “dominated by people who not only liked being in and around schools, they excelled at academic work.” The result is an inevitable blind spot, with almost everyone focused on “how to make an institution that is not enjoyable for many kids work marginally better.” If you want to learn more about how to make school work for more Americans, Rotherham advises, talk to more Americans for whom school didn’t work.

Writing at the Seventy Four, Derrell Bradford wrote a smart piece noting that “Uber and charter schools are opposite sides of the same disruptive, empowering coin.” No surprise, therefore, that New York City’s Mayor Bill de Blasio dislikes them both. Hizzoner’s attacks on Uber “at the behest of the Taxi and Limousine Commission (TLC) and its well-heeled, medallion-wielding financiers, Bradford wrote, “look stunningly similar to his volleys against the city’s charter school sector.” Both battles bloodied the mayor’s nose.

“The problem in American education is not dumb teachers. The problem is dumb teacher training,” noted UVA cognitive scientist Dan Willingham in a well-observed New York Times op-ed. “Policy makers have debated the best way to evaluate teacher effectiveness, but have shown little interest in the training that is supposed to make them effective in the first place.” Hear, hear. One hopeful development to address that oversight is a new coalition of education school leaders, Deans for Impact, which launched in 2015. Willingham was a major contributor to their “Science of Learning” report, a must-read for educators.

I’ve been banging the drum for curriculum as a reform lever for a long time. So it will surprise no one that one of my favorite blog posts of the year was Kate Walsh’s “Curriculum: The Great Divide among Ed Reformers” over at NCTQ’s blog, which called out reformers who refuse to take the nuts and bolts of reading instruction seriously. “I think the issue for some ed reformers is that other reforms are a lot more important,” she wrote. “I can’t quite figure out why there are still perfectly reasonable, rational people who aren’t willing to embrace the 2+2=4 connection between children learning how to read and every other outcome reformers fight for.” Me neither, Kate, but let’s keep at ‘em. Meanwhile reports like “The Hidden Value of Curriculum Reform” from the Center for American Progress will hopefully help. So too “Curriculum Counts,” a report by the Manhattan Institute’s Charles Sahm, which looked at New York City’s curriculum choices in implementing Common Core. Sahm demonstrated the degree to which we are in the dark on the curricula used in our schools. Lastly, TNTP did its part to pry open the classroom black box with “How Do Teachers Really Spend Their Time?”

Few write as clearly about literacy as Marilyn Jager Adams of Brown University. Her post at the Albert Shanker Institute’s blog, “Knowledge for Literacy,” made a case that still needs attention: “If we wish to advance our students’ literacy, we must devote ourselves to increasing the breadth and depth of their domain knowledge.” At the Huffington Post, Karen Chenoweth covered the same ground in a terrific post, “Kids Love Knowing Stuff.”

Hey, teachers! Had enough of being told to be the “guide on the side?” That there’s no “deep learning” unless it’s student-led, small-group, hands-on, active learning? Molly Worthen, an assistant professor of history at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill disagrees (as do I). Her article Times, “Lecture Me. Really,” noted that a good lecture is not a recitation of facts—it’s the building of an argument. “Absorbing a long, complex argument is hard work, requiring students to synthesize, organize, and react as they listen,” she wrote.

Another ringing defense of traditional academics can be found in a surprising place: military academies. Jon Marcus of the Hechinger Report had a piece in the Atlantic noting that West Point and other service academies “are expanding their requirements in the liberal arts with the conviction that these courses teach the kinds of skills employers say they want, and leaders need: critical thinking, problem-solving, teamwork, and communication.” You want Plato on that wall. You need Plato on that wall.

