The Education Gadfly Weekly

Vi-Nhuan Le, RAND Corporation
2002

Vi-Nhuan Le is the author of this 200-page RAND study on behalf of the "Bridge Project" of the Stanford Institute for Higher Education Research. The core question is how well do the high school tests (of English and math) required by these five states line up with tests of the same subjects administered to first-year college students (for admissions and/or course placement, particularly decisions about whether a student needs remediation or is ready for college-level work). The states under review are California, Georgia, Maryland, Oregon and Texas, each of which gets a substantial case study here. The "alignment" being examined, however, has mostly to do with the tests' coverage or content, not their "performance standards." Do high school math achievement tests, for example, probe the same kinds of math and contain the same kinds of exercises as tests administered for college entry or placement? The less-than-electrifying conclusions are apt to hold greater interest for testing experts than education policy watchers, and in several cases the definition of "alignment" strikes me as too relativistic: "In math, there are no instances of misalignments, as discrepancies among assessments reflect variations in test use." In other words, the tests differ because they're used for different purpose but (in the author's conceptual framework) that doesn't mean they're mis-aligned. Much the same conclusion is reached in English, except for "one notable misalignment" when it comes to "the scoring criteria of the writing measures." Perhaps more interesting, "most state achievement tests cannot inform colleges admissions or broad course placement decisions...because they contain, on average, fewer problem-solving, inference, or advanced content items than do college admissions and college placement tests." To my eye, this is a needlessly complacent and passive view of test alignment at a time when many believe that the entire education system would be better served if these various tests were prodded to incorporate both the same content and the same performance standards. If you'd like to see for yourself, you can download a PDF version or order a hard copy for $10 at www.rand.org/publications/MR/MR1530.0/.

Devotees of professional development for teachers will be interested in this thoughtful paper by Harvard education professor Richard F. Elmore, published by the Albert Shanker Institute. In 40 pages, he contends that more and better professional development is an "imperative." He explains (in fairly general terms) how to improve today's standard-issue professional development and what conditions must obtain in a school for it to have the desired effect on teacher practice and student performance. He concludes that there's generally enough professional-development money in the education system but that much is being mis-spent. He also points to some of the political and organizational barriers in the way of improving this situation, having mostly to do with dicey changes in roles, responsibilities and power relationships within schools. Insightful and welcome, if somewhat abstruse. You can request a free copy by sending an e-mail to [email protected].

Charter Schools Institute, State University of New York
March 2002

As this week's Gadfly editorial makes plain, charter schools are under assault nationwide. But supporters of choice in education can take some comfort in the findings of a recent report from the Charter Schools Institute at the State University of New York. In reviewing the performance of New York's 32 charter schools, the Institute concluded that they are largely achieving the goals established for them in the state's 1998 Charter Schools Act. Parents are clamoring to send their kids to charters in New York, where 70 percent of the schools have waiting lists. Most of the charters are located in high need areas and serve students near the bottom of the academic barrel, many of whom make rapid progress thanks to the rigorous standards, quality teaching, innovative practices and personal attention they receive in these new schools. Officials in school districts that have lost students to charters say they're fighting to win them back by copying charters' appealing features and practices. What accounts for such success? Careful quality control. The SUNY Trustees, who leave the day-to-day management and support of charters to the Institute (along with New York's Board of Regents and local school boards), closely scrutinize charter applicants to make sure they're focused laser-like on the bottom line: student achievement. Although it is more self-congratulatory and descriptive than rigorous, this report-which includes a short profile of each of the 22 operating charter schools approved by the SUNY Trustees-is worth a look at http://www.newyorkcharters.org/resource/newchoice_002.html. You can also order a copy by calling the Charter Schools Institute at 518-433-8277.

