Authorized in 2005, Academic Distress Commissions (ADCs) are the state’s mechanism for intervening in low-performing school districts. Youngstown was the first district to come under the thumb of the state back in 2009, with Lorain added in 2013, and finally East Cleveland in 2018. Today, all three districts are under the supervision of an ADC—bodies comprising five members, three of whom are appointed by the state superintendent, one by the district school board, and one by the local mayor. Under state law, the ADCs hire a chief executive officer who is vested with managerial authority and charged with creating and implementing an improvement plan.

The rationale behind interventions like ADCs is fairly straightforward: Chronic underperformance isn’t acceptable, and states have an obligation to act when children are ill-served. But state interventions are also plenty controversial wherever they’ve been undertaken, with detractors largely decrying the loss or dilution of local governance. Ohio is no different, with ADCs sparking endless criticism, especially after 2015 legislation—supported by former Governor Kasich—that greatly strengthened this intervention model. Last year, a bill amendment was introduced to suspend ADCs, though the effort failed when Kasich threatened to veto it.

ADCs are likely to come under even stronger fire this year as opponents of the policy will hope that Governor DeWine’s administration will be less supportive than its predecessor. Should Ohio persevere? Give up? Change course?

While it won’t win popularity contests in today’s anti-accountability climate, Ohio should stand firm in its efforts to improve student learning in low-performing districts. In this post, I take a look at key data indicating that districts under the auspices of an ADC are indeed troubled—and that the state is right in taking action to improve student outcomes. Note that in a few cases—for example, Youngstown’s recent test scores—the data reflect post-ADC performance. But most of the data discussed below reflect pre-ADC performance, and the vast majority of it predates the 2015 reforms to the ADC model.

Enrollment

One important yardstick of districts’ health is whether there is demand for their schools. Families can voice their dissatisfaction and vote with their feet by moving elsewhere or choosing other schooling options. Though enrollment declines don’t necessarily indicate that districts are doing a poor job educating children—shrinking districts can deliver a great education, just the same as expanding ones—large enrollment declines likely suggest problems with educational quality.  

On this count, it’s clear that the districts now under ADC oversight have been ailing for decades. Consider the figure below: Enrollment in Youngstown has plummeted from over 16,000 in 1980 to under 5,000 today. Similarly, Lorain is less than half the size it was in 1980, and East Cleveland enrolls a mere 1,800 students, compared to 8,000 during the Reagan era. The slide in enrollment is the result of families leaving these districts for better opportunities elsewhere, parents opting for other educational options (notably, charters or vouchers starting in the 2000s), and perhaps declining birthrates as well.

Figure 1: Enrollment of ADC school districts, 1980 to 2019 (selected years)

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Student outcomes

Enrollments, of course don’t tell the entire story, so let’s dig into pupil outcomes, which are the primary goal of districts. Since districts go into state receivership due to poor student results, the achievement data are sure to be bleak. But figures 2 and 3 remind us that the vast majority of students attending these districts struggle mightily to meet state academic standards. In 2017–18, a mere 30 to 35 percent of students attending East Cleveland, Lorain, and Youngstown districts met reading proficiency standards, slightly lower than the average proficiency rate of the Big Eight districts, and far below the statewide average. [1] A similar story emerges in math: Just 20 to 33 percent of the district students met math proficiency standards, while 63 percent statewide did so.

Figure 2: Proficiency rates on state reading exams, 2015–16 to 2017–18

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Figure 3: Proficiency rates on state math exams, 2015–16 to 2017–18

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Source: Ohio Department of Education, Download Data (District AMO Calculations files). Note: Due to transitions in state exams, proficiency trends can be tracked only to 2015–16. As one of the Big Eight districts, Youngstown is included in the Big Eight district average (the same applies for figures 4 and 5).

Maybe test scores aren’t your cup of tea. So let’s look at college completion rates—earning two- or four-year degrees—one of the few post-secondary data points available. (We don’t have information on things like employment or wages to complete the picture; legislators, please change that!) We observe dismal completion rates: For the class of 2011, completion rates ranged from a meager 7 percent in East Cleveland to 16 percent in Lorain. Like state exam scores, these completion rates fall well below the statewide average of 33 percent and track more closely with the Big Eight average of just 13 percent for the class of 2011.

Figure 4: College completion rates, class of 2009 to 2011

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Source: Ohio Department of Education, Download Data (District Prepared for Success files). Note: This chart displays the percentage of students in the high school classes of 2009 to 2011 (including non-graduates) who completed an associate degree or higher six years after high school.

Proficiency and degree attainment rates partly reflect the high poverty rates of East Cleveland, Lorain, and Youngstown. Ohio’s value-added measure, however, controls for students’ prior state test scores and produces ratings that are less tied to poverty. But even on this more poverty-neutral measure, these districts still fare poorly. Table 1 displays their overall value-added ratings since 2012–13, the first year in which the state assigned an A–F rating on the measure. Save for a couple A’s in Lorain and one in East Cleveland, they’ve received almost all F’s, indicating that students typically fail to make expected growth over time. These low ratings are especially troubling given students’ already low achievement levels. In short, they remain stuck in the lowest portion of the achievement distribution. Moreover, because poor value-added ratings can’t be easily dismissed as reflections of poverty, they are much better indicators of educational ineffectiveness.

Table 1: Overall value-added ratings for ADC school districts, 2012–13 to 2017–18

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Source: Ohio Department of Education, District Report Cards.

School funding

To round out this picture, it’s worth examining whether underfunding might be a problem. Figure 5 displays the per-pupil expenditures for the three districts in comparison to the statewide and Big Eight averages. In fiscal year 2018, East Cleveland spent a whopping $19,100 per pupil and Youngstown spent $18,300—far above the state average of $11,900, and even surpassing the Big Eight district average of $15,200 per pupil. Lorain spent a more modest $13,700 per student, an amount still above the state average, but below the Big Eight. Overall, the funding data do not generally indicate shortfalls; in fact, the districts receive fairly generous funding, primarily from the state revenue sources.

