The Education Gadfly Weekly

I’m appalled that The Donald might actually win the Republican nomination running on a “platform” of bombast and xenophobia. But like many of you, I’ve also been trying to understand his appeal. A booming cottage industry—shall we call it Trumpology?—is emerging to explain his supporters to the rest of us. Is it the strength that he projects? His image as a “winner”? Is he tapping the anger of the white working class and finally showing them some respect? Or is a significant slice of America still simply, and secretly, racist?

The part of his message that resonates most broadly, it seems to me, is his war on “political correctness.” Some on the Left see this as simply giving tacit approval to prejudice or poor manners. I don’t think so. It’s bigger than that: It’s about our fatigue with politicians and other leaders sticking to their talking points rather than speaking the whole truth. Here’s how the Atlantic’s Peter Beinart put it this week: 

In the professional conservative world, “political correctness” is confined to the Left. But for Trump’s supporters, who are less doctrinaire, it means something broader. It refers to the things that elites won’t admit but “ordinary people” (or at least the “ordinary people” who like Trump) know are true. Liberal elites may try to conceal some of these “truths”: Mexican immigrants are wrecking the country; Muslim immigrants are potential terrorists. But conservative elites conceal others: Trade deals destroy American jobs; big donations affect government policy.

Our world of education policy is full of examples of this kind of political correctness. “Ordinary people” understand that some kids are smarter than others, that some parents are completely out to lunch, that some teachers are burned-out dolts. But we can’t actually admit that in polite company.

But what’s the biggest taboo in education today, especially in higher education policy, that anyone on the street will tell you? It’s that lots of high school graduates aren’t ready for college, have virtually no shot at succeeding there, and are better off doing something else with their time.

Consider this breathless headline from the Hechinger Report from late last week: “Many who pass state high school graduation tests show up to college unprepared.” As the Seventy Four’s Matt Barnum tweeted, “This isn't surprising b/c high school exit exams aren't – and shouldn't be! – set at college readiness level.”

And why shouldn’t high school graduation standards be set at a college readiness level? Because we’re not going to deny diplomas to a majority of America’s eighteen-year-olds. That’s what would happen, at least for the foreseeable future. As data from the National Assessment of Educational Progress show, we’ve never gotten more than 40 percent of twelfth graders to the college-prepared level.

That hasn’t stopped us from encouraging the vast majority of high school graduates to give college a try. Consider the following chart. The college enrollment numbers are for recent high school completers, defined by the Census Bureau as “persons 16–24 years old who graduated from high school in the preceding twelve months. Includes persons receiving GEDs.” The college preparedness data come from the NAEP. (We don’t have long-term trend data for math.)

What this picture shows is that the “college preparation gap” is larger now than in 1992, even though the college preparedness rate has remained relatively flat, due to the fact that the proportion of recent high school graduates enrolling in college rose sharply (at least until very recently). The gap was largest for the high school class of 2009. The proportion of that class possessing the reading skills for college-level work was a whopping thirty-two percentage points less than the proportion that enrolled.

Late last year, the National Student Clearinghouse published the disappointing news that college completion rates are trending downward, and that just 53 percent of the students who started higher education in 2009 had earned degrees six years later. Now look at the chart again. Is this any surprise? To put it bluntly, much of the high school class of 2009 failed to complete college because far too many of its members weren’t prepared for college in the first place.

The non-politically-correct response would be obvious: We should stop encouraging so many kids to go to college, especially those who are far from ready academically. To his credit, Bellwether Education Partners’ Chad Aldeman said as much in a recent U.S. News & World Report article. “We’re not good at telling people they’re not good enough for something. Other countries are just better at telling students, ‘You shouldn’t try for a four-year bachelor’s degree.’”

But are higher education leaders willing to say this? Not as far as I can tell. A brand-new report from the Center for Community College Student Engagement looks at “the underprepared student and community colleges.” (It led to another not-so-shocking headline from the Hechinger Report—at least not shocking to us jaded K–12 policy wonks: “Why are many students with ‘A’ averages being barred from college-level classes?” Answer: Because of rampant grade inflation in high schools.) It’s full of depressing statistics (86 percent of community college students think they are well prepared academically, yet 68 percent land in remedial education) but also worthy ideas about how to provide “underprepared” students greater support and better advice. But not once does it contemplate the obvious, if politically incorrect, solution.

