The Education Gadfly Weekly

Generous pensions—one of the main “perks” of public-sector employment—come at a steep price: After years of can-kicking, state pensions face funding shortfalls that total in the trillions. Yet many are hesitant to restructure them. Among the reasons cited is the backlash expected from teachers facing a loss or diminution of their long-established defined-benefit (DB) pension plans. This new study by Dan Goldhaber and colleagues suggests, however, that teachers may be more receptive to new pension structures than previously thought (echoing findings from a New York poll conducted earlier this year). Researchers analyzed teachers’ pension preferences using data from Washington State over two time periods during which educators could opt for a DB or hybrid plan (which combines a DB and an employee-funded defined-contribution [DC] plan). During both periods, the majority of teachers—both new and experienced—opted for the hybrid plan. (Only teachers over age fifty-five preferred the traditional DB option.) The researchers then examined the association between choice of pension program and teacher effectiveness, measured by value-added. Compellingly, teachers choosing the hybrid plan were 2 to 3 percent of a standard deviation more effective than those opting for the DB plan. This is equivalent to the difference between a teacher with one or two years of experience and a novice—and hints that the composition of the teacher workforce (and its overall quality) is likely to be influenced by pension structures. The political will to revamp teacher-pension plans remains buried. This study provides a shovel with which we may start to dig it out.

Dan Goldhaber, Cyrus Grout, Annie Pennucci, and Wesley Bignell, Teacher Pension Choice: Surveying the Landscape in Washington State (Washington, D.C.: National Center for Analysis of Longitudinal Data in Education Research, October 2012).

A flurry of legislative activity in 2010, spurred in part by Race to the Top, left many states with new teacher-evaluation systems, performance-pay metrics, tenure protocols, and more. This report, authored by Patrick McGuinn for the Center for American Progress, suggests that states are now struggling to implement and sustain these muscular policies. He looks closely at the implementation of revamped teacher-evaluation protocols in six states:  Colorado, Delaware, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, and Tennessee. How have they managed their increased role in what has long been a local pursuit? The process has proved slow and frustrating: New units (created to provide services like evaluator training and to track teacher effectiveness) have faced difficulties coordinating their work with that of local education agencies. Administrators skilled in teacher evaluation are scarce, forcing states to lean heavily on outside organizations. The see-saw between state policy and local control has proven particularly difficult to balance: Do states impose statewide evaluation systems (as in Delaware and Tennessee) or grant districts more flexibility? Still, these challenges are not insurmountable. McGuinn offers a number of common-sensical yet sensible recommendations to that end: For example, he urges officials to reflect on which tasks state education agencies are best-equipped to undertake and to think carefully about the tradeoffs between hiring outside organizations and building their own capacity. McGuinn’s report is a valuable reminder that any successful reform scheme must couple ambition with a commitment to building capacity.

Patrick McGuinn, The State of Teacher Evaluation Reform (Washington, D.C.: Center for American Progress, November 2012).

In education, only two things, once gone, cannot be replaced: Time and excellent educators. So argues TNTP (née The New Teacher Project) in this tag-along to its blockbuster August report, The Irreplaceables. While the August report assessed how schools and districts could retain top-flight teachers, this case study  of the District of Columbia school system (DCPS) scrutinizes whether its new teacher-evaluation system, known as IMPACT, is effectively weeding out the bad and retaining the good. Evidently it is. In 2010-11, D.C. retained 88 percent of its irreplaceable teachers (those who were rated “highly effective” by IMPACT), compared to just 45 percent of its low-performers. Impressive, when compared with the retention patterns of other districts studied by TNTP, which retained, on average, 85 percent of low and high performers alike. But improvements are still possible. For example, two-thirds of DCPS principals do not consider smart retention a top priority. Further, D.C. Irreplaceables are 30 percent more likely to teach in the District’s lowest-poverty schools than its highest-poverty ones. (Conversely, while only 3 percent of teachers in the lowest-poverty schools are ineffective, 36 percent of educators in the highest-poverty schools are.) As D.C.—rightly—continues to identify and nudge out weak teachers, it must take a keen look at where replacements are needed, and enact policy to help get them there. How much more aggressive the district will be on these fronts will mostly be up to Schools Chancellor Kaya Henderson, herself a TNTP alum.