Figure 5: Per pupil spending, FY 2016 to 2018

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Source: Ohio Department of Education, District Profile Reports. Note: The data reflect only operational expenditures and don’t include capital spending.

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The data on the districts under ADC oversight are grim—faltering enrollments, dismal achievement, low college completion rates, and weak academic growth. And there is no shortage of taxpayer support. Based on these data, the state is right to intervene on behalf of the 13,000 students attending these districts. Yes, Ohio could wash its hands of these troubled districts and hand back control to the school boards; no one in D.C. is forcing Ohio to undertake this type of intervention. But surrender is unlikely to drive the improvements that children in these districts deserve. That being said, there could be ways to improve the ADC model, to make it likelier that reform will reverse these troubling trends. Stay tuned for a follow-up post that considers the possibilities.

With President’s Day at hand, we at the Thomas B. Fordham Institute wondered how many public schools honor our former chief executives with their names—and what that might tell us about which presidents we revere.

It’s not as easy an exercise as you might think, given that many presidents have common last names—and a few have the same last names. For example, plenty of counties, and thus schools, go by “Clinton”—but they’ve been around since long before Bill Clinton became president. And if a school is named Harrison Elementary, is that after Benjamin, or William, or neither?

To find out, our research intern Sophie Sussman started with the latest Common Core of Data from the National Center for Education Statistics, then painstakingly researched any school whose presidential name was ambiguous, mostly by looking at school websites. (Yes, this took months, as she scrutinized almost five thousand schools!)

In the end, we erred on the side of caution and only included schools that we could tell, for sure, are named after particular U.S. presidents. The Adamses and Roosevelts, in particular, probably deserve higher numbers than we could confirm, with forty-three and one hundred schools, respectively, using their surnames, but without clarity regarding which president, if any, they are honoring.

Enough with the throat-clearing. Let’s look at the results.

American Presidents Ranked by the Number of Public Schools Named after Them

It’s understandable that Lincoln would come in at number-one—he did save the Union, after all—but it’s remarkable that he won in a landslide. It’s also somewhat surprising that Jefferson edged out Washington. It makes sense that few recent presidents have many schools named after them—with Barack Obama, our first and only black president, the clear exception. As Jay Greene found in his 2007 analysis, naming schools after anybody has largely gone out of fashion.

Still, one may fairly ask, which presidents have received more or less honor than perhaps they deserve? To answer that question, we have to rely on someone’s hierarchy of presidential greatness. Thankfully, Siena College just came out with a fresh ranking of American presidents, based on a survey of historians and political scientists. Such lists are of course subjective and can be politically biased, but Siena's works just fine for these purposes.

Here’s how the rankings in the first list compare to these “greatness” rankings:

American Presidents Ranked by their “Greatness”
and Number of Schools Named After Them

According to these rankings, the ten presidents who most deserve additional school namesakes are Bill Clinton, Franklin D. Roosevelt, George H.W. Bush, Gerald Ford, Lyndon Johnson, Jimmy Carter, Richard Nixon, John Quincy Adams, James Polk, and Harry Truman. As expected, most of these “underrepresented” presidents served relatively recently, and FDR and Adams may in fact have more schools named after them than we could confirm. Having a presidential cousin or father makes it difficult to tell. But poor James Polk!

On the flip side, the ten presidents who are most overrepresented by schools include Herbert Hoover, William Harrison, James Buchanan, James Garfield, Andrew Jackson, Zachary Taylor, Ulysses Grant, Warren Harding, William McKinley, and Franklin Pierce.

As for our current president, despite a lifetime of putting his name on almost everything, to date there are no public schools named Donald J. Trump. But considering that even (the impeached) Andrew Johnson has two schools named after him, it’s probably only a matter of time.

Happy President’s Day!

In the waning days of January, Chiefs for Change—a nonprofit, bipartisan network comprising state and district education chiefs, including Ohio’s own superintendent, Paolo DeMaria—issued a report containing a series of recommendations on how to improve career and technical education (CTE).

The report presents a compelling case for why stronger CTE programs are necessary, namely that the United States lags behind other leading countries when it comes to quality career preparation during high school. In places like Germany, Finland, and Switzerland, students in grades ten through twelve take a “substantial, coherent course of study focused on a particular career area comprising five to six credits or more.” In the United States, only 6 percent of students do the same.

International differences in education models aren’t necessarily a bad thing. But the lack of adequate career preparation in America has led to some troubling consequences. The U.S. Department of Labor reported a record-high 7.1 million job openings in October 2017, but they also reported approximately the same number of unemployed adults—an indication that the skills and preparation of job-seekers didn’t match the needs of employers. Data also show that there are shortages in middle-skill jobs that don’t require a college degree but do require training and industry credentials.

High-quality CTE could help fill these gaps. According to Chiefs for Change, there are already some districts and states in its network that are on the right track. In Denver Public Schools, for example, approximately 4,000 high school students participate in job shadowing, mentoring, internships, and apprenticeships. In Tennessee, state leaders have aligned industry credentials to improved career pathways that lead to locally available jobs, and have expanded dual enrollment so that CTE students can access technical programs.

