Let me preface my response on the fact that I am I am a mom and a scientist. I dabble in education policy because it has such a profound impact on my household and my community.

So why are so many students two, three, or more grade levels behind? I am particularly concerned because the vast majority are male and students of color. I have seen how this hurts families and school communities. People in the D.C.-Maryland-Virginia area only really like winners, and if you have a student that is behind, people don’t like to talk about it. I think this leads to problem number one. Why don’t parents and parent groups obsess over this issue? Policy folks may think I am crazy, but I am out there in the schools and in the meetings. Some groups bring it forward but we don’t stay focused on the why of below grade level kids. We just look at data and keep looking.

Don’t faint, but I don’t think data can help with this issue. I think the problem is communication. Usually the way parents find out is through a statewide test letter mailed to their home, which has a wonky explanation page similar to the one attached to tax forms. A few lucky parents are informed by parent teacher conferences. During the conference, the teacher will rely heavily on education terminology, which makes it hard to accurately surmise how bad a situation the student faces. This poor information continues until eighth grade when the system sends students that cannot read or properly calculate simple math problems to high school. We have lived like this for decades and tried the latest intervention over and over without making it clear to the parent and student what is really happening.

First, if a student is two to three grade levels behind in elementary school, we should intervene swiftly and with an all-hands-on-deck approach. We need to have the highest-level administrator of school meet with the parents (this is always done for disciplinary action but rarely for academic intervention) and tell them how important it is to cure the problem. There should be a prescription (if we don’t know the solution, that is a bigger issue), such as go to Saturday school or mandatory after school sessions. We need to do a better job of diagnosing the student’s problem before we issue the medication (educational solution) to cure it. The actual reason they are behind and the steps, one through five, that will get them back on track. There needs to be deadlines that are measurable. The parents need to be engaged, and students need to understand what is happening. The meetings should have a simple chart with the milestones and a red “X” for items not being met and a green check mark for the items that are met. No more long diagnostic and professional reports to parents. A simple chart and, if progress can’t be made, bring in the specialist. The chart can be emailed weekly or texted, but the parents must respond affirmatively that they understand the progress report. The parents and students can be given homework to do at home too, but the majority of the intervention must take place under the supervision of a qualified professional.

Most affluent parents can afford to hire a specialist at the moment their student falls behind, and then back that up with a tutor. That is because they understand the first communication in the form of a state exam score or sit in the classroom and question the teacher to make sure their student is getting the proper attention. These parents intervene immediately and go into crisis mode until their child is on or above grade level. The key is to mimic this for all students utilizing the resources that can be provided at the school and district (if necessary). Too often the reason students stay behind is because no one has the laser and persistent focus on the family. We are so busy looking at data reports instead of talking to Jay and his guardian over and over about him being behind. We need to do this for all subjects, not just math and reading. We keep treating the symptoms and not the disease. A student failing science has hidden math application disease, which will later manifest itself.

Finally, we have begun to rely too much on email or these automated grade reporting systems. Anything automated for a student that is below grade level is not going to work. You need eye contact with the parent and student. No google classroom report or notes. Successful students had this type of contact at some point either in school or at home. Small groups or clubs after or during school is the only approach, and in some cases it will take one on one. If you see them slip, start back on step one. Some will say this is too expensive. We are wasting money now collecting a million data points with few results. Data does have a huge role for statewide and national policy. But districts, and in particular individual schools, spend too much time on this instead of saying we need Sally, Marcus, and Javier to get a prescription for help. Principal Hernandez needs to call Mr. and Mrs. Singh to discuss their daughter’s progress and go over the chart again. Our goal is to have her on grade level by January. Go back to preassessments to show parents where their kids started. The tools are available, but human contact is the only way to solve this ever persisting problem.

During this past summer, Family Engagement Lab facilitated a gathering of parents to discuss parent-teacher partnerships at their elementary school. During the discussion, the group moderator pulled us aside to let us know that a parent was there because her child had been retained a grade and she did not know why. A few weeks later at another gathering, we were pulled aside by the moderator again, this time to tell us about a parent whose child was receiving decent grades throughout the year but scored poorly on the state test and now needed summer remediation.

In both cases, the parents were not fluent in English, and their children attended schools where nearly all teachers and staff only spoke English. This barrier often limits the two most important figures in a child’s life—parents and teachers—from communicating early to identify problem areas and partnering together to support struggling learners. Language is only one of several barriers to parent-teacher collaboration. Limited time and resources, as well as cultural differences, can make even basic communication challenging.

For many parents, their kids are doing “great” until quite suddenly they are not, leaving parents wondering why they were not informed sooner so they could have done something to help. Research from Learning Heroes highlights that this disconnect is a significant national concern, with 89 percent of parents believing their child is on track, while only 36 percent of students are actually meeting grade-level standards.

The consequences are severe. English learners make up 9.5 percent of public school students, and 16 percent of kindergarteners nationally, yet proportionately far fewer achieve academic proficiency compared to their English-speaking peers. For example, national data reveal that ELs are far less likely to achieve proficiency compared to non-ELs in mathematics (14 percent versus 43 percent) and Reading (9 percent versus 40 percent). For low-income students, the data are also troubling, as students from economically disadvantaged backgrounds typically enter school behind their peers academically—and they never catch up. The long-lasting negative impacts associated with academic underachievement are well-documented and range from lower high school completion rates to lower earning potential and underemployment.

But parents hold incredible potential for positively altering the trajectory for students who are behind. In fact, parent engagement in at-home learning has been found to have more than twice the effect on student test scores than risk factors like parents’ education level or socioeconomic status.

Fellow wonks, we need to do a better job of inviting parents into their child’s learning process, early and often. When parents are not plugged into their child’s learning, we miss the opportunity to build the key relationship between parents and teachers that sets students up for success. When parents are invited to collaborate with teachers to support learning, we open the door for positive relationships that are marked by regular, ongoing, two-way communication about learning. Teachers know more about their individual students’ needs and are able to better meet those needs in the classroom, and parents are inspired to provide extra encouragement and support at home. Gone are the days when communication occurs primarily when there is a problem, and oftentimes, when we’ve missed opportune windows to intervene.