The New Teacher Project, Keeping Irreplaceables in D.C. Public Schools: Lessons in Smart Teacher Retention (Brooklyn, NY: TNTP, 2012).

Mike and Adam celebrate school-choice victories in New Jersey and Race to the Top and worry about the battles ahead. Amber ponders state-mandated special-ed enrollment targets.

Amber's Research Minute

New York State Special Education Enrollment Analysis by CRPE - Download PDF

Ten years ago, George W. Bush signed the No Child Left Behind Act, the law that has dominated U.S. education—and the education policy debate—for the entire decade. While lawmakers are struggling to update that measure, experts across the political spectrum are struggling to make sense of its impact and legacy. Did NCLB, and the consequential accountability movement it embodied, succeed? And with near-stagnant national test scores of late, is there reason to think that this approach to school reform is exhausted? If not "consequential accountability," what could take the U.S. to the next level of student achievement?

Join three leading experts as they wrestle with these questions. Panelists include Hoover Institute economist Eric Hanushek, DFER's Charles Barone, and former NCES commissioner Mark Schneider, author of a forthcoming Fordham analysis of the effects of consequential accountability. NCLB drafter Sandy Kress, previously identified as a panelist, was unable to attend.

Jeb Bush pushed hard for putting the interests of children first. Photo by Joe Burbank/Orlando Sentinel/MCT/Getty Images

I don’t know whether his hat is edging into the 2016 presidential election ring, but I do know that Jeb Bush gave a heck of an education keynote on Tuesday morning at the national summit convened in Washington by his Florida-based Foundation for Excellence in Education.

At this annual bipartisan-but-predominantly-Republican soiree aimed at state legislators and other key ed-policy decision makers—this year’s was by far the largest and grandest of the five they’ve held so far—Bush pushed hard for putting the interests of children first and did so in language plainly intended to appeal across party lines. A later session, which I had the pleasure of “moderating,” brought much the same message from John Podesta of the Center for American Progress. Though nobody expects Podesta to vote Bush for president (or anything else), in practice they agree on about 90 percent of the ed-reform policy agenda and maybe 70 percent of the strategy for attaining and sustaining it.

Bush opened by citing Charles Murray’s new book and lamenting the loss of upward social and economic mobility in American society and the damage it is doing to our values as well as our competitiveness. “We have these huge gaps in income,” he said, “with people born into poverty who will stay in poverty….This ideal of who we are as a nation—it’s going away, it’s leaving us,” adding that “There is one path that can change this course…And that is to assure that we move to a child-centered education system where we have no excuses for the fact that we have these big education gaps that will yield income gaps and lives that are constrained because people don't have the power of knowledge.”

Bush’s formulation of a “child-centered” system has five essential elements.

• High standards. He termed them “I’m-not-kidding-standards” and then launched into a powerful endorsement of the Common Core State Standards for English and math, noting that “If we've learned one lesson from reform it is this: We continually underestimate children. Setting high standards and demanding results drive student academic gains…It will take some adjustment, but our kids will rise to the challenge of these new standards if we give them the opportunity and tools to do it.”
• Results-based accountability at every level of the system, including letter grading of schools on the basis of their performance. “It seems to me,” he said, “that lessons learned in life ought to be applied to education. We reward the things we want more of. We especially reward excellence. We're not as happy when there's mediocrity, and we create strategies to turn mediocrity into improvement. And when there's failure, we should have no tolerance for it. That is the simple basic accountability system that should be applied in every school district in this country…[But] robust accountability doesn't just end with grading schools. It also recognizes that the parents need to have power…I'm really excited about the parent-trigger movement…where parents that have no power and have been cast aside for way too long now have been given the power to say, ‘If my school is not working I want a say on how to change it.’”
• Differentiation of teacher performance based on professional skills and student results, not tenure or union membership, coupled with differentiated compensation linked to those evaluations. The traditional system for rewarding teachers is “based on an industrial unionized model that is completely inappropriate for the 21st century…There are incredibly fine teachers that get paid less even though they're doing the Lord's work consistently over time, and there are teachers that are mediocre that get paid more because they've been there longer....We should move to a system that rewards and elevates the profession of teaching as a profession and moves away from this system where longevity of service is the determining factor of how much money you make.”
• A panoply of quality school choices, public (including charters, of course) and private alike, accessible to all students—especially those in greatest need of alternatives to today’s worst schools—coupled with a thorough system of transparency and comparability to help parents make wise selections. “School choice,” Bush explained, “is the catalytic converter to accelerate these [other] things at a faster pace.”
• Shrewd—but universal—use of technology to individualize instruction, customize student progress, engage kids, and augment teachers. “Digital learning,” he predicted, “is ultimately going to be commonplace across the fifty states, and it will be a joyous occasion when it does. Imagine a classroom in a blended learning environment where rich digital content comes from the very best providers, where teachers are managing the learning experience for students, where it's competency based, where we don't sit our little butts in a seat for 180 days and say, ‘Okay, now it's time to take three months off,’ and then come back and sit our butts down…for another 180 days. [Instead, we must] move to a system where if you master the material, you're not held back. And if you haven't mastered the material, you're not pushed along. That's what technology offers: the ability to customize the learning experience in a powerful way.”

