1. Before we get to the big news of the week, let’s take a brief moment to talk about awesome young people. There is no mention of us directly here, but the 7th and 8th graders in the Fordham-sponsored Dayton Leadership Academies participated in a 9/11 commemoration in the Oregon District of Dayton which doubled as a remembrance of the recent tragic shooting there. The event was part of their leadership class and they represented DLA—and Dayton—with pride and grace. (WDTN-TV, Dayton,  9/11/19)
2. The aforementioned “big news of the week” is the release of school and district report cards, which occurred yesterday. Statewide coverage—including a quote from Fordham’s Chad Aldis—comes from Gongwer. At that level the news is generally good. More districts going up than down in overall grades with some notable jumps in places. Doesn’t stop some folks from complaining about report cards generally. You know the buzzwords I’m talking about, right? “Snapshot”, “unrepresentative”, “arbitrary”, “not the full picture”, etc. You will see these words recur out of different mouths all across the state in the following coverage, right when you most expect it. (Gongwer Ohio, 9/12/19) We will talk about the even bigger big news in a bit, but a quick preview comes courtesy of state superintendent Paolo DeMaria, who told Gongwer, “I know there are those voices out there that say having some kind of harsh consequence [you know what he means, right?] can be a motivator, and I think this bears some of that out. I don't think it gets exclusive credit, but one of the reasons that these districts have shown the kind of progress that that they have is because they really were aggressively attentive to trying to get out of that status [you know what he means here too, right?].”

3. The news was mostly good in overall grades across Stark County, but this piece, also including a quote from Chad, digs into some of the component grades too. Lots of room for improvement there, I think. (Canton Repository, 9/12/19) Ditto for this piece from the Rep’s Gatehouse sister outlet the Dispatch. The central Ohio coverage includes a brief look at local charter school report cards too, including commentary from Chad. More comparisons to come, I’m sure. (Columbus Dispatch, 9/12/19)
4. Of course the biggest of the big news is how the latest report card data might impact ongoing legislative work on Ohio’s means of intervening in chronically-underperforming districts. (Yes, I’m aware that that would be speculation—“might”—rather than news; but beggars can’t be choosers around here these days.) We will say briefly that East Cleveland City Schools, still in the first year of its Academic Distress Commission-based turnaround effort, maintained an F grade for 2018-19. (Cleveland Plain Dealer, 9/12/19) Lorain City Schools, however, in the second year of its Academic Distress Commission oversight, rose to a D on its report card. CEO David Hardy’s words of congratulations to and thankfulness for his teachers and staff were heartfelt and moving to me. The president of the elected school board’s words, in what appeared to be an effort to downplay the improvement, were borderline nonsensical to me. (The Morning Journal, 9/12/19) Even though hizzoner the board prez is pretty quiet in the Chronicle’s report, they still manage to blunt and obfuscate the district’s accomplishment (first time above an F in TEN YEARS, y’all) by the way it is presented. (The Chronicle-Telegram, 9/13/19) Speaking of things Lorainiacs never thought they’d see: Rather than go through a trial, the elected school board, the CEO, and the poor treasurer caught in the middle managed to sit down and solve their little employment dilemma amicably. Through lawyers, and only after eight hours of negotiations. But what are you going to do? (The Morning Journal, 9/11/19)

5. Sadly, no such good news was forthcoming for Youngstown City Schools, currently in their third year under the aegis of an Academic Distress Commission. They recorded an overall F for 2018-19, the fourth straight year at that grade. Devastating for the students and families. (The all new Vindy.com, 9/13/19) That F grade for Youngstown is 100 percent bad news, right? For students looking for a good education in the city, no question. But maybe there is a silver lining? (WFMJ-TV, Youngstown, 9/12/19)
6. That’s right, the next step in the Academic Distress Commission turnaround process for Youngstown as it currently exists in Ohio is the dissolution of the elected school board and the appointment of a new board by the state superintendent and Youngstown’s mayor. But only if HB 154, currently under discussion in the Senate, doesn’t up and change everything. Here is a look at where the school turnaround revamp legislation currently stands from the point of view of Senate leadership. (Gongwer Ohio, 9/11/19)

7. As we noted earlier, there are the usual caveats trotted out every year like clockwork to try and cast doubt on the accuracy and importance of state report cards (“flawed”, “unfair”, “ever-changing”, “confusing”, etc.). But sometimes folks will go off script when talking to reporters—for good or ill. So how about a quick look at some of those more candid reactions? First up, let’s go direct to Denial, Ohio: “As long as we make yearly growth, and feel like the kids are making growth, that's more important to us.”  OK. Cool. (WSAZ-TV, Huntington, WV, 9/12/19) One suburban Toledo supe cited the decision to hold back a sizeable group of special needs students from graduation: “If given the choice between doing what is right for students on IEPs or taking a higher letter grade, we will do what is best for students every single time.”  (Toledo Blade, 9/12/19) Springfield City Schools fell from a D to an F last year. Hard, I’m sure, for a supe to process. “I refuse to let the report card define us,” he tells the News-Sun here. But instead of the report card, he seems to be fine with allowing Common Core (of all things!) to define them: “Much work over the last four years has gone into laying the foundation for achieving these priorities; deconstructing Ohio’s Learning Standards, establishing a scope of sequence, selecting rigorous curricular resources, creating assessments to measure progress toward and mastery of the standards and providing the professional development that teachers and staff need to be successful in meeting the district priorities.” (Springfield News-Sun, 9/12/19) Barberton City Schools in suburban Akron is too busy dealing with a chronic absenteeism problem to care too much about this report card nonsense. (Akron Beacon Journal, 9/12/19) The Medina Gazette covers every county school district in some detail. Cloverleaf Local Schools attributes their jump from a D to C to a strong investment in teacher professional development. Meanwhile, Buckeye Local schools got a C overall, mainly because there were just too many components to work on to boost the overall grade: “You just look at the report cards and try to identify the areas where you can make a difference in for the following year.” (Medina Gazette, 9/12/19) Toledo City Schools was one of several districts to jump from an F to a D this year, which resets the clock on state intervention (if such a thing still exists by this time next year). Folks there are pretty happy, but the caveat provided for their continuing struggle to improve is a bit iffy to me. “He also said that overall TPS has made great strides in recent years considering how many of the district’s students come from academically disadvantaged backgrounds.” Hopefully since that was an attributed comment rather than a direct quote, someone just misunderstood what was actually said and not an admission that either poor students have trouble learning or TPS has trouble teaching them. (Toledo Blade, 9/12/19) A number of individual schools in Cincinnati received As this year, a good thing. “We sell hope,” commented the principal of a newly-minted A school, which seems kind of a weird thing to say to that news. The district supe, in response to her district’s repeat of an overall D, said, “Results like this do not happen by accident.” Which is also a weird thing to say, if you ask me. (Cincinnati Enquirer, 9/12/19) When I was a kid, I loved those little books that would describe ridiculous, outdated laws that were “still on the books” in various cities and counties across the country. I was reminded of those books when I learned that Dayton City Schools raised their overall grade from an F to a D. They also got to reset the clock on a declaration of academic distress, stopping theirs at the eleventh hour with a crap ton of money and effort. So glad the General Assembly wasted all that effort passing a law to keep them from being declared in academic distress. Perhaps it will soon appear in a book of crazy useless laws along with “no eating raisins on Sunday”, which is still on the books in Cornrow County. (Dayton Daily News, 9/12/19) Speaking of the General Assembly, let’s give former state school board president Tom Gunlock the last word on report card results for now. He is sure that the general good news across the state is not to be trusted. “They need to pick whatever their goal is,” Gunlock said. “If their goal is to give a diploma to everybody in the state, then the (legislature) did it well. If the goal is to make sure every kid is ready for the next part of his or her life, then they did it very poorly.” Daaaaang. (Dayton Daily News, 9/12/19)
8. Whew! Just time for two bits of non-report-card-related news. Fordham’s latest report, ironically on the postsecondary readiness—or lack thereof—of Ohio’s high school graduates, got some lovely in-depth coverage from the Ohio Star news outlet. Thanks, guys! (Ohio Star, 9/12/19)

