1. The leader of the newest statewide e-school is introduced in this glowing piece from his hometown newspaper. Awesome. (Delaware Gazette, 6/22/18)
    
2. While a group of Toledo-area business leaders took to the Blade’s opinion page last week to laud district supe Romules Durant, the actual editors of that page seem a little less enamored of him at the moment. (Toledo Blade, 6/23/18)
    
3. Full circle story here: Columbus City Schools’ various administration buildings are worth lots of dough according to a recent appraisal, and almost any combination of them could be sold at auction for more than enough to cover the cost of the district’s recent impulse purchase – the headquarters of former statewide e-school ECOT (aka Dracula’s Coffin). District bean counters might even save a bit on maintenance in the long run. Of importance, thought, is the fact that any district buildings going up for auction have to be offered to charter schools first. (Columbus Dispatch, 6/20/18)

New Ohio online school legislation

New legislation on online charter schools, House Bill 707, was introduced in the Ohio House on Tuesday. The bill would, among other things, create a study committee to determine how to better fund online schools. For a detailed breakdown of other changes in the bill, see here.

Charter schools are helping to stabilize Cleveland’s population

Cleveland’s population has been declining since the 1960s. The Scene recently reported on changes that the city is making to attract and retain young parents in an effort to stabilize and grow the population. And it looks like a focus on great new schools, including charters, is helping the city make some progress. 

New White House proposal to merge Departments of Education and Labor

Yesterday, the White House released a proposal to reorganize the federal government in a reform plan titled, “Delivering Government Solutions in the 21^st Century.” The plan includes a recommendation to merge the Departments of Education and Labor to create a new department named the Department of Education and Workforce. Reaction from Congress, which would need to approve this type of change, was quick and predictable.

Charter School Governing Board Toolkit

The National Charter School Resource Center (NCSRC) has featured a helpful toolkit from Charter Board Partners in their resource center. According to NCSRC, the resource is “designed to support boards in building the best membership to ensure student success.” The toolkit offers tips and strategies for developing an effective and consistent recruiting process; creating a strategic onboarding process tailored to each new board member; establishing an effective board chair; and more. You can access it here.

Upcoming events

As a reminder, registration is open for a few upcoming events, including the School Performance Institute’s Purposeful Planning workshop (June 27, 2018) in Columbus, Ohio, the National Family and Community Engagement Conference (July 11-13) in Cleveland, Ohio and the 2018 Project-Based Learning Ohio Institute (July 24-27) in New Albany, Ohio.

In a pattern now becoming all too familiar, the State Board of Education recently got spooked by the prospect of tougher standards and delayed action on lifting grade-promotion standards under the Third Grade Reading Guarantee for 2018–19. The decision should not have been a gut-wrenching one, since state law requires the board to gradually lift standards each year after initial implementation. As most loyal Gadfly readers know, the reading guarantee is an early-intervention policy that aims to ensure that children can read fluently before entering fourth grade.

At issue at the June board meeting were the standards students need to meet to be promoted. But what exactly are Ohio’s promotional standards? What exams and test scores determine promotion—or retention, if falling short? Are they rigorous benchmarks, or are they relatively easy for students to meet?

The first thing to know about promotional standards is that they currently have little to do with proficiency on state exams. That might be surprising, given the guarantee’s stated purpose “to make sure that students are on track for reading success by the end of third grade.” Rather what we see from figure 1 is a significant discrepancy between promotional and proficiency rates, especially in the past two years. In 2013–14 and 2014–15—the first two years of the reading guarantee—Ohio administered its old third-grade ELA tests that had low proficiency bars, thus explaining the smaller gaps. But the gap has widened as Ohio has now shifted to new state tests with higher proficiency standards. In 2016–17, for example, a remarkable 94 percent of students met the requirements necessary for promotion, yet just 64 percent reached proficiency on the state’s third grade English language arts (ELA) exams.

Figure 1: Percent of students reaching proficient or above on third grade ELA exams versus percent meeting the Third Grade Reading Guarantee promotional requirements, 2013–14 to 2016–17

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Source: Ohio Department of Education

What explains the gap between promotional and proficiency rates? The answers lie primarily in Ohio policy. Consider the following issues.