We founded Family Engagement Lab to improve student achievement by helping schools and teachers ignite the power of families to support learning. Through listening sessions and research with families and teachers, we developed a tool called FASTalk (Families and Schools Talk), designed to break down the barriers that can prevent effective parent-teacher collaboration and meaningfully improve academic achievement for vulnerable students. FASTalk helps to:

• Build parents’ knowledge and confidence through weekly tips and activities sent via text, in their home language. Importantly, all tips and activities are aligned to high-quality curricula, connecting families with key information about classroom instruction and how they can help support that learning at home.


• Strengthen key relationships between parents and teachers from the moment children start their formal education. All FASTalk text messages come from their child’s teacher, parents’ most trusted source of information to support learning (e.g., see Deloitte, 2016). Furthermore, messages are delivered with warmth and gratitude and promote ongoing, two-way communication about learning through weekly polls that allow parents to provide feedback on their experience with the activities.


• Make ongoing academic partnership easy for busy teachers and parents. FASTalk’s parent-child learning activities are tied directly to classroom learning and easy to do anywhere. Messages are pre-loaded and pre-scheduled for teachers (who, as we know, have a lot on their plates already).

FASTalk is having an impact on the academic achievement of struggling students. FASTalk helped four times as many kindergarten students who were the furthest behind on the development of key literacy in the fall meet literacy benchmarks midyear. When looking at report card grades, we found that grade acceleration was most pronounced (two to three months) for students whose families did not share a common language with the teacher.

By inviting parents to collaborate in student learning and strengthening the relationships between parents and teachers, we can help a range of students who are at risk for falling several grade levels behind: English learners in urban districts, rural families with limited internet connectivity, special education students, children living in poverty, and others.

The adoption and implementation of high-quality curricula nationwide is raising the bar for what students should know and be able to do. Families are ready—and motivated—to support their learning. Let’s foster positive relationships between teachers and families to ensure that all students, especially those who are the most vulnerable and furthest behind, have the opportunity to meet and exceed these expectations.

I want that quiet rapture again. I want to feel the same powerful, nameless urge that I used to feel when I turned to my books. The breath of desire that then arose from the coloured backs of the books, shall fill me again, melt the heavy, dead lump of lead that lies somewhere in me and waken again the impatience of the future, the quick joy in the world of thought, it shall bring back again the lost eagerness of my youth. I sit and wait. —Excerpt from All Quiet on the Western Front.

It’s Wednesday morning, first period, eighth grade English language arts. Ms. Jackson faces her twenty-five students[1] in Urban Center USA. She has fourteen years of teaching experience. Three months earlier, her principal had announced that the curriculum she had been using—more or less—for the last eight years would be replaced by a “high-quality, standards-aligned, EdReports green-labeled” curriculum.[2] Prior to the start of the semester, Ms. Jackson had received a day of professional learning on the new materials, followed up by an additional hour of “PD” a month ago.[3] In those sessions, she had been admonished by the district’s curriculum director to dig in and be sure to stay on pace with the new curriculum.

She was determined to try. But her challenges were considerable: Seventh grade assessment results told her that on average, her students were more than two years below grade level in reading. Ms. Jackson was reassured to find that, based on its Lexile level (a measure of difficulty), All Quiet on the Western Front was at the very low end of difficulty for the grade. But it would still be uphill work.

Today was to be a “Reveal,” meaning that “Students [should] go deeper into the text, explore the author’s craft and word choices, analyze the text’s structure and its implicit meaning.” She stared at the paragraph before them: rapture and reading, desire and lead, memory and futurity, the mental universe, the lead inside, figuratively, symbolically, literally?

She would start with the figurative language. She looked at the curriculum guide again—very minimal help there for her challenge.[4] An internet source from the Massachusetts Department of Education told Ms. Jackson the obvious: “Strategically plan instruction that incorporates previous standards into the lesson, for example: how to distinguish literal from figurative language.” Easy to say, but how to do it?

To add to her problems, today was observation day. Ms. Jackson’s principal was going to evaluate her teaching using the Charlotte Danielson framework. Ms. Jackson knew that her principal, a one-time math teacher, would plough through the list—“engaging students in learning,” “using questioning and discussion techniques,” “demonstrating flexibility and responsiveness.” There was nothing about actually teaching All Quiet on the Western Front. Neither would Ms. Jackson be given any credit in her evaluation for attempting to remediate her students’ lack of understanding of literary symbolism in the text in front of them.

What would be on the principal’s mind, however, were the results of a computerized Interim Assessment from the Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortium (SBAC) that her eighth graders had recently taken. Ms. Jackson recalled that among the many, many skills on which her students struggled was “8.L.5 Demonstrate understanding of figurative language, word relationships, and nuances in word meanings.” Of course, the interim test had contained no reference to her curriculum material. Not one of her students would be tested on their understanding the “breath of desire” or the “dead lump of lead.” She had no idea if spending a class session on this specific language would or would not translate into her students’ successfully deciphering figurative language in some unrelated chunk of text used in the next curriculum-agnostic assessment—or the all-important summative assessment at the end of the term.

Ms. Jackson recalled the warning in the Common Core State Standards that “The Standards set grade-specific standards but do not define the intervention methods or materials necessary to support students who are well below…grade-level expectations.”[5] She knew the usual trajectory for such students: Send them to RTI (Response to Intervention)—a label given to the effort in thousands of schools to support students with learning challenges. Many of Ms. Jackson’s students were already receiving “Tier 2” support[6]—structured, assessed lessons on isolated vocabulary and skills such as “fluency stems” using “fluency strips.” Ms. Jackson knew that once subject to extensive RTI treatment, all attention to All Quiet on the Western Front would melt away, but maybe her students just needed to get back to the basic skills?

Ms. Jackson’s recalled her teacher preparation program and induction. Nothing she had been provided with had prepared her to translate a demanding text—this text in this curriculum—into teachable strategies that could be used to support her students’ as they struggled today. She was on her own, and had a choice to make.

Those “breaths of desire”—and the hope of deep, thoughtful engagement with great works of literature that inspired her district to adopt its “high-quality, standards-aligned, EdReports green-labeled” curriculum in the first place—would just have to wait.