Oceans of ink were spilled on the protests that roiled Mizzou, Yale, Princeton, and dozens of other college campuses. Much of the criticism was mockery and contempt heaped upon students demanding “safe spaces” and the punishment of “microaggressions.” The Atlantic’s Conor Friedersdorf has covered the protests with an appropriately skeptical eye and respect for free speech. His piece noting the “weaponizing of safe space” was particularly excellent. For K–12 educators, the must-read was from NYU’s Jonathan Haidt, who described the oppressive intellectual environment not of college campuses, but of high schools where “only people in the preferred groups get to speak, and everyone else is afraid.” A post on his blog titled “The Yale Problem Begins in High School,” Haidt painted a sobering picture of students who “go off to college and learn new ways to gain status by expressing collective anger at those who disagree.”

In 2015, I began paying close attention to Susan Dynarski, a professor of education, public policy, and economics at the University of Michigan. Posts like this one at the Times’s “Upshot” site are the reason why. “Urban Charter Schools Often Succeed. Suburban Ones Often Don’t,” was a clear and scrupulously fair take on what the research shows: “In urban areas, where students are overwhelmingly low-achieving, poor, and nonwhite, charter schools tend to do better than other public schools in improving student achievement,” Dynarski wrote. “By contrast, outside of urban areas, where students tend to be white and middle class, charters do no better and sometimes do worse than public schools.”

I’m a sucker for writers who willing to call out the hypocrisy of their own side. No one does it better than New America’s Conor Williams. His February piece at the Seventy Four blasted liberals who want to protect the relationship between housing and schools, while poor parents who try to skirt the system go to jail. “When I confront fellow liberals about defending the deeply hierarchical, inequitable link between real estate prices and school enrollment, they almost always say something to the effect of, ‘Why can’t we just make all schools great?’” Another Williams piece, an imagined hipster critique of “The Existential Horror of Teach For America” defies easy summarization, but trust me, it’s hilarious.

Speaking of the Seventy Four (and slaying education pieties), Matt Barnum eviscerated once and for all the hackneyed argument that we should somehow treat teachers the way we treat professional athletes. His wickedly funny sendup, suggested just the opposite: we should treat pro athletes the way we treat teachers. “Athletes should be compensated solely based on experience and whether they have a master’s degree in the sport that they play,” Barnum faux-argued. And let’s stop forcing veteran athletes into retirement and replacing them with someone with less experience and fewer credentials. “Our teams deserve experienced, qualified players—not young kids straight out of college or even high school who are supposedly faster and more athletic.” Game, set, match.

During a high-visibility Supreme Court hearing last week on the Fisher v. University of Texas admissions case, Justice Scalia made some ill-considered comments on race in higher education: "There are those who contend that it does not benefit African Americans to get them into the University of Texas, where they do not do well, as opposed to having them go to a less advanced school, a slower-track school where they do well." Then, referencing a case filing, he added, “One of the briefs pointed out that most of the black scientists in this country don't come from schools like the University of Texas,” he said. “They come from lesser schools where they do not feel that they're being pushed ahead in classes that are too fast for them.”

Myriad commentators went after him. Others came to his defense. And still others landed somewhere in-between. We don’t view Scalia as a racist, but there’s no denying that his statements can be interpreted as suggesting that black kids are inescapably destined for the slow track. It’s not surprising that people are offended.

It ought to go without saying, but of course there is nothing inherently inferior about poor and minority students. Individual kids are not equally adept or eager learners, but it’s as wrong for a Supreme Court justice to suggest that entire racial or ethnic categories are slow as for a presidential candidate to propose that entire religious groups be barred from the United States.

Yet an inconvenient truth also lurks behind Scalia’s observations and all the subsequent to-do: There is a fast track in American education. It runs all the way from kindergarten through graduate school. And we’re getting far too few black students onto it. Schools, communities, and parents are failing to do right by many African American (and other poor and minority) youth, particularly those with the greatest academic potential. The disproportionate number of black students who are well prepared to succeed in selective universities is just a symptom; the disease is systemic failure in the K–12 system.

First, a great many black kids attend high-poverty schools awash in low achievement—places where all the pressures on teachers incentivize them to equip weak pupils with basic skills in reading, writing, and arithmetic. Such schools invest most of their resources in boosting low-achievers, which has been the central focus of our public policies, private philanthropies, and moral sensibilities for decades. Such schools are also apt to judge teachers by their success in getting low-achievers over the proficiency bar. They therefore have little energy, time, incentive, or money to spare for students already above that bar.