The Chiefs for Change report doesn’t recognize Ohio as one of the model states, and no Ohio districts are mentioned either. But that doesn’t mean our CTE sector is not working. In fact, quite a few of the report’s recommendations are already in place in Ohio. For example, it suggests that states build a “truly seamless” transition between postsecondary education and career training by dovetailing CTE programs with higher education and dual-enrollment opportunities. Ohio does this already through Career-Technical Credit Transfer, a policy that allows students to transfer technical-course credit to state institutions of higher education. Some of these transferable courses are available thanks to individual agreements between a secondary CTE program and a higher education institution. Others are available through statewide agreements that require all public colleges and universities in the state to award postsecondary credit to students who meet standards such as a specific class grade or a certain score on an end of course exam. In central Ohio, Columbus State is leading the way through a portfolio that includes investing in innovation grants, college and career pathway partnerships, and programs like Credits Count. (See here for a more in-depth look at all of Ohio’s dual-credit options.)

There are also recommendations that Ohio doesn’t currently follow but should. One such example is the call to expand work-based-learning (WBL) opportunities with local employers. The Ohio Department of Education has a framework for schools to use to grant high school credit to students who demonstrate subject competency through WBL, and there are various apprenticeship and internship programs across the state. That’s a good start. But finding WBL opportunities that count for credit requires students to reach out to their districts and “discuss the opportunities for partnership.” That’s asking quite a lot of high school students who might not even realize they could benefit from work-based learning, let alone be aware of available opportunities. It’s likely that these and other barriers to entry—like transportation issues—are keeping participation numbers low.

There are several ways for state leaders to improve the current structure. For instance, Chiefs for Change advises states to work with the business community to “establish intermediary organizations” that could advocate for WBL opportunities and publicize their successes. CareerWise Colorado, a business-led nonprofit that oversees a three-year apprenticeship program for high school students, is one example. Another option is an organization that makes students aware of the WBL opportunities already available in their area, just like School Choice Ohio does for Ohio’s voucher-eligible families. Legislators could also help by using federal funding and flexibility to create more opportunities, or by incentivizing businesses to participate through the strategic use of tax credits.

Another potential opportunity is for Ohio to do a better job of collecting, disseminating, and analyzing data on high quality career-readiness programs. Despite the thousands of students who participate in CTE, Ohio offers very little information about its programs or their students. For instance, we don’t know how many students currently participate in work-based learning, so there is no way to track progress in expanding such opportunities moving forward. Creating a better data system should be a top priority for Ohio policymakers.

The Buckeye State has a vibrant and growing CTE sector, and it’s important to celebrate what’s working. But it’s also important for policymakers and advocates to continue to push for improvement—and the latest recommendations from Chiefs for Change are a great place to start.  

1. In case you haven’t been following it (and who can blame you with everything else going on here?), a battle royale has been raging in neighboring West Virginia. A battle over education reform the tenor of which, as I understand it, could make even a coal miner’s daughter blush. Ohio’s charter schools – and particularly a Fordham-sponsored school in Sciotoville, Ohio – got dragged into the discussion this week by a Charleston television station. I may be biased, but I feel that Sciotoville Community Schools Superintendent Rick Bowman really managed to get across what makes his educational model work for his students and how the charter school framework helps in this effort. Nice. (WVAH-TV, Charleston, WV, 2/15/19) In the end, the WVAH piece was too little, too late, it seems, as a scaled back version of the bill which (among other things) reduced charter schools to a two-building pilot program passed the West Virginia House yesterday. (WOWK-TV, Huntington, WV, 2/14/19)

2. Enough about charter schools in the Mountain State. How are charters faring right here in the good old Buckeye State? The CEO of NACSA put pen to paper in a Dispatch op-ed this week in which he declared the era of Ohio’s lawless charter sector to be over, thanks to the work of our General Assembly over the last few years. Nice. (Columbus Dispatch, 2/13/19)

3. You can also be forgiven for missing the fact that the state board of education met this week, so inconsequential did their deliberations seem. Nothing of note in any media outlet. Until today. The board took the time to deliberate on and then to vote (10-7) to deny a group of families their request to transfer their property from one school district to another which they would prefer their children attend. The vote sucks for those families, of course, but a couple of points of deliberation suck for us all. First up, board member Linda Haycock called it “a crime” that a district would lose $450,000 in property tax revenue should the transfer be approved. When the children and families who are supposed to be benefitting from that educational funding are emphatic that they are not, in fact, benefitting, I think the “crime” clearly lies elsewhere. Second, the same Right Honorable Member also suggested that the families in question should use open enrollment to change schools to the new district. Unfortunately, the desired district, like so many higher-quality districts around the state, does not offer open enrollment to students outside its boundaries. Oops. Finally, board member Antoinette Miranda is quoted as saying (on the record!), “If they want to move and go to another district, then they should buy a house in that district.” I’m sure that this is exactly what Dr. Miranda would do should the need arrive, yes. But to assume that this course of action is readily available to everyone seems to me the height of blinkered blindness. Shameful. (Dayton Daily News, 2/15/19)

