Did you know you can have every edition of Gadfly Bites sent directly to your Inbox? Subscribe by clicking here.
Last week, our friend Checker Finn published a dual review of House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy’s “Commitment to America” and our recently published AEI volume Sketching a New Conservative Education Agenda. Whereas he found the former “marginally constructive” and eminently vague, he was kind enough to deem our volume a “grand buffet” of ideas “covering a staggering array of issues.” He noted, however, that our contribution did not exactly amount to a concrete “prix fixe meal with a chef-determined menu.”
That’s quite right—and we consider that to be a feature, not a bug, of our Conservative Education Reform Network (CERN). We launched CERN a few years ago hoping to address a few persistent challenges that have confronted conservatives who are intent on improving American education.
First, while there has long been a lot of political and policy energy around issues like school choice and free speech on campus, there has unfortunately been too little emphasis placed on concrete concerns that confront families, communities, and educators. Second, while the rise of populism and the breakdown of the bipartisan education reform consensus provided an opening for policy entrepreneurship, we were concerned that policy currents might be less influenced by thoughtful principle than by the vicissitudes of personality politics. And third, we noted a rising cultural and political divide between the center- and hard-right that threatened to limit the odds of the development and pursuit of a constructive policy agenda.
Our Sketching a New Conservative Education Agenda series was and is intended to address these challenges. The exercise is, as Checker noted, truly a matter of sketching and not blueprinting. We chose to open the national platform of AEI to the now more than 600 members of the CERN community, stipulating only that the contribution must be principled, thoughtful, and constructive. We were pleased to see that, for Checker, the result was an “efflorescence of ideas, sometimes nebulous, often concrete,” and “periodically colliding with each other.”
We did not launch CERN as an effort to either directly set or push a particular conservative education policy agenda. Rather, our hope was that fostering a diverse array of ideas could illustrate the right’s potential to develop and deliver substantive and constructive reforms. After all, the downside of the left’s ownership of many of our educational institutions is that they have become beholden to serving and expanding the status quo. In the wake of the massive disruption of Covid-19, students and parents sorely need the kind of fresh and constructive thinking on display in our volume.
The question of precisely which policies should be pursued, in what order, and under what messaging banner was—however—intentionally beyond the scope of our project. While we’d consider it a mark of success if policy advocacy organizations or state legislators find ideas therein to add to their “prix fixe” policy agenda, we didn’t and don’t see it as our role at CERN to dictate taste or the direction of the conservative movement. Rather, our role is—per AEI’s broader mission—to promote a competition of ideas about how best to improve American public education, and to provide a big tent for anyone inclined to thoughtfully contribute to this intellectual mission.
We were thrilled to publish so many current and former Fordham Institute–affiliated individuals, and are grateful to Fordham for providing a platform for us to issue an open invitation to anyone in their orbit to contribute a sketch to our series or to join our network. Please feel free to e-mail us at [email protected] and [email protected] if you’re inclined to help add to the buffet!
A few weeks ago, Ohio released state report cards for the 2021–22 school year. Annual report cards have been the law of the land for decades, so Ohioans are generally familiar with them. But report cards themselves look a little different this year, as the state legislature revamped the framework during summer 2021.
Although the biggest change was a shift from an A–F to a five-star system, several individual components also got a facelift. That includes the early-literacy component, which measures reading improvement and proficiency for students in grades K–3. To provide a more complete picture of early literacy in Ohio schools, the component now includes three measures, the first two of which were added via last year’s reform legislation.
1. Proficiency in third grade reading
This measure reports the number of students who score proficient or higher on the reading segment of the third grade English language arts (ELA) state test. This is not the same as overall proficiency rate on the ELA test, as this measure covers only the reading segment of the test and excludes the writing part.
2. Promotion to fourth grade
This measure reports the percentage of students in third grade who were promoted to fourth grade, and thus were not subject to retention under Ohio’s Third Grade Reading Guarantee.
3. Improving K–3 literacy
This measure uses two consecutive years’ worth of data to determine how well schools and districts are helping struggling readers. It uses the results of fall diagnostic assessments and the state test to determine the percentage of students who moved from not on track in reading to on track from one year to the next.
