The Education Gadfly Weekly

At its November meeting, the State Board of Education reopened the debate over Ohio’s graduation standards. To facilitate this discussion, the Ohio Department of Education unveiled a concept paper that set forth various options. Among them was a route to graduation that would permit students to receive diplomas under alternative criteria such as satisfactory GPAs, attendance rates, capstone projects, internship or work hours, and several other possibilities. Dubbed the “alternative knowledge demonstration pathway,” this proposal would extend such options to the class of 2019 and beyond.

This may sound familiar. Rewind to earlier this year and recall that state policymakers approved alternatives such as these in lieu of meeting achievement targets on end of course exams (EOCs) or the ACT/SAT, or earning industry-recognized credentials and demonstrating workforce readiness[1]—the three “original” pathways under Ohio’s updated graduation standards. Such alternatives were extended only to the class of 2018, the first cohort expected to meet the new requirements.

As state board members ponder once again the direction to take on graduation requirements for succeeding classes, they should keep the following points in mind.

1. Remember the board’s own vision statement declaring the aim that “all Ohio students will graduate well prepared for success.”
   

   
   The original three graduation pathways—the two exam-based options and the industry credentials pathway—adhered to this vision by challenging students to demonstrate readiness in clear ways. Specifically, the EOC and ACT/SAT achievement targets are set in ways that signal to institutions of higher education that graduates are ready to embark on advanced coursework or technical certification programs. Meanwhile, the credentialing pathway (more on this below) is designed so that students seeking to enter the workforce will be primed to advance quickly in their careers.

   The proposed alternative options unfortunately fail to impart much confidence that students following those paths will be ready for life after high school. Does completion of a single capstone project—of who knows what quality—mean young people are ready for the rigors of post-secondary education? Or the armed services? Or a technical career in advanced manufacturing or healthcare? Maybe or maybe not. More likely, however, is that these alternatives will be used as last-ditch efforts to shuffle students out of the K-12 system and into adulthood—not exactly following the board’s vision of readiness for all students. In fact, if the board pursues yet again the “alternative knowledge” approach, it should revise its vision statement to read more honestly:

   The State Board of Education’s vision is for all Ohio students to graduate from the PK-12 education system with the knowledge, skills and behaviors necessary to successfully continue their education and/or be workforce ready and successfully participate in the global economy as productive citizens. Ultimately, all students will graduate well prepared for success.

2. The alternatives options are open to gaming and manipulation.
   
   

   Schools may be tempted to game the options in ways that don’t benefit students. This could take various forms, including artificially inflating—even retroactively changing—course grades to ensure that students meet the GPA threshold; approving a capstone project of dubious quality (Does standing on your head count? Making 100 sandwiches for the homeless?); or fudging data on school attendance or the number of hours in an internship/work experience. Ideally, state policies would incentivize schools to do right by all of their students—encouraging them to help youngsters reach higher achievement levels and/or gain competencies necessary for employment. Instead, the alternatives will pressure educators to excuse and then promote students who have not yet met academic or career-ready standards—a shameful practice that one teacher recently called unethical.

3. The exam-based pathways require students to demonstrate knowledge and skills in core academic subjects.
   
   Despite all the grumbling over state exams, it must be emphasized that Ohio’s high school EOCs assess students’ knowledge and skills in key content areas—math, English, science, and U.S. history and government. It should be non-negotiable that Ohio students exit high school able to read, write, and do math, while also possessing a basic knowledge of science and the history of this nation and its government. Yet the alternative graduation options suggest that competency in these subjects is replaceable by things like capstone projects or internships and part-time jobs. Unfortunately, completing work experience is no substitute for literacy; rather it should be seen as a complement that builds on pupils’ core academic abilities.
    
4. Don’t discount the industry credentials pathway.
   
   

   The board may justify alternative graduation standards on the grounds that some students struggle to meet the exam-based pathways (EOCs or ACT/SAT). That’s a reasonable concern. But the solution isn’t to create eleventh-hour graduation workarounds. Policymakers would serve students better by emphasizing the rigorous credentialing pathway as a legitimate way to earn a high school diploma and ready themselves for the workforce and/or higher education. Pupils pursuing this pathway also stand to benefit: As a Fordham study reveals, CTE students are more likely to graduate high school and generate higher wages as young adults when compared to their closely matched peers. 

