The Education Gadfly Weekly

Gary Orfield is at it again, although this time with a twist: This book, edited by Orfield and Penn State professor Erica Frankenberg, focuses on how suburban areas are handling an influx of poor and minority students—and how they might handle it better. The book profiles six suburbs (located outside Atlanta, Boston, Chicago, Los Angeles, Minneapolis, and San Antonio) as well as Beach County, Florida (which encompasses West Palm Beach and Boca Raton). Each case study analyzes demographic shifts, how the districts are combating their schools’ achievement gaps, and what the political and cultural hurdles are to achieving true racial integration (Orfield’s long-time end-goal). (Prefacing these chapters is a welcome analysis and discussion of the demographics of suburbia at large—showing that, across the board, it’s less homogenous than many people suppose.) The Resegregation of Suburban Schools is a worthy contribution to the academic literature on suburbia and a thought-provoking read on the morality of desegregation. But look elsewhere for concrete policy ideas. In these pages are only vague proposals for affirmative-action programs when hiring educational professionals, amorphous “involvement” of civil-rights organizations like the NAACP in the suburbs, and an increase in magnet schools and student-exchange programs (i.e., busing across district lines). The recent attempts to extend integration programs to the suburbs should stand as a lesson: Racial integration—while a nice idea—can quickly bog down. It might be time to start thinking of diverse schools as one choice for parents, rather than a forced reality.

SOURCE: Erica Frankenberg and Gary Orfield, eds., The Resegregation of Suburban Schools: A Hidden Crisis in American Education (Cambridge: Harvard Education Press, 2012).

When it comes to national elections, political pundits have long asserted that: “As Ohio goes, so goes the nation.” The same has oft been said of Texas and the textbook market, one reason that many eyes followed the 2010 debate in the Lone Star State over adding elements of creationism and conservative ideology to the state’s science and social-studies standards. (Certainly the adoption of the Common Core State Standards by forty-five states loosens Texas’s grip on textbook design for English language arts and math—but the more controversial subjects of science and history remain tightly controlled.) This documentary film tracks the lengths to which some members of the Texas Board of Education (Don McLeroy, a dentist, and Kathy Dunbar, a lawyer) went to infuse nonsense into their state’s academic standards. In one scene, the pair work to remove a standard on separation of church and state. In another, they try to poke holes in the state’s science standards dealing with evolution. While slow-moving at points, the overall narrative woven by this documentary is interesting—and the underlying messages are important: Texas’s control of textbook content reaches past its borders (a trend that will continue for many subjects even after CCSS-aligned material is published). Forcing all to pay attention to what happens within them.

SOURCE: Scott Thurman, The Revisionaries (New York, NY: Kino Lorber Incorporated, 2012).

Digital learning has the potential to revitalize American public education, providing personalized instruction to millions of students. Which doesn’t mean it will cause them to learn much. This report from the International Association for K-12 Online Learning (iNACOL) properly observes that today’s assessment systems cannot provide the data necessary to track the efficacy of online-learning programs. This creates two potential scenarios, both problematic: Digital education could either 1) become ubiquitous but not transformative, as effective programs are not scaled up nor shoddy programs shuttered or 2) be weakly adopted as states restrict options for programs that are unproven. To remedy this situation, iNACOL points to five measures that should be used to evaluate online programs: proficiency levels, individual student growth, graduation rates, college and career readiness (though the authors fail to fully define the term), and reduction of the achievement gap. The authors then offer a number of recommendations for how to operationalize these measures. Among them: Online-education programs need common assessments across most course subjects (and end-of-course exams for all); state data systems must be updated to meet the challenge of collecting, reporting, and passing data between schools and the state; and online-school data should be disaggregated from that of brick-and-mortar schools to assure accurate reporting. For those still unclear about exactly how to go about implementing these changes, this report presents example plans-of-action both for states without online schools and for those that offer individual online courses statewide. In just thirty-four short pages, iNACOL authors define the problem, propose a solution, and then offer concrete and useable recommendations for how to make that solution a reality. Bravo!

