Effective communication is a two-way street that involves not only sending and receiving information, but also understanding it. Breakdowns can occur at any point. A new report from the Center for American Progress digs into the state of school-to-family communication, looking for strengths, weaknesses, and opportunities in this important endeavor.

Researchers Meg Benner and Abby Quirk build on previous studies which indicate that clear and consistent communication channels are an important way for schools to encourage family engagement. But the mere existence of a channel (weekly emails, monthly phone calls, regular conferences, etc.) is not enough. Even quantifiable participation by parents is not sufficient to ensure the desired engagement. Are schools sending the sorts of information parents want? Can parents understand what they receive? Does the information convey the tone which schools intend? Does it lead parents to take action? Is technology a help or a hindrance? The potential for miscommunication is high.

In fall 2019, Benner and Quirk recruited survey participants via a crowdsourcing data acquisition platform called CloudResearch. They set racial and ethnic targets for parent participants using the 2015 public school enrollment estimates—per the Common Core of Data files from the National Center for Education Statistics—for Asian/Pacific Islander, black, Hispanic, and white parents so as to obtain a nationally representative sample. The teachers and school leaders who participated in the survey, having no targets set during recruitment, were overwhelmingly white. In the end, they recruited 1,759 total participants in three categories: 932 parents, 419 teachers, and 408 school leaders. The vast majority of all respondents were associated with traditional district schools, although both charter schools and magnet schools were represented.

Overall, parents, teachers, and school leaders reported that schools’ communication of various information types is useful, and that parent engagement is strong. However, there were several notable discrepancies. For instance, 92 percent of parents agreed or strongly agreed with the statement that they were “involved with their children’s learning,” while only 64 percent of teachers and 84 percent of school leaders agreed that parents were involved. School leaders were most likely to agree with the statement that parents were “involved with the school community”—85 percent of them agreed or strongly agreed—compared with 72 percent of parents and 69 percent of teachers.

Parents, teachers, and school leaders all rated individual student achievement (a catchall category without reference to specifics such as test scores or grades) as the most important type of information to communicate. Beyond that, though, important differences of opinion emerged. Parents rated curriculum information and resources related to college and career readiness as the next two types of information they desired, while teachers instead rated patterns of behavior and disciplinary action as their second and third choices, respectively. School leaders favored schoolwide achievement information as number two, followed by a raft of other things tied for (a distant) third.

While parents, teachers, and school leaders all reported that the school communicated information frequently, all said that ideal communication would be more frequent and more consistent. The ideal reported frequencies of conveying different types of information unfortunately varied widely among the categories of respondents (with parents and teachers wanting varying levels of increased frequency and school leaders wanting to stand pat or decrease frequency). Additionally, school leaders reported that the overall amount of information shared was increasingly too much as they moved from younger to older grades, while parents reported the amount as increasingly too little. An important divergence of opinion.

The report concludes with recommendations for federal, state, and district levels. They include schools surveying parents about their engagement and communication preferences, the feds maintaining Title I Parent Engagement funds, states providing technical assistance to schools to develop parent engagement plans, districts investing in technology advisors who can recommend parent-focused communication improvements, schools connecting information to individual student achievement whenever possible, school leaders reinforcing parent communication as a central responsibility of every teacher, and schools providing training and resources to ensure staff members have the capacity and tools to communicate with all parents.

SOURCE: Meg Benner and Abby Quirk, “One Size Does Not Fit All: Analyzing Different Approaches to Family-School Communication,” Center for American Progress (February, 2020).

Reinforcing the importance of the CSP

Virginia Gentles has authored a new policy brief for The R Street Institute explaining how the federal Charter Schools Program (CSP) helps provide seed funding for teachers, parents, and local organizations to launch innovative schools for individual communities. Worth a look given the current federal education budget discussions.

Charters and vouchers

Matthew Ladner, executive editor of redefinED, authored a recent blog post looking at the equilibrium—or lack thereof—between private and public school choice. That is, vouchers vs. charter schools. He argues against a state of animosity between the two camps, emphasizing areas of common ground instead, especially at the federal level.

School funding writ large

Closer to home, Plain Dealer editorial board member Tom Suddes opined this weekend on the continuing saga of the EdChoice Scholarship program as legislators and the governor work to find common ground. He argues that larger school funding failures in the state—including the growing charter school sector—have led us to the intense state of animosity facing the existence and the structure of Ohio’s voucher programs.

Charter facilities remain an obstacle

NACSA’s latest policy brief explores how access to facilities remains an immense obstacle to growing more innovative schools. A review of charter applications shows that most schools don’t have a building identified when they submit their applications and more schools anticipate having to secure their own facility rather than sharing space with school districts.

Last call for March’s School Performance Institute Workshop

Bring your team to a high-performing urban charter school to learn how to build a culture of academic and operational excellence. Join School Performance Institute at their upcoming Study the Network workshop. This workshop combines interactive sessions with live-classroom observations and conversations with key staff to help build your team’s capacity to create and implement change. Register today for the next workshop on March 17th, 2020! For more information, contact John A. Dues.

NOTE: The Thomas B. Fordham Institute occasionally publishes guest commentaries on its blogs. The views expressed by guest authors do not necessarily reflect those of Fordham.

“Gap closing” is one of Ohio’s six major school report card components. The ostensible purpose of the component is to provide the public with information on which schools are making progress in closing achievement gaps among Ohio’s most disadvantaged students. Gap closing, however, has long been criticized on multiple fronts: it does not actually measure the closing of achievement gaps; it is highly correlated with socioeconomic status; and biases Ohio’s accountability system toward rewarding achievement rather than growth. To these woes we can add another concern, those centered around gap closing’s newest sub-component: English language progress (ELP). 

