It's All So Clear Now

Normally I leave charter school issues to my colleagues Eduwonk and Sara Mead. But this morning's front page article in the WaPo struck me as too obvious to pass up.

It details how DC Public Schools is considering a novel arrangement with KIPP, one of the city's most successful charter schools. KIPP wants to start a new middle school, but is having a hard time finding space. Meanwhile, one the regular DCPS elementary schools is losing enrollment and thus has too much space, to the point that it's in danger of being closed. Thus, the arrrangement: co-locate in the same building, don't overlap grades, and coordinate curricula so students from the elementary school can stay in the building and go to the KIPP middle school if that's what they want to do.

Sounds great, right? Not to DC school board vice president Carolyn Graham, who'se worried that if the district helps expand a popular, high-performing charter school to which lots of parents want to send their children, lots of parents will send their children. She said:

"We want to fully embrace a working relationship with KIPP, but we don't want to do it to the detriment of our student body and financial viability," she said, adding that the system lost about $11 million in city funding this year after more than 3,000 students departed. "We want them to come up with a way of working with our charter school partners so that all our students would benefit."

Hmmm. You know, that's kind of wordy, let's tighten that up a little:

"We want to fully embrace a working relationship with KIPP, but we don't want to do it to the detriment of our student body and financial viability," she said, adding that the system lost about $11 million in city funding this year after more than 3,000 students departed. "We want them to come up with a way of working with our charter school partners so that all our students I would benefit."

There we go. Much more clear.

It's true that more students in charter schools means less students in DCPS. But if you're going to complain about that, you've got to at least make an attempt to say why that would be bad, particularly wih the test scores, parental demand, and the best judgment of the DCPS superintendant providing evidence to the country. The fact that Graham offers nothing of the kind is enormously telling.

Ignorance is Strength, We Have Always Been at War with Eastasia, Holding Schools Accountable for Minority Achievement Hurts Minority Students

Yesterday the AP continued it's week-long inadvertent expose of muddled thinking about NCLB with an article titled "Law raises fear of more school segregation."

NCLB unexpectedly hurting the very students it's designed to help! Man, that would be quite a story if it were, what's the word...oh, right: true. But the story offers little evidence, starting thus:

No one...disagrees with [the] contention that Connecticut hasn't always given its poor and minority students an education as good as it's given its rich and white students. No one thinks the gap between the two systems is a good thing. And no one wants the disparities to continue. In the past, the main hurdle has been money...But now, [Connecticut state education commissioner and noted anti-NCLB litigant Betty] Sternberg says, there's another hurdle: the federal No Child Left Behind Act.

"We've had a reluctance on the part of school districts to accept youngsters who come in with deficiencies because they're concerned that if they get enough of them ... they'll become labeled as failing schools," she says.

It's a problem that many experts believe is confounding an effort to eliminate the racial achievement gap on standardized annual tests. That's because the law requires schools to demonstrate that students in specific racial, social and economic groups are making annual progress. A school fails if even one group fails. The more groups in a school, the greater chance for failure.

How do school districts not admit students who live within the district's legal geographic boundaries? Which districts is Sternberg talking about? What's she doing to prevent that from happening? Or is this all just complete supposition?

Also, "many experts" believe this? Such as? Two are cited. First Jonathan Kozol says:

"The really rich and ritzy suburbs that don't participate in any form of integration...[are] going to be rewarded for their selfishness. They're going to be rewarded for their racial insularity because they're not admitting any kids who are at any academic risk. They're not admitting any kids who had been previously studying, for perhaps the first six years of school, in a rotten, overcrowded school."

Again, how exactly do the ritzy suburbs pull this off? Does anyone have an example, even one, of an actual low-performing minority student being illegally turned away from an actual rich white school district? If they did, don't you think that would have made it's way into the story?Moreover, assuming Kozol is right, are we to believe that NCLB has changed that attitude, that the selfish suburbs were previously welcoming these students with open arms?

Expert #2 is:

Barbara Radner, director of DePaul University's Center for Urban Education, [who] works with Chicago public schools and has heard some parents complain about the treatment of inner city children when they move to suburban schools. "I have heard that there is a resentment toward those kids because they are dragging those schools down in the lists," Radner said.

