We are enjoying the early stages of a surprising and encouraging curriculum moment in education marked by robust attention and interest in scientifically-sound reading instruction. Among veteran advocates for knowledge-rich curriculum, it feels like a long overdue and welcome change in the weather.

Here’s how it could end: A few years from now, maybe by 2025, imagine yet another doleful round of NAEP scores showing that kids still aren’t making significant progress. The bottom that dropped out of NAEP in 2019, with our poorest performing children falling further behind, still hasn’t recovered. Now imagine these depressing results follow a few years of fascination and flirtation with high-quality curricula—schools, districts, even entire states, converted to the cause of curriculum and content, turning to EdReports to select curricula that are aligned with standards, knowledge-rich, and of sufficient rigor to challenge students. As analysts digest another round of depressing test scores, a consensus forms about curriculum-based reform, and quickly calcifies: We tried it. It didn’t work.

Two weeks ago in this space, David Steiner of the Johns Hopkins Institute for Education Policy looked at our emerging love affair with high-quality curricula and materials (a renaissance he helped spark as the architect of EngageNY) and concluded that “any celebration is utterly misplaced.” No one should expect to see a surge in student outcomes because “we have built a system that not only fails to support the sustained use of demanding curriculum—but actively produces powerful disincentives to its use,” he wrote. The list of those disincentives is long: state assessments unaligned to content; teacher evaluation systems that valorize “student engagement” conspiring against challenging material; and intervention schemes for struggling students that privilege content-agnostic basic skills and pull kids away from core curricula—a thorny and vexing problem that was the subject of this year’s Fordham Wonkathon, winners of which are heralded in this week’s issue of the Education Gadfly Weekly.

At Saturday’s ResearchEd conference in Philadelphia, the keynote was delivered by Baltimore schools CEO Sonja Santelises, who struck a similar theme with a stirring bit of straight talk on what she describes as “educational redlining.” Students in majority-white classrooms are more likely to get engaging, high-quality lessons and grade-appropriate work, she noted. Citing studies on low-quality student assignments from both TNTP and the Education Trust, she put the matter in sharp relief, quoting one student preparing for the same AP exam as students in other schools. The more fortunate students were reading The Odyssey, while in her school the assigned text was The Hunger Games. “There’s nothing wrong with The Hunger Games. I love The Hunger Games. I read it when I was twelve,” the girl said. “It really struck me as unfair.”

Dr. Santelises is a compelling figure who spends her days at the intersection of knowledge-rich curricula, research-based practice, urban education, and low test scores. Few district superintendents are more well-versed or more committed to knowledge-rich curricula. And she knows it’s exactly what the 85,000 kids whose education she is responsible for need, and what they’ve mostly been denied due to “educational redlining.” She’s also exceptionally clear-eyed, and her experience should sober those of us who have long championed curriculum as a reform lever and who might be tempted to think we’re winning the argument.

“I want to be honest,” she cautioned. “I’ve never said it’s just about curriculum. What I’ve said is that if you don’t have a strong curriculum, you’re not even starting in the right place.” But ultimately it’s teachers who bear the responsibility of figuring out how to deliver it. They will determine, Santelises warned “whether this content-rich curriculum, this shift back to science-based reading instruction, is actually going to take hold.” When teachers are ill-prepared themselves to teach challenging material, or when students are denied the opportunity to grapple with complex texts and given simplistic or overly-scaffolded work with low cognitive demands, gaps will only persist and widen. “If we don’t figure this part out,” Santelises said, “all of the research in the world is not going to move what happens every day with kids.” She’s exactly right.

Speaking afterward, Santelises went even further, describing the adoption of a knowledge-rich curriculum as “the first half of Chapter One.” This is the part that curriculum advocates, and frankly most single-issue advocates in education, miss. Every structure, impulse, imperative, and habit in a large school system works at cross-purposes. Teacher training rarely valorizes it on the front end, once on the job the pressures of testing and accountability functionally demands bad practice by expecting visible results now. As Steiner observed, “Is it any surprise that over 95 percent of America’s teachers use multiple, self-curated internet materials mixed together in an utterly eclectic and incoherent fashion with their district’s curriculum?” And no, the answer is not “scaffolding,” the most common “solution” suggested to teachers whose students are far below grade level. Santelises drew hearty laughs during her ResearchEd talk when she quipped that school administrators “sprinkle [scaffolding] like its pepper on a Caesar salad. ‘You just need to scaffold!’ You can get to the standards, just scaffold!’” Such facile and simplistic answers “are actually going to undermine the absolute right intent of having a more rigorous curriculum,” she explained. Right again.

