Charter schools in Ohio, post-budget

Charter schools were undoubtedly winners in the most recent state budget. Funding and policy changes will provide a huge boost to the sector and promise good things for the students attending Ohio charters. Toledo Blade editors opined in favor of Ohio’s new child-centric budget, including a positive reference to “deserving” charter schools.

Negativity from the usual corners

While some commentators did try to cast automatic closure changes approved in the budget as weakening charter accountability, Rep. Jamie Callender was quick to point out that the changes merely aligned academic expectations for charter and district schools. Minus the actual closure part, of course.

The future for charters is so bright…

But there is no time to rest, especially not when a new school year beckons. Fordham’s Aaron Churchill, feeling buoyed by several years of strong reforms in Ohio’s charter sector, laid out the case for expansion of high-quality charter schools in the state. Current operators should feel bullish about growing and out-of-state operators should recognize the newly unfurled welcome mat.

The national perspective on charter facilities

This week, the Charter School Facility Center at the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools released a national snapshot of charter facilities funding in 30 states and the District of Columbia. Ohio does reasonably well, but has a lot of room for improvement.

Speaking of NAPCS

Emily Schultz, director for state advocacy and policy with the National Alliance, was interviewed for West Virginia public media on the topic of the value of charter schools as she sees it. Her theme was largely one of innovation and choice for families. She references Sciotoville Community School as a model that perhaps other rural communities might find valuable. Unfortunately, the final bill signed into law this month is likely too narrow, she believes, to bring much innovation to the Mountain State.

Not all the news is good

Epic Charter Schools in Oklahoma are under the microscope after an investigative report alleged enrollment inflation, funding irregularities, and lax authorizer oversight. The shadow of ECOT’s demise looms large over this story and many pundits will be looking for a similar outcome.

Last month, Alabama’s Governor Kay Ivey signed the Alabama Literacy Act into law, making the state the nineteenth to require third grade reading retention. It’s a policy with roots in California, but that got its legs in Florida under former Governor Jeb Bush. Freelance reporter Alexandra Starr recently reported on the subject for NPR’s “All Things Considered.” A follow up segment is also in the works.

Reading proficiently by the end of third grade is considered a significant milestone and gateway to lifelong success. A third grader who cannot read proficiently is four times less likely to graduate from high school than one who can. To encourage schools and districts to take this milestone seriously, states like Alabama have enacted legislation to hold back students who are not reading proficiently by the end of third grade. That said, states have approached this effort in a variety of ways. Some mandate retention, while others allow for retention but do not require it.

The research on retention is voluminous. Hundreds of studies have been carried out on the subject, most with a focus on the elementary level. At first blush, the “weight” of the evidence makes it tempting to argue that retention is ineffective, but that would be akin to printing out all of the studies, organizing them by those finding positive and negative effects, and then deeming the heavier pile the more credible—an exercise all too common with education research.

Though the matter is far from settled, an examination of newer Florida-type policies show that retention based on objective measures plus intensive interventions work. As an example, Indiana—where I worked as an assistant state superintendent—passed such a law in 2010. Since the state’s enactment of the policy, fourth grade reading has steadily improved. It’s difficult to draw causal inferences from NAEP, but as Figure 1 illustrates, Indiana increased the percentage of students proficient in reading while decreasing the percentage of students scoring below basic—a trend which held for all principal subgroups.

Figure 1. NAEP fourth grade reading scores, by percentage of all students at achievement levels, 2009–17

As is common in states that adopt retention mandates tied to third-grade reading, the initial reaction was one of resistance from Alabama’s education establishment, including the state’s department of education, school superintendents, principals, and school boards. We faced similar opposition in Indiana. Everyone shares the goal of improving reading in the early grades, but policymakers and practitioners tend to part ways on retention—which is frowned upon for a litany of reasons ranging from the cost of holding students back to the potential stigma and damage to students’ self-esteem. Yet the prevailing practice of social promotion has proven exponentially more destructive.

Furthermore, the question of how to test for reading proficiency, especially reading comprehension, is a complexifier in the retention debate. My colleague Robert Pondiscio has written extensively on the topic, and pointed out that reading tests in grades three through eight send instructionally troubling signals to teachers and can incentivize bad practice. The burgeoning trend of valorizing knowledge acquisition is an indubitably positive one, but removing reading tests altogether strikes me as a bridge too far.

To wit, it seems to me that the arguments against reading tests or retention are allowing the perfect to be the enemy of the good. The effects of retention on academic achievement may be a mixed bag, but eight states with comprehensive reading policies have made greater gains than those without. And it’s unclear what long-term impacts retention may have on metrics like college enrollment or average earnings. Hopefully, it’s a question that will be answered by future research. In the meantime, there’s a lot to be said about the accountability provided when a state’s framework includes retention in the toolkit.

The naysayers will argue that, by retaining low-achieving third graders and providing them an extra year in school, states like Florida were able to artificially boost their numbers on federally required tests in fourth grade. This claim has always been part of the retention debate, though its veracity is questionable, with one recent study showing that the extra year does not explain the difference in student performance.