It was the first education speech I can remember where I found myself agreeing with every single word.

Yes, I’d love to see Jeb run for president. But whether he does or not, his clarity, courage, persistence, and adroit, open-handed, open-armed leadership are some of the most valuable assets that today’s education reformers have.

The new teacher contract in Newark has rightfully caused widespread celebration. It has earned praise from New Jersey’s governor and education commissioner, Newark’s mayor and superintendent, local and national labor leaders, and many others. There seems to be a consensus that a new day has dawned for public education in this troubled city.

Gov. Chris Christie has shown that he is committed to helping Newark schools improve. Photo from Wikimedia Commons.

The history of urban school improvement efforts suggests, however, that we ought to temper our enthusiasm. The roadside is littered with much-ballyhooed but ultimately unsuccessful attempts to fix failing inner-city schools.

But if reform leaders are willing to exploit the opportunity that lurks in the Newark contract, this could turn out to be a pivot point in the nation’s decades-long effort to reform urban schooling.

This contract is an enormous improvement over its predecessors: It reforms compensation by prioritizing effectiveness instead of seniority. It speeds the implementation of improved teacher evaluations and enables change in the lowest-performing schools. It allows for greater school-level decision-making and removes bureaucratic barriers to reform.

The district will now be better positioned to attract and retain the best educators. Its leaders will have added flexibility to make decisions that meet kids’ needs. New Jersey residents will have greater confidence that state, local, and philanthropic funding will be spent in productive ways.

The agreement has also spawned plenty of strange bedfellows, bringing together management and labor, left and right. Local union president Joseph Del Grosso and national AFT leader Randi Weingarten cheered the contract. State superintendent Chris Cerf and district superintendent Cami Anderson lauded its transformative nature. At a signing event, GOP Governor Chris Christie called Democratic Mayor Cory Booker an "indispensable partner" and said, “This is the most gratifying day of my governorship.”

But there have been many similar celebrations before that were followed by the same dismal educational results. Why expect a different outcome this time? 

The Newark school system now has everything it could possibly ask for: a reform-oriented teacher contract, a new state law on tenure and evaluation, per-pupil funding that’s double the national average, the $100-million Zuckerberg donation, partnerships with leading nonprofit organizations, freedom from a politically-motivated school board, a tough local superintendent, a reform-friendly mayor, the nation’s best state superintendent,  an incomparably bold governor, and a vibrant charter-school sector nipping at its heels.

Yes, we should see this as the beginning of a new era. But we must also declare an end to the excuses. If Newark can’t generate dramatically better results this time, it never will—and one must wonder whether other cities can.   

The governor should say so, and then put the district on the clock.

This was never an option in years past—the district was the only game in town, and leaders had to put all of their eggs in the district’s basket. There was no “or else.” 

So when results came up short (as they always did), leaders had no recourse. The stubbornly underperforming district, having successfully weathered another passing storm of reform, would carry on as before, watching another set of vanquished elected officials exit, their heads hanging low.

But now an “or else” exists. It’s that vibrant charter sector—and not only in Newark. Indeed, we now know that the district is expendable. In New Orleans, three-quarters of students attend non-district charter schools. In Detroit and Washington, D.C., the number approaches 50 percent. In a dozen other cities, it’s more than 25 percent.