SOURCE: Susan Patrick, David Edwards, Matthew Wicks, and John Watson Measuring Quality from Inputs to Outcomes: Creating Student Learning Performance Metrics and Quality Assurance for Online Schools (Vienna, VA: iNACOL, October 2012).

Mike channels Darth Vader and Checker channels, well, Checker, in a Halloween edition of the podcast featuring all sorts of treats: charter schools, the Common Core, and the political appeal of ed reform. Amber explains why Fordham’s latest study on teacher-union strength is a must-read—all 405 pages of it.

Amber's Research Minute

This timely study represents the most comprehensive analysis of American teacher unions' strength ever conducted, ranking all fifty states and the District of Columbia according to the power and influence of their state-level unions. To assess union strength, the Fordham Institute and Education Reform Now examined thirty-seven different variables across five realms:

1) Resources and Membership
2) Involvement in Politics
3) Scope of Bargaining
4) State Policies
5) Perceived Influence

The study analyzed factors ranging from union membership and revenue to state bargaining laws to campaign contributions, and included such measures such as the alignment between specific state policies and traditional union interests and a unique stakeholder survey. The report sorts the fifty-one jurisdictions into five tiers, ranking their teacher unions from strongest to weakest and providing in-depth profiles of each.

Imagine a high school where every course is challenging, all students choose (and are academically strong enough) to be there, discipline problems are few, teachers are knowledgeable and attentive, pretty much everyone earns a diploma, and virtually all graduates go on to good colleges.

For more on this issue, purchase Exam Schools: Inside America's Most Selective Public High Schools.

How much would you pay to send your son or daughter to such a school? If it's an elite private institution, you might easily fork over the price of an Ivy League degree before your child even sets foot on a university campus.

But this vision isn't a snapshot of a $40,000-a-year prep school. It's the profile of 165 free public secondary schools in the United States, many of them in big cities known for sky-high dropout rates, low test scores, metal detectors at the schoolhouse door, and rapid turnover among teachers.

What distinguishes this small subset of America's 20,000 public high schools is that they are academically selective. Students compete for admission by demonstrating they are qualified (and eager) to do the work.

Sometimes called "exam schools," because test scores are typically part of their selection process and a handful of them rely solely on such scores, they tailor their curricula and teaching to high-performing, high-potential kids who want a high school experience that emphasizes college-prep, or college-level, academics. Some are ancient institutions—Boston Latin is as old as Harvard, New York City's Townsend Harris High School has roots in the 1840s—but half of them are creations of the past 30 years. Some are world-famous, but many are not. They come in all sizes—from 68 pupils to 5,000—and can be found in all kinds of communities. A majority are affiliated with school districts, but some are university-run or otherwise exist outside the regular system. One in 10 is a public-sector boarding school, often statewide, such as the Illinois Math and Science Academy. Only a few are charter schools.

Some have highly competitive admissions processes, accepting as few as 10 percent of their applicants. Others take every youngster who meets their threshold standards, provided there's an available desk. In either case, exam schools are probably the best deal a high school parent can find today in American education—public or private. Our recent study uncovers why.

First, exam schools offer a free, full-time solution to the problem of providing suitably challenging curriculum and instruction to bright, motivated students. They are entire schools devoted wholly to high-level academics, not magnet programs within conventional high schools, honors tracks, or collections of Advanced Placement courses. Rigorous homework is routine. Independent research projects and internships are common. High expectations are the norm, as is hard work. Such a culture all but guarantees that students aren't picked on for being "nerds" or "acting white," as they might be elsewhere. Many exam schools screen applicants for behavior, too, so students go through classes, hallways, and lunchrooms without major distractions or threats to their safety.

One's teacher is apt to be amply qualified also. The proportion of instructors with Ph.D.s in exam schools is higher than the norm, and many have had experience teaching at the college level or working in fields related to the disciplines they teach (e.g., engineer-turned-science teacher). Teacher turnover is low and, although the pay seldom exceeds the district scale (aside from compensation for longer days and additional periods), those we spoke with found their work gratifying and relished the chance to work with eager, high-ability students.