Traditionally, Ohio’s gap closing measure has assessed schools on how various subgroups—including those who are African American, Hispanic, or economically disadvantaged, or have special needs—perform in three areas: English language arts, math, and graduation rates. With the addition of ELP to gap closing in 2017–18, Ohio schools with English learner (EL) populations are now additionally evaluated based on those students’ performance on the Ohio English Language Proficiency Exam, an alternative assessment given to ELs. 

The inclusion of ELs into the report card is required under federal law and shines a much-needed spotlight on the academic needs of one of the state’s fastest growing student populations. But while well-intentioned, the new ELP measure is imperfectly implemented. This post highlights three chief shortcomings. 

First, the ELP measure relies on raw proficiency thresholds. Proficiency thresholds only give schools credit for students who achieve proficiency in a content area; no credit is assigned for moving students closer to proficiency. Second, the ELP measure effectively imposes all-or-nothing point thresholds on schools. Of the 780 schools that have been assessed on the measure since 2018, some 73 percent received the full 100 points, while another 25 percent received 0 points. Only 2 percent of assessed schools received partial points for the ELP sub-component. Finally, the contribution of ELP to the overall gap closing score and report card grades varies dramatically across schools, and for some schools weighs very heavily. 

Taken together, these features add up to a system in which the performance of very small numbers of students can have disproportionately large effects, not only on a school’s ELP sub-component grade, but also on the entire report card grade. Importantly, the inclusion of ELP may benefit some schools, “inflating” their final report card score, while penalizing others. In this post, however, I focus on ELP’s potentially negative consequences because the point penalties imposed on schools are, on average, about three times as large as any potential bonuses.

Let’s take a closer look at how the various pieces of ELP fit together. 

The use of raw proficiency thresholds and the largely all-or-nothing allocation of points are related, and they contribute to small numbers of students having potentially outsized effects on the ELP grade. The use of proficiency thresholds (rather than a proficiency index) means that ELP-assessed schools receive no credit for students who approach but fail to meet the proficiency standard; they only receive credit when students “pass” the state’s EL assessment.[1] The ELP measure additionally tends toward an all-or-nothing points structure because ELP assigns points based on the performance of a single subgroup: English learners. Unlike the other gap closing measures, sub-par performance by EL students cannot be counter-balanced by the performance of another group.[2] For all these reasons, then, the performance of a very small number of EL’s can mean the difference between a 0 and 100 score on ELP.

Of course, any accountability system necessarily imposes some types of thresholds. The system described above might be less troubling if the ELP measure played only a modest role in report card scores. But now we come to a third feature of ELP: its relatively heavy weighting in the overall gap closing score and, as a result, on the overall report card grade. As highlighted in Table 1, for most schools being held accountable for ELP gap closing, the performance of English learners constitutes one-third to one-quarter of the entire gap closing grade, but in rare circumstances it can comprise as much as 100 percent. This difference is due to the fact that not all schools are assessed on all possible components of gap closing.[3] Furthermore, because the Ohio report card system weights the overall gap closing component differently depending on a school’s population and grade configuration, gap closing itself can account for anywhere between 4.5 and 47.5 percent of a school’s overall report card grade. Somewhat oddly, there is currently no correlation between the weighting of ELP in a school’s overall report card grade and the percent EL students in a given school population.

Table 1: Contribution of ELP to Gap closing Score and to Overall Report Card Score

​

Why does this matter? The use of proficiency thresholds and the preponderance of all-or-nothing point allocations, when combined with the relatively heavy weighting of the ELP sub-component, creates an accountability system which permits dramatic shifts in gap closing scores and even overall report card scores based on the performance of a very small number of students. 

For starters, Ohio’s system mechanically permits a school to be penalized up to four letter grades on the entire Gap Closing measure based on the failure of a single EL student to make adequate progress. This, for example, was the experience of New Albany Middle School in New Albany-Plain Local School District in 2019. Because the school missed that year’s ELP proficiency threshold of 51 percent by one student, it received 0 points for the ELP gap closing sub-component. Its overall gap closing grade, which would have been a 100 (an A) without ELP, was reduced to a 66.7—a D. The story did not end here, though. The school’s D grade on gap closing, in turn, had effects on its overall report card grade, which was reduced by nearly 0.98 points, lowering the letter grade from an A to a B.  

Curious about the broader picture—in particular, how much a single student’s ELP performance could affect the overall report card grade of two otherwise identical schools—I created a dataset containing all possible combinations of report card scores for the achievement, progress, K–3 literacy, graduation rates, and Prepared for Success components. I then simulated the final report card grade for two schools with identical profiles except for their ELP gap closing measure: One school passes the threshold and receives 100 points for the sub-component, while the other fails by one student and receives 0 points. Results are summarized in Table 2.

Table 2: How Much Can One Student’s Performance in ELP Gap Closing Affect a School’s Overall Report Card Grade?

​

The simulation suggests that, based on the performance of a single EL student, a school can earn an overall report card grade that is as much as two letter grades lower as an otherwise identical school. Consistent with the findings of Table 1, Ohio’s small number of early-learning elementary schools are the hardest hit because gap-closing comprises nearly half of their overall report card grade. Middle and K–5 elementary schools, which are graded on three to four report card components, can easily see their report card grade fall by an entire letter grade. High schools are the least vulnerable, but depending on how close they are to the grade threshold, they can also see their grades reduced by a full letter grade.  