4. Finally this week, we have a lesson in deconstruction. As many of you know, I am a huge fan of Ohio’s standalone STEM schools: public, but not part of a district; and focused on science, technology, engineering, and math throughout its curriculum. They are also mastery-based (students must earn 90 or better on all assignments/papers/tests or must redo portions of them), accelerated (traditional year-long course material is often covered in a single semester), and geared to early college access (as early as 7^th grade if kids are ready). And I love this crazy model – it is what I would have wanted for myself as a kid, it has benefitted my own children enormously, and I have seen it rocket many previously-underserved students into the academic stratosphere over the years. And while this odd kitchen sink model has been replicated fully in a handful of other such schools across the state, I fear that there is something afoot to try to “deconstruct” the vital interlocking pieces of this school and to try and build success upon one or two of them. This ignores everything that clearly works in these schools and is a recipe for disaster if you ask me (which, of course, nobody ever does). First up, disconnecting mastery from, well, everything else. The Hawken School, a high-dollar private school with a long history in Cleveland, this week unveiled an ambitious plan to expand both physically and programmatically. They are promising a new school which couples “experiential learning” —already in use in their system – to something called “ungraded mastery”. Somehow, they are going to develop a way of evaluating students that does not rely on pesky letter grades or ratings or numbers which can damage (I gather) kids’ self-esteem. It is a work in progress and much still needs to be worked out, but there are some building blocks of the new paradigm explored in this PD piece. I am 100% certain (speaking of mastery), that I will find ridiculous whatever they come up with. I hope that doesn’t hurt anyone’s feelings. (Cleveland Plain Dealer, 2/15/19) Second, we have what appears to be Rent-a-STEM. That is, a private company whose MO is to truck small STEM lessons to schools across the state which do not have established STEM academics. For a small fee, of course. Leaving the profit motive aside, gang, if STEM is as great for kids as you say, it should be all day, every day. Shouldn’t it? Otherwise, it’s just an hour of Legos and coding. Sadly, some of the good folks behind the birth of Ohio’s standalone STEM schools are wasting their money on these mechanical dogs and VR ponies. Less deconstruction, y’all, and more standalone STEM/mastery/acceleration/early college schools. (Columbus Dispatch, 2/15/19)

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National expert praises progress in Ohio charter sector

Greg Richmond, the chief executive officer of the National Association of Charter School Authorizers (NACSA), wrote an op-ed that appeared in the Columbus Dispatch this week. Richmond notes that the “sun is setting on the ‘Wild, Wild West,’” a phrase that NACSA once used to refer to Ohio’s charter school sector. He explains that charter-schooling in Ohio is headed in the right direction, as Ohio has increased transparency, eliminated conflicts of interest, strengthened charter governing boards, and improved its oversight of sponsors.

New report from CREDO on Ohio charter school performance

Stanford University’s Center for Research on Education Outcomes (CREDO), the nation’s foremost independent evaluator of charter-school performance, will be in Columbus on February 19 to unveil a brand new analysis of Ohio's charter sector performance from 2013-14 through 2016-17. CREDO director Margaret (Macke) Raymond, Ph.D. and lead analyst Chunping Han will present their findings. You can register for the event, which will be held at the DoubleTree Suites Hotel in Columbus from 8:30 - 10:00 am, here.

How Opportunity Zones benefit charters

As a result of the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, based on where they’re located, charter schools may have opportunities to benefit from Opportunity Fund investments. If a charter opens in a designated Opportunity Zone, they may be able to reduce facility financing costs. You can learn more about this during an NAPCS webinar on February 21.

Ohio legislative updates

Legislative session is getting underway. Representative Blessing has been named chair of the House Education Committee, while Senator Lehner continues her tenure as Senate Education Committee chair. Bills are being rolled out in both chambers, and one bill in particular could impact charter schools. Representative Ingram has introduced House Bill 43, a bill that would eliminate the requirement for districts to offer unused buildings to charter schools before selling them to other entities. Given the facility challenges charters already face, this bill merits watching.

Other events

There are a couple other upcoming events in the charter school space. Don’t forget that on February 21, the School Performance Institute is hosting a workshop in Columbus and registration is open for the National Charter Schools Conference, which will be held from June 30-July 3 in Las Vegas.

This is the second in a series of interviews called “moms and choice,” (the first can be read here) in which I talk with mothers who—because of issues like bullying, weak academics, poor instruction, insufficient special education services, or a belief that a kid may simply do better elsewhere—chose a different school for their sons and daughters. Their stories are all different, but there is a common thread that runs through them: Their children were not getting what they needed—or deserved—and staying where they were became untenable.

This interview is with Maureen Kelleher, whose daughter began her education at a local charter school in Chicago, Illinois. Maureen is a senior writer and editor at Education Post, who previously spent a decade as a reporter, blogger, and policy analyst.

How did school choice become an important issue—and cause—for you?

In today’s Chicago, school choice is the reality for many families, especially when kids are in high school. About three-quarters of Chicago high school students choose a school that isn’t their neighborhood high school, and increasing numbers of families are choosing somewhere other than their zoned neighborhood school.

There’s actually a lot of push here from parents to make sure that the zoned neighborhood schools are strong choices for parents, because people are tired of crossing their fingers and putting their children’s futures into a lottery application system or testing their four-year-olds to get into a selective-enrollment elementary school for high-scoring kindergartners. In Chicago, the public push is to make sure that every neighborhood school can be a school of choice for families and not a school of last resort or worse.

I feel very lucky to live in a neighborhood that has some strong neighborhood schools—one three blocks from my house—and where the community won a brand-new high school just five years ago. My daughter currently attends our neighborhood elementary school, but it wasn’t where we started and it might not be where we spend the rest of her elementary years.

When my daughter started kindergarten, our family’s highest priority was to find a school with a strong English-Spanish dual-language program. We had sixteen schools on a spreadsheet—district, charter, and parochial—and kept track of all the acceptances and wait-list calls. Even after school started, it took a while to land in the right place. My daughter attended three different schools in the first half of kindergarten, but she landed at a dual-language charter school near our home and we were very happy there until the beginning of fourth grade, when we had to make a move home to our neighborhood school.

What was not working?

While we were very happy with the community and the dual-language program, the school’s math instruction was a weak point, and I got frustrated. I could see her performance on standardized tests plunging and the beginning signs of math phobia. More broadly, I felt she wasn’t being challenged to her full academic potential beyond math, too.

Why did you decide to make a change?

It really hurt to make a mid-year decision to leave the school we loved. At the same time, I was very concerned that she wasn’t being challenged academically, especially in math. I feared she would never regain the lost ground in math if we didn’t nip the problems in the bud without waiting any longer.

It also helped tremendously that I knew our neighborhood school was a quality choice and has an outstanding reputation in math. We decided it was worth it to sacrifice Spanish-language instruction this year while we she regains ground in math. We’re now investigating dual-language schools, and other possibilities, for next year. We’ll see where we end up.