Exam schools are also surprisingly diverse. As a group, over 40 percent of their pupils are black or Latino. Some schools, like Jones College Prep in Chicago, are among the most racially balanced secondary schools in town. Their proportion of low-income youngsters nearly matches the wider high school population. Individual schools may not reflect the demography of their communities, but most make earnest efforts to create a diverse applicant pool.

With challenging classes, dedicated and knowledgeable teachers, and able, motivated peers from all kinds of backgrounds, it's reasonable to ask whether exam schools consume more than their share of scarce financial resources.

On the contrary, we found that exam schools also get pinched as states and districts allocate tight budgets. Washington plays a role here, too, since the focus of the No Child Left Behind Act on low achievers and troubled schools, coupled with state and federal funding streams for special education, means that schools serving high achievers don't receive money that other public schools often do. Yes, some districts provide extra resources for "advanced" courses, and exam schools strive to piece together funds from multiple sources, including county supervisors, university budgets, parents, and alumni. We visited some that are generously resourced, but most were laying off staff and enlarging classes.

Money isn't their only challenge. Allegations of elitism persist. Admissions practices are under constant scrutiny by politicians, civil rights groups, and others. And regular high schools in the vicinity tend to be jealous, accusing exam schools of "creaming" the best students, thereby jeopardizing the other schools' academic rankings (which are often based on how many pupils take AP exams) and college-entrance reputations. They may even be seen as threatening real estate values in the neighborhood.

In response, savvy exam school promoters sometimes enter into treaties with the regular high schools—a sort of reverse quota system—and promise not to admit more than so many youngsters from particular districts or neighborhoods. (We encountered this in Bergen County, N.J., and the Queens borough in New York, for example.) Virginia's Maggie Walker Governor's School eases "brain drain" angst by reporting each student's test scores to his or her "home school," where they get included in the school's state report card.

A further challenge for exam schools—not yet resolved—is the question of whether they truly "add value" to their pupils. Although such schools typically win plenty of accolades, including academic prizes, stellar college-matriculation results, and lofty rankings on "best high schools" lists, they haven't had to produce hard evidence that they impart more knowledge or skills to their students than these same talented youngsters would pick up elsewhere.

When a school screens applicants for academic talent, it ends up with pupils who perform well on tests, earn high grades, and get into competitive colleges. But do such students learn more because of what happens in the school? Little research has been done. State and district assessment results don't much help. Hence today, America's exam schools have no systematic answer to that important question.

Even so, they're awash in more qualified applicants than they can accommodate. Demand clearly exceeds supply in this particular education marketplace.

And a marketplace it is. These are "schools of choice" that nobody attends against their will. They're educational havens for high-ability youngsters from low-resource families. They encourage education-minded middle-class families to stay in cities (and public education systems) that they might otherwise flee. They foster municipal pride. And they sometimes attract talented adults—and the firms that employ such folks—to move to town because they can see education offerings there that they want for their daughters and sons, kids who may become tomorrow's scientists and engineers and thus help boost the nation's competitiveness in the global market.

If, as Warren Buffett said, "Price is what you pay, value is what you get," then exam schools are a good value, indeed a real bargain, not just for thousands of young Americans and their families, but also for the wider society.

This essay first appeared in Education Week, October 17, 2012. Chester E. Finn Jr. and Jessica A. Hockett are the authors of Exam Schools: Inside America's Most Selective Public High Schools (Princeton, 2012).

Everyone knows that teacher unions matter in education politics and policies, a reality that is never more evident than at election time. In recent weeks, for example, state affiliates have been pushing for higher taxes on businesses to boost education spending in Nevada, successfully suing to limit the governor’s authority over education in Wisconsin, and working to sink an initiative to allow charter schools in Washington State. Of course, those instances are but the tip of a very large iceberg. Across the land, unions are doing their utmost to prevent all sorts of changes to education that they deem antithetical to their interests.