Although these three measures are unrated, the state combines them to create an overall early-literacy rating for districts and schools. That rating is calculated by adding up the results of all three measures—which are weighted according to state law—to establish a weighted early-literacy percentage. This number is then compared to score ranges set by the state board of education to determine a school’s rating. As is the case with other report card components, schools receive ratings of one to five stars.
So how did Ohio districts fare in the wake of pandemic-related disruptions? Well, the good news is that, of the state’s 607 districts, 397 of them—roughly 65 percent—met or exceeded state standards and earned early-literacy ratings of three, four, or five stars. That’s great news for Ohio kids, and falls in line with analyses by Ohio State’s Vladimir Kogan, who found that ELA achievement among third graders has “charted an impressive rebound” after plunging earlier in the pandemic.
On the bad news front, 208 districts earned either one or two stars. That means approximately 34 percent, or one third, fell into the “needs support” or “needs significant support” categories. All three of the districts that recently emerged from state oversight via an Academic Distress Commission (ADC)—Youngstown, Lorain, and East Cleveland—earned only one star. And all but one of the Big Eight districts also earned only one star (Cincinnati earned two).
Taken together, the Big Eight and former ADC districts serve nearly 154,000 students. And while most of their students are older than grades K–3, many of them learned to read in the same elementary schools that are earning troublingly low early-literacy ratings. Obviously, the pandemic played a part in declining scores, but many of these districts were struggling with early literacy long before then. It’s also important to remember that, while helpful, districtwide ratings can mask low scores for individual schools. Even in districts that scored well, there could still be schools full of students who are struggling to read.
If state and local leaders don’t take these results to heart, thousands of students will pay the price down the road. Fortunately, Ohio seems to be headed in the right direction. The Ohio Department of Education’s recently released budget priorities aim to boost early literacy in some smart ways, including incentivizing the use of high-quality instructional materials, encouraging professional development for teachers in the science of reading, and deploying literacy coaches to low-performing schools. And so far, state leaders have resisted political pressure to eliminate the Third Grade Reading Guarantee’s retention requirement, which is backed by strong evidence.
There are other interventions—like doubling down on the potential of out-of-school time or increasing the support that persistently low-performing schools receive—that are also worth investment. But going into budget season, it certainly seems like Ohio leaders are focused on improving early literacy. Given just how many districts had abysmal early-literacy scores, that’s clearly the right approach.
Sylvia Allegretto and her colleagues at the union-backed Economic Policy Institute (EPI) have been arguing for over eighteen years that teachers are underpaid. Her latest in a long line of reports on the topic was published in August and follows the same methodology as all previous versions.
Using data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), Allegretto compares teacher wages and benefits in all fifty states and the District of Columbia to those of a large group of workers in a BLS classification known as “civilian professionals.” This is, Allegretto writes, the “broadest category available that corresponds with all college graduates,” and thus is felt by EPI to be the most directly comparable with teachers. Wages comprise regular pay as reported to the IRS, which includes both direct pay for hourly or salaried work and supplemental pay for things like overtime, bonuses, profit-sharing, and paid leave. The benefits category includes health and life insurance, retirement plans, and payroll taxes such as Social Security, unemployment, and workers’ compensation. All forms of compensation are reported on an earnings-per-week basis, which Allegretto says adjusts for the fact that most teachers do not receive pay for their regular jobs during the summer. My Fordham colleague Aaron Churchill took issue with this methodology upon the release of a previous version of this report in 2016, partly because it assumes that all bachelor’s degrees represent a similar level of skills, and also because it ignores the fact that, even during the school year, teachers report working fewer hours than other professionals.
The findings from 2021 are in line with EPI’s earliest analysis. To wit, teacher wages lag that of civilian professionals, just as they have done in every studied year since 1996. In 2021, the wage gap between the two groups was the largest EPI’s analysts have ever seen: 23.5 percent. It is, as ever, headline news.
Inflation-adjusted average weekly wages of teachers have been relatively flat since 1996—increasing just $29 between 1996 and 2021—while the comparison group of college graduates rose by $445. Allegretto notes that there have been some time periods when the gap narrowed and others when the gap increased, generally based on broad economic trends. She wisely points out that wage volatility—both upward and downward—impacts teachers less than civilian professionals because teacher pay scales are set by long-term contracts. Allegretto also discusses pandemic labor market disruptions, concerned that they could distort the methodology EPI has been using. However, data suggests that college-educated workers were much less affected by the pandemic than were other workers. Thus, the previous methodology remained in place with the caveat that “any pandemic-related issues with the data that come to light will be addressed in future updates.”
