The Education Gadfly Weekly

Let’s just stop pussyfooting around and say it out loud: The “historic” peak in the country’s high school graduation rate is bullshit.

According to federal data released late last year, and dutifully trumpeted ever since (including in last night’s State of the Union address), the nation’s high school graduation rate has hit an all-time high, with 82 percent of the Class of 2014 earning a diploma. “As a result, many more students will have a better chance of going to college, getting a good job, owning their own home, and supporting a family,” crowed then-Secretary of Education Arne Duncan.

Isn’t it pretty to think so?

In fact, Secretary Duncan might be right for now. Confidence and good will are baked into a high school diploma. It is an academic promissory note that signals to college admissions staffers, employers, and others that the holder has achieved some reasonable level of academic proficiency. But it’s also a faith-based system. It only works if people believe it stands for something tangible.

Regarding the recent spike in graduation rates, good luck figuring out what it stands for. Not improved student proficiency, certainly. There has been no equally dramatic spike in SAT scores. Don’t look for a parallel uptick on seventeen-year-old NAEP, better performance on AP tests, or the ACT, either. You won’t find it. The only thing that appears to be rising is the number of students in need of remedial math and English in college. And the number of press releases bragging about huge increases in graduation rates.

A recent New York Times report looked at a South Carolina school district where only one in ten students were ready for college-level work in reading based on their ACT scores; an abysmal one in fourteen were ready for freshman math. An editorial a few days later blasted “counterfeit” high school diplomas, pointing the finger at states with “weak curriculums and graduation requirements that make high school diplomas useless.” To be fair, not everything about the sudden rise in graduation rates smells funny. Motoko Rich’s report notes that declining teenage pregnancy rates, reductions in violent crime, and better data collection to identify chronically absent students and those at risk of failure have surely contributed. Heavens be praised. But, she added, “an increasing number of states and districts offer students more chances to make up failed credits online or in short tutoring sessions without repeating a whole semester or more.”

Right. And this is the point at which graduation rates—and what they say about the value of a diploma—begin to sink into the dark swamp of “credit recovery.”

Take the example of Baltimore. A recent news release from Baltimore City Public Schools trumpets the district’s fifth straight year of gains: In 2010, 66.7 percent of high school students graduated within five years of entering ninth grade; as of 2014, it was 74.9 percent. The city couldn’t have achieved that stunning rate of success without the (even more stunning) 36.5 percent of students who graduated via the “High School Bridge for Academic Validation Plan.” Baltimore’s press release doesn’t mention that fewer than half of Baltimore’s freshly minted high school graduates passed the Maryland State High School Assessments (HSAs).

In New York City, graduation rates are also at record levels, hitting 70 percent for the first time—a dramatic twenty-four-point rise in a decade. Schools chancellor Carmen Farina described the results as “important progress,” but she noted that “there is so much more to do to ensure equity and excellence in classrooms across all five boroughs.” You can say that again. Gothamites have not forgotten the New York Post’s reports on the “EZ-Pass” scandal—a steady drumbeat of stories documenting grade-fixing and phony summer school programs. One student even wrote a front-page article describing how she earned credit she didn’t deserve for a government exam she failed, but needed for graduation.

And advocates for school closure should take note: A new report from the New York City Independent Budget Office casts doubt on the value of diplomas conferred upon students from city schools slated for closure in the Bloomberg era. These pupils were more likely to have earned class credits through credit recovery and to have scored at exactly the cutoff point on state Regents exams—a red flag, to put it bluntly.

To be sure, there are very good reasons for credit recovery: We should want students who fall behind on credits due to illness, pregnancy, or some other disruption to have the opportunity to catch up and graduate. Neither the child nor society benefits if we place barriers in the way of graduation. But problems with credit recovery are legion. There’s no clear definition of what it is, no good or consistent data on how often it’s used, and no way of knowing whether it’s academically rigorous or merely a failsafe to paper over failure and drag unprepared kids across the finish line to boost graduation rates.

The potential for abuse is rampant, whether through less-than-rigorous credit recovery schemes or (as in many of the cases detailed in the New York Post) a teacher holding his nose and passing a student for the sake of expedience. Has the student earned her diploma, or is she merely being handed a diploma as a parting gift?

