Editor's note: This post is a submission to Fordham's 2018 Wonkathon. We asked assorted education policy experts whether our graduation requirements need to change, in light of diploma scandals in D.C., Maryland, and elsewhere. Other entries can be found here.

The challenges of setting high school graduation requirements include several interrelated variables:

• What threshold of accomplishment do we demand for awarding a high school diploma?
• What measurement tools do we want to use to determine whether that threshold has been met?
• Who’s responsible for enforcing that the standards are met, and what are the consequences of failure for that actor?

Improvement in all three areas is necessary if we’re going to properly serve students. So let’s start at the end and work backwards.

To date, states have generally defined graduation requirements in terms of courses that students are required to complete. Under No Child Left Behind, accountability systems generally pushed districts to improve in two areas: graduation rates and standardized test scores. The graduation-rates requirement was to incentivize keeping students in school and on track for college and career. And one purpose of standardized test scores is to act as a check on watering down the requirements, by creating pressure for academic excellence and measuring proficiency in a manner that can be analyzed across different groups of students.

Overall, the animating principle of high school graduation is usually college and career readiness. States generally posit that students who complete a certain set of courses should be ready for college and career. While at a system level, standardized tests are supposed to act as a prompt for excellence, there’s not typically a link between test scores and receiving a diploma—so those requirements may provide some balance for the system. But with some exceptions, they don’t generally provide that balance for individual students.

And it turns out that even with these two fixed points, districts have had a lot of ways to squeeze the balloon. The standardized-test-score requirement doesn’t really prevent districts from letting the air out of graduation expectations to help students meet them. State requirements have generally focused on Carnegie Units, and it’s not that hard to create passable classes that don’t really get students to whatever threshold of mastery the state had in mind when it set those graduation requirements.

Moreover, many districts in turn put pressure on high school principals to produce higher graduation rates. In a lot of instances this amounts to blaming the victim. By the time students get to high school, they already are on a particular trajectory—one that for some students will leave them short of graduation requirements. It would probably be appropriate for high school principals to be held accountable for the incremental increase or decrease in graduation rates from what would have been expected from an entering cohort in ninth grade—but that’s kind of wonky, and is also not particularly appealing to districts who are responsible for the overall rate.

So a fundamental part of the problem here is that districts are being held accountable for getting students across a threshold that they themselves play a large role in defining. As long as that is the case, the pressure to “game the system” will always be there. And as long as that pressure is there, some number of districts will succumb to it—either by defining the requirements for a diploma in ways that make it less meaningful, or by putting pressure on principals to produce numbers that only lowered standards or foul play can produce. If states are going to set the bar, they need to really set the bar in a way that lets districts focus solely on getting students over it.

What that means is that, when it comes to setting a standard for high school graduation, the state needs a definition that it alone controls. Fortunately, that dovetails well with an emerging trend of focusing on mastery rather than seat time. States can’t really monitor whether all of their districts are teaching rigorously in their schools (although it would be great if they could). But they can define mastery, and then measure whether it’s been achieved.

New York State’s Regents exams are the best example of this: content-specific assessments that show whether a student has deep content knowledge in a subject. Advanced Placement tests fulfill much the same function. These assessments and others like them show that it is practically possible for states, individually or collectively, to define a body of knowledge that students are expected to know—and then measure whether students know it. Indeed, states are already expected to have learning standards tied to college and career readiness, and those standards should be used to define the content students are expected to master.

Each state could define for itself how many subjects students would be expected to master and how much variation in subject choice is permitted, and then provide assessments in all the subjects it’s prepared to give credit for. A high school diploma would be awarded solely to students who meet those requirements, and district and school graduation rates would give credit only for students who are awarded that diploma. By focusing on mastery rather than seat time, districts could make better allowance for students to move at different speeds toward completion, rather than building systems based on the assumption that students will largely learn at the same pace. Districts and schools could be allowed to give out certificates to other students who meet some but not all of the standards, although colleges and employers would know that the state diploma is the true mark of mastery.

This approach would allow states to be flexible in defining what degree of content mastery justifies a diploma. It would be an excellent opportunity to rethink career and technical education, and would offer opportunities for mastery in CTE areas that employers value. The state’s higher education and employer communities could be actively involved in both defining the subjects in which mastery leads to credit toward a diploma, and in defining the level of rigor necessary to display mastery. Over time states could study the effects of the diplomas on college and workforce success, and adjust their requirements based on the data they generate.

Will this lead to a complete reimagining of the American high school? Maybe. And if it does, that won’t come from a series of state-dictated mandates. If states truly commit to defining the bar, then districts and schools (including charter schools) can focus on figuring out how to organize themselves most effectively to get students over it. Some will be slow to change, but others may experiment—and that experimentation could lead to valuable information that would help shape practices at other schools.