This is one of many such misconceptions of mandatory retention policies, but they are not as draconian as they are often reported to be. Most include good-cause exemptions—such as for special education students and those with limited English proficiency—that provide local leaders considerable latitude in adhering to the law. In Florida, fewer than half of students not meeting the promotion standard on the state test are actually retained. Moreover, these laws consider retention a “last-resort” measure. On its own, retention would service little purpose if there were no change in approach or practice the following year. An effective policy must include retention alongside early identification, teacher training, intensive reading intervention, and parent involvement.

It’s taken twenty years, but more states are rightfully giving social promotion the third degree. And thanks to the post-recession “Baby Bust,” it’s happening at the most opportune time. Reading instruction still leaves much to be desired, but it’s doubtful the states that really need to focus on the issue would do so without the encouragement provided by a statutory requirement. Case in point: The effects of Indiana’s third grade reading statute are now part of the state’s DNA. As one Hoosier official recently concluded, “Without legislation, I don’t know if the focus would be on literacy. All eyes are on all children reading by the end of third grade.”

1. Post-budget analysis continues. Fordham’s Aaron Churchill is among the folks quoted in this piece looking at the budget’s changes to charter school automatic closure provisions. (Columbus Dispatch, 7/24/19) Meanwhile, editors in Toledo opined: “The budget reveals an administration that intends to have its arms elbow-deep into solving the real problems of education.” Given this, the editors generally laud the budget for its education provisions—minus Academic Distress Commissions—and say very little at all about charter school changes. Interesting. (Toledo Blade, 7/25/19)
   

2. However, the Blade’s associate editor has his own thoughts on education policy and penned his own solo commentary to address them. He starts out by blasting state report cards generally (and returns to this a couple of times throughout), but what he’s really stuck on is the value added measure. He is responding to testimony before JEOC (RIP) last week provided by a Toledo City Schools board member about how biased she believes the measure is against large school districts. Take note that what she testified is that a small negative rating on student growth gets magnified for large districts like Toledo. Which kind of makes sense to me seeing as to how we’re talking about a lot of students in a big district, but what do I know. Mr. Troy tells me that nobody in Ohio understands report cards but this one exceptional board member. Wonder if heroner would be saying the same if Toledo had a small positive growth rating that was itself inflated. Who knows? Certainly not me. (Toledo Blade, 7/26/19)
   

3. Speaking of which, only Ohio’s giant urban school districts could turn a multimillion dollar budget windfall into a reason to complain. (Akron Beacon Journal, 7/23/19)
   

4. I am left wondering after all of this if things are saner in the smaller districts. This piece about how Berea City Schools are changing their method of gifted identification indicates to me that the margin is slim. (Cleveland.com, 7/25/19)

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Are essay-based group competitions good for educational innovation? 

Recently, education policy maven and friend Rick Hess penned “The Wham-O Pudding Essay Contest Theory of Educational Innovation,” a brilliantly funny framing of his thoughts on the oh-so-many contests to select the next Big Education Idea. Oh, to write with such waggery.

I have opined elsewhere on the conduct of these contests; in particular about the need to stick to the mission and goals as they’re written. If you put in a request for jalapeño mango chutney, yet reward only the contestants who submit vanilla ice cream variants, your contest is being a bit ungenerous. If you don’t like it spicy, fair enough. Just don’t ask teams to waste their time on Mars Journey design when you’ll really only read maps that head toward Ames.

Yes, it’s true Kennedy sought Mars as the original space goal and, when it was ruled is unrealistic, reluctantly settled for putting a man on the moon. Practicality is fine; just be fair. If you’re giving away a $100,000 prize, you may not want the totally unsafe bet to receive it. But if you’re claiming to be all about disruption and out-of-the-box thinking, well at least give a few of those entrants some recognition along the way.

But what about the basic function of these contests? Are they good for the innovators and entrepreneurs that they address? Are they good for the education community as a whole? Are they good for kids?

So Rick knows something about these that he didn’t tell you. He sits on the board of an organization called 4.0 Schools that does nothing but conduct Wham-O Pudding Essay contests. It has conducted many rounds of these in various forms over a number of iterations in varying sizes and objectives and character of awards. (I’ve entered several times, done the phone interview, phoned Matt Candler, got nothing in return.)

Indeed, for a while, they ran the impressive The Apprentice edu-derivative, Startup Weekend Edu. But I often wish I’d never heard of these foundations and had consistently spent my time in other ways. “Cash is king,” we were told that start up weekend. Sell something now.

“If Jobs and Wozniak, or Bill Gates and Paul Allen, had penned an essay in the 1970s about their vision, it would’ve been divorced from the experience of doing it,” says Rick. That’s true.

Also worth noting: Not all of us come to this with parents who hung with IBM’s CEO, went to private prep schools and Harvard with the children of other elite, or happen to be thrown in with a genius technology wizard or live in the neighborhood of the company occupying the state-of-the-art position in the industry we want to change. Not all of us can get an appointment with H. Ross Perot. Or even Drive Capital. Not all of us stumble onto Esquire Magazine in a fire sale.

“Because they were garage-builders … I kind of suspect their entries would’ve paled next to those of thumb-suckers and soothsayers who’d spent their days learning what phrases were in vogue and mastering impressive-sounding terminology,” adds Hess. That’s true, too. I can show you the pile of failed applications sitting on the desk beside me.