It’s certainly bracing that American education seems poised to rediscover the centrality of what teachers teach and what students learn. But curriculum advocates (and I count myself as one) should not underestimate the enormity of the challenge or the long odds of success. Mostly they—we—must not allow ourselves the luxury of thinking or allowing others to believe that the battle is won at adoption.

Schools are complex institutions with competing priorities almost hard-wired to metabolize and neutralize any “fix.” Curriculum does not exist in isolation. The road to results is long and steep. Having leaders like Santelises at the helm of a major American school district is important. Buying time for thoughtful reforms to take root is even more important.

If I may offer some unsolicited advice to my fellow disciples in the cause of research-based teaching and knowledge-rich curricula: widen your lens, embrace complexity, forget top-down initiatives, counsel patience, brace yourself for years of struggle, identify your allies doing the actual work, and prepare to protect their flank. In sum, abandon single-issue curriculum advocacy, which is naïve, unrealistic, and self-defeating. It paves the way for more of the wild, fad-prone gyrations that we see over and over in this field.

Curriculum is not the missing piece of the puzzle, it’s the foundation for the rest of what schools do. It’s great to see a new seriousness emerge about instructional materials and the work we ask children to do. But we are not nearing the end of the story. As Santelises observed it’s the first half of Chapter One.

A new study by CALDER investigates how career and technical education (CTE) course-taking affects college enrollment, employment, and continuation into specific vocational or academic programs in college.

The researchers use postsecondary and unemployment insurance data from the Education Research and Data Center (ERDC) from 2014–16 to study the postsecondary outcomes of Washington State’s high school graduating class of 2013. Postsecondary data are limited to students who enroll in public colleges and universities in Washington State, and the final analytical sample includes 38,987 students whose eighth-grade achievement data can be linked to high school completion records. With about 43 percent of the sample qualifying as having concentrated in career and technical education—high school graduates who complete at least four CTE credits—the authors compare concentrators to otherwise similar non-concentrators by controlling for academic achievement prior to high school.

They find that students who concentrated their coursework in CTE are less likely to enroll in college, but are more likely to work full-time and for longer than other non-college-goers in the three years after high school. Specifically, 59 percent of CTE concentrators enrolled in college, as opposed to 65 percent of non-concentrators. This may be explained in part by the fact that CTE students are more likely to be disadvantaged, e.g., have learning disabilities (by 2.5 percentage points), be English language learners (by 4 percentage points), or qualify for subsidized lunch programs (by about 10 percentage points), and consequently, less likely to enroll in college.

Among students who do not enroll in college, CTE students are 1 percentage point more likely to work full-time in the three years following high school graduation, and are more likely to work full-time for an average of 0.11 more quarters within the three-year period.

And among students who do enroll in college, CTE students are significantly more likely to enroll in and complete vocational programs, primarily at community colleges and particularly in applied STEM fields—i.e., information technology (network systems, information support services, and interactive media pathways) and manufacturing (maintenance, installation, and repair pathways)—and public safety fields, such as correction services, security and protective services, and law enforcement services.

One important limitation of the study is that it does not include enrollment data for students in private nonprofit and for-profit colleges or out-of-state public institutions. In the analysis, these students are incorrectly coded as not attending college, and because it’s rare for students to enroll in two-year colleges out of state, this classification error likely skews the overall college enrollment and four-year college enrollment regressions. Additionally, the findings are limited to the state of Washington, where some minority groups that may benefit from vocational credentials, such as blacks and Hispanics, are underrepresented, compared to the overall U.S. population.

Still, it’s a comprehensive study, considering the data available, and it shows that the relatively high rates of transition into certain vocational programs can’t be fully explained by differences in academic preparation or other observable student characteristics. These positive impacts of CTE participation among Washington State high schoolers suggest positive effects on credential attainment and subsequent earnings, and that isn’t something to ignore.

SOURCE: James Cowan, Dan Goldhaber, Harry Holzer, Natsumi Naito, and Zeyu Xu, “Career and Technical Education in High School and Postsecondary Pathways in Washington State,” CALDER (November 2019).

1. This is an editorial which exonerates the Lorain school board and every other area official and meddling rando who obstructed David Hardy’s work as CEO even before he got started. I don’t like it. (Morning Journal, 11/16/19)
2. This is a piece of reportage, in which suburban school officials complain to the media about the EdChoice Scholarship Program and demand that it be “fixed”. I don’t like this one either, and EdChoice isn’t broken. (Gongwer Ohio, 11/15/19)

3. This is a story about teachers at Ohio’s largest online charter school. The teachers are lovely and positive and provide some interesting detail about their jobs. I don’t hate it, despite some offputting quotes and misinformation provided by others. (Columbus Dispatch, 11/17/19)
4. This is a story I like very much, even though it is ostensibly about sports. But it is also about donuts, adoptions, Italy, cute kids, and a foundation in Westerville that helps students in struggling districts attend private schools instead. (Columbus Dispatch, 11/18/19)

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Note: This is the seventh in a series of blog posts on school funding in Ohio; for the previous posts, see here, here, here, here, here, and here.