—

When I and my New York State Education Department colleagues launched EngageNY in 2010, I could not have guessed that the materials would be used in some fashion by up to a third of math and a quarter of ELA teachers. EdReports, citing RAND data, indicates that “36 percent [of teachers] indicated they used EdReports “to identify, select, and implement instructional materials.” The Council for Chief State School Officers is several years into an eight-state project to support state education leaders in supporting their school districts’ transition to the use of High-Quality Instructional Materials.[7]

But any celebration is utterly misplaced. Availability isn’t usage, and usage “in some fashion” isn’t going to move the needle on student outcomes. Ms. Jackson’s story is going on across the United States, and it is negating efforts to implement high caliber curriculum across the country.

Ed Reports puts the matter succinctly:

Unfortunately, even as materials have improved, a significant challenge remains in ensuring districts are using the quality materials that are available. Our analysis shows that only a small fraction of students (22 percent in math and 15 percent in ELA) are exposed to aligned curriculum at least once a week.

Common sense suggests, and data confirms, that this isn’t going to achieve anything.

I predict that in the coming months, we will see more such findings to the effect that new high-quality curricula aren’t achieving much of anything for our less prepared students—and the critics are already vocal. My Johns Hopkins University colleague Bob Slavin holds nothing back: “Actual meaningful increases in achievement compared to a control group using the old curriculum? This hardly ever happens…. I am unaware of any curriculum, textbook, or set of standards that is proven to reduce gaps. Why should they?” Instead, he points to research on the positive effect of tutoring, which, as he points out, is curriculum agnostic.

Bob Slavin is an education research scientist: He looks at a single intervention, measures its impact, and reports. Marc Tucker, by contrast, is a systems thinker: He looks at the American education system, finds it deeply flawed, and argues that single interventions such as adopting a high-quality curriculum are likely to prove next to useless until enough of the entire system has been rendered coherent. In words that could have been explicitly addressed to high-quality curriculum interventions, Tucker writes:

The key levers of top performance in the countries with the best education systems don’t work in this country because they are not supported in this country by the other elements of policy that make them work in the top- performing countries.

It won’t surprise readers that the OECD finds that Singapore has some of the strongest curricula in the world. As the report makes clear, Singapore takes curriculum very seriously indeed: What you teach matters in Singapore. But that’s because teacher preparation, curriculum, and examinations, to mention but three key elements, work together so that strong curricular content can have the impact it should.

Our sobering tale of Ms. Jackson reveals that in the United States 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. In what school of education are teachers prepared to teach powerful and demanding works of literature to students who are two or three grade levels below the level required to make real sense of those texts? (I know of none, but would like to be mistaken.) Is there a high-quality ELA curriculum that includes materials for teachers whose students are below grade level? In how many districts are principal evaluation tools supplemented by curriculum-specific rubrics? Beyond the quizzes and curriculum-embedded assessments, how many standalone interim assessments actually measure students’ knowledge of what their curriculum asks them to read? How many summative assessments do the same? Where can we find RTI models that are integrated with specific curriculum?

One state—Louisiana—is in the early stages of providing positive answers to some of these questions. Taking advantage of ESSA’s Federal Pilot Assessment Authority, the state is developing a combined interim and summative assessment grounded in its widely used ELA “Guidebooks” curriculum.[8] The state is starting—just starting—to focus on the implementation challenges of teaching this demanding, high-quality curriculum.

Elsewhere, not so much, or none at all. As TNTP’s recent report resoundingly reaffirms, “Students spent more than 500 hours per school year on assignments that weren’t appropriate for their grade and with instruction that didn’t ask enough of them—the equivalent of six months of wasted class time in each core subject.” And that’s on average: “Classrooms that served predominantly students from higher-income backgrounds spent twice as much time on grade-appropriate assignments and five times as much time with strong instruction, compared to classrooms with predominantly students from low-income backgrounds.”

Given these multiple, mutually reinforcing disincentives to teaching rigorous, grade-level materials profiled above, 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?[9]

In the last decade, a few states, hundreds of school districts, and thousands of schools have taken seriously the responsibility to provide their students with challenging content that is worth learning, and thus worth teaching. But these pioneers are rowing upstream. Our policies must change to help, not hinder, them:

• Schools of education must prepare teachers for curriculum literacy—the know-how to remediate without abandoning challenging curricula materials.
• Publishers need, as a matter of urgency, to provide scaffolding to teachers who face the exacting challenges of teaching grade-level instructional material to students who are years behind.
• RTI materials, wherever practical, should lead students back to the core curriculum, not away from it.
• Districts can and should rapidly add curriculum-specific rubrics to their principals’ teacher evaluation tool.
• Districts should stop using non-aligned interim assessments, using the curriculum-embedded tests instead, or challenging test-makers to create aligned interims.[10]
• We should all realize that one day of Professional Learning isn’t going to change years of teachers’ pedagogical practices. If a district adopts a new curriculum, it will take sustained professional learning, and principal buy-in and leadership, to effectuate fidelity of implementation.

What we teach, and how well we teach it, are the core of any and every school learning experience, no matter the method used. Unless we incentivize teachers to teach demanding material well, most especially to underprivileged students, we will lose this vital opportunity to close achievement gaps and raise learning outcomes. We cannot afford to prove the obvious to ourselves one more time: that implementing an essential aspect of learning is a wasted effort in an incoherent education system.

[1] The average size of an American public middle school classroom.

[2] EdReports is a non-profit organization that evaluates curricula for their alignment with national standards. Green is the color they give to a curriculum that has a high degree of alignment. https://www.edreports.org

[3] Tom Kane and his colleagues found that on average, teachers receive 1.1 days of Professional Development on new instructional materials. https://cepr.harvard.edu/curriculum-press-release

[4] For example, the “Teacher’s Note” for Grade 8, Module 2, Lesson 32 suggests that “If students need a reminder about what constitutes figurative language, ask students to list types of figurative language and write their responses on the board.”

[5] “What is not covered by the standards.” http://www.corestandards.org/ELA-Literacy/introduction/key-design-consideration/

[6] Tier 2 support is essentially a set of interventions for students who are not able to undertake grade level work despite some “supplemental instruction.” http://www.rtinetwork.org/learn/what/whatisrti

[7] Disclosure: The author is an advisor to this initiative.