Recently a company in Columbus, Ohio, hit the sweet spot in the sector they aimed to serve. They finally arrived at a product that just instantly spoke to the customers they talked to—that has the potential for radically disrupting the healthcare administration industry. They tried twenty-seven products before getting there. What’s important is that the first twenty-seven did not pay the bills along the way. You can build an organization in a way that does. Hewlett-Packard did. If you want to build an education org like it, then the “sell anything to anyone who will buy” it model works. But usually that’s exactly the approach that never gets around to leap-ahead change.

So, no, the really good BHAGs may simply never fit into the forms of a Wham-O Pudding essay contest. Far more pointedly, my BHAG may never fit into the form of the upcoming contest questionnaires at Fordham, 4.0 schools, and other organizations.

But does that mean they should not conduct them? And if they do, should the innovators (should I) invest our precious time our time elsewhere?

Risk’s summative concern seems for the larger conversation: “I fear that this big-idea contest boomlet risks redirecting attention, energy, and regard toward poseurs and aspiring TED talkers, and away from the innovators and inventors with the skill and the will to make remarkable things happen.”

But that was happening anyway. Remember when the edu-pundits were all agog over the seventeen-year-old who would save American education? (And who was basically a Diane Ravitch knock-off, with less than 1 percent of her accumulated knowledge?) Here in Ohio, administrators practically worship at the feet of Ted Dintersmith and George Couros. Chris Emdin, anyone?

The glut of poseurs and TED-talkers is hardly the unique spawn of the contest strategy of change.

On the innovators’ side, there is, of course, the possibility of side benefits. That this time, tailoring the form, in this targeting of the words, to this organization, I will finally discover The Magic Marketing Message that resonates with a larger audience. Or that this time the ideal stakeholder will discover us, and join forces. Could happen.

A confession: I buy lottery tickets. Not often. Not many. But some—maybe six to ten a year.

When your only shoes are pocked with holes, when your bed hurts your back at night, when you don’t have the gasoline you know you need to go and visit the people that you know you absolutely have to talk to, when you live largely on long-term hope, then sometimes short-term hope is priceless indeed. Sometimes the thought that the half-billion (or half-thousand) that may lie on the piece of paper in your wallet is the comfort and support needed to move you forward.

And sometimes, the thought that a group of education experts assembled somewhere will grasp your idea and move it onto another level is the one thing that keeps you going.

For many years, first-rate charter networks looked at Ohio and immediately “swiped left.” Sadly, the state’s charter sector had a well-earned reputation for mediocre performance, was too often mired in controversy, and suffered from skimpy funding.

But all that is rapidly changing due to bold policy reforms—so much so that Ohio is quickly transforming into an attractive locale for high-performing schools. Two critical policy advancements are creating a healthy environment where quality charters can take root.

1. Recognizing the need to overhaul its charter laws, the General Assembly passed landmark reforms in 2015. The notable changes include strengthening charter authorizer policies to demand more responsible oversight practices; closing statutory loopholes that allowed chronically low-performing schools to escape accountability; and enacting several commonsense governance provisions. These forceful reforms have reshaped the charter sector. Dozens of low-capacity authorizers and poor-performing schools, including an abysmal online school, have gone away. This sifting process is restoring confidence that charters can govern themselves responsibly, and it’s helping to protect the reputation of top performers. Most importantly, these reforms are starting to bear fruit when it comes to pupil achievement: School report card ratings and a recent CREDO evaluation both indicate that brick-and-mortar charter performance is on the upswing.

2. Cognizant of the state’s large charter-funding gaps, Governor Mike DeWine and the legislature just this month enacted a milestone appropriation that drives additional state dollars to high-performing, high-poverty charter schools. Over the next two years, $60 million—up to $1,750 per low-income student—in supplemental funding will be disbursed to quality charters so that they can increase their capacity to serve more children in need of a great education. Importantly, these funds are also available to stellar national charter networks seeking to expand into the Buckeye State. Overall, the passage of this funding program demonstrates an appetite among lawmakers to leverage state dollars to support great charters, and it represents a big step forward in efforts to narrow funding disparities.   

While Ohio’s policy environment for charters has dramatically improved, the need for extraordinary, beat-the-odds charter schools remains acute. Consider just a few data points about students attending schools in Ohio’s “Big Eight” cities—areas that have historically faced major educational challenges. (For a more comprehensive review, see this report.) Figure 1 shows that seventh grade proficiency rates slump well below the state average and are mostly stuck in the 30s, even dipping as low as 19 percent in Youngstown.

Figure 1: Seventh grade ELA and proficiency across Ohio Big Eight districts, 2017–18

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Note: The statewide average in seventh grade ELA and math was 64 and 59 percent, respectively.

The next figure reveals depressingly low percentages of students reaching the state’s college-remediation-free benchmarks on the ACT or SAT exams.

Figure 2: Remediation-free ACT or SAT scores across Ohio Big Eight districts, classes of 2016 and 2017

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Note: The statewide average remediation-free rate was 26 percent.