How to fund low-income students is one of the big questions in Ohio’s ongoing school funding debate. While the plan put forward by Representatives Bob Cupp, John Patterson, and a group of district officials would spread more than a billion additional dollars in state aid across Ohio schools, concerns have been raised that it doesn’t steer nearly enough money to the state’s neediest schools.

For instance, a highly detailed analysis by Howard Fleeter indicates that high-poverty “Big Eight” urban districts would see an average increase of $1,115 per pupil under a fully implemented plan, poor rural districts would gain $1,158 per pupil, and wealthy suburban districts would see a bump of $906 per pupil. Not satisfied by this modest advantage for poorer districts, the Akron Beacon Journal editorial board urged the state “to do better.”

Though not featured in Fleeter’s analysis, Ohio’s brick-and-mortar charter schools, despite serving predominantly low-income students and already shortchanged in the overall funding system, would fare dismally under the plan. The Big Eight charters would see an increase of just $758 per pupil—even less than wealthy suburban districts. Worse yet, charter amounts would be frozen after a couple years, while districts would continue to gain funds after full implementation because the plan calls for adjustments based on inflation. Meanwhile, private-school scholarships, which also serve mainly disadvantaged students, would not rise at all—a $0 increase. 

There are a number of plausible reasons why the Cupp-Patterson plan doesn’t concentrate dollars on poorer schools.

• With the exception of school choice funding, Ohio’s overall system is already pretty fair to high-poverty schools. Perhaps it’s harder to justify sending more state funds to them.

• The Cupp-Patterson plan seeks to eliminate “caps,” which suppress funding increases for some wealthy (but growing) school districts. While removing caps is a worthwhile endeavor, doing so likely soaks up a significant portion of the funding hike sought under the proposal.

• Its icy approach to choice programs might reflect the interests of the district officials who served as plan developers. 

• As Representative Patterson noted earlier this year, he and his colleagues have “been unable to fully define what ‘economically disadvantaged’ is.”

Given the questions around the way in which the plan funds low-income students, it’s worth reviewing how Ohio currently provides extra resources to schools that serve needier students. We’ll also consider some options that legislators could pursue to strengthen the state’s approach to funding low-income students. (Wonk warning: This piece gets into the weeds on some issues, but the details are important as legislators weigh alternatives.)

Option 1: Funnel more dollars through the Opportunity Grant

Through its current funding formula, Ohio already delivers more state aid to its poorest school districts. The core of this system is the Opportunity Grant, which in FY 2018 drove 58 percent of state foundation aid to districts. The allocation of these funds is based on the “state share index” (SSI), which takes into account a district’s property wealth, and in about half of all districts, resident income too. The SSI, whose values range from 0.05 to 0.90, is multiplied by the “base amount” for the Opportunity Grant—currently $6,020 per pupil—so that poorer districts receive larger allocations, while wealthier districts receive less because they can raise more revenue locally.[1] As Figure 1 indicates, the SSI generally correlates with districts’ ED rates, meaning that the Opportunity Grant will tend to allocate more state funds to districts with the most disadvantaged pupils.

Figure 1: Relationship between economically disadvantaged students and state share index, Ohio school districts, FY 2019

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Source: Ohio Department of Education

Thus, one way Ohio could direct additional state dollars to districts with more low-income students is to simply funnel more dollars through the Opportunity Grant. For instance, if Ohio raised the base amount to $6,500 per pupil, a high-poverty district such as Dayton, which has an SSI of 0.88, would see an increase of $422 per pupil. Conversely, wealthy districts would see smaller increases: A district with an SSI of 0.15, for example, would see a bump of just $72.[2] In addition, increasing the base amount and adding a multiplier to it would also better support public charter schools, which receive the full base amount because they have no local taxing authority. Nevertheless, as Figure 1 indicates, the correlation between districts’ SSI and ED rates is not one-to-one—nor is that result likely because the SSI isn’t based on ED data. So while this remains a viable option, some of the funds would be misdirected if the goal is to effectively steer extra resources to low-income students.