9. Finally today, just to bring some balance to the general good news tone in these clips: Columbus City Schools approved a contract to spend three quarters of a million dollars replacing every incandescent bulb in its system with LEDs. Thus far, there have been five fires in local school buildings as a direct result of the work. The explanation given here is pathetic enough (“We’re in a hurry! Three different contractors are making the same dumb mistake!”), but the projected clean up costs simply add insult to injury. (WSYX-TV, Columbus, 9/11/19)

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In the last month, two reports have renewed questions about the current direction of states’ high school assessments. The first, End-of-Course Exams and Student Outcomes, from Fordham’s Adam Tyner and Lafayette College’s Matthew Larsen, finds that end-of-course assessments (EOCs)—tests designed around specific high school courses, like algebra II or biology—are correlated with higher high school graduation rates and college admissions test scores. Despite these positive effects, however, Tyner and Larsen also find that EOCs may be slipping in popularity among states. The second report, The New Testing Landscape: How State Assessments are Changing under the Federal Every Student Succeeds Act, by Lynn Olson of FutureEd, reveals one of the reasons why: the rise of the ACT or SAT as states’ primary high school assessments.

ESSA opened new possibilities for states in how to best assess high school students, many of which put EOCs at a disadvantage. Most notably, ESSA included flexibility for states to permit districts to choose a nationally recognized high school assessment, like the SAT or ACT, instead of the state test, so long as the nationally recognized tests met key quality standards. So far only a few states like Oklahoma and West Virginia have taken advantage of the option—likely due to the complications of using results from two different assessments for accountability and reporting. However, the explicit reference in ESSA and its related regulations to college entrance or placement tests could be perceived as giving the SAT and ACT the imprimatur of the federal government—a perception that’s becoming reality as the U.S. Department of Education’s (ED) peer review of state assessments found that the ACT “substantially” met federal requirements in at least one state (so far, the SAT has “partially” met them).

What’s more, it’s easier to demonstrate compliance with ESSA using a high school assessment given in a single grade. When I worked at ED, states using EOCs were often caught off-guard when asked which test they were using to meet federal requirements. For example, one state wanted to use all three of its math EOCs, arguing that—together—they covered the entirety of the state’s standards and best gauged student readiness for college and career. While that was a logical claim, it ran afoul of federal law because only some, not all, students were assessed on all three EOCs.

Thus, one of the main advantages of EOCs—that they are taken whenever a student is enrolled in a course and better reflect what they are learning in the classroom—became a liability. In the end, most states defaulted to using the first EOC in the sequence as their federal test (e.g., algebra I) because it was the only one all students took statewide. In turn, this highlighted states that were choosing to administer more tests than federal law required—a tough argument at a time when the opt-out movement was in full swing, especially among high schoolers who were focused on Advanced Placement and college admissions tests (an oft-cited reason states switched to the ACT or SAT).

On top of anti-testing sentiment, budget constraints pushed states toward tests like the ACT and SAT and away from EOCs. ESSA did not increase the authorized level of funding for assessments and, in fact, caps formula funding for state assessments at $369.1 million. Given that states must administer general assessments and alternate assessments for students with significant cognitive disabilities in three subjects, as well as English language proficiency tests, federal dollars do not go far enough to cover costs to maintain current testing programs, let alone the costs of upgrading assessments to use new technology, include innovative items, produce results faster, incorporate new accessibility features, or meet other priorities. With funds stretched thin, states face pressure to keep testing costs low—and reducing the number of assessments administered in high school or going with an off-the-shelf assessment like ACT or SAT is an easy solution, even if experts call into question whether these assessments are fully aligned to state standards or have adequate accommodations for students with disabilities and English learners.

That’s not to say the price tag of the ACT or SAT is its only upside. When a state uses the ACT or SAT to meet federal requirements, it provides the assessment free-of-charge to all students—which could increase college enrollment, especially among historically underserved students who may not take the test otherwise. Switching to the ACT or SAT can also quell testing backlash from those supporting the opt-out movement. The tests are typically shorter than many states have used in the past, especially when you consider cumulative time required to take multiple EOCs, and it is nearly impossible to argue that college admissions tests are irrelevant or have no benefit for students. Research from ACT, the College Board, and others also finds that test results, alone or in combination with other indicators, are predictive of student success in postsecondary education—though not as strong or consistent a predictor as high school GPA.