Last, we see that too few Big Eight schools, whether district or charter, make significant impacts on student growth over time. Figure 3 shows that just 17 percent of district schools in the Big Eight achieved an A or B on the state’s “value added” growth measure. Meanwhile, 64 percent received an F. Unfortunately, students stuck in these low-rated schools are unlikely to be making the progress needed to reach rigorous academic benchmarks by the time they exit high school.

Figure 3: Distribution of overall value-added ratings across Big Eight schools (district and charter), 2017–18

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***

Ohio has a lot going for it. Wallet Hub, for instance, recently ranked Ohio as one of the top states in the nation for fun, and CNBC just rated us the tenth best state for business. We’ve got great parks, beautiful lakefront, prestigious colleges and universities, museums, big-time athletics, and hopping (or hipster, if that’s your thing) urban areas.

Thanks to state legislators’ courageous reforms, Ohio is undergoing a renaissance in its charter school sector. Yet the need for excellent schools remains great. Tens of thousands of students, many from less prosperous backgrounds, are still waiting for a life-changing education. For all the terrific charter networks out there: Will you join us?

Editor’s note: This is the sixth in a series of posts looking at whether the nation’s schools have improved over the past quarter-century or so. The first two demonstrated that student outcomes rose significantly for the lowest-performing students and children of color from the late-1990s until the Great Recession—especially in reading and math, but in other academic subjects, too. The third post argued that this educational progress coincided with dramatically improving conditions for our poorest families. In particular, the “supplemental poverty rate” plummeted for children of color in the 1990s and into the 2000s. The fourth post looked at the potential relationship between poverty rates and academic achievement trends. Finally, the fifth installment argued that standards-based reform and a surge in school spending also deserve credit for rising achievement in the late 1990s into the 2000s.

A few weeks ago I presented a hypothesis: that the rapidly improving economic conditions for the country’s poorest families during the 1990s may have been responsible for much of the progress in student achievement we saw in the 2000s. As you can glimpse in the figure below, it appears that significant economic downturns, and upticks, were followed by similar movements on the National Assessment of Educational Progress—about seven years later for fourth grade scores and thirteen years later for eighth grade.

Figure 1. The “below basic in fourth grade reading rate” versus the supplemental child poverty rate

I find that national picture provocative and compelling. Still, I wondered if we’d see a similar pattern at the state level. Were the states where child poverty declined the most the same states where the “below basic” rate dropped the most?

In a word, no.

Figure 2: Percentage change in the supplemental poverty rate (1991–2000) vs. percentage change in the below basic rate in fourth grade reading (1998–2007)

As is evident, there’s no clear relationship between the change in poverty rates and the change in below-basic rates. One explanation is that my hypothesis doesn’t hold water. Another is that other factors were at work that led to very different results for various states—that the declining poverty rate pushed down the below-basic rate everywhere, but some states went farther faster than we’d predict based on their poverty rates alone.

Let’s see which states went farther and try to understand what else might explain their impressive results.

We’ll start by looking at the change in supplemental child poverty rates in the 1990s versus the change in below-basic NAEP rates in the late 90s into the early 2000s. Think of this as the core of the No Child Left Behind era. Here are the states that did the best.

Table 1. Top ten states for percentage change over time in the child poverty/below basic ratio, fourth grade reading, 1998–2007[1]

The names on this list should look familiar, given that most of them were the poster children of the early education reform movement. Delaware would later win one of the first Race to the Top grants; Massachusetts is famously the highest achieving state in the nation thanks to the “Massachusetts Miracle” reforms of the 1990s and 2000s; Jeb Bush’s Florida policies have become a model for states nationwide; North Carolina and Texas in many ways inspired the early standards-based reform era. Several of these states also led on scientifically-based reading instruction—notable given these results are for fourth grade reading.

Now let’s see how it looks for other grades and subjects.

Table 2. Fourth grade math, 2000–2007

Table 3. Eighth grade reading, 2003–2011

Table 4. Eighth grade math, 2003–2011

Some states did well across the board or close to it—namely Delaware, Massachusetts, New York, Texas, Georgia, Hawaii, and Washington. Several of these states displayed impressive reform credentials during that time period. A few of the other states that did well too leave me scratching my head, given that they aren’t known for reform-minded policies, or really much of anything: Montana, North Dakota, and New Mexico (in the pre-Hanna Skandera era) to be exact.

That all feels a bit like ancient history, however. Now let’s look at the more recent results—during a time period when the Great Recession created challenging economic conditions and most states struggled to keep their teachers paid and their achievement scores from declining.

Table 5. Fourth grade reading, 2009–2017

Table 6. Fourth grade math, 2009–2017

Table 7. Eighth grade reading, 2009–2017

Table 8. Eighth grade math, 2009–2017

Now we have a new set of states in the winner’s circle. Knocking it out of the park is Indiana, winner of our Ed Reform Idol contest, which faced brutal economic conditions after the Great Recession but made progress in some grade levels nonetheless. California also placed on all four lists—intriguing evidence that the Jerry Brown/Mike Kirst effort to boost funding while driving decisions to the local level may be paying off. Rhode Island hit a grand slam, too—way to go, Deb Gist. Arizona crushed it as well—someone tell Matt Ladner—perhaps because of its combination of widespread choice and thoughtful standards-based reform. Race to the Top favorite Tennessee scored in two categories. Florida is back on the list, this time for math instead of reading. And don’t overlook Mississippi, which has been making sure and steady progress even as its neighbor to the west, Louisiana, gets all of the national attention.