The even bigger problem is that we might just be stuck with it. Refusing to confer even a debased, potentially meaningless credential on an eighteen-year-old is tantamount to publicly pronouncing him a failure—unfit for post-secondary education, entry-level employment, or military service. As one child advocate lamented to Chalkbeat this week, “Panera Bread asks if you have a high school diploma. What are the options for these kids?”

Look, it’s not a bad thing that graduation rates are up. There may yet be a pony at the bottom of this prodigious pile. But without proficiency measures validating the diplomas we’re handing out like participation trophies after a youth soccer match, we’re flying blind. In the era of ESSA, when every state is on the hook to define accountability for itself, demonstrating the legitimacy of credit recovery—and the value of a high school diploma more generally—is an area ripe for reform and transparency. If states and districts want to claim credit for a meteoric rise in graduation rates, the onus is on them to prove that their diplomas are worth more than the paper they’re printed on.

Until then, leave those self-congratulatory press releases in your desk. 

Officials at the Department of Education have requested public comments by January 21 about areas in the new Every Student Succeeds Act where regulation might be “helpful or necessary.” My recommendation to the feds: Tread very lightly.

That’s not an ideological plea (though I am ideologically disposed to a limited federal role). It’s because there’s no one best system for school accountability, and there never will be. Uncle Sam has to be damn sure not to smother good ideas that the states might develop, now or in the future.

That’s not to say that anything goes. ESSA established “guardrails,” in D.C. parlance, to ensure that states don’t eviscerate results-based accountability. They cannot decide to judge schools by nothing but student engagement, or teacher happiness, or the number of hugs a kid receives each day.

But Congress did give the green light to the states to come up with new approaches to rating school quality. It’s critical that John King and his colleagues don’t put on the red light before the process even begins.

Let me offer a few examples of novel approaches that deserve to be permissible, and even embraced, under the law—but that the micromanagers at the department might inadvertently close off if they’re not careful:

1. Weighting academic achievement and academic growth differently for different types of schools. As regular readers know, I’m a big proponent of individual-level growth measures because they can largely control for factors that schools cannot influence (prior student achievement, the challenges of poverty, etc.). They are the fairest way to measure school performance. But it can be hard for schools with high academic achievement (typically those with affluent populations) to show much progress over time. Thus systems that look at growth alone sometimes end up labeling affluent, high-achieving schools as mediocre or worse. Since those ratings don’t pass the smell test, this can’t help but create face validity problems. Here’s one solution: Start with the premise that a great school either has very high achievement for all students or helps all of its students make a lot of progress over the course of the year. Both types of schools deserve A ratings. So states might adopt a rule that says that any school that gets an A for either academic achievement or for academic growth gets an A overall. That will mean, of course, that for some schools, either academic growth or academic achievement will count for very little. Will the department allow that?
2. Weighting the “English language proficiency” index more heavily for schools with many English language learners. ESSA requires state accountability systems to measure “progress in achieving English language proficiency”—and for this indicator to count for a “substantial amount” in a school’s grade. And there’s no doubt that it should be a major component of a school’s rating if much of its population is still learning English. But what if a school has just a few ELL students? Surely their progress shouldn’t count too much compared to, say, the reading and math gains of all students. Will states have the flexibility to weight this component differently depending on the makeup of the student population?
3. Considering performance at the “advanced” level when measuring academic achievement. The new law also requires states to use, as part of their rating systems, an indicator of academic achievement “as measured by proficiency on the annual assessments.” But must such an indicator look at achievement on the “proficient” level only? What if a state wants to give extra credit to schools that get more kids to the advanced level (like level four on Smarter Balanced or level five on PARCC)? That’s clearly worthy of support. They might also want to give partial credit for getting kids to the basic level so that we don’t repeat NCLB’s mistake of encouraging schools to focus only on the “bubble kids” just below the proficiency cutoff. (See how Ohio’s “performance index” currently does this, for example.) Will the department allow this? Maybe even encourage it?

So how might King et al. deal with these sorts of issues? One option is to answer these questions in the affirmative: In the regulations, declare that these particular approaches meet the spirit of the law and are welcome. (I’m hopeful that our ESSA Accountability Design Competition on February 2 will generate many more such ideas.) But here’s the rub: We’re going to have to live with this law for at least five years, if not a lot longer. Isn’t it likely that some state is going to come up with other promising approaches down the road?