****

Ohio’s 55,000 K–12 EL students deserve access to high-quality English language programs. They deserve the opportunity to achieve English proficiency and to fully participate in their schools’ broader academic programming. At the same time, however, Ohio communities deserve an accountability system which provides meaningful differentiation of school performance. Because of ELP’s flaws, Ohio’s current report card system fails this standard. 

Ohio policymakers should return to the drawing board and construct an ELP measure that encourages districts to attend to the language acquisition needs of the state’s ELs and provides a fair assessment of their progress in moving students toward language proficiency.

1. In case you missed it, Chad was a panelist at a recent Cleveland event discussing Ohio’s voucher program. It went pretty well for a panel organized by voucher grouchers if I do say so myself (and what do you read these clips for if not that?), but was unlikely to have changed anyone’s mind on the topic. (Personally, the response given by audience members to the mom whose son has a voucher was bothersome.) The superintendent of Catholic schools in Cleveland was on the panel in support of EdChoice and you can read the diocese’s take on the event here. (Catholic Diocese of Cleveland, 2/27/20) On the national front, EdChoice (the organization) research director Mike McShane takes a look at the big picture on voucher research. A new paper out this week marks the 27th study of the question of private school choice effects on students who could access a voucher but who remain in public schools. It is the 25th of those studies which have found competitive effects benefits for those remainers. He calls it “a pretty solid consensus.” However, the findings on participant effects—including here in Ohio—are where the real conundrum of the title lies. McShane has some thoughts. (Forbes, 2/27/20)
2. So what’s going on with the voucher grouching here in Ohio? The governor, the House speaker, and the Senate president had their 90-minute come to Jesus meeting earlier in the week. What little we know about how it went can be found here. (Gongwer Ohio, 2/26/20)
3. Tiny Frontier Local Schools (student body 536) is losing too much money due to local families opting out of the district by various means. (One of those means is not, as you might have suspected, via vouchers. They are not mentioned at all here, despite the fact that two of their three school buildings are eligible.) The culprits cited are interdistrict open enrollment, online charter schools, and homeschooling. (That’s right, when you get desperate enough, even homeschooling can somehow be considered stealing from the district’s coffers.) The biggest problem is that while Frontier Local is open for incoming students via open enrollment, they are net losers in that exchange—with more going out than coming in. Even worse, officials can only speculate as to why kids leave…or indeed why they come in. (Convenience? Seriously, guys?) Board members seemed pretty surprised about all of this information, even though none of it can be remotely new. (Marietta Times, 2/28/20)
4. Another day, another district using data to better serve its students. (Cleveland.com, 2/27/20)
5. Incoming clarification from the Big Giant Beard! State supe Paolo DeMaria said this week that his new proposal for minimum test scores to earn a diploma isn’t a lowering of the bar, despite what you’ve heard, because it’s never been required for students to score “proficient” on those tests to graduate. Well, that’s pretty clear, isn’t it? Clarification ends. *Achoo!* (WVXU-FM, Cincinnati, 2/27/20)
6. District school board meetings sound like a lot of sauce to me, even when they are not focused on something controversial. Case in point, this piece covers a recent Akron City Schools meeting in so much painstaking detail that I really don't know what to focus on in clipping it. The clear realization that kids in the district’s STEM high school have it really good compared to their peers in those increasingly-worthless-sounding “career academies”? The donation of a giant rock (thanks for nothing, people)? Or the fact that some district families have figured out—oh by the way—that they can petition to have their homes rezoned to another school district? Whatever your favorite flavor, I predict some great Gadfly Bites clips coming to us from Akron in the near future. (Akron Leader, 2/27/20)
7. How do you know that a charter school story in the mainstream media is a good charter school story? The words “charter school” do not appear it in. Three Toledo (charter) School for the Arts students were among fifteen honored by the University of Toledo for their short story contest winning entries. (Toledo Blade, 2/28/20) Horizon Science Academy (charter school) in Lorain got a nice profile piece as they celebrated African American History Month with food, sharing, and a student-led “wax museum” event. (The Morning Journal, 2/27/20)
8. Speaking of Lorain, the interim CEO is said here to have released “findings” from his district-wide listening sessions, but it sounds more like he reiterated the action steps he is already implementing after getting his marching orders from the newly-resurgent usual suspects. Seriously? Dude listened to staff in all 14 buildings (100% attendance I’d wager!) but held only 3 events open to the public. Here is a photo from the first session:

   

   At the second session, Ring was said to have been telling parents what teachers have told him about the reading curriculum they hate. And the third session was held during a board meeting. I’d bet my life there were more union members than community members at that one. (Elyria Chronicle, 2/28/20) And here’s is what Pleasant Local Schools thinks of its parents, courtesy of an editorial in the actual local newspaper written by the elementary school principal. How utterly embarrassing. (Norwalk Reflector, 2/28/20)

Did you know you can have every edition of Gadfly Bites sent directly to your Inbox? Subscribe by clicking here.

“Education is not one-size-fits-all” is a common phrase heard in today’s education debates. There’s a good bit of truth to the mantra. Every child is unique in his or her own way, and policies and practices should reflect those differences. To its credit, Ohio acknowledges the importance of tailoring education to the needs of individual students. As suggested in the title Each Child, Our Future, the state’s strategic plan—developed with the help of thousands of Ohioans—focuses on customization, and it claims to “advance shifts in education policy and practice” that include “honoring each student” and “emphasizing options.” 

These guiding principles, however, seem to have been forgotten in the raging debate over EdChoice, Ohio’s main private-school scholarship (i.e., “voucher”) program. Instead of centering the debate on the needs of each family and child, it has mostly focused on the perceived harm to school districts. That dubious claim, flogged incessantly by voucher critics, is contradicted by research showing just the opposite—that the competition associated with private-school choice actually improves public schools.