Exclusions

The discrepancy reflects in part the impact of students who are included in proficiency rates but excluded from promotional calculations. English language learners and certain students with disabilities, for instance, are exempted under state law from the guarantee’s promotional requirements. Yet most (if not all) of these students are included in proficiency calculations. This “deflates” the proficiency rate to a certain extent if they score less than proficient on the state assessment. To put it another way, Ohio’s proficiency rate may have been a few percentage points higher had it reflected only students included in the promotional rate. Nevertheless, these reasonable exclusions play a minor role in explaining the discrepancy: From 2013–14 through 2016–17, just 5 to 7 percent of students have been excluded from the promotional requirements, leaving 20 to 30 percentage-point gaps in the past two years that still require explanation.

Promotional standards

The most significant factor explaining the gap is that Ohio policymakers haven’t matched promotional and proficiency standards. State law doesn’t necessarily require equivalency between the two—at least not in the early years of implementation. Rather a statute calls on the State Board of Education to set gradually higher promotional standards until they eventually match the proficiency benchmark (no specific timetable is given). To set the promotional bar, the state board has recently relied on reading “subscale” scores on third-grade ELA exams, thus excluding results on the writing section. Although this is a very literal interpretation of the “reading” guarantee, it’s not apparent that state law permits this; it refers explicitly to the ELA assessments in its promotional provisions. In any case, the board has established standards using reading subscale scores set below the proficient, or “on grade level,” benchmark since 2015–16.

Starting in 2017–18, the board shifted gears slightly and began setting promotional standards based on both overall ELA scores and reading subscales. Students can be promoted if they meet one or the other standard. But even this action raises questions: Why didn’t the board lift reading subscale scores in 2017–18? According to Hannah news service, a state official explained last July that the reading subscales are now being treated—somewhat puzzlingly—as an alternative assessment (more below) that students can use to meet promotional requirements, with the full ELA exam now being seen as the main test. Because state law only directs the board to increase the ELA standards for promotion—and is silent about raising benchmarks on alternatives—it’s lawful to maintain the same subscale benchmarks each year.

The upshot of this twisty tale: About one in five students over the past couple years have been promoted to fourth grade even though they don’t reach proficiency benchmarks. That will continue until the state board aligns promotional standards with proficiency.

Table 1: Scores needed to meet promotional standards on state third-grade ELA tests

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Notes: For 2013–14 and 2014–15, Ohio used ELA scaled scores (below proficient) from its “old” state exams to set promotional standards. The state’s achievement levels are as follows (from lowest to highest): limited, basic, proficient, accelerated, and advanced. At its June 2018 meeting, the State Board of Education proposed but did not pass a resolution to adopt 677 as the ELA promotional score for 2018–19; no mention is made in the resolution about reading subscale scores. 

Alternative assessments

Finally, we must not forget that state law also allows for grade promotion when students meet an “acceptable level of performance” on alternative reading assessments. Currently, the Ohio Department of Education (ODE) approves—at its own discretion—four alternatives (not including the reading score on the state assessment) that schools may offer for the purposes of meeting promotional requirements. It’s not clear how exactly ODE, the board, or test developers work to align promotional scores on alternatives with state exams. Indeed, there has been some questioning around this very issue. (Several districts recently claimed the alternative promotional scores are too stringent!) That’s something the board—or the governor or legislature—should demand answers on, so long as state law allows the use of alternative assessments. Nonetheless, such alternatives have permitted thousands of students to move to the next grade, even though they did not demonstrate acceptable reading skills on state exams that they have multiple opportunities to take. In 2015–16 and 2016–17, ODE reported that 8.3 and 4.3 percent of students, respectively, used alternative tests to gain promotion—a final factor that helps to explain the proficiency-promotion gap.

* * *

Six years ago this month, Governor Kasich signed into law the Third Grade Reading Guarantee, telling the press, “Kids who make their way through social promotion beyond the third grade, when they get up to the 8th, 9th, 10th grade … they get lapped, the material becomes too difficult.” Research backs up his point, indicating that pupils struggling to read early in life have great difficulty catching up, and many eventually drop out of school. Halting the grade-promotion train, at least momentarily, is the right thing to do. Young children who have difficulty reading deserve the instructional time and help needed to get the fundamentals nailed down. To implement the policy properly, Ohio needs to set clear, high standards for promotion, lest children fail to receive the supports they need to move on. Regrettably, it appears that some policymakers have been more interested in fiddling with promotional standards and playing games with alternative tests than focusing on ensuring students are proficient. Here’s hoping—or is it wishing?—that the board will at last approve a higher bar when it meets in July. After all, it’s the law.

