The Education Gadfly Weekly

Many of today’s parents yearn to live in or near the lively, culturally vibrant heart of the city—in diverse, walkable neighborhoods full of music and theater, accessible to museums and stores, awash in ethnic eateries, and radiating a true sense of community. This is a major shift from recent generations that saw middle class families trading urban centers for suburbs with lawns, malls, parks, and good schools.

But good schools still matter. And standing in the way of many parents’ urban aspirations is the question: Will the public schools in the city provide a strong education for my kids?

To be sure, lots of parents favor sending their sons and daughters to diverse schools with children from a variety of racial and socioeconomic backgrounds. But can such schools successfully meet the educational needs of all those different kids? How do middle class children fare in these environments? Is there enough challenge and stimulation in schools that also struggle to help poor and immigrant children reach basic standards? Is there too much focus on test scores? And why is it so hard to find diverse public schools with a progressive, child-centered approach to education?

These quandaries and more are addressed in this groundbreaking book by Michael J. Petrilli, one of America’s most trusted education experts and a father who himself is struggling with the Diverse Schools Dilemma.

The book is now available for purchase from Amazon, in print or as an eBook.

The opt-out-of-state-testing movement has notched more wins lately. “Thousands,” we read, are refusing to take the tests in New York alone. And tons more interest and attention are being devoted to this topic in states and communities far and wide.

Tough questions urgently arise: Is it legal to opt your child out of state tests? Should it be legal? And if it’s not—and ought not be—legal, is it a legitimate act of civil disobedience to refuse to obey such a law?

The recent surge of activity has more than one source. Partly it’s a response to broad concerns about too much testing and disquiet over curricular narrowing and test-prep overkill. Partly it’s a reaction against the Common Core standards, which have lately become controversial. And partly it’s just old-fashioned Rousseauian romanticism about the ends of education and the proper metrics by which to determine whether the right ends are being attained.

Yes, it’s understandable. But is it acceptable?

The legal status of testing opt-out is a bit murky. “Required by state law but not consistently enforced” seems to be the rule in most places. Colorado statutes, for instance, declare that “Every student enrolled in a public school is required to take the assessments in the grade level in which the student is enrolled.” New York requires participation in the tests but also has an administrative procedure in place for those who refuse. (“These students will be considered to have ‘no valid test score’ and will be counted as not tested.”) In the months ahead, states will have to clarify what is and isn’t required and how test participation is to be enforced—although, as with home schooling, they may choose to leave it murky rather than inviting big political battles.

As for parents, think about the parallels. Is it OK to opt their kids out of vaccinations before coming to school? Out of attending on Thursdays—or on their birthdays? Out of going to math class? Submitting a lab report in chemistry or a book review in English?

Testing is more serious than lab reports, for it goes to the core of society’s interest in ensuring that its own next generation is educated—not just making them spend time in school but making certain they actually gain the skills and knowledge that they and their society will need to thrive in decades to come.

Education is both a private and a public good, which is why states have assigned themselves constitutional responsibility for educating their young people. Every single state. (A representative clause, borrowed from the Arkansas Constitution, reads, “Intelligence and virtue being the safeguards of liberty and the bulwark of a free and good government, the State shall ever maintain a general, suitable and efficient system of free public schools and shall adopt all suitable means to secure to the people the advantages and opportunities of education.”) That’s why states have enacted “compulsory attendance” laws. And that’s why paying for education is the largest or second-largest item in the budget of every single state.

Yes, the private side of the education “good” is well represented, too. The Supreme Court famously ruled in 1925 that “The child is not the mere creature of the State; those who nurture him and direct his destiny have the right, coupled with the high duty, to recognize and prepare him for additional obligations.”

That right vouchsafes to families the options of private schooling and home schooling but not of no schooling, for it is balanced by “high duty” and by the “power of the state,” as recognized in the same Court decision, to “reasonably to regulate all schools, to inspect, supervise and examine them, their teachers and pupils; to require that all children of proper age attend some school, that teachers shall be of good moral character and patriotic disposition, that certain studies plainly essential to good citizenship must be taught, and that nothing be taught which is manifestly inimical to the public welfare” (emphasis added).