Several of these states are the same ones that look impressive according to “America’s Gradebook,” an analysis from Matt Chingos and his team at the Urban Institute—even though theirs is a snapshot in time, and mine examines progress over almost a decade.

To be sure, some states present a puzzle—they haven’t been particularly bold on reform, or generous on spending, yet got impressive results over the past decade. Virginia is at the top of that list. Michigan (yes, Michigan!), too.

Still, during both the NCLB era and more recent years, the lists have a clear reformy slant.

—

As I’ve written before in this series, I understand that the simple analyses I’ve presented here don’t count as rigorous evidence. I would love to see proper methodologists dig into these questions, too, and try to “decompose” the national and state-level NAEP results to determine what might explain them, and how much credit (or blame) goes to socioeconomic conditions, reform efforts, additional spending, or other factors.

From what I’ve seen, though, I’m ready to offer this tentative conclusion: Big national trends, such as we see on the National Assessment of Educational Progress, or high school graduation or college completion rates, are driven mostly, though not entirely, by big national socioeconomic trends. The booming 1990s had a bigger impact on NCLB-era gains than we understood at the time, and the Great Recession created a fiercer headwind than we understood, as well. Given that we’re now experiencing another historic boom—one that is finally lifting the wages of the lowest-income workers—we should expect child poverty rates to continue to fall and student achievement—after some delay—to start to rise. That is, if past is prologue.

Yet demography is not destiny. As we know for individual children, as well as individual schools, great effort can allow people or institutions to beat the odds. So it is with states. All jurisdictions should benefit from today’s economic conditions, but some will see their students go further faster depending on the policies their leaders put in place.

Which states are ready to lead during the next phase of education reform?

[1] We found the ratio between the supplemental child poverty rate at the time of a cohort's birth and the NAEP below-basic rate when the cohort was assessed—the poverty/below basic ratio—for the 1991 and 1998 birth cohorts. We then found the percentage change in the poverty/below basic ratio between the 1991 cohort and 1998 cohorts, as displayed in the last column in the table. States with larger percentage changes were able to narrow the gap between the child poverty rate and the NAEP below-basic rate over time. States with positive percentage changes saw improvements in student test scores at a rate that outpaced the state’s decrease in childhood poverty.

1. As my loyal Gadfly Bites subscribers know very well (love to all five of you!), your humble clips compiler loves to unearth obscure stories from odd outlets and to tie together the full range of found pieces into a story of the day, eclectic as it might turn out to be. Just for you. Well, today’s lead clip is probably the opposite of all that. To wit: I am the last person in all of America to find and talk about this very very prominent story which has been posted and discussed literally everywhere in the last 36 hours. But it’s still pretty cool. Hathaway-Brown, a bougie all-girls private school in Cleveland, is the first of its kind in the country to establish a varsity eSports program. It is probably only the wide reach of the AP—and not the cringey “Ooh look! Girls can be gamers too!” angle—that accounts for the story’s ubiquity in news outlets. Probably. (Associated Press, 7/22/19)

2. Longtime readers of the Bites will recall me following a series in the Plain Dealer a while back which chronicled the successes and roadblocks of a low-income family as they navigated life in Cleveland—including housing, employment, healthcare, and schooling for four children. I am noting it again because of this new piece in which not only is school choice a vital component but also in which my former employer, the awesome School Choice Ohio, is shown assisting the family in navigating the many options available to them. SCO FTW! (Cleveland Plain Dealer, 7/23/19) On the topic of school choice, Matt Ladner of RedefinED blogged earlier this week about the huge boost Ohio’s new biennial budget has given to choice in the Buckeye State. Nice. (RedefinED, 7/22/19)

3. Speaking of the budget, a lesser-known (to me, at least) provision was apparently a big boost to something called the Health IT in the CLE (HIT in the CLE) Community Classroom. I think they were funded mostly on the awesomeness of their mission—providing after school computer and data science instruction to CMSD students who do not have access to relevant coursework elsewhere—rather than the cleverness of their name. The new funding will allow the once-daily pilot program to expand to five days per week and, hopefully, boost the number of students taking part. (Yahoo Finance, 7/23/19) And since we’re on a tech kick this issue, here’s info on a summer program for recent high school grads in Columbus that seems to be pretty cool as well. Go nerds! (Columbus Dispatch, 7/24/19)

4. Summer is over for students at AIM Academy, Stark County’s only year round school. The new year—just the school’s second in existence—began earlier this week. Reviews of the first year seem positive. All but three school families (all of whom had to apply to attend) returned for the second year, and word of mouth was so positive that there is a waiting list of over 60 students this year. Only a small handful of third graders had to be retained due to the Third Grade Reading Guarantee, a big improvement over the usual numbers at other Canton schools. And preliminary test scores showed the school “holding its own” academically. (I’m not sure what that means, but let’s call it “not bad news”). The positive reading and test score outcomes are credited to intensive work during the three week “intersessions” – that is, targeted academic remediation for students who are behind which is conducted during the mini breaks taken throughout the year. As a result of this awesomeness, remediation is being cut this year to occur in just two of the three weeks in each intersession. Wait, what? (Canton Repository, 7/23/19)