This is where Fordham and other proponents of EOCs should think about additional research—and advocacy. EOC proponents need to demonstrate that, despite the cost and time associated with EOCs, these assessments come with many of the benefits of the SAT or ACT without the pitfalls related to standards alignment and accessibility. While it is encouraging that Tyner and Larsen found a positive relationship between the number of EOCs a state offered and student performance on the SAT or ACT, more compelling still would be research that EOCs are associated with positive postsecondary outcomes, including college enrollment, persistence, and credit accumulation—one of the core arguments lobbied in favor of using the SAT or ACT as a statewide assessment.

Similarly, research on any differential effects of EOCs based on how they are used is needed to better make the case for EOCs to policymakers. One reason the SAT and ACT are popular is the tangible benefit of college admission for students from taking the test. Such benefits could also be afforded from EOCs—and some states have tried to do so by incorporating EOCs into student course grades and GPAs, using results as a way for students to test out of college remediation, or requiring students to pass EOCs to graduate, i.e., using them as high school exit exams. Although Fordham’s study found that EOCs, in general, were related to higher graduation rates, the EOCs in the study were used in a variety of ways for accountability. Given past research showing exit exams decrease graduation rates—in contrast with Tyner and Larsen’s findings—additional research on whether the effect of EOCs on graduation and other outcomes varies depending on the type of stakes attached to them would assist policymakers in determining the right incentives to place on EOC results.

EOC exams may never carry the same cachet or brand-name recognition that the SAT or ACT enjoy with college admissions officers and families, but they may not need to if advocates can demonstrate they provide other, meaningful benefits for student learning and postsecondary success.

School closures hurt. While they are relatively uncommon nationwide, they are sometimes unavoidable—and they’re always painful, especially for the students and families who are displaced and who rarely see any educational benefit as a result. For them, closures are mostly profound disruption followed by deep disappointment. The fact that closures may contribute to the health of the school system as a whole over many years offers little consolation.

What if there were a better way to handle closures, one that ensured that students would come out of the process with a better educational experience—or at least gave them a decent shot at one? What if students and families in closing schools weren’t left to fend for themselves, but got the guidance they needed to understand their school options, make informed decisions, and navigate the re-enrollment process smoothly? 

These are the questions we explore in EdNavigator’s newest publication, The Upgrade Rule: How Schools and Districts Can Make School Closures Work Better for Families.  

The “Upgrade Rule” refers to a simple maxim: You shouldn’t close a school until you can offer families something better—an “upgrade.” We’ve been exploring how exactly to do that over the last two years in New Orleans, where we partnered with Orleans Parish School Board (OPSB, now known as NOLA Public Schools) to provide support to families in seven schools that were closed between 2017 and 2019. In coordination with OPSB, EnrollNOLA, and the schools themselves, we focused on ensuring families knew exactly what they needed to do, understood their options, and always had someone knowledgeable they could turn to for advice and guidance.

Our goal was straightforward: make the closure process less traumatic for families and help them get an upgrade. We offered parents in closing schools clear information about the school options that were available to them, personal support in making decisions about where they wanted to apply, and guidance in getting through the application processes. We also conducted proactive outreach to families as New Orleans’ school enrollment deadline approached to ensure that all families submitted their applications in the main round.

In the end, these efforts made a difference. While seats in the city’s highest performing schools remained scarce, 93 percent of students from closing schools with D–F letter grades landed in a new school that was at least one letter grade better, and 66 percent gained seats in a school two letter grades better. 

In the paper, we dig into what strategies worked well—at the district level, as well as with individual families—in the effort to give all families an upgrade. There’s still plenty to learn about how to make the Upgrade Rule a reality, but here’s what we’re recommending based on our experience in New Orleans: 

• Give families from closed schools preferential treatment in the enrollment process. In New Orleans, families were given “priority status” in the centralized enrollment process, meaning students from closed schools went to the front of the line for open seats in the schools of their choice. 
• Operate on a timeline that maximizes opportunities for families. Families need time to process the closure on an emotional level, but they also need time to explore and take advantage of all opportunities, including those in religious or private schools—so districts need to take into account the admissions timelines for all local institutions.
• Invest substantial resources in the best possible communication to families. With the inherent confusion and stress that goes along with a school closure, families need access to clear, useful information that helps them understand what’s happening, what their options are, and what they need to do (and when). 
• Bring support directly to families instead of waiting for them to find it. Families can’t be expected to ask for help—help needs to come to them, and it can’t come in a one-size-fits-all package.

While The Upgrade Rule focuses on school closures in New Orleans, we think the big lessons are applicable anywhere and anytime schools must be closed. For families like the nearly 1,700 we supported in New Orleans, the stakes couldn’t be higher.

Editor’s note: This article was first published by EdNavigator.

Today, the Ohio Department of Education released annual report cards for Ohio’s 610 school districts and roughly 3,500 public schools. Based on data from the 2018-19 school year, report cards include a user-friendly, overall rating along with component ratings that provide additional context. Ratings are anchored in state exam results and other indicators of academic success.
 

“Parents and communities deserve an honest look at academic performance,” said Aaron Churchill, Ohio Research Director at the Thomas B. Fordham Institute. “Ohio’s report cards remain the backbone of a transparent education system that puts student outcomes at the center. Importantly, report cards include not only point-in-time snapshots of proficiency but also measures of student progress over time. Because progress indicators don’t correlate with demographics, they allow high-performing, high-poverty schools to shine.”

Statewide data reveal gradual improvements in proficiency on state math and English exams. The charts below display proficiency on fourth and seventh grades over the past four years—all years in which students took Ohio’s “next generation” assessments that were first administered in 2015-16.

“Over the past decade, Ohio has raised expectations for schools and students,” continued Churchill. “These reforms challenge all young people to exit high-school ready for college and career, and they are starting to bear fruit. The visible gains in achievement should bolster confidence that Ohio is on the right track.”