It’s a balancing act: shared public and parental authority, state power leavened by family preference.

Parents get greater leverage when they choose to educate their daughters and sons at home or send them to private school at their own expense. In those situations, state testing is optional and probably should be. But when they expect the state to educate their children at public expense, the public has a right to know whether those children are learning anything (no, not whether Johnny and Mary are learning, but whether the children of Waco—or Scarsdale—are learning); whether taxpayers are getting a decent ROI from the schools they’re paying for; and whether their community, their state, their society will be economically competitive and civically whole in the future as a result of an adequately educated populace.

How to find this out? Testing certainly isn’t perfect—but neither are any of the other metrics. Time spent—even promotions and graduations—doesn’t prove that learning occurred. Neither do teacher-conferred grades. And all the other options are subjective, expensive, impractical, or all of the above.

So we test. As former D.C. schools chancellor Michelle Rhee wrote the other day in The Washington Post,

Tests are not fun—but they’re necessary. Stepping on the bathroom scale can be nerve-racking, but it tells us if that exercise routine is working. Going to the dentist for a checkup every six months might be unpleasant, but it lets us know if there are cavities to address. In education, tests provide an objective measurement of how students are progressing—information that’s critical to improving public schools.

For the past decade, on their own initiative and under powerful pressure from Washington, states have administered standardized assessments of various kinds to all their (public school) pupils in grades 3 through 8 in math and English and then more in high school (and in science).

Yes, the tests leave much to be desired. They should be faster, computer-based, and adaptive. The questions should require thought, analysis, knowledge, not just regurgitation or guesswork. They should provide speedy feedback to schools, parents and pupils alike. Fortunately, it looks as if the forthcoming Common Core assessments will indeed be better. Kids may spend less time taking them, they’ll probe important learning, and they may even be educational in their own right.

But the nature of the test isn’t what’s at stake today. Our schools need to become more effective and our children need to learn more. Test results advance the public interest much as vaccinations do. (Maybe your kid is healthy today but the classroom needs everybody’s kid to be inoculated lest an epidemic start.)

Better tests are coming, but that doesn’t excuse “opting out” now. It’s not a legitimate form of civil disobedience. And it’s probably not legal, either. If you really find state tests odious, put your money and time where your mouth is—and stop asking taxpayers to educate your children.

Back in January, a Bloomberg News ranking of the world’s most innovative countries punctured the theory that low U.S. test scores are acceptable because U.S. students are happier and more creative than their overseas counterparts. Those (undeniably fuzzy) metrics don’t prove that high-ranking countries like South Korea and Japan produce more innovative students, but they certainly cast a shadow over this romantic, goofball justification of U.S. underperformance, which we’ve seen from multiple sources including (of course) Diane Ravitch and Alfie Kohn.

Well, now there’s more. And the news is still bad for the low-score apologists.

OECD just released the results of a 2012 assessment designed to measure students’ creative problem-solving skills, devoid of curricular knowledge and conventional academic skills.

Two findings are important.[1] First, there turns out to be a strong, positive correlation between creative problem-solving performance and straightforward, traditional, familiar (if often bleak) math, science, and reading scores.[2] Rather than a tradeoff, subject scores seem to buttress problem-solving skills—or at least to originate from the same source, sort of like twins.

Second, two of the countries with the best creative problem solvers in the world are South Korea and Japan—the same two countries that ranked first and fourth on Bloomberg’s innovation index, albeit nations that, perversely, are often criticized for robbing their students of the very thing at which they now appear to be the best.

Moreover, not only do South Korea and Japan have super-high scores on the problem-solving assessment (second and third in the world, respectively), but they also exceeded expectations more than any other countries.  (The correlation noted above means that OECD can use core-subject scores to predict problem-solving performance. When a country’s problem-solving scores are better than that prediction, that country has exceeded OECD’s expectation for it.) Turns out that just nine of forty-five participating countries pulled off that feat—and South Korea and Japan topped the list.

