The Education Gadfly Weekly

The more things change, the more they stay the same—at least for seventeen-year-old achievement. According to the latest Long-Term Trend (LTT) NAEP report (released today), scores for youngsters in this age group have scarcely budged since the test was first administered in the 1970s. (Recall that the LTT report differs from the “main NAEP”: The former, given every four years, utilizes a similar battery of questions to test reading and math so that results are comparable longitudinally; the latter determines proficiency across a host of subjects, employing periodically updated frameworks and exams, hence with little potential for long-term tracking.) But there’s growth among younger pupils: Average scores for nine and thirteen year olds rose since the 1970s in both reading and math, sometimes substantially—from an eight-point gain (on a 500-point scale) for thirteen-year-old reading scores to a whopping twenty-five point gain for nine-year-old math scores. And most race- and gender-based achievement gaps narrowed—in some cases dramatically. The white-black reading gap at age nine, for example, decreased by twenty-one points; the seventeen-year-old white-Hispanic math gap shrank by thirteen points; and the female-male nine-year-old reading gap lowered by seven points. While some satisfaction should be taken from these gains by minority students (and by boys in reading and girls in math), the stunted achievement at age seventeen is more than worrisome. Will the Common Core alter this very long-term trend? The next LTT administration is slated for 2015–16.

SOURCE: National Center for Education Statistics, The Nation’s Report Card: Trends in Academic Progress 2012 (Washington, D.C.: Institute of Education Sciences, June 2013).

The missed opportunity in the education of gifted students runs up and down the system, including into and beyond the college gate. Last December, Caroline Hoxby and Christopher Avery showed that there are far more high-achieving, low-income students than previously thought—but that these young people, unaware of their options, often do not even apply to selective colleges. Now, Hoxby and Sarah Turner report on a well-crafted intervention aimed at closing the information gap. It’s called the Expanding College Opportunities (ECO) Project. After sending and emailing customized informational packets (which consisted of college-specific information and application fee waivers, alongside guidance on how to apply to selective colleges, on the net cost of college, and on colleges’ varying graduation rates—all at $6 a pop) to high-achieving seniors (10,000 of them in 2010–11, with a control group of 2,500, and 15,000 in 2011–12, with a control group of 3,000), the authors saw positive results: Compared to the control group, recipient students were 20 percent more likely to apply to public and private schools with similarly high-achieving students. And in this Hamilton Project paper, the authors outline ways to bring this initiative to scale: First, in order to scale up the number of students reached, the ECO project will need to team up with credible, established institutions, such as the College Board and ACT. Second, because the Census recently stopped gathering data on incomes, housing values, occupations, and adults’ education, the authors propose that the federal government allow them access to other sources of this data—via FAFSA, for instance, or Title IV programs. Third, the authors propose to apply similar interventions to different subgroups of students, such as those earlier in the high-school sequence, guiding them on AP classes or subject-specific achievement tests. Lastly (and predictably), the authors call for more research.

SOURCE: Caroline M. Hoxby and Sarah Turner, “Informing Students about Their College Options: A Proposal for Broadening the Expanding College Opportunities Project,” Hamilton Project Discussion Paper 2013-03 (Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution, June 2013).

With Mike beaching it in an undisclosed location, Dara and Daniela take on some big topics: If affirmative action were to end, how could colleges maintain diversity? Do teachers need convincing to use technology? All things considered, is college worth it? Amber charts a course to charter quality.

Amber's Research Minute

“National Charter School Study 2013,” by Center for Research on Education Outcomes (Stanford, CA: Center for Research on Education Outcomes, June 2013).

In 2009, CREDO released an expansive study of charters that made big waves. It showed that, among the sixteen states studied, there was wide variation in charter quality: Lots of charters were doing well, but even more were underperforming their local district schools. Ever since, charter antagonists have gleefully cited this report to make all types of unflattering claims about chartering.

They should be less buoyant this week.

Four years after the first study’s release, CREDO is out with an update. It includes all of the previous participating states and a slate of new ones. In total, the states covered by the new report educate more than 95 percent of charter students nationwide.

This week has brought lots of articles about the study. But most miss some key findings—both in terms of the sector’s basic descriptive statistics and the quality of its schools.

I encourage you to read the full report, not just the executive summary, because some of the most significant findings and lessons evaporated in the shortening process.