[8] NWEA, Curriculum Associates, the National Center for Assessment, and my colleagues and I at the Johns Hopkins Institute for Education Policy are working with the Louisiana Department of Education to design and implement this assessment, currently at the middle school level.

[9] As Kathleen Porter-Magee wrote in Education Next in 2017, “A RAND study revised last April found that 98 percent of secondary school teachers and 99 percent of elementary school teachers draw upon ‘materials I developed and/or selected myself’ in teaching English language arts. And those materials are most often pulled from Google (96 percent) and Pinterest (74.5 percent). The results were similar for math.”

[10] In addition to NWEA’s work in Louisiana, Centerpoint recently announced that it was going to create interim assessments for Illustrative Math and EL (what used to be called Expeditionary Learning when it was first part of EngageNY).

All children deserve to attend schools that educate them to the maximum of their ability and open as many opportunities as possible for them. Poor or rich, black or white, high or low achieving, this is a goal we often hear espoused but seldom see achieved. The victims of this dereliction are broad and many, but the results of the 2019 National Assessment of Education Progress (NAEP) give us good reason to focus once again on high achievers. They offer a bright spot on a generally gloomy horizon.

Most everyone has read by now about the dismal scores on our Nation’s Report Card, which again measured how fourth and eighth graders did in math and reading. Aside from fourth grade math, marks were generally flat or down, especially for our lowest-performing children.

The dismayed responses that followed were mostly justified. For those of us who spend our days striving to improve the achievement of young Americans, it was truly disheartening.

Yet a few bright spots emerged. In these pages, for example, my colleague Mike Petrilli and Chiefs for Change CEO Mike Magee detailed the heartening results in Washington, D.C., Mississippi, and Louisiana. Florida also posted some praiseworthy gains. All good, as far as it goes, but why is nobody remarking on the exceptionally strong performance of high-achieving children? Why are they yet again being ignored—and worse?

Check out figures 1 and 2, showing gains over the past decade by top-decile students and in the percentages of students attaining NAEP’s “advanced” level, which is legitimately thought of as “world class.”

The math picture, figure 1, is brightest. Notice how the trendlines, both shorter- and longer-term, are generally positive for children from all races and ethnicities, and regardless of economic status. That’s good. Period. It represents hundreds of thousands of students who are receiving a better mathematics education than they were in previous years.

Figure 1. Results of the 2019 NAEP, percentage of students achieving at advanced level and 90th percentile scores in math, by race and eligibility for free or reduced-price lunch

The results aren’t as positive in reading, especially in the short term, but figure 2 shows that there are bright spots there, too, notably among some disadvantaged groups.

Figure 2. Results of the 2019 NAEP, percentage of students achieving at advanced level and 90th percentile scores in reading, by race and eligibility for free or reduced-price lunch

Bear in mind that the black, Hispanic, and low-income students shown here are mostly disadvantaged, and are generally placed on the deficit side of achievement gap calculations. They’re usually among the have-nots when we talk about the haves. As such, they rely more than their advantaged peers on school to give them the skills, knowledge, and wherewithal to succeed in school, work, and life. Their gains should be applauded, the more so because they contrast with so many other of the NAEP results.

Yet that’s not been happening. Instead, they’ve been widely disregarded and sometimes even characterized as a bad thing. Consider this opening paragraph of a piece written by the Wall Street Journal’s editorial board lamenting the NAEP results: “The highest-achieving students are doing better and the lowest are doing worse than a decade ago. That’s one depressing revelation from the latest Nation’s Report Card that details how America’s union-run public schools are flunking.”

Sure, the faltering scores of low performers are a big and dire problem, especially in a land that yearns to narrow its achievement gaps. But it is unequivocally not depressing that our highest achievers are doing better. Nor should we consider the two outcomes—one positive and one negative—to necessarily be “flunking.” If a young student was improving in one subject but losing ground in another, would she be flunking school? I hope not. Success deserves praise and encouragement, while deficiency deserves attention and solutions. That holds, too, for our schools.

We must, of course, dig deeper into the unsatisfactory gains for some groups, even at the highest levels, and why many other groups are static or declining. Petrilli has theorized that “shifting academic standards dramatically higher, making the tests tougher, and pushing schools to adopt curriculum aligned to those standards and tests may have inadvertently left behind the lowest performing kids.” There are always tradeoffs. In the days of No Child Left Behind, almost all of the focus was on struggling students, and that harmed higher achievers. We may or may not have overcorrected. Some other constellation of policies and factors could be influencing the NAEP results more than we know. I encourage researchers and analysts across the country to search for answers.

Whatever the causes, however, the most recent NAEP results suggest at least two outcomes are clearly established. One is that we have far too many children achieving below their grade level, and we must intensify our efforts to change that. The other is that many schools are doing something right for their high-achieving students, and it’s benefiting kids from all races, ethnicities, and economic backgrounds. The first is a problem we must solve. The second is a good outcome that deserves praise and acknowledgment.

With less than a year to go until the 2020 presidential election, Elizabeth Warren’s ascendancy to ostensible Democratic frontrunner, and the release of her voluminously noxious education proposal, I fell into a fever dream of the same strain that afflicted AEI’s Rick Hess earlier this fall: I imagined President-elect Warren shaking hands with Randi Weingarten in the White House Rose Garden followed by an exchange between a glum reformer and a long-time union apparatchik who was giddy about the coming four years. Here’s the gist of the conversation:

Glum reformer: As a pro-reform Democrat, I’ve always been a fan of Elizabeth Warren. I didn’t care too much for her education plan, but I figured it was more about virtue signaling than actual policy. My hope was that after she became president, she would moderate her tone on education policy issues. Plus I thought DeVos was deplorable. But Randi Weingarten? Seriously?

Cheery unionist: What an acceptance speech! And a fiery one at that:

No more billionaire privatizers, no more school choice segregationists, no more corporate deforms, no more assaults on public education! Teachers are the heroes of our country, and your voices have been heard loud and clear. As Secretary of Education, I promise to work with the president-elect to make sure teachers are paid what they deserve, to end federal funding for charter schools, to eliminate the ability of states to pass right-to-work laws, and to stop the fixation on testing. The decades of top-down edicts and mass school closures are finally over.