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Improvements are also evident in the majority of Ohio’s low performing school districts. The table below displays districts that received an “F” overall rating last year (2017-18) and key results from their 2018-19 report card: Their overall ratings and performance-index scores, a composite measure of proficiency across all tested grades and subjects.

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Much of the initial response to my new book about Success Academy has focused on the role parent self-selection plays in the charter school network’s astonishing—and astonishingly consistent—results. Given that I wrote an essay about the critical role parents play for the Wall Street Journal, I can’t complain about that takeaway. But there’s more to the story, and it’s incorrect to attribute Success Academy’s outcomes merely to the families it serves. It’s equally important to look at what parent buy-in actually buys: a coherent, energetic, and unusually consistent school culture that drives student achievement, and which can only be achieved when parents are active participants, not unwilling conscripts

The clearest insight into Success Academy’s culture and performance predates the network’s founding. In 2002, Nobel Prize–winning economist George A. Akerlof and his colleague Rachel E. Kranton published a paper titled “Identity and Schooling: Some Lessons for the Economics of Education” in the Journal of Economic Literature. They observed that schools not only impart skills; they also impart an image of ideal students, their characteristics, and their behaviors. “School rituals—pep rallies, homeroom announcements, assemblies—and day-to-day interactions in classrooms, hallways, and gymnasiums reveal the nature of this ideal. Teachers, administrators, and coaches praise and reward some students, while they disapprove of and punish others. These features and occasions define what we call a school’s social category and its ideal student. Students with backgrounds similar to this category readily identify with the school. Others, however, do not fit in easily,” they wrote.

Akerlof and Kranton’s point, which reaches full flower at Success Academy, is that you have to establish and promote a culture of achievement and inspire a critical mass of students to embrace it. “If you’re able to get a majority of the students to buy into it, it becomes self-perpetuating, because young people like to fit in,” explains Patrick Wolf, an education policy professor at the University of Arkansas, who introduced me to Akerlof and Kranton’s work. “Even if a student is not oriented toward valuing achievement, if they enter a school in which that’s the dominant culture, they will accommodate themselves to it.”

Success Academy’s culture is unusually clear and consistent. It offers an unmistakable vision of who students are expected to be and why it matters. Ensuring that a child’s parents are on board and equally committed at home magnifies the effect. And it stands in sharp relief to the neighborhood schools that their students would otherwise attend, where staff are more likely to be advised to “choose your battles wisely” rather than to “sweat the small stuff.”

If you accept the idea that school culture can be a significant driver of student outcomes, even the primary one, it leads to an uncomfortable conundrum for education policymakers. The ability to “control for culture” is baked into the opportunities afforded the children of affluent Americans. If you are reasonably well-off and want your child to go to school surrounded by peers who take school seriously, behave well in class, care about their grades, put forth significant effort, and have parents who are as engaged and invested as you are, you have your choice of private or public schools in higher-income zip codes that offer gifted programs and Advanced Placement classes. It is challenging but not insurmountably difficult to steer your child into a productive learning environment alongside equally motivated peers who embrace an academic identity. Most pertinently, your right to self-select and pursue an excellent education for your child is unquestioned and unremarkable.

If you are a similarly-minded parent, but without the means to pay your way out of a chaotic or poor-performing neighborhood school, your options are limited. Success Academy founder Eva Moskowitz understands better than most the connections between school culture, parental buy-in, and student outcomes.

You can take a cynical view of this, and many do, believing Moskowitz “creams” parents to make herself look good and to shame neighborhood schools and the teachers union. Or a more generous one: Moskowitz alone among major ed reform figure understands that school culture is essential, must be established, nurtured, and zealously protected—and nothing is more deleterious to those efforts than families who are less than fully committed. I embedded in Success Academy to see for myself and make up my own mind based on what I saw, not on what critics or cheerleaders insist. Even though Success makes some instructional and curricular decisions that I might not make, on the whole what I saw was a school culture that appeared to be working well for the majority of children. It’s worth dwelling on how it feels and the signals it sends to children.

To put it mildly, the historic relationship between low-income children of color and schools in the United States has not been a good one. If you are black or brown and poor, particularly in a large city, school is the place where, as often as not, you learn the low regard in which you are held. The message you often receive is that you are not very capable and not much is demanded of you. The relationship between communities of color and schools has been characterized by some combination of low expectations, failure, and coercion, often tinged with racism, either tacit or overt. We have warehoused generations of children of color in our schools, given them little, and asked for even less in return.

What I was saw at Success Academy—what felt different, powerful, and potentially enduring—was a consistent pattern of high expectations, warmth, and encouragement. Tough love, to be sure, but focused on specific and measurable outcomes. The engagement of the teachers I spent a year observing was personal, authentic, and intense. Whether they could articulate it or not, the children under their care surely sense the investment their teachers have in them and in their success. Frustrated by my inability to name this quality, let alone quantify it, I started referring to it offhandedly as the “GAS Factor.” GAS stands for (forgive the indelicacy) “give a shit.” It describes the signals communicated to children by their school that there are adults in their life outside their immediate family who are invested in them, view them as capable, and expect much from them and for them.

Educators and scholars often fret about whether schools pay sufficient attention to developing students’ civic engagement. It is seldom observed that schools are not where children go to learn civic engagement, but to experience it, to feel the effects of the civic engagement in their community. This is the “hidden curriculum,” the unwritten, unofficial, and often-unintended lessons, values, and perspectives that students absorb. If you are a child, you see it in the interest teachers take in you and the signals that your education is important and leads to some meaningful end. You are not just in school marking time and filling a seat. School matters. You matter. Your teachers aren’t punching a clock and cashing their paychecks. They give a shit. By extension—since teachers act on behalf of the state and society, which authorizes and administers the vast majority of our schools—so does your country.

Empathy is part of the GAS factor, but only a part. Highly effective teachers care deeply about their students, but so do a lot of highly ineffective teachers. “They won’t care what you know until they know that you care” goes an expression repeated endlessly to new teachers. The advice, like so much about education, is offered in earnest. But it is easy for this kindly bromide to mutate into low expectations, even condescension. How can we expect a child to pass algebra when he’s hungry? How can I ask this teenager to do her homework when her mother works nights and she’s responsible for her younger siblings? Why should we expect children to read and understand Shakespeare when it’s so far removed from their lives, interests, and personal experience? How can I expect this student to behave like the other kids, given the trauma he’s endured at home and in this neighborhood? The brand of tough love practiced at Success may not be for everyone, but it is authentic and effective. When you are surrounded by adults who are clearly invested in your success, who do not assume your inevitable failure or condescend because they perceive you as less than or other, who do not dwell on your deficits or perceive you as oppressed or a victim, you are pointed in a different direction in life.

