Last week, I argued that the education-policy field has reached a state of homeostasis, “characterized by clearer and fairer but lighter touch accountability systems; the incremental growth of school choice options for families; but no appetite for big and bold new initiatives.” This “end of policy,” as I called it, won
Last week, I argued that the education-policy field has reached a state of homeostasis, “characterized by clearer and fairer but lighter touch accountability systems; the incremental growth of school choice options for families; but no appetite for big and bold new initiatives.” This “end of policy,” as I called it, won’t last forever, but while it’s here, we have a chance to finish what we started and usher in a “Golden Age of Educational Practice.” In other words, to implement the higher standards with fidelity. To improve teacher preparation and development. To strengthen charter school oversight and quality. To make the promise of high quality career and technical education real.
The challenge, I said, is that “while policymakers might be taking a break from education policy, we cannot afford to take a break from educational improvement.”
Unless, that is, we’re satisfied with the results our $650 billion educational system is producing. But we shouldn’t be. It’s not just lackluster student achievement, with barely a third of students reaching “NAEP proficiency” in core subjects. It’s also the 61 percent of students who graduate high school unprepared for what’s next, and the alarming number of young people who struggle to get and hold decent jobs, or who feel alienated from civic life.
If you care about the future of our country, you have to worry about how to improve our schools—how to help the bad ones get to good (or go away), and the good ones get to great.
But how? If big new policy initiatives are off the table, at least for now, how might concerned citizens, including wealthy philanthropists, make a difference? (Those philanthropists certainly shouldn’t give up on K–12 education, as Dylan Matthews has advocated.)
In the weeks ahead, I’m going to write about various ideas, with a focus on traditional—i.e., district-operated—public schools. (Yes, I believe that school choice and charter schools have much promise, too.) All of my notions fall under the headings of innovation, research, and development. In other words, let’s use science to drive progress in education, as it has in so many other fields. Here’s a sampler:
Stay tuned for my thoughts on each of these, and please send along your ideas, as well. Policy may be out of fashion, but improving our schools had better not be.
Critics of standardized testing say scores merely reflect family income and other factors beyond schools’ control—while also narrowing the curriculum and warping instruction. Still, the tests have value, and there’s much more that schools could do to address the inequities they reveal.
“Standardized tests are best at measuring family income,” education-reform opponent Diane Ravitch has opined. “Well-off students usually score in the top half of results; students from poor homes usually score in the bottom.”
Similarly, an education policy analyst told the Washington Post earlier this year that test score gains at some high-poverty D.C. high schools didn’t mean much—and neither, presumably, did the fact that at some other high schools fewer than five percent of students scored at or above the proficient level.
“People want to read into these test scores lessons about what the schools are doing,” he said. “But these scores, even the growth scores, depend a great deal on students’ opportunities to learn outside of school. If we address the poverty and racism, then we will see these test scores increase.”
At the same time, many parents and teachers have charged that testing has distorted the curriculum, caused students unnecessary anguish, and taken valuable time away from instruction. The replacement for No Child Left Behind, the Every Student Succeeds Act, was supposed to ease up on testing. Anti-testing agitation has died down, but in most cases the pressure on schools to raise scores remains as high as ever.
Critics of testing make some valid points. Test scores are highly correlated with family income, and the gap in scores has grown along with income inequality. And there’s no doubt that testing in reading and math has squeezed other subjects—like history, science, and the arts—out of the curriculum. Teachers have also adapted their instruction to mirror the kinds of questions that appear on the tests.
But we don’t need to wait until poverty and racism have been “addressed” to do something about the test-score gap. If schools want to narrow gaps—and the underlying inequities they reveal—they simply need to stop looking to the tests as a guide to what and how to teach. Instead, they need to reintroduce the subjects they’ve jettisoned in a futile effort to boost scores.
It’s important to understand what standardized tests—and especially reading tests—are actually measuring. Most educators, along with most members of the general public, assume that reading tests assess skills. The tests consist of passages followed by questions designed to measure students’ comprehension: Which part of the passage supports this claim? Which statement below best summarizes the passage’s main idea?
