Today, Fordham released a new report suggesting changes to Ohio’s school report cards to help parents and taxpayers get the best information about the performance of their schools and districts. This is the preface to that report.

Most of us can remember getting report cards as kids. Sometimes the grades would be a validation of a job well done; sometimes they were disappointing, considering all the effort we had made in class. Sometimes—let’s admit it—the grades were low but also fair, given the quality of our work or the lack of effort we had put into it.

Regardless of how we felt at the time, most of us recognize that report cards played an important, if not always pleasant, role in our education. We needed the feedback that they generated in order to know our strengths and weaknesses, and they were important to parents and guardians who could offer help when our grades signaled that greater support was needed.

Likewise, the educational health of our schools hinges in no small part on periodic reviews of how they’re doing. Over the past two decades, states have developed annual report cards intended to offer an objective view of the performance of individual schools and districts. What’s on those report cards is used by families making decisions about which schools to choose for their daughters and sons, by taxpayers seeking evidence that their dollars are being well spent, and by decision-makers tasked with holding schools accountable for student learning and—most importantly—helping them improve when necessary.

In some respects, Ohio’s report cards do a good job informing the public about school quality. Most notably, the user-friendly A-F grading system offers a clear view of performance that’s a long way from yesterday’s bureaucratic jargon (one recalls with chagrin the state’s old “continuous improvement” rating for many schools). For the most part, the grades are properly grounded in hard data taken from state assessments or college entrance exams. Several of the metrics rightfully encourage schools to pay attention to the achievement of all students, rather than focusing solely on children who haven’t yet cleared the “proficient” bar. Especially praiseworthy are the Performance Index—a weighted measure that awards additional credit for high achievers—and value added scores that account for the growth of individual pupils.

Yet Ohio still has ample room for improvement. For starters, Buckeye school report cards have gotten unwieldy in size, containing more than a dozen letter grades with a dizzying array of calculations used to generate these ratings. A second and somewhat related issue is that report cards rely too heavily on “status” measures—e.g., pupil proficiency or graduation rates—that largely correlate with demographics and prior achievement. As a result, Ohio unfairly downgrades high-poverty schools due in part to factors outside of their control. This violates what Douglas Harris, a Tulane University researcher, calls the “cardinal rule of accountability”: holding schools to account for that which they can do something about.

This paper offers suggestions to improve Ohio’s school report cards. Most of them would require legislative action—much of the report card framework is a matter of statute—while others could be handled by the State Board of Education or Ohio Department of Education (ODE). If these proposals were implemented, Ohio would move towards a simpler, fairer, and more balanced approach to grading districts and schools.

Why are we offering these proposals now? Didn’t ODE just submit the state’s Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) plan—including policies related to report cards—to the U.S. Department of Education? It’s true that ODE recently did this to comply with the federal law. But ESSA’s overarching intent is to devolve authority over education policy back to the states. As Senator Lamar Alexander—one of the chief architects of the law—declared, “The national school board era has come to an end.” State policymakers now have the ability to create report cards that make sense to Ohioans, including the flexibility to make changes to them when necessary. In addition, though ODE’s ESSA planning process engaged many stakeholders, this wasn’t the appropriate forum to make substantive revisions to school report cards. That’s primarily the job of lawmakers, as the accountability framework behind the report card is primarily a matter of state law. If elected officials decide to make changes (within, of course, the basic parameters of ESSA), ODE can submit the requisite paperwork to Washington to amend the state plan.

After report cards were released this fall, media coverage suggested that several state legislators, including the Senate and House education committee chairs, would be open to reexamining this issue. That’s good news. We agree that improvements are needed, yet they also need to be made thoughtfully. With these suggested changes, a much improved report card can become a reality.

We encourage you to download the full report.