Namely: Stop admitting students who are far from ready to succeed in college. Why do we consider for-profit colleges “predatory” when they recruit ill-prepared students but allow community colleges and state universities to engage in the same practice while hiding behind “open access” rhetoric? We know many students are unlikely to ever make it past developmental education, much less earn credentials. (A recent study provides further evidence of this.) Why saddle them with debt and regret? Why allow colleges to cash checks from Pell Grants that aren’t going to do the students, or taxpayers, any good?

There’s always been a big gap between the skills needed to earn a high school diploma and those needed to succeed in college. Neither Common Core nor anything else on the K–12 reform agenda is going to change that basic calculus. Policy makers simply will not deny diplomas to the huge portion of eighteen-year-olds who have made it to the end of the twelfth grade without the reading and math skills necessary to succeed in credit-bearing college courses.

If the higher education system wants to improve its completion rate, and better serve young people coming out of high school, it should take it upon itself to set and enforce a real standard for college entrance—a standard much higher than a high school diploma. That this notion is still considered politically incorrect is one sign of just how unserious the talk of higher education “reform” really is. 

In the past two decades, something extraordinary has happened with very little fanfare: The reading ability of our lowest-performing children has increased significantly. According to the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), between 1990 and 2012, the scores of nine-year-olds at the tenth and twenty-fifth percentiles increased by roughly two grade levels (about twenty points). For those children, those gains aren’t just impressive—they’re potentially life-changing.

At the same time, there has been a fourteen-point gain (a little more than a grade level) among fourth graders at the fiftieth percentile and a mere six-point gain among those at the seventy-fifth and ninetieth percentiles.

What’s causing this long-term trend of much greater gains among lower-performing students than higher-performing ones? That’s hard to say. There are many plausible explanations, but one that seems likely is that K–2 teachers have simply gotten better at teaching “decoding” (learning to sound out words). Nationwide, there’s been an increased focus on evidence-based practices, including high-profile initiatives like the National Reading Panel report and Reading First. Both stressed that children must be explicitly taught how to decode, and most early reading programs—and, more significantly, teachers—seem to have gotten the message.

But decoding is only the first step in developing strong readers. And there’s reason to believe that in striving for proficiency, many other steps have been neglected. As Nell K. Duke, one of the nation’s reading researchers, wrote:

When the aim is to show reading improvements in a short period of time, spending large amounts of time on word-reading skill and its foundations, and relatively little on comprehension, vocabulary, and conceptual and content knowledge, makes sense. Measurable gains in phonological awareness, alphabet knowledge, and word reading can be achieved quickly and, for most students, relatively easily. In contrast, gains in comprehension, vocabulary, and conceptual knowledge are harder to measure, at least in young children, and harder to achieve. Yet the long-term consequences of failing to attend to these areas cannot be overstated [emphasis added].

Unlike decoding, reading comprehension is not a skill that can be directly taught, practiced, and mastered. Expansive knowledge and vocabulary, accumulated over time, are the keys to comprehension. If you know a lot about dinosaurs, for example, and have learned to decode, you can read with understanding about dinosaurs with little difficulty. But if you’ve never heard of dinosaurs, your ability to read complex texts about them is compromised.

As your broad, general knowledge grows, so will your broad, general reading ability. The sheer volume of subjects a literate individual has some knowledge of, and the size of a proficient reader’s vocabulary, mean that the race to improve reading comprehension is by definition a marathon. But our testing and accountability policies have tended to demand that teachers treat it as a sprint. That might be why NAEP reading scores among thirteen-year-olds have only increased by 3–8 points (looking across the spectrum from the tenth to the ninetieth percentiles) between 1990 and 2012; among seventeen year olds, they have decreased by 3–5 points. These are the long-term consequences to which Duke alludes.

By returning control to the states, the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) provides an opportunity for states to rethink the enticements baked into accountability policies. They can now incentivize long-term investments in building knowledge and vocabulary over short-term investments in boosting scores, which too often spike quickly before plateauing or even fading.

It is not a mystery why reading comprehension scores are so stubbornly tied to socioeconomic status. Knowledge and vocabulary grow exponentially, beginning at birth. Children with well-educated parents come to school with larger vocabularies and more knowledge. Their verbal advantage grows each day during dinnertime conversation, bedtime read-alouds, weekend museum visits, sports and music lessons, and other forms of “concerted cultivation.” Reading researcher Keith Stanovich dubbed this structural advantage in language and knowledge the “Matthew Effect,” from the biblical passage in the Gospel of Matthew about the rich getting richer and the poor getting poorer. It neatly captures the heart of the issue: Privileged children come to school on day one with larger stores of knowledge and vocabulary than their disadvantage peers. That gives new knowledge and vocabulary fertile soil in which to root. The gaps don’t merely persist, they widen. The longer we wait, the wider the gap grows.