Lynn Cornett and Gale Gaines, Southern Regional Education Board
2002

Incentive policies can make a difference when it comes to improving teacher quality, argues Lynn Cornett, senior vice president, and Gale Gaines, director of legislative services, at the Southern Regional Education Board (SREB). Some incentives work better than others, however, and Cornett and Gaines argue for using past experience to design new efforts to attract and retain good teachers. The idea of using incentives-including performance or merit pay, scholarships, distinguished educator awards and the like-to attract new teachers or teachers of high-demand subjects or teachers for tough school situations goes back to at least the 1980s. One popular approach targeted incentives directly at teachers who were deemed to be high performers or those in subjects facing acute supply problems. Performance pay faced resistance from teacher unions, however, and by the late 1990s was no longer seen as a viable option for most states. This is not surprising, considering surveys that show up to 80 percent of teachers confident that they're among the top 20 percent performers. According to Cornett and Gaines, this history offers valuable lessons for today's policymakers as they search for ways to boost teacher quality and recruit skilled practitioners. Two messages are especially clear: 1) changing the structure of teacher work and teacher pay is almost impossible; and 2) teachers need to be involved in the development of any program that seeks to tie financial rewards to individual performance. Today, more states are turning to "whole-school incentive programs" that reward a school's entire staff for meeting school-wide performance criteria or making gains toward established targets. Showing improvement on state proficiency tests is one key measure of a school's award eligibility but not the only factor. Most states also look at a mixture of graduation rates, drop-out rates, attendance, postsecondary readiness and individual school targets. "Quality Teachers" reports that whole-school incentive programs are more apt to enjoy the support of teachers. Will this assure that every child in America has an excellent teacher? "No," note Cornett and Gaines, but they believe it's one promising strategy on the teacher quality front. To learn more, check out the report or order a copy at http://www.sreb.org/main/HigherEd/leadership/Quality_Teachers.asp.

National Education Association
2002

The National Education Association's research department has put out this joint edition of two annual data sources, one ranking the states on a wide variety of quantitative education indicators in 2001, the other estimating some of the same statistics for states and the nation in 2002. There's tons of data here, much of it fairly accessible and much of it credible. Readers may not realize, for example, that average per-pupil public school spending has risen to an estimated $7425 in the current school year (not counting capital costs, interest payments, etc.) But some of the NEA's blind spots and policy agendas show up, too. There is nary a mention of charter schools, for example, and teacher pay figures do not include fringe benefits. If you'd like your very own copy, visit http://www.nea.org/nr/nr020408.html.

Carolyn Minter Hoxby, National Bureau of Economic Research
April 2002

The creative and prolific Harvard economist, Carolyn Minter Hoxby, authored this working paper for the National Bureau of Economic Research. Her conclusion is that "The costs of accountability programs are...tiny...relative to the cost of other education programs." She estimates the costliest of state testing programs at about one-quarter of one percent of per pupil spending. It's such a bargain, she says, that "even if the benefits of accountability are small, its benefit-to-cost ratio is likely to be extremely high relative to that of other programs." This is highly relevant at a time when state officials are complaining that their education budgets will be broken by the costs of complying with the testing requirements of the new federal No Child Left Behind act. Hoxby says, in effect, that that's a red herring, that "the main barrier to good [testing] programs is not expense but the support and interest of education experts, policy-makers and the public." Note, though, that she is dealing here with the costs of testing itself, not the rewards and interventions that would be attached to a fully wrought "accountability" system. You can download this 25-pager from www.nber.org/papers/w8855. (Depending on your relationship with the N.B.E.R., you may have to pay for it.)

I'm not prone to paranoia but lately I see an awful lot of folks bent on stopping the charter movement dead in its tracks and I also see them making much headway. I don't think it exaggerates to say that a war is being waged against charter schools. As with many wars, however, both sides have something to answer for. Those who want this decade-old education reform strategy to have a longer opportunity to show what it can accomplish need to recognize that their own failings aren't making its defense any easier.

Attacks are coming from many directions. State officials lead some of them (e.g. Ohio, Indiana, New Jersey, Michigan). Local school systems spearhead others (e.g. California, Pennsylvania, Massachusetts). Teacher unions, having failed in legislative chambers to arrest the charter movement, are turning to the courtroom (in Ohio, Pennsylvania). Governors who claim to be pro-charter (e.g. Georgia's Barnes, Texas's Perry) are going along with newly restrictive legislation. Blue-ribbon panels convened to solve charter problems end up compounding them.

The specifics take many forms and sometimes those behind them are actually trying to help. For instance, Ohio auditor Jim Petro thought he was improving the Buckeye State's charter program with his scathing report on the Ohio Department of Education's sloppy stewardship of that program. But Ohio's teacher unions had blood in their eyes when they brought ever-widening lawsuits against the program itself. The Georgia legislature (and Governor Barnes) strengthened that state's limp charter law in certain respects but sorely weakened it in others. Indiana's state superintendent may simply have received bad legal advice when she decided not to give her state's new charters any money during their first semester. And Texas and New Jersey claimed to be correcting "abuses" when they imposed reams of red tape on their states' relatively freewheeling charter programs.

But one only needs to be a little bit paranoid to see big trouble brewing for charters, whether the troublemakers mean them well or ill.

What accounts for this changing climate? Three problems seem fundamental.

First, much as it also resists standards-based accountability, our deeply conservative public education system is fighting back against this disruptive innovation, one that shifts power, changes control of resources, introduces new forms of accountability, upsets longstanding practices, and brings new uncertainties. This does not have as much to do with charters in particular as with change in general.