Instead of putting high-ability and high-achieving students in classes that propel them onward as fast as they can move, a 2014 study by the Brookings Institution’s Tom Loveless found that high-poverty schools had almost twice the percentage of de-tracked students as low-poverty schools. In America’s leafy suburbs, white and Asian kids are far likelier to attend schools that understand acceleration, fast-tracking, ability-grouping, and “gifted and talented” education. Their schools are also likely to be well resourced—and are under lots of parental pressure to help their students travel to the Ivy League and prestige public universities like UT Austin. As Ford Foundation President Darren Walker recently remarked, “[E]ven though talent is spread evenly across America, opportunity is not.”

The proper course of action, obviously, is to extend similar opportunities to poor and minority kids. As we argue in our new book, Failing Our Brightest Kids: The Global Challenge of Educating High-Ability Students, there are better ways to maximize students’ potential, including universal screening, mastery-based progress, and more opportunities outside the classroom.

First, schools, districts, and states should use extant assessments—such as the standardized tests that kick in by third grade—to screen all kids. They should then use those results to identify the top 5 percent or so of test takers in each school and give them opportunities to partake in accelerated, deeper curricula that better capitalize on their potential and prior achievement. This will diversify the qualifying population and not just favor upper-middle-class kids. Recent research by economists Laura Giuliano and David Card proves that this works, especially for minority students.

Teachers in every elementary school should also be asked to nominate additional kids who, though they are not top scorers, earn excellent grades or show uncommon potential. Classroom professionals need to look with extra care for children from poor, minority, and immigrant families—and they should look holistically, instead of just at grades and scores. Districts will need to provide the teachers themselves with screening tools to help with such identifications and invite students and parents to come forward if they would like to be considered. But they should also urge principals to develop schoolwide methods for dealing with parental pressures, outside influencers, and allegations of favoritism or discrimination. Combining this with universal test-based screening would identify perhaps 10 percent of students who are already high-achievers or, in their teachers’ eyes, could prove to be. This is a generous enough definition to benefit those pupils who lack prepared or pushy parents.

Second, we should allow students to move through school based on mastery rather than age. The single best thing our education systems could do for high-potential students—and everybody else—would be to make it possible for them to progress through curricula at their own pace. Instead of age-based grade levels (all eleven-year-olds belong in fifth grade, where they’re all held to the same performance standards) kids could proceed one unit or module at a time, subject by subject, with no obligation to move through all at the same rate. Mark Zuckerberg’s personalized learning initiative is suggesting this very thing. And indeed, technology can help make this a reality. But only if schools alter time-honored structures and familiar schedules, make smart use of technology, encourage team teaching, use tutors and aides as well as teachers, and wean themselves from grade-level textbooks. They’ll also have to wean parents from stubbornly insisting that simply because a given child is eleven, she must be in fifth grade.

Third, students should be offered more learning opportunities outside the regular classroom. We ought to create after-school or weekend enrichment classes and online options so that high-ability pupils (and others) can engage in independent study beyond their standard curricula. Especially in the middle grades, schools should provide comprehensive pull-out opportunities for entire subjects, not just a period or two per week. In high school, where students are better able to study on their own, they need “blended” and “virtual” learning options akin to the fast-evolving offerings of higher education. There also ought to be dual-enrollment plans, honors programs, schools-within-schools, beefed-up AP and International Baccalaureate sequences, specialized magnets, “exam schools,” early college high schools, gifted-centric charter schools, and more.