Observe that the U.S. appears on the list a mere tick below Japan; but before the drums and bugles are rolled out, consider that this isn’t necessarily a good thing. According to the OECD, strong relative performance likely bodes well for countries with high core-subject scores—countries like South Korea and Japan. It might imply that these places “provide learning opportunities that prepare students particularly well for handling complex, real-life problems in contexts that they do not usually encounter at school.” But for countries with low scores in the core academic subjects, OECD says strong relative performance might indicate that their schools are producing students who score below their potential in math, science, and reading. In other words, these schools may be doing a poor job of developing the human capital that walks into their classrooms.

America’s subject-matter scores are technically average (i.e., they’re near the OECD mean), so one might say the lessons are mixed. However, considering our GDP and our ambitions in the world, such scores must be termed low, not average. (Talk about expectations!) So if the latest PISA data offer any solace to the U.S., it lies in the ability of our fifteen-year-olds to do well despite our education system, not because of it.

If there’s true good news in the data, it belongs to countries like South Korea and Japan, which have again demonstrated that there’s no tradeoff between test scores and innovation. Defenders of low scores are just going to have to find another excuse.

Great news: Kansas is cool again! The Sunflower State’s House and Senate have emerged from a cyclone of negotiations with a school-finance bill that increases aid to poor school districts, reduces teacher-protection measures, creates a tax-credit scholarship program, and does not ban the Common Core (or counting to 100 or reading)! Phew. That was a close one, Kansas.

The U.S. House education committee passed two bipartisan bills on Tuesday. The first would reauthorize the Institute for Education Sciences. The second is a charter-school measure meant to foster more high-quality schools and encourage them to do better by English-language learners and special-needs students. Both are worthy measures, and even getting them out of committee feels like cause for applause in today’s political climate. But, of course, many hurdles lie ahead.

Officials in Washington, D.C., have issued a proposal for the first comprehensive overhaul of the district’s school boundaries in four decades. The city unveiled three policy proposals for how D.C. might assign students to its public schools. The least drastic proposal would continue to assign families a neighborhood school while giving some charter schools feeder rights into DCPS middle and high schools. The most drastic proposal would base admissions largely on the results of a lottery, with considerations for socio-economic balance, eliminating the “right” to a neighborhood school. The third is a middle-ground option, which would maintain neighborhood elementary schools but create a lottery system for middle and high schools. It’s hard not to notice echoes of “controlled choice” in a few of these proposals; play back our lively debate on this topic from last month for more background.

In the latest round of the voucher war between state of Louisiana and the DOJ, Judge Ivan Lemelle ruled that the Bayou State needed to provide the DOJ with a list of all of its voucher applicants and recipients, leading the DOJ to claim victory. But before the feds break out the celebratory fruit basket, recall that the DOJ had originally demanded the authority to certify participating private schools and review and potentially deny voucher awards—a clear attempt to wrest control of the choice program. Importantly, Judge Lemelle did not provide the feds with this power. Pass that fruit basket over to Bobby Jindal.

Mike and Michelle discuss the “opt-out outrage,” good news from Kansas, and hope for the quagmire that is the United States Congress. Amber has the goods on exactly how generous public pension plans are.

Amber's Research Minute

Not So Modest: Pension Benefits for Full-Career State Government Employees by Andrew G. Biggs, (Washington, D.C.: American Enterprise Institute, March 2014).

Just how generous are public pension plans? In this AEI report, Andrew Biggs tabulates the benefits—including pension and Social Security benefits, but not including health care benefits—that an average, full-career, state employee who retired in 2011 or 2012 now receives and compares the total with the income of full-time, full-year employees in his state. (Bear in mind that twenty-two states include teachers in their state retirement systems, while twenty-seven have separate systems for them.) In the average case, a retired state employee enjoys combined pension/Social Security income greater than the income of 72 percent of full-time employees working in his/her state. At the less generous end of this spectrum we find Maine, where benefits to full-career government employees (including teachers) exceed the earnings of 31 percent of full-time workers. At the high end is Oregon, where state retirees (including teachers) exceed the earnings of 90 percent of full-time workers in the Beaver State. (You read that right.) Other exceptionally generous states include West Virginia, California, and Nevada, all of which pay average full-career state retirees benefits that exceed 87–89 percent of the wages earned by full-time workers in those jurisdictions. Biggs also examines replacement rates, which measure retirement income as a percentage of pre-retirement earnings. Most financial advisors recommend a replacement rate of 70 percent, meaning that one’s retirement benefits (including Social Security) should equal 70 percent of one’s pre-retirement salary. Well, Biggs finds that the replacement rate paid to an average full-career state employee is 87 percent of final earnings. The lowest replacement rate is 54 percent in Mississippi, but three states (Oregon, California, and Texas) pay total retirement benefits that (with the addition of Social Security) equal or exceed final earnings. The upshot: most Baby Boomers who spent a lifetime in government service can look forward to a very comfortable retirement; let the generational jealousy commence.