Second, the "charter movement" is leaderless and rudderless, less an army than a motley array of individualistic schools, self-absorbed educators and parents, over-eager entrepreneurs, detached analysts and theorists, and advocacy groups that focus intently on their immediate issues but aren't good at helping the broader public understand what charter schools are and why they're a good idea, especially for poor kids. It's not unlike Afghanistan: plenty of warlords, rival parties and local chieftains but nothing akin to an effective national government.

Third, as presently constituted, the charter machinery simply isn't working very well in many places. Thus the widespread impulse to tinker and fiddle with it. The biggest issues aren't, as many suppose, weak academic achievement by the schools themselves. (In fact, careful research is finding in a growing number of states that charters add greater academic value to disadvantaged youngsters than conventional public schools do.) Rather, the core malfunctions are (a) too many feckless, inept authorizers (aka sponsors) that casually issue charters to groups unprepared to run successful schools, are sloppy about results-based accountability, too eager to revert to regulation as the antidote for charter ills, and clueless about what to require before renewing a school's contract; (b) a small but visible group of greedy charter operators more interested in making a few bucks at state expense than running good schools for needy kids; and (c) ill-conceived state laws that starve charters of needed resources while not freeing them from enough of the red tape that binds conventional schools.

The charter phenomenon in America is now a decade old and in many ways it's made remarkable strides: huge growth in schools, surging demand for them, widespread customer (and educator) satisfaction, much organizational innovation, signs of rebirth in local control and civil society, some swell specimens of successful schools, a number of interesting people and groups entering the field, and promising signs that charter-led competition is prompting overdue change in the traditional system. The essential concept-freedom in return for results-has seeped into the larger education debate and mainstream organizations (such as the Education Commission of the States) can now visualize entire school systems run on the charter model. We can actually see schools shutting down because they do a lousy job. We also find charter-like schools in England, Canada and Singapore and hear talk of them even in Japan. At the fast-changing intersection of charters and technology we see some tantalizing creations-e.g. "virtual charter schools"-that are so different from 1950's-style public education that nobody yet knows quite how to deal with them.

At another level, however, the charter movement is losing its edge. Problems such as those noted above are growing more prominent than the promise of the charter idea itself. Political leaders who were much taken with that early promise have ridden off into the sunset. Their successors tend to view charters as somebody's else's idea, to be more aware of malfunctions than successes, and to be skillfully manipulated by establishment interests that are now wide awake to the fact that charters aren't willingly going away and can be kept in check only by strong-arming politicians.

Last week's commission report in Michigan illustrated many of these dynamics. (You can find it at http://www.charterschools.msu.edu/cschools_rpt.html.) Because Michigan lawmakers were stalemated over a bunch of charter issues (especially lifting the "cap" on how many of these "public school academies" are permitted), the legislature called for a special panel "to conduct a complete and objective review of all aspects of public school academies in Michigan." Chaired by Michigan State University president Peter McPherson, the commission also included the state superintendent of schools (who has already distanced himself from its recommendations), several experts, a couple of charter people and the head of the Michigan Education Association. Like most such carefully balanced groups, it was destined to make compromises, and that's what it did, recommending a modest easing of the cap but also more red tape for charter schools and their sponsors (all in the name of "stronger accountability," of course). On the sticky but vital issue of finances, the commission simply punted.

If its recommendations are followed, Michigan will have more charter schools but they'll have less freedom to run themselves and will look a lot more like conventional public schools. The charter advocates on the panel acknowledge this but say it was the best deal they could strike.

With other states headed in the same direction, it's time to pause and ask: if the essence of the charter idea is slowly drained from the reality of charter schools, why bother creating more of them? Charter schools become a faux reform, a label affixed to an institution that has scant opportunity to do anything differently. This is as much a sham as claiming to be engaged in standards-based reform but doing so with crummy standards, shoddy tests and no real consequences.

As T.S. Eliot famously wrote in "The Hollow Men" we may begin to say of the charter phenomenon, "This is the way the world ends, not with a bang but a whimper."

Researchers believe that teenagers who feel "connected" at school are less likely to be violent or suicidal, to abuse drugs or to get pregnant. A major study released last week tried to identify features of schools where teenagers are likely to feel connected. Their conclusion: class size and teachers' experience and degrees have no bearing on school connectedness, but school size and what the analysts call "classroom management" do. In smaller schools, and those in whose classrooms students get along with each other, pay attention, and hand in assignments on time, teenagers report stronger feelings of connectedness. (Of course, this last variable may be picking up much more than the teacher's classroom management skills.) The study relied on data from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health, which includes written surveys filled out by 75,000 students.