But why standardized tests? Why not art, music, writing, or a student’s personal passions? Why must a reading or math exam be the referendum for a child’s relationship with their school? It needn’t be, of course, and I have written elsewhere at length about the deleterious effects of testing and test prep. But in this context, there is something powerful about an objective measure of achievement. It is one thing when your mother or teacher expresses pride in your accomplishments. It is quite another when the State of New York tells you that your performance equals or exceeds anyone’s in the state.

Consider for a moment how this experience must feel to a low-income child of color at Success Academy, surrounded by adults who seem deeply invested in him and his test scores. You get pushed and encouraged with “attack strategies,” positive reinforcement, and, yes, a megadose of test prep. There are phone calls from your teacher, often nightly; handwritten notes of encouragement from your principal or your teacher from last year; and pep rallies, prizes, and effort parties. No attempt is made to suggest that the bar is low and the test is easy. Quite the opposite. The bar is high. You are given a challenging task by supportive adults, pushed, prodded, cajoled for months, and told, “You can do this!”

And then you actually do it.

Even more powerfully, you are part of a school community where nearly all your friends do just as well you, and all your friends’ parents value education every bit as much as your own do. It’s not possible to overstate the astonishing normalizing power of this school culture or the degree to which it is at odds with the school experience of the majority of low-income children of color in the United States of America of a place called a school. One cannot be blithe about it, or cynical.

It is nearly inconceivable that a school could create or sustain this kind of school culture—or any well-articulated and coherent culture—in the absence of parents making a clear-eyed decision to sign up for it and vote with their feet. If school culture and parental buy-in is what differentiates successful schools from less successful schools, if we prevent low-income black and brown parents, and only those parents, from self-selecting into productive school cultures that fit their desired “social category and ideal,” we are functionally imposing mediocrity on those families—and only those families. If we want to start unwinding and correcting the chronic and persistent underperformance of schools serving low-SES Americans, let’s start there.

This essay is adapted from How The Other Half Learns: Equality, Excellence, And The Battle Over School Choice (Avery, 2019, $27, 384 pages), by Robert Pondiscio, where portions of it originally appeared.

What if you were told that elementary schools in the United States are teaching children to be poor readers? Last month, Emily Hanford did exactly that with the release of her radio documentary “At a Loss for Words: How a flawed idea is teaching millions of kids to be poor readers.” A follow up to her award-winning exposé on the science of reading, it goes a step further by calling attention to an inconvenient truth that something is rotten in the world of reading instruction.

In her fifty-three-minute tour de force, Hanford argues that teachers continue to be kept in the dark on reading science, and leads listeners towards a Matrix-like reveal of how bad teaching practices and classroom materials remain deeply embedded in our schools. The documentary opens with a moving account of Molly Woodworth, an otherwise successful student who struggled to read as a kid. Woodworth learned to hide and cope with her predicament, but her difficulties as a child led to a resolve to make sure her own children wouldn’t suffer the same hardships. It was a shock then when Woodworth—while volunteering in her daughter’s kindergarten classroom—observed how children were being taught to read:

The teacher said, “If you don’t know the word, just look at this picture up here,” Woodworth recalled. “There was a fox and a bear in the picture. And the word was bear, and she said, ‘Look at the first letter. It’s a “b.” Is it fox or bear?’”

Woodworth was stunned. “I thought, ‘Oh my God, those are my strategies.’ Those are the things I taught myself to look like a good reader, not the things that good readers do,” she said. “These kids were being taught my dirty little secrets.”

The teacher was following the curriculum, and in all likelihood meant well and was unaware and unschooled in how the strategies she was using were disproven and debunked decades ago. According to Hanford, this flawed approach is driving the way many children are being taught to read across the country. She’s probably right, but there’s no way to know for sure, given the anemic amount of data available on instructional materials.

Nevertheless, I decided to try a little experiment—albeit a highly unscientific one—with regard to my own daughter, who will be entering kindergarten next year. Here in Colorado, full-day kindergarten recently became tuition free. The move coincided with some recent scouting of local public schools, and a couple of weeks ago I toured what is considered one of the best in the area. As my colleague Robert Pondiscio wrote, “If you are a well-off parent who wants a safe, structured, academically rigorous school, and you wish your child to attend school alongside the children of like-minded parents, it is not insurmountably difficult to get it.” This school categorically fit the bill.

Upon arrival, I was told how project-based learning is a focus across the school. I was shown a music room chock full of guitars and keyboards, as well as a Chinese classroom where the teacher shared her passion for the language, cuisine, and culture. I also had a chance to observe each of the school’s kindergarten classrooms, where students were busy swiping away on iPads or otherwise working at small group activities. A feeling of joy, care, and purpose was palpable. At first blush, the school lived up to its sterling reputation, but a moment of truth was to be delivered when one of the kindergarten teachers asked if I had any questions. My response: “How do you teach reading?”

The teacher smiled and proudly explained how she used guided reading and leveled books—an instructional method highlighted by Hanford that causes problems for children learning how to read—to “meet the needs of each child.” She proceeded to invoke Lucy Calkins, an author whose methods have been largely invalidated, followed soon thereafter with those two dreaded words: “balanced literacy,” an anodyne-sounding approach that belies its complicity in preventing kids from becoming skilled readers. All of this was ostensibly in service of addressing the multiple “learning styles” of children. Another parent on the tour with me liked what he heard and nodded affirmingly. I was crestfallen.