1. As predicted earlier this month, Dayton Biz Tech – a dropout recovery charter school sponsored by Dayton City Schools – was this week saved from the chopping block by the school board. Biz Tech was granted a one year contract extension after a “successful” 2017-18 school year which overrode a couple of bad previous years. (Dayton Daily News, 6/20/18) No such luck, it seems for nearby Trotwood-Madison City Schools. Folks there seem fairly resigned to a third straight year of poor showing on state report cards, which would likely trigger a declaration of academic distress and the imposition of an Academic Distress Commission by the state. As all my loyal Gadfly Bites subscribers (hello, my lovelies!) will recall, Trotwood took a proactive step in this regard several months ago when they poached Tyrone Olverson from Youngstown City Schools to be their interim superintendent. Olverson is quoted extensively in this piece, explaining how he has hit the ground running in Trotwood. He seems to be implementing what sounds a lot like a turnaround plan akin to those in Youngstown and Lorain, as if he and the elected school board have realized that the district is actually in academic distress before the state does. Fascinating. (Dayton Daily News, 6/21/18)
    
2. Speaking of schools digging out from under an academic distress designation, the highly-impressive new leader of Lorain High School this week made his introduction to the community. Seems like it went well. (Northern Ohio Morning Journal, 6/21/18)
    
3. The new Cincinnati Waldorf High School struck out in its efforts to locate in historic Mariemont for its inaugural year, as everyone seemed to expect it would. So instead they will locate about a mile away in Madisonville. On the upside, the new location is apparently more conducive to school operations and so may persist longer than the originally-planned two years as the school grows by one grade level per year. Full speed ahead! (Cincinnati Enquirer, 6/22/18)
    
4. Not a district we talk about much around here, but here is a story about the support foundation for Westerville City Schools. It is, apparently, rolling in the dough (even more than usual) thanks to a hugely-successful art-based fundraiser and so is ramping up its grant program for classroom teachers’ projects. Worth a look at what such a district gets up to in this regard, especially in these “unprecedented” circumstances. (ThisWeek News, 6/19/18)
    
5. Finally today, LeBron James may have disappointed some folks on the basketball court this month (so I hear), but I’d say he’s knocking it out of the park for kids in Akron’s I Promise program. Here’s a look at a new effort to connect incoming 10^th graders with Kent State University so they’ll be well-prepared to get to and through college. Touchdown! (Akron Beacon Journal, 6/20/18)

The octet of D.C.-area private school heads who boasted a few days ago that their pricey bastions of teaching and learning will no longer offer Advanced Placement courses made much of how the home-grown classes that will replace AP “allow for authentic engagement with the world and demonstrate respect for students’ intellectual curiosity and interests.”

That’s apt to resonate with the upper-middle class parents whose children fill most of the seats at places like Sidwell Friends, St. Albans, and Landon—and whose per-child tuition payments next year will mostly be north of $40,000. Their kids are apt to do fine in college and beyond, with or without AP. (They’d probably do fine with or without the pricey private education!) For the vast majority of American families, however, desperate for quality schooling and solid college prospects for their own children, this whole maneuver looks, well, snobby and smug.

It’s also slightly off-base and disingenuous. Off-base because, in contrast to the school heads’ assertion that AP courses “emphasize breadth over depth,” the College Board has been systematically overhauling and replacing its thirty-eight AP course frameworks and exams to emphasize concepts and “big ideas” as well as “essential knowledge,” and expects to complete that exacting process just about the same time these elite schools are repudiating Advanced Placement.

It’s disingenuous in part because the heads’ statement barely hints at what’s almost certainly their main motive in repudiating AP: Everybody has it nowadays, and it’s essentially free down the street. So offering AP no longer makes their schools distinctive—and worth the hefty cost. They must find other ways to be different.

And it’s disingenuous because, while the schools cease to list courses that are branded “Advanced Placement” and sanctioned as such by the College Board, they’ll keep administering the AP exams in May—and you can be sure that thousands of their pupils will continue to take them. (You can also be sure that teachers and school heads will monitor those exam results and agonize if they don’t include enough 4’s and 5’s.) That’s what’s happened at other high-status private schools such as Fieldston, Exeter, and Choate-Rosemary Hall, which made a big deal of foreswearing AP but whose students—and most definitely their tuition-paying parents—continue to take it seriously.