   How does this pathway work? It asks young people to earn a passing score on the WorkKeys assessment and to attain twelve points in the industry-credentials system. Designed by ACT, WorkKeys gauges students’ workplace readiness in math and literacy; under the credentials requirements, students earn certifications in various competencies (e.g., six sigma or safety practices in oil and gas extraction). Importantly, students must accumulate certificates in a particular career field such as manufacturing, healthcare, or agriculture to meet this requirement. This encourages CTE students to gain expertise in a chosen career field instead of aimlessly seeking certificates across various fields.

   State leaders should also be encouraging educators to have frank conversations—as early as ninth or tenth grade—with students and parents about post-secondary goals and how they can meet them. Struggling students may indeed resolve to pursue EOC or ACT/SAT pathways, or perhaps they’ll see credentials as a more viable option (or pursue both concurrently). To be certain, this shouldn’t lead to “tracking” of young people into the substandard vocational programs or suggest that pursuing credentials closes doors to higher education. To address concerns such as these, the board should keep a close eye on the rigor of the industry-recognized credentials system (which they are charged with overseeing). State leaders and educators can also communicate to students and parents that choosing the credentialing route does not rule out college matriculation—something most young people aspire toward—either directly after high school or later in life. 

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Earlier this year, the State Board of Education undermined rigorous graduation standards by pushing for questionable alternatives that lawmakers later ratified. In the coming months, that same board (and the legislators who may again follow its lead) has a chance to redeem itself by rebuffing proposals to enact low-level alternatives for future graduating classes on a more permanent basis. The board’s stated vision is to ensure students leave ready for success after high school, whether college or career; this time around, it shouldn’t flinch.

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.

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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?

The gap in vocabulary for children growing up in poor households compared to their higher-income peers is well documented in research, especially for the youngest students just entering school. But shouldn’t the start of formal education begin to mitigate that gap? Research has shown that, unfortunately, initial gaps tend to persist, leading to a steep uphill climb by the time students are “reading to learn” in fourth grade and up. A group of researchers from the University of Texas at Dallas and San Diego State University recently studied whether the pernicious effects of socioeconomic status (SES) might negatively affect not only base vocabulary size but also the typical processes of word learning, which would serve to increase a child’s vocabulary going forward.

They recruited a group of 68 students ages 8 to 15 to take part in an experiment that required participants to use the surrounding text to identify the meaning of an unknown word. Each exercise included three sentences, all with a made-up word at the end. For example: “Pour some water in my raub.” This was the last of a three-sentence triplet designed to lead a reader to that “raub” means “cup.” All of the words comprising the context were high-frequency words typically acquired by age 8, but half of the triplet sequences were geared to give less obvious build up to the correct answer. The goal was to identify whether vocabulary, reading skills (both decoding and reading comprehension), working memory, and/or SES status correlated with success in identifying the unknown words. Through this experiment, researchers found that SES was negatively related to success in this task. Poor students did significantly worse than did their higher-SES peers. Reading skills and working memory were not found to be related to success. Some caveats related to this study include its small n-size and a high proportion of bilingual participants with varying levels of exposure to English.

This study provides support for the so-called Matthew Effect, which posits that students who enter school with a large vocabulary have an ongoing advantage over students who do not. The usual response to this is call for expanded pre-K and richer content in the earlier grades, but the students being studied here are well past that age. Luckily for them, there is plenty of research showing successful vocabulary-building interventions for middle schoolers who arrived with deficits. This study includes no data on the educational history and experience of any of the participants. Any extensions of this research should take into account the amount and quality of the education children have received because good schools matter, especially for students growing up in poverty.

SOURCE: Mandy J. Maguire, et. al., “Vocabulary knowledge mediates the link between socioeconomic status and word learning in grade school,” Journal of Experimental Child Psychology (February 2018).