This approach puts the state, districts, and schools in roles that recognize their areas of institutional superiority. States are better than districts and schools at defining what colleges and the workforce need writ large. Districts and schools are better at figuring out how to educate children—and may also be better at figuring out the workforce needs of their particular region, so they could design their programs accordingly.

This proposal clears up the current misalignment of institutional interests, embraces the notion that college and career readiness is multifaceted, and comes closer to measuring what actually matters for students to succeed beyond high school. Aren’t those the things any good wonk would want to do?

For a quarter-century, the dedicated people who oversee charter schools have been working at solving one of the toughest problems in public life: How can public entities ensure that service providers do their jobs effectively and for a good price, and without micromanaging them into mediocrity?

This is not a problem unique to education. Far from it. Any activity funded with taxpayer dollars faces the same dilemma—from health care, to infrastructure, to garbage collection, and on down the list. Public administration experts like David Osborne urge the government to “steer instead of row” by outsourcing the provision of these services to for-profit or non-profit entities, and holding them accountable for results. That sounds straightforward—until you’re the one charged with actually doing the work.

It’s a blessing, then, that the charter schools movement has the National Association of Charter School Authorizers to plug away at this thorny question. For almost two decades, it has stood up for the autonomy-in-return-for-accountability bargain at the heart of the charter schools promise. And it's walked the talk—both by helping to authorize schools itself, and by examining what this bargain looks like in practice.

As someone who leads an organization that authorizes charter schools, I can tell you that it’s not always easy to distinguish rowing from steering. When one of our schools does poorly on its state report card or is facing a crisis involving student safety, it’s hard not to reach for the oar. Sticking to steering may sound good in theory, but it can look like an abdication of responsibility in practice.

Into the squall comes NACSA’s latest study, Leadership, Commitment, Judgment: Elements of Successful Charter School Authorizing. It’s useful, authoritative, and nuanced. It doesn’t pretend that there are easy solutions to authorizers’ many dilemmas, including: How much should one rely on proven models when approving new schools, versus showing an openness to innovation? What is the right response when an existing school is neither great nor terrible, but just chronically mediocre? Are there appropriate ways to offer “assistance” without crossing the line into micromanagement? What do you do with a school where someone gets caught pilfering funds, but the larger organization is sound and the school is working wonders for kids?

None of this will satisfy our libertarian friends, who seem to equate any form of assertive oversight with bureaucratic nanny-statism. Nor will it satisfy fierce opponents of charter schools, whose definition of “accountability” involves public-sector employees doing all the work of education, regardless of the quality of the outcomes.

But for those of us striving every day to do a better job in our authorizing responsibilities, this analysis is a Godsend. With clear examples and insights from some of the best authorizers in the country, it reaffirms the field’s commitment to school-level autonomy and accountability, and reasserts that good oversight can’t be “paint by numbers,” as one official put it. It is not management-by-spreadsheet, but the pursuit of good decisions, informed by data and wisdom, that keep the charter movement growing in size and quality.

Those of us at the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation are honored to be selected as one of the authorizers profiled in NACSA’s report. We know we have much more to learn from our peers than we have to teach from our own experience, but that’s the mark of a great field—a true commitment to excellence, both for ourselves and our professional peers.

There are still no easy answers when it comes to overseeing charter schools effectively. But NACSA is helping us ask the right questions—and that is a mighty contribution.

In case you missed the headlines, D.C. Public Schools Chancellor Antwan Wilson recently resigned. Though a few scandals have plagued the district as of late, the one that spurred Wilson’s resignation was personal. He bypassed the citywide school lottery system to enroll his daughter in a high-performing school.

Wilson’s actions must be condemned as a misuse of power and a violation of public trust. He should not have circumvented district policies for his family’s benefit, and his resignation is warranted.

That being said, it’s not hard to understand why he did it. Based on media reports, the school that his daughter initially enrolled in—an arts magnet school—turned out to be a bad fit. Rather than keeping her in a school that didn’t work for her, Wilson did what most parents would do: He searched for a better option. Unfortunately, this meant using his power and connections to transfer his daughter into a high-performing school. Given these facts, it’s clear that he wanted his daughter to attend an academically strong school that was also a good fit for her. 

Wilson’s situation isn’t unique. Whether it’s a low-performing school, a school that isn’t the right fit, or both, tens of thousands of Ohio families have found themselves in the same position. The Buckeye State is considered a national leader in school choice. So, in theory, its families should have a menu of educational options. But how accessible are they? Let’s take a look at a few of the most common ways parents choose schools.