Educators under pressure to raise scores drill students in these supposed skills for hours every week, using a variety of unrelated brief passages. Often the texts students use to practice the “skills” are geared to their individual reading levels, which may be well below the reading level of the grade they’re in.
But the passages on the tests are usually at what is deemed to be grade level. And they don’t relate to anything students have actually learned in school, because the test designers have no idea what topics different schools are covering—if, given the narrowing of the curriculum to reading and math, they’re covering any topics at all. So the designers include passages on a random variety of subjects.
To demonstrate comprehension skills, students first need to have enough background knowledge to understand the passages. In fact, studies have shown that the key factor in reading comprehension isn’t abstract skill but relevant knowledge—which means that reading tests primarily measure knowledge, not skills.
That brings us to why students from higher-income families generally score better. It’s not just because they have more money. For a variety of reasons—like level of parental education and exposure to enriching experiences—children from wealthier families are more likely to pick up the kind of knowledge necessary to understand the passages on reading tests.
But contrary to what critics like Ravitch argue, schools are not powerless in the face of this unequal distribution of knowledge. If they turn away from the fruitless effort to build abstract comprehension skills and toward building students’ knowledge of history, science, and the arts, an increase in comprehension—and test scores—will eventually follow. The earlier that process begins, the greater the chances of success. (Math tests are a somewhat different story, but lack of background knowledge and vocabulary can certainly interfere with students' ability to understand word problems.)
There’s an important caveat: it's impossible to predict what topics will be covered on a standardized reading test, so the specific knowledge a student acquires in school may or may not help. Eventually, students can amass enough knowledge and vocabulary to understand almost any passage that shows up on a test, but it’s hard to say exactly when that point will be reached.
One way around that problem is to make the topics on tests more predictable, so that teachers can give all students a fighting chance at understanding the passages. One state, Louisiana, is now experimenting with reading tests aligned to the state’s own English and social studies curriculum. Alternatively, test designers could announce in advance a list of topics the reading passages will draw on. Unless teachers have a sense of what topics to cover in school, the tests will continue to penalize kids who haven't been lucky enough to acquire much knowledge elsewhere.
Test scores provide a valuable general barometer of how much knowledge different groups of students have been able to accumulate. But there are reasons to build knowledge that are more important than test scores. The more knowledge you have, the better able you are to understand high school- and college-level texts—or newspapers, or on-the-job instruction manuals. People with more knowledge have a better chance of getting good jobs and exercising their responsibilities as citizens.
The question is whether standardized tests are more of a help or a hindrance in addressing the gap in knowledge. On the one hand, the tests uncover inequities that are masked by schools’ grading systems, thereby holding educators’ feet to the fire. It’s not as though schools were doing a great job of building knowledge, or equalizing access to it, before high-stakes testing came along.
On the other hand, because of widespread misunderstanding about what the tests measure, testing may have made the situation even worse. When educators feel they’re being evaluated on the basis of their students’ skills, it can be hard for them to take in the message about the importance of building knowledge.
There’s no ideal solution, but here’s what I recommend: Keep giving tests, but make the topics of reading passages more predictable, thereby providing an incentive for teachers to cover content and not just "skills." Alternatively, ease up on using test scores to rate schools and evaluate individual teachers. Either of these measures could give educators breathing room to consider whether what and how they teach is providing all students—and especially the most vulnerable—with the knowledge they need and the skills that can only develop in tandem with it.
Natalie Wexler is the author of “The Knowledge Gap: The Hidden Cause of America's Broken Education System—and How to Fix It,” forthcoming from Avery in August 2019. She is also the co-author, with Judith C. Hochman, of “The Writing Revolution: A Guide to Advancing Thinking Through Writing in All Subjects and Grades” (Jossey-Bass, 2017).
This article was originally published by Forbes.