5. The given reason for cutting back on the awesomeness at Canton’s AIM Academy in the foregoing clip is expense. The teachers conducting the remediation work are expensive and, apparently, that level of expenditure for actual academic success was not sustainable. And the story may only get worse. In nearby Mahoning County, the auditor has sent out a warning that declining overall population means declining student bodies in the county’s school districts, and that means money crunches down the pike. Unless, of course, these school districts can find a way to save money. Unfortunately, cutting back on the awesomeness is not an available option for most of them. (Youngstown Vindicator, 7/22/19)

6. Finally today: a look at what’s going on in school districts following the non-abolition of Academic Distress Commissions. In Youngstown, incoming CEO Justin Jennings attended a meeting of the elected school board, looking for common ground. Unfortunately, board members are still dithering over placing a levy on the November ballot. Probably because they were hoping they’d be giving that money to themselves and not to the CEO. (Youngstown Vindicator, 7/24/19) In Lorain, a new board member was chosen to replace former president Tony Dimacchia. The new member’s views on the ADC were pretty clear.  Because of that, Lorain also likely will not have a levy on the November ballot. Sounds familiar. (The Morning Journal, 7/23/19). In this coverage of the very same Lorain school board meeting, emphasis is given to some real world math problems which were discussed. And they are fascinating. Apparently the district uses student swipe cards to take attendance, and the teachers have “a box” on their desks that (I think) is used as a check against those swipes. But it seems that neither students nor teachers are having much success using these gizmos and attendance data—and all of the downstream uses of that data—may be out of whack because of it. Additionally, neither administration nor board can seem to agree on just how many teachers union members are employed in the district. Wonder if they use swipe cards to figure that out? (Elyria Chronicle, 7/24/19)

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We read Chester Finn’s recent Flypaper column, “Public attitudes toward gifted education: Supportive, complacent, incomplete,” with great interest and painful recognition. We’re business executives and parents who have been involved with gifted education for more than a decade, at the school, district, and state levels. We’d like to elaborate on some causes and consequences of the issues he highlighted.

Our introduction to gifted education came in Alberta, Canada, where gifted programs were limited to the top 5 percent of students based on their IQ test results. Our children pursued an accelerated course of study that was facilitated by the common provincial curriculum that all schools followed. Additional funding was provided for social and emotional services for gifted students—for example, to address their sometimes debilitating perfectionism, difficulty in forming authentic peer relationships, and challenges working in cognitively diverse groups.

While there is always room for improvement, Alberta’s gifted education program has produced impressive results. For example, on the 2015 PISA science assessment, 2.8 percent of Alberta fifteen-year-olds scored at the highest level, compared to 1.2 percent in the United States.

When we moved to Colorado and were considering where to live, the gifted education program in Jefferson County, the nation’s thirty-sixth largest school district, initially seemed quite promising. Jeffco had implemented universal gifted screening for second graders before the state mandated it, offered gifted center “school within a school” programs that were housed within seventeen of the district’s 137 schools and featured academic acceleration, and generally seemed supportive of gifted education.

Sadly, we soon learned that the district’s reality fell well short of its rhetoric.

Based on the different ways that students can be qualified as gifted under Colorado’s “Exceptional Children’s Educational Act,” our analysis found that at least 17 percent were potentially eligible based on the “general intellectual ability” or “specific academic aptitude” criteria—before even including the percentages considered gifted in the leadership and creativity categories. While in Alberta “gifted” was a special-ed designation, in Colorado it has too often seemed to be just another competitive parenting prize.

Given the large number of students deemed gifted, we weren’t surprised to find an incoherent mix of academic approaches to serving their needs, even at the “gifted center” schools, including many strategies that research has not shown to be effective (e.g., cluster grouping, assigning extra work, and having kids serve as teaching assistants for their peers).

In contrast to Alberta, acceleration, which researchers have found to be very effective, was inconsistently implemented and produced far weaker results than the research evidence shows is possible. There appear to be many reasons for this, including the lack of a common state, or even district, curriculum, the belief among a surprising number of educators that gifted education is an affront to equity, concerns that acceleration would result in students “running out of classes to take in high school,” and complaints from some parents that acceleration was too challenging for their kids (unsurprising, given the high percentage of students categorized as gifted).

We later discovered that Colorado school districts are only required to pay for dual enrollment in two-year community college courses, and often refuse to pay for courses at four-year universities, which are better aligned with many gifted students’ needs and college plans.

In another contrast to Alberta, special education services that systematically target gifted students’ social and emotional needs were essentially AWOL, except for those gifted students with an IEP or 504 plan. Unfortunately, failure to address these needs early on can have serious consequences when gifted students become adults.

Finn pointedly noted that the existence of shortcomings like those we have encountered reflects an issue that few want to confront: “The problem of leadership in gifted education.”