A recent study from the Education Research Alliance at Tulane University uses thirteen years of student-level data from Louisiana to examine differences in suspension rates for black and white students, as well as poor and non-poor students. Overall, it finds that black students are about twice as likely as white students to be suspended and low-income students are about 1.75 times as likely to be suspended as non-low-income students. However, as with previous studies of this topic, it is difficult to know whether (or to what extent) these gaps reflect educator bias, as opposed to differences in behavior or school culture.

According to the authors, suspensions for black students in Louisiana last an average of 0.40 days longer than suspensions for white students who commit the same type of infraction. This difference could be interpreted as evidence of bias (or at least systemic inequity). However, when comparisons are restricted to students in the same school, grade, and year, the difference between black and white students is just 0.10 days. So, at the very least, the first estimate overstates the bias exhibited by individual educators.

Further complicating matters, since suspensions for low-income students are 0.18 days longer than suspensions for their high-income peers, even treating these smaller within-school differences as evidence of bias implies that educators harbor a particular animus against the poor (which seems strange, since poverty is less visible than race). Then again, unlike other studies (which have typically found that differences between schools account for most socioeconomic and racial disparities), this one finds that “within-school differences account for at least 50 percent of the black/white and poor/non-poor gap in kindergarten and grades 5 through 12.” It’s not clear what explains this difference. But assuming it’s real, the implication is that discipline gaps are (at the very least) more “visible” to students and teachers in Louisiana than in other places.

Uncomfortable yet? Well buckle up because we’re just getting started.

So far, most of what I’ve written about this study could probably have been written about any number of discipline studies over the years. Consequently, in an effort to advance the conversation, the authors go on to examine fights between one black student and one white student, which in their view represent “a very particular setting” where disciplinary “disparities most likely would reflect discriminatory school discipline practices” (emphasis added). As the authors acknowledge, even this assumption is contestable. After all, it’s possible that black and white students behaved differently in these fights—and thus warranted different punishments. (Which kid started it, for example?) But, for the sake of argument, let’s assume that the authors have succeeded in putting a lower bound on the racial bias of Louisiana educators.

After controlling for student demographics, the school the students in question attend, and the number of prior fights each was involved in during the year in question (to address the possibility that students who are involved in multiple fights are disciplined differently), the authors estimate that black students receive suspensions that are an average of 0.05 days (or just 1.6 percent) longer than those handed out to the white students. In other words, they receive one additional day of suspension for every twenty interracial fights.

Frankly, if that number accurately quantifies the amount of racial bias in Louisiana, then we should all start talking about something else (like our criminal justice system). After all, only a quarter of black students in Louisiana are suspended in a given year, and less than a third of these suspensions are for violent offenses, so the “average” black student in the state is probably suspended for about one violent offense per lifetime. In other words, if we assume that the bias detected in interracial fights applies to violent offenses in general, then by the end of grade twelve the average black student in Louisiana is suspended for about 0.05 days longer than she should be on account of violent offenses.

Is a student who gets in one fight going to miss out on college because she is suspended for an additional twenty-five minutes? Will the life outcomes of a student who gets in twenty fights be significantly altered by one additional day of missed classes? And what about the life outcomes of his classmates?

Of course, it’s possible that this estimate really is a “lower bound” that understates the racial bias of Louisiana educators. But even if that’s the case, how is the “true” extent of that bias to be disentangled from the other factors that determine suspension rates? And, more to the point, what is the appropriate remedy—other than a less racist society?

SOURCE: Nathan Barrett, Andrew McEachin, Jonathan N. Mills, and Jon Valant, “What are the Sources of School Discipline Disparities by Student Race and Family Income?,” Education Research Alliance at Tulane University (November 2017).

A new recent study conducted by David Blazer of the University of Maryland examines whether teachers affect student outcomes other than test scores, including students’ self-reported behavior and happiness in class and self-efficacy in math. The study collects data from fourth and fifth grade teachers in four anonymous school districts in three states on the East Coast across three school years (2010–11 to 2012–13).