Option 2: Enhance the ED component with funding based on direct-certification counts

To provide extra resources in a direct manner to districts serving a high proportion of low-income students, Ohio includes a funding component based on ED rates. This funding stream, often considered part of the state’s categorical “add-ons,” is far smaller than the Opportunity Grant—making up just 5 percent of the overall foundation program. This component doesn’t rely on the SSI. Rather, it’s based on the ED index, whose values range from 0 to 4.1, and is designed to deliver more aid to districts with more concentrated student poverty.

Figure 2 displays the clear, albeit mechanical, relationship between districts’ ED rates and index values (the curve is due to a square term in the index). The ED index is then multiplied by a base amount of $272 per pupil, resulting in more dollars flowing to higher-poverty districts. For instance, a district with an ED index of 3.5 would receive $952 per pupil in extra support through this funding stream. Public charter schools are eligible to receive these funds, too, and their amounts are based on the ED indexes of students’ home district.

Figure 2: Relationship between economically disadvantaged students and ED index, Ohio school districts, FY 2019

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Source: Ohio Department of Education. Note: The figure displays each district’s percentage of ED students, including both district and charter students who reside in the district (the index is based on students attending both types of schools).

At first blush, the ED component appears to be a natural lever to deliver more aid to districts serving low-income students. But here’s the rub: As discussed in an earlier piece—and probably alluded to in Representative Patterson’s comment—a growing number of Ohio students are being misclassified as “economically disadvantaged” due to their districts’ or schools’ participation in a federal subsidized meals program known as Community Eligibility Provision (CEP). Under this program, students are universally eligible for free and reduced-priced lunch (FRPL)—the basis for ED identification—and thus CEP leads some more affluent students to be incorrectly deemed ED. In my estimation, approximately 65,000 students are misidentified, about the size of the Cleveland and Toledo school districts combined.

In what developers have called a “placeholder” amount (until a proposed study on ED identification and costs is finished), the Cupp-Patterson plan would increase the ED base amount from $272 to $422 per pupil. That’s probably OK for now. But given the challenges of ED identification in light of CEP, what’s likely needed is an alternative mechanism to deliver funds in a more accurate way. Basing funding on direct certification (DC), a direction that a few other states have gone, is a promising option. Using administrative records, DC identifies low-income students based on their households’ participation in means-tested programs such as TANF, SNAP, or Medicaid, along with students flagged as in foster care, migrant, or homeless.

This method has the advantage of not misclassifying higher-income students who attend CEP schools. And because the income thresholds are lower to participate in these means-tested programs—at or below 133 percent of the federal poverty line versus FRPL’s eligibility cutoff of 185 percent—DC captures students who likely face the greatest educational challenges. However, DC may undercount some low-income students whose families decline to participate in means-tested programs, and it would require some cross-agency heavy lifting to properly link records. 

Care would also need to be taken to incorporate a new measure of student poverty into the existing system. Because the income thresholds differ under ED and DC methods, some districts and charters may lose funding if Ohio suddenly replaced one method for the other. A range of implementation options exist, but perhaps the most straightforward (though requiring additional funds) would be to create a two-tiered structure that stacks DC-based funding on top of the existing ED dollars. The table illustrates what that could look like.

​

This approach would have the following advantages:

• Drive more resources to districts and charters that educate students from Ohio’s lowest-income families.

• Continue to provide extra aid for students in households between 133 and 185 percent of the federal poverty line. 

• Avoid a potential “hold harmless” provision, since funds are being added to the component.

• Deliver some extra funding under the ED tier for low-income students whose families don’t participate in TANF, SNAP, or Medicaid.

• Enable CEP districts to allocate funds to their neediest schools based on DC counts. (They currently report 100 percent ED across all schools.) The state could even require these funds to automatically flow to the schools in which DC students attend.

Option 3: Use the new Student Wellness and Success funding stream

In a new dimension of school funding starting this year, Ohio now provides $276 million in extra funds to districts and charters that aim to support students’ non-academic needs. These dollars must be spent in specific ways, and schools have to engage community partners as well. Perhaps seeking to avoid the problems of defining student poverty via ED status, the allocation of these funds is based on U.S. Census Bureau estimates of districts’ percentage of children whose family incomes are at or below 185 percent of the federal poverty line (charter funds are again based on students’ home district data). Much like the Opportunity Grant and ED funding, districts with higher poverty rates receive larger per-student subsidies than wealthier districts. The exact calculation is somewhat complicated, but it generally allocates between $20 and $250 per pupil depending on the childhood poverty rate of the district.[3]

Although census data have many useful applications, they have some drawbacks when used in a school funding context. First, it’s not based on the actual enrollment of students attending public schools—it’s all children ages zero to eighteen. Thus, it would reflect children under the kindergarten age, along with homeschooled and non-public-school students. Second, the data are collected via survey samples, resulting in estimates of poverty that in some cases differ quite substantially from ED counts. While districts’ census and ED data generally correlate, the rates diverge by more than 10 percentage points among a fairly large number of Ohio districts.[4] In most cases, the ED rates are probably more reliable measures of districts’ student demographics, since they are based on actual headcounts. Third, because the census doesn’t produce data at an individual school level, it can’t help us gauge poverty across schools. Thus, it’s hard to imagine a system that effectively drives dollars to high-poverty schools based on census data.