Glum reformer: What about nominating someone with real teaching experience?

Cheery unionist: Promise kept! Randi’s a former high school history teacher. She mobilized teachers into Warren’s camp, and getting this nomination is just deserts.

Glum reformer: She still has to be confirmed though.

Cheery unionist: Shouldn’t be an issue now that we have control of both the House and the Senate. Did you hear that Randi has already called for a reauthorization of ESEA that does away with the requirement for annual testing?

Glum reformer: Ugh. You realize she’s also hellbent on putting the kibosh on charter schools, right?

Cheery unionist: I’ll let you in on a little secret. As someone who has an inside track into what the Warren administration is planning, they know there’s a limit to what they can accomplish legislatively, even with the federal government trifecta. Instead, Randi’s planning a death-by-a-thousand-cuts approach. Publicly profess large and lofty policy aims, but inside focus like a laser on mischief-making and gumming up the works.

Glum reformer: What do you mean?

Cheery unionist: Take the federal charter school grants program application. How many pages is it? To follow her new boss’s lead, Randi could push to quadruple its length and make the thing virtually unworkable. Yes, they’ll seek to dismantle it legislatively too, but it’s all hands on deck in the new administration to think creatively about pushing their regulatory authority. Here’s another potential target: charter authorizers. What’s the average length of a charter contract? Is there a way they can compel states to lower that time period? Create as much disincentive as possible to renew a charter contract, let alone open a new school. They could also promulgate guidance around fiscal impact—or something vapidly analogous—to provide more reasons for rejecting charter applications. Wrap all of this in rolls of red tape, and top it off with a bright, burdensome bow.

Glum reformer: In principle, I’m with Randi on a bunch of things like school discipline reform and LGBTQ students. But going after charters and choice is misguided.

Cheery unionist: You don’t get it, do you? Education reformers will never have enough manpower and political muscle to either protect or advance policies as long as you’re at each other’s throats. And now that we control the White House, the war of attrition is going to set you back even further. We’ll win by continuing to milk public opinion—the media eats up our homilies to underpaid teachers, teacher shortages, and low job satisfaction—and by working slowly and surreptitiously under the cover of regulatory darkness.

Glum reformer: And I thought things couldn’t get any worse.

Cheery unionist: The fox is in the henhouse. You’ve made your bed. I suggest you lie in it!

—

My delirium was shaken off after a sip of coffee, and an email appearing in my inbox with the subject line “Oneirophobia.” If Warren does end up winning the nomination, the sensible thing to do would be to return from the fringes and tack back towards the center. In which case, there’s little need to worry about my fever dream becoming anything more than just that.

A new study published in AERA Open investigates whether and to what extent racial discipline gaps are associated with racial achievement gaps in grades three through eight in school districts across the U.S. It also examines if these relationships persist after accounting for differences across districts.

The researchers combined data from the Stanford Education Data Archive (SEDA), which contains achievement gap information for about 2,000 school districts nationwide, and the Civil Rights Data Collection (CRDC). They gathered achievement data from the SEDA and disciplinary data from the CRDC for the 2011–12 and 2013–14 school years, since these were the only two years for which a CRDC census of all U.S. public schools overlapped available SEDA data. They measured racial achievement gaps as district-level disparities between Hispanic and black students and their white counterparts, based on states’ math and English language arts standardized-test-score data. They used suspension counts by race for public schools that include any grade from third to eighth to measure the difference in out-of-school suspension rates between minority and white students.

Their key finding is that discipline and achievement data are indeed positively correlated for black and white students. A 1 percentage point increase in the black-white discipline gap is associated with a 0.01 standard deviation increase in the black-white achievement gap, and a 1 standard deviation increase in the achievement gap is associated with a 2.2 percentage point increase in the discipline gap. Put simply, districts with larger black-white discipline gaps have larger black-white achievement gaps, and vice versa.

Socioeconomic differences between black and white students could serve as one possible explanation for this result. That is, in districts where black students are much poorer than white students, on average, black students have both lower test scores and higher suspension rates. Although the authors do control for district-level racial disparities in the percentage of students who receive free and reduced-price lunch, it is doubtful that the socioeconomic data they had at their disposal could fully account for differences in family income by race.

Furthermore, the association between the black-white achievement and discipline gaps is partly explained by the tight coupling of achievement and discipline for black students specifically, who experience higher suspension rates in districts with larger achievement gaps and experience higher achievement in districts that suspend them less frequently. Because this tight coupling is absent among white students, the authors suspect that the mechanisms connecting achievement and discipline—e.g., teacher biases, peer effects, feelings of belonging—are more salient for black than white students.

While there is some evidence that Hispanic-white discipline gaps are positively related to Hispanic-white achievement gaps, this correlation did not hold after the inclusion of community-level characteristics (e.g., unemployment rate, college degrees held, median income) and district-level characteristics (e.g., percentage of English language learners, racial segregation, gifted and talented racial gap). In other words, the fact that the Hispanic-white achievement gap is wider in districts with bigger Hispanic-white discipline gaps is not due to the racial discipline gap, but rather to other differences between school districts.

This is the first rigorous empirical study to explicitly examine the relation between the racial achievement gap and the racial discipline gap on a national scale. Of course, the finding that there is an association between the achievement and discipline gaps for black and white students but not Hispanic and white students is purely descriptive, not causal. And because the analyses rely on data spanning grades three through eight, the results cannot be generalized to earlier or later grades. Still, the study sheds light on these racial intersections and offers hope in its implication that interventions aimed to close one black-white gap may have the potential to influence the other.

SOURCE: Francis A. Pearman II, F. Chris Curran, Benjamin Fisher, and Joseph Gardella, “Are Achievement Gaps Related to Discipline Gaps? Evidence From National Data,” AERA Open (October–December 2019).

This year's Wonkathon is over, and the results are in!

2019's Wisest Wonk:

• Abby Javurek, for “Beyond the binary: We can foster equity in both opportunity and outcomes.”