Benefits are, unsurprisingly, higher for teachers than for the comparison group. This has also been a steady trend over all the years of study. In 2021, the benefits gap favoring teachers was at the highest level ever seen: 9.3 percent. Combining the wage and compensation gaps results in a total compensation gap of 14.2 percent, with civilian professionals coming out on top.
Allegretto includes numerous breakdowns of the wage differential by itself—male teachers fare worse than females, teachers in Colorado have a far larger gap than their peers working in Rhode Island, etc.—but not for the combined wage/benefits differential. Those data would likely impact the conclusions of the report and perhaps change the headlines they generate.
The Fordham Institute reviewed EPI’s first report on teacher compensation back in 2004. Their methodology hasn’t changed and neither have our quibbles with it. The comparison group of workers is needlessly broad; the difference between free market and union-negotiated wages and benefits is treated as a statistical quirk rather than a heavy thumb on the scale of supply and demand; and teacher scheduling (school day schedules, summers off, etc.) is averaged out of the equation, despite it likely being a hugely valuable non-monetary incentive for many teachers (not to mention the popularity of those schools with four-day weeks).
There’s another unanalyzed factor to consider that’s become a larger issue recently. With baby-boomer teachers retiring en masse, the average teacher is much younger and less experienced than in previous years. This “composition effect” drives down average salaries. But that’s a statistical mirage, as the inflation-adjusted pay for teachers at any given point on the pay scale (new teachers, ten years of experience, etc.) is up sharply. Comparing teachers to workers with similar skills and similar years of experience would significantly change the outcome.
But to add a new question into the ongoing discussion: What if we assume for a moment that EPI’s analyses have all been right and that their overriding call throughout the years—more pay for teachers!—should have be heeded following the release of at least one of these recurring reports since 2004. Why hasn’t it? Each iteration of these EPI reports has concluded with some tie in to current events to attempt to ground and amplify that call. “Now more than ever...” But neither housing bubble nor Race to the Top nor Great Recession have done anything to change the trajectory of teacher wages and benefits, nor the gap between them and their nonteacher professional peers. Why not? Now that would be some valuable research. Perhaps the latest call—tied to a putative teacher shortage—will be the one that finally works to get policymakers to see the light. Or perhaps it won’t.
SOURCE: Sylvia Allegretto, “The teacher pay penalty has hit a new high,” Economic Policy Institute (August 2022).
Did you know you can have every edition of Gadfly Bites sent directly to your Inbox? Subscribe by clicking here.
Teachers are the most important in-school factor affecting student achievement, and in the wake of pandemic-caused learning losses, Ohio schools need effective teachers more than ever.
But hiring and retaining teachers is easier said than done, even in the best of times. Longstanding issues around licensing and compensation keep talented individuals away from the profession.
Our latest policy brief, third in a series of papers, addresses teacher-pipeline and teacher-retention issues which are critical if Ohio wants to make teaching an attractive and financially rewarding career option for more young people. In this paper, we focus on several ways that Ohio policymakers can better attract talent and strengthen the state’s teacher workforce.
Important new research
This week, the Thomas B. Fordham Institute released a blockbuster new report which uses Ohio administrative data to differentiate charter schools operated by “for-profit” management companies from those operated by “non-profits”, describe how their operations differ, and answer the question of how their form impacts their effectiveness compared to each other and to traditional district schools. The results are eye-opening; be sure to check it out. Lead writer Linda Jacobson covered the report and its implications for The 74, linking it to the national push to get the United States Department of Education to roll back its full slate of rule changes to the Charter Schools Program.
Report card results
Vindy.com took a look at the report card results for Youngstown-area charter schools, noting similar pandemic-era achievement declines to area districts. However, a number of charters appear to have bounced back faster, some even showing achievement levels today that are higher than in 2019. Kudos to those schools and their students, and kudos to Vindy.com for allowing school leaders to explain all that they have done and continue to do to catch their students up and move them forward again.