However, as I looked around the room full of the progeny of affluent and well-educated families, and considered what I had just heard alongside Hanford’s outstanding reporting, it occurred to me that almost all of the students at that school were part of the 40 percent whom researchers estimate will learn to read no matter how they’re taught. To wit, in an endeavor that risks exposing me as a total nerd, I’ve almost finished taking my four-year-old through Zig Engelmann’s Teach Your Child to Read in 100 Easy Lessons, the abbreviated version of an acclaimed evidence-based reading program. My daughter is flourishing and reading fluently. But for her and many of the children I saw that day, their success at reading will be in spite of the instruction they receive in school, not because of it. And kids who aren’t lucky enough to have parents with the time and expertise to teach them how to read will continue to be left behind.

On national reading tests, almost two-thirds of American students score below the proficient level. More tragically, almost half of African American and Hispanic fourth graders still score below NAEP’s basic level in reading. Hanford’s latest documentary keeps the momentum going on an important national conversation about curriculum reform and how our nation’s children are (or aren’t) being taught to read. OxyContin maker Purdue Pharma is expected to file for bankruptcy, but Heinemann, the purveyor of the misbegotten reading products dominating the education market today, continues to rake in north of $500 million annually. The lack of accountability can be infuriating, but Hanford’s meticulous spotlight on the evidence could be the first step in beginning to turn the tide.

Editor’s note: This is the second in a series of posts looking at how two school networks—Rocketship Public Schools and Wildflower Schools—enable their students to master standards at their own pace. See the first post here.

Last week I argued that one of the greatest challenges facing elementary educators is the vast gulf in readiness levels between their high- and low-achieving students. Some kids enter first grade ready for Diary of a Wimpy Kid, if not Harry Potter, while others are still sounding out their letters. We looked at how two very different school models—Rocketship and Wildflower—cope.

This week we go deeper into how these schools ensure that their lowest-performing kids don’t fall further behind. That’s an essential objective for any school, but it’s a particular concern in the personalized-learning world. That’s because some skeptics have insisted that by focusing instruction on the current level of struggling students, educators might inadvertently impede them from making progress and catching up.

For example, after the release of last year’s blockbuster report, The Opportunity Myth, TNTP’s Amanda Kocon urged schools to make sure every student was spending at least half of their time on grade-level content:

Students don’t need assignments to be grade-appropriate 100 percent of the time—or even three-quarters of the time. In fact, in the very best classrooms we observed in The Opportunity Myth, students spent roughly half of their time on grade-appropriate assignments, and that made a real difference—about six months of additional learning for kids who started the year behind—relative to classrooms where students had those opportunities less often. That still leaves plenty of time for intentionally designed remediation, for tapping into student’s individual interests and strengths to guide the arc of their learning, and for making sure students’ experiences in school leave them feeling successful and proud.

And of course the Common Core standards stress the importance of students reading books with appropriately demanding “text complexity,” rather than spending all of their time with “just right” texts at their current reading levels.

So how do Rocketship and Wildflower thread this needle for their low-performing students—meeting them where they are while helping them stretch to master grade level content? Let’s find out.

Wildflower’s Matthew Kramer:

Those of us in the Montessori world, and at Wildflower, don’t think of the curriculum as one long scope and sequence to be worked through linearly. We think of curriculum as a spiraling, branching way of organizing skills and knowledge—where students find different things easier and harder and more and less interesting at particular moments in time, or over longer periods. This can lead to the situation of a child being “behind” state standards in a given area, sometimes for trivial reasons (e.g., the student has yet to learn a particular geography topic), and sometimes for very important reasons (e.g., undiagnosed dyslexia leads to accumulated struggles with reading and writing). We also don’t think of childhood as a long, undifferentiated teaching and learning opportunity. As modern neuroscience research has demonstrated, children go through periods of special sensitivity and openness to particular types of input and learning.

We aim to leverage the natural energy that exists in children to follow their passions as the primary fuel for student learning and development, but we also recognize that there are times when a more direct intervention model is needed. For example, in a Montessori environment, when sensitive periods for language acquisition and touch end between six and seven years old, children are much less likely to spontaneously be drawn into reading and writing. Once that happens, it’s the teacher’s (we call ours Guides) role to create a highly structured, direct instruction program focused on phonics—generally delivered in short, fifteen-minute bursts sprinkled throughout each day, where most time is still spent focused on a child’s interests. Over the years, Montessorians have borrowed intervention programs developed in other environments (e.g., Orton-Gillingham for reading) and developed their own interventions that typically involve using the manipulatives in more teacher-directed, structured ways.

This approach to curriculum causes the notion of being ahead or behind to be much less salient. As a Montessori child and parent myself, I have appreciated the way Montessori classrooms are more collaborative and less competitive than traditional classrooms. There is less focus on getting good grades and figuring out your class rank. That doesn’t mean that kids are protected from reality about things they are learning quickly or struggling with; the environment seeks to use reality as a tool for reflection in many important ways, and materials are self-correcting so that feedback is built into nearly everything. It just means that we don’t seek to roll things up into broad summative judgments. We don’t need to go from “long division is interesting and I like it and I’m good at it” to “I’m good at math” and certainly not to “I’m smart.” That chain of inference isn’t very helpful, as Carol Dweck’s work on fixed versus growth mindsets has made clear.

Instead, we encourage children to find the things that spark their passions, dig into them deeply with the structured support of the Montessori curricular framework, and think of their classmates as a group of fellow human beings who also have passions, strengths, areas that don’t come easily, etc. One person whom I went to school with thirty-five years ago, who subsequently became a Montessori teacher and administrator, recently said to me that the first time he realized there were “smart” and “dumb” kids was when he switched to a traditional college prep high school environment. Up to that point, the other kids in the class were just kids. He didn’t realize that evaluating each other and ranking the group by aggregate smartness was a thing. I think that’s a beautiful sentiment.

Rocketship’s Preston Smith:

Twelve years of experience has confirmed our belief that it is critical to meet students where they are and help them rapidly grow up to and above grade level. If a child is behind, giving them solely grade-level content is not necessarily the best solution, as they cannot access that content. Similarly, if a child is ahead, giving them solely grade-level content can often lead to boredom and disruptive behaviors.