Complacent and a tad self-righteous as the school heads’ declaration reads, however, they’re not entirely wrong to forego some of AP’s hassles, such as its rigid exam calendar and insistence on approving teachers’ course syllabi. For as Advanced Placement has spread across American secondary education—with almost three million students sitting for more than five million exams last month—its value has diminished somewhat for kids at well-established schools like these.

The selective colleges to which most of their seniors apply are awash in candidates with AP courses and exam scores on their transcripts. While that information helps admissions officers appraising kids from little-known high schools in remote locales, those same officers already have databases on applicants from Georgetown Day School and Holton-Arms. They have a fair sense of what’s in those schools’ courses, what the transcript grades and class ranks signify, and how seriously to take their teacher recommendations. They can easily couple that information with scores on other tests and predict how a given applicant will fare on their campuses. Moreover, as those same selective colleges grow fussier about conferring degree credit and acceleration based on AP exam scores—the Harvard faculty recently voted to cease offering the option of starting as a sophomore—one of the original rationales for Advanced Placement wanes.

On the other hand, solid scores on AP exams are still used, almost everywhere, Harvard included, for college course placement. It remains possible to skip mass-lecture introductory classes by submitting evidence of having mastered that content in high school. And thousands of other colleges continue to rely on those exam scores as the basis for conferring degree credits and the possibility of shortening one’s time within the ivy walls—and reducing one’s total tuition hit.

Perhaps the biggest sacrifice being made by the D.C.-area private schools is the opportunity for their students’ work—and ultimately their teachers’ effectiveness and their own institutional value-add—to be judged impartially on a national metric that’s retained its rigor in a time of grade inflation and that’s scored anonymously by veteran high school teachers and college professors. Advanced Placement is about as close as American K–12 education has today to a gold standard—and as close as we come to a quality national curriculum at the intersection of high school and college. While independent schools are of course free to shun all such forms of standardization, the thousands of public and private schools that have embraced AP are enhancing their students’ access to assured educational quality and academic rigor. One day, the elite institutions that say they can do this better on their own may find themselves sorry that they scorned an approach that’s stood the test of time since 1955.

In a recent blog, I described an initiative called New Skills for Youth (NSFY) that aims to help states transform their career-readiness sectors. The multi-year grant competition awarded $2 million grants to ten states—including Ohio—to expand and improve career pathways for high school students over the course of three years.

With the first year of the grant finished, NSFY released a snapshot highlighting the work of all ten participating states. The concluding page provides an index of eleven focus areas of improvement and identifies the states that made significant progress in those areas. Ohio is identified in six sections: communications, dual credit, employer engagement, graduation requirements, program quality, and work-based learning.

Based on the information included in Ohio’s individual snapshot, here’s a brief overview of the state’s work in each focus area.

Communications

During phase one of Ohio’s work with NSFY, the project team conducted a statewide survey tailored to a variety of stakeholders, including business leaders, parents, students, teachers, and secondary-school and higher-education administrators. The survey, along with supplemental information from focus groups and data analyses that were part of a broader needs assessment, revealed that, although 71 percent of students expressed interest in career-focused options, most were unaware of the opportunities available to them. To combat this lack of knowledge, Ohio’s NSFY project team created SuccessBound, a communications strategy aimed at increasing student enrollment in career readiness programs that align with employer needs. So far, the initiative has produced videos and student profiles of success stories, informational and social media resources, and a toolkit for families (toolkits for businesses and schools are forthcoming). Six regional conferences were also convened that provided attendees with the opportunity to learn more about the initiative and network.      

Dual credit

When folks in Ohio talk about dual credit, they’re usually talking about College Credit Plus, a statewide program that offers college-ready students the opportunity to earn high school and college credit simultaneously. But there are also additional pathways toward college credit available to students enrolled in career and technical education (CTE) courses. For example, Ohio has developed statewide articulation agreements that allow high school students to count certain CTE classes toward postsecondary degrees. These agreements are known as Career Technical Assurance Guides, or CTAGs. The Ohio Department of Higher Education maintains a list of all the available CTAG courses (in areas like virtual design and imaging and electrical engineering technology) online, and offers a search tool that helps students identify which of their CTE credits can transfer to the next level.