Second place:

• Jessica Varevice, for “Teachers and curricula aren't enough for below-grade-level standards. They also require scalable strategies tailored to their needs.”

Third place:

• Gwen Baker, Lauren Schwartze, and Bonnie O’Keefe, for “Follow schools' leads to embrace personalized learning and academic rigor.”

Thank you to all of our participants! Read about the competition, as well as all nineteen entries, below.

—

The past decade’s shift to significantly higher academic standards and more rigorous assessments means that many more students are now achieving far below grade-level expectations. In recent months and years, there’s been much debate about how best to help such students catch up.

To oversimplify a bit, on one side we find educators and advocates who believe that all students can benefit from spending most of their time working on grade-level material. On the other side are those who believe that all students can benefit from “personalization” or “differentiation”—strategies that meet them where they are and then accelerate their progress over time. (Yes, sometimes these two sides try to find common ground.)

This is in part a pedagogical debate, but it touches on key issues of school organization, such as whether students should spend significant time in small, targeted ability groups; whether we should retain pupils at year’s end if they aren’t ready to move on, or even add another grade to elementary schools where lots of kids are behind; or whether we should rethink age-based grades altogether.

This debate also has implications for assessment and accountability systems. Federal law currently requires states to test students on grade-level material—sometimes at the expense of accurately measuring what low-achieving (and high-achieving) students know and can do, and discouraging schools from teaching material from earlier grades, even if that’s what students need. Should we shift to a system that prioritizes accuracy instead, seeking to gauge progress over time as clearly as possible, even if that means testing some children on far-lower-level material than their age-peers? Or would that amount to endorsing the soft bigotry of low expectations once again?

This year’s Wonkathon tackled these issues head-on. We asked contributors to address this fundamental and genuinely challenging question: What’s the best way to help students who are several grade levels behind? 

Below are their answers:

• Why struggling students remain below grade level, and how to help them, by Michael Goldstein


• Beyond the binary: We can foster equity in both opportunity and outcomes, by Abby Javurek


• To help students who are several grade levels behind, implement IEPs in elementary and middle school, by Charles Ogundimu


• To help students who are several “grade levels” behind in reading, focus on building—and assessing—students’ knowledge, by Natalie Wexler


• Follow schools’ leads to embrace personalized learning and academic rigor, by Gwen Baker, Lauren Schwartze, and Bonnie O'Keefe


• Rigor or personalized learning? Just ask Dr. Seuss., by Jessica Shopoff


• To help students who are behind, find out if their assignments match their goals, by Daniel Weisberg


• Tailored paths that can combine pre-, on-, and post-grade skills are the solution for students below grade level in math, by Joel Rose


• From Play-doh to Plato: All students need to grapple with grade-level text, by Harriett Janetos


• Staying on the shelf: Why rigorous new curricula aren’t being used, by David Steiner


• Engaging families, early and often, is the best way to help students who are several grade levels behind, by Vidya Sundaram and Elisabeth O’Bryon


• Parent communication, not data, is the problem when it comes to below-grade-level students, by Lisa Murdock


• If we want to accelerate student learning, we need to redesign the school day, by David Liben and Meredith Liben


• To ensure success for all students, state assessment makers must be learners, too, by Jessica Baghian


• Teachers and curricula aren’t enough for below-grade-level students. They also require scalable strategies tailored to their needs., by Jessica Varevice


• Fostering teacher quality and expertise is the best way to help students who are several grade levels behind, by Candice McQueen


• Closing student achievement gaps requires both rigorous grade-level work and personalized learning, by Britt Neuhaus


• The best way to help students who are several grade levels behind is to do a better job of following their progress, or lack of it, in the long term, by Barbara Gottschalk


• Driving learning for all students: A framework for Multi-Tiered Systems of Support, by Bonnie Hain and Laura Slover

What's a Wonkathon?

For several years now, we at the Thomas B. Fordham Institute have hosted an annual “Wonkathon” on our Flypaper blog to generate substantive conversation around key issues in education reform. Last year’s exploration of high school graduation standards engaged almost two dozen participants and can be found here.

The honor of “wisest wonk" has previously been conferred on such luminaries as Jessica Shopoff, Chase Eskelsen, Christy Wolfe, Seth Rau, Joe Siedlecki, McKenzie Snow, Claire Voorhees, Adam Peshek, and Patricia Levesque.

1. State Senator Matt Huffman wants Ohio to be “first in line” for a federal private education choice matching program…if it ever actually happens. And last week he introduced legislation to get the ball rolling. (Gongwer Ohio, 11/4/19)
2. Unfortunately, Ohio’s existing private school choice apparatus may require some tending by state lawmakers first, if the tenor of this piece is anything to go by. It reports that the EdChoice Scholarship program is “targeting” suburban schools now, such as Emerson Elementary in Lakewood, allowing students to leave for private school with a tuition voucher. (The Patch, 11/4/19) Both tone and fact in the Lakewood piece are off, as you might have guessed. What’s really happening is that this is the first new list of EdChoice eligible district schools after several years of “hold harmless” as new report cards were rolled out. And the list of low performers has…expanded a bit from the old days. This piece, from the same source and with the same approach, looks at Parkside Elementary in Solon. District officials air their take on the EdChoice designation as the journalist hints at more suburban consternation to come. (Patch.com, 11/5/19)

3. Following on from the similar Cleveland story earlier this week, Dayton area children notched better kindergarten-readiness scores in 2018 than in the year before, with publicly-funded Preschool Promise participants outshining their non-program peers. Especially the suburban kids. Just like the Cleveland story, the readiness numbers aren’t all that great overall (one-third-ish meeting the bar) and it seems pretty pricey per child. But unlike the national story on CLE, the PP folks are much more appropriately enthused by the data. (Dayton Daily News, 11/5/19)
4. A meeting is scheduled for later this week in Youngstown so that the city’s mayor can formally receive the list of 20 nominees (composed by the state supe’s nominating panel) from which he is to choose five to constitute the school district’s new board. (WFMJ-TV, Youngstown, 11/6/19) But first, there’s a court hearing today to try and stop all that from happening. The current Youngstown school board (you know, the one that some folks seem so anxious to keep around) has requested a restraining order to stop the train on the grounds that…. Oh man, who cares why? Just because, OK? (Vindy.com, 11/6/19)

5. And finally: Lorain’s levy passed yesterday. (The Chronicle-Telegram, 11/6/19)

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My thirty-plus years in teaching have taken me on an unplanned path from Plato to Play-doh. When I taught Advanced Placement English to seniors three decades ago, I would have confidently bet against finding myself twenty-five years later teaching kindergarteners how to read. Or four years after that, preparing third graders for their state assessment, which would summon those same reading skills I had taught my seniors.