The analysis focuses on a subset of forty-one teachers who were part of a random assignment study in year three and a group of students (and their teachers) who completed a survey about their attitudes and behaviors during all three years. Analysts had access to student demographic and achievement data, teacher value-added data, and student survey data on three constructs, behavior in class (e.g., “My behavior in this class sometimes annoys the teacher”), self-efficacy in math (e.g., “In this class, math is too hard”), and happiness in class (e.g., “I enjoy math class this year”). Regarding the causal nature of the study, in the spring of 2012, fourth and fifth grade teachers were randomly assigned to class rosters of the same grade level; participants were generalists who taught all subject areas such that their contribution to student outcomes would not be confounded with the effect of another teacher.

The findings can be boiled down to two key results. First, teachers substantially affected all three self-reported measures of student attitudes and behaviors. The largest of these effects was on students’ happiness in class, for which a 1.00 standard deviation (SD) increase in teacher effectiveness led to a roughly 0.30 SD increase in that outcome. Further, the magnitude of teacher effects on behavior in class and self-efficacy in math was generally larger than teacher effects on students’ math performance but, again, smaller than teachers’ effect on student happiness.

Second, in a different model, there’s a small but negative relationship between teacher effects on students’ math performance and teacher effects on happiness in class. Blazar suggests that “teachers who are skilled at boosting math achievement may do so in ways that make students less happy or less engaged in class.” That’s not terribly surprising considering we’ve all taken a class that taught us a lot but wasn’t the most exciting or enjoyable learning experience in the world (Mr. Vanorden’s tenth grade Geometry class comes to mind).

The study ends with a warning that student survey data on non-cognitive outcomes like these are not appropriate for official accountability systems but can certainly inform areas where teachers might need additional training or professional development. In the end, the report contributes to our knowledge of how to gather and make sense of richer measures of student outcomes like attitudes, behaviors, and engagement, in addition to test scores. It seems like the entire field is echoing the need for such measures—and thankfully we’re making some headway.

SOURCE: David Blazar, “Validating Teacher Effects on Students' Attitudes and Behaviors: Evidence From Random Assignment of Teachers to Students,” Education Finance and Policy (October 2017).

The annual “parent power index” published by the Center for Education Reform raises worthy questions—how much power is afforded to parents, and what can they do to acquire more? Despite its various flaws, the index attempts to quantify the extent to which options and information are available to parents so they can make good decisions for their child’s education—a useful lens unto itself.

A plethora of other groups evaluate how well states are doing on education—doling out grades on the strength of charter laws or a bevy of other education policies like funding, test scores, or teacher quality. Even if we disagree with how some scorecards are calculated or the mischaracterizations that can flow from them, such grades can be informative. They provide a look at how states compare to their peers and how policy or legislative improvements can set the right conditions for success though of course not guaranteeing it. (As we know from a long journey to charter reform in Ohio, those conditions matter a lot.)

Yet even achieving wins in policy areas I think matter most for kids—like teacher quality or school choice—offers no guarantee that such reforms will stay in place or have a fast enough effect on the children who are languishing now. What programs, resources, or supports promise to enhance parent power in an immediate way? Below are some ideas worth bringing to Ohio: some are larger scale than others; some are tried and true; some are merely personal observations about supports that seem to be missing for many families.

Grassroots parent organizations. Intermediary organizations that help parents know how to navigate and engage with the school systems and powers can take on many forms: some are focused on community organizing and winning political campaigns; some operate with the primary purpose of helping parents select between a variety of school options; some even provide wraparound supports for families, helping with educational decisions or employment opportunities. All of them engage directly with parents on the ground to mobilize toward improving schools and the day-to-day lives of families.

Better transportation. It’s one thing to have a wide range of school options, but quite another to manage the logistical realities of getting children to and from school. In many communities, long bus rides for youngsters remain a serious challenge. Some school options require parents to transport children themselves. Ideally, no family would be denied options that are reasonably close to their residence for the sole reason that they lack transportation.

