Celebrating choice

National School Choice Week is coming up (January 26 – February 1), and NSCW president Andrew Campanella has a great op-ed making the rounds across the country in which he celebrates not only school choice, but also the main drivers of those choices: parents.

Specialized education

Here is a profile of Lakes and Bridges, a charter school in South Carolina with a specialized curriculum designed to support students with dyslexia and to boost their academic achievement. The school is drawing families from far and wide looking for just such an alternative.

Student homelessness and virtual schools

The Ohio Department of Education recently released its annual count of homeless students in the Buckeye State: a heartbreaking 25,600 kids. Coverage of the report from the new-ish Ohio Capital Journal, focusing on how schools work to support their students experiencing homelessness, is notable for including the work of Findlay Digital Academy, a virtual charter school for students at risk of dropping out. For them, making sure students can “get to class” includes making sure they have secure internet access on top of all the other needed services.

Quality charter funding

Congratulations to the 63 charter schools across Ohio who met the criteria and were approved to receive funding from the state’s brand new Quality Community Schools Support Program. The idea of schools meeting the criteria for the support funding is an important one, as there was discussion prior to the award of a potential “loophole” in the legislation authorizing the funding which could have allowed low-performing schools to seek funding. However, adherence to the intent of the original legislation made sure that no such loophole was in evidence.

DECA on the glow up

Dayton Early College Academy is in the midst of a fantastic-looking renovation of its space in Fitz Hall on the University of Dayton campus. The Dayton Business Journal calls it “ambitious”—which it is. But looking at those pictures, we’d call it “awesome”.

Sign up today for the next 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 coming up on March 19, 2020! For more information, contact John A. Dues.

One of the oddest features of the 2019–20 Democratic primary season has been the return of the busing issue. Half a century ago, it nearly tore the party apart. Judicially mandated reassignment of students to achieve racial balance proved to be the most unpopular policy since Prohibition, opposed by overwhelming majorities of white voters. In city after city, Hispanic and Asian American leaders and parents fought to preserve neighborhood schools. By the mid-1980s, support for busing had fallen below 50 percent among African Americans. The parents of African American students subject to busing were often the most vocal opponents of the policy. Yet here were Kamala Harris and other Democratic candidates attacking Joe Biden for his position on an issue that had long ago faded into political oblivion.

The candidates who pounced on the former vice president seemed to have little interest in actually bringing busing back. From its origin in the 1960s to its slow demise in the 1990s, busing had only one reliable patron: the federal courts. Given this, it would be easy to dismiss the return of the busing issue as little more than a debater’s ploy to attack a leading candidate for the Democratic nomination. But Senator Harris’s nostalgic defense of desegregation in Berkeley unleashed a series of articles calling for the return of busing to address what is misleadingly called the “re-segregation” of American schools.

Not only is this line of argument a clear political loser for Democrats, but it badly distorts the history of school desegregation, preventing us from learning from that searing experience. Most important, by using the ambiguous term “desegregation” to cover vastly different policies, it keeps us from distinguishing between the features of desegregation that improved opportunities for minority children and those that did not.

In his opinion for a unanimous court in Brown v. Board, Chief Justice Earl Warren never explained what school districts must do to achieve desegregation. Nor did Warren provide an adequate explanation for why state-sponsored segregation is wrong.

Both NAACP lawyer Thurgood Marshall and the justices assumed that, in most cases, school districts would follow the standard practice of neighborhood schools. Neighborhood schools and the prohibition of race-based assignments: In 1954 no one considered these commitments “racist.”

The reinterpretation of “desegregation” to mean just the opposite—that is, to mandate use of racial assignments in order to replace neighborhood schools with racially balanced ones—came in two stages, the first directed by the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals in the mid-1960s and the second by the Supreme Court from 1968 through 1973.

Faced with thousands of school districts that remained nearly as segregated as a decade before, judges and administrators used numerical benchmarks to determine whether schools were making a good-faith effort to comply with Brown. These benchmarks did not require strict racial balance, only evidence that the old patterns had been dislodged. The resulting desegregation orders were remedial—tough measures designed to confront officials who had defied the courts for many years.

The second stage came in three decisions the Supreme Court issued when it re-entered the picture after a decade and a half of silence. In Green v. County School Board of New Kent County, the Court issued a short, rhetorically powerful, but deeply ambiguous opinion that upheld the general approach of the Fifth Circuit, but added the enigmatic command to eliminate all “racially identifiable” schools.

In its 1971 Swann v. Charlotte-Mecklenburg Board of Education decision, the Court appeared to say that, for urban school districts with a history of legally-mandated segregation, desegregation requires racial balance in all its schools, even if that requires extensive busing of students (including those in elementary school) far beyond their neighborhood schools. Swann has since become the foundational opinion for those who believe that desegregation requires rather than prohibits the use of race in assigning students to particular schools.

The third Supreme Court decision on busing, issued in Keyes v. School District No. 1, Denver, Colorado in 1973, in effect applied Swann’s expansive remedies to cities outside the South. The Court later lowered the evidentiary threshold so that a school district’s failure to maximize racial balance constituted evidence of discriminatory intent.