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.

In a recent blog post, University of Virginia cognitive scientist Dan Willingham posits three possible types of personalization in personalized learning—children learning at their own speed, pedagogical tailoring, and individualized content. I have sought out all of these variations for my children over the years and, as Willingham notes, they are not mutually exclusive. But neither are they equally important. Let me make the case, as a father of two high school girls, that personalized pacing is a must-have, personalized pedagogy is a nice-to-have, and personalized content is largely to be avoided, at least until the end of the K-12 experience.

Personalized pacing and pedagogy

My children’s experience at The Metro School, a 6-12 STEM-focused early college school in Columbus, shows that students learning at their own speed is the prime mover of successful personalized learning (PL).

Metro’s model generally compresses what would be year-long courses in traditional schools into one semester. Course material is divided into discrete units and subunits, with each having clear goals for students and teachers and clearly connecting to the next. It moves fast, the expectations are high[1], and there is little downtime. Students’ progress is assessed regularly along the way, usually by teacher-created tests, giving teachers clear feedback about the challenges students are experiencing. Difficult-to-grasp concepts can be reinforced somewhat in future lessons, but Metro students are generally required to remediate their previous work while continuing with new material. More on this in a moment.

Willingham and others suggest that such a model sounds messy for teacher and student, but it is here that pedagogical tailoring comes in. Approaches to remediation must be varied: student-driven efforts to find and correct errors (test corrections, report revision, etc.), the same material taught in a different way by another teacher or a tutor, watching a Khan Academy video and doing sample problems, etc. Remediation can take place as homework, in a study hall, or after school in office hours. Whatever works to make the material understandable to students must be available. At Metro, pedagogical tailoring is not a distinct version of PL but just another tool in the same box.

Even with pedagogically tailored remediation baked in, however, fast-paced PL won’t work perfectly for every student in every subject, as my children can attest. But that is not a reason to reject the approach. Consider: The students who pass an accelerated class at the end of the semester move on (to another class, another teacher)[2], leaving, say, the sixth grade math teacher with only those students who still need help. By stating clearly what students must know and be able to do to succeed in the next math course and by employing ongoing assessment and remediation during the regular course to determine specific proficiency gaps, the teacher can concentrate her post-course remediation where it is needed. A rigorous, focused “recovery week” should be enough to boost most students’ skills up where they need to be. And even if a student is so far from proficiency that he would benefit from repeating the entire course, it’s still only one additional semester—ultimately the same amount of seat time as in a traditional sixth grade math class. The clear goals and unit/subunit breakdown allow teacher, student, administrator, and parent to know exactly where the child needs to concentrate her efforts in order to become proficient.

Contrast this approach with most traditional schools in which a student earns a “D” at the end of a full year of sixth grade math. If such a school would dare to hold him back, he would repeat the entire course again over another year. Perhaps there would be additional tutoring, perhaps not. If he takes the course again and finishes with a “C,” he has improved, but he has taken two years to do so and he still may not have proficiency enough to be successful in the next math course for which he is already “late.”

Of course, this doesn’t just apply to math at Metro. It also works for English, social studies, and science, too. Assessing and addressing students’ proficiency gaps from beginning to end of every course and having remediation time and methods immediately available provide the needed backstop to keep students moving forward even at high speed and even if they have incomplete mastery along the way.

As you can imagine, there is a lot of prep work involved in building a PL education model. All teachers in a department must be on the same page as to what their incoming students must know and be able to do to succeed in their courses; assessments must accurately define the required level of proficiency all along the continuum; and administrators must make sure that remediation practices are thorough and rigorous while causing the least interference with overall forward progress. But once that infrastructure is in place, PL looks pretty much like regular teaching and learning. Students and parents must understand the acceleration and remediation processes, but the basic pedagogy is wholly recognizable. The various lessons and approaches need not be invented anew every year. New teachers will need to get up to speed and additional approaches can always be workshopped and added to the rotation, but if you've got three or four reliable ways to teach sixth grade math or freshman biology concepts, that's probably all you'll ever need.