Last week, we at the Center on Reinventing Public Education celebrated our twenty-fifth anniversary by hosting a convening of practitioners, advocates, and researchers to take stock of where our education system stands, and how it must change to prepare every child for a future where change will be the one certain constant. We discussed a set of essays focused on ideas ranging from more customized learning and talent development, to innovative career preparation strategies, to out-of-school enrichment, as well as new roles for teachers, community groups, and school system leaders.
I was taken aback that one of the main headlines coming out of those difficult, provocative, and nuanced conversations was that reformers were souring on standardized tests.
Our gathering in Seattle could hardly be described as a representative sample of reformers. We intentionally brought together reform critics, researchers, and others outside the usual education-policy crowd, seeking people who would push each other’s thinking and pressure-test the ideas in our papers. And though there were indeed some vocal critics of test-based accountability within the crowd, the prevailing view was that it’s more essential than ever to measure student academic and other progress, but our measures and methods must continue to evolve.
What this group shared in common was a willingness to question assumptions. We're hardly the only ones looking for fresh thinking right now. Kenya Bradshaw of TNTP has described the current moment as a “policy winter.” Fordham’s Mike Petrilli has declared “the end of education policy.”
Yet our students are preparing to confront a future where rapid shifts in technology, including but surely not confined to artificial intelligence, promise new opportunities accompanied by greater economic upheaval. Talented innovators and problem-solvers will be needed more than ever to solve increasingly complex economic, political, environmental, and social challenges.
Preparing every student for this future demands that our education systems create more diverse academic pathways that allow students to nurture specific skills and talents, as CRPE founder Paul Hill observed in his new essay on governance and accountability. But this won't diminish the importance of foundational academic skills like literacy and numeracy; on the contrary, it will demand that students attain these “gateway” skills—and more of them—earlier in life than we have typically expected. Hill is not alone in making this observation; the World Bank has similarly highlighted the importance of measuring students' foundational skills.
Four years ago, colleagues at CRPE and the Thomas B. Fordham Institute convened a group of scholars and policy experts who outlined a set of principles that can ground a productive school accountability debate. Those remain a helpful starting point.
A debate about how to structure accountability in this new era must be informed by what has changed since No Child Left Behind became law almost seventeen years ago. Students now have more choices. It's become the norm in big cities for them to attend schools outside their “attendance zones.” Their parents also have better information to inform those choices, and a growing body of research shows that parents can use that information to select more effective schools so long as system leaders make that information accessible.
There's also a growing push to measure student progress in ways that are more competency-based and personalized. In CRPE's recent work on personalized learning, we saw how angst over accountability mechanisms like teacher evaluations stymied innovation in schools. But at the same time, we need to be wary that some of the very groups leveling this critique at accountability systems are would-be education providers—including online charter schools—that have consistently posted dismal academic results.
A personalized approach to accountability should not give some providers a pass on performance in the name of fostering innovation. At our event on last week, Lindsay Jones of the National Center for Learning Disabilities underscored the urgency of this question, asking how we can ensure that schools meet a standard of excellence for students with special needs at a time when our nation can ill afford to squander their talents. Here NCLB got something important right: It held schools accountable for the performance of key subgroups within their student populations—including students with disabilities and non-native English speakers. Sandy Kress and other accountability hawks are right to worry about the present retreat from these requirements. In another essay in our twenty-fifth anniversary collection, we argue that American education must focus on creating high expectations for every student, rather than simply measuring the aggregate performance of all pupils. That would increase the accountability demands on schools because they could no longer hide struggling individuals behind average performance improvements.
Still, these ideals are easier to articulate than to enshrine in policy. As Caleb Offley, a senior advisor with the Walton Family Foundation, observed, Hill's paper poses more questions (nineteen) than it answers. That's an indication of where our debate currently stands. And it reflects the considerations that school system leaders grapple with constantly. Under what circumstances does it make sense to close a struggling school or try to shore it up? Are accountability-related fears that stifle innovation well founded, or can talented, focused school leaders help overcome them? How should accountability systems gauge the broader set of skills, including what Andreas Schleicher described as one’s “compass—the ability to define one’s way,” that we believe our students will need in the future, without diluting the expectations they set around core academic skills like literacy and numeracy?