But I digress.

So, how does EdChoice align with greater customization in K–12 education? Let’s consider that question through the lens of the two key shifts mentioned in the state’s strategic plan.

Honoring each student

As I’ve said in media comments, most Ohio families are likely quite satisfied with their local school district. That assumption is based on survey data showing that a solid majority of parents view their local schools positively, in addition to the longstanding custom of parents selecting their school system via the real-estate market. But this doesn’t mean that the district is the best option for all children. Consider just a few reasons why it may not be.

• Many contend that options aren’t needed in schools that receive good overall academic ratings. But even when the average student is faring quite well, there are still students who struggle academically. In the highly-regarded Franklin County districts of Dublin and New Albany, for example, 18 and 12 percent of students, respectively, did not reach state proficiency standards in 2018–19. While those numbers are small compared to those in other, poorer districts, they indicate that some students may need something different to get back on-track. 
• Outside of academics, some students may have difficulties fitting in socially at their local public schools. While this can happen anywhere, the sheer size of large, comprehensive high schools in particular may leave some students feeling a bit lost. For instance, in Ohio’s largest high school, William Mason in suburban Cincinnati, 9 percent of its students were “chronically absent” last year, suggesting some degree of disillusionment with their schooling experience. Students such as these might benefit from attending a closer-knit school. 
• Discipline may also be a problem. For example, last year the Cincinnati school district had more than 6,000 incidents of fighting or violence and just over 1,000 incidents of harassment or intimidation—roughly forty incidents per school day. In the much smaller district of Youngstown, 770 fights broke out last year, which the local NAACP chapter rightfully called “unacceptable” and “at a crisis level.” No student should have to attend a school where he or she feels physically threatened or unsafe. Other school alternatives might offer safe havens. 
• Still others (or their families) may have values or beliefs that they feel are contradicted by the public school system. As Fordham fellow Dale Chu argues, schools are not “values-neutral.” When values don’t square, fathers and mothers—those who bear the principal responsibility for raising their children—may wish to seek a school that better aligns with their worldview.

         When parents and students find themselves in situations such as these, it’s hard to say that their assigned school is fully honoring them. To be clear, this isn’t a criticism of the traditional education system. It’s just naïve to expect public schools, even at their very finest, to be all things to all people (and that’s true for non-publics, as well). What all this suggests is that Ohio should be encouraging a wider range of school options, not choking them off. That leads us to the next section.

Emphasizing options

A choice-rich system of schools enables more parents and students to match their needs with the offerings of different educational providers. After decades of policy reform, many Ohioans have tuition-free, public-school options at their fingertips. They include alternatives accessible via inter- and intra-district open enrollment, STEM and charter schools, and career-technical centers. Private schools, of course, are also an option. But unfortunately, tuition costs often restrict access to only the wealthy.

That’s where the EdChoice scholarship comes in. Since 2006–07, Ohio has provided state assistance that unlocks private-school opportunities for low- to middle-income families. Today, more than 40,000 students use an EdChoice voucher, some of whom have voiced strong support for the program in recent days. At one committee hearing (starting at 12:45 in the video), a Corryville Catholic student testified, “Without EdChoice, it would be a huge struggle to pay the extra tuition. EdChoice makes it possible for many of us to get into Catholic high schools.”

These hearings were held as the state legislature continues to wrestle with policies that would expand EdChoice eligibility from its somewhat limited base to more Ohio households. The impasse between the Senate and House has largely revolved around the program’s controversial eligibility rules for the performance-based EdChoice voucher, which is slated to expand significantly this fall. Although both chambers have sought to scale back that expansion (though to a very different extent), they appear to have agreed that the income-based scholarship should be accessible to more working families. The Senate has proposed to increase the income-eligibility threshold from 200 percent to 300 percent of the federal poverty guideline (FPG), while the House has suggested moving to 250 percent.

Although it cannot exhaustively cover all “needy” students (as described above), expanding choice via the income-based program is likely more politically manageable. Even so, some have suggested that relaxing the income thresholds as currently proposed might be too generous. But when looking at private-school options from the perspective of middle-income families, that’s not the case. Consider a four-person household with an income at 300 percent FPG, or $78,600 per year. After paying federal, state, and local taxes—EdChoice uses pre-tax incomes—that family likely has somewhere around $60,000 in disposable income. After paying the costs of housing—the average yearly mortgage payment is about $12,000—utilities, transportation, food (for four), healthcare, and saving for retirement and college...well, you get the picture. Without EdChoice, most hard-working, middle-income Ohioans will have difficulty affording private-school tuition, even at a modestly priced school. Through scholarship support, however, Ohio would emphasize options by opening doors to more schools for families such as these.

***

For the past decade and a half, the EdChoice program has played an integral role in supporting students who need something different from their educational experience. By providing much-needed financial aid, it puts more private-school options within their reach. However accomplished, continuing to expand EdChoice would further advance the state’s goal of customizing education for each individual child.

We cannot be sure whether the national education reform movement that roared across America from A Nation at Risk (1983) until recently has halted or simply paused. Reform, however, is definitely at low ebb—and most student scores and other outcome measures remain flatter and at lower levels than the country needs. While reform efforts still inch along in some states and communities, they appear to inch backward almost as often. This deceleration creates a discouraging yet valuable moment for everyone, conservatives included, to contemplate the future of American education while considering past successes and earlier mistakes.