Said simply, chartering can replace the district—and this can happen in Newark, too.

Charters already have a 17-percent market share there and, more importantly, as a fine new study from CREDO shows, these schools are doing extraordinary work: Each year a student attends a Newark charter, she learns seven and a half months of reading and a full extra year of math more than her peers in traditional district schools.

The extremely successful charter networks KIPP and Uncommon Schools are already operating in Newark—and are prepared to grow there. The district has numerous under-enrolled buildings, meaning that there’s space within which charters can grow. A wide array of support organizations, including foundations and human capital providers, stand ready to advance the expansion of high-performing charters.

And most importantly, since the state has complete control of the district and the state education department is New Jersey’s lone charter authorizer, the state, at the governor’s direction, could lead Newark’s transition from a district-based to a charter-based system.

Let’s hope, of course, that the numerous arrows now in Newark’s quiver will enable that district to drastically improve student achievement. But we cannot allow ourselves to look back ten years hence and realize that the district devoured another set of reforms and remained as low-performing, obstreperous, and powerful as ever.

By selecting Cerf as state commissioner, faithfully backing Anderson as local superintendent, reforming tenure, supporting the new teacher contract, and more, Governor Christie has shown that he is committed to helping that district improve.

But for the sake of today’s and tomorrow’s children, there must be a Plan B. By putting the district on the clock and offering a new vision for urban public education, Governor Christie can offer a brighter future to Newark’s residents and, in the process, emerge as the nation’s most aggressive and forward-thinking education-reform governor.

A version of this post appeared in the New York Daily News and as a blog post on the Flypaper. For more about CREDO's study on New Jersey charter schools, see another of Andy Smarick's recent posts on Flypaper.

The National Association of Charter School Authorizers (NACSA), a top-notch group of entities that are serious about sponsoring quality charter schools, issued a call this week for authorizers and state laws to be more proactive in closing failing schools and opening great new ones. They call it the One Million Lives campaign.

Figure 1: Number of Ohio charter schools in the lowest 15 percent of state performance. Source: 2011-12 Ohio Report Card Results.

At the kickoff, NACSA President Greg Richmond said, “In some places, accountability unfortunately has been part of the charter model in name only. If charters are going to succeed in helping improve public education, accountability must go from being rhetoric to reality.” He then called for a policy agenda aimed at achieving both smarter growth and stronger accountability in these ways:

• Establishing strong statewide authorizers that promote both high-quality growth and accountability,
• Writing into law standards for authorizers that are based on NACSA’s excellent Principles & Standards for Quality Charter School Authorizing,
• Placing performance expectations for charter renewal into state law,
• Empowering authorizers to close schools that fail to meet the expectations set in their charter contracts,
• Holding authorizers accountable for the performance of their schools and their authorizing practices, and
• Creating automatic school closure laws that make it impossible for education failure to persist forever.

Ohio, where Fordham is an authorizer (of eleven charters today, more tomorrow), is an excellent case in point. The Buckeye State has had more than its fair share of charter-school failures, and there is ample room for improvement in the state’s charter laws and school performance. When NACSA and Richmond speak about closing troubled schools and opening more great schools, Ohio policymakers should take heed. Ohio has dozens of charter schools in the lowest 15 percent of all statewide public-school performance in both reading and math (see figure 1).

Figure 2: Ohio charter school closures. Since Ohio’s default-closure law took effect, it has shut down nearly as many low-performing charter schools as have authorizers on their own.

But Ohio is also doing some things right. It was a leader in creating laws that hold authorizers accountable for the performance of their schools. Under Ohio’s charter law, approved organizations must negotiate a contract with the state to become an official authorizer.

Back in 2004, as a matter of fact, Fordham negotiated the first performance contract with the Ohio Department of Education to serve as an authorizer. Fordham, like the state’s other eighty-plus authorizers, has a contractual agreement with the department that spells out our responsibilities as an authorizer. These responsibilities include ensuring all authorized schools are in compliance with relevant state and federal laws as it relates to operational, financial, and academic performance. The performance conditions of this contract, especially with regards to holding schools accountable for their academic performance, should be strengthened. The Ohio Department of Education is, in fact, exploring ways to ramp up expectations on authorizers and their schools. But despite its limitations, the contract does give the department the authority to close truly troubled authorizers, and in recent months, one authorizer was closed for its incompetence.  