Option 1: Move to a new district or neighborhood

If you don’t like the schools in your neighborhood or school district, then you could pack up and move somewhere else. In fact, many parents specifically choose their homes based on their perceptions of local school quality. But many of the best schools in Ohio are located in affluent suburbs, where housing prices are high. Some people have used the addresses of family members or friends to avoid high real estate costs and gain access to better schools. But that’s a risky move. Districts have admitted to tailing parents to check for residency, and at least one mom was already sent to jail for lying about her home address. This is likely the most common method of school choice, but it’s also time-consuming and very expensive.   

Option 2: Open-enroll in another district

This form of choice permits students to attend public schools that are outside their district of residence—but only if the receiving district has available space and chooses to admit non-resident students, and only if parents are able to transport their children to the alternative. This is a feasible option for families in rural and small-town Ohio, where almost all districts permit this. But unfortunately, very few of the state’s affluent suburban (read: high performing) districts allow non-resident students to attend. Fordham’s open-enrollment report found that Ohio’s largest inner cities—including Cincinnati, Cleveland, and Columbus—are surrounded by districts with closed borders that exclude tens of thousands of nearby low-income and minority students from going to better schools.

Option 3: Enroll in a charter school

Approximately 110,000 Ohio children attend charter schools. Many of these schools are doing remarkable work with their students, who often come from low income households. Unfortunately, state law prohibits new brick-and-mortar charters from opening in many geographic areas, so lots of Ohioans—especially in rural areas—only have access to virtual varieties.

Option 4: Enroll in a private school

Ohio families have sent their children to private schools for over a century. But not everyone lives near one. And they charge tuition, sometimes a significant amount, which automatically excludes the majority of low and lower-middle income families unless the cost is subsidized. That’s where vouchers come in. The EdChoice, Jon Peterson, Cleveland, and Autism Scholarship Programs offer state-funded private school scholarships to Ohio students. But they have several stipulations that limit their accessibility. Vouchers can only be used at participating private schools—and many of the most sought after schools in the state don’t participate. Those that do aren't required to accept eligible students, so parents who want a voucher and live near a participating school still might be unable to enroll their child. And to be eligible for a scholarship, a student must have a disability, live in Cleveland, be assigned to attend a low-performing school, or have an income below 200 percent of the federal poverty guidelines. Income eligibility is also restricted by grade level—only students in fifth grade or below are eligible for the 2018–19 school year—and by available funds.

Option 5: Homeschool

Thousands of Ohio families homeschool their children each year. But it’s not a viable option for the vast majority of parents. This could be because both parents work full-time, because the family doesn’t have access to a nearby co-op they like, or because the out-of-pocket expenses are just too steep.

Option 6: Keep your child at his or her assigned traditional public school

This is the most common path for Ohio families. For some it’s a good, conscious choice. But for many, due to all of the aforementioned barriers, it’s their only option. It’s also sometimes a bad one that condemns their child to a low-performing or ill-fitting school.

***

Ohio has a robust system of school choice, but it still excludes far too many of the families that need it most. This is why thoughtful state policy is so important. The decisions made in the legislature and the governor’s office aren’t philosophical debates or theoretical dilemmas. They affect real families who are trying to do right by their children. Ohioans deserve quality choices and plenty of them, and the officials that they’ve elected should work to empower—not hinder—this freedom. 

1. It may or may not surprise you to know that not many school districts in Ohio have a diversity plan when it comes to hiring. Small town Mansfield is not one of those districts. Seems to me that they don’t have much to show for having a plan in place for a year, but district officials seem satisfied. (Mansfield News Journal, 2/23/18)
    
2. Things are much more clear cut in Norwalk schools; almost too much so. Both the board and the teachers union in the small northern Ohio town are delighted with their recent contract negotiations. They even use the word “enjoyable” to describe the process. Can you imagine? And what alchemy could have led to this shiny happy outcome? A newly-implemented process called “interest-based bargaining” (isn’t that every kind of bargaining?). “Essentially it emphasizes working toward solutions and takes away conflict from the process,” the journalist explains helpfully. Oh, right. THAT’s what everyone else is doing wrong. (Norwalk Reflector, 2/25/18)
    
3. Some of the small town districts in Northeast Ohio seem to be continuing a 30 year lament in regard to school levies. Some say that a 1976 law makes “boom and bust” cycles the norm for their districts – a situation which is hard to explain to voters when they are asked for new or renewal levies perhaps a bit more often than they would like. Other local levies (municipalities, parks, etc.) are also confounding problems for schools, they say. Controlling costs is not mentioned, but you probably guessed that. (Willoughby News-Herald, 2/25/18)

Editor's note: This post is a submission to Fordham's 2018 Wonkathon. We asked assorted education policy experts whether our graduation requirements need to change, in light of diploma scandals in D.C., Maryland, and elsewhere. Other entries can be found here.

A little over a decade ago, Chicago Public Schools began tracking the number of freshmen failing two or more classes who had a 10 percent absence rate or more than eighteen unexcused absences in a year. Data from the Consortium on Chicago School Research showed that, once students hit this threshold, their likelihood of dropping out skyrocketed.