What exactly do we want to happen when students aren’t achieving basic competencies? Imagine a ninth grader who shows up in high school reading at a third-grade level. Should the high school be held accountable for that student's lack of proficiency? What level of growth should we demand as the school begins the painstaking work of building that student's vocabulary, background knowledge, and confidence? How can we create early-warning systems to ensure that these kinds of learning gaps get diagnosed and addressed long before that student arrives at high school unable to read?
These are hard questions. The right answers may depend on the needs of individual students, the professional judgment of those who educate them, and the local context in which they operate. As Gisèle Huff of the Jaquelin Hume Foundation observed during one of our discussions, a key foundation for any accountability system is trust. None of that is reason to eradicate tests and testing; what it does is underscore the importance of testing done right. Educators need confidence that tests, standards, and the performance expectations by which teachers are judged will remain constant, year over year. Policymakers need—and will be responsible for helping build—that confidence. Parents need clear, stable metric by which to know whether their children are making progress and to help them select schools where there children will thrive, as well as confidence that they will have recourse if their kids aren’t meeting their learning goals. And the accountability systems that are informed—in part—by testing need to be trustworthy, too.
At CRPE, we are committed to creating a forum where thoughtful people can grapple with these questions, in all of their complexity, without losing sight of the fact that our public education system must work urgently to prepare every child for the future. Falling back into reform camps and either-or thinking are sure paths to continued stasis. Instead, students need us to come together to create new opportunities for upward mobility, career readiness, and ways to realize untapped potential.
Robin Lake is the director of the Center on Reinventing Public Education at the University of Washington Bothell.
Among postsecondary students who began their studies in 2003–04, 68 percent of those at public two-year colleges and 40 percent at public four-year colleges took at least one remedial course during their enrollment between 2003 and 2009. Of course, we’d prefer that students not need remediation in the first place. But if they do, how effective are these courses?
A report by Tom Kane and colleagues sheds light on the question, examining the impact of a statewide college remediation policy in Tennessee on students’ ability to take and pass college-level math and accumulate college-level credits. The original goal of the program, called Seamless Alignment and Integrated Learning Supports, or SAILS, was to shift the locus of math remediation from college back to high school. The program was gradually rolled out to a majority of Tennessee high schools over the last several years.
It works like this: Students in SAILS-participating schools who score below the remediation threshold of 19 on the ACT math test (that’s roughly half of the seniors in those schools) can fulfill their math remediation by completing an online math course their senior year. If they complete all five online modules, they are exempted from math remediation when they enroll in a Tennessee community college.
Analysts examine SAIL’s impact for seniors in three academic years (2013–16) under two different versions of the program. The first requires students to complete remediation before college (that’s pre-requisite remediation); the second allows students to enroll in remediation concurrently with their college-level classes (the co-requisite version). They also use two research designs: difference in differences, where they compare the changes in student outcomes in schools implementing SAILS in the first year to the changes in outcomes for schools that had not yet implemented SAILS; and a regression discontinuity design that examines the outcomes of students who score right above or below the ACT-score threshold. The latter measures the impact of being assigned to remediation of any kind, meaning SAILS (pre-requisite, or co-requisite) versus no remediation.
The study has three key findings. First, under the “remediate-before college” policy, students with ACT scores below 19 enrolled in college-level math at higher rates after their schools implemented SAILS. Specifically, they were 29 percentage points more likely to enroll in college math, and roughly half passed the course, yielding a 13- percentage-point increase in the percentage passing college math by the end of their first year.
However—cue second finding—SAILS did not improve students’ math achievement. There was no difference in math performance on a mathematics post-test administered to students above and below the cutoff. Related, the program did not increase the likelihood of students passing college math. As indicated, half of them passed, yet the passing rates were not higher than for students with similar ACT scores just above the threshold for remediation.