Perhaps there’s another option to consider, then. The department could make it clear, via its regulations, that it will defer to state plans unless they clearly violate both the letter and the spirit of the law. The feds will aim to get to “yes.” That’s surely what the Republicans in Congress expect.

At every turn, federal officials should ask themselves: Is additional regulatory language absolutely necessary? Is it closing off some good ideas that nobody has thought up yet? Are we assuming a certain structure for state accountability systems (that they all include an index, for instance, with indicators weighted the same for all types of schools) that might get in the way of promising innovations?

Arne Duncan was not known for showing restraint—or for seeing wisdom in the adage that sometimes less is more. Here’s John King’s chance to show that his tenure will be different.

• The ink is dry on the bill, the interest groups are mollified, and the lobbyists have made the first payments on their tastefully appointed condominiums. Now that the Every Student Achieves Act has become the law of the land, it’s time to examine its implications for our federal education bureaucracy. Ace Fordham policy fellow Andy Smarick has identified the shrinking classroom influence of Uncle Sam as the top media takeaway from ESSA’s passage, and there’s no denying that Congress acted decisively to roll back the Department of Education’s Obama-era authority. But just how much has the agency—and John King, who will act as its leader regardless of whether he ever gets a confirmation hearing—seen its prerogatives narrowed? This recap from Education Week offers a good primer, consulting aides from both parties along with education superlawyer Reg Leichty. Shockingly, the sources don’t agree on whether future secretaries of education will be “handcuffed” in their dealings with state accountability schemes. But as Leichty happily observes, those differences in opinion will likely be resolved in the courts.
• Now that it’s the second week of January, you’ve probably received your W-2 tax form. And as the old saying goes, there are only two certainties in life: the opposition of teachers’ unions to the promise of public support for religious schools, and taxes. With the new year comes a revived effort on the part of the New York Catholic Conference to pass a bill through the Empire State legislature to create such an incentive, though their foes remain recalcitrant. (Ninety thousand students attend schools operated by the Archdiocese of New York, which should add some political heft to the pleas of Big Apple believers.) The ground for legislative progress is fertile in New York: Governor Cuomo is on record supporting the tax credit bill, and even Mayor Bill de Blasio has proven surprisingly amenable to collaboration with religious partners. Cardinal Timothy Dolan, perhaps the most eloquent advocate of religious education, put it nicely: “This is about our kids, where they go is second to their getting a quality education wherever they happen to be.”
• The reading of judicial tea leaves isn’t the Gadfly’s specialty, no matter how many Perry Mason reruns he screens nightly. Still, Monday’s oral arguments in the Supreme Court case Friedrichs v. California Teachers Association certainly seemed to point in a clear direction—and one that friends of public employee unions might find ominous. For the uninitiated: The case was brought by California teachers who objected to paying “agency fees,” which finance union work in the (ostensibly apolitical) collective bargaining realm. If the court finds that the fees infringe on the plaintiffs’ First Amendment rights—as they seemed disposed to do, if their public remarks were any indication—they could act to deprive public unions of an important source of revenue and effectively make the United States a “right-to-work” nation. It may be the most important case decided in this term, but don’t assume that the court watchers have their ruling figured out already.

A new study from the National Bureau of Economic Research examines how Louisiana’s statewide voucher program affects student achievement. The Pelican State expanded its program statewide in 2012; by 2014, twelve thousand students had applied for more than six thousand slots to attend 126 private schools. Because the program was oversubscribed, the vouchers were randomly assigned such that some kids were offered vouchers and some weren’t. This study focuses on roughly 1,400 grade students in grades 3–8 who applied in fall 2012—the first application cohort after the program expanded.

The primary (and surprising) finding is that attending a voucher-eligible private school reduces voucher students’ test scores in math, ELA, science, and social studies (though ELA is not significantly lower). Math scores go down by 0.4 standard deviation one year after the lottery, and for other subjects, the drop is between one-quarter and one-third of a standard deviation. Voucher use also reduces the probability of being promoted to the next grade and shifts students into lower state performance categories. The outcomes are even bleaker for younger children.

In short, this is all very bad news. But remember that these are first-year outcomes, and first-year evaluations of anything ought to be taken with a grain of salt.