In articles about the new research, some reporters alluded to studies that have linked school size to academic achievement, but that connection is not well understood or documented. A new study by two professors at Teachers College has found that many of New York City's small high schools teach "a diluted version of social studies that does not adequately prepare students for citizenship's demands." While the small high schools do have a more caring atmosphere, their handling of social studies has been hurt by a "less is more" curriculum philosophy, in which teachers focus on big themes that they deem relevant to minority students (e.g. slavery and civil rights) and skip important events in history like the American Revolution. New York Times reporter Anemona Hartocollis notes that the study comes at a time when many of the small schools are also fighting the state's requirement that they administer Regents exams in history and other subjects, arguing that these exams are too sweeping and fact-based.

"Classroom Management-but not Class Size or Teacher Experience-Linked to Lower Levels of Teen Alienation from School," Division of General Pediatrics and Adolescent Health, University of Minnesota, April 11, 2002 (press release)

"Connectedness Called Key to Student Behavior," by Michael Fletcher, The Washington Post, April 12, 2002

"Study Faults Small Schools on Social Studies," by Anemona Hartocollis, The New York Times, April 10, 2002

San Francisco made headlines last year when it announced that it would begin integrating some schools on the basis of income. This year, the school board in Cambridge, Massachusetts voted to do the same thing. Many experts are excited about this new strategy for diversifying schools, particularly since courts have begun to limit the use of race in student assignments. (Richard Kahlenberg's 2001 book All Together Now: Creating Middle Class Schools through Public School Choice offered a ringing defense of the idea, for instance.) But after learning that their children have been assigned to low-performing schools that will require cross-town busing, some parents in San Francisco are less thrilled with the plan. Hundreds of Asian American parents who would prefer that their children attend neighborhood schools protested at a school board meeting last week, and city and community leaders are backing the parents. For more see "School district diversity plan under microscope," by Joyce Nishioka, The San Francisco Examiner, April 10, 2002.

Devotees of professional development for teachers will be interested in this thoughtful paper by Harvard education professor Richard F. Elmore, published by the Albert Shanker Institute. In 40 pages, he contends that more and better professional development is an "imperative." He explains (in fairly general terms) how to improve today's standard-issue professional development and what conditions must obtain in a school for it to have the desired effect on teacher practice and student performance. He concludes that there's generally enough professional-development money in the education system but that much is being mis-spent. He also points to some of the political and organizational barriers in the way of improving this situation, having mostly to do with dicey changes in roles, responsibilities and power relationships within schools. Insightful and welcome, if somewhat abstruse. You can request a free copy by sending an e-mail to [email protected].

Carolyn Minter Hoxby, National Bureau of Economic Research
April 2002

The creative and prolific Harvard economist, Carolyn Minter Hoxby, authored this working paper for the National Bureau of Economic Research. Her conclusion is that "The costs of accountability programs are...tiny...relative to the cost of other education programs." She estimates the costliest of state testing programs at about one-quarter of one percent of per pupil spending. It's such a bargain, she says, that "even if the benefits of accountability are small, its benefit-to-cost ratio is likely to be extremely high relative to that of other programs." This is highly relevant at a time when state officials are complaining that their education budgets will be broken by the costs of complying with the testing requirements of the new federal No Child Left Behind act. Hoxby says, in effect, that that's a red herring, that "the main barrier to good [testing] programs is not expense but the support and interest of education experts, policy-makers and the public." Note, though, that she is dealing here with the costs of testing itself, not the rewards and interventions that would be attached to a fully wrought "accountability" system. You can download this 25-pager from www.nber.org/papers/w8855. (Depending on your relationship with the N.B.E.R., you may have to pay for it.)

Charter Schools Institute, State University of New York
March 2002

As this week's Gadfly editorial makes plain, charter schools are under assault nationwide. But supporters of choice in education can take some comfort in the findings of a recent report from the Charter Schools Institute at the State University of New York. In reviewing the performance of New York's 32 charter schools, the Institute concluded that they are largely achieving the goals established for them in the state's 1998 Charter Schools Act. Parents are clamoring to send their kids to charters in New York, where 70 percent of the schools have waiting lists. Most of the charters are located in high need areas and serve students near the bottom of the academic barrel, many of whom make rapid progress thanks to the rigorous standards, quality teaching, innovative practices and personal attention they receive in these new schools. Officials in school districts that have lost students to charters say they're fighting to win them back by copying charters' appealing features and practices. What accounts for such success? Careful quality control. The SUNY Trustees, who leave the day-to-day management and support of charters to the Institute (along with New York's Board of Regents and local school boards), closely scrutinize charter applicants to make sure they're focused laser-like on the bottom line: student achievement. Although it is more self-congratulatory and descriptive than rigorous, this report-which includes a short profile of each of the 22 operating charter schools approved by the SUNY Trustees-is worth a look at http://www.newyorkcharters.org/resource/newchoice_002.html. You can also order a copy by calling the Charter Schools Institute at 518-433-8277.