We applaud the successes. Schools today are far more often judged by their results and the gains made by their pupils than by the money spent on them or the programmatic bells and whistles that they offer. Standards and expectations are higher almost everywhere. Achievement has risen a bit, at least in the earlier grades, and especially for the lowest performers. Some learning gaps are narrower, and many opportunities are wider. Career and technical education is enjoying something of a revival. Millions more families have options for their children’s education, as it’s no longer taken for granted that students will attend the district-operated public schools closest to their homes.

As we celebrate these accomplishments, we should also reflect on how they came about. Many of their driving ideas were conservative in origin, although making them happen typically entailed bipartisanship and compromise, as Democrats and Republicans, mostly center-left and center-right, found common ground in pursuit of big changes in a deeply entrenched system that was not successfully serving many of their children or the society in which they live. Among the conservative leaders who championed such reforms, most were governors and legislators, but key roles were also played by presidents from Ronald Reagan through the Bushes 41 and 43, teaming up with equity-minded progressives, and often with business and civil rights groups that found it possible to link arms. The shared goal was to help more young Americans find opportunity and success, thus addressing conservatives’ desire for better outcomes and more choices along with progressives’ desire to make the system fairer and close long-standing learning gaps.

Bipartisanship is in tatters today in many realms of our national life, and that’s a big problem on countless fronts. Yet it’s also an opportunity for conservatives to recognize that the gains made possible through bipartisanship also meant suppressing some important differences and neglecting some vital elements of schooling in particular and education in general. It’s time to lean into those differences, understand what’s been neglected, lost, or distorted, address some troubling education voids, and see if we can renegotiate terms before the next wave of reform.

That’s the purpose of a brand-new book, published by the Templeton Press, edited by us and supported by the Kern Family Foundation: How to Educate an American: The Conservative Vision for Tomorrow’s Schools. In it, almost two-dozen right-leaning public intellectuals and scholars responded to our request to help us “address the big questions about where America finds itself at this moment in history, where we’re going (or should go), and the role of primary-secondary education in taking us there.” Among the many names that you will recognize are three former Secretaries of Education (Lamar Alexander, Bill Bennett, Rod Paige); the American Enterprise Institute’s Yuval Levin, Jonah Goldberg, Nicholas Eberstadt, Naomi Schaefer Riley and (until recently) Arthur Brooks; and the Manhattan Institute’s Kay Hymowitz and Heather Mac Donald as well as the Hoover Institution’s William Damon.

Conservatives have important truths to speak that often aren’t heard (or heeded) in discussions of public education—sometimes because conservatives have circumscribed their own truth-seeking behind a wall labeled “school choice” and have sometimes withdrawn their own children into schools that suit them without paying sufficient heed to the education of others or the broader needs of the country we all inhabit. Today’s reform hiatus creates a space in which conservatives can refresh their own thinking about schooling’s proper role and the contents of a first-rate education.

For America to have the prosperous, secure, and vibrant future that we all want, and for our children and grandchildren to enjoy their full measure of that future while contributing their very best to it, we need a primary-secondary education system that delivers the goods—and delivers them for everyone.

For conservatives to absent themselves from conversations on how best to bring about that future, and retreat into enclaves and echo chambers of their own while mouthing (or earnestly insisting on) the policy nostrums of the 1990s, is not just irresponsible. It also yields the shaping of that future to those who now term themselves “progressives.” Is there a conservative alive today who actually welcomes that prospect?

So what do the conservatives represented in our book think is needed at this moment in time? As should be expected from this cadre of creative thinkers, they set off in many directions—but as the reader will discover, their separate musings turned out to revolve around several key themes.

The first is the importance of rekindling students’ understanding of American history, civics, and citizenship, including the kind that instills an informed love of country even as it acknowledges past failings and present challenges. (Yes, we and our fellow authors are happy to give apoplexy to the ghost of Howard Zinn.)

A second theme revolves around good character. That includes moral education, properly construed, but also the critical work of helping young people find purpose and feel needed, the benefits of asking students (high achievers and their peers alike) to work hard in their studies and beyond, and the injustice of dubious discipline “reforms” that reinforce a soft bigotry of low expectations around student behavior.

The third big theme urges a broader view of what follows elementary and secondary education. College need not be the only pathway to dignity or the middle class and a key goal of our schools should be to inform teenagers about the “Success Sequence” and encourage them to follow it: finish school, get a full-time job, get married, and start a family—in that order.

There’s much, much more in the volume itself, and we hope that both conservatives and others will engage with the ideas and arguments therein. As Princeton’s Robert George argues in his chapter, “viewpoint diversity” leads to better understanding of the truth, so let’s take the time to understand where different sides of the debate are coming from. It’s what we want our children to do, and we should model it as well.

Editor’s note: What follows is a reprinting of the preface to an important new book, How to Educate an American: The Conservative Vision for Tomorrow’s Schools, edited by Fordham’s Michael J. Petrilli and Chester E. Finn, Jr., and published by Templeton Press.

I was participating in a humdrum educators’ roundtable in Buffalo, New York, in 1988 when “Monk” Malloy, president of the University of Notre Dame, asked this question: “What is the purpose of a public school?”

There was a long silence until finally Albert Shanker, president of the American Federation of Teachers, proposed this answer: “The public school was created for the purpose of teaching immigrant children reading, writing, and arithmetic and what it means to be an American with the hope that they would then go home and teach their parents.” The reason to read this book is to judge for yourself whether the twenty-two conservative luminaries who wrote its chapters have produced a better answer today to Malloy’s question than Albert Shanker did thirty years ago.