So what explains the negative findings? They stand out in comparison with those of other gold-standard voucher studies, which have identified neutral or positive results—particularly for African American students, who make up the vast majority of recipients in Louisiana. Let’s examine the limited evidence in the study that may provide an explanation.

Some analysts are pointing the finger at “overregulation.” Jason Bedrick of Cato, among others, argues that the best private schools in the state opted out of the program because they didn’t want to comply with its many mandates. Only the most desperate, cash-starved schools participated, which explains the disastrous results. (The private school participation rate in Louisiana—about one-third of schools—is much lower than that seen in most other voucher or tax credit programs.)

Does that explanation hold water? It’s certainly true that Louisiana’s program comes with many requirements for schools. To participate, they have to administer the Louisiana state test to voucher students; receive a rating based on the achievement of their voucher students; and risk being deemed ineligible to enroll new voucher kids if they do poorly for two consecutive years. These accountability provisions are all policies that Fordham has promoted in the past.

But that’s not all. Schools also must have an open enrollment policy, meaning that they cannot apply their usual admissions requirements. Plus, schools must accept the voucher amount as the full tuition payment (which is about $3,300 less than what the students’ “sending” districts spent per pupil). That’s largely a moot point, however, since eligibility is limited to students from families earning below 250 percent of the federal poverty line (on average, applicants’ families earned roughly $15,400).

So it’s not hard to believe that the litany of requirements is keeping many private schools on the sidelines. But is there really evidence that non-participating schools are stronger than the ones that played ball, because all of the participating schools were “desperate” for students and dollars?

In short: no. Results for schools with rapid enrollment declines in previous years were no worse than other schools to which students applied.

Further, there’s no evidence that testing and accountability mandates are keeping many private schools from participating. But an AEI survey in 2015, which focused on Louisiana’s program in particular, found that “administering the state accountability test” was a “major factor” in the no decision for just 34 percent of non-participants. This meshed with a 2013 Fordham study in which our principal investigator, David Stuit, found that 37 percent of non-participants said the requirement to comply with state testing was “extremely or very important” to their decision not to take part.

But it seems just as likely that non-participating schools are concerned about the other regulations at play, and especially the limitation on using their regular admissions standards. In AEI’s study, most of the non-participating principals in Louisiana cited “future regulations that might come with participation” as their biggest hurdle—the fear of the unknown. And in the Fordham study, Stuit found that regulations restricting student admissions and schools’ religious practices are more likely to deter school participation than requirements pertaining to academic standards, testing, and public disclosure of achievement results.

Maybe the testing and accountability requirements are encouraging some private schools in Louisiana to stay away. But isn’t it just as likely that they aren’t thrilled with the idea of accepting extremely poor students (some of whom wouldn’t meet their usual admissions standards) and losing money in the bargain?

All of this to say that, sure, we need to need to be careful about meaningfully safeguarding the autonomy of private schools in voucher programs. But this study left us with a simpler takeaway: Some private schools in Louisiana stink. But if we hadn’t tested those kids, we would never have known that.

SOURCE: Atila Abdulkadiroglu, Parag A. Pathak, Christopher R. Walters, "School Vouchers and Student Achievement: First-Year Evidence From the Louisiana Scholarship Program," NBER (December 2015).

This year marks the twentieth edition of Education Week’s annual “Quality Counts” report, but not much has changed from the nineteenth—or other editions of recent vintage. Massachusetts is still the tops—with a handsome 86.8 out of a possible hundred points—and the nation’s only B-plus state for education. Maryland, New Jersey, and Vermont are next in line, each earning a B. The nation at large earns a C, as do most states—thirty-two of them registering somewhere from C-minus to C-plus. The biggest gain in the standings was accomplished by the District of Columbia, which jumped from thirty-eighth last year to twenty-eighth this year and earned an overall C.

Perhaps more unpredictable days are ahead. To wit, of particular interest in Education Week’s package is Edie Blad’s piece on California’s so called “CORE districts”—six school systems that received the only local-level waiver from some NCLB requirements. The districts, which include Los Angeles, San Francisco and Fresno, adopted an accountability system that includes “suspension rates; school-climate survey responses from parents; and measures of traits related to students' social development and engagement, like self-management and social awareness,” in addition to traditional test scores to monitor schools. In short, the CORE districts are at the forefront of the kind of non-academic accountability measures that are ostensibly encouraged by the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA).