Lynn Cornett and Gale Gaines, Southern Regional Education Board
2002

Incentive policies can make a difference when it comes to improving teacher quality, argues Lynn Cornett, senior vice president, and Gale Gaines, director of legislative services, at the Southern Regional Education Board (SREB). Some incentives work better than others, however, and Cornett and Gaines argue for using past experience to design new efforts to attract and retain good teachers. The idea of using incentives-including performance or merit pay, scholarships, distinguished educator awards and the like-to attract new teachers or teachers of high-demand subjects or teachers for tough school situations goes back to at least the 1980s. One popular approach targeted incentives directly at teachers who were deemed to be high performers or those in subjects facing acute supply problems. Performance pay faced resistance from teacher unions, however, and by the late 1990s was no longer seen as a viable option for most states. This is not surprising, considering surveys that show up to 80 percent of teachers confident that they're among the top 20 percent performers. According to Cornett and Gaines, this history offers valuable lessons for today's policymakers as they search for ways to boost teacher quality and recruit skilled practitioners. Two messages are especially clear: 1) changing the structure of teacher work and teacher pay is almost impossible; and 2) teachers need to be involved in the development of any program that seeks to tie financial rewards to individual performance. Today, more states are turning to "whole-school incentive programs" that reward a school's entire staff for meeting school-wide performance criteria or making gains toward established targets. Showing improvement on state proficiency tests is one key measure of a school's award eligibility but not the only factor. Most states also look at a mixture of graduation rates, drop-out rates, attendance, postsecondary readiness and individual school targets. "Quality Teachers" reports that whole-school incentive programs are more apt to enjoy the support of teachers. Will this assure that every child in America has an excellent teacher? "No," note Cornett and Gaines, but they believe it's one promising strategy on the teacher quality front. To learn more, check out the report or order a copy at http://www.sreb.org/main/HigherEd/leadership/Quality_Teachers.asp.

National Education Association
2002

The National Education Association's research department has put out this joint edition of two annual data sources, one ranking the states on a wide variety of quantitative education indicators in 2001, the other estimating some of the same statistics for states and the nation in 2002. There's tons of data here, much of it fairly accessible and much of it credible. Readers may not realize, for example, that average per-pupil public school spending has risen to an estimated $7425 in the current school year (not counting capital costs, interest payments, etc.) But some of the NEA's blind spots and policy agendas show up, too. There is nary a mention of charter schools, for example, and teacher pay figures do not include fringe benefits. If you'd like your very own copy, visit http://www.nea.org/nr/nr020408.html.

Vi-Nhuan Le, RAND Corporation
2002

Vi-Nhuan Le is the author of this 200-page RAND study on behalf of the "Bridge Project" of the Stanford Institute for Higher Education Research. The core question is how well do the high school tests (of English and math) required by these five states line up with tests of the same subjects administered to first-year college students (for admissions and/or course placement, particularly decisions about whether a student needs remediation or is ready for college-level work). The states under review are California, Georgia, Maryland, Oregon and Texas, each of which gets a substantial case study here. The "alignment" being examined, however, has mostly to do with the tests' coverage or content, not their "performance standards." Do high school math achievement tests, for example, probe the same kinds of math and contain the same kinds of exercises as tests administered for college entry or placement? The less-than-electrifying conclusions are apt to hold greater interest for testing experts than education policy watchers, and in several cases the definition of "alignment" strikes me as too relativistic: "In math, there are no instances of misalignments, as discrepancies among assessments reflect variations in test use." In other words, the tests differ because they're used for different purpose but (in the author's conceptual framework) that doesn't mean they're mis-aligned. Much the same conclusion is reached in English, except for "one notable misalignment" when it comes to "the scoring criteria of the writing measures." Perhaps more interesting, "most state achievement tests cannot inform colleges admissions or broad course placement decisions...because they contain, on average, fewer problem-solving, inference, or advanced content items than do college admissions and college placement tests." To my eye, this is a needlessly complacent and passive view of test alignment at a time when many believe that the entire education system would be better served if these various tests were prodded to incorporate both the same content and the same performance standards. If you'd like to see for yourself, you can download a PDF version or order a hard copy for $10 at www.rand.org/publications/MR/MR1530.0/.