Do this for a decade and the “over-matching” problem on Justice Scalia’s mind will diminish if not disappear. It will also help solve the “under-matching” problem whereby high-achievers from disadvantaged backgrounds don’t even apply to competitive colleges because nobody in their school is paying attention to them. Today’s K–12 system showers undue advantage on those who already have advantages. High-ability poor and minority kids are among the most neglected populations in American public education. Yet they too deserve an education that meets their needs and enhances their futures. They have their own legitimate claim on our conscience, our sense of fairness, our policy priorities, and our education budgets. Those kids depend more than upper-middle-class youngsters on the public education system to do right by them. And instituting these reforms will get more of these kids onto the fast track and into elite universities. The day will come when Supreme Court justices have no grounds to opine that black students are better off in “slow-track” schools. And that’s a day worth dawning.

Penny Wohlstetter and her coauthors have delivered a terrific new Fordham study, “America’s Best (and Worst) Cities for School Choice.” It finds a creative, concrete, and unusually useful way to get under the hood and delve into messy questions about the availability of choice, quality control, political support, and the effects of policy environment. The result is exceptionally useful for understanding what individual cities are doing and contemplating how they might do better.

Wohlstetter has powerfully extended an earlier study that I did with Fordham back in 2010, “The Nation’s Best (and Worst) Cities for School Reform.” That study looked at education ecosystems, examining a broad set of variables that included philanthropic support, political leadership, bureaucratic burden, and the talent pool. Here, Wohlstetter looks specifically at the issue of choice, which allows her to go deeper and get more granular. She examines the entire picture of choice in thirty cities, including charter, magnet, and private schools. She finds that New Orleans, Washington, D.C., and Denver lead the pack; that New York City is becoming less hospitable to choice under Mayor de Blasio; and that some southern cities are surprisingly strong on choice.

This kind of analysis is invaluable if we’re to better cultivate the conditions for excellent schools of choice, but it’s hardly ever in evidence. That fact is really important, more so than any particular finding. You see, there are really two kinds of policy thinkers when it comes to school reform: gardeners and engineers. There are those who regard school reform as an engineering challenge—a matter of pulling this lever and imposing that requirement. Others of us are more inclined to think like gardeners, relying on the conviction that all policy can really do is foster the conditions under which good things are more likely to happen.

It shouldn’t be especially controversial to observe that the engineering camp has dominated the school reform squad in recent years. The lexicon alone—filled with its talk of “effective teachers” and the “exporting best practices”—is a tip-off. What’s followed has been a push for testing, new standards, statewide teacher evaluation systems, and related efforts to secure the assurances and certainties of engineering. The problem is that complex social organizations and processes are incredibly tough to engineer. This isn’t my observation, it was Friedrich Hayek’s—I’m just borrowing it. (If you’re interested, I discussed all this at length several years ago in Education Unbound).

And it’s not just that complex systems are hard to engineer; it’s that they often defeat the very premise of the exercise. Unlike steel, plywood, or asphalt, human systems learn. They change in unpredictable ways. They anticipate, interpret, backlash, and course-correct, so that engineering efforts are almost inevitably assured of delivering results other than those they intend. Hayek argued that, try as they might, it was impossible for engineers to gather all the knowledge and information needed to solve this problem. This is why sensible proposals for school accountability or teacher evaluation can go south when tackled as grand schemes with little regard for real-world dynamics.

Thus, some of us find gardening the more promising approach to educational improvement. Gardeners are passionate about removing obstacles, creating the conditions for growth, and yanking up weeds, but they’re conscious that success is organic. Soil conditions, temperature, and light are immensely important. A planting that grows gloriously in one locale may wither in another. Good gardeners worry about conditions and do what they can to alter or adjust to them—but they also know that planting a “great” bulb in the wrong circumstances cannot be solved by even the most brilliant bit of engineering.

Wohlstetter and her coauthors have really produced a gardener’s guide. This is a report filled with particulars on climate and soil conditions. It tells readers which locales are particularly hospitable to choice, which are not, and how those various ecosystems might be nourished. I only hope that we don’t have to wait another five years for the next installment. Hell, Ben Franklin was able to produce Poor Richard’s Almanac every year, and he did it all in a world without word processing software, fancy data models, or deep-pocketed philanthropists. 

Editor's note: This post was first published on Flypaper on December 17. 