The role of teacher unions in education politics and policy is deeply polarizing. Critics (often including ourselves) typically assert that these organizations are the prime obstacles to needed reforms in K–12 schooling, while defenders (typically, also, supporters of the education status quo) insist that they are bulwarks of professionalism and safeguards against caprice and risky innovation.

Yet these arguments have rested on little but anecdote, opinion, and personal observation. There’s been scant real information on how much teacher unions matter, how exactly they seek to wield influence, and whether they wield more of it in some places than others.

There’s plenty of conventional wisdom, to be sure, mostly along the lines of, “unions are most powerful where every teacher must belong to them and every district must bargain with them and least consequential in ‘right-to-work’ states.”

But is that really true? Even if it is, does it oversimplify a more complex and nuanced situation?

Download How Strong Are U.S. Teacher Unions?

In a major study we released this week together with Education Reform Now, How Strong Are U.S. Teacher Unions: A State-By-State Comparison, we dug deep, churning vast amounts of data to parse the differences in political strength across state-level unions in the fifty states plus the District of Columbia.

Let us acknowledge that it’s not a perfect analysis. Let us admit that its conclusions are more nuanced, even equivocal, than we at Fordham are accustomed to. And let us also recognize that, even as we were gathering and analyzing all that data, multiple factors—economic woes, party shifts, court decisions, changing policy agendas, the arrival of many new players—conspired to produce enormous flux in precisely the realms that we were examining.

Some union leaders are thrilled to wield that cudgel against our report, even terming it “laughable” and “silly.” AFT President Randi Weingarten said it appeared to be “deeply flawed and misleading” and faulted it for omitting poverty in the analysis. (She didn’t say whose poverty. The states’? The kids’? The teachers’? We did, in fact, examine the resource levels of state unions themselves.) 

But of course they wouldn’t like it. They don’t want to be studied or compared. They go to great lengths to conceal information about the means by which they wield power. If they lauded our analysis, you would and should be suspicious of it.

In the end, we learned a ton from it—about individual states, about national patterns, about unexpected relationships, and about surprising exceptions. The report itself provides vast detail and is worth examining, but here are a few highlights:

• As the map shows, and as you likely expected, the strongest unions are generally found on the West Coast, in the Northeast, and in the industrial Midwest; the South is mostly the province of relatively weak unions. But there are surprises. Hawaii, currently perched on the edge of a teacher strike, might be unknown to many as union-central. Likewise, Montana and Alabama punch well above their reputational weights.

• Teacher strikes, like the one recently concluded in Chicago, are legal in fourteen states and illegal in thirty-seven.

• Thirty-two states require local school boards to bargain collectively with their teachers, fourteen states permit local boards to do this, and five states prohibit collective bargaining altogether (Georgia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Texas, and Virginia).

• Twenty-three states are “right-to-work” states, meaning that they prohibit unions from collecting “agency fees” from non-members. Twenty-eight jurisdictions allow such fees.

• In the 2010 election cycle, teacher unions in twenty-two states were among the top ten overall donors (excluding individual donations) to candidates for governor, legislature, high court, and elected education positions. In twenty-one states, they were among the top five highest-giving interest groups. In Colorado and Indiana, they ranked first.

• In just two states (Pennsylvania and New Jersey) did our survey of insiders unanimously deem teacher unions the most influential entities in shaping education policy over a recent three-year period. But survey respondents in twenty states found them to be generally more influential than other entities (including the state school board, state superintendent, governor, legislators, business interests, and advocacy groups).

• Despite all of that, the unions’ influence may be waning. For the three years prior to 2011, education policies in most states reflected union priorities. But in 2011’s legislative sessions (after 2010’s historic Republican surge), a growing number of lawmakers enacted policies that were less in line with union priorities.

We could not systematically link our rankings of union strength to state-level student achievement. Only a few of our data points (like teacher-employment policies) are apt to affect achievement directly. Others, like spending on education, could “touch” students indirectly, but there’s no strong evidence to support their link to achievement. We also have a timing problem since many state policies are in flux and don’t align with point-in-time snapshots of achievement. More important, we know that many other factors at both the state and local levels—poverty included, Randi!—affect how much and how well students learn, so postulating a relationship between state-level union activity and student achievement would be an oversimplification.