From what we’ve seen, an important source of this leadership vacuum has been the organizational choices that the gifted community has made (at the national, state, and district levels) to include parents, teachers, and administrators in the same advocacy associations. As a result, most of these organizations are dominated by educators, not parents. But time and again we have seen that this doesn’t work very well in practice. There are limits on how far district employees will go in “advocacy” on gifted education issues—and most of the time those limits fall far short of what is needed to meet the challenges at hand.

Sadly, we’ve also seen that parents rarely push back because too many of them are already intimidated by the challenges of raising a gifted child and don’t want to risk being deemed “uncollaborative” and losing whatever scraps the district is throwing their way. Needless to say, most districts prefer parents to be cheerleaders for those scraps.

There is also an enormous gulf between the way K–12 treats gifted students and the way the business world sees them.

CEOs know from experience what researchers have found in the data: Talent follows a power law, not a normal distribution (see, e.g., “The Best and the Rest” by O’Boyle and Aguinis). Today, CEOs are more obsessed than ever with hiring and retaining top talent. Why? Because in our era of “cognitive capitalism,” top talent has a disproportionate impact on companies’ ability to absorb and apply rapidly improving automation and artificial intelligence technologies, and thus their chances of survival in a world of winner-takes-all competition.

Unfortunately, we’ve learned that a sizable source of America’s failure to fully develop the talents of its most cognitively gifted students lies deep in the structures, processes, and cultures of many school districts and gifted advocacy organizations. After a decade in the trenches, we hold little hope that gifted education will substantially improve on the scale that is required. This is not uplifting news for employers or for parents of gifted children. But it is the hard reality today in far too many school districts.

We also know this: As technological and economic change continues to accelerate, the consequences of failing to meet gifted students’ cognitive, social, and emotional needs are going to be far larger and more severe than many of today’s K–12 leaders understand.

When The New York Times ran an article earlier this month on the “growing backlash” against urban charter schools, Greg Richmond, President of the National Association of Charter School Authorizers (NACSA), offered an oddly tepid response. “Most charter schools are not part of networks, most are not No Excuses,” he tweeted. “You wouldn't know that from media coverage.”

In fact, while “no excuses” schools operated by networks may not be the most common form of charters, they are by far the most successful. Perversely, they are also the ones that charter advocates, authorizers, and operators seem most eager to distance themselves from. NACSA cheerily notes a “notable and significant decline” in approvals by authorizers of no excuses schools. 

It’s a strange and dangerous moment in the charter-school movement. Democratic presidential candidates are falling over themselves to distance themselves from charters and attack “privatizers.” But the greatest victory of anti-charter activists has not been souring the public or even the Democrats on charter schools. It’s been turning the charter school sector against its own most successful model.

The phrase “no excuses” was coined twenty years ago to describe an optimistic movement and mindset that insisted there must be no excuses for adult failure. This coincided with the charter movement’s highest level of moral authority and public prestige, but that was no coincidence. When it first gained traction as a brand, a school model, and a rallying cry, “no excuses” signaled the non-negotiable belief that the root cause of educational failure and black-white achievement gaps was not poverty, not parents, not children, and above all not race. It was the belief that failing schools were the source of the problem and that great schools could be the solution—provided, of course, that everyone associated with them refused to tolerate or excuse failure.

Schools that embraced the “no excuses” mantra and mindset shared standard features such as longer instructional days, data-driven instruction, school uniforms, insistence on proper classroom behavior, an embrace of testing and accountability, and an unshakable commitment to get all students to and through college—features that remain in place in many charters (and other successful schools) today.

But you'd be hard-pressed to find a single charter leader who now uses the term to describe their school model. In an interview in The Atlantic two years ago, Success Academy founder Eva Moskowitz responded almost viscerally to it. “We’re not a no-excuses school. We're just not. I don't really know how to respond to that nomenclature.” But as I note in my forthcoming book, How the Other Half Learns, based on a year of fly-on-the-wall observations at Success, Moskowitz’s schools are not merely no excuses schools, they’re the most no excuses. Whether one cares for her brand of education or not, its defining feature is a demanding and unflinching culture that reflexively (often uncomfortably) asks what adults—including parents—need to do differently when things go awry.

If we’re clear-eyed and candid, we have to concede that nearly three decades of ed reform has been a mixed blessing—lots of disruption in return for less than stellar results. But there have been two clear and unambiguous victories. The first was the moral authority of calling out the “soft bigotry of low expectations” making it unacceptable to hold poor and minority kids to lower standards. The second is urban charter schools, mostly CMO-run, that have come the closest to honoring that ideal while providing a critical lifeboat to families otherwise stuck in lousy schools.

A 2017 report from Stanford University’s Center for Research on Educational Outcomes (CREDO) found that urban charter schools “provide significantly higher levels of annual growth in both math and reading compared to their traditional public school peers.” CREDO estimated that students in CMO-run schools received the equivalent of ninety-seven additional days of school in math over traditional district-run schools and an extra forty-six days of instruction in reading. The standouts among this group were KIPP, Achievement First, Uncommon Schools, YES Prep, and other “no excuses” pioneers. The comparatively lackluster results of other charters make ed reform and charter advocates’ reluctance to embrace and defend the high-fliers doubly odd.