Shanker was a patriot—an old-fashioned, anticommunist, Hubert Humphrey–liberal Democrat union organizer whose parents had immigrated from Poland. So he and this book’s conservative writers agreed on one thing: In coeditor Chester Finn’s words, “Schools should inculcate a solid understanding of and appreciation for why America exists and what it stands for, to transmit history and civics and, yes, a positive attitude toward its strengths as well as a reasoned commitment to addressing its weakness.” Or, in Shanker’s words, “Public schools played a big role in holding our nation together. They brought together children of different races, languages, religions, and cultures and gave them a common language and a sense of common purpose. We have not outgrown our need for this; far from it.”

Today, there is elite disdain for such Americanism. But this is not a popular attitude. Most audiences applaud and some come to their feet when I say, “We should teach more United States history in our schools so our children can grow up knowing what it means to be an American.” There is bipartisan support for this sentiment. After September 11, 2001, George W. Bush and Al Gore both reminded the nation that principles create the American character—not considerations of race, religion, or national origin. In my first address to the US Senate, I introduced a bill to create summer academies for outstanding students and teachers of US history. Within a day, Senator Ted Kennedy had rounded up nearly twenty Democratic cosponsors without my asking. Especially in today’s internet democracy, an era Peggy Noonan calls “The Great Estrangement,” Americans are hungry for institutions that unite. I suspect that most would agree that it would be a good idea to begin each school day with a student leading the Pledge of Allegiance and then giving his or her version of what it means to be an American.

According to education historian Patricia Graham, “Schools in America have danced to different drummers through their long history”—and schools have a very long history. Hunter-gatherer “play schools” helped children learn to survive. Sumerian schools taught scribes to help a culture survive. During the Agricultural and Industrial Revolutions, schools taught youngsters to work and got them out from under their parents’ feet. Sociologist James Coleman said that in early America, schools helped parents do what parents could not do as well. That was especially true for teaching literacy. Graham says, “Now the drumbeat demands that all children achieve academically at a high level and the measure of that achievement is tests.”

This book’s conservative writers would temper that drumbeat with a second great conservative goal—in the coeditors’ words, “to restore character, virtue, and morality to the head of the education table where they belong.” This is no new thought. Plato said schools should create good men who act nobly. Thomas Jefferson believed that a democracy granting broad liberties needed institutions instilling moral restraint. But Yuval Levin’s essay suggests why character education does not rise so easily on a liberal list of priorities: progressive education wants to liberate the student to be himself or herself, Levin writes, while conservative education wants to form the student to be better suited to the responsibilities of citizenship.

After embracing citizenship and character, the book’s authors diverge in their emphases. Several show a healthy respect for school choice but also for its limits. There is a shout-out for career and technical education. To me, Bill Bennett’s chapter is the most persuasive. He argues that content must be at the center of any conservative consensus on education. He reminds us that in the 1980s and 1990s, conservatives were leading a content crusade with E. D. Hirsch and Governors John Engler, Tommy Thompson, and Jeb Bush as well as Bennett himself as chief architects. This movement was called (shall we whisper it?) “Common Core.” This state-by-state reformation of school standards and curricula was well underway when the Obama administration tried to push it faster by making Common Core a quasi-federal mandate. Republicans imagined black helicopters flying. What conservatives had invented, many Republican legislators had voted into state law, and hundreds of thousands of classroom teachers in forty-five states expected they’d be teaching was suddenly condemned and abandoned...by conservatives.

This abandonment was less complete than it would appear. Last year, our daughter’s family lived with us in Tennessee while her home was being remodeled. She placed two sons in a nearby mountain elementary school. When the boys returned home to their Westchester County, New York, public school, I asked, “Did they have trouble adjusting?” “Nope,” she said. “Common Core here. Common Core there.” Many states simply renamed Common Core to avoid political flak and charged ahead. One advocate told me, “We won. But we’re not allowed to say so.”

The backlash to Common Core brings me to the most obvious mission missing from this volume’s conservative agenda: local control of schools. America was created community by community. The initiative for American public schools was entirely at the local level, Marc Tucker has written. He termed this an “accident of localism.”

I have spent much of my public life trying to preserve this localism. To begin with, federalism—the dispersal of central authority—is a crucial tenet of American liberty. Our revolution, after all, was mostly about distaste for a king. As a practical matter, my experience is that those governing education from a distance have good intentions but limited capacity and that schools can be only as good as parents, teachers, and citizens in a community want them to be. The saga of Common Core is the greatest proof of this pudding. Here was a conservative crusade—new rigor in what students needed to know—blown up by conservatives’ fear that Washington, D.C., was forcing them to do it. The Common Core federal directive was piled on top of other dictates from Presidents Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, and Barack Obama on how to define standards, teaching, tests, curricula, and remedies for low-performing schools. Almost everyone in public schools became sick of Washington telling them what to do. So, in 2015, teacher unions and governors united to help Congress enact the “Every Student Succeeds Act,” which the Wall Street Journal said was “the largest devolution of federal control to the states in a quarter century.”

Now, after the rise and fall of a national school board, our one hundred thousand public schools have about the same balance between federal leadership and state and local autonomy that existed during the George H. W. Bush administration. Once again, we have it about right. Thirty years ago, President Bush and the governors set the nation’s first national education goals and then launched an “America 2000” initiative to help states meet those goals by creating voluntary standards, voluntary tests, and start-from-scratch schools. This was done the hard way, state by state and community by community—not by federal mandates. Today’s environment is ripe for a revival of a content-based conservative consensus, or in Bill Bennett’s words “a great relearning,” as the best way for our public schools to help our country get where we want it to go. But this time, let’s avoid the lure of federal mandates and do the job the American Way: state by state, community by community.