Ohio was also the first state to mandate (in 2005) the automatic closure of terminally bad charter schools. The law was the result of too many authorizers failing to close persistently troubled charter schools, especially those floundering academically. The law has been modified and improved over the years. NACSA noted in their press release that almost as many charters in Ohio have been closed down by state law as have been closed by authorizers since the law took effect in 2007 (see figure 2).

Automatic closure laws are a mixed blessing, inasmuch as they let authorizers off the hook. But they do achieve the desired result: the demise of truly awful schools. Indeed, Ohio’s General Assembly is currently debating legislation that would strengthen the state’s closure requirements and extend them to “dropout recovery” charters, which are currently exempt from such laws.

Ohio is making progress out of the wilderness of charter mediocrity, but education reformers here and across the country should fully embrace the One Million Lives campaign as a way to do even more. Howard Fuller captured the spirit: “The One Million Lives initiative will not only raise the level of discourse on quality but can help build the coalition necessary to put excellence into action. Our schools, our students, and our nation will be better for it.”

On Monday, the U.S. Department of Education announced sixty-one finalists in its Race to the Top–District competition. In this iteration of the Race, each district contender was required to procure its union’s signature—a condition that nipped some applications in the bud. But by-and-large, charter schools don’t have that problem, and they made off with merry gains: 10 percent of the finalists were charters, while only 4 percent of K-12 public school students attend charter schools—though that number is growing.

Five years after Missouri stripped the St. Louis Public School District of its accreditation and took over, that school system—in which students in times past were “almost as likely to drop out as earn a diploma,” according to the Wall Street Journal—is starting to rise from the dead. The difference? Kevin Adams, the unassuming, data-driven schools chief hired by the state-appointed board. Under his tenure, the graduation rate rose 18 percent and the debt fell by $25 million; attendance is up, misbehavior is down, and optimism runs high for St. Louis.

The Laura and John Arnold Foundation will invest $25 million to expand high-performing charters in New Orleans and create new ones—the group’s second investment in the Big Easy. Pre-Katrina, 83 percent of New Orleans schools were failing; after the proliferation of charter schools, that number has dropped to 40 percent. “"High-quality public charter schools have changed the landscape of public education in New Orleans," said New Orleans Mayor Mitch Landrieu. “…We [now] have the opportunity to open doors of opportunity for even more students and ensure that our children get the excellent education they deserve." Huzzah for the Arnolds!

Ten years ago, George W. Bush signed the No Child Left Behind Act, the law that has dominated U.S. education—and the education policy debate—for the entire decade. While lawmakers are struggling to update that measure, experts across the political spectrum are struggling to make sense of its impact and legacy. Did NCLB, and the consequential accountability movement it embodied, succeed? And with near-stagnant national test scores of late, is there reason to think that this approach to school reform is exhausted? If not "consequential accountability," what could take the U.S. to the next level of student achievement?

Join three leading experts as they wrestle with these questions. Panelists include Hoover Institute economist Eric Hanushek, DFER's Charles Barone, and former NCES commissioner Mark Schneider, author of a forthcoming Fordham analysis of the effects of consequential accountability. NCLB drafter Sandy Kress, previously identified as a panelist, was unable to attend.

Ten years ago, George W. Bush signed the No Child Left Behind Act, the law that has dominated U.S. education—and the education policy debate—for the entire decade. While lawmakers are struggling to update that measure, experts across the political spectrum are struggling to make sense of its impact and legacy. Did NCLB, and the consequential accountability movement it embodied, succeed? And with near-stagnant national test scores of late, is there reason to think that this approach to school reform is exhausted? If not "consequential accountability," what could take the U.S. to the next level of student achievement?

Join three leading experts as they wrestle with these questions. Panelists include Hoover Institute economist Eric Hanushek, DFER's Charles Barone, and former NCES commissioner Mark Schneider, author of a forthcoming Fordham analysis of the effects of consequential accountability. NCLB drafter Sandy Kress, previously identified as a panelist, was unable to attend.