In the Green-Swann-Keyes trilogy of cases, the Supreme Court departed so far from the original understanding of Brown—as well as from the Civil Rights Act, which stipulated that “‘desegregation’ shall not mean the assignment of students to public schools in order to overcome racial imbalance” (emphasis added)—that one must ask what lay behind this fateful transformation. The answer is apparent in the many lower-court decisions applying the Court’s contradictory, maddeningly ambiguous, and sometimes disingenuous opinions. The underlying problem, they explained, is not state-sponsored racial segregation, but racial isolation, whatever the cause. The most direct statement of this argument appeared in an influential 1967 report by the United States Commission on Civil Rights:

The central truth which emerges from this report and from all of the Commission's investigations is simply this: Negro children suffer serious harm when their education takes place in public schools which are racially segregated, whatever the source of such segregation may be. (Emphasis added.)

This message was transmitted to federal judges by respected expert witnesses. They confidently testified that the academic performance of minority children could be improved substantially if placed in schools that are 70–80 percent white. (Over 80 percent will leave minority children feeling isolated; less than 70 percent approaches the “tipping point” for white flight.)

Judicially mandated reassignment of students to achieve racial balance was thus transformed from an extraordinary judicial remedy for egregious racial discrimination to an education policy designed to improve the academic performance of minority students, even in districts praised by judges for their desegregation efforts.

This ambitious education-reform plan faced three challenges. First, the evidence on which it was based simply did not justify the confidence with which it was propounded.

The second problem was white flight: If desegregation orders lead white families to flee urban areas for the suburbs or private schools, then the presumed benefits of the project will be substantially reduced.

The third problem was that, in many cities, the percentage of minority students exceeded the “optimal” 30 percent even before judicial intervention. There, addressing “racial isolation” by making schools majority white required the creation of mega-school districts, fundamentally changing the way schools are governed.

In its 1974 decision in Milliken v. Bradley, the Supreme Court held that the suburbs could be included in mandatory desegregation plans only if there was evidence that they had engaged in “segregative acts.” After Milliken, federal courts ordered two-way busing that crossed political boundaries only once, in Joe Biden’s Delaware. In most instances, the buses would stop at the city limits.

The Supreme Court’s tacit embrace of the racial isolation argument in the Green-Swann-Keyes trilogy combined with the rigid constraint imposed by Milliken placed the lower courts in a terrible bind. In the 1970s, most district court judges required desegregation by the numbers, though some judges allowing more variation than others. Gradually they shifted away from a preoccupation with racial ratios toward experimentation with more extensive educational reforms. Meanwhile, school demographics were rapidly shifting, with the number of white students continuing to decline and the number of Hispanic students escalating. Desegregation issues were no longer black and white.

Today, it is hard to find a newspaper article on race and education that does not confidently assert that our schools are becoming “re-segregated.” Yet a 2019 analysis conducted by the Washington Post found that “[t]he number of children attending U.S. public schools with students of other races has nearly doubled over the past quarter-century, a little-noticed surge that reflects the nation's shifting demographics.”

Readers have good reason to be confused about what the terms “segregation,” “desegregation,” and “re-segregation” now mean. Clearly, those who claim our schools are being re-segregated do not mean that states are enacting laws to mandate racial segregation or even that school officials are locating school buildings or drawing attendance zones to keep the races apart. Most large urban school districts have made substantial efforts to reduce the impact of housing segregation through magnet schools, “controlled choice,” majority-to-minority transfer options, and careful siting of new schools. The original meaning of the term “segregation” and the pivotal role de jure segregation played in the abominable racial caste system of the South are distant memories.

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Over the past seven decades, “desegregation” has acquired many meanings, and a variety of policies have flown under its banner. Some of these have markedly improved the educational opportunities we provide to minority students. Others have not. All other things being equal, there are significant advantages in reducing the number of predominantly minority schools—not because their students are black or Hispanic, but because they are likely to be poor. Yet “other things” are rarely equal. Long bus rides can tire students and reduce the amount of time they spend in class or on school work. Eliminating neighborhood schools can dampen parents’ involvement in their children’s schools. Regular rejiggering of school assignments to maintain racial balance threatens the stability and continuity that promote learning. White flight can drain schools of both wealthier students and political support. Not surprisingly, the parents of African American students have often become frustrated with these features of desegregation plans, and have argued for a return to neighborhood schools over which they have more control.

Given demographic trends, ending “racial isolation” by making urban schools majority white is a pipe dream. Treating “desegregation” as an undifferentiated whole that we must either accept, busing and all, or reject—and thus be tarred as racist—is not only politically imprudent, but prevents us from appreciating which forms of desegregation did work. A more equitable distribution of resources, smaller classes, magnet schools, more experienced teachers, early learning opportunities—these are some of the things that seem to have made a difference.

In the decade following the civil-rights revolution, education reformers could be forgiven for viewing judicially imposed racial balance as a magic bullet that would produce a more equitable education system throughout the nation. In the years that followed, we learned that education reform is never so simple. Today, education experiments and innovations abound. Many of them will fail; a few might succeed. Far better to attend to these incremental reforms than to sit around waiting for the reappearance of the magic school bus.

Editor’s note: This is a slightly modified excerpt of an article by the author published in National Affairs.

A few years ago, as I was wrapping up grad school (where my dissertation was about migrant workers in China, of all things), I came across a bunch of fascinating podcast episodes about education policy and school reform. Listening to these organic, long-form discussions with thinkers as sharp and varied as Arnold Kling, Diane Ravitch, Jiang Xueqin, and Lant Pritchett put me on all kinds of new ideas about technology, the future of work, and how the education system might change to better prepare students for twenty-first-century realities. There were interesting things happening in the education world, I realized, and I wanted to know more. Step one was to listen to more of these intense yet free-flowing conversations and to read some of the books I was now discovering through them. Now here I am, a member of the national research team at America’s leading education policy think tank.