Here are my big takeaways in no particular order:

• Contrary to public perception, only 56 percent of charter students live in urban areas; the rest are in suburbia, rural areas, and small towns.
• More than half of the charter kids studied live in poverty—higher than the district school rate. A growing number of Hispanic and low-income families are choosing charters.
• Among the sixteen initial states, charters have improved significantly in both reading and math. They now outperform traditional public school (TPS) peers in reading (about eight days more of learning per year) and are on par in math. (Figure 22 nicely shows these improvements.)
• The performance of new charters lags that of longer-standing charters.
• Looking at all twenty-seven states, the average charter student starts further behind academically than his TPS peers.
• Importantly, charters are producing large academic gains for the most historically disadvantaged students, notably low-income Hispanic and African American students and English language learners.
• Enrollment among these groups is growing; in other words, the groups of students that most benefit from charters are increasingly finding their ways into charters.
• However, there continues to be wide variation in performance within the national charter sector. Some schools outperform peer district schools, some do about the same, and some lag behind. But these proportions have been trending, since 2009, in the right direction for the charter sector.
• One continuing disappointment: CMO-run schools aren’t doing as well as they should. We’re all aware of the great CMOs, but too many states have allowed middling or poor charters to replicate, causing overall CMO performance to lag.
• Perhaps most striking is the enormous variation in charter performance from state to state. Some state charter sectors are helping their kids learn dozens of extra days worth of material annually. The best results are now found in D.C., Louisiana, Massachusetts, Michigan, New Jersey, New York, Rhode Island, and Tennessee. (By contrast, the performance of Nevada’s charters is shameful.)
• I suspect it’s no coincidence that the states with great charter performance have independent authorizers (no more district authorizing!).
• The report compares the additional learning kids get from their states’ charters to their respective states’ NAEP scores. Two major findings jump out: In Massachusetts and New Jersey—states with high statewide NAEP scores—the charter sectors still best their TPS counterparts.
• In D.C., where NAEP scores are woeful, the charter sector is offering kids remarkably higher-performing options.
• Per Figure 42, the longer kids stay in charters, the more they learn compared to TPS peers.
• Lastly, the report offers five scenarios for closing low-performing charters. The upshot is clear: Get serious about shuttering failing charters, and the sector’s overall performance skyrockets. (It would have been nice if they had also shown the sector-wide influence of various scenarios for growing the best charters.)

All in all, the results are encouraging for charter supporters. It appears that the systemic elements of chartering are working as many predicted. In other words, chartering is a continuous improvement process for a system of schools: When you build a strategy around closing bad schools while enabling great ones to grow and promising new ones to start, you shift the quality distribution to the right year after year.

This, of course, requires both sound policies and smart practices, especially among authorizers. But if we keep at this with fidelity, we should see the charter sector continually improving. That means more great seats for kids in need.

This piece was updated on June 27, 2013, for the Education Gadfly Weekly.

A week catching up on education challenges and reforms in England made clear that the U.S. and its “mother country” continue to track—and copy and study and refine—each other’s programs and policies, much as they have done at least since Margaret Thatcher’s and Ronald Reagan’s education teams realized how much they had in common. But the differences remain profound, too.

Let’s start with nine notable similarities.

1. Both nations are engaged in major pushes to overhaul their standards, assessment, and accountability systems. Mediocre PISA and TIMSS results plus persistent domestic achievement gaps have caught the eyes of policymakers and education leaders on both sides of the pond, as it’s become clear that yesterday’s so-so expectations just aren’t good enough and that today’s testing-and-accountability regimes do not produce nearly enough world-class, college-ready graduates. Nor have they significantly reduced the most troubling performance gaps. Changes are afoot.

2. With standards-raising comes keen anxiety about implementation on the ground (will teachers, for example, be adequately prepared?) and about public outcry when more youngsters (and schools) are found wanting.

3. Whereas yesterday’s incentives caused programs and practitioners to focus on the “bubble kids” who could be nudged over the only achievement bar that mattered to a school’s rating, tomorrow must employ some sort of value-added calculus that causes every child’s progress (or lack thereof) to count, including both those far below the bar and those who easily cleared it.

4. While English and math remain at the core of the accountability system (joined, somewhat half-heartedly, by science), leaders in both countries also seek to round out children’s education with other subjects, including career-enhancing skills.

5.  Much alternative-certifying of educators is underway, along with deregulation of entry into both the classroom and the principal’s office. England’s version of Teach for America (called “Teach First”) is going gangbusters (with government funding). Much like California’s High Tech High, networks of charter-style schools can grow their own teachers (and decide how much to pay them). And it’s no longer necessary even to be an educator to be eligible to lead a school.