Bigger and better
Cleveland’s Global Ambassadors Language Academy, which bills itself as the first language immersion school in northeast Ohio and the only Mandarin immersion school in the state, this week won a grant of $250,000 in ARPA funding from the Cuyahoga County Commissioners. GALA plans to renovate a former school building into which their unique programs can move and grow. Awesome!
Never too early
The school year is only a couple of months old in West Virginia, but applications to open new schools for next fall have already begun arriving before the Professional Charter School Board. Here’s a look at two of those applications, one focused around business learning and the other around nursing skills.
Excellence visits Excellence
It was a long drive, but well worth it. 50 students from Morehouse College traveled from Atlanta to Brooklyn by bus earlier this month to visit Excellence Boys Charter School. They came bearing gifts, performances, and testimonials showcasing their college’s core pillars and beliefs that lead to success. The message: You, too, can be Morehouse Men!
*****
Did you know you can have every edition of the Ohio Charter News Weekly sent directly to your Inbox? Subscribe by clicking here.
Did you know you can have every edition of Gadfly Bites sent directly to your Inbox? Subscribe by clicking here.
One of the most contentious debates in American education focuses on whether to group students into classrooms using some measure of prior achievement. Whole class grouping by prior achievement or content mastery is most common for math instruction, less common for English and reading, and least common for other subjects; it appears to be more common in middle schools (48 percent) than in elementary schools (24 percent). The back and forth about grouping has become especially heated in recent years, with several high-profile states (Virginia, California) and districts (San Francisco, Seattle, New York) either eliminating grouping or considering adopting the practice for some subjects, grades, or performance levels.
The research on instructional grouping, however, is more positive than grouping critics would have us believe. Complicating the careful study of this practice is the many forms that grouping can take and the roles of grade level, subject matter, and teacher ability to differentiate instruction in the effectiveness of any grouping strategy or intervention. On balance, though, we find that large-scale studies and meta-analyses of grouping show evidence of positive effects for high-performing students and little downside (and often upside) for lower-performing students.
In concept, any kind of grouping by readiness or prior content mastery is a response to American students of any given age being academically diverse in what they know and can do. In some recent work, we and our colleagues found that the typical American classroom includes students that span three to seven grade levels of achievement mastery. This translates to a fifth-grade classroom that includes students who have yet to master second-grade math content, as well as those who have already mastered eighth-grade math content.
A separate 2021 study by Blaine Pedersen et al., using international TIMSS data, showed that the typical American fourth-grade classroom includes student achieving at all four international benchmarks in math. Although that may be hard to picture, note that there are only four international benchmarks, meaning that the entire possible range of student performance is present in the typical fourth-grade classroom! This was true before the pandemic, and recent research suggests that Covid-19 has made American students even more diverse in terms of grade-level content mastery.
Some schools respond to this diversity in academic readiness by grouping students by performance level for instruction. This was the topic of a recent National Bureau of Economic Research working paper by Kate Antonovics, Sandra E. Black, Julie Berry Cullen, and Akiva Yonah Meiselman, who looked at the effects of “tracking” on Texas students from 2010 to 2019. It’s important to note that this wasn’t a study of tracking per se. Rather, it evaluated the relationship between math achievement and being exposed to classrooms that were more or less academically diverse than the school as a whole. Under a scenario where students are assigned to classes at random, every student is taught alongside students from the entire achievement distribution present in the school. What skills a student has mastered has no bearing on class placement. We make this point because there is no way to know exactly what mechanism led to some students being in more- or less-homogenous classrooms, though the authors did control for things like the number of classrooms available in a given school (i.e., if there’s only one classroom for a grade, then of course the classroom will include the full range of academic diversity).
The researchers came to several important conclusions, in addition to confirming that this form of instructional grouping is more common in middle than elementary school. They also report that grouping by prior test scores is much more common than any kind of grouping by race/ethnicity or socioeconomic status. Although, of course, prior achievement is correlated with demographics, this finding means that most of the observed disparities in racial, ethnic, or socioeconomic representation across classes is due to achievement and not demographics. And finally, the extent of instructional grouping is correlated with degree of academic diversity within a school grade. Schools with a wider range of academic needs within a given grade tended to group more. In fact, this remained one of the only significant predictors of schools implementing instructional grouping. Average achievement, whether the school was a magnet, the political lean of the county, and the demographic makeup of the school were all non-significant predictors in the final model.