Having said that, we can’t resist eyeballing whether policies in a few high-performing states are more in line with the positions of reformers or of teacher unions. Take, for example, Delaware, Massachusetts, and Maryland. These three states, which, along with Florida, have significantly outpaced the rest of the country in student-achievement gains since the early 1990s, are often viewed as bastions of union influence. To be sure, they all have lots of unionized teachers. But when union strength is considered more holistically, these states show up toward the middle of the pack (nineteenth, twenty-first, and twenty-third, respectively).

No, we can’t claim that weakened unions alone will result in student-achievement gains. Still, suffice it to say that no one can claim with a straight face: “Want to boost student outcomes? Empower the teachers unions!” Which means, to our eyes at least, that what groups like Democrats for Education Reform, Stand for Children, and StudentsFirst are doing to challenge the hegemony of the unions is appropriate, important, and good for the country.

An Idaho judge ruled this week that the nonprofit behind $200,000-worth of ads backing state Superintendent of Public Instruction Tom Luna’s education reforms must disclose its donors (New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg among them). The incident may end up hurting Luna’s cause by raising populist ire against deep-pocketed contributors. Regardless, education-reform advocates should embrace greater transparency over edu-advocacy spending given who still spends the most.

American science education has plenty of room for improvement and President Obama deserves credit for putting STEM education on the agenda. Less admirable, as a Washington Post op-ed pointed out this week, is that his solution relies heavily on infusing America’s schools with 100,000 more teachers. Making STEM a priority matters little if that amounts to a continued focus on inputs rather than outputs—or turns out mainly to be an election year sop to a key Democratic constituency.

Kentucky is introducing a promising program to allow districts to operate more like charter schools, with greater independence and fewer regulations. That’s well and good, but there’s a simpler way to boost efficiency and creativity through school autonomy: Join the forty states that allow actual charters.

The principal of a failing Florida charter school irked some lawmakers and fired up school-choice critics this week when she received a $519,000 departure payment. (Never mind that district officials rarely leave their posts as paupers, regardless of performance.) Shame on her and the irresponsible governing board of her lousy school. Charter advocates must be vigilant to condemn such excesses while also stressing that increased regulation is not the solution—rather, it deprives charters of the autonomy that is their greatest strength. Stronger authorizing is the answer.

This timely study represents the most comprehensive analysis of American teacher unions' strength ever conducted, ranking all fifty states and the District of Columbia according to the power and influence of their state-level unions. To assess union strength, the Fordham Institute and Education Reform Now examined thirty-seven different variables across five realms:

1) Resources and Membership
2) Involvement in Politics
3) Scope of Bargaining
4) State Policies
5) Perceived Influence

The study analyzed factors ranging from union membership and revenue to state bargaining laws to campaign contributions, and included such measures such as the alignment between specific state policies and traditional union interests and a unique stakeholder survey. The report sorts the fifty-one jurisdictions into five tiers, ranking their teacher unions from strongest to weakest and providing in-depth profiles of each.

This timely study represents the most comprehensive analysis of American teacher unions' strength ever conducted, ranking all fifty states and the District of Columbia according to the power and influence of their state-level unions. To assess union strength, the Fordham Institute and Education Reform Now examined thirty-seven different variables across five realms:

1) Resources and Membership
2) Involvement in Politics
3) Scope of Bargaining
4) State Policies
5) Perceived Influence

The study analyzed factors ranging from union membership and revenue to state bargaining laws to campaign contributions, and included such measures such as the alignment between specific state policies and traditional union interests and a unique stakeholder survey. The report sorts the fifty-one jurisdictions into five tiers, ranking their teacher unions from strongest to weakest and providing in-depth profiles of each.