"I have heard..." Case closed! Remember the end of Ocean's Eleven, where George Clooney purposefully makes up the weakest conceivable story about his knowledge of the casino robbery to fool Andy Garcia? The story begins "I know a guy...."

The rest of the article focuses on some inner-city schools which, contra Sternberg, are succeeding despite having lots of low-income and minority students. To wit:

Wedged in a poor, gritty immigrant neighborhood, Henry C. Dwight Elementary School near downtown Hartford, defies the odds. It harks back to an earlier era of learning. Its ceilings are high, there is a fireplace in the library and students wear uniforms as they dart between classrooms. The oldest public school in one of the nation's oldest cities, Dwight finds itself at the center of a growing national debate over whether the nation's newest education experiment is -- unexpectedly -- encouraging school segregation.

Dwight's population is racially and economically diverse, making its future under the law uncertain even though it is currently meeting its goals. The law stresses getting students proficient in math and reading by 2014, the school's principal, Stacey McCann, says. "They're (federal officials) not validating the incremental successes, but we are making great gains," says McCann, who supports the law. "I believe schools ... are making gains, but they might not make the mark that has been set."

When Congress passed the landmark law in 2001, Dwight was one of Hartford's worst-rated schools and exactly the type of multiracial, underperforming school the government intended to pressure to improve. So far, Dwight has. It has met its annual goals under the law even though it has eight special groups it must report to the government and a student population that hails from 21 countries

Okay. So there's a school full of low-income and minority students. Presumably this was just as true before NCLB as it is today. And despite having lots of disadvantaged students, it's doing well, thus proving that those students can in fact learn, and as such removing the incentive for rich white public schools to not admit those students, which they're not allowed to do legally anyway, and which we've been given no real evidence that they're actually doing, and which they were presumably doing prior to NCLB if they're doing it at all, as evidenced by the fact that they they were then and are now rich and white.

Let's say, purely for the sake of argument, that despite being a good school the malignant forces of poverty eventually catch up with Henry C. Dwight Elementary and it falls short of the 2014 goals. How would that affect segregation, one way or the other? It's already segregated. It's already full of minority students. If the school is labeled as inadequate under NCLB, wouldn't that increase the incentive for parents to say "Hey, I'm going to try to get my kid into that rich white school that isn't labeled as inadequate?"

What am I missing?

N Size Fits All

Monday's AP story about minority students being excluded from NCLB accountability calculations has generated enough commotion among legislators and commentators to warrant...another AP story, about said commotion.

I've been of two minds (or hands) on this. On the one hand, I'm a hard-liner on the various bureaucratic gambits and statistical trap-doors currently being used by state departments of educations to relieve pressure on local school systems to close the achievement gap. They're ridiculous, getting worse, and need to stop.

On the other hand--and this is reluctantly the hand I'm going with--both the article and the subsequent react have an unmistakable (yes, Eduwonk got there first) shocked, shocked air about them that in the long run doesn't help the cause.

The original article plays up the fact that "an Associated Presss computer analysis found..." Wait. A "computer analysis"? As opposed to what, an abacus analysis? Is that supposed to lend the article some kind of super-scientific gravitas? Anyway, the "computer" analysis found that minorities make up the "vast majority of students whose scores are excluded." Well, right. Because the thing about minority students is that there are, you know, fewer of them. If you implement a provision that excludes scores from smaller groups of students, and you base those groups on race/ethnicity, than it's to be expected that smaller racial/ethnic groups will be excluded more.

The react article doesn't add much. Various Congressional leaders pledge to investigate these new revelations of provisions that have been common knowledge for years. The recently-formed Commission on No Child Left Behind issued a press release saying:

"This story by the Associated Press is alarming and, unfortunately, confirmed by much of the Commission's own work. If the goal of the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) is to ensure that all children meet State standards, then allowing large numbers of the most disadvantaged children to fall between the cracks is unacceptable. The issues raised in this article only further reinforce the need to come up with realistic solutions that actually make NCLB a better tool to close the achievement gap. The practices raised in this article have had the effect of making these children invisible and speak to greater transparency over how this law is implemented."