6. Despite all that, it’s as hard in England to shed incompetent school staffers as in the U.S. Besides contracts and tenure-like arrangements, European Union member countries face extra rules meant to enhance job security. These apply even in “school-takeover” situations where the entity that’s taking over—and keen to transform the school’s culture, expectations, practices, etc.—must hang onto the old staff team. (This can be gotten ‘round by abolishing positions, but I was told that the more common—and costly—remedy is to buy out contracts.)

7. Though England is voucher-averse, its charter-like sector is burgeoning, with more than half of all secondary schools now functioning as “academies” (we would say “conversion charters”), having successfully petitioned Whitehall to extricate them from district control. Many academies, including most of the strongest, are now run by “chains”—the British version of CMO’s—which are also being asked to turn around low-performing schools. There’s also a promising, if slower-growing, sector known as “free schools,” akin to start-up charters. (The government provides them with facilities, however!)

8. A version of “weighted student funding” (known there as the “pupil premium”) is underway, with extra funds going to schools serving needy kids. (Also familiar, however, were England’s endless struggles over basic funding formulae, exacerbated by a very tight overall budget situation.)

9. Though a Labour Party victory in the next election would definitely lead to policy tweaks, all the major political parties (of which England has three) generally support the reform thrusts described above, as has pretty much been the case on both sides of the Atlantic since the eighties. The major changes underway today owe as much to Labourites, such as Michael Barber and Andrew Adonis, as to Tories, like Michael Gove and Ken Baker.

But big differences also persist between English and U.S. reforms and structures. Eight of these caught my eye.

1. As is widely known, England has a highly centralized national education system, more like one of our states than like Uncle Sam. Decisions made in London apply everywhere—which is not to say they’re implemented with equal fervor everywhere. (What’s “federal” is that Scotland has long run its own education system and does so very differently from England—and Wales and Northern Ireland now do likewise.)

2. Centralization is combined with far greater school-level control of key decisions in England, especially regarding personnel. Even in the “state sector,” every principal is selected by his school’s “board of governors” and then has major say over who will teach in his school. In the academy and free-school sectors, he can also disregard conventional certification requirements and pay scales. From a U.S. perspective, this kind of authority, combined with the boom in academy-style autonomy, amounts to altered governance, not just exceptions and exemptions. (But it has proven more challenging at the primary level, where England has some 11,000 schools enrolling fewer than 250 pupils each, without the organizational or financial wherewithal to succeed as free-standing organizations—though the government is devising schemes for getting them to share services and pool resources.)

3. Their unions are weaker. I don’t know whether that’s a cause or a product of building-level autonomy or (as is often said) a correlate of having multiple teacher unions, sometimes within the same schools, but it’s a fact that makes other reforms somewhat easier. Yes, the unions will gain influence if Labour prevails next time—but they’re already less than thrilled with some policy stances that the party has espoused in education. Which doesn’t mean they can alter those stances.

4. Though there’s much fussing and quarreling about the content of England’s “national curriculum,” and though some schools pointedly eschew it (nonetheless, their students ordinarily take the same exams), few doubt that there is and will continue to be a national curriculum in England. National exams, too, are more or less uniform across the land. (Recall that, in education matters, England is more akin to a big state.)

5. So long as the present government is in office, the national curriculum will be content-heavy. It’s no secret that Michael Gove, England's secretary of state for education, is an E.D. Hirsch and Core Knowledge fan (but so are some leading Labourites). They’re more apt to add skills to a knowledge base than to start with skills and frost with content.

6. The gaps that worry them most are somewhat different from ours. As one policy advisor observed, “What race is to America, social class is to Britain.” Their lowest-achieving demographic group is working-class white boys. (Their highest achievers, however, are Asian immigrants and the children thereof, leading to the quip that “the fastest way to boost achievement in England is to encourage Chinese immigration.”) And having produced remarkable gains over the past decade in the big inner cities (notably including London), attention is shifting to “rural and coastal” deprivation.

7. As U.S. education leaders (notably Arne Duncan) try to focus attention and energy on “the bottom five percent” of schools (a.k.a. “dropout factories”), English reformers talk a lot about schools whose problem is that they’re “only satisfactory” and about getting the country from “60 percent” to “85 percent.”

8. Finally—and many would say most importantly—Her Majesty’s inspectors (based in a free-standing agency) constantly visit schools, appraising their performance on multiple indicators (not just test scores), giving them detailed feedback on what they need to do differently, and making all of that public. It’s a time-tested, external-audit arrangement with boots on the ground all over the land. This means that policy, money, and regulation aren’t the only engines of reform on their side of the sea.