Far be it from me to claim prescience, but perhaps more folks should have paid attention last year when Rick Hess and I raised a caution about the intensifying ardor among educators for schools to embrace “social-emotional learning” (SEL): 

SEL will be counted a dismal failure if it encourages educators to settle for pillowy paeans to “happiness,” “self-esteem,” and “inclusivity” at the expense of harder things such as character, ethics, virtue, and civility. If SEL does tip toward the lax and banal, history suggests that it will likely have a relatively short shelf life, much like the self-esteem fad of the 1980s. There turned out to be no solid research foundation under the work of California’s celebrated Task Force to Promote Self-Esteem and Personal and Social Responsibility. To the contrary, its “findings” were ultimately exposed as fraudulent. Long before that, its recommendations were widely mocked for their feel-good soft-headedness. (We suspect this sorry excursion also played a role in the Golden State’s long-term slide in academic performance.) Much the same thing sank the nationwide passion for “values clarification” education in the 1960s and “outcomes-based education” in the 1990s. These movements faltered due to a lack of evidence that they worked and became politically untenable once they came to be seen as inimical to “traditional” values and basic skills. [emphasis added]

What we’re beginning to see today may not be “pillowy paeans” on the part of SEL cadres but practices and emphases that raise concerns in some quarters that what’s going on under SEL’s broad umbrella may be inimical to traditional values and religious faith.

Several recent instances may be fleeting exceptions—but they may also be the squeaks of choking canaries in coal mines where toxic fumes are leaking.

• When the Idaho Education Department presented Gem State legislators with a (modest) budget request to support professional development in SEL for educators, some legislators walked out in disgust. One analogized the proposal to “the collective behavioral approach that was depicted in Brave New World.” Another, reported Education Week, found it “’troubling’ that schools would try to measure students’ social and emotional skills at all.” (At this writing, the budget request remains in play.)


• When Alexandria, Virginia, middle school teachers initiated meditation in classrooms as part of a push for greater “mindfulness” among students, just two sixth graders opted out of the voluntary practice—one that has some research support as a stress reducer, though it’s not yet clear that it advances learning. Still, flags were raised that this practice, commonly associated with Eastern religions, might undermine the faith of children from traditional Christian families.


• When the Highline, Washington, public schools moved to slash the use of out-of-school suspensions by instituting “restorative justice” and other “re-engagement” practices, classroom violence and teacher turnover both rose. We read in The Hechinger Report that “Kimmie Marton, a special education teacher at Mount Rainier High School, said students became more disrespectful after the threat of out-of-school suspensions diminished. ‘Kids will cuss you out, there’s stealing and disobedience,’ she said.”

Many efforts are underway by advocates to encourage states and districts to embrace policies and practices that incorporate SEL, and the wiser of these leave much to local judgment and educator discretion. But decentralization can backfire, too, if those making decisions for their classroom, school or district aren’t well attuned to parental and community sentiment or fail to think through the potential unintended consequences of their initiatives. As the Idaho example shows, however, as did a Tennessee episode a few years ago, statewide policies can also be risky.

Worth noting, too, are some efforts—albeit dwarfed by those of the advocates—to block SEL. The anti-everything Pioneer Institute, for example, has circulated a white paper dubbing it “new-age nanny state” and urging that no public dollars be spent on its promotion. For all we know, there are also Russian bots exploiting this opportunity to sow discord among Americans.

It’s well known that public education is inherently susceptible to controversy when anyone tries to make changes in institutions (and people) that are often stodgy, set in their ways, and risk averse. SEL efforts are bound to raise concerns and hackles, just as new math curricula do—and heaven protect us from changes in the bell schedule, much less the school calendar! So it’s no surprise that some yellow caution lights are blinking. The question is whether those at the wheel will step on the gas and rush through the intersection even as some of those lights turn red, or will tap the brakes, steer carefully, and avoid collisions.

Let me be clear. Children are not just little cognitive learning machines. They’re small flesh-and-blood people who will learn less of what schools should teach them if they’re stressed, lonely, angry, or fearful, just as they’ll learn less if they’re hungry, cold or sick. Schools have an obligation to do what they can to ensure that their classrooms are safe places in which kids feel comfortable, that teachers and other staff members are sensitive to students’ social, emotional and physical wellbeing as well as to their mastery of the three R’s, and that the formation of good citizens with sound character—though that takes far more than schools alone are capable of—is a vital educational mission. I’m all for SEL done right, much as the Aspen commission envisioned it, in support of academic learning. But sniffing and speaking about raisins in second grade, offering yoga as an alternative to detention, and abruptly substituting “restorative justice” for firm discipline in places where teachers are getting assaulted by students—such practices are bound to mystify, alienate, and even infuriate more than a few parents and educators. If it becomes many more than a few, political trouble for SEL lies ahead, as well it should.

With so many quick-fixes proposed to raise student achievement, it’s hard to tell who school reform is really for. Is it for superintendents trying to appease their school board? Is it for politicians who need to make themselves look re-electable? Or—a radical thought—could it be in support of teachers, those who have the closest contact with the students whom schools are meant to be serving?

A new AEI report by Mike Goldstein examines the barriers to successful reform caused by ill-fitting, top-down policies meant to improve instruction and outcomes, and finds that they often lead to improper implementation, misuse of teachers’ time, and the likelihood that more quick-fix policies will be adopted as the ones before them fail.