While it is likely true that those who do not learn from the mistakes of history are doomed to repeat them, those who are not tested on the subject in school may be doomed not to have learned much history in the first place.

“Advanced Civics for U.S. History Teachers,” a smart new white paper from Massachusetts’s Pioneer Institute, counsels civics and history advocates to show “persistence and unity” in order to restore history to “its rightful place as a treasured academic discipline and a fundamental educational priority.” The paper was issued in the weeks before ESEA was reauthorized and signed, but its primary recommendation—that states mandate a statewide assessment in U.S. history—is astute and timely now that states largely control their own testing and accountability destinies.

Pioneer also recommends “strong funding streams for professional development” and highlights several outstanding programs with national reputations that “buck the trends and afford teachers and students the possibilities of teaching and learning history in a rich, engaging and rigorous manner”: The Center for the Study of the Constitution; the Robert H. Smith Center for the Constitution; the Ashbrook Center at Ashland University; and the outstanding “We the People” program. (One recommendation the report strangely overlooks, perhaps because of Pioneer’s general aversion to all things federal, is restoring the $10 million the Center for Civic Education used to receive annually from the U.S. Department of Education for “We the People.”)

The authors also recommend that school administrators “focus their hiring on teachers with strong content knowledge.” It’s a fine and even necessary recommendation, but teachers can’t give what they don’t have. One data point the report overlooks: In the most recent NAEP exam, a mere 18 percent of eighth graders performed at or above the “proficient” level in U.S. history, and only 23 percent did so in civics—levels that make U.S. performance in reading and math look robust by comparison. Just 2 percent of college graduates are history majors—less than half the figure from forty years ago. The line at the job fair for teachers with strong content knowledge will not be a long one. If I may add a recommendation to Pioneer’s list: Several states have begun to make passing the U.S. citizenship exam a high school graduation requirement. Perhaps it should also be a condition of teacher certification.

“Parents, students, government officials, and business leaders need to be made aware of the dire straits of history and the consequences of continuing along the path we are now on,” the authors note. Knowledge of our history’s foundational documents, seminal events, and pivotal leaders, they note, “are in a state of full-blown retreat.” We know this. The nonsense that spews daily from the mouths of presidential candidates, their enablers, and various media hacks merely remind us.

So yes, one very good place to start is statewide testing in history “with a strong focus on the founding documents.” Perhaps Massachusetts, with Pioneer’s energetic push, can lead the way. Then those who do not learn the lessons of history can merely be doomed to repeat the class.

SOURCE: Anders Lewis and William Donovan, “Advanced Civics for U.S. History Teachers: Professional Development Models Focusing on the Founding Documents,” Pioneer Institute (November 2015).

Fifty years ago, Catholic schools educated 5.6 million children in thirteen thousand schools across America. Perhaps the most depressing passage of Catholic School Renaissance—a new book by Andy Smarick and Kelly Robson aimed at philanthropists—is found on pages twelve and thirteen, which present inglorious charts detailing the deterioration of Catholic schools and their enrollment. Though that decline is not presently as drastic as it was during the 60s and 70s, it’s easy to despair over the state of one of most successful learning mechanisms in U.S. history.

Luckily, the next hundred pages explain what ought to be done to save these national assets. Smarick and Robson believe that our growing national acceptance of school choice provides a climate ripe for a Catholic comeback—and donors have the biggest role to play in bringing about the renaissance. “The question is no longer whether Catholic schools should be run differently; it’s about how,” they argue. The book explains how promising models should be scaled and offers a few viable solutions to the biggest problems plaguing the sector (teacher recruitment and retention chief among them). In a useful appendix, it lists dozens of opportunities for donors to shape systems via marketing, data reporting, and infrastructure development, as well as the approximate cost of each reform.

The Cristo Rey Network is one attractive candidate for expansion. To offset tuition costs, students (almost ten thousand in all) work five days per month in entry-level jobs at hospitals, universities, law firms, and other businesses. As they gain work experience, their income goes directly toward tuition, covering 40–60 percent of each student’s costs. Minority students make up 97 percent of those enrolled in the network, which now comprises thirty schools in nineteen states and Washington, D.C.