Today, thanks to this system of tracking freshmen attendance and grades, Chicago’s high school graduation rate is up more than 20 percentage points and is approaching the national average, despite having a student population that is much poorer than the nation as a whole.

The “freshmen on track” metric works because it is based on reliable data points that are unlikely to be corrupted. At a time when people are questioning the validity of high school diplomas, student grades and attendance could provide an answer to the question, “What standards should students meet to graduate from high school?”

Let’s start with attendance. High-school students are old enough to take responsibility for getting to school and doing their work. Attendance is an objective metric we already measure and, short of lying, is not easily corruptible.

We can partly blame parents if kids don’t show up, but we can’t hold parents accountable in any meaningful way, despite some alarming and misguided attempts that landed poor parents in jail for their child’s truancy. These cases typically involve younger children for whom parent responsibility is primary.

Arguably, schools and teachers share some responsibility for low attendance if students are not engaged, but again, it’s very hard to measure. Low engagement might show up in measurable ways like low participation in school activities or underachievement (low grades among kids with high test scores). Principals or teacher leaders can also assess engagement through observation.

But engagement is still hard to measure because it’s not objective and is easily corruptible if principals arbitrarily set the bar low. We cannot build an accountability system around levels of student engagement, even if it’s a worthwhile thing to assess and monitor.

The bottom line is that, absent extenuating circumstances like extreme personal trauma, if high school students don’t consistently show up at school, we should hold them accountable by denying them a diploma.

The other relevant indicator is student grades, although this is considerably more subjective. One teacher’s “A” could be another teacher’s “C.” One teacher’s “C” could be another teacher’s “F.” But even with variance in grading and absent outright deceit, grades generally indicate if a student is passing a course and doing the work.

A related question is: How do we know if a student is college-ready? This one’s easy: college entrance exams and passing grades on advanced placement tests. As we say in the music business, KISS—"keep it simple stupid.” High Advanced Placement passing rates and ACT/SAT scores are crystal clear, highly incorruptible metrics of academic success and college readiness.

As for “career-ready,” no one really knows what the term means. It could be tied to an industry certificate like a NIMS credential, which certifies readiness to work in manufacturing. We could also establish an agreed-upon set of work skills—like the Common Core for career and technical education—but it would no doubt be slaughtered on the altar of local control.

Instead, “career-ready” should be tied to what employers actually value, which is work experience. A student who wants to go straight to work after high school should acquire work experience in high school—proof that he or she can show up on time, hold down a job for more than a week, and get an employer to provide a positive reference.

Countless young people start working in high school—baby-sitting, burger-flipping, etc. High schools should take responsibility for helping eleventh and twelfth grade students find work, or for giving them work experience in the school building. Pay students to stock shelves, clean up science labs, mow athletic fields, or tutor younger students.

As for exit exams, there are two problems. First of all, it is wrong to deny a diploma to a student who shows up for four years and does the work, even if he or she tests poorly.

And second, exit exams merely create a barrier to graduation where none is needed. Colleges don’t need exit exams to determine college-readiness. They base admissions on grades, essays, extracurricular activities, recommendations—and, of course, test scores.

So, what would a diploma tied to attendance and grades mean for the American high school today?

First of all, it means that kids are responsible for showing up. This puts indirect, justified pressure on parents to do their part. It also puts some pressure on the school to keep kids engaged, so responsibility is shared.

Second, it means that grades—even if low—indicate that the student is doing the work. Teachers, parents, and kids take grades seriously. Policymakers should too.

Third, it means that, aside from accommodations for students with disabilities, high schools should teach all kids to grade-level standards through twelfth grade. They should not lower standards. Learning goals should be consistent, agreed-upon, and ambitious.

Finally, it also means that it’s up to kids and parents to decide if they are college material or not. Schools cannot and should not make this decision because they will invariably get it wrong. We have too much evidence of race-based tracking to go down that path again.

Ultimately, a high school diploma based on attendance and grades signals that the student isn’t a quitter. Diplomas could also be modified to indicate whether a student finished on time or through a credit-recovery program.

Based on these currently available and highly reliable metrics, districts and states can hold high schools accountable and parents are in a good position to judge school quality. They will know that graduation rates are based on the number of students meeting attendance requirements and passing their classes. They will know how many students graduate on time or through credit recovery programs. They will know the level of rigor based on the number of students taking AP courses and passing AP exams. They will know the number of students taking college entrance exams and getting “college-ready” scores. And ideally parents would also know how many students enroll in college and complete within six years, but this information is harder to track.

A high graduation rate also implies something positive about student engagement, school safety, and student morale—issues parents care deeply about. Essentially, by linking graduation to grades and attendance, parents can tell how well a school is serving all kids.