Gary Orfield is at it again, although this time with a twist: This book, edited by Orfield and Penn State professor Erica Frankenberg, focuses on how suburban areas are handling an influx of poor and minority students—and how they might handle it better. The book profiles six suburbs (located outside Atlanta, Boston, Chicago, Los Angeles, Minneapolis, and San Antonio) as well as Beach County, Florida (which encompasses West Palm Beach and Boca Raton). Each case study analyzes demographic shifts, how the districts are combating their schools’ achievement gaps, and what the political and cultural hurdles are to achieving true racial integration (Orfield’s long-time end-goal). (Prefacing these chapters is a welcome analysis and discussion of the demographics of suburbia at large—showing that, across the board, it’s less homogenous than many people suppose.) The Resegregation of Suburban Schools is a worthy contribution to the academic literature on suburbia and a thought-provoking read on the morality of desegregation. But look elsewhere for concrete policy ideas. In these pages are only vague proposals for affirmative-action programs when hiring educational professionals, amorphous “involvement” of civil-rights organizations like the NAACP in the suburbs, and an increase in magnet schools and student-exchange programs (i.e., busing across district lines). The recent attempts to extend integration programs to the suburbs should stand as a lesson: Racial integration—while a nice idea—can quickly bog down. It might be time to start thinking of diverse schools as one choice for parents, rather than a forced reality.

SOURCE: Erica Frankenberg and Gary Orfield, eds., The Resegregation of Suburban Schools: A Hidden Crisis in American Education (Cambridge: Harvard Education Press, 2012).

When it comes to national elections, political pundits have long asserted that: “As Ohio goes, so goes the nation.” The same has oft been said of Texas and the textbook market, one reason that many eyes followed the 2010 debate in the Lone Star State over adding elements of creationism and conservative ideology to the state’s science and social-studies standards. (Certainly the adoption of the Common Core State Standards by forty-five states loosens Texas’s grip on textbook design for English language arts and math—but the more controversial subjects of science and history remain tightly controlled.) This documentary film tracks the lengths to which some members of the Texas Board of Education (Don McLeroy, a dentist, and Kathy Dunbar, a lawyer) went to infuse nonsense into their state’s academic standards. In one scene, the pair work to remove a standard on separation of church and state. In another, they try to poke holes in the state’s science standards dealing with evolution. While slow-moving at points, the overall narrative woven by this documentary is interesting—and the underlying messages are important: Texas’s control of textbook content reaches past its borders (a trend that will continue for many subjects even after CCSS-aligned material is published). Forcing all to pay attention to what happens within them.

SOURCE: Scott Thurman, The Revisionaries (New York, NY: Kino Lorber Incorporated, 2012).

Digital learning has the potential to revitalize American public education, providing personalized instruction to millions of students. Which doesn’t mean it will cause them to learn much. This report from the International Association for K-12 Online Learning (iNACOL) properly observes that today’s assessment systems cannot provide the data necessary to track the efficacy of online-learning programs. This creates two potential scenarios, both problematic: Digital education could either 1) become ubiquitous but not transformative, as effective programs are not scaled up nor shoddy programs shuttered or 2) be weakly adopted as states restrict options for programs that are unproven. To remedy this situation, iNACOL points to five measures that should be used to evaluate online programs: proficiency levels, individual student growth, graduation rates, college and career readiness (though the authors fail to fully define the term), and reduction of the achievement gap. The authors then offer a number of recommendations for how to operationalize these measures. Among them: Online-education programs need common assessments across most course subjects (and end-of-course exams for all); state data systems must be updated to meet the challenge of collecting, reporting, and passing data between schools and the state; and online-school data should be disaggregated from that of brick-and-mortar schools to assure accurate reporting. For those still unclear about exactly how to go about implementing these changes, this report presents example plans-of-action both for states without online schools and for those that offer individual online courses statewide. In just thirty-four short pages, iNACOL authors define the problem, propose a solution, and then offer concrete and useable recommendations for how to make that solution a reality. Bravo!

SOURCE: Susan Patrick, David Edwards, Matthew Wicks, and John Watson Measuring Quality from Inputs to Outcomes: Creating Student Learning Performance Metrics and Quality Assurance for Online Schools (Vienna, VA: iNACOL, October 2012).