Though basing funding on census data is a reasonable short-term solution, it’s something only two states currently do and is likely not ideal over the long haul. The Student Wellness funds have praiseworthy aims, but legislators should tread carefully when it comes to using this funding stream to deliver extra aid to Ohio’s poorest schools.

* * *

The Cupp-Patterson plan gets a few things straightened out in Ohio’s funding system. But as some critics have suggested, it doesn’t have an especially strong focus on driving extra state resources to the neediest students, whether they attend district or charter schools or use a scholarship to attend a private school. If state legislators seek to make funding low-income students an even greater priority, they have options within the existing framework. It doesn’t take a complete overhaul of the system to make it happen.   

In the United States, there are more than 34,500 private schools. Tuition-charging high schools run the gamut from small religious institutions that serve dual academic and social purposes, to larger schools centered around a certain pedagogy, to elite academies that draw highly-motivated students from far and wide. The landscape is different in the United Kingdom, where they’re smaller, more academically focused, and concentrated on the more elite end of the scale. A new study in the Oxford Review of Education examines private schools in England to see whether, and how, such schools might confer an academic advantage on their pupils over those in what the study’s authors term “state schools” (what we would call “public schools” in America).

The University College London research team used an existing longitudinal data set called Next Steps, which followed a representative cohort of English children born in 1989 and 1990. Data were collected annually between 2004 and 2010, with a follow up in 2015. The private school study included data such as social class, parental education level, income, housing status, ethnicity, gender, and test scores. Additionally, since state schools in England base attendance largely on catchment areas, geographic locations of private school students were also collected for comparison.

The research team focused on those students attending private versus state schools during their upper secondary studies—roughly speaking, equivalent to the last two years of American high school—in which students with college plans must participate. The team identified 5,852 students in the sample who met the criteria of actively working toward college admission and whose test scores were available. 14.6 percent of these students were in private school, mirroring the national average of 15 percent private school attendance. Their research questions: Are privately educated students in upper secondary schools likely to take more courses which will facilitate college admission? Do private school students perform better in those courses than those in state schools? And do private schools confer any other advantage on their pupils for getting into an elite university, or indeed into any university?

The results: The number of college prep courses taken is higher for students in private schools, but only slightly. And that boost disappears when student demographics are similar between private and state school students. Performance on end-of-course exams follows a similar pattern. The more similar students are demographically, the more similarly they score on exams, regardless of school type attended. However, previous research has identified a hierarchy of courses within the college prep framework—and end-of-course test scores—that are more likely to facilitate students being accepted into a university. This new report indicates that students in state schools are far more likely to take courses lower on that hierarchy than are their private school peers—courses which have the weakest correlation with facilitating university acceptance. This then results in an overall boost for private school students in attending a university, especially increasing attendance at elite universities.

The details matter here. Saying that private schools confer an academic advantage on their students is true in a very general sense, and the report reinforces that high-level view. But data show that this “advantage” weakens or even disappears the more demographically similar two students are, indicating that much more is at work than just school environment. And the finding that state schools serve up far more courses that fill time and do not lead to university acceptance is highly alarming. A 2018 study by the Center for American Progress reached a similar conclusion here in the United States: The number, type, sequence, and rigor of high school courses all matter mightily in making a diploma equal a ticket to college. Any school, public or private, that can hold the line on rigorous and relevant coursework for its students will confer the “advantage” that matters most: college readiness.

SOURCE: Morag Henderson, et. al., “Private schooling, subject choice, upper secondary attainment and progression to university,” Oxford Review of Education (November, 2019).