In truth, my recent career trajectory all started with EconTalk, the popular podcast hosted by libertarian economist Russ Roberts. If you’re not a libertarian—or not interested in economics—don’t worry: Roberts thinks like an economist but is unfailingly honest and charitable with guests from across the political and methodological spectrums.

As we start the new year—a great time to find some new podcasts—I thought it was an opportune moment to recommend my favorite ten EconTalk podcasts for educators, ed policy wonks, and school reformers.

10. Eric Hanushek on education, skills, and the millennium development goals (2015)

The raspy-voiced king of value-added modeling himself discusses his book (with Ludgar Woessmann) The Knowledge Capital of Nations, explains how important education is to a country’s economic standing, gives the definitive take on Finland’s schools, and even briefly discusses one of my favorite topics: external exam systems.

9. Andy Matuschak on books and learning (2019)

Matushcak is a software engineer who wrote a provocative essay against books, but his point is really to emphasize the importance of more interactive ways to learn than books and lectures. Of course, passive knowledge “transmissionism,” as he calls it, could certainly be the result of too many podcasts, and now you can see why I’m (actively?) blogging about EconTalk episodes.

8. James Heckman on facts, evidence, and the state of econometrics (2016)

In this episode—by far the wonkiest on this list—Professor James Heckman drops knowledge on recent scholarly debates ranging from economics to epistemology. But for the Nobel laureate scholar of human capital and early childhood education, education policy is never far off, and researchers will certainly appreciate this sprawling conversation even if some others may skip it.

7. Daphne Koller on education, Coursera, and MOOCs (2014)

Sure, you might be thinking “a podcast about the founder of a MOOC platform is sooo 2014,” and you’d be right. But the questions about how education and technology interact and how that relationship will develop were being confronted with fresh eyes in the mid-2010s, and Dr. Koller is as sharp an analyst of these trends as anyone. Since those questions are not going away, these conversations are well worth going back to.

6. Dan Willingham on education, school, and neuroscience (2009)

One of the few cases where I had already read the book before listening to the podcast (a decade after the episode’s debut), Willingham’s insights into memory, literacy, and the importance of building broad knowledge contribute to debates from the classroom-level all the way to national policy. And Professor Willingham’s examples and anecdotes are second to none.

5. Angela Duckworth on grit (2016)

Maybe you think “grit” has just become a meaningless buzzword, the epitome of the emptiness of fashionable “SEL” interventions, but no longer even all that fashionable. It might have a buzzword as the title, but this book—and this episode—is much deeper than that. If students are the ones who are ultimately responsible for doing their work, the world of education policy needs many more people who are thinking as hard about what motivates them as Professor Duckworth is.

4. Diane Ravitch on education (2010)

There aren’t too many people who have ever lived who know as much about the American education system as Diane Ravitch, and everyone will learn something from this wide-ranging conversation.

3. Doug Lemov on teaching (2013)

For me, the best part of the episode with Uncommon Schools teaching guru Doug Lemov is his discussion of the theoretical basis behind his classroom practices, whether those are innovative practices, traditional ones, or some kind of hybrid. I was teaching the year I first listened to this and started using some of Lemov’s techniques in my classroom, with instant results.

2. Arnold Kling on education and the Internet (2012)

I first heard of economist Arnold Kling on EconTalk, and he quickly became something like an intellectual hero to me. His amazingly weird personal website includes sections on books (he’s written eight), his biography (it begins, “I started out very sickly”), and Israeli dancing. His opinions on education policy are the thoughtful critiques of a genius outsider, interrogating basic assumptions and shibboleths about student learning, classroom dynamics, how technology will change the world, and why certain ed-tech trends probably won’t pan out.

1. Lant Pritchett on education in poor countries (2013)

This brief hour contains a wealth of new ideas about how we should think about schools from a systematic perspective and improve the incentives and signaling throughout all levels of the education system. Starting by exposing a fundamental problem at the heart of education policy, the equation of “seat time” with education, this episode (and the book on which it’s based) contains a bounty of fascinating theories and concepts—from the reason Mexicans have fewer Catholic schools than Guatemalans to the difference between “spider systems” and “starfish systems” to why poor children in India are so likely to attend private schools—that are sure to make you re-think some of your basic assumptions about education policy and beyond.

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These are by no means all the worthwhile conversations on EconTalk about education, just my favorites. Roberts has spoken with Bryan Caplan about the signaling versus human capital debate, Elizabeth Green about teacher training, Doug Lemov on teaching students literacy, Terry Moe about why education reform has moved so slowly, and many others. And EconTalk obviously isn’t the only podcast covering big ideas in education. Fordham’s own Education Gadfly Show, Nat Malkus’s The Report Card, Conversations with Tyler (Cowen), the Education Next Podcast, and the unfortunately now defunct Higher Ed Happy Hour are all platforms for great conversations about schools and education policy.

The U.S. Department of Education recently proposed significant changes to the Civil Rights Data Collection (CRDC), including eliminating the school finance portion. The Department sought feedback, and boy did it get it—over 600 comments, plus coverage in NPR and Education Week.

Breaking with many of our peer organizations, Edunomics Lab wrote in support of eliminating the school finance portion of CRDC.

We got some calls. This didn’t seem right given that Edunomics Lab has been a champion of education finance data and financial transparency. How were we not siding with peers like Education Trust, the Center for American Progress, GreatSchools, the Learning Policy Institute, and WestEd in crying foul at the move to strip school spending questions from the federal education civil rights survey? Isn’t Edunomics Lab for financial data? Isn’t Edunomics Lab for civil rights? (Yes, and yes.)