Our model has proven effective for all types of students, helping children of all abilities grow and succeed. We set high expectations for all students, regardless of where they start academically. As a parent of two Rocketeers, I have personally witnessed the benefits of purposeful differentiation and personalization for each of my kids. Our mission to eliminate the achievement gap compels us to serve students who are most at risk of falling behind their college bound classmates. Eighty-plus percent of our students are classified as socioeconomically disadvantaged, with some schools seeing up to 30 percent of pupils classified as homeless. Many Rocketeers have experienced PTSD and trauma, such as depression, anxiety, and lack of trust, causing short- and long-term challenges to their learning and physical and mental health. We also accept students in all grades at all times of every school year, so we have many children coming in mid-year or mid-elementary school. All of this adds up to many Rocketeers starting the school year more than one grade level behind or at vastly different academic levels. Therefore, there is quite a lot of ground to make up to get our Rocketeers to grade level and beyond, so we have focused our model on making sure we can get our kids from behind to ahead instead of stuck working on material not at their mastery level.

We’ve accomplished this through a more flexible approach to curricula and instruction than other schools. Our model is built upon using different learning modalities in order to meet the unique needs of each student. Our Rocketeers move throughout the day, week, and school year from large to small group to even one-on-one instruction, based on academic data that indicate their level and need. Our ability to rapidly utilize student achievement data indicating content mastery (regardless of grade level) allows us to quickly and accurately discern where our Rocketeers are excelling and where they need more practice. Data are reviewed and used to adjust work plans on daily and weekly bases, ensuring that our Rocketeers are meaningfully engaged in a flexible learning environment that best allows them to master content and skills.

We know that this approach and flexibility of groupings and content in the classroom is working, as our Rocketeers progressed an average of 1.36 years in math last year (as measured by the nationally-normed NWEA MAP), which means that in just one school year they learn an entire year’s worth of material and skills, plus 36 percent of an additional grade level’s content. So a student who comes in far behind stacks this success year over year to rapidly close that grade-level gap. Last year alone, over 2,100 Rocketeers made the leap from behind grade level to ahead in at least one academic subject.

This approach to instruction and learning at Rocketship means that grades are not the driving force for our Rocketeers and families. Rather, parents and students are intimately aware of their personalized goals on various indicators like STEP, NWEA, their online learning programs, and more. Our Rocketeer’s success is not determined or judged based on subjective means or grades, but rather personalized goals that grant our parents and students greater agency to succeed and thrive. In addition to greater ownership, it makes success and progress more visible for all of our Rocketeers, which better enables their growth mindset and engagement in school. 

Through regular analysis of student work and assessment data, we are able to ensure that our Rocketeers are not falling further behind, but rather are making the level of progress necessary to return to grade level. In addition, our advanced Rocketeers are exposed to content that challenges them at their level, and they are supported to continue to accelerate their learning above and beyond their grade level. This instructional approach enables us to best serve all students and, in the process, enable our Rocketeers to more rapidly eliminate their achievement gaps.

A new study by Matt S. Giani, Paul Attewell, and David Walling uses unemployment insurance data from 2015 to estimate the effect of completing some college on labor market outcomes of more than 200,000 Texas students who graduated high school in in the year 2000. Unlike most studies, which compare college non-completers to completers, this one compares non-completers to students who didn’t enroll in college to begin with. And the size of the sample allows the authors to explore differences based on students’ economic background, race, gender, and the type of institution (two-year or four-year).

Overall, they find that attending some college but not graduating boosts employment by roughly 20 percentage points and earnings by 6 percent after fifteen years. Moreover, the employment benefit from having some college seems to be greater for historically underrepresented groups. For example, going to but not completing a four-year college is associated with a 13.2 percent increase in earnings for women, but just a 2.6 percent increase for men. Similarly, “non-disadvantaged students who attend four-year colleges short of a credential receive almost no increase in earnings, whereas disadvantaged non-completing students receive a 22.6 percent increase in earnings.”

In addition to these findings, the authors also highlight two results that are arguably counterintuitive.

First, among “non-completers at four-year institutions,” only the first one to twelve credits were associated with a significant increase in earnings—meaning there were no additional benefits for students who earned more credits (but no degree). As the authors note, this suggests that “the simple act of enrolling in college is a strong signal to the labor market, even before students have accumulated significantly more human capital.” However, another potential implication is that college is mostly a signal, meaning that human capital isn’t really accumulating at all.

Second and even less intuitively, the benefits of “some community college” seem to be larger than the benefits of “some four-year college,” especially for certain groups. This finding points towards what is arguably the most important insight in the paper, which is the generally underappreciated extent to which signals are “contextual.” As the authors put it:

A bachelor’s degree in a specific field from a specific college or university could be a positive signal for certain job opportunities and a negative signal for others. Similarly, college attendance without completion could be a positive signal for some job opportunities and a negative signal for others.

Based on their findings, the authors argue for “a conceptual shift away from the notion of ‘the college dropout’ as failure or wasted effort and toward an appreciation of the practical utility of ‘some college’ for many students.” In other words, perhaps we’re spending too much time worrying about students as opposed to institutions. Or to put it in even more plainly, perhaps the fundamental problem isn’t “college non-completion” so much as it’s the increasingly watered-down nature of the college experience.

After all, if you really do get points for trying, it makes even less sense to let everyone win.

SOURCE: Matt S. Giani, Paul Attewell, and David Walling, “The Value of an Incomplete Degree: Heterogeneity in the Labor Market Benefits of College Non-Completion,” The Journal of Higher Education (August 2019).

Bellwether Education Partners, long interested in the improvement of school transportation systems, released no less than three papers on the topic this summer. One of them, “Intersection Ahead,” looks at choice-based racial integration efforts through a transportation lens.

School choice efforts such as charters and vouchers are still a long way from fulfilling their primary purpose—increasing the number of quality school seats for the neediest underserved students—but authors Phillip Burgoyne-Allen, Bonnie O’Keefe, and Jennifer O’Neal Schiess focus specifically on schools of choice designed with another purpose: reducing racial segregation in their cities. They provide three case studies—a magnet system in North Carolina, a “diverse-by-design” charter network in Kansas, and a “controlled choice” model in Kentucky. For each, the authors explain the myriad ways that leaders are trying to facilitate more integrated classrooms, and the many challenges they’re facing. One of biggest issues, and the focus of the paper, is how to effectively and efficiently get prospective or enrolled students to the schools they want to attend. This is an issue for all schools of choice that are trying to achieve any positive end.