1. Ohio’s Report Card Study Committee met this week to talk turkey about all of the various parts making up school and district report cards. Our own Chad Aldis was invited to provide testimony, which is fairly liberally quoted in Gongwer’s coverage. Nice. (Gongwer Ohio, 11/13/19) You can read Chad’s full written remarks here….if you’re into that sort of thing.
2. Chad was also on the opinion page of the Dispatch today, opining on the topic of Academic Distress Commissions. (Columbus Dispatch, 11/15/19)

3. Speaking of Academic Distress Commissions, the one in charge of Lorain City Schools voted unanimously this week to end the tenure of district CEO David Hardy, effective January 3. Seriously, guys? Unanimous? (WKYC-TV, Cleveland, 11/13/19) And speaking of voting folks out of a job, there is some discussion of that possibility in this piece, in which a “divided” state board of education ended up voting to give state supe Paolo DeMaria a raise and a bonus instead. (Gongwer Ohio, 11/14/19) I don’t know what to make of the fact that the Dispatch’s version of the state board story is the less salacious of the two. Frankly, I’m a little shook. (Columbus Dispatch, 11/14/19)
4. Can you imagine a city government entity trying to cap a traditional district school’s enrollment size for any reason? Nope. Neither can I. The howls of outrage would be deafening. So why must private schools endure such egregious meddling on the regular here in Ohio? Beats the heck out of me. (ThisWeek News, 11/14/19)

5. Let’s end the week on some happier news. Here is a profile of an awesome-sounding education provider for students in the Canton area who are on the autism spectrum. Why yes, they do take students on the Ohio Autism Scholarship. How kind of you to ask. And the piece discusses that at some length too. (Canton Repository, 11/15/19)

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Since 2005, Ohio’s Educational Choice Scholarship Program, or EdChoice, has allowed tens of thousands of students to attend private schools via a state-funded scholarship in the form of a voucher. From the program’s inception, students could qualify for a scholarship because they were assigned to attend a low-performing school. Ohio also launched an income-based voucher in 2013, and has added a new grade level of eligibility each year. By 2020, low-income students in grades K–7—regardless of their assigned school—would have been eligible for a voucher.

Every year, the Ohio Department Education releases a list of which public schools are designated as EdChoice (i.e., low performing) schools. The criteria for how a school is placed on the list are outlined by state law and require the use of three years of school report grades. These criteria are supposed to be cut and dry, but over the last few years, things have gotten more complicated. That’s because, back in 2016, state lawmakers introduced a safe harbor policy intended to protect students, teachers, and schools from accountability sanctions during Ohio’s transition to new and more rigorous state assessments.

State report cards for the 2018–19 school year were released this fall, and a new list of EdChoice-designated schools was published not long after. Because of the safe harbor policy, the schools were identified based on data from the 2013–14, 2017–18, and 2018–19 school years.

Compared to last year’s list, the new list is…well, huge. In 2018, there were around 500 EdChoice-designated schools. Now over 1,200 of the state’s 3,186 traditional public schools are designated. In one year, the list has more than doubled in size. But its length isn’t the only thing that’s generating attention. It’s also who’s on it. For years, EdChoice largely identified schools in higher-poverty communities. But for the first time, some suburban districts have schools on the list too. This is largely because of modifications in state law as to what constitutes a struggling school. Recent changes have gone from looking primarily at a school’s overall grade to other important data points like student growth and the school’s ability to help struggling readers.   

Unsurprisingly, there’s already pushback coming from these areas. There are concerns about a mass exodus of voucher-wielding students headed for private schools, and a resultant drain on funding. There are arguments that schools don’t deserve to be on the list because the report card measures that put them there are faulty. And, of course, there are anti-choice folks gearing up to argue that the list is just another example of how the state uses accountability policies to “punish” traditional districts.

But amidst all this controversy, there are a few important things to remember.

First, it’s highly unlikely that the EdChoice designated school list is going to lead to a mass exodus of public school students. Just because students are eligible for a voucher doesn’t mean they’re going to actually use one. Parents aren’t going to pull their students out of schools that they feel are serving them well. For example, an elementary school in Shaker Heights found itself on the list last year for the first time but only lost a total of five students. In places like Solon, Shaker Heights, and Upper Arlington, where housing prices are high, the likelihood of a significant number of families suddenly opting for private schools is slim. Many of these residents pay high mortgages and property taxes because they want to send their children to the local public schools.

Second, we shouldn’t be rushing to change report cards just because of a larger-than-normal EdChoice designation list. Such a move would be a great example of the tail wagging the dog. Does Ohio’s accountability system need some adjustments? Certainly. Here at Fordham, we’ve made several common sense recommendations. But it would be irresponsible of state lawmakers to make drastic changes purely because a few districts are unhappy that their poor grades gave students more school options.

Finally, it’s important to realize that as long as educational opportunities are afforded based on academic performance measures, there will continue to be tension and pushback. The best path forward isn’t to ignore this controversy, but to resolve it by empowering more families who can’t afford to enroll their children in their school of choice the opportunity to do so based on their incomes instead of their schools’ report cards.

