As Elena notes below, the House Committee on Education and Labor had a big full-committee hearing today on No Child Left Behind reauthorization, focusing on the recent discussion draft which we've been discussing at length (here and here) at Q&E for the last week. I had a chance to testify on the first panel (there were four more as the day went on) along with John Podesta from CAP, Jack Jennings from the Center on Education Policy, Standford's Linda Darling-Hammond, and others.
It was fun; committee member attendance was high and there's always a lot of energy in a hearing with a packed audience and many more waiting in line outside to get in. You only get five minutes to talk, though, and there's this little backwards-counting digital clock thing (like the ones they use for bombs in the movies) on the desk in front of you that lights up red when your time is up. Stressful! So my comments were a very abridged version of this, but with many more uses of the word "Um."
There's definitely a middle-groundedness to the proposal; when you read the statements of advocates like Ed Trust and CCCR on the one hand, and the NEA on the other, they read like mirror images: everything the one likes the other hates, and vice versa. I'm generally not a fan of the "if we're getting it from both sides we must be on track" trope--a lot of times that just means you've split the difference in the worst possible way--but in this case I think there's truth in that, particularly as a starting point for the politically perilous negotiations to come.
Monday, September 10, 2007
Right Now: House Hearings on NCLB
Friday, September 07, 2007
What You Should Think About the New Version of No Child Left Behind, Part (and Title) II
The House Committee on Education and Labor released the second part of its discussion draft amendments to the No Child Left Behind Act this morning. The first part, discussed on Q&E earlier this week (and at Eduwonk here), dealt with Title I of the law, which contains the high-profile and deeply controversial accountability provisions. But there are actually eight more titles to NCLB, page upon page dealing with a host of issues big and small, everything from multi-billion dollar programs to "exchanges with historic whaling and trading partners (really). The most important is Title II, which focuses on teachers.
And if there's one theme that runs through both parts of the draft, it's that this committee is really getting serious about improving the quality of teachers for low-income and minority students. Academic research shows that teacher quality has a huge impact on student learning--particularly for academically vulnerable students. It also shows that effectiveness in the classroom varies a lot among individual teachers. If a low-income student gets three to five unusually good (i.e. one standard deviation above the mean or more) teachers in a row, they can catch up to their more privileged peers. If, on the other hand, they get a bunch unusually bad teachers in a row, they're often left so far behind that it's all but impossible to catch up.
The tragedy is that the latter circumstance is far more common than the former. High-poverty schools often have tremendous difficulty attracting and retaining experienced, qualified staff. They have less money, the students are harder to teach, and they often fail to give teachers a safe, supportive working environment. Tthe values and ethos of the teaching profession, moreover, tend to associate the "best" students with the best teachers. Teaching AP students in a wealthy suburb is a high-status, often well-paid job; teaching remedial courses to recalcitrant students in a hollowed-out urban high school is not.
The discussion drafts attack this problem on multiple fronts. First, as discussed earlier, by improving the "comparability" provisions guaranteeing that schools receiving Title I funds must first receive an equal share of state and local funds. Right now there's a huge loophole in that provision which requires districts to count a first-year teacher being paid $30,000 as equal to a veteran teacher making $60,000 per year for the purposes of determining how much money schools receive. The draft would change that and require districts to use the actual dollar amount in question. That, in turn, would obligate districts to put more experienced, well-paid teachers in high-poverty schools (or lower student-teacher ratios).
The amendments to Title II eliminate the so-called High Objective Uniform State Standards of Evaluation (HOUSSE) exception to NCLB's requirement that all students be taught by a "highly-qualified" teacher. To be highly-qualified, you have to have a bachelor's degree, a teaching license, and demonstrated content knowledge in the subject you teach, either by majoring in that subject in college or passing a state certification test. The last requirement was included in part because of studies from people like Penn's Richard Ingersoll showing that a lot students--particularly low-income and minority students--are taught by teachers without enough content knowledge in their field, a particular problem in high school where subjects are more advanced. But a lot of states used the HOUSSE provision to essentially grandfather veteran teachers out of the requirement entirely. The draft would close that loophole.
The Title II amendments also put a big new requirement on the NCLB teacher quality grant program. This is the biggest federal education program you've never heard of, providing $3 billion a year. The draft says the feds "may not provide any assistance" (i.e. money) to states that don't comply with "section 1111(b)(11)(C)" of NCLB. What's that? A little-known section that's actually been on the books since NCLB was enacted five years ago, but has been virtually ignored by the states. It requires states to "determine whether poor and minority students are being taught disproportionately by teachers who are inexperienced, out-of-field, or not highly qualified." If they are (they are), states have to create and implement a plan to fix the problem. Under the proposed language, the Secretary of Education must withhold the state's share of the $3 billion if the state "fails to provide evidence...that the [State Department of Education] is implementing policies designed to eliminate disparities in teacher assignments and school staffing between and within school districts..."
(This last proposal is a perfect illustration of the "ask-then-tell" principle of federal-state policy formation. First you politely ask states to do some difficult but virtuous thing they don't want to do. Then you wait one reauthorization cycle (usually about seven years), carefully documenting their utter refusal to do so. Then you tell them to do the right thing, using the threat of withheld federal funds as the hammer.)
All of these provisions will be hotly debated, because teachers unions are likely to see them as infringing on the autonomy of teachers to decide where to work. To be sure, teachers aren't pawns or soldiers to be deployed at the