Adam Tyner and I recently coauthored a report examining gaps in American schools’ gifted programming. The process made me think about the role of democracy in gifted and talented programs and vice versa. As I learned more about the topic, I became increasingly convinced that the current procedures used to identify high achievers were undermining basic democratic values and principles like individuality, equality, and fairness that functional democracies must observe and preserve. Far too many bright students, especially the country’s most disadvantaged, are denied opportunities to be screened for these offerings. In a school system that should—and often purports to—strive to maximize the education of every child, the treatment of these young boys and girls falls well short of that ideal.

In a great book called On Democracy, the late Yale political scientist Robert A. Dahl asks, “Is equality self-evident?” He argues that, for most of us, it is far from self-evident that all men and women are created equal. Dahl makes an important distinction between inequality in ability and inequality in opportunity, the latter being my main concern. Gifted and talented programs affirm inequality in ability yet fail to provide equality in opportunity by restricting efforts to identify eligible students to those first deemed “worthy” of screening—a label often based on teacher referrals and stereotypical views that favor more advantaged children.

To restore and uphold our democratic values, Dahl calls for a moral judgment he terms “intrinsic equality”:

“We ought to regard the good of every human being as intrinsically equal to that of any other.” Employing the words of the Declaration, as a moral judgment we insist that one person’s life, liberty, and happiness is not intrinsically superior or inferior to the life, liberty, and happiness of any other. Consequently, we say, we ought to treat all persons as if they possess equal claims to life, liberty, happiness, and other fundamental goods and interests.

Intrinsic equality implies that every child—regardless of socioeconomic status, race, or ability—should be given an opportunity to be considered for gifted programs. But they aren’t. Research has shown that low-income, Hispanic, and African American students are often overlooked and referred for gifted screening at a lower rate than their high-income, Asian, and white peers.

To be sure, being a math whiz or spelling bee champion does not make that student superior to or more worthy of attention than any other student. But neither should children who struggle in math or spelling be the overwhelming focus of so many American schools. (Others argue that struggling students should receive more attention, but that’s a discussion for another time.)

Adequately educating all students means recognizing that each has unique abilities, needs, and interests, and that every child is equally deserving of attention. Yet the educational inequality that plagues the country’s gifted programming undermines our democracy by engendering exclusion. If the United States is to continue being a beacon of hope to so many young children and youth from diverse backgrounds, we must fix this—and gifted and talented programs are uniquely positioned to be an effective solution. They recognize intrinsic equality, provide equal opportunity to students, and strengthen our democratic values. As my colleague and report coauthor Adam Tyner has written, “All students deserve to be challenged.”

Christopher Yaluma is a Ph.D. candidate at the Ohio State University and a former research intern at the Thomas B. Fordham Institute.

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

1. Editors in Columbus this week opined – using Fordham as a prominent piece of evidence – in favor of strong and substantive graduation requirements. (Columbus Dispatch, 2/22/18)
    
2. The main thrust of this piece, looking at the recent meeting of Lorain’s Community Business Schools Partnership group, is that new turnaround programs in the troubled district will likely start small and grow slowly. But I can’t tell if that mindset exists because the public suggestions they are getting about the ideal process are so timid or because there is fear of a financial catastrophe coming up that could scuttle everything. Either way, though, kind of a downer. (Northern Ohio Morning Journal, 2/21/18) But it looks like a credible first step toward change might finally have been taken. But who knows? Five months is a long time and wasn’t he already out the door back in November? (Elyria Chronicle, 2/22/18)
    
3. It was announced this week that Kent State University would partner with Akron City Schools to create three new “college and career academies” within Firestone High School to help students move more seamlessly from high school to higher ed. These academies will cover areas such as visual and performing arts, interior design, fashion, film, aeronautics, visual and communications design, and architecture and environmental design. The best part of the plan as I see it: a summer camp component, with financial assistance, to increase awareness and understanding of what KSU has to offer and how Akron high schoolers can access it. Nice. (Cleveland Plain Dealer, 2/21/18)
    
4. I should have known it was too good to last. After a plethora of positive stories about Life Skills Centers – charter schools focused on helping non-traditional students gain academic skills and work credentials – in several Northeast Ohio cities the last several months, the tide has turned. Life Skills Center of Youngstown will close at the end of this school year after being non-renewed by its sponsor due to poor academic performance. What is most interesting is the response from Youngstown City Schools, directing Life Skills students to the district’s online program as perhaps a “better fit” than East High School or even Choffin Career Center. It’s almost like the district already knows the Life Skills students might have some experience of the district’s more “traditional” offerings (and vice versa).  But I could be wrong about that. (Youngstown Vindicator, 2/22/18)
    