Our response wasn’t a mistake. And our reasoning is simple: CRDC yields bad school spending data.

“But isn’t bad data better than no data?” asked a colleague from a data visualization organization.

We say “no.” And stripping CRDC of school spending data does not leave us with no data: Other more reliable data sources are emerging. For those who think we’ve gone batty, here’s our thinking (and, to be clear, our comments deal exclusively with changes to the CRDC finance section, not other proposed eliminations):

The CRDC survey isn’t structured in a way that can yield reliable school-level financial data. In many districts, financial accounting systems aren’t equipped to isolate dollars and staff counts in the way CRDC asks. For instance, CRDC asks districts to isolate those full-time equivalent (FTE) counts and salaries for support personnel in each school that are funded by state and local dollars, but many district accounting systems only count dollars (not FTEs) or don’t isolate expenditures in this way.

In the absence of standardized tracking for the survey variables, some 14,000 local administrators (one in each school district in the country) are left to guess at how to complete it. Should they use budget data instead of expenditures? Should a school consider reading coaches as teachers when they instruct small groups? What should a school do when some instruction happens via districtwide contracts that enable students to take AP classes online? The result in many states is that the data are neither clean nor comparable. Sometimes, they are downright wrong.

Problematically, CRDC bypasses state agencies. Schools and districts submit their figures directly to the federal government. That’s because the federal authority for collecting CRDC data doesn’t extend to state agencies. (While SEAs can voluntarily assist their districts, they don’t have to and most don’t.) Often there are blatant errors, but the Department of Education doesn’t have access to the actual systems, so by the time the data are assembled and published, some three years later, no one can attest to their accuracy or use them in a timely or effective manner. Where the data are wrong, they stay wrong.

Other federal surveys offer more promise for accurate data. The F-33 (Local Education Agency Finance Survey) and School-Level Finance Survey or SLFS (an optional but growing survey of spending variables by school in twenty states) don't share the same fatal flaw. Unlike CRDC, both collections have a named “fiscal coordinator” in each state agency. These coordinators work continuously with NCES to ensure that the accounting systems in their states align with the federal collections and resolve data errors. (That said, the two-or-more-year delay in publishing the data limits its use for more nimble and nuanced budget decisions.)

The new ESSA-mandated school spending reports offer another—more timely—alternative. ESSA requires states to publish school-by-school financials annually. States have been working hard to build systems that work with their states’ accounting structures. Many are going further to work with district leaders, advocates, and parents to develop state report cards that depict school spending in a user-friendly way. To date, twenty-one states have published their spending data, with the remaining states on track to meet the June 2020 deadline.

Isn’t CRDC better than nothing on some variables? It’s true that while SLFS and ESSA data collections will include school spending, they won’t have all the same finance variables as CRDC. For isolated state and local spending on some inputs like support personnel salaries, some have argued that CRDC data are better than nothing. We disagree. In a high-stakes world where trust in districts is already low, posting incorrect and dated information in the name of civil rights isn’t helpful. (For anyone needing an example of why bad data is worse than no data, see here.) If nothing else, we’re wasting school and district leaders’ valuable time. CRDC finance questions are tedious, time consuming, and duplicative. And we have better data options.

We know we’re swimming against the tide on this. In a letter against the proposed CRDC changes, Washington Senator Patty Murray and twenty-seven of her Democratic colleagues argued that cutting the school finance elements “will further hide funding inequities between low-income and more affluent school districts.” This misunderstands existing datasets. (NCES already reports reliable data on district spending.) We support the proposed CRDC change because we understand the full complement of school finance datasets and CRDC’s flaws.

Let us be clear: We need great financial data on schools. Neither SLFS nor ESSA data collections are perfect; more work is needed to ensure the data are clean and used constructively. Critics have rightly noted that the Department of Education doesn’t yet collect ESSA data, which means that data could disappear and leave us without the ability to compare school spending across states over time. To ensure these data are not lost, Edunomics Lab is launching a new initiative to collect, archive, and assemble the data for cross-state comparisons.

Reliable school spending data are vital for equity and civil rights purposes. To that end, we support eliminating what isn’t working and focusing instead on real financial transparency, with comparable, actionable data that can lead to on-the-ground changes in spending practices that support equitable opportunities and better outcomes for all students.

One of the most talked about education policy proposals during last year’s busy state budget season was the creation of the Quality Community Schools Support Program, which increased state aid for charter schools by $30 million. Now, nearly half a year later, that program is making headlines once again because of a potential loophole.

Let’s start with a little context. The new funding program was built around two stipulations. First, it only provides resources to charter schools that meet quality benchmarks. These standards—which my colleague Aaron Churchill called “rigorous but reasonable”—include being authorized by a sponsor with an exemplary or effective rating, scoring higher on the state report card’s performance index measure than the district in which the school is located, and receiving an overall grade of A or B for value added.

Second, the program specifically targets high-poverty charter schools. Only schools that enroll at least 50 percent economically disadvantaged (ED) students are able to access the funds. In addition, the law provides a higher amount of per-pupil funding for ED students—eligible schools receive $1,750 for each student identified as low income, compared to $1,000 for non-economically disadvantaged students.

When the program made it through the budget cycle and into law, choice advocates immediately saw its potential. Charters have long faced significant funding shortfalls compared to their district counterparts. A study published by Fordham last year found that charters in the Big Eight received approximately $4,000 less per pupil than their district counterparts. This funding gap severely limits the potential of schools, networks, and the entire sector. Newly available money would, among other things, make it possible for the state’s best networks to expand their reach and open more schools.