How much were you aware of school choice before the situation with your daughter reached a crisis?

I’m probably hyper-aware of school choice and our options since I’ve been following schools in Chicago for a long time. In some ways, being a mom who knows the local schools for a living gives me a lot of power. I always have a backup plan or an idea of where else we could go if things don’t work out at the school she’s in. And in other ways, it’s really hard. My challenge is to remember that no school is perfect and there will always be something in the school experience that I’m not completely satisfied with. And it’s OK for my kid to have struggles and less-than-perfect school experiences. It’s a matter of setting priorities and checking in with her to make sure she feels the right balance of challenge and support that will allow her to thrive.

How has your family benefitted from school choice?

Having the option to put our daughter in an English-Spanish dual-language program has been a huge asset for our whole family. Her dad works second shift and my Spanish isn’t strong enough to keep her truly bilingual. Being part of a dual-language school has been essential in maintaining and strengthening her language and cultural ties with Mexico, where half her family lives. Last summer she and her dad spent ten days with his family and she was able to speak with her great-grandmother. If she had gone to our neighborhood school starting in kindergarten, I don’t think she would have had the language ability to make the most out of that kind of experience.

What are your takeaways and advice for parents?

Kids’ needs change, and so do school cultures. Sometimes the school you loved when they were in kindergarten isn’t the greatest fit for them as they get older. It’s possible—especially in a school system where kids, theoretically, stay in the same school from kindergarten all the way through eighth grade—that you might have to make a change which the system isn’t set up to help you with.

It’s important to know what school options are available and have backup plans ready in case you need them.

The views expressed herein represent the opinions of the author and not necessarily the Thomas B. Fordham Institute.

In an essay in The Washington Post last summer, Sonja Santelises, the courageous chief executive of Baltimore City Public Schools, described a problem commonly overlooked in school districts like hers: a “disjointed” curriculum that’s not simply lacking in rigor, but fails even to “connect [students’] experiences to other people’s histories and the larger world.” More than 80 percent of her district’s pupils are black, but according to Santelises, the world they saw through the lens of their school curriculum was impossibly skewed, even depressingly so. Baltimore’s children were “taught about tragedies of African American history such as slavery and Jim Crow but learned nothing about the Great Migration and very little about the Harlem Renaissance,” she wrote.

Santelises wasn’t indulging in platitudes and generalizations. She had hard data on her desk that showed how the district’s “patchy curriculum” was “exacerbating knowledge gaps for our low-income students.” Baltimore was one of the first school districts to put its English language arts curriculum up for analysis by a team led by David Steiner and Ashley Berner at the Johns Hopkins Institute for Education Policy. In the past year, they have quietly performed a similar analysis for one entire state, another urban school district, and several smaller ones in Massachusetts. They lifted the veil on their “knowledge mapping” tool this week in a webinar with Chiefs for Change, which co-sponsored the work. It offers an intriguing mechanism for education leaders to see the degree to which their English language arts curriculum, as a whole and over time, builds critical background knowledge and aligns with their local vision and priorities.

It’s been a pleasant surprise to see curriculum come into its own in the last few years as a potentially powerful lever for improving student outcomes. But the tools we have to evaluate it are focused primarily on whether a published or “OER” curriculum is “aligned” with standards. Unlike math or science content standards, English language arts standards typically describe skills and processes—the kinds of things students should be able to do when they read a text. Skills like “compare and contrast” and “find the main idea,” when viewed exclusively through the lens of standards, might appear content-neutral, but in reality they’re closer to content-dependent. Common Core famously (and in retrospect, impotently) valorized “build[ing] a foundation of knowledge” in social studies, science, and other disciplines. But it’s beyond the scope of standards to dictate curriculum content. That’s a state or district’s job and a heavy lift.

If a curriculum routinely requires students to “read closely to determine what the text says explicitly and to make logical inferences” it will likely satisfy the conditions for “alignment.” But this tacitly encourages a view of ELA that elevates skill over content, eliding entirely the role of prior knowledge in comprehension. “America’s reading gaps are not caused by skills shortages but by knowledge vacuums,” Steiner noted just last month in this space. “When we provide even very weak readers with a story about a topic they know, finding the main idea is a snap. By contrast, give strong readers a passage about something they know nothing about, and they can stare at it forever with little chance of finding that same idea.”

“Alignment” also tells us nothing about literary merit, quality, or lasting value. You can explore themes of fratricide and revenge by studying Shakespeare’s Hamlet or Disney’s The Lion King. In no way are they “equal.” A three-star restaurant and Taco Bell may both get “A” ratings from the board of health if they’re aligned (as they must be) to safe food handling standards, but they are not otherwise comparable. The same is true of various ELA curricula. Each can be aligned to standards, but the one that attends to coherent and cumulative building of knowledge is clearly superior and preferable. You can spot the difference between a fast food joint and a high-end restaurant at a glance; it’s not as immediately obvious with curricula.

Critically, the Hopkins’s knowledge mapping tool is not an off-the-shelf exercise that suggests, “We know what quality curriculum is and here’s why yours doesn’t cut it.” It starts with a robust framework of key domains—“U.S. History before 1865”—and then topics—“dystopian literature”—that any knowledge-rich ELA curriculum should address. It then asks systems leaders, “What else do you want your curriculum to accomplish?”

Then via painstaking analysis, it reveals how well the ELA curriculum hits the mark or misses it, surfacing gaps that are invisible at the classroom or even school level. Neither is this a mere exercise in list-making and box-checking. The mapping tool considers the social and emotional dimensions of works of literature in addition to the knowledge “domains” students are exposed to in both fiction and non-fiction works. What arrives on district decision-makers’ desks is (among other things) a “heat map” representing the frequency and level of exposure to domains of knowledge. As Berner describes it, the effect might be, “Wow, we're doing a good job of reinforcing social and emotional learning, but we're not touching on Asia, Africa, or the Middle East.”