Employer engagement

Ohio’s efforts to bridge the gap between education and industry started long before the NSFY grant. For instance, towards the beginning of Governor Kasich’s administration, he created the Office of Workforce Transformation (OWT) to improve the state’s workforce development efforts. From its inception, OWT has prioritized making connections between K–12 and postsecondary education and employers. The Executive Workforce Board, which guides all of OWT’s work, has members from the business, government, and education sectors. In the most recent state budget, the legislature tasked OWT with developing a regional workforce collaboration model that would provide businesses and stakeholder groups (like postsecondary institutions and the College Tech Prep Regional Centers) with guidance on how to partner to provide career services to students. The final guidelines highlight the work of some truly innovative partnerships, like the Central Ohio Compact.

Graduation requirements

Similar to its efforts in employer engagement, Ohio had already incorporated career education into its graduation requirements prior to the NSFY grant. Back in 2014, the legislature created three pathways students could take to earn a diploma; one of these pathways requires students to earn a specific score on the WorkKeys exam and an industry-recognized credential. WorkKeys is a job-skills test that measures how well prepared students are for the workforce, and students who receive a certain score can earn a National Career Readiness Certificate in addition to their Ohio diploma. As for credentials, Ohio offers a vast array of them in thirteen different career fields, including engineering and information technology. And students can now earn a job readiness seal that’s garnered support from a variety of Ohio businesses and schools.

Program quality

The federal government defines “career pathways” as combinations of rigorous, high-quality education with training and other services. Ohio has a variety of career pathways, but it previously lacked a way to determine whether programs were high quality. That’s why the Ohio NSFY team developed criteria to evaluate programs and help local decision makers ascertain which ones to expand or phase out. The criteria identify four aspects of successful, high-quality, and in-demand pathways: 1) business and community engagement, 2) career-pathway design, 3) educator collaboration, and 4) learning environment and culture. Ohio’s NSFY team is working to scale career readiness models that fulfill these criteria.

Work-based learning

Work-based learning (WBL) is designed to help students master a combination of academic, technical, and professional skills. In Ohio, students are jointly supervised for the duration of their WBL by their employer and a representative from their school. Supervision is based on a learning agreement that all three parties must agree on. In an effort to increase student engagement, the recent budget bill required the Ohio Department of Education (ODE) to develop a framework for schools to use to grant high school credit to students who demonstrate subject competency through WBL. Traditional districts and charter schools will be required to follow ODE’s framework during the upcoming school year. Schools have two options for issuing credit to students: They can enhance a course by offering work-based learning as part of course requirements, or they can replace a course with WBL via their credit flexibility policy. According to the NSFY snapshot, Ohio is still working on how to reliably measure work-based learning participation and evaluate performance—including the possibility that WBL indicators could be added to the state’s accountability system.

***

Ohio still has plenty of room for improvement. But the work outlined above is both significant and encouraging. As career and technical education continues to grow in prominence and scope at the national level, Ohioans should feel fortunate to have access to CTE programs that are already so far ahead.

“These kids are so amazing. I’m so proud of them.”

I’m sorry, what? Is a fifth grade graduation really all that amazing? Are we really high-fiving and showering our kids with gifts because they finished eighth grade? There was a time when graduations were only for twelfth graders. I think I liked that better, truth be told.

Now certainly there are circumstances where these milestones and achievements can be and are remarkable. War-torn countries. Violence-ridden communities. Children who have overcome the odds of illness and trauma. Students with disabilities who were told they’d never read, never write, never make it in the world. Children who endured relentless bullying, racism, and even shootings in a place that is supposed to feel safe. For them, a never-ending standing ovation is in order. And so is our admiration and respect.

But for most of us in suburban America, we are caught up in a culture that over-praises the most basic achievements, as if finishing elementary school was even up for negotiation or “graduating” from eighth grade symbolizes some sort of triumph. Sure it’s a right of passage and can make a parent weepy, but the “these kids are so amazing” mantra that floods social media this time of year (followed by fifty comments of “congratulations”) isn’t helping anybody, especially not the kids upon whom the praise is being heaped. Pride is one thing, but telling them that they’re “amazing” because they finished fifth or eighth grade seems to leave little room for them to see how much more we expect them to do.

“To whom much is given, much is required.”

Did I tell my thirteen year old that he’s amazing because he’s finishing seventh grade today? Hell no. I told him that despite his many buddies who are skipping the last day of school with parent permission, he is going to fulfill his obligations as a student and be there until the end. I told him I’m proud of the way he worked to improve some of his grades this final trimester. I told him I love him, as I do every morning. But I also told him that there is nothing amazing about him making it to eighth grade and that it would actually be pretty amazing if he hadn’t. Everything is in place for him to succeed. And he needs to understand that, for many boys his age here in our little state of Rhode Island and across this vast country, that is simply not the case.