Knowledge. Enhancing parent power also means closing information gaps. Every family should know about Khan Academy, top educational software programs, or apps (Bedtime Math is my own personal favorite) and the brilliant grade-by-grade guides from E.D. Hirsch on what kids need to know (or his curricular sequences available for download). These supplemental supports aren’t limited to the virtual realm, either. Every family should be aware of educational programming, free resources, or mentoring offered through their area libraries, community centers, or universities.

Easy-to-read school/district report cards and access to meaningful data. Every parent should be able to find information on the performance of their child’s school and/or district with ease. Unsurprisingly, report card information remains difficult to find, and descriptions of the data are often complex and hard to understand.

Tools to know precisely how a child is performing. Beyond being clued in about school-level grades, parents need access to student-level information about their child. How is she scoring on state exams? In which standards is she lacking? Where is she excelling? Periodic progress reports are insufficient if the goal is to equip parents to intervene or supplement in order to meet individual student needs.

Solid understanding of lottery or admissions procedures. Even well-resourced parents can find school enrollment hard to navigate. Some cities have developed common admissions systems in an effort to streamline the enrollment process—and remove barriers for low-income parents especially. Timelines, deadlines, requirements, etc. should be available, and parents should be allowed to tour schools and see teaching in action before choosing their school.

Access to… all of the small things that add up. I’m going to use this last category as a catch-all for the various supports and opportunities I wish all parents had that might empower them to be fully involved and engaged in their child’s schooling:

• access to high-quality preschool and early learning opportunities;
• resources necessary to help close their own educational and skill gaps;
• consistent access to school principals, teachers, and decision makers who are fully engaged partners with families;
• access to extra-curricular opportunities, tutoring, music/art/dance lessons, sports, and/or community service opportunities;
• high-quality afterschool care;
• ability to tap into well-loved public resources, like libraries, science centers, museums, and public parks;
• having a job that enables parental involvement in their kids’ education;
• supplemental services for speech, counseling, or any physical or behavioral needs that impede learning.

*****

Maximizing parent power requires that we go beyond state-level legislative reform. Sound policy can set the conditions for success, and some legislative ideas—like education savings accounts—can take it a step further to more immediately empower parents. But much more attention needs to be paid to gaps in information and opportunity, resource disparities, and the fact that current educational delivery systems are simply not working well for a lot of families. Too often, that’s based on income. Yet even well-resourced families may struggle to make sense of public information on the quality of schooling or to access schools and programs that suit their child.

Readers, what else would you like to see on this list to increase parent power?

1. I don’t usually clip blog posts, but the Ohio-centric nature of this piece from Citizen Ed was too much to resist. It describes a panel event called “The Faces of Education Reform,” held at the recent Excellence in Education annual conference. Two of those faces belonged to Ohioans—Kelley Williams-Bolar, who was prosecuted (and persecuted, it seems) for residency fraud in Akron, and Walter Blanks, a current college student who credits the EdChoice Scholarship Program for getting him where he (impressively) is today. (Citizen Ed blog, 12/5/17)
    
2. Seasoned veteran reporter Cathy Candisky from The D seems to have been present for some reason when a lawyer from the Ohio Department of Education reported to a hearing officer some of its recent attendance audit findings for ECOT. Or maybe she just read the notes. Anywho, some questions are raised. (Columbus Dispatch, 12/5/17) Meanwhile, a cub reporter for The D drew the short straw and had to attend ECOT’s board meeting yesterday, in which it was revealed that water is wet. By which I mean, ODE’s clawback of previous funding due to prior attendance audit findings is affecting the school’s bottom line. As promised. (Columbus Dispatch, 12/5/17)
    
3. Columbus Schools supe Dan Good is heading into retirement, but it seems he wants to go out swinging. Case in point, his report at last night’s board meeting which blasted city council and the Columbus community at large for, it appears, abandoning the district and “unfairly saddling” it with “total responsibility” for kids. He sounded pretty scathing to me when he said that community partners’ promises of in-school assistance are often not kept and that out-of-school problems create traumatic situations that, he seems to indicate, can undo the work of district staff. (Columbus Dispatch, 12/5/17)
    