Generous pensions—one of the main “perks” of public-sector employment—come at a steep price: After years of can-kicking, state pensions face funding shortfalls that total in the trillions. Yet many are hesitant to restructure them. Among the reasons cited is the backlash expected from teachers facing a loss or diminution of their long-established defined-benefit (DB) pension plans. This new study by Dan Goldhaber and colleagues suggests, however, that teachers may be more receptive to new pension structures than previously thought (echoing findings from a New York poll conducted earlier this year). Researchers analyzed teachers’ pension preferences using data from Washington State over two time periods during which educators could opt for a DB or hybrid plan (which combines a DB and an employee-funded defined-contribution [DC] plan). During both periods, the majority of teachers—both new and experienced—opted for the hybrid plan. (Only teachers over age fifty-five preferred the traditional DB option.) The researchers then examined the association between choice of pension program and teacher effectiveness, measured by value-added. Compellingly, teachers choosing the hybrid plan were 2 to 3 percent of a standard deviation more effective than those opting for the DB plan. This is equivalent to the difference between a teacher with one or two years of experience and a novice—and hints that the composition of the teacher workforce (and its overall quality) is likely to be influenced by pension structures. The political will to revamp teacher-pension plans remains buried. This study provides a shovel with which we may start to dig it out.

Dan Goldhaber, Cyrus Grout, Annie Pennucci, and Wesley Bignell, Teacher Pension Choice: Surveying the Landscape in Washington State (Washington, D.C.: National Center for Analysis of Longitudinal Data in Education Research, October 2012).

A flurry of legislative activity in 2010, spurred in part by Race to the Top, left many states with new teacher-evaluation systems, performance-pay metrics, tenure protocols, and more. This report, authored by Patrick McGuinn for the Center for American Progress, suggests that states are now struggling to implement and sustain these muscular policies. He looks closely at the implementation of revamped teacher-evaluation protocols in six states:  Colorado, Delaware, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, and Tennessee. How have they managed their increased role in what has long been a local pursuit? The process has proved slow and frustrating: New units (created to provide services like evaluator training and to track teacher effectiveness) have faced difficulties coordinating their work with that of local education agencies. Administrators skilled in teacher evaluation are scarce, forcing states to lean heavily on outside organizations. The see-saw between state policy and local control has proven particularly difficult to balance: Do states impose statewide evaluation systems (as in Delaware and Tennessee) or grant districts more flexibility? Still, these challenges are not insurmountable. McGuinn offers a number of common-sensical yet sensible recommendations to that end: For example, he urges officials to reflect on which tasks state education agencies are best-equipped to undertake and to think carefully about the tradeoffs between hiring outside organizations and building their own capacity. McGuinn’s report is a valuable reminder that any successful reform scheme must couple ambition with a commitment to building capacity.

Patrick McGuinn, The State of Teacher Evaluation Reform (Washington, D.C.: Center for American Progress, November 2012).

In education, only two things, once gone, cannot be replaced: Time and excellent educators. So argues TNTP (née The New Teacher Project) in this tag-along to its blockbuster August report, The Irreplaceables. While the August report assessed how schools and districts could retain top-flight teachers, this case study  of the District of Columbia school system (DCPS) scrutinizes whether its new teacher-evaluation system, known as IMPACT, is effectively weeding out the bad and retaining the good. Evidently it is. In 2010-11, D.C. retained 88 percent of its irreplaceable teachers (those who were rated “highly effective” by IMPACT), compared to just 45 percent of its low-performers. Impressive, when compared with the retention patterns of other districts studied by TNTP, which retained, on average, 85 percent of low and high performers alike. But improvements are still possible. For example, two-thirds of DCPS principals do not consider smart retention a top priority. Further, D.C. Irreplaceables are 30 percent more likely to teach in the District’s lowest-poverty schools than its highest-poverty ones. (Conversely, while only 3 percent of teachers in the lowest-poverty schools are ineffective, 36 percent of educators in the highest-poverty schools are.) As D.C.—rightly—continues to identify and nudge out weak teachers, it must take a keen look at where replacements are needed, and enact policy to help get them there. How much more aggressive the district will be on these fronts will mostly be up to Schools Chancellor Kaya Henderson, herself a TNTP alum.

The New Teacher Project, Keeping Irreplaceables in D.C. Public Schools: Lessons in Smart Teacher Retention (Brooklyn, NY: TNTP, 2012).