5. We end the week with some much-needed good news from an unlikely source. Yahoo Entertainment News is reporting on a teacher at Dayton Leadership Academies (a charter school sponsored by Fordham, in case you didn’t know) who is a) reinforcing a family atmosphere in her classroom every day, b) always looking for new ways to engage her beloved students, and c) is a huge superhero movie nerd. After seeing the mega hit Black Panther movie on opening weekend, she greeted each and every one of her students with her version of T’Challa and Shuri’s Wakandan handshake…while wearing Black Panther’s mask! The video of her superheroic teachery nerdness has gone viral for every reason you can think of. Especially all the good reasons. Awesome teachers forever! (Yahoo Entertainment & Lifestyle, 2/22/18)

Back in October, the Gates Foundation announced a new strategy for their education efforts. Going forward, the organization plans to focus much of its attention—and monetary investment—on networks of schools that will develop locally-driven solutions to improve student achievement. The foundation already issued its first Request for Proposals, along with some guidance based on feedback from various organizations with prior experience improving postsecondary outcomes for students.

Although this grant opportunity is for school networks and not policymakers, there are still plenty of important lessons that lawmakers can learn from the guidance that Gates released to its applicants. And candidates up for election in November should also consider it as they finalize their education platforms.

Here’s a look at three key ideas:

Focus on equity

The Gates Foundation wants applicant responses to “demonstrate a clear commitment to equity.” This is of course important because every single child matters and deserves an excellent education.

For state lawmakers, supporting school choice is a great way to accomplish this. Education is often referred to as the great equalizer, but for millions of children in the United States equal educational opportunities are just a pipe dream. Because of their household incomes and neighborhoods, these students are trapped in persistently failing schools. Allowing families to choose where their children will be educated—and providing them with an array of high-quality options—could make this dream a reality.

Empowering choice isn’t a silver bullet, but it has helped millions of families. All across the country, there are charters serving minority and low-income students extraordinarily well. Some of these schools are helping pupils graduate from college at three to five times the national average. Others are leading the way in closing achievement gaps.

Charters aren’t the only form of school choice. But they are the most widespread, and they offer the clearest picture of what happens when everyone—not just those who are rich enough to pick their neighborhood—is empowered to choose.

Focus on student outcomes

Gates says that applicants should strive for outcomes that are “supported by research that is predictive of high school graduation and post-secondary success.” And it particularly emphasizes improvement for black, Latino, and low-income students.

In the past, policymakers have incentivized, tracked, and reported student outcomes with state accountability systems and school report cards. These systems are important and should be maintained and continuously improved, but they are limited to just a few years of student data. They miss the long-term picture: how students’ school experiences translate into real life outcomes.

The vast majority of states don’t effectively or efficiently link K–12 data with workforce and college completion data, and policymakers ought to change that. Not only would this better inform lawmakers, educators, and the general public, it would also promote more high-quality educational research. It’s important, though, that these data aren’t used as a high-stakes measure in accountability systems. Long-term outcomes are most useful as an informational tool—not an accountability measure that’s tied to consequences—and as such, they should be tracked and reported but not graded.

Focus on the school level

The Gates Foundation guidance also instructs applicants to identify “the root cause of the student outcome problem, based on data, evidence, and key stakeholder opinion.”

For policymakers, there are two key lessons here. First is the importance of stakeholder engagement. Teachers, administrators, parents, and students all have unique insight into what kinds of policies and practices would be best for their schools and communities. States should back these views with quality data and evidence, which they ought to gather and analyze quickly and efficiently.

Second, policymakers must recognize the limits of policy. That’s difficult, considering the nature of their work. But the sooner they recognize the limitations of their roles, the better. That means avoiding prescriptive, one-size-fits-all mandates and instead using policy to create the best possible conditions for student success—conditions in which schools are incentivized and empowered to succeed, even if it’s in different or unique ways.

***

Each of these focus areas bring something different to the table. Prioritizing outcomes at the expense of local empowerment will leave key stakeholders frustrated by their lack of influence and potentially unwilling to implement changes. But narrowly focusing on the school level in the absence of hard data on outcomes and equity gaps will limit reforms’ long-term effects. Candidates and current policymakers should therefore combine all of these ideas to create platforms that fulfill the needs and rights of every student.

In 2010, New Schools for New Orleans (of which I am the CEO), Louisiana’s Recovery School District (RSD), and Tennessee’s Achievement School District were awarded a nearly $30 million federal Investing in Innovation (i3) grant to transform low-performing schools.

Earlier this week, CREDO released their report evaluating the effectiveness of the grant and its impact on students in thirteen schools in New Orleans and eight schools in Tennessee. This evaluation is an important addition to the growing body of research into New Orleans’s educational resurgence: Tulane's Education Research Alliance, Stanford's Center for Education Policy Analysis, National Bureau of Economic Research, American Educational Research Association.