Personalized content: Proceed with caution

As for the “individualized content” concept, in my experience, its usefulness is far more limited than the others. My daughters attended a Montessori school from age three through the end of first grade. Montessori education is a tried and tested version of the individualized content concept. Children are free to choose their activities from the classroom materials and those activities are often multi-disciplinary. It allows students to spend a lot of time on subjects and activities of interest (making calendars was a huge favorite for both of my girls) but it also allows for procrastination and outright avoidance of topics of lesser interest, as Willingham and others fear. That’s where my family hit the wall with Montessori education—math avoidance. For me and my wife, that was a no-go: We were okay with our kids picking whatever they wanted from the buffet, but they still needed to eat their vegetables, too. When preschool was over and the stakes got higher, we left for a more traditional private school where math was never optional.

Interestingly, as our daughters are currently finishing up their high school requirements early (thanks to the acceleration described above), the opportunity to reintroduce individualized content has arisen: higher level elective classes, college credit-bearing classes, student-interest driven research, community service projects, student-led theatrical productions. Self-tailored and largely self-directed work, with an advisor to oversee inputs and outputs, this content is less traditional and more an exploration of future paths they could take in college and in life. Having achieved the “goal” of high school (i.e.—graduation) early, the stakes are lower for them than in preschool–the vegetables having been consumed, as it were–my daughters can take better advantage of the last two years of high school in fully personalized learning.

To summarize: the basis for successful PL is an accelerated course model with solid structure and frequent assessment of mastery. Most students can learn material successfully at a faster pace than in a traditional school. Those who need more time should get it, along with additional teaching methods based on the students’ individual needs. Once basic education goals have been met, individualized content can be deployed to take the place of readin’, writin’, ‘rithmetic, and the rest.

A note about technology

In my experience, technology is an adjunct to personalized learning, not the center of it. Perhaps it’s not surprising that tech billionaires interested in education would lean heavily toward this as the prime driver of personalization, but these tools are only as good as the knowledge of the user. Giving kids access to Quizlet, Prezi, Google docs, and Grammarly is valuable and may help some students engage more with the material, but software cannot educate a student in isolation. Coding is an important course that kids can take, but it’s not a way to learn English or American history. The ways that, say, literature have been traditionally taught are still rock solid—vocabulary, reading, analysis, writing papers—even at an accelerated pace. On the teacher side, Curriculet and Newsela are good reading applications and Schoology is a great platform for tracking gaps in proficiency—but it still takes great teaching to actually fill those gaps. My children can attest that laptops and tablets are valuable and one-to-one technology programs in schools should certainly be expanded, as should home internet access. But the personalization part of PL is inside the student, not inside the machine. “Kids on computers” is what you may see from outside the classroom window; inside, you will see that kids are learning the material at their own pace and in the ways that make sense to them.

My children have been inside those classrooms. It works.

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Professor Willingham ends his piece by asking, “is personalized learning worth pursuing?” and suggests that more research on the topic is required to answer that question. Chan/Zuckerberg seems to agree and is proposing a rigorous R&D plan to engineer PL for the future. That’s fine—and those of us at the Thomas B. Fordham Institute would be happy to participate. But personalized learning has already proven its worth to me and many others. My children have thrived and I have seen the model I described work for students who were grade levels behind in math or English as well as d for students who would be considered gifted. I love this model and am gratified that others in education reform are starting to discover it. My children are living examples that PL works and allows students to achieve quantifiable growth and proficiency in subjects across the board.

[1] Metro employs “mastery grading”, in which students must reach at least 90% on most assignments or their work is “incomplete” and must be remediated up to 90%. This is not a requirement for successful PL, but is a good fit for acceleration of this type. With seat time eliminated as a determination of course completion, the proficiency bar can be set as high as we dare.

[2] Metro holds an intersession between semesters to facilitate remediation and elective courses, but the details are too complicated to go into here. Suffice it to say that deviations from a traditional school calendar are clearly required for an accelerated course model.