The work is being done in partnership with Chiefs for Change. That’s potentially powerful because the mapping tool gains strength and insight the more broadly it’s used. If a significant number of districts (or states) represented by the Chiefs put their ELA curricula up for review using the Hopkins tool, it will be possible to make more and better generalizations about curricula across the U.S., prying open the classroom “black box” that researchers and policymakers often lament.

The tool does have some inevitable shortcomings. It cannot account for the entirety of curricular inputs; it’s looking merely at ELA, for now (Steiner and Berner hope to build out social studies and science knowledge mapping capabilities eventually). But the approach is promising and bears watching closely. It’s a potential “last mile” solution that enables states, districts, or CMOs to evaluate curricula with greater nuance and sophistication than ever before.

Many schools have decreased physical education classes (PE) or cut them entirely, but there have been recent pushes to get kids back outside during the school day, such as the efforts of Texas Fitness Now (TFN), a large grant program available to high-poverty Texas middle schools. The goal of their PE programs is to get kids healthier, but also to improve academic performance and student behavior. Researchers Analisa Packham and Brittany Street ask of TFN: Did it?

Texas Fitness Now, the second-largest physical activity grant program in the U.S., distributed $37 million to high-poverty Texas middle schools from 2007–2011. Most of each grant was designated for buying PE equipment and hiring PE instructors; some was meant for nutrition education. Students in participating schools had to participate in PE classes for thirty minutes per school day and took a fitness test twice each year. Each school received about $10,000.

Most PE program studies focus on elementary schools, but TFN and this study covered only middle school students. Researchers studied the effects of TFN on students’ BMI and overall fitness levels using a statewide test called the FITNESSGRAM, which measures students in areas such as body composition, aerobic capacity, and strength. Due to privacy concerns, results from the test are only available by school, gender, and grade, and not at the student level. They also looked into likely indirect results of a PE program, including scores on the Texas Assessment of Knowledge and Skills (TAKS), disciplinary actions, and daily attendance. Researchers analyzed these factors in schools right on either side of the program’s eligibility cut-offs, which are similar enough to each other to serve as trial and control schools.

TFN’s impacts on physical fitness were nearly non-existent. When looking strictly at body composition, there was in fact a slight downturn in the percentage of students with a healthy BMI, although the number of obese students (those with extremely high BMIs) did decrease. Marginal fitness levels, measured in the FITNESSGRAM, saw no significant change. The authors suggest a number of possible explanations for these disappointing effects, including the chance that exercising at school makes kids less active at home.

The program had no effect on test scores and a negative effect on student behavior. Neither reading nor math scores saw any statistically significant change. There was also little effect on daily attendance. The authors admit the lack of impact is surprising, given significant declines in student behavior. TFN schools saw a 16 percent increase in disciplinary actions and a 7 percent increase in the number of students misbehaving. They also lost more instructional time due to suspensions than non-TFN schools.

The authors hypothesize that many of the program’s underwhelming results could be due to an uptick in bullying. Out-of-shape students may get discouraged and stop trying during PE if their peers make fun of their weight or coordination, which might explain the stagnant fitness levels. And the increase in disciplinary actions and suspensions could also be concentrated among bullies. However, they were unable to study any of these guesses.

The study and the program itself both have their limitations. Researchers could not obtain the student-level fitness outcomes that might shed light on who is and is not benefitting from TFN. A more granular study might include basic demographic information like race, ethnicity, and income, but also other characteristics such as prior fitness level and previous PE experience. Nor were the authors able to investigate the potential mechanisms of the changes they identified; in particular, more information about bullying trends would be enlightening.

Moreover, as a recent Atlantic article covering the study pointed out, TFN itself is not representative of the types of physical education and activity most scientists recommend for students, especially adolescents. The most effective PE programs are “multifaceted and holistic,” and often require nutrition education alongside exercise opportunities. Experts also point out that unstructured recreational time can be even more beneficial to physical fitness than programmed physical education classes. The results of this Texas grant program are indeed disappointing—but if scientific research continues to show that physical education is more complex than our traditional model, we may need more creative grant opportunities to help kids build healthy lifestyles.

SOURCE: Analisa Packham and Brittany Street, “The Effects of Physical Education of Student Fitness, Achievement, and Behavior,” Working paper (November 2018).

Whether initiated from the bottom-up or the top-down, any effort to help educators align their practice with the best evidence is going to succeed or fail on the strength of its implementation. As my colleague Robert Pondiscio wrote recently:

Shifting ed reform’s focus to improving practice is an acknowledgment that underperformance is not a failure of will, but a lack of capacity. It’s a talent-development and human capital-strategy, not an accountability play. Forcing changes in behavior, whether through lawmaking or lawsuit, may win compliance, but it doesn’t advance understanding and sophistication. Teachers need to understand the “why” behind evidence-based practice to implement it well and effectively.

He’s right, of course. But how can schools and systems actually do this—build capacity, and teachers’ understanding in a way that will alter what they actually do in their classrooms?

Scholars and reformers have been struggling with this question for basically forever. (See, for example, this classic thirty-year-old article by my University of Michigan thesis advisor David Cohen, “A Revolution in One Classroom: The Case of Mrs. Oublier.”) Bundling evidence-based practices into a coherent, highly teachable curriculum can help, as can videos of teachers delivering the material with real groups of students. But ultimately, the transmission of evidence-based practices is a slow, steady, and social grind, not something to be achieved entirely by articles, videos, or reports.