The primary aim of the i3 grant was to lift students out of low-performing schools and increase their opportunities to attend high-performing schools. While the report acknowledges that most turnaround schools did not meet their ambitious goal—going from the bottom 25 percent of performance to the top 33 percent of performance—it notes that the new schools performed better than those they replaced: “The CRM [Charter Restart Model] schools in both New Orleans and Tennessee showed significantly higher academic growth compared to the Closing schools they replaced.”

Students who did not attend the turnaround school also benefitted from the closure of the low-performing school. “Even students who were ineligible to attend a CRM school had an academic growth comparable to that of similar students in non-CRM schools, suggesting widespread positive consequences from the closure of the Closing schools, ” notes the report.

These findings are consistent with those from Tulane’s Education Research Alliance that showed school closure and turnarounds produced between 25 percent and 40 percent of New Orleans’ unprecedented academic growth.

Key takeaways

Harbormasters matter a lot

The researchers attribute the disappointing results in Tennessee in part to the absence of a harbormaster in Memphis or Nashville. I was the superintendent of the RSD throughout the evaluation period, and NSNO was an invaluable partner; as the report concludes, NSNO became a leading example for other harbormaster across the country. Now that I am CEO of NSNO, we look forward to working with Orleans Parish School Board in the same fashion in the years ahead.

School selection is critical

Potential turnaround operators that do not meet a high bar for selection, even when provided with significant additional support, rarely do as well as schools that meet the full criteria for leadership, continuous improvement, and school model from the outset.

Fresh starts have an advantage over full turnaround

On average, starting a school with a grade at a time results in better performance, on both qualitative and quantitative measures, than a full school turnaround.

Centralized equity initiatives are necessary

OneApp, New Orleans’s centralized enrollment program, provided families with access to a wider range of schools. The citywide special education initiative and a revamped school funding formula that provided more resources to schools serving students with the highest needs also strengthened the commitment of schools to serve all students.

Prioritize community engagement

The CREDO report notes the growing pains of our community engagement efforts. Early on, the school selection process was too often finalized without input from the community. We learned this lesson the hard way and developed an authentic, comprehensive approach to involve the school community in the school selection process.

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The i3 grant played an integral role in improving the performance of the school district. Over the period of the evaluation, ACT and state test scores improved, graduation rates increased, more students started to enroll in college, and we decreased the percent of students attending schools that perform near the bottom of the state.

Source: New Schools for New Orleans

Our aspiration reaches far beyond better than before, so we will use this evaluation and others to push forward so that every child in New Orleans attends a great school that puts them on a path to a high-quality life outcome.

Editor’s note: A version of this post was initially published on New Schools for New Orleans’s blog.

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

Over the past year, Ohio lawmakers have been mulling revisions to the state’s teacher evaluation policies. The leading proposal, put forth in similar provisions in Senate Bill 240 and Senate Bill 216, would replace the state’s current evaluation framework, known as the Ohio Teacher Evaluation System (OTES), with a framework sketched out by the Educator Standards Board (ESB).

If passed, the new evaluation system would continue to require annual teacher evaluations (with some exceptions); protocols calling for at least two thirty-minute observations; and ratings assigned along four categories. The major difference between OTES and the ESB recommendations is how they incorporate student performance data in teachers’ evaluations. Controversially, OTES prescribes certain weights that student growth measures must receive in the rating system. However, ESB proposes that “high quality data” be embedded as “sources of evidence” that evaluators can use to justify their ratings along various dimensions of Ohio’s performance rubric.[1] While an updated rubric has yet to be unveiled, it would likely follow a national pattern that is now weakening the use of student data in teacher ratings.  

Replacing OTES with the ESB approach may or may not end up being an improvement. But Ohio lawmakers shouldn’t be the ones to decide which framework to use, or other matters of teacher evaluation. Rather, they should follow the advice of an older but still relevant RAND Corporation paper that contains the timeless recommendation: “states should not impose highly prescriptive teacher evaluation requirements.”

Scrapping mandates would reverse a decade-long national effort to bolster teacher evaluations through various policy levers. These well-intentioned efforts aimed to solve several problems in evaluations, including perfunctory classroom observations and systems that deemed nearly all teachers as satisfactory. Unfortunately, these efforts have been largely in vain. Evaluation systems continue to deem almost all teachers as competent, and many evaluators continue to sleepwalk through the process. The only things that changed were the incredible amounts of time that administrators have been forced to spend meeting state requirements and the additional testing needed to generate data for evaluations. Hence the calls to change course once again.