As I note in my book, no single event, policy directive, or study marked the moment when “no excuses” went from a rallying cry to a curse. The broken-windows theory of community policing on which no excuses school culture was loosely based (e.g., sweat the small stuff; order is essential; learning can't occur in chaos) became closely associated with aggressive “stop and frisk” policing, much as no excuses became conflated with thoughtless zero tolerance policies and exclusionary discipline.

The sight of black and brown children required to “track the speaker” in class, or passing through hallways in straight lines, routinely brings complaints from both progressive educators and political progressives that high-performing schools teach only compliance and perpetuate the “school-to-prison pipeline”—a critique that deserves the strongest rebuke. Students in high-performing charters are not on their way to prison. They’re on their way to college. If all you see is teachers imposing their will on children, compliance for compliance sake, rather than a determined effort to create the school culture and classroom conditions—attention, focus, and affirmation—that make learning possible, you’ve missed the point entirely. 

The reluctance to defend the no excuses culture validates the common criticism that these schools are harsh and militaristic. Yet caring support for students is essential to the success of no excuses schools. “One thing I consistently found was that no-excuses discipline failed if it was not combined with the sure knowledge on a student's part that teachers cared deeply about them and their education,’ said David Whitman, who wrote a seminal book in 2008 on no excuses schools, Sweating the Small Stuff: Inner-City Schools and the New Paternalism. “There had to be a caring connection between teacher and student for strict discipline to work, or what I described as a kind of benign paternalism,” he told me. SEL enthusiasts take note: Tough love is not an oxymoron. 

Wonks may love research and data, but narrative wins hearts and minds. The general impulse—that a safe, well-run, and orderly school is a precondition to academic excellence—has not changed in a generation and remains very popular with parents who continue to swell urban charter waitlists. The mindset that it is (or ought to be) morally unacceptable to allow low-income kids and children of color to be failed by adults and the institutions we build for their ostensible benefit is no less valid or resonant today than it was two decades ago. What “no excuses” got right—and it’s still right—is that learning cannot occur in chaos. High expectations are essential and non-negotiable. “No excuses” meant exactly that: If kids are failing, we are failing. These are ideals that don't need an apology. They need a revival.

Editor’s note: This article was first published on Education Week’s blog Rick Hess Straight Up.

The ever-vigilant Jack Kent Cooke Foundation has issued a short (two-page!), trenchant issue brief—closer, really, to an infogram—showing how the “excellence gap” in American schools has actually worsened over the past two decades.

In case you haven’t been paying attention, or getting confused by all the gaps we are supposed to be closing, the excellence gap (as defined by the Foundation and by scholars such as Jonathan Plucker) is “the discrepancy between the percentage of lower-income versus higher-income students who reach advanced levels of academic performance.”

This analysis employed National Assessment (NAEP) data and examines, at the national level, the percentage of U.S. students in grades four, eight, and twelve who score at NAEP’s “advanced” level in reading and math. This time, they examine the (always woefully small) high-scoring population according to which students were and weren’t eligible for federally subsidized meals, deeming the former “low-income” and the latter “other” (but also referring to them as “more affluent”).

That’s about all one can do with NAEP data, and it isn’t perfect, for subsidized-meal eligibility has changed over the years—about half of all public-school pupils now qualify—and it’s gradually vanishing as a usable proxy for student disadvantage. Still, the Foundation’s central point is indisputable: Most of the increase in the share of U.S. students reaching “advanced” on NAEP—and it’s certainly good that there’s been an increase, however modest—has occurred among the pupil population that is not having lunch in school with Uncle Sam’s help. The achievement boat occupied by those who do receive such help has risen a bit, but not nearly as much as that in which their “more affluent” peers sit in presumably greater comfort.

A few years ago, Brandon Wright and I examined the excellence gap with the help of PISA data. (You’ll find that on pages 34–39 of Failing Our Brightest Kids.) We looked—country by country, including the United States—at the populations of fifteen-year-olds who scored 5 or 6 (top of the scale) on PISA in 2012, and subdivided those populations into the four quartiles that OECD data-maestros call the Index of Economic, Social and Cultural Status (ESCS). We looked at the ratio of high scorers within the top quartile to high scorers in the bottom and (for the U.S.) found them to range from eight to one at best (that was in math) to eleven to one at worst (reading.) This placed the United States very low among kindred countries when we ranked them according to such ratios. The best-off countries (such as Singapore, Finland, and Japan) had ratios around three to one—still big excellence gaps but not nearly as wide as our own.

Then we did the same thing with PISA data but used parental education rather than ESCS. Here, again, the U.S racked up ratios from six to one to twelve to one between high scoring students with highly educated parents and those with poorly educated parents, and here, once again, other nations did far better (also around three to one).

America is supposed to be a land of opportunity and upward mobility. But it’s painfully clear, whether we use NAEP or PISA as our reference, that at the high end of student achievement, as at the levels NAEP terms “basic” and “proficient,” the circumstances of students’ births still matter far more than they should. And the Jack Kent Cooke Foundation says it’s getting worse, not better.