He doesn’t experience hunger. Or witness violence. Or know how it feels to be called names or held to lower expectations in school because of the color of his skin or the accent of his parents. He has three college-educated grandparents. Two parents with graduate degrees. If he falls, there are strong safety nets in place to catch him. If he experiences illness or injury, he has the health insurance and access to doctors (that his parents know personally) to ensure he gets the right care. If his school issued Chromebook-breaks over vacation, we have another one he can use.

He and his two younger brothers are set up for success. They started this life on third base. And so did their parents.

So I will not overly praise them—especially not on public forums—when they meet basic minimal expectations. But I will look hard for those moments when they go above and beyond, whether in gratitude, empathy, generosity, or hard work. The moments when they think of others before themselves. The moments when it clicks and they internalize the reality that they started this life with a head start and have an obligation to find their own way to pay it forward.

Finishing fifth grade? Or eighth grade? Nothing amazing about that.

The author first published a version of this article on her blog, Good School Hunting.

I’ve never led a school, run a school system, or served on a school board. So maybe I am about to ask something that is incredibly naïve and possibly insulting. But here goes: Why are so many of our school districts so complacent? I understand why they don’t always do the hard things, like firing ineffective veteran teachers, or expensive things, like starting one-on-one tutoring programs. But I can’t fathom why so many don’t do the easy, more or less no-cost things, either.

Let me offer two examples:

1. Adopting an aligned, high-quality curriculum. This has never been simpler! (Not faithful and imaginative implementation—that’s hard. But picking a good curriculum? Easy!) Both states and non-profits—especially EdReports—are doing reviews of curricular products, and there is a growing number that are meeting high standards for quality, alignment to state standards, and usability, some of which are free. Yet what limited data we have indicate that most schools continue to choose curricula that are not aligned, not rigorous, not proven—if they are choosing curricula at all. I recently got my hands on a “Market Brief” by Education Week that looked at the market share of various English language arts and math curricula for elementary schools. In both subjects, the market leader is “Other”—as in a large plurality of districts is using something “other” than the major commercial products or open education resources. It’s anyone’s guess what these materials are, but other surveys hint that they are probably lessons downloaded from Pinterest and other sites.

Meanwhile, the products that districts are purchasing are generally not those that score well on various rating systems. HMH’s “Journeys” is the top choice for ELA classrooms, with 19 percent market share, even though it only “partially met” EdReports’ very first screen. McGraw-Hill’s “Reading Wonders” is next, with 5 percent, and then Pearson’s “Reading Street,” with 4; the former received just middling marks from EdReports, and the latter scored terribly. On the other hand, Pearson’s “ReadyGEN Text Collection” and Amplify’s “Core Knowledge Language Arts” both received top ratings from EdReports for fully meeting its criteria for content and usability, yet each has less than 1 percent market share.

It’s not much better in math. HMH’s “Go Math” is in the lead with 16 percent; Pearson’s “enVisionmath 2.0” and McGraw-Hill’s “Everyday Math” come in at 8 and 7 percent respectively. None of these materials fully met EdReports’ criteria for alignment to college and career ready standards; enVision and Everyday Math score particularly poorly. But now for some good news: Eureka Math, born as EngageNY Math, has 9 percent of the market, plus rave reviews from EdReports and discerning states such as Louisiana. And the consumers of the product love it too; 82 percent of district administrators surveyed by Education Week who are frequent users of the program said Eureka Math helps improve student achievement. And 77 percent gave Eureka Math positive marks for improving instruction; the next best was 29 percent.

It’s a truism that there’s not “one best curriculum” that fits all schools’ needs. But it’s also the case that some curricula are simply better than others. According to the Education Week data, the good stuff is being used by maybe 10 to 15 percent of schools. Why on earth is this number so low?

2. Making the tenure approval process more rigorous. Teacher evaluation reform may have crashed and burned, but that’s not because the impulse was wrong. Research continues to show that teacher effectiveness varies dramatically from one classroom to the next; our lowest-performing teachers have a hugely negative impact on their students’ trajectories. Identifying these teachers at the get-go and getting them out of our schools could do a world of good. As would recognizing and rewarding our best instructors.