When schools make purchases—be it programs, curricula, or materials—on behalf of teachers, they rarely take into account the “large teacher time costs” or “implementation costs” of new reforms, and rarely give them the support or training necessary for success. When these new reforms inevitably fail to produce their intended effects—and without the necessary supports for proper implementation, they always will—schools and politicians turn to the next quick-fix, like smaller class sizes and the hiring of additional specialists. As one educator described it, “[teachers] have tried new ideas so many times in the past, only to be asked to change again.” As so many reforms come and go, teachers become wary of their effectiveness, leading them to become more entrenched in the particular practices they prefer. Yet they usually can’t outright say “no” to new policies, so they resort to what the report calls “half-baked implementation,” incorporating some elements of the reforms into their pedagogy and practice, and rejecting or ignoring other parts.

Goldstein suggests that, instead of wasting so much time and so many resources on things teachers won’t use anyway, leaders should adopt “teacher-controlled funds.” Teachers would receive a sum of money at the beginning of the school year to use at their discretion for a range of purchases, including materials, trainings, or field trips. This, he says, will reduce the likelihood of half-baked implementation because teachers are better positioned to know the specific needs of their classrooms—and more invested in their success. To be sure, however, schools shouldn’t be completely hands-off. They ought to continue providing teacher coaches, curriculum training, and the like to ensure their teachers are making informed decisions instead of, for example, relying on mediocre supplemental materials.

The report contends that teacher-controlled funds would increase teacher retention by making teachers feel more valued and respected. Lack of autonomy is one of the most cited reasons for teacher attrition, so it’s possible that this may be true. It’s also possible that this policy could overburden teachers—especially new teachers—with the responsibility of creating a unique curriculum and supplying it. This may be just as demanding on teachers’ time as trying to learn about new school-wide initiatives. It’s also unclear what effect it may have on standards and accountability, especially if teachers are unable to access decent materials or assess the quality of them. Under this policy, it would be difficult to ensure consistent quality within a single district, let alone in the 13,000+ districts across the country.

“What keeps this stupid system propped up?” the report asks. “The illusion by top-down deciders that this time, this time, they’ll get it right.” But it’s hard to say if any top-down reform will “get it right.” Yes, it’s important to ensure that 13,000+ districts are held to certain standards, but it’s naïve to think that new materials, curriculums, or programs alone can raise student achievement. No policy will work if teachers aren’t prepared and motivated to implement it. Getting teachers to that point may require giving them the deference and autonomy to make their own decisions for their classrooms. Maybe teacher-controlled funds are a good way to do that.

SOURCE: Mike Goldstein, “If Education Procurement is Broken, Is Teacher Choice the Answer?” AEI (February 2020).

1. Still in something of a holding (our breath) pattern on EdChoice in Ohio, so let’s talk about some other stuff first. Big news from the world of student wellness funding. Governor DeWine says more money’s coming. So I say, “Let’s fill up those empty rooms!” Link (Gongwer Ohio, 2/25/20)
    
2. Graduation season is on the horizon, but not everyone is rejoicing. The elected school board in Tipp City Exempted Village Schools was told by the assistant supe that Ohio’s graduation requirements are super de-duper complicated, gee whillikers, and it’s just too hard for him to keep up. He suggested that the board could “talk to the legislature” about this and get it changed. Hopefully they reminded his whiny a$$ that the reason they’re complicated (and the reason why they’ve changed several times recently) is because he and his colleagues didn’t think the exceedingly simple “pass the test and you’re in” pathway was acceptable. (Troy Daily News, 2/25/20)
   
   

3. Folks in Massillon City Schools say that their CTE program is “not the same voc ed as 20 years ago”. Everything I see and read in this piece says otherwise. Honestly, it’s only one photo of some grease-covered kid peering out from under the hood of a diesel engine away from being exactly the same voc ed as 40 years ago. Only difference seems to be the massive numbers of kids taking it in Massillon today. (Massillon Independent, 2/25/20) Staying in Massillon—and continuing to talk about what’s new is old—this is a piece that tries to convince us that a “vivarium” (look it up) is a great new education opportunity for high schoolers. First up, this project as described seems more like enrichment for adults. And secondly, this cutting edge “vivarium” thing is said to be 25 years old and has likely been sitting mostly unused outside Washington High School since the last time raising chickens was supposed to be the next big thing in biology education. (Massillon Independent, 2/25/20) Meanwhile, in not-Massillon, I think we have finally actually found not-your-grandad’s CTE. (Patch.com, 2/25/20)
    
4. Perhaps it’s just better to move rezone your house to another district. The residents of the Village of Hills and Dales, despite ongoing legal challenges, will get to vote on whether folks who want their houses rezoned should be allowed to do so. Despite the law already saying they can. (Canton Repository, 2/25/20)
   
   

5. Now on to voucher stuff. This is an editorial, from the Dispatch, which opines that a purely income-based voucher program would be fairer than one based on school suckitude. (Columbus Dispatch, 2/25/20) This is a news story from local TV in Toledo which reads like an editorial. It includes the endlessly repeated indelible rhetoric of Washington Local Schools. (WTOL-TV, Toledo, 2/25/20) Lots of opinionated quotes in this piece, but let’s just stick to the important fact presented: Governor DeWine says he will be meeting with House and Senate leadership (probably today) to try and hammer out a voucher deal. (Dayton Daily News, 2/25/20)
    

6. But don’t forget that there is, currently, more at stake in this dealmaking beyond just vouchers. The aforementioned rezoning law has been chucked in there, along with Academic Distress Commissions. The usual local folks in Youngstown are all saying the usual stuff about dismantling their ADC and returning power to them the people. (Vindy.com, 2/25/20) Meanwhile, the Lorain ADC is being dismantled apace, no legislation required it seems. (Elyria Chronicle, 2/24/20)

Did you know you can have every edition of Gadfly Bites sent directly to your Inbox? Subscribe by clicking here.