An Atlantic article by sociology professor Richard Greenwald examines Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s education legacy, concluding that while the Big Apple’s education sector has certainly seen progress (graduation rates have increased 39 percent since 2005, for example, and Bloomberg has made a concerted effort to rebuild the decrepit physical infrastructure), there have also been setbacks (e.g., problems with test administration). Instead, the author suggests that Bloomberg claim the mantle of “recycling mayor”—or perhaps “alternative-transportation mayor” instead.

A survey of 200 Idaho teachers found that most don’t need convincing to bring educational technology into the classroom—they just need training. Eighty-four percent said the pros of ed tech outweighed the cons and that they are currently using or planning to use ed tech in their classrooms. However, 80 percent either didn’t know of social-media technologies like Skype and Twitter or employ them rarely or never—and only 21 percent of those surveyed employ games, simulations, or virtual laboratories in their classrooms on a monthly basis.

After accepting the New York City teacher union’s endorsement, mayoral candidate Bill Thompson is carefully constructing his stance on education policy. Due in part to the involvement of his campaign chairwoman, State Board of Regents chancellor Merryl Tisch, he has fostered a relationship with charter advocates and Randi Weingarten. We’ll see how he handles this balancing act.

Chris Walters, a Virginia native and newly minted Massachusetts Institute of Technology PhD, has caused a stir in Boston with his thesis project: Building on prior MIT studies, he found that low-income students who performed poorly in the city’s traditional public schools did much better after enrolling in charter schools—and that their progress was greater than that of fellow charter students. Could this mean that there’s no charter creaming in the home of the Boston cream pie?

The more things change, the more they stay the same—at least for seventeen-year-old achievement. According to the latest Long-Term Trend (LTT) NAEP report (released today), scores for youngsters in this age group have scarcely budged since the test was first administered in the 1970s. (Recall that the LTT report differs from the “main NAEP”: The former, given every four years, utilizes a similar battery of questions to test reading and math so that results are comparable longitudinally; the latter determines proficiency across a host of subjects, employing periodically updated frameworks and exams, hence with little potential for long-term tracking.) But there’s growth among younger pupils: Average scores for nine and thirteen year olds rose since the 1970s in both reading and math, sometimes substantially—from an eight-point gain (on a 500-point scale) for thirteen-year-old reading scores to a whopping twenty-five point gain for nine-year-old math scores. And most race- and gender-based achievement gaps narrowed—in some cases dramatically. The white-black reading gap at age nine, for example, decreased by twenty-one points; the seventeen-year-old white-Hispanic math gap shrank by thirteen points; and the female-male nine-year-old reading gap lowered by seven points. While some satisfaction should be taken from these gains by minority students (and by boys in reading and girls in math), the stunted achievement at age seventeen is more than worrisome. Will the Common Core alter this very long-term trend? The next LTT administration is slated for 2015–16.

SOURCE: National Center for Education Statistics, The Nation’s Report Card: Trends in Academic Progress 2012 (Washington, D.C.: Institute of Education Sciences, June 2013).

The missed opportunity in the education of gifted students runs up and down the system, including into and beyond the college gate. Last December, Caroline Hoxby and Christopher Avery showed that there are far more high-achieving, low-income students than previously thought—but that these young people, unaware of their options, often do not even apply to selective colleges. Now, Hoxby and Sarah Turner report on a well-crafted intervention aimed at closing the information gap. It’s called the Expanding College Opportunities (ECO) Project. After sending and emailing customized informational packets (which consisted of college-specific information and application fee waivers, alongside guidance on how to apply to selective colleges, on the net cost of college, and on colleges’ varying graduation rates—all at $6 a pop) to high-achieving seniors (10,000 of them in 2010–11, with a control group of 2,500, and 15,000 in 2011–12, with a control group of 3,000), the authors saw positive results: Compared to the control group, recipient students were 20 percent more likely to apply to public and private schools with similarly high-achieving students. And in this Hamilton Project paper, the authors outline ways to bring this initiative to scale: First, in order to scale up the number of students reached, the ECO project will need to team up with credible, established institutions, such as the College Board and ACT. Second, because the Census recently stopped gathering data on incomes, housing values, occupations, and adults’ education, the authors propose that the federal government allow them access to other sources of this data—via FAFSA, for instance, or Title IV programs. Third, the authors propose to apply similar interventions to different subgroups of students, such as those earlier in the high-school sequence, guiding them on AP classes or subject-specific achievement tests. Lastly (and predictably), the authors call for more research.

SOURCE: Caroline M. Hoxby and Sarah Turner, “Informing Students about Their College Options: A Proposal for Broadening the Expanding College Opportunities Project,” Hamilton Project Discussion Paper 2013-03 (Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution, June 2013).