4. Totally unrelated to the above, the number of security cameras in Kettering’s middle schools is scheduled to go up by more than 800 percent soon. Um… yay? (WHIO-TV, Dayton, 12/5/17)
    
5. Changes in federal school lunch requirements are in the works and the comment period is open at regulations.gov. The PD, intrigued by comments posted by a fourth grade class in Willard, Ohio, took a look. (Cleveland Plain Dealer, 12/6/17)

Over the past thirty years, the school discipline pendulum has swung wildly from one extreme to the other, as policymakers have struggled to solve an inherently difficult problem. Today, the “zero tolerance” policies that were all the rage at the end of the last century are generally viewed as heavy-handed and blunt, removing administrator discretion and treating many different kinds of offenses as equally injurious. Yet as the tide of elite—and education reform—opinion has turned against over-suspension, the instinctive response of policymakers has once again been to tie the hands of teachers, principals, and local officials, this time with the explicit goal of reducing the use of suspensions, especially for traditionally disadvantaged groups.

Overall, we agree that suspensions are unlikely to benefit suspended students. But an important question about school discipline is also whether the push to reduce the number of suspensions is harmful to the rule-abiding majority. According to a 2004 study, 85 percent of teachers and 73 percent of parents felt the “school experience of most students suffers at the expense of a few chronic offenders.” And that was before the push to reduce suspensions. A more recent study by the Manhattan Institute’s Max Eden showed that the percentages of students and teachers in New York City reporting drug use, gang activity, and physical fights rose dramatically in the years following discipline reforms initiated by Mayor Bill de Blasio, which require that principals obtain written approval from the city before suspending a student for “uncooperative/noncompliant” or “disorderly” behavior.

To examine these matters further, we enlisted Matthew Steinberg, assistant professor of education at the University of Pennsylvania, and Johanna Lacoe, an experienced researcher at Mathematica, to conduct Fordham’s new study, The Academic and Behavioral Consequences of Discipline Policy Reform: Evidence from Philadelphia. In it, they examine outcomes in the School District of Philadelphia (SDP), which changed its code of conduct in the 2012–2013 school year to ban out-of-school suspensions (OSS) for low-level “conduct” offenses—such as profanity or failure to follow classroom rules—and reduce the length of OSS for more serious infractions.

Below is a summary of what they found:

1. Changes in district policy had no long-term impact on the number of low-level “conduct” suspensions, and most schools did not comply with the ban on such suspensions.
2. Changes in district policy were associated with improved attendance—but not improved achievement—for previously suspended students.
3. “Never-suspended” peers (i.e., students who didn’t receive a suspension in any of the years considered by the study) experienced worse outcomes in the most economically and academically disadvantaged schools, which were also the schools that did not (or could not) comply with the ban on conduct suspensions.
4. Revising the district’s code of conduct was associated with an increase in racial disproportionality at the district level.

Based on these findings, we draw three conclusions:

First, schools may respond very differently to district mandates, depending on their demographics, achievement levels, and prior suspension rates, as well as other factors bearing on policy implementation and compliance. In Philadelphia, the “toughest” schools tended to ignore the district’s ban on conduct suspensions, while the highest-achieving schools appeared unaffected—because they didn’t have any conduct suspensions to begin with. Finally, the schools in the middle stayed lukewarm, meaning they reduced their suspensions but (in most cases) didn’t eliminate them entirely. In other words, schools responded (or didn’t) much as you might expect them to, given their pre-existing challenges.

Second, top-down mandates can have unintended consequences—even when they emanate from local decision makers rather than distant state or federal governments. In Philadelphia, never-suspended students in many schools, including most schools that reduced their suspension rates, experienced a decline in academic performance relative to the most plausible comparison group. And the district-wide decline in conduct suspensions coincided with a suspicious increase in the number of minority students suspended for more serious infractions (though it is impossible to know if less serious offenses were reclassified as a result of the policy change). Clearly, these are not the responses that district leaders intended.