Not surprisingly, emerging trends in accountability dominate the report, with several pieces examining “how new state and federal strategies are transforming the assessment of school performance and reshaping the consequences for poor results.” Andrew Ujifusa weighs in with a piece on the “Innovation Lab Network,” a twelve-state effort to “rethink, redesign, and lobby for changes to instruction and accountability” incubated in districts with the potential to evolve into statewide accountability systems. 

The first “Quality Counts” was issued in 1997. Its point, then as now, was to track state progress in implementing the then-novel idea of standards-based-reform. The new year promises to usher in a new era of state dynamism, particularly on accountability. Perhaps that will shake up things in the not-too-distant future. Here’s hoping a handful of new Massachusettses will emerge in the brave new world of ESSA.

SOURCE: “Quality Counts 2016: Called to Account,” Education Week (January 2016).

The expansion of the Advanced Placement program, on its face, is one of the great feel-good stories of education in my lifetime. Instead of being relegated to a boutique résumé item on the college applications of America’s most fortunate high schoolers, AP has broadened access to its more rigorous curriculum to kids across the country. Demanding coursework prepares students better for the higher expectations of post-secondary education, and successful completion of exams can often be counted for precious college credit. So, high-fives all around, right?

Maybe not. After all, if we’re moving so quickly to fit new students into AP classes, can we be sure that the experience is still as enriching as it was when the program was more narrowly focused on elite pupils? Is the content being diluted? On the flip side, critics point to huge gaps in participation among different ethnic groups. With disproportionate numbers of white and Asian students taking and passing exams, has the march toward equity made any real progress?

Those are the questions this AEI report, which focuses on the national spread of AP participation between 1990 and 2013, seeks to answer. It begins with an enlightening look into just how widely Advanced Placement classes and exams have expanded over the last generation. According to data from the College Board, some 2.2 million students took 3.9 million AP tests in 2013. That figure represents a more than five-fold increase in test takers over twenty-three years. What’s more, the total portion of high school graduates who received AP course credit has risen from 12 percent in the era of Perfect Strangers to 39 percent in the time of How I Met Your Mother. Importantly, these numbers didn’t spike merely because a greater variety of courses are now being offered; classes like AP calculus—which has been available throughout the entire period featured in the study—have seen an increase in enrollment as well.

The extent of this growth leads us to the matter of scale: With so many new students being welcomed into the program, and so quickly, is there a risk of spreading AP rigor (i.e., qualified instructors and resources) too thin over too many students? The author addresses this concern by looking at NAEP mathematics scores in 2000, 2005, and 2009—three points of measurement covering a decade of rapid AP expansion. (Since math achievement is well correlated with performance in other subjects, it is used as a proxy for overall academic success.) In each year, participant scores were effectively the same—between .63 and .68 standard deviations better than the national average. So far, at least, we haven’t seen Advanced Placement turn into too much of a good thing.

There is some concerning news, however. Participation in AP courses has gone up among every conceivable student group: boys and girls, whites and blacks, Asians and Hispanics, as well as for every level of parents’ education. But that growth has been realized faster among some groups than others, leading to worrying discrepancies among groups: The average black student earns just half of an AP credit over his high school career, compared to 1.1 credits for white students and 2.7 for Asian students. While there was no gender gap in AP participation as recently as 1998, an eight-point difference now separates girls receiving AP credit (43 percent) from boys (35 percent).

Importantly, the report suggests that these disparities are driven chiefly by preparedness rather than access—that the well-known achievement gaps separating some students from their classmates are naturally reflected in AP participation. We should absolutely hope that this is true, and that minority, male, and disadvantaged students aren’t arbitrarily being kept from more challenging academic opportunities. But there’s no excuse for us neglect the challenge of improving student performance among those underrepresented groups. “While we should responsibly expand AP,” the author concludes, “we must recognize that the ultimate solution to AP participation gaps is closing the preparation gaps before high school.” Thankfully, our forthcoming book on Education for Upward Mobility has some clear ideas on how to do precisely that.

SOURCE: Nat Malkus, “AP at scale: Public school students in Advanced Placement, 1990–2013,” AEI (January 2016).