But it remains super hard to do that once teachers have earned tenure (a.k.a. a “permanent contract”), thanks to states’ tenure and due-process laws, as well as local collective-bargaining agreements. What’s not hard is denying someone tenure in the first place. Given that most teachers have to wait three or four years before they are eligible for tenure, and that three or four years is plenty of time to determine whether someone is an effective instructor, districts have a golden opportunity to ensure quality control in the classroom. They can make the tenure-approval process rigorous instead of a rubber stamp. Even better: They could make it a true honor, complete with a ceremony welcoming newly tenured teachers into the most important profession in the world.

Joel Klein made this reform in New York City, and the Big Apple’s rate for approving tenure-eligible teachers went from close to 100 percent to around 50 percent, practically overnight. It has crept back up under de Blasio, but it’s still much lower than the near-universal rates we see in most districts around the country. Nor did Klein have to actually fire unproven teachers; he told most of them to try again the next year, though many decided to leave the classroom instead.

So districts have a choice: They can make tenure an achievement or automatic. Why would anyone choose the latter?

***

I suppose there are two ways to look at examples like these. The hard-edged view is that our public-school system still isn’t responsive enough to the need for fundamental improvements in student learning, despite test-based accountability, choice-driven competition, and everything else we’ve tried. Maybe it really is time to replace it. The other, more optimistic take is that if and when schools start to pick this low hanging fruit, we could see student learning accelerate big time.

Let me place a wager: If we could get the market share of high quality curriculum above 50 percent, and the percentage of junior teachers approved for tenure on their first try below 50 percent, we would see the most dramatic improvement in student achievement since A Nation at Risk—or maybe ever. Is there any reason, other than complacency, not to try?

Within the reform community, a tension that has been brewing under the surface for years is now playing out in full view. It pits those who believe that parent empowerment (i.e., the power to vote with one’s feet) equals accountability versus those who subscribe to the “grand bargain” of accountability for results. Those in the first group are generally aligned with the current administration’s tack, while the latter have argued that a refortification is in order. The choice isn’t binary, of course, but these two camps are illustrative of the larger disagreements at play.

I attended a workshop a couple of months ago that endeavored to bridge the divide. Hosted by EdChoice, the event brought together a diverse group of stakeholders, including researchers, policymakers, practitioners, and philanthropy. There were folks in attendance who were fans of the Bush-Obama era, as well as those who felt the reforms implemented under their tenure were a detriment to students and the system writ large.

Participants wrestled with a number of key questions, such as: What is the purpose of an accountability system, and who should be held responsible for owning and operationalizing it? Though most folks felt that recent history has been too top-down in this regard, finding the sweet spot between local autonomy and technocratic overreach proved elusive—at least for the limited amount of time we had together as a group.

Complicating matters further is that the A-word has become a dirty one now synonymous with standardized testing. Certainly accountability means so much more, but it’s reasonable to argue that the well has been poisoned at this point. “Transparency” and “responsibility” came up as potential alternatives, though how to measure either would also require extended discussion.

There’s also a debate about what test scores tell us about school performance. To be candid, my thinking on the subject has evolved over the years. I still believe in the relationship between short- and long-term outcomes, but I’m more open-minded now to schools that deliver positive life outcomes without the stellar test scores to match. As the father of a young daughter, I’m also more appreciative of the intangible elements that make school and learning special, but may not lend themselves easily to hard measurement.

That said, I see no reason to ditch test-based accountability anytime soon. As a self-professed accountability hawk, I still firmly believe that the problem with standardized testing is less about the complaints (e.g., they’re biased against some students or too easily gamed) and more about the lack of outrage at the number of schools—especially those serving low-income communities—that are not teaching the basic reading and math skills necessary to pass them.

Still, there seems to be a lot more questions than answers on the issue. It’s all enough to make an honest policy wonk nervous (our dinner venue for the evening was an apt one) that even if we were able to build the ideal accountability system, we’d still have Gus the Truck (i.e., there’s a ceiling to what it can accomplish on its own). But this doesn’t mean abandoning accountability. Instead, we need an evolution that moves us toward a focus on improving long-term outcomes and ensures that educators have a seat at the table because they’re the ones who wrestle with the implications of these systems on a daily basis.