Third, after the “concurrent-remediation” policy was introduced, SAILS no longer had an impact on the percentage of students taking or passing college math during their first year, nor on the total number of credits completed by their second year. In other words, the concurrent policy bypassed the original intent of SAILS by allowing students to do their remediation alongside college-level courses. There were also no differences in program impact by race.
The lackluster results led analysts to hypothesize that self-paced online courses may not be well-suited to the needs of low achieving students. (We’ve heard that before.) Or maybe the program simply wasn’t very good at teaching math. Or perhaps taking math remediation during one’s senior year in high school is simply too little, too late. All three theories are possible. But having once taught high school seniors, the latter particularly resonates with this author. Trust me: Trying to get eighteen-year-olds to play catch-up when most have an acute case of senioritis is a losing proposition.
SOURCE: Thomas J. Kane et al., “Remedial Math Goes to High School: An Evaluation of the Tennessee SAILS Program,” Center for Education Policy Research, Harvard University (October 2018).
School choice can only thrive when families are well-informed about their options. Unfortunately, good information about different schools in a district can be hard to come by, and even when it is accessible, how it is presented and the level of detail provided can heavily influence the decisions parents make. To understand how to display data to nudge parents, particularly low-income parents, in the direction of high-performing schools, researchers at Mathematica Policy Research designed a series of school-data presentations and tested their effects on parents’ selections.
For the experiment, the authors designed a hypothetical district with sixteen different schools, each of which had different strengths and weaknesses, and asked 35,000 low-income parents to select a school for their child to attend based on online displays of information about each. The schools and their characteristics remained constant, while the displays varied across five factors: numbers-only format versus a visual one; whether a district average was included for comparison; whether parent opinions were included; low- or high-information summaries; and whether the default sort order was by distance from home or by academic performance. After evaluating the schools, parents picked their top three and answered a few questions about their final choices and the usability of the platform. The authors then estimated the effects of each factor on a parent’s decision.
Of the five factors, the simple default order of the list most strongly affected parents’ choice of school. When the options were listed in order of academic achievement, parents chose academically stronger schools (about 5 percentile points higher) that were farther away from home (about 0.6 miles farther). Even when parents could manually re-sort the list by a number of different criteria, the default order was still the most powerful influence on the outcome.
Other factors had significant effects, too. For example, using icons to represent academic performance and safety skewed choices towards schools with higher ratings in those areas. High-information displays, which cited twenty-two data points instead of four, encouraged parents to choose better-resourced schools. And when ratings from other parents appeared in the display, safety ratings had a stronger effect on the ultimate choice.
Overall, the best display model for encouraging parents to pick high-performing schools sorted the list of schools by performance, displayed a limited amount of information on each school, used icons to represent academics and safety, and included ratings from other parents and a district average for comparison. Using this model, parents picked schools with academics nineteen points higher than those selected by parents using the worst, or opposite, model.
The experiment has its limitations, though. Asking parents about a hypothetical school district cannot fully replicate a real school choice environment, where parents may already have developed good or bad impressions about particular schools from their neighbors, the news, or advertising. The stakes of picking a fake school are also lower, and parents may be less swayed by external factors when their child’s actual education is on the line.
Even if each factor’s influence is relatively small, the effects are cumulative and can add up to make a big difference in a family’s final decision. That, the authors explain, is why this study is so important to improving the school choice environment, especially for low-income families. There’s no such thing as a no-nudge display, so reform advocates should seek to understand which nudges lead to the best outcomes for students.
SOURCE: Steven Glazerman et. al, “Nudging Parents to Choose Better Schools: The Importance of School Choice Architecture.” Mathematica Policy Research (November 2018).
On this week’s podcast Chester E. Finn, Jr., Chad Aldis, and David Griffith discuss whether we’ve reached the “end of education policy.” On the Research Minute, Amber Northern examines how same-race teachers affect students’ long-term educational outcomes.
Amber’s Research Minute
Seth Gershenson et al., “The Long-Run Impacts of Same-Race Teachers,” National Bureau of Economic Research (November 2018).