On the twin challenges of recruitment and retention, the report quotes Seton Education Partners cofounder Stephanie Saroki de Garcia: “Virtually no one in the country is recruiting, selecting, and compensating urban Catholic school leaders the right way.” Part of the problem, the authors submit, is that these positions tend to pay significantly less than comparable ones in district schools.

Smarick and Robson argue that the sector ought to direct focus to the benefits of teaching outside of public schools, such as better student behavior and more flexible credentialing requirements. And donors should look to the Catholic teacher education programs that are already providing multi-year training and mentoring for their staff, such as Notre Dame’s Alliance for Catholic Education, the Lynch Leadership Academy, and Partners Advancing Values in Education. Philanthropic support for these models would go a long way toward helping them attract and retain better classroom leaders.

In all, Catholic School Renaissance is a great guidebook for philanthropists curious about how they can help sustain a great American educational traditional. Donors ought to take heed.

SOURCE: Andy Smarick and Kelly Robson, Catholic School Renaissance: A Wise Giver’s Guide to Strengthening a National Asset (Washington D.C.: The Philanthropy Roundtable, 2015).

In its 2015 state policy analysis, the National Association of Charter School Authorizers (NACSA) found that fourteen states have seen positive charter policy changes since the organization’s inaugural report last year. These wide-ranging improvements demonstrate the value of sizing up a state’s legal framework, diagnosing its structural problems, comparing it to peers, and using that information to press policymakers for change. In other words, rankings like this—and other seemingly wonky law and policy reviews—may actually pave the way for real improvements.

NACSA analyzed and ranked every state with a charter law (forty-three, plus the District of Columbia) against eight policy recommendations meant to ensure a baseline of authorizer quality and charter school accountability: 1) Can schools select from at least two authorizers? 2) Does the state require authorizers to meet endorsed standards (like NACSA’s)? 3) Does the state evaluate its authorizers? 4) Do poor authorizers face sanctions? 5) Do authorizers publish annual performance reports on schools? 6) Is every charter bound by a contract that outlines performance expectations? 7) Are there strong non-renewal standards, and can authorizers effectively close poor performers? 8) Does the state have an automatic closure law on the books?

Additionally, the report offers four state case studies, outlining the challenge to quality in each (e.g., Indiana’s multiple authorizers and authorizer “shopping” problem) and the policy fixes (e.g., consequences for poor authorizing practices). 

Ohio’s rise in the rankings to third (and a near-perfect score) is notable, resulting in huge part from the state’s charter school reform bill (HB 2). Indiana and Nevada tie for number one, while Kansas, Virginia, and Maryland are at the bottom of the barrel. Washington earns an unfortunate non-rating in the wake of its state supreme court ruling that its charter school law is unconstitutional.

The report rightly points out that the policy recommendations forming the backbone of the report represent “cornerstones of excellence” but cannot determine quality on their own. State policy is just one part of the quality equation, and NACSA notes that “authorizers often develop practices that work around weaknesses or vagaries in state law.” Implementation is paramount. For example, Fordham’s home state of Ohio earns full points for requiring authorizers to submit annual performance reports, but authorizers themselves determine the rubric for scoring their schools, resulting in zero comparability and wildly different definitions of quality. Ohio’s closure law is among the oldest in the nation, yet it hasn’t accomplished much and is currently on pause. The state put a meaningful authorizer evaluation into law, but the first round of ratings has been rescinded. Current recommendations on the updated evaluation, if put in place, are so onerous that likely no authorizer would earn high marks. Still, to the extent that states can pull certain policy levers and set a minimum framework for quality, they should. The 2015 analysis gives reason to hope that many already are.

SOURCE: “On the Road to Better Accessibility, Autonomy, and Accountability: State Policy Analysis 2015,” National Association of Charter School Authorizers (November 2015).