With the Every Student Succeeds Act, some states are beginning down this road by weaving college and career readiness or world languages into their accountability systems. Most of these indicators are focused on high schools, though I’d like to eventually see more in the early grades. For sure, there will be questions to be answered (e.g., What’s age appropriate when it comes to career readiness at the elementary level? How do we deal with exposing kids early on, but recognizing that it will be years before we see whether the effort was successful?), but my hope is that states will see these as new opportunities to be innovative.

Encouraging students to grow up to form strong, intact families is another example of keeping long-term outcomes in mind (and not one without controversy). A few months ago, the study released by Raj Chetty et al. created quite the buzz by shining a light on what many of us instinctually already knew about the punishing reach of racism. Buried in the data—behind the shiny New York Times infographics—was a fascinating finding about the power of a father’s presence: Black boys do especially well in neighborhoods with a large fraction of fathers at home. What implications might this finding have for schools and for accountability systems?

Students spend way more time at home than they do in school, and the likelihood of this imbalance changing anytime soon are slim to none. The perennial question is how to maximize the time schools do have to effectively mitigate against some of these larger intractable issues. Try this one on for size: Should educators teach the success sequence, and should accountability systems be employed to nudge schools to do so? Now there’s an idea that’s sure to make some people nervous.

Over two years ago, we at Fordham published one of the first studies that examined the potential long-term benefits of career and technical education in high school. Conducted by Shaun Dougherty, the study found that students who “concentrate” their CTE coursework in one area experienced multiple benefits, such as a higher likelihood of graduating and higher wages compared to non-concentrators.

A new study by Daniel Kreisman and Kevin Stange found virtue in a related path—taking more specialized or upper level CTE courses, versus an assortment of introductory courses, as non-concentrators tend to do. The analysts used detailed longitudinal transcript and labor market information for a cohort of respondents in the National Longitudinal Survey ‘97 (NSLY97) to glean the benefits of CTE courses on longer-term outcomes. The NSLY includes a rich set of measures that can be used as individual controls for student background and ability, as well as for location and cohort effects.

The dataset includes about 9,000 individuals who were between the ages of twelve and eighteen when they were first interviewed in 1997. The survey is representative of all American youth at that time period and respondents had been followed annually to glean information on their educational attainment, labor market experience, and family formation, among other areas. High school transcripts were also collected from respondents' high schools; in total, transcript data were collected for over 6,000 respondents. Courses were coded to identify “low” and “high” level: Low-level courses are those classified as the “first course” on transcripts, while upper-level courses include those beyond the introductory level, such as “second or later courses,” “specialty courses” or “co-op/work experience.” The wage analysis was restricted to a “wage sample” of 3,708 students whom analysts determined had entered the labor market and had a valid wage record.

Kreisman and Stange found that more vocational courses were associated with higher wages, on the order of 1.8–2.0 percent for each year of specialized/upper level vocational coursework. In fact, when separating vocational coursework into higher and lower levels, they found that wage gains were driven entirely by upper-level courses, largely in technical fields and among non-college graduates. There were no discernible wage gains when it came to taking an additional introductory level CTE course.

Digging into various CTE strands, Kreisman and Stange determined that wage gains were driven by Transportation & Industry (including construction trades, mechanics and repair, transportation, and production), Business & Management (including business management, services, and marketing), and Health Care. Next, they found little to no evidence that CTE coursework decreased the likelihood of college graduation, nor that the monetary value of the courses are explained away by other factors. Specifically, they wrote, “while wage gains associated with non-vocational courses (core and electives) are entirely explained by college enrollment, wage gains from upper level vocational courses are unaffected by controlling for college enrollment and completion, suggesting that these courses do in fact have real value in the labor market.” That’s terrific news. Finally, through a series of “alternative hypothesis testing,” they found—to the relief of all who rightly shun the “tracking” history of old-school voc-ed—that students appear to positively sort themselves into CTE courses, as opposed to adults funneling low-ability students into them.

The bottom line is analogous to that of our seminal 2016 study, which is that the benefits of CTE coursework accrue to students who specialize, rather than to those who take a smattering of courses (typically introductory) in multiple areas. That means that CTE programs need to be built in a way that allows students to go into depth on any topic that is offered to them. Because, as the title of this report indicates, there’s greater value in depth than in breadth.

SOURCE: Daniel Kreisman and Kevin Stange, “Vocational and Career Tech Education in American High Schools: The Value of Depth Over Breadth,” Education Finance and Policy (June 2018).