Small point: transparency is arguably the cause of these problems, not the solution. As states have pushed the envelope on adopting large thresholds for excluding minority students from AYP calculations, other states have noticed and followed suit.

Large point: Neither the Commission nor the various allegedly alarmed commentators nor the authors of either article seem especially interested in grappling with the issue of how many minority students should be excluded from AYP calculations. 1.9 million may very well be too high, but the right number isn't zero. Statistically speaking, it doesn't make sense to hold a school accountable for the scores of a tiny number of students, and when you add up tiny numbers from 90,000 schools nationwide, the sum is not so tiny at all.

Moreover, the issue in question--minimum subgroup sizes--is one of a whole range of factors to consider in constructing AYP calculations, including confidence intervals, grade bands, multi-year aggregation, etc. etc. Depending on how you combine these various adjustments, subgroups of different sizes can be appropriate. A small minimum subgroup size with an ultra-permissive 99-percent confidence interval, for example, could exclude more students than a medium-sized minimum subgroup size with no confidence interval. Taking one element of the AYP calculation in isolation oversimplifies the issue to the extreme.

Final point: The most moderate voice on this issue in either story comes from Ross Wiener at the Education Trust:

"The solution may be to set a single federal standard for when minority students' scores don't have to be counted separately, said Ross Wiener, policy director for the Washington-based Education Trust. While the exemptions were created for good reasons, there's little doubt now that group sizes have become political, said Wiener, whose group supports the law."

Tip: There is no organization on the planet more adamant about preserving the role of NCLB in identifying schools that aren't serving poor and minority students than the Education Trust (my former employer). If you find yourself farther out on the edge on these issues than EdTrust, you've crossed the line from serious analysis and commentary and need to turn around and make your way back.

Labor vs. Education? Surely Not.

In the Washington Post this morning, Harold Myerson, in criticizing the new "Hamilton Project," has this to say about the project's focus on education:

"The authors place great stress on improving American education -- a commendable and unexceptionable goal, but one that may do little to retard the export of our jobs since, as they acknowledge, it's increasingly the knowledge jobs that are going to India and even China.

How's that?

After all, the conventional wisdom is that we need to invest in the education system precisely because of increased competition for knowledge jobs from India and China. I'm not a flat-earth Kool-aid drinker by any means, but the basic point is right: Mobile capital and advances in telecommunications mean that if companies can hire smart, well-educated people for less money on the other side of the world, they will. Since we can't compete in the global labor market on price, our only option is to be smarter and more-well educated. Thus, education is increasingly important.

Has Myerson uncovered some brilliantly counter-intuitive argument here that he just didn't have the space to share with his readers because he was too busy taking shots at Robert Rubin?

Not really.

This is actually just a somewhat oblique and half-hearted attempt to push an argument that's popular with labor folks these days: education is worth less in the labor market than it used to be (a, shall we say, highly-debatable point), globalization is bad, we can't compete with the Indians and Chinese, so the only alternative is high trade barriers and strong unions.

I'm not against strong unions and frankly I'm glad the Post has at least one columnist who cares about labor issues and talks about them frequently. But to set the interests of workers and the interests of education reform in opposition to one another is a terrible and counter-productive idea, both as a matter of policy and politics.

CNN strikes back

Obviously worried that ABC News was poised to wrest away naming rights to the Quick+ED sensationalism award with last weak's teacher sex/murder double dip, Cnn.com goes down and dirty--literally--and adds an oh-so-topical immigration angle with this story:

"Buckets Used as Bathrooms in School Lockdown"

As a side note, I've got say, big props for whoever writes the headlines at CNN. There are all kinds of jobs in this world, and I've always admired people who take quotidian jobs and inject them with a certain undeniable genius and creativity, simply for their own sake. Even when the net effect is to degrade the national education dialogue and make our world just a little bit coarser and less worth living in, you have to admire the dedication.

Tom Toch Should Be Smiling

While many states are eliminating constructed response and essay questions from their assessments, Washington, D.C.'s new comprehensive assessment system will add them.

(Hat tip to DC Education Blog.)