Valorizing knowledge acquisition is the secret sauce that’s missing from education policy, testing, and accountability. Preferred policy areas—like teacher quality, choice, chartering and merit pay—are agnostic to curricular content. This is a hiding-in-plain-sight lever that policy makers have seldom thought to pull. ESSA could change that.

The principal challenge for state policy makers is to embrace a clearer, more accurate view of what reading comprehension actually is: a reflection of the sum of a child’s education across the curriculum, not a “skill” to be taught. Once you see reading through this lens, a different policy picture starts to emerge almost unbidden. What kids do in school all day—not just in reading instruction—starts to matter a lot. If this insight were reflected in the way we structure and incentivize schools, elementary school would look very different than it does today. To pick one obvious example: A nationally representative survey published in 2012 found that K–3 teachers spent just 16–19 minutes per day on social studies and science; grades 4–6 teachers spent just 21–24 minutes a day. This is exactly the wrong approach once you see building knowledge as integral to reading achievement.

“The mistaken idea that reading is a skill,” notes cognitive scientist Daniel Willingham, “may be the single biggest factor holding back reading achievement in the country. The knowledge base problem must be solved.”

If we want all children to be great readers, education policies must actively incentivize teaching reading skills plus science, history, geography, and the arts from the first days of school. Substantial gains in decoding have shown we can get kids to the starting line. But we’re leaving them stuck there.

Next week, we’ll talk about the implications for state policy makers of this clear view of what reading comprehension actually is. 

Los Angeles is our country’s Mecca for magic and transformation. It’s where long-extinct dinosaurs come alive, marionettes turn into real boys, and Ryan Reynolds gets chance after chance to anchor film franchises. It should come as no surprise, therefore, that the wonders extend even to the education realm. In December of last year, it was anticipated that just 54 percent of high school seniors in the Los Angeles Unified School District would graduate on time—a byproduct of the state’s exacting new academic standards, and fully twenty percentage points lower than in 2014–15. Just a few months later, that projection has amazingly shot up to 63 percent. District administrators are hyping the “dramatic gains,” but skeptics point to the role of dubious credit recovery schemes that allow students to make up for classes they originally failed. These programs exist in a black box, to put it generously, allowing no real scrutiny of their rigor or legitimacy. We need to know far more about the online measures that miraculously lift students’ fortunes. Otherwise, the degrees they collect will carry no weight, and the value of a high school diploma will fall like a worthless penny stock.

The “dramatic gains” necessary to improve America’s high schools will require more than magical thinking. Districts in every state have to adapt their practices to fit the demands of life and labor in the twenty-first century, inculcating work skills and real academic proficiency. Thankfully, there’s a bipartisan effort afoot in Virginia that aims to do just that. Governor Terry McAulliffe is attempting to shift graduation requirements in the commonwealth, placing limits on seat time and awarding credit for work experience outside the classroom. The proposal (versions of which have passed in both houses of the Virginia General Assembly) will open career-track options for students in their last two years before graduation. The focus on career and technical education, paired with a simultaneous effort to boost state school funding by $1 billion, represents an impressive reimagining of the aims of high school learning. We’ll be watching closely.

In general, we should be doing way more to get our kids to and through college. A four-year degree may not be for everybody—and we need to invest in alternative pathways for high school graduates who want to enter the workforce right away—but there’s no doubt that post-secondary education confers life-altering rewards to those who complete it. Sadly (and perhaps predictably), those advantages aren’t being spread around as evenly as we’d like. According to new research from Brookings Institution scholar Brad Hershbein, the relative value of a bachelor’s degree is much lower for students whose families earn less than 185 percent of the poverty level. The gap in salary between those college graduates and their more affluent peers actually grows over time, such that they earn just 70 percent as much as degree holders from non-poor backgrounds by mid-career. It must be noted, of course, that pursuing higher education is still a sound decision for those in poverty and near-poverty, who stand to benefit enormously in comparison with low-income students who don’t attend college. Still, it’s deflating to see the inequities of birth reproduced even after an ostensibly successful journey through the education system.