SOURCE: Andrew G. Biggs, Not So Modest: Pension Benefits for Full-Career State Government Employees (Washington, D.C.: American Enterprise Institute, March 2014).

This edited volume, courtesy of University of Pennsylvania education professor Laura Perna, addresses the widening gaps between the education qualifications of the population and the demands of the job market. Since a different analyst wrote each chapter, we are presented with a smorgasbord of data and recommendations. But readers should at least seek out Nancy Hoffman’s excellent chapter on career and technical education. She shows how our country’s large number of high-school drop outs and paucity of associate-degree holders has resulted in an economy with a surplus of careers for which nobody is qualified, while many ill-educated workers vie for relatively few low-skilled, low-wage jobs. Hoffman urges our school system to provide students with education and training towards a specific calling. This would keep kids in school and on track for real jobs. To achieve this, she indicates that we need—among other things—better communication among high schools, employers and community colleges as to the skills these students will need to succeed in the workplace. From this neck of the woods, it is evident that the “college-for-everybody” push has led many well-meaning (and/or politically correct) Americans to grow squeamish about recommending “career” education. (For recent examples, just peruse the reactions to Mike’s recent Slate article questioning college for all.) But quality career and technical education ought to be an option for all schoolchildren, not just ones from less privileged backgrounds. Maybe it’s time to think about what’s good for young people—and for the nation’s economy.

SOURCE: Laura W. Perna, ed., Preparing Today's Students for Tomorrow's Jobs in Metropolitan America (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013).

Why do many high-achieving students struggle to sustain their academic performance over time? Eric Parsons, an economist at the University of Missouri, takes a crack at finding the answer—and unearths a paradox. In this study, he follows a single cohort of high-performing students in Missouri from grade 3 through grade 9 to see which school factors influence their academic success. Initial high flyers are defined as those who score in the top 10 percent of their grade cohort for grade 3 or grade 4 and do not score outside of the top 20 percent for the other year. Then he further sorts the initial high flyers into two groups: “soaring” and “falling,” based on their scores on grade 7 and 8 math exams. “Soaring” means a student scores in the top 10 percent on either grade 7 or 8 exams and doesn’t fall outside the top 20 percent in either grade. “Falling” means she doesn’t meet that criteria. There were five key findings: First, nearly two-fifths of the initial high flyers lost their high-flyer status by the end of the study. (This sounds familiar.) Second, both soaring and falling high flyers begin their school careers in high-achieving schools, but by the end of the study, many falling high flyers are no longer attending above-average schools—and some are attending schools that produce below-average growth. Third, schools doing well with their low performers also appear to do well with their high performers. Specifically, moving to a school that does a quarter of a standard deviation better with low performers increases the probability that a high flyer maintains her status by nearly 9 percentage points. Fourth, high performers who attend lower-performing schools are more likely to take Algebra I later, relative to their peers who attend higher-performing schools. Fifth—and surprisingly—as both the number and share of high flyers increase within a school, high flyers are less likely to maintain their high flying status—this after controlling for overall school quality and school achievement. Does this means that the competition for resources is not between the haves and have-nots but among the most able? Could it be that schools with many high flyers are less likely to notice if some of them slip through the cracks, especially if they are still firmly above average? We can’t know for sure. There is a lot to unpack here—some of which does not jibe with previous research.

Eric Parsons, “The Icarus Syndrome: Why Do Some High Flyers Soar While Others Fall?” Working Paper (Columbia, MO: Economic and Policy Analysis Research Center, Department of Economics at the University of Missouri–Columbia, July 2013).