Third, policymakers should respect the wisdom of practitioners when it comes to school discipline. For us, the biggest lesson from Philadelphia’s experience is that “discipline reform”—however defined or conceptualized—is best initiated at the school level rather than the district level, where the law of unintended consequences is more apt to prevail. Suspensions may have costs for suspended students, but these must be balanced against the necessity of maintaining an orderly learning environment. And the individuals best positioned to make those judgment calls, and to gauge how effective future approaches to discipline may be, are those on the front lines. Teachers and administrators who are struggling to manage disorder cannot be expected to comply willingly or well with a directive that eliminates one of their most important tools.

Overall, the report’s findings speak to the stubborn realities that educators must contend with, which brings us to our final point: a plea for the removal of the rose-colored glasses that so many observers and critics seem to don when viewing school discipline. Everyone knows that changing a district’s policy on suspensions is unlikely to address the underlying issues in tough schools—or peaceful ones. So viewing this as a civil rights issue and trying to fix it with top-down decrees is impractical and potentially harmful, whether those decrees emanate from the district, the state, or the banks of the Potomac. If the goal is finding more effective ways to build a safe and strong school culture, it is far better to work with staff in high-poverty schools than to imply that they have racist tendencies and may be deliberately violating students' civil rights.

We harbor no illusions that this study will put an end to the discipline debate. But we hope it will inject a measure of nuance into the conversation—and perhaps help the discipline policy pendulum to find a more stable resting place somewhere in the vast and sensible middle ground. 

One important question about school discipline is whether it helps or harms those being disciplined. But a second, equally important question is whether a push to reduce the number of suspensions is harmful to the rule-abiding majority.

Fordham’s newest study, The Academic and Behavioral Consequences of Discipline Policy Reform: Evidence from Philadelphia, examines outcomes in the School District of Philadelphia (SDP), which made dramatic changes to its code of conduct during the 2012–13 school year. Specifically, it instituted a new ban on out-of-school suspensions (OSS) for low-level “conduct” offenses—such as profanity or failure to follow classroom rules—and reduced the length of OSS for more serious infractions. To gauge the impacts of these changes, Matthew Steinberg (University of Pennsylvania) and Johanna Lacoe (Mathematica) examined data before and after they were implemented, and penned two scholarly papers: one that focuses on the district-level effects of the change in discipline policy, and a second that explores patterns of attendance and achievement at the school, grade, and individual levels.

Here we combine those papers and synthesize their key findings for a lay audience, which include:

• Changes in district policy had no long-term impact on the number of low-level “conduct” suspensions, and most schools did not comply with the ban on such suspensions.
• Changes in district policy were associated with improved attendance—but not improved achievement—for previously suspended students.
• “Never-suspended” peers (i.e., students who didn’t receive a suspension in any of the years considered by the study) experienced worse outcomes in the most economically and academically disadvantaged schools, which were also the schools that did not (or could not) comply with the ban on conduct suspensions.
• Revising the district’s code of conduct was associated with an increase in racial disproportionality at the district level, in part because schools with higher proportions of minority children were less likely to follow the new mandates.

Based on these findings, we draw three conclusions:

1. Schools may respond very differently to district mandates, depending on their demographics, achievement levels, and prior suspension rates, as well as other factors bearing on policy implementation and compliance.
2. Top-down mandates can have unintended consequences—even when they emanate from local decision makers rather than distant state or federal governments.
3. Policymakers should respect the wisdom of practitioners when it comes to school discipline.

Simply changing a district’s policy on suspensions is unlikely to alter the underlying issues in tough schools. So trying to fix them with top-down decrees is impractical and potentially harmful, whether those decrees emanate from the district, the state, or the banks of the Potomac. If the goal is finding more effective ways to build a safe and strong school culture, it is far better to work with and support staff in high-poverty schools than to tie their hands with mandates that often work against them.