In this week's podcast, Mike Petrilli and Robert Pondiscio discuss the jump in Los Angeles’s high school graduation rate, literacy in the era of ESSA, and why community colleges shouldn’t admit ill-prepared students. In the Research Minute, Amber Northern explains how Louisiana’s scholarship program has affected students. 

Amber's Research Minute

Jonathan N. Mills, Anna J. Egalite, and Patrick J. Wolf, "How Has the Louisiana Voucher System Affected Students?," Education Research Alliance for New Orleans (February 2016).

A new Harvard University study examines the link between Common Core implementation efforts and changes in student achievement.

Analysts surveyed randomly selected teachers of grades 4–8 (about 1,600 in Delaware, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Mexico, and Nevada), asking them a number of questions about professional development they’ve received, materials they’ve used, teaching strategies they’ve employed, and more. Analysts used those responses to create twelve composite indices of various facets of Common Core implementation (such as “principal is leading CCSS implementation”) to analyze the link between each index and students’ performance on the Common Core-aligned assessments PARCC and SBAC. In other words, they sought to link teacher survey responses to their students’ test scores on the 2014–15 PARCC and SBAC assessments, while also controlling for students’ baseline scores and characteristics (along with those of their classroom peers) and teachers’ value-added scores in the prior school year.

The bottom line is that this correlational study finds more statistically significant relationships for math than for English. Specifically, three indices were related to student achievement in math: the frequency and specificity of feedback from classroom observations, the number of days of professional development, and the inclusion of student performance on CCSS-aligned assessments in teacher evaluations. Regarding that last finding, schools in which every teacher reported that test scores play a role in teacher evaluations saw bigger math gains (a .18-standard deviation difference) than those in which no teachers said they played a role. (In math, analysts also found that the use of the textbook Go Math! was positively related to student performance.)

In English language arts, the only index that predicted student performance on the PARCC or SBAC ELA tests was “school context,” defined as the degree to which teachers perceive school to be a pleasant place to work (a total head scratcher!). Analysts try to throw an optimistic bone about ELA into their conclusion by saying that old state tests focused heavily on reading comprehension, while the new assessments are more sensitive to writing instruction and may encourage teachers to emphasize more writing (case in point: 86 percent overall say that they have increased attention on writing).

The implementation aspects (or “indices”) not linked to student achievement were also illuminating. They include, among others, fully embracing the Common Core; teachers developing materials with their colleagues; teachers describing substantial shifts in instruction; and teacher collaboration.

It is really tough to attempt to glean research-based, actionable insights from correlating teacher survey and student achievement data. We don’t have a long track record of doing so, which makes this type of research even more important. But at this stage in the game, these findings raise more questions than they can answer.

SOURCE: Thomas J. Kane et al., "Teaching Higher: Educators’ Perspectives on Common Core Implementation," Center for Education Policy Research, Harvard University (February 2016).

Over the past decade, Tennessee has seen steady growth in math, science, and social studies scores. Those gains have been accompanied, as in many states, by rising high school graduation rates. But all is not well in the Volunteer State. “Reading remains an area where we are putting in substantial efforts and not seeing corresponding improvement,” laments this impressive report from the state’s education department.

English language arts (ELA) is the only subject tested on the Tennessee Comprehensive Assessment Program (TCAP) for which less than half the state’s students earn a “proficient” score. State officials are rightly alarmed by the spiral of failure that sets in when children are far behind in reading by the end of the third grade: Only one-third of Tennessee third graders who scored “below basic” on the TCAP in 2013 improved to “basic” two years later. A mere 3 percent reached proficiency by fifth grade. Neither is third-grade proficiency sticky. Twenty percent of students who scored “proficient” in third grade dropped back down to “basic” by fifth grade; more than half of the “advanced” third graders fell back below that level two years later.

So what’s the matter with Tennessee? The state sent literacy experts from TNTP into more than one hundred elementary classrooms across the state. They identified a “concerning trend” that sheds light on the problem: “The reading instruction that students are receiving in early elementary grades is not sufficient to carry them into the later grades where rich vocabulary, a broad base of knowledge, and critical thinking skills become ever more crucial." Teachers in the critical early grades are spending considerable time teaching students word recognition skills, “but they are far less often helping students connect decoding skills to the act of true reading.”