That’s the takeaway from this excellent Atul Gawande article in the New Yorker from a few years ago, “Slow Ideas.” The whole article is worth a (slow) read, but let me highlight some key passages about various attempts to change medical practice, and save lives, in poor, low-tech parts of the world.

Every year, three hundred thousand mothers and more than six million children die around the time of birth, largely in poorer countries. Most of these deaths are due to events that occur during or shortly after delivery. A mother may hemorrhage. She or her baby may suffer an infection. Many babies can’t take their first breath without assistance, and newborns, especially those born small, have trouble regulating their body temperature after birth. Simple, lifesaving solutions have been known for decades. They just haven’t spread…

The most common approach to changing behavior is to say to people, “Please do X.” Please warm the newborn. Please wash your hands. Please follow through on the twenty-seven other childbirth practices that you’re not doing. This is what we say in the classroom, in instructional videos, and in public-service campaigns, and it works, but only up to a point.

Then, there’s the law-and-order approach: “You must do X.” We establish standards and regulations, and threaten to punish failures with fines, suspensions, the revocation of licenses. Punishment can work. Behavioral economists have even quantified how averse people are to penalties. In experimental games, they will often quit playing rather than risk facing negative consequences. And that is the problem with threatening to discipline birth attendants who are taking difficult-to-fill jobs under intensely trying conditions. They’ll quit.

The kinder version of “You must do X” is to offer incentives rather than penalties. Maybe we could pay birth attendants a bonus for every healthy child who makes it past a week of life. But then you think about how hard it would be to make a scheme like that work, especially in poor settings…

Besides, neither penalties nor incentives achieve what we’re really after: a system and a culture where X is what people do, day in and day out, even when no one is watching. “You must” rewards mere compliance. Getting to “X is what we do” means establishing X as the norm. And that’s what we want: for skin-to-skin warming, hand washing, and all the other lifesaving practices of childbirth to be, quite simply, the norm.

To create new norms, you have to understand people’s existing norms and barriers to change. You have to understand what’s getting in their way. So what about just working with healthcare workers, one by one, to do just that?

Working with people one by one was the approach taken by a Bangladeshi nonprofit in the 1980s in a remarkably successful initiative to combat cholera:

The organization didn’t launch a mass-media campaign—only 20 percent of the population had a radio, after all. It attacked the problem in a way that is routinely dismissed as impractical and inefficient: by going door to door, person by person, and just talking.

It started with a pilot project that set out to reach some sixty thousand women in six hundred villages…The workers were only semi-literate, but they helped distill their sales script into seven easy-to-remember messages: for instance, severe diarrhea leads to death from dehydration; the signs of dehydration include dry tongue, sunken eyes, thirst, severe weakness, and reduced urination; the way to treat dehydration is to replace salt and water lost from the body, starting with the very first loose stool; a rehydration solution provides the most effective way to do this...

Initially, the workers taught up to twenty mothers per day. But monitors visiting the villages a few weeks later found that the quality of teaching suffered on this larger scale, so the workers were restricted to ten households a day. Then a new salary system was devised to pay each worker according to how many of the messages the mothers retained when the monitor followed up. The quality of teaching improved substantially. The field workers soon realized that having the mothers make the solution themselves was more effective than just showing them. The workers began looking for diarrhea cases when they arrived in a village, and treating them to show how effective and safe the remedy was…

The program was stunningly successful. Use of oral rehydration therapy skyrocketed. The knowledge became self-propagating. The program had changed the norms.

No, the analogy is not perfect for K–12 education. Implementing a high quality English language arts or mathematics curriculum requires a much higher level of intellectual dexterity than treating cholera. But the tale resonates on several levels. It illustrates the power of social learning, the importance of active learning, the willingness of program designers to adapt their approach based on what they were hearing in the field, and ultimately the incredible impact on real outcomes that can come from a peer-to-peer approach. All of this is applicable to implementing evidence-based practices in American schools.

This, however, requires someone to play the role of the healthcare workers, the peers, the conduits. Thankfully, the vast majority of American schools—especially elementary schools—already have such people today. We call them instructional coaches.

One of the most significant, yet least noted, developments in the recent history of American schooling is the advent and scaling of this whole new class of educators. According to the National Center for Education Statistics, three-fourths of all primary schools and two-thirds of all high poverty schools have someone in a coaching role. A recent meta-analysis by Matthew Kraft and his colleagues indicates that coaching is very effective at changing instruction and somewhat effective at improving outcomes, especially when programs are relatively small-scale.

Obviously, giving someone the title of “instructional coach” doesn’t suffice; this is another case where implementation is everything. The coaches themselves need to be highly effective educators—both of students and of fellow teachers. Helping other instructors improve their craft takes a high degree of social and emotional skill, technical expertise, and patience. It can’t be generic, lest it will prove no more effective than conventional professional development. Coaching tied to specific, high quality curricula is probably best. And it’s not inexpensive; as Diana Quintero pointed out in a recent article for the Brookings Institution’s Brown Center, these coaches are precisely the sort of positions that have inflated the ranks of “non-teachers” working in our schools, which in turn has squeezed out other priorities, like higher teacher pay.

If deployed well, however, instructional coaches show great potential. So state and local leaders should ask themselves, when trying to implement a high quality curriculum or other evidence-based practices:

• Am I using instructional coaches effectively?
• Have we picked the best people for that role?
• Have they been properly trained on the new curriculum?
• Do they have a manageable number of teachers to work with?
• Do we have a way to collect their feedback so that we might make changes to the curriculum or program in response?

This solution isn’t sexy or particularly “disruptive.” It’s hard work. But whether we want to save children’s lives from cholera or illiteracy, there are no shortcuts.