Instead of searching for blanket solutions, a superior approach would simply restore the rights of school leaders to manage delicate and context-dependent matters of personnel policy. By removing evaluation mandates, legislators would shift a central management task to the district and school level—where it rightfully belongs. School leaders bear the responsibility for their schools’ performance; have direct supervision over staff; can best judge what approaches are feasible within their internal political environment; and understand their own schools’ time and resource constraints. Due to considerations such as these, Ohio lawmakers should allow school leaders to undertake, without regulatory interference, the hard but essential work of managing people.

To press this idea further, let’s return to the aforementioned RAND report and apply its insights to specific evaluation mandates: conformity to the ESB (or OTES) framework and annual teacher evaluations.

Evaluation framework: One of RAND’s key insights is that “the school district should decide the main purpose of its teacher evaluation system and then match the process to the purpose.” Behind this statement is the notion that evaluations serve multiple purposes. On the one hand, they aim to help teachers improve their practice through feedback. On the other hand, they also try to hold teachers accountable by informing high-stakes personnel decisions. Yet a singular framework won’t match the main purpose of evaluations as understood in various contexts. For instance, OTES tends to veer more into accountability territory with its use of hard data that can be used to defend decisions such as teacher retention or dismissal. This type of approach might be warranted when leaders oversee struggling schools or face reductions in force due to enrollment declines. But an accountability focus may not be needed in districts that see evaluations as a way to help teachers go from good to great. Flexible, feedback-oriented frameworks might be more appropriate in those contexts.

Evaluation frequency: An equally important conclusion from the RAND paper is that “top-level commitment to and resources for evaluation outweigh checklists and procedures.” The first part of this statement deals with the unmistakable need to commit to evaluations, lest they become mindless routines. But the other key idea is that schools need to devote resources—time especially—to conduct purposeful evaluations. Under state law, schools must evaluate all teachers on an annual basis, though exceptions are made based on teachers’ prior ratings.[2] In schools with twenty or thirty teachers, undertaking this many evaluations per year could yield superficial reviews as resources are stretched thin. To conduct rigorous evaluations within constraints, schools might need to consider strategies other than annual reviews. For instance, to allow time for deeper evaluations, some schools might want to review teachers on cycles—perhaps humanities instructors in even-numbered years and STEM in odd. Other schools might need a targeted approach in which struggling or inexperienced teachers are evaluated more frequently, maybe each quarter. Such reasonable strategies, however, are disallowed or discouraged when the norm is to evaluate all teachers annually.

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Delegating authority to school leaders on evaluations would raise concerns for some. Will evaluation practices worsen without regulations? Will it be more difficult to root out teachers who cannot demonstrate minimal competence? Both are possible, but there are ways to mitigate these risks.

1. State policymakers should continue to require school boards to conduct annual superintendent and principal evaluations. Formally holding these individuals responsible for implementing teacher evaluations, as delineated by local boards, would ensure they occur on a regular basis. A reasonable case could be made to require schools to evaluate non-tenured teachers on an annual basis, and require use of those results in tenure decisions. However, in principle, evaluating non-tenured teachers and conditions of continuing employment should be determined by local schools, with minimal state regulation.
2. Ohio lawmakers should maintain robust, transparent school report cards that put pressure on local leaders to produce solid academic outcomes and adopt practices, like purposeful evaluations, that can raise achievement. In cases where schools are chronically failing to perform, the state could then consider top-down requirements.
3. The legislature should consider restoring other management rights to school leaders, including the ability to remove low-performing teachers with less red tape. While this approach delves into challenging issues such as “just cause” statutes, bold legislators should work on removing structural barriers that make dismissal difficult or that discourages principals from even trying. Lawmakers could also prohibit evaluations from being subject to collective bargaining so that management is not tempted to compromise its right to review staff performance.
4. Ohio legislators should continue to promote healthy competition among schools. The discipline of the market often compels companies, under no legal coercion, to implement robust HR practices lest they lose customers or top-notch employees. Schools should likewise be incentivized to adopt strong personnel policies, including evaluation, that cultivate the talent needed to attract and serve families and students.
5. To build the capacity of schools committed to rigorous evaluation, legislators should appropriate funds to train independent evaluators, perhaps employed by regional ESCs. These individuals would have the expertise to make sound judgments about teacher performance and offer clear suggestions for improvement. Although some principals may be effective evaluators, others may not be for various reasons. Some might lack the subject-area expertise to evaluate certain teachers; others might withhold uncomfortable feedback to teachers they don’t want to offend; and still others might be overwhelmed by the sheer number of evaluations to complete. Policymakers would promote stronger on-the-ground practices by encouraging the use of independent experts who can assist principals in carrying out evaluations.

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On certain issues, state lawmakers need to insist on uniform rules and regulations. They include things like standard assessment and school accountability systems, uniform financial reporting, and health and safety rules that apply to all. But the legislature should embrace differences in the way that schools organize and manage themselves. Rather than imposing requirements onto all schools, they should allow local management to make decisions about personnel practices, including teacher evaluation.