At Fordham, we’ve been arguing for income-based eligibility for a while. Income-based vouchers are vital because they help the students most in need of options. Low- and middle-income families are seldom able to just pick up and move to a new district. Charter schools also aren’t an option for many families because state laws limit where charters can open. That leaves private schools as the only alternative, but paying tuition without assistance would be a serious financial burden. So families often end up stuck, not just in poorly performing schools, but in schools that, regardless of their overall academics, don’t meet their student’s needs.

The good news is that, thanks to the recently passed state budget, more children will soon be eligible for EdChoice scholarships. Starting in 2020–21, for example, the program will be expanded to include low-income students in all grades. And the state is adding a new, year-round application window, as well as an automatic increase in the number of available scholarships if the number of applications exceeds 90 percent of the current cap.

But the work isn’t finished yet. If lawmakers want to escape the annual debate about what schools should be on the EdChoice-eligibility list, they should seriously contemplate how they can open the door of educational choice to more families. Rather than limiting families to a school that meets the state’s frequently changing definition of underperforming, we should commit to making it easier for parents to find a school that helps their child thrive.

More school bus woes in Columbus

Another week, another story of charter school students in Columbus getting woeful service from Columbus City Schools’ transportation department.

Why not charter schools?

The LeBron James-supported I Promise School got a ton of kudos this week when it was announced that housing—I Promise Village—for needy students and their families would be added to the services available next year. A detailed and interesting story from the Akron Beacon Journal discusses two other rare examples of such efforts across the country, including a boarding-style charter school in California.

Here to stay

The Buffalo News this week discussed ongoing efforts to turnaround low-performing district schools in the city. The tone of the piece was one of sadness that charter schools continued to “proliferate” during the turnaround work. But the director of the Buffalo Academy of Science, as you might expect, put it more positively: “The charter school sector is real,” he said. “I know there are a lot of people trying to ignore this fact, but the charter schools are here to stay as long as the education is not fixed in Buffalo.” Maybe even after that!

Maybe not here at all

The charter school sector in Kentucky is not real. At least not yet. But that didn’t stop River Cities Academy from attempting to be the first charter school to open in the Bluegrass State. They submitted a 939-page application to a local school district and even went so far as to court interested parents. A lack of local will, a lack of state funding, and a lack of support from the incoming governor will likely doom the nascent effort.

In Cleveland, the work continues

The Cleveland Transformation Alliance’s annual report touts some positives among its district and charter partner schools—pre-K, graduation rates, and third grade reading scores—but there doesn’t seem to be a lot to hang one’s hat on. Hopefully more substantial progress will come soon.

Relay Leadership Training event

KIPP Columbus is hosting a one-day training event on January 16, 2020, focusing on teacher observation and feedback. It is ideal for anyone who coaches at least one teacher or who will be preparing to coach in the coming year. Leaders will learn the four keys to effective observation and feedback, including locking in frequent and regular observations, identifying the one or two most important areas for growth, giving direct face-to-face feedback that practices specific action steps for improvement, and creating systems to ensure feedback translates to practice. In addition, leaders will have opportunities to practice skills by participating in simulations and video reviews. For more information or to register, click here.  Registration is now live, with seats on a first-come, first-served basis. Please contact Cecilia Shanahan with any questions.

Last month, the Mississippi State Board of Education began a public comment period on a new proposal to eliminate the state requirement that students pass a U.S. History end-of-course exam before receiving a high school diploma. This is just the most recent development in a years-long trend that has seen a number of states already eliminate such tests in various subjects, and others consider doing the same. Even New York, where the high school Regents Exams have been central to raising high school standards, is debating whether to keep them.

Promoters of these course-based exams say that they help keep classrooms on task, provide the public with a uniform quality check on school performance, and give students a reason to study hard instead of “grade grubbing.” On the other hand, critics offer the broad complaint that there is simply too much standardized testing in schools and specific concerns that assessments may be low-quality and may not cover the knowledge and skills students need. And when states have required students to pass exams in order to graduate, researchers have found evidence that the difficulty of the tests discourages some students from persisting and graduating.

It’s still not clear whether the movement to eliminate these exams will accelerate, level off, or reverse, but what happens could make a big difference to both school accountability systems and how American students engage their coursework.

A recent report I co-authored for the Thomas B. Fordham Institute analyzed how these end-of-course assessments (often called “EOCs”) are have been used by states in recent years. We found that the states that are now turning away from these exams are bucking a longer trend in the U.S. towards higher high school standards and the adoption of course-specific tests.