Magnet schools enroll students in specialized programs—be it math, science, art, etc.—from larger geographies than traditional school assignment zones, either serving an entire district or multiple districts in a region, with entry often via lottery. The breadth of geographic coverage, and often the quality of magnet schools, ensure that they are attractive to a wide cross-section of students. Some magnets, like the system in North Carolina’s Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools profiled in one case study, have been engineered specifically to boost integration. Admission, for example, hinges on an index comprising five socioeconomic indicators: household income, educational attainment, English being spoken in the home, homeownership, and single versus multi-adult households. And based on the existing diversity of a magnet school, priority for new admissions is given to students at whatever indicator levels are needed to maintain the desired diversity level. Because these systems exist in tandem with more traditional assignment zone schools, districts must literally drive far and wide to meet students’ needs. Mitigating efforts like staggered bell schedules and efficient pickup locations can help, the report says. But costly and time-intensive routes seem mostly unavoidable, and therefore hamper magnets’ contribution to integration.

The second case study covers Crossroads Charter Schools in Kansas City, Missouri, which are “diverse-by-design,” meaning they’re committed to student diversity in their mission and have achieved a certain level of diversity within their actual enrollment. Location decisions, when those can be controlled, can assist greatly in achieving a charter’s mission of diversity, but can often wreak havoc with transportation. The Crossroads schools are located in a downtown area where space was available but population density remains low. Getting any students to simply attend, let alone a diverse group of them, required the school to create its own transportation network from the start via fundraising and partnerships with other charters. But ultimately, the students bore the cost of increased diversity, not the schools. “The reality is that the low-income student across town has to wake up earlier and catch the bus, whereas a more affluent student closer to our schools might have a parent drive them and get an extra hour of sleep,” said Courtney Hughley, chief operating officer at Crossroads. As with the aforementioned magnet systems, there are ways to mitigate these effects, but they’re largely unavoidable as long as children live far from the schools they want to attend.

The final case study is of the “controlled choice” model in Jefferson County Public Schools (JCPS) in Louisville, Kentucky. The populous and sprawling district has several large school-assignment zones. Residents can only attend schools in their zone, but each has a number of school choices—especially at the elementary level. Individual schools have a “diversity index” that includes average household income, racial breakdown, and family educational attainment. Families rank their choices and are assigned based on those rankings and how their attendance would affect a school’s diversity index. The transportation requirements are, obviously, enormous. JCPS provides all transportation and employs a “depot model,” wherein many students must travel to transfer points and change buses daily to and from school. Without it, the district’s school choice system and diversity efforts would not work. Data show that JCPS’s transportation is more efficient overall than its description might suggest, but much of that financial efficiency rests on the sacrifices of the youngest students in the district—elementary students who must travel farthest and transfer twice each day. Throw in fog, snow, or rain, and those real “costs” surely become apparent.

The key recommendations from the Bellwether—adequate and equitable funding; innovation, planning, and technology; and partnerships among districts, charters, and other community organizations supporting families—make sense. They’d generally make any transportation system more efficient. But a well-funded and cost-effective school transportation system—even one that leads to increases in quality and integration—that requires poor kids to wake up before dawn, transfer buses, and ride for two hours is not a win for families. They’re bearing most of the costs. A better system would include a collection of good schools near every child from which families could choose. But until we achieve that, “efficient” school transportation may, sadly, be the best we can do.

SOURCE: Phillip Burgoyne-Allen, Bonnie O’Keefe, and Jennifer O’Neal Schiess, “Intersection Ahead: School Transportation, School Integration, and School Choice,” Bellwether Education Partners (August 2019).

1. As promised, the Senate Education Committee yesterday took a look at a bill promising some big changes to the state’s academic distress paradigm. Our own Chad Aldis was on hand to provide testimony. Gongwer’s coverage of the hearing is lengthy—it’s kind of quiet around Capitol Square, you know; plus this is important stuff—and detailed. (Gongwer Ohio, 9/10/19) Lots of detail on some of the testimony in the PD (not Chad’s, though). It’s clearly a complicated plan that’s tough to condense into a short-ish news report, but Patrick mostly covers it. (Cleveland Plain Dealer, 9/10/19) Closer to the heart of the matter, however, the same cannot be said of the Elyria Chronicle’s coverage. A number of descriptions of aspects of the proposed new process here are muddled and confused. But perhaps it’s because there’s only one thing that really matters locally: whether Lorain City Schools gets released from “state takeover” via the final bill. And it is very clear that that is not the case as it stands now. (The Chronicle-Telegram, 9/11/19)
2. In separate but oh-so-related news, school and district report cards are to be released tomorrow. Some closely-watched districts have been getting out ahead of the news by publicly previewing their final overall grades early. Akron City Schools is super happy with their projected grade of D, even though it means that they stay the same as last year. (Akron Beacon Journal, 9/9/19) Ditto for Canton City Schools, also ecstatic over their projected D. This will be a boost from last year’s overall F for them. It was achieved, officials think, due in large part to a boost in graduation rate. You know what I mean. Even better: if that turns out to be the actual final grade, the clock will start over in regard the “turnaround” process, no matter which version we end up with. (Canton Repository, 9/9/19) The catchall report from this week’s meeting of the elected board of Canton City Schools noted the projected overall district grade (called, evocatively, a “fragile D”), but focused more on families cranked off about the district’s new Scrooge-ish busing policy. Still. (News5, Cleveland, 9/10/19) Speaking of report cards, the Dayton Daily News found not one single school district official anywhere who likes those things. Not a one. Can you imagine? (Dayton Daily News, 9/11/19)

3. Finally today, the elected board of Mansfield City Schools spent a couple of hours with a life coach cheerleader “national thought leader, keynote speaker & strategist” earlier this week and came out of it pretty darn jazzed and a couple of ideas around “public image” strategies. To wit: they would, in the future, like to “celebrate our diversity” (what were you doing before, one might ask) and to get the word out that “we hire our grads” (someone else who’s owning where they are, if you know what I mean). Oh those lucky families and students. (Richland Source, 9/10/19)

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