Having worked primarily as a reading specialist for the past dozen years in a high-poverty elementary school, I have now experienced the full range of reading skills—from the ability to decode a single word to the ability to comprehend multi-paragraph text. More importantly, my work as a reading specialist has illuminated all the impediments to achieving proficiency with these skills. These experiences, confirmed by research, have convinced me that if we want students to be able to tackle grade-level text (and we do!), they need to spend the majority of their time reading grade-level text. Our job is to help them do just that.

The research about whether to teach children at their “instructional or frustration level” is clear. National Reading Panel participant Timothy Shanahan has written extensively on this topic. “Placing kids in easier, below grade level books reduces their opportunities to learn, but learning will only take place with accommodative and supportive instruction.” Just to be clear: “No one is claiming that just placing kids in harder books leads to greater learning—clearly harder books require instructional adjustments by teachers that are an important part of the equation,” so the emphasis is placed on teacher-scaffolded grade-level texts.

In the fall edition of Reading Research Quarterly, researchers looked at whether below-level readers should be given easier texts to read. They warn that, because these “easier texts tend to be shorter and contain fewer difficult words and less detail, students reading easier versions of texts may learn less content, ultimately contributing to inequities among different populations of students.” Recent books like The Knowledge Gap emphasize the importance of developing comprehension through increased knowledge and vocabulary, so reducing content is not the direction we want to be headed. We want to raise the level of the learner, not lower the level of the learning. Once again, Shanahan provides emphasis: “The point shouldn’t be to place students in books easy enough to ensure good reading, but to provide enough scaffolding to allow them to read harder books successfully.” And this is also the conclusion in Reading Research Quarterly: “Most students, even if struggling with comprehension, can read challenging versions of texts when accompanied by instructional support.” Which returns us to our original question: Should we differentiate texts or instruction? Answer: differentiate instruction.

I am convinced that below-level readers should spend most of the time reading on-level text—with support. In California, students take the CAASP beginning in the third grade. Last year, I attended a two-day workshop on this assessment prior to teaching a third grade class once a week. Up until then, I had spent the majority of my time at the elementary level working with small groups of struggling first and second graders, with students who could not read the words and therefore had no gateway to comprehension.

This workshop was an eye-opener, particularly the deep dive into the performance task, whereby students analyze multiple articles on one topic and then use evidence from these articles to synthesize a response to a given “task”—producing either narrative, informative, or argumentative writing. I quickly realized that this performance task was an authentic assessment, and acquiring these skills in elementary school would certainly make students middle and high school “ready.” But it was also obvious that without explicit and systematic instruction in how to analyze text and synthesize a response, the majority of my third graders, especially my below-level readers, would not stand a chance at achieving proficiency with this “performance.”

In an interview about The Knowledge Gap, Natalie Wexler emphasizes that our decades-long efforts to teach elementary students reading skills like finding the main idea or making inferences haven’t improved overall reading, and she is arguing for teaching more content at the elementary level in order to close the knowledge gap between high-performing and low-performing students. The Common Core State Standards emphasize increasing the reading of nonfiction text, 50 percent by fourth grade and 70 percent by the end of high school, but most elementary school students, even when they can read all the words, can’t necessarily make sense of the ideas presented in these nonfiction texts. This is why well-chosen reading strategies can be valuable, not as ends in themselves, but as a means to accessing content.

So this is where I relied upon my educational background—a single-subject English teaching credential, a master’s in writing instruction, and a reading specialist’s credential—to teach all of my students how to tackle grade-level text. I put together a third grade reader modeled after the CAASP with multiple articles on a single topic (dinosaurs, wildlife conservation, volcanoes, etc.) followed by performance tasks: writing assignments that require either narrative, informative, or argumentative writing (sometimes all three). A resource popular with elementary school teachers, The Reading Strategies Book, features 300 reading strategies that come with very helpful anchor charts. I chose five strategies that I’ve found over the years to be most beneficial for students and used these to “anchor” students through navigating text by visualizing, inferencing, making connections, questioning, and determining important ideas.

And here’s an important point: There was nothing easy about this process for any of my students. Therefore, to give my below-level readers a fighting chance, I had to pull them separately in small groups to address the fact that they still struggled with decoding multisyllabic words. So I applied the same instructional techniques I had used with these struggling readers in my second-grade reading intervention program to help them read these grade-level articles. In addition, these students were given multiple opportunities to read and reread the text so that word recognition wasn’t a barrier to accessing the content, and their developing fluency fueled their comprehension. Once this barrier was crossed, they could tackle the text in the same way my other students tackled it.

One student in particular, who had strong vocabulary knowledge but was reading two years below grade level because she struggled so much with decoding, exemplified this need for support. Once she decoded a multisyllabic word—which was never an easy task—her vocabulary knowledge paved her way toward comprehension.

Timothy Shanahan asks: “If low-performing fourth-graders are to be taught from second grade books, when do they catch up?” Certainly, this was the question I kept asking myself about my struggling students. Another one of my third graders had come to my second grade intervention session mid-year reading at the kindergarten level—basically a non-reader. However, she was a diligent worker, and she ended third grade with a CAASP ELA score of 2/4, “approaching proficiency.” Without the push and practice from grade-level text, she would have been lost trying to navigate that arduous assessment.

The answer to the old joke—How do you get to Carnegie Hall?—is also the answer to how you get students to read at grade level. Practice, practice, practice—with grade-level text.

Standards are written to reflect the instructional path that students should follow throughout their educational journey. In math, that includes concepts such as basic algebraic thinking in the early elementary grades, multiplying fractions in the fifth grade, working with ratios and rates in the sixth grade, and so forth. Let’s call this the “standard instructional path.”