“Being valedictorian, it didn’t mean anything,” said Shanika Bridges-King about her time at Bryn Mawr to the Boston Globe last month, as part of a series of exposés. Reporters spent a year tracking down the city’s public high school valedictorians from the mid-2000s to learn how their lives had turned out. “I didn’t understand anything I read. I didn’t know how to write. I felt like I was disabled in this elite environment.”

Bridges-King graduated at the top of her class at The English High School in Boston. Her statement is upsetting, yet not really surprising, due to an all too common problem at low-income high schools nationwide: inflated grades that wrongly and harmfully signal to graduates—even valedictorians—that they’re ready for college.

“I felt like I wasn’t prepared to be there,” echoed Jose Barbosa, who attended Boston University after he finished at the top of his class at the Jeremiah E. Burke High School, also in Boston. “I was massively unprepared,” said Abadur Rahman, valedictorian of East Boston High School and recipient of a full scholarship to Northeastern University, who added, “Folks were at a different quintile than we were in terms of how much material they had [already] comprehended and internalized.” “I felt like Hyde Park High School did nothing, really, to prepare you for a school like Boston College,” said Michael Blackwood, valedictorian of The Engineering School in the Hyde Park Education Complex.

The fact that America’s high school education is broken is not new. Over the last year, stories have cast doubt on the stratospheric graduation rates reported in several states, including Alabama, California, Georgia, Florida, Maryland, Minnesota, New Jersey, Texas, and Washington, D.C. Pressure to boost those rates, often due to school accountability policies, plays a role—but so do complex motivations like empathy and concern for kids’ future well-being. It’s these latter impulses that lead folks to believe that easing expectations, at least for disadvantaged and struggling students, is a victimless, thoughtful, and maybe even noble act. Though it does young people no real good to be awarded unearned diplomas.

The harm done by lowered expectations doesn’t just befall the kids who are barely making it through high school. As illustrated by those profiled in the Globe, a disservice is being done to their high-achieving peers—not young people at risk of not graduating at all, but those who leave high school at the top of their class and under the impression that they’re fully ready for college, including elite schools like Bryn Mawr, B.U., and B.C. They discover—with surprise, pain, angst, embarrassment—that they’re nowhere near ready. The culprit is grade inflation, which occurs when subjective course grades exceed objective measures of performance.

According to a September 2018 Fordham study of the problem, “rising high school grade point averages have been accompanied by stagnant SAT, ACT, and NAEP scores.” That’s true just about everywhere in America. In North Carolina, the focus of the study, the median grade in affluent high schools in 2016 was a B; in less affluent schools, it was a slightly lower B-. In Kentucky, my colleague Adam Tyner found much the same thing using data compiled by the Bluegrass Institute: in 2016, the average GPA in rich schools was 2.95, and 2.93 at lower-income ones. 

Standardized tests, however, indicate far wider gaps—and a much more dire situation for disadvantaged teens. More than seven out of ten affluent twelfth graders in North Carolina were proficient on statewide assessments, but barely four in ten of their low-income peers cleared that bar. ACT scores in Kentucky are considerably higher at richer schools than poorer ones. Back in Boston, the 53 percent proficiency rate on MCAS among tenth graders in the city’s public schools, most of which are low income, falls well short of the statewide rate of 74 percent. And this phenomenon isn’t new: A 1994 U.S. Department of Education study found that A students at high-poverty schools had the same average English and math scores on tests administered as part of the National Education Longitudinal Study of 1988 as C and D students at affluent schools. These kids’ dreams are being killed by kindness.

Grade inflation causes many problems, but two are especially harmful. The first, aptly explained by Seth Gershenson, a professor at American University who conducted the Fordham Institute analysis, is complacency that stunts kids’ potential: “When a student thinks he has already mastered material that he has not, the student will not invest the extra effort and time necessary to truly learn it. Likewise, parents will not recognize the need to help their child catch up. In this case, the complacency is not due to lack of desire or ability, but rather faulty information about the student’s academic standing.”

The second problem is that inflated grades allow students to progress through high school and then into colleges for which they aren’t actually prepared—a problem known succinctly as “overmatching.”

When reality hits—especially if students are disadvantaged and therefore lack the familial safety net and support of their more privileged peers—this combination of faulty information and academic ill-preparedness can be devastating. Consider, again, the valedictorians featured in the Globe series. Jose Barbosa reported feeling disappointed in himself and withdrew from Boston University after three semesters, though he later graduated from Mount Ida College. Abadur Rahman got to a point where “Maybe you’re not who you think you are. Maybe you’re not good enough. Maybe you’re not meant to be in school.” He had to leave Northeastern’s honors program and switch to a less challenging major. Scariest of all is Telma Taveres, whose 4.76 GPA made her the 2005 valedictorian at the John D. O’Bryant School of Mathematics and Science, one of the city’s three prestigious exam schools. In her third year at Smith College, one of America’s top liberal arts schools, she suffered a panic attack so severe that she ended up in a psychiatric ward and was told to take a year off. She never returned to Smith, though later was able to earn a degree at UMass Boston.

Of the ninety-three valedictorians the Globe checked in with, one in four failed to graduate with a college degree in six years. Forty percent earn less than $50,000 a year, while just one in seven has an annual income exceeding $100,000. One in four has an advanced degree. Four have been homeless.

If these are the outcomes of the top graduates of the city’s low-income high schools, one can't help but wonder what hope students with a 3.5 GPA have of succeeding, let alone those with 3.0 or 2.5. Their schools are lying to them about what they’ve accomplished. This most harms the most vulnerable among them—and it needs to change.

Yet the policy winds are blowing the other way. The easiest way to check inflated grades is via external exams, but states are rushing to get rid of those—and colleges are pushing to make admissions SAT-optional. That might help the children of privileged parents who are pushing for their children to look even better to the admissions teams at the colleges from which they’ll almost surely graduate. But it won’t help poor and minority kids like those valedictorians in Boston.