So schools with more academic diversity tend to do more instructional grouping. But is this good? The authors measured how exposure to more- or less-grouped classrooms influenced math achievement as measured by where students fell in comparison to their peers across the state. In other words, how does being exposed to more- or less-grouped classrooms influence student academic achievement, as compared to the rest of the state, and how do those effects differ for students who start out lower achieving versus higher achieving?
The findings are somewhat complicated because of rigorous multiple estimation methods and because effects were examined for students achieving at or below the 25th percentile, as well as students at or above the 75th percentile. In the end, the analyses suggest, greater exposure to instructional grouping is associated with no change in predicted math achievement for low-achieving students, but is positively predictive of upward percentile mobility for high-achieving students. In other words, when lower-achieving kids are taught in classrooms with a narrower range of the achievement distribution than is present in the entire schools, it does them no harm. They do as well as if they taught in classrooms that didn’t involve any form of ability grouping. But when higher-achieving kids are grouped, they do better.
How much better? Not a ton. A 1 standard deviation increase in grouping exposure for kids who were in the top 25 percent of math achievers in third grade predicted a 1.3 percentile-point increase in eighth-grade test scores. Instead of scoring at the 80th percentile among eighth graders in Texas, the student would score just over the 81st percentile. And although there were no similar positive effects for lower-achieving students, the students did end up in smaller classes. The authors hypothesized that this might have helped mitigate any hidden negative effects of grouping on lower-achieving students, but there’s no way to know from these data.
This study does not support or contradict a school’s decision to engage in more or less grouping by prior achievement. Instead, it simply shows that this kind of grouping does not appear to harm or hold back lower-achieving students, while it does seem to help higher-achieving students a bit. An implication of such findings is that higher- and lower-achieving students would become even more different in their math achievement, similar to what was seen in the recent NAEP 2022 data.
The study also raises two issues that are common in this type of research. First, flexible grouping and tracking are not the same thing. “Grouping” refers to placing students in flexible groups where membership depends on interest, subject matter, and recent performance and can change throughout the year (a mix of between- and within-class grouping); “tracking” refers to placing students in long-term, full-class, essentially permanent groups. Tracking also has a negative connotation, so tends to make people (ourselves included) nervous when it appears—the word, that is—in the literature, regardless of the grouping arrangements being studied. Again, the data alone don’t tell us or the researchers what mechanisms led some students to be taught in more- or less-academically-diverse classrooms than others.
Second, what happens within the groups is of paramount importance, but most studies—the present one is no exception—do not look at the curriculum, instructional strategies, or quality of differentiation within the groupings of interest. Given the well-documented importance of these and other factors on student learning, it’s hard to examine the effects of any type of “grouping” without knowing what actually happened within each classroom. As noted earlier, we understand why these facets of education aren’t included in the present study (it’s really difficult!), but it’s definitely a limiting factor in much of the grouping literature.
Our interpretation of these grouping/tracking studies (and other research on reforms that are primarily organizational in nature) is that they average out the role of curriculum and teachers, which are probably the most important factors. In other words, if we accept that high-quality instruction and curriculum is normally distributed within each group or track (which it probably isn’t), then those factors would balance each other out in most studies. If that is the case, then the results of these studies tell us something important—the organizational reform of grouping students by readiness for instruction appears to have small benefits for the brightest students and no negative impact on students at the lowest readiness levels—but they don’t tell us what the organizational strategies would do in the presence of, for example, pre-differentiated, prescriptive curricula with teachers skilled in differentiation (see here for an interesting, nuanced take).
Put differently, this latest study may show us the lower-bound of what a form of instructional grouping can do—that it didn’t hold any students back or restrict their learning—but it also doesn’t show us the full scope of possible benefits. This is by no means a criticism of the present study, but rather a guide and call for future research that informs the types of grouping that can best facilitate learning for all students.
Editor’s note: This was also published as a guest article in an edition of “Advance,” a newsletter from the Thomas B. Fordham Institute written by Brandon Wright, our Editorial Director, and published every other week. Its purpose is to monitor the progress of gifted education in America, including legal and legislative developments, policy and leadership changes, emerging research, grassroots efforts, and more. You can subscribe on the Fordham Institute website and the newsletter’s Substack.