But that’s not all it could do. Lawmakers also recognized that, while Ohio is home to some excellent charter schools, there are charters doing remarkable work outside the state, too. Networks like IDEA Public Schools, Uncommon Schools, and YES Prep have a history of serving students well, and recruiting them and others to the state would mean more quality learning opportunities for Ohio students.

To make the state a more attractive destination for high performers, lawmakers included a method for out-of-state operators to access Quality Community Schools Support Program funds for their newly created Ohio schools. Like existing charters, new schools are required to contract with an exemplary or effective Ohio sponsor. But since they are new and therefore lack performance-index and value-added scores, they can demonstrate their quality by meeting one of the following options:

Option A: Has operated a school that received a grant funded through the federal Charter Schools Program or received funding from the Charter School Growth Fund.

Option B: Meets all of the following requirements:

• One of the operator’s schools in another state performed better than a school in the district in which the school is located;

• At least 50 percent of the total number of students enrolled in all the operator’s schools are ED;

• The operator is in good standing in all the states where it operates schools; and

• The department determines that the operator does not have any financial viability issues that would prevent it from operating a community school.

These alternative methods for proving quality were intended for schools that aren’t already operating in Ohio. State Superintendent Paolo DeMaria said as much in his budget testimony: “The budget also affords new community schools the opportunity to qualify for funding if the school replicated a school that meets the above criteria or uses an operator with a record of quality in other states” (emphasis added).  

The distinction that these methods were intended for use only by new schools is critical. Why? Because Accel, a large charter operator with ten Ohio schools that qualified for funding, applied for its thirty-three other schools to also receive funding—despite those schools failing to meet the required academic benchmarks. Accel based their request on a Colorado charter school they run that was awarded a federal grant a few years ago and therefore meets the requirements of Option A. (For more information, check out this detailed overview by Patrick O’Donnell of the Plain Dealer.) 

It’s hard to fault operators for pursuing every possible option to get their schools more funding. But the out-of-state provisions weren’t designed to open a back door to eligibility for current Ohio schools that failed to meet rigorous quality standards. They were designed to give high-performing out-of-state operators a chance to demonstrate their quality prior to opening a new school.

Late last week, the Ohio Department of Education announced that sixty-three schools qualified for the funding. Dozens of other schools, including the thirty-three mentioned above, were denied funding because they failed to connect their Ohio operations to those in other states. This seems like a fair result. It would have been incredibly concerning if a large group of schools was able to sidestep the standards every other Ohio charter had to strive for purely because of a distant association with an out-of-state entity.

At the end of the day, every existing charter school in Ohio was given the same opportunity to earn a portion of these funds. Sixty-three of them did, and they deserve credit for that. Hopefully over the next few years, many more charters—including those that applied and fell short this time—will improve and earn funding in the next round. Until then, policymakers would be wise to revisit the language and make it crystal clear that the out-of-state option is intended only for operators who haven’t yet had the opportunity to achieve success in Ohio.

After spending most of my forty-year career working on organizational performance improvement, I have learned that some of the most important causes of poor performance are often the least visible.

One of these is organizational governance, which has been defined as “the set of responsibilities and practices exercised by the board with the goal of providing strategic direction, ensuring that objectives are achieved, ascertaining that risks are managed appropriately, and verifying that the organization’s resources are used responsibly.”

In practice, “governance” takes several different forms. In the corporate sector, almost all firms employ some version of “administrative governance.” In this model, which has evolved over time through regulation, case law, and experience, the board of directors’ fiduciary duty of care is interpreted to include making careful, informed decisions by assuming an active role throughout the entire decision-making process. This includes assuring themselves that they have the information required to take action, devoting sufficient time to reviewing this information, and drawing on the advice of outside experts when necessary to augment their own knowledge.

Under administrative governance, board decisions typically include establishing critical organizational goals; approving the strategy and resource allocation to achieve them; hiring and evaluating the CEO (and sometimes approving the hiring of other senior officers); ensuring that risks to the success of the strategy and survival of the organization are identified and properly managed; and accurately reporting results to stakeholders.

Most of these decisions are taken only after extensive discussions with management, and among board members themselves. The critical challenge for corporate boards using the administrative governance model is maintaining a clear distinction between governance and management. As someone once pithily put it, the former is about asking the questions, while the latter is about telling the answers. This challenge is made more difficult by the fact that corporate boards inevitably have directors who were once CEOs themselves. The transition from being an effective manager to being an effective director is not an easy one to make.

In contrast to corporate boards, many not-for-profit, public sector, and school district boards use a “policy governance” model, such as the one developed by clinical psychologist John Carver in 1990.

Policy governance has four key elements, wherein the board:

• Is responsible for devising statements that describe the purpose/goals the organization must achieve;
• Is responsible for hiring a CEO/superintendent to achieve those ends;
• Devises “executive limitations” to constrain the behavior of the CEO/superintendent and the district; and
• Regularly and rigorously monitors the superintendent’s performance compared to the ends and executive limitations.

Whereas corporate boards typically concern themselves with means as well as ends, under policy governance, the means by which ends are to be attained—including strategy, resource allocation, and risk management—are left to the CEO/superintendent’s discretion.

This can and often does lead to weak or slipshod implementation that may block the ends from being achieved. For example:

• Boards often establish ends and executive limitations that lack associated metrics that are valid, reliable, and rigorous;
• Boards fail to carefully monitor the attainment of ends and compliance with limitations, and/or they fail to impose significant penalties on CEOs when ends are not attained or executive limitations are violated;
• A single-minded focus on the CEO as the board’s only employee tends to create excessively powerful CEOs and weaken information flows back to the board, thereby undermining the board’s ability to perform its fiduciary duty of care; and,
• Policy governance limits transparency with respect to critical decisions, many of which are made by the CEO out of view of the board (and, in the case of school districts, out of view of the public as well).

This raises a critical question: Why do so many boards outside the private sector use policy governance in spite of its apparent weaknesses? It is not because the law mandates it; boards themselves usually decide on the governance model they will use. So what might account for popularity of policy governance?

In my experience, this seems to be primarily due to differences in board legal context and director qualifications. In terms of context, school board directors are far less exposed to the risk of litigation based on an alleged failure to comply with some aspect of their fiduciary duty of care. This makes it easier for them to adopt the policy governance model.

In terms of qualifications, corporate boards deliberately select directors with a mix of experience, industry knowledge, and functional skills that are relevant to the organization’s business. This enables them to have very detailed discussions with corporate management teams about critical decisions and performance outcomes.

In contrast, school board members are elected by the public. As a result, their average level of relevant experience, knowledge, and skill relative to district management is often lower than is true in the case of corporate boards. This makes the adoption of policy governance more attractive.

In sum, use of the policy governance model has arguably resulted in weak board governance of many school districts, and has thus created another root cause of their poor student achievement and other lackluster results. Unfortunately, the use of policy governance seems likely to persist, due to durable factors like school boards’ legal context and the average qualifications of their directors.

2019 was quite a year for education reform. We saw many conversations about what conclusions to draw from NAEP scores, how to help accelerated learners, the ineffectiveness of restorative justice practices, and what it would take to bring research-based literacy instruction into our classrooms. To mark the end of a decade, and the end of 2019, here’s a countdown of the year’s nineteen most popular posts:

19. “Instructional coaches: The heroes of the Golden Age of Educational Practice,” by Michael J. Petrilli. Mike is glad that more and more teachers have access to instructional coaches, especially those in high-poverty schools. He puts more stock in the effectiveness of “social learning” to shape instruction than in imposing rewards and punishments on teachers, and makes the point by showing how healthcare workers in Bangladesh used a person-to person education campaign to improve practices there.

18. “Even more social engineering in New York schools,” by Chester E. Finn, Jr. The New York City Council decided that every school in their community school districts would have to develop a desegregation plan, making a complicated school admission system more complicated. What’s worse, Checker explains, is how this decision threatens the quality of selective schools that already have a strong record of helping underserved students succeed.

17. “At least encourage the crazy ones: How to reward our highly motivated students,” by Frederick M. Hess. With all the attention going to closing the achievement gap, many accelerated students get little attention in the education reform movement. Rick offers a solution inspired by The Concord Review: Use guided essay writing to let motivated students explore topics they’re passionate about.

16. “To help students who are several “grade levels” behind in reading, focus on building—and assessing—students’ knowledge,” by Natalie Wexler. You can’t improve literacy without teaching content knowledge. Natalie expands on how an approach based on this fact would help educators prevent students from falling behind and identify those that have.

15. “Evidence-based products won't sell themselves,” by Michael J. Petrilli. It seems that the whole “If you build it, they will come” mantra doesn’t apply to education products. Mike explains how crucial good marketing is to getting these products in the classroom. He warns that even the best ones may perish if they can’t compete.

14. “Practicing humility when it comes to evidence-based practice,” by Michael J. Petrilli. Despite the zeal of reformers, even the best reforms might not work everywhere or as intended. With this in mind, Mike encourages education advocates to keep in mind the limits of existing education research, and the gaps within in it, when making recommendations.

13. “Rampant grade inflation is harming vulnerable high schoolers,” by Brandon L. Wright. Grade inflation doesn’t just hurt struggling students, writes Brandon. He shows how even high school valedictorians who make it to elite colleges suffer when they arrive on campus unprepared. He urges states to focus on efforts to check for grade inflation and stop risking the future of their students.

12. “Knowledge is power: Why our students need less of Franklin's wit and more of Madison's wisdom,” by Dr. David Steiner. David draws a contrast between Benjamin Franklin’s focus on practical skills and James Madison’s focus on theoretic wisdom and how it applies to our education system. The error of the former created today’s problem where students are taught “critical thinking skills” but no common base of knowledge to draw from. He believes it’s time to give all students access to a common trove of wisdom.

11. “Restorative justice gone wrong: One mother’s horror story,” by Julia Carlson. Julia shares her nightmare experience with flawed discipline practices. Her son was bullied for a month—without consequences for the bullies—because his school decided to embrace restorative justice practices. School leaders did little when she confronted them, causing her to pull her son from the school and reconsider her previous support for its practice.

10. “Ed reform’s lost decade: Twilight of the technocrats,” by Robert Pondiscio. Robert believes the 2010s were marked by the misguided optimism of reformers who viewed good standards and accountability policies as a panacea for education ills. But they were wrong, and he hopes reformers in the next decade shift the movement’s center of gravity to on-the-ground changes inside classrooms rather than big structural changes outside of them.

9. “Reading between the lines: What states can do about America’s literacy challenge,” by Joanne Weiss. What if states took the initiative in supporting student knowledge-building? Joanne pitches this as a solution that would help educators know what content to teach and which texts to use so that their students can read on grade level.

8. “The worst news from NAEP,” by Max Eden. The release of NAEP scores this year sounded many alarms for education reformers. One concern Max points out is that reform efforts failed to deliver for African American students. But he also asks which policies are to blame for this outcome.

7. “Dear teachers, most of the popular lessons you found online aren't worth using,” by Amber M. Northern and Michael J. Petrilli. The market for instructional materials for educators is so vast that even Amazon wants a piece of the pie. The bad news, write Amber and Mike, is that while teachers turn to the internet for quality content to use in teaching, “the sites they’re turning to are often providing subpar versions of it.”

6. “Curriculum advocates: Prepare for a long, hard struggle,” by Robert Pondiscio. Robert likes the reform movement’s recent attention to curriculum. He even imagines a future where entire states adopt high-quality, knowledge-rich curricula—and still see no improve improvement in NAEP scores. That’s because curriculum adoption is only half of the battle. He hopes reformers turn their attention now to implementation.

5. “Staying on the shelf: Why rigorous new curricula aren’t being used,” by David Steiner. David paints a picture of your average, motivated middle-school teacher told to switch to a new curriculum after one day of training. Left alone to juggle multiple contradictory instructions from state standards, her principal, and her previous training, she gives up and returns to her old curriculum. This lack of teacher support and incentives will have to change to raise learning outcomes.

4. “When a school is improving, stay out of the way, warns an important new book,” by Robert Pondiscio. Robert reviews Eric Kalenze’s book, What the Academy Taught Us, and draws insights from its sad but enlightening ending. It tells of an effective teacher-led intervention system that began lowering dropout rates—until the district decided it had “better” ideas.

3. “How much knowledge is necessary for comprehension?,” by Robert Pondiscio. What does a game of Jenga have to do with teaching reading comprehension? Pull out just enough blocks, says Robert, and the tower falls, much like how the meaning of a lesson can hinge on an essential vocabulary word or concept. Here he reviews a study that has some implications along these lines.

2. “Restorative justice isn't working, but that's not what the media is reporting,” by Max Eden. Max reviews a RAND school discipline study that runs counter to the narrative of restorative justice advocates. But, he notes in frustration, the study’s authors—and subsequently the media—framed the results in a way that obscures the concerning findings.

1. “The scourge of education malpractice,” by Dale Chu. Emily Hanford’s radio documentary lays the problem of kids being poor readers at the feet of inadequate—even harmful—teaching practices. Dale, in what was Fordham’s most read article of 2019, took this knowledge to his own daughter’s reputable kindergarten to ask about their approach to literacy, only to find that it relied on such practices. Children with invested parents will learn to read well regardless of this, he writes, but what does that mean for less fortunate students?

Gifted education in the U.S. is too scarce and lacks substance, and that’s especially true for high achieving black and Latino children. A new report by the Education Trust concludes that this gap has “everything to do with policies, adult decisions, and practices and little to do with students’ academic abilities.”

Authors Kayla Patrick, Allison Socol, and Ivy Morgan use national participation data for gifted and talented programs, eighth grade Algebra I, and Advanced Placement. Thanks to the U.S. Department of Education’s 2015–16 Civil Rights Data Collection and Common Core of Data, these data exist for all schools in the U.S.

They begin by examining algebra achievement to “debunk the myth that students of color do not excel in advanced courses.” Their analysis is based on course passage, and they find that, where data exist, almost all such students who enroll in eighth grade algebra end up passing: black children represent 20 percent of enrollees and 19 percent of passers, while those figures for their Latino peers are 27 percent and 26 percent, respectively. The authors conclude that “It is clear that Black and Latino students can be—and very often are—successful in advanced coursework.”

Nevertheless, Patrick, Socol, and Morgan find that too many of these children never get the chance to participate in advanced coursework. If they can succeed when given these opportunities, the authors reason, then participation should be more “fair,” by which they mean the share of black and Latino students’ overall enrollment in a school system should be closer to their share of enrollment in advanced courses. Yet across the board, that’s pretty far from the case. Black students’ overall enrollment hovers around 15 percent in elementary, middle, and high school, for example, yet their shares of students in gifted programs, eighth grade algebra, and Advanced Placement classes don’t exceed 10 percent. The gaps for Latino students are similar. Worse, they find, “the most racially diverse schools…are more likely to have disparities in access.” And although less diverse schools are more likely to have fairer representation, these schools tend to have lower overall enrollment in advanced coursework.

To narrow these gaps, the authors offer a plethora of state-level policy solution, some of which are more compelling, convincing, and realistic than others. The strongest include requiring and funding universal screening for gifted and talented programs that uses multiple measures of ability and potential, instituting automatic enrollment of children who qualify, and using tools like tech-based blended learning to expand the number of students with access to strong, fully-certified teachers. These are each sensible and relatively low cost, so most schools and districts could institute some or all of them.

For readers who follow these issues, the report doesn’t offer a whole lot that’s new or surprising, but that’s OK. It’s a worthwhile reminder that our schools are failing to provide disadvantaged gifted children with the education they deserve—one that that meets their needs and enhances their futures, just like peers with other distinctions and problems. And that doing this better means providing all students from all races, ethnicities, and backgrounds with the opportunity to enroll and excel in challenging, rigorous coursework.

SOURCE: Kayla Patrick, Allison Rose Socol, and Ivy Morgan, Inequities in Advanced Coursework, Education Trust (January 9, 2020).

1. As dedicated Gadfly Bites subscribers will no doubt recall, your humble clips compiler is of the opinion that a) the EdChoice voucher program is not “broken” (it is operating as designed, including a boost in the number of eligible students based on school report cards, which has happened before), and b) that no mass outflow of students from districts to private schools will occur (no more so than in any of the other previous expansions of the program). Y’all will also recall, no doubt, that I am likely the only person in Ohio who holds this opinion and that no one else cares what I think on the matter except perhaps some of you. At a minimum, you are continuing to read this. (Silly you!) At-large discussion around “obvious brokenness” and the necessity for a legislation-based “short term or long term voucher fix” continues feverishly. Based on the discussion, I’d like to a third facet to my opinion. It is that c) the February 1 “deadline for action” noted in said discussion is artificial and unnecessary. If the state’s voucher program is so potentially catastrophic and as harmful as we are being told, the deadline should be whenever it needs to be to “contain the damage”. Since the only damage anyone is concerned about is to districts’ bottom lines (and not to any families being chronically underserved by those district schools), surely the real “deadline” is nearer to the fall, just before school starts, and thus the “fixers” can take their time to get the proper “fix” in place. Chill out, gang. Clawing back vouchers from families after they have been awarded should be no big deal if districts’ very survival is at stake. Right? But again, that’s just my opinion. (Cleveland Plain Dealer, 1/14/20)
    
2. As I have exposited in these Bites before, the main aim of most of the voucher grouchers seems to me to be attacking those things which underpin the EdChoice program: school report cards. No report cards, no ranking of low-performing schools, no EdChoice eligibility. Simple. But is there a way to rate schools without report cards, perhaps? One state representative, discussing voucher hatred with some local peeps in Fulton County, seems to favor “feelings” as a replacement rating system. He explains repeatedly how he “feels” that schools in his district are good, despite what the current report cards (and EdChoice eligibility list) say. Perhaps we could keep vouchers if we simply replace report card-based eligibility with someone’s feelings on school quality? Probably as good a way as any to lower the number of eligible schools to some acceptable number…whatever number that may be. (Fulton County Expositor, 1/14/20)
   
   

3. Something similar is at work in this piece, I think. It is a huge and detailed article about so-called “improvements” wrought upon pre-K in Cincinnati via a massive infusion of tax dollars. (You know what I’m talking about.) Despite in-depth discussion of numerous “improvements” to the trappings and conditions of the pre-K experience (teacher salary increases, more teacher training, free school uniforms, more curricular materials)—and despite several promises in the piece to turn to a discussion of outcomes—the piece skillfully avoids that final dénouement. In the end, we are given no evidence at all that things have improved for kids academically. Only trappings, suppositions, hopes…and feelings of improvement. (Soapbox Cincinnati, 1/14/20)
    
4. The power of eminent domain is likened to the unavoidability of the draft in this update on the football field kerfuffle in Bridgeport Local Schools, which we first talked about on Monday. A local attorney made that assertion to a reporter this week, indicating his belief that the district will win in its efforts to secure the property it wants, a thriving commercial hub which the owner doesn’t want to sell. While that lawyer is probably right, I doubt that the 95-year-old property owner made it to where he is today by rolling over for a good analogy. (WTOV-TV, Steubenville, 1/14/20)
   
   

5. Greg Toppo, author of the book “The Game Believes in You,” takes a look at the efforts of Cleveland private school Hathaway Brown to forge a path for girls in the competitive and growing world of varsity esports. Interesting stuff. (The 74, 1/14/20)

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A mere 6 percent of students are enrolled in charter schools nationwide, but there are sixteen cities in which at least one-third of public school students attend charters. Newark, New Jersey, is one of them. Its charter school sector educates about a third of the city’s 55,000 public school students and represents “one of the most expansive and rapidly growing in the nation,” notes Marcus Winters, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute and associate professor at Boston University. Thus it is significant that Winters’s new study finds that “attending a Newark charter school that participated in the city’s common enrollment system leads to large improvements in math and reading scores,” and that those effects are “especially large for students who attend a charter school run by either the KIPP or Uncommon Schools networks.” In other words, charter effectiveness—at least under certain conditions—can continue to grow even as the number of schools and students served expands.

Newark developed a universal enrollment system starting with the 2014–15 school year. Known as “Newark Enrolls,” the system allows families to rank up to eight schools and uses a complex algorithm to place children in public, magnet, and most charter schools. Just over half of families were admitted to their first choice schools; 95 percent ended up in one of their top three picks, according to a Columbia University analysis of placements for the 2016–17 school year.

Winters’s report looks at data from the first two years of Newark Enrolls. He notes that just a few studies have analyzed results among a similarly broad set of charter schools in cities where charters educate a large percentage of children, citing studies of Boston and Denver as comparable. This matters, Winters writes, “because charter schools may not scale well. For instance, large charter sectors might dig deeper into the local market for teachers and school leaders, necessitate a larger bureaucracy, or lead to changes in the characteristics of students who enroll in charters.” So it’s a significant finding that Newark’s charter sector, and particularly schools operated by two leading CMOs, can continue to raise student performance, even as they grow and even as charters comprise a large and growing share of the city’s population.

The study lands at a well-timed moment, with charter schools increasingly out of favor among Democrats, who count low-income families of color in urban centers as their ostensible political base (support for charters among such families remains strong) and who tend to dominate the local politics in major cities. Newark Schools Superintendent Roger León has asked New Jersey officials, for example, to reject the renewal applications of four charter schools in his city and to block further expansion, citing the financial impact of charters on district schools. The Manhattan Institute report arrives just days before New Jersey’s education commissioner is expected to rule on those renewals and adds fresh fuel to the debate.

SOURCE: Marcus A. Winters, Charter Schools in Newark: The Effect on Student Test Scores, Manhattan Institute (January 15, 2020).