The report’s sophisticated view of reading and due diligence in investigating classroom practice is spot-on, smartly distinguishing between “skills-based reading competencies” and “knowledge-based reading competencies.” The former is “necessary but not sufficient for early literacy development; later reading comprehension and academic success depend mostly on strong knowledge-based competencies.” Two-thirds of K–2 lessons observed by the TNTP team focused on phonics and other word recognition abilities. “Most lessons did not provide students with opportunities to use their newly acquired skills in reading or writing, and less than 10 percent included an explicit link to drawing meaning from words.” Moreover, lessons were “rarely structured to expose students to complex texts and their vocabulary, ideas, and content knowledge.” In grades 3–5, students spent relatively little time reading during school “literacy blocks,” and most instruction focused on mastery of individual skills in isolation rather than deep comprehension of texts and their content.

Tennessee is surely not the only state to struggle to move the needle on reading. Change the name on this report to almost any other state and its diagnosis would survive the trip across the border virtually unchanged. The recommendations too: The report calls for a new statewide literacy coaching model and teacher preparation with “full alignment to skills- and knowledge-based competencies.” Other states should follow suit—including bringing the TNTP team that contributed to the Tennessee report in for a visit.

Tennessee hopes to get 75 percent of its third graders proficient in reading by 2025—an ambitious but not outlandish goal. This report offers encouraging evidence that the state has a coherent plan to get there: a clear-eyed view of reading, enhanced teacher training, persistence, and patience.

Lord knows we’ve tried everything else.

SOURCE: “Setting the Foundation: A Report on Elementary Grades Reading in Tennessee,” Tennessee Education Department and Ready to Read (February 2016). 

Rural school districts face many of the same challenges as their urban counterparts: lots of students living in poverty, low college-attainment rates among parents, high and growing numbers of ELL students, and difficulty attracting and retaining high-quality teachers and principals. Add the sprawling and isolated geography, weak tax base, and iffy broadband access that plague many rural districts, and we have a daunting set of barriers to the goal of students leaving high school fully ready for their next step in life. As Paul Hill put it recently, if America neglects its rural schools, nobody wins.

Fortunately, according to a new report from Battelle for Kids and Education Northwest, America’s rural schools are not standing idly by. The report looks at the work of rural education collaboratives (RECs), which have been formed across the country in an effort to respond to these very challenges. While there seems to be no handy list—nor a single definition—of such organizations, the authors know what they’re not looking for: top-down collaborations, which they eschew in favor of “informal and organic collaborative structures that are more peer-to-peer and network based.” The identify the right sort of RECs as partnerships that are: 1) committed to a common purpose that creates value for rural students and reaches beyond the missions of individual members; 2) run through a member-led governance structure; 3) focused on improving practice by establishing real solutions to defined educational opportunity problems at significant scale; and 4) clear about intended outcomes and metrics of success.

RECs are characterized as positive forces for innovation in their regions and necessary engines for their districts to access burgeoning opportunities. Already, RECs have helped their participating schools leverage dual enrollment, digital learning, standards-based education, more personalized academic tracks, and career advising to give their students the best possible education given geographic and economic constraints.

The report serves up case studies of four RECs (and looks generally at seventeen RECs in sixteen states) that illustrate different approaches to their regions’ unique concerns. Those interested are encouraged to check out the Vermont Rural Partnership, the Eastern Shore of Maryland Educational Consortium, and the Northwest Rural Innovation and Student Engagement (NW RISE) Network. A taste of what you will discover in these case studies can be found in Fordham’s home state of Ohio.

The Ohio Appalachian Collaborative (OAC) was established in 2010 with the integral participation of Battelle for Kids itself. OAC currently serves twenty-seven districts with forty-eight thousand students. The case study focuses on grants received by OAC (Race to the Top, Teacher Incentive Fund, and Straight A Fund innovation grants) and on the collaborative’s major focus: college and career readiness. In three years between 2012 and 2015, OAC reported an 85 percent increase in student participation in dual enrollment courses, a six-fold increase in the number of dual enrollment courses available, and a doubling of the number of dual-enrollment credentialed teachers at the high school level. Proof of the success of Ohio’s effort (and the others’) is still to come, but these are solid numbers that urban districts in the Buckeye State—and elsewhere—would love to have.

SOURCE: “Generating Opportunity and Prosperity: The Promise of Rural Education Collaboratives,” Battelle for Kids (January, 2016).