At the end of each school year, students take a state summative assessment (marked by the filled diamonds in the chart below) that reflect student performance relative to the current year’s standards.[1]

While the standards themselves are clear and coherent, they provide little guidance about what to do for the millions of students who begin the school year without the precursor knowledge required to succeed with grade level material. This is especially problematic in math, given it’s so cumulative. A student is going to have a hard time learning how to calculate the area of a circle if they haven’t yet mastered multiplication.

Since only about two in five students begin fifth grade on the standard instructional path, how should schools best address the strengths and needs of students with unfinished learning dating back to elementary school?

Some argue that good teaching is enough to get students caught back up. They insist that high-quality teachers with expectations focused on grade-level material can always find ways to get students back on the main path. This belief is essentially cemented into federal and state education policy, as accountability systems are based on grade-level assessments.

But in math, there’s not much evidence to suggest catching them up in a single year is practical—certainly not at scale. Not only have researchers shown the probability that schools can pull this off to be remarkably thin, but there’s mounting evidence that in trying to do both, students are falling further behind (see The Iceberg Problem).

That doesn’t mean that educators should simply meet students where they are. Growth only matters if it is in service of college and career readiness. In some situations, “meet them where they are” can become a proxy for perpetual remediation, particularly for historically disadvantaged student populations. Expectations matter, and there’s no doubt far too many students attend schools that simply don’t expect enough.

But in math, an exclusive instructional focus on grade level content that ignores students starting points is not the solution either. That approach is more aligned with equality than with equity.

What’s instead required is the development of tailored paths—customized instructional programs that combine pre-grade, on-grade, and (in some cases) post-grade skills in order to connect where students are to the standard instructional path. For some who aren’t as far behind, these tailored paths may take a single year. But for those who are multiple years behind and who aren’t able to access more instructional time, they may need a bit longer. In all cases, schools would then need assessment and accountability systems that are aligned with each student’s unique path to get there (the white rectangles below).

Through our work with Teach to One: Math, we’ve been piloting these kinds of tailored learning paths for several years. In some partner schools, we had the freedom to implement this approach with fidelity because those schools operated under local accountability systems tied to student learning growth on adaptive, multi-grade assessments. But in others, schools pressed us to ensure more “standard path” instruction than we would have recommended because of concerns around grade level assessment and accountability.

What’s worked better?

According to a third party study of all three-year implementations (with an n of 739 students), programs that operated under accountability systems tied to learning growth improved 38 percentile points, while those more focused on ensuring exposure to grade level content grew 7 percentile points. In growth-aligned schools, that corresponded to an improvement in the percent of students on a college ready trajectory from 19 percent to 40 percent. In schools that prioritized more grade level exposure, the percent of students on a college-ready trajectory still improved, but not as much (12 percent to 22 percent).[2] In one district, ongoing efforts to both meet students unique needs while also prioritizing grade level exposure ended up with a muddied implementation and an indeterminate evaluation.

And it’s not as if students who began middle school far below grade level spent all of their time on pre-grade material. The chart below shows how the distribution of pre-grade material declined over time in those schools focused on learning growth.

More research would be required before we can conclusively determine that tailored learning paths are more likely to drive long term proficiency. But given both its early promise and the evidence that a focus on grade-level material may be causing students to fall further behind, how might our national K–12 strategy include efforts to foster the development of these kinds of tailored learning paths?

The first step is to recognize that tailored learning paths require a different way to think about accountability that’s less focused on annual grade level assessments. Policymakers should not retreat from insisting upon high expectations for all students, but must also find ways to create space in policy for tailored paths that span multiple grade levels to emerge. Texas’s work around Math Innovation Zones is an early example worth following.

But more importantly, tailored learning paths aren’t likely to develop within the traditional model of schooling. Schools can’t simply train teachers to diagnose each student’s unique strengths and needs and then build and implement a tailored path—all within the confines of their classroom. It’s just too far beyond the scope of what any single teacher can reasonably accomplish.

That’s why innovative learning models that break from traditional notions of whole-class instruction are so essential to addressing the needs of students who are multiple years behind where they should be. Our nation has lived with the same basic delivery model of one-teacher-thirty-students-in-a-box-with-a-textbook for more than a century. It’s time to modernize it.

Innovative learning models can now be designed in ways that integrate research, teacher talent, practical know-how, and (yes) technology so that schools can better organize meeting each students’ unique strengths and needs. They could also solve for other important objectives, such as social and emotional development, more opportunities for parent involvement, more authentic learning experience for students, and more controls that minimize racial and ethnic biases in the classroom. These worthwhile endeavors are far more likely to succeed if they are embedded within thoughtfully-designed learning models, rather than being one more thing for teachers to get trained on and then figure out how to execute.

Here’s a bit about the model that we’ve built, but we need others to emerge as well. With the right incentives, today’s charter management organizations, publishers, product companies, universities, and others could all compete to design new models that replace textbooks as the core “technology” used in schools today. And in exchange for supporting the R & D to develop them, the model providers themselves would do something that today’s textbook companies generally don’t do—share in the accountability for student outcomes.

Leveraging serious R & D to drive improvement in our nation’s schools has not been a core element of reformers’ playbook over the last few decades. Meanwhile, over $100 billion of R & D over the last decade has helped to double our national output or renewable energy while reducing coal to its lowest level in more than a generation. In health care, R & D is what’s fueled the development of new ways fight disease and improve and prolong quality of life. In defense, R & D is what’s enabled our forces to rely upon military strategies that put fewer American lives at risk on the battlefield.

Future generations will wonder why it took our sector so long to move in this same direction.

The best way to support students who are multiple years behind is to design adoptable, innovative learning models that are organized do just that. Absent that, the profound limitations of the traditional classroom model make it highly unlikely that the tailored paths they require can ever be reliably provided.

[1] Note that advanced students are able to progress through algebra by the end of the eighth grade and take the algebra state assessment rather than the eighth-grade state assessment.

[2] Based on MAP Growth College Readiness Benchmarks study linking performance on MAP to the trajectory required for achieving on ACT score of 22.