Traditionally, it has been common for high schools to set a very low bar for graduation, with many states having only “seat-time” requirements and the ones that required students to pass an “exit exam” assessing nothing more than 8thgrade material. After the publication of A Nation at Risk in 1983 alarmed Americans about the quality of their schools, many states upgraded their graduation tests to cover high school-level content. More recently states have increasingly linked testing to what students were studying in specific courses, using EOCs. While in the 1990s, just two—New York and North Carolina—used state-mandated end-of-course exams, a majority have used at least one of these tests in the years since. Although a few states have dropped the exams recently, the tests are still a major part of many high schools: Students in twenty-six states from the class of 2020 will have taken at least one EOC.

Still, although few states have dropped their EOCs entirely, many states are changing how they use them or are reducing their number. For example, Tennessee and Washington have recently reduced the number of EOCs, and although Ohio and Pennsylvania both added new exams in recent years, those two states have watered down their significance. Utah and Texas have gone so far as to forbid school districts from holding students accountable for their performance on the tests by factoring the scores into course grades, while administrators and teachers may still be held accountable.

Figure 1: The use of EOCs has risen dramatically since the turn of the century, but has been falling more recently

What is behind these recent changes? After a decade and a half since the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) of 2001 ushered in a new era of test-based accountability, pressure to reduce testing has grown in many states. This new anti-assessment mood has often steered arguments away from the nuances of types or specific uses of tests. Instead, many activists and politicians have argued simply to eliminate tests.

Mississippi is a good example. In that state, despite the state requiring just three state tests of high schoolers (plus the ACT), the U.S. History EOC is the only state test that can be eliminated while keeping in compliance with federal law, so anti-testers have targeted it all the same. Few states require students to take more than a handful of tests during the entire four years of high school.

Although in the U.S. there is some debate about whether exams such as EOCs and general high school exit exams are beneficial to students, numerous international studies have found that countries with objective external assessments academically outperform countries without them. A recent review of these studies by economist Ludger Woessmann says that, internationally, “central exams are related to better student achievement, favorable labor market outcomes, and higher economic growth.” Although some American studies have shown evidence that high school exams increase the dropout rate, in our study of EOCs, we found no such negative effect and even found some positive effects: States using the most EOCs have higher graduation rates and perhaps even slightly higher SAT or ACT scores.

As high school graduation rates continue to climb and states increasingly implement “credit recovery” and other programs to pass more students along, it’s still not clear whether the drop in states using EOCs is a blip or the beginning of a longer trend. As long as anti-testing sentiment is strong, those concerned about academic rigor in high schools will need to work to preserve these tests, improve them, or replace them with something equally external, objective, and rigorous.

Editor’s note: This essay was originally published by Real Clear Education.

When I read the article in The 74 by the Colorado Education Initiative’s Rebecca Holmes introducing a one-day conference that would bring together educators, families, and students to discuss what school quality is and who decides, I looked at who would be speaking. As most of them held positions different from mine, I decided to attend. It turned out to be an enlightening day.

The first speakers highlighted the conference’s goal of “building an accountability system designed for family, community, and educator needs,” and the key questions participants would address: “What do we value? What defines school quality? And what evidence will we accept that quality standards have been met?”

The program given to participants included this list of possible student outcomes for attendees to consider. The order was interesting, to say the least:

As the day wore on, some predictable themes kept coming up:

• Teachers are the experts at assessment.
• Standardized tests have many limitations, and should be deemphasized or eliminated.

However, other speakers raised points that clearly made some in the audience uncomfortable:

• The acceptability of locally designed performance criteria critically depends on whether the associated metrics are reliable, valid, and rigorous.
• It also depends on whether there is evidence that outcomes on these metrics are significantly affected by school-level interventions.
• Student assessment should require the transfer and application of demonstrated concepts.

For me, the most interesting part of the day was when one speaker summed up what seemed to be the dominant audience view by saying that “accountability means continuous improvement.”

I’ve spent forty years in the private sector, including leading a professional engineering company, and I fully agree that continuous improvement is critical and depends on efficient feedback based on clear goals, appropriate metrics, and effective assessments. But I also know that a continuous improvement process is not the same as an accountability system.

Accountability systems include consequences at the group and individual level for both good and bad results. Unfortunately, throughout last week’s meeting, consequences weren’t mentioned at all. For private sector and military leaders, that absence speaks volumes.

There is a reason why employers today increasingly require job applicants to take a broad range of assessments covering reading, math, and writing proficiency, as well as critical thinking, complex problem solving, and other advanced skills. Employers have largely lost confidence in academia’s accountability systems, in both K–12 and higher education. After last week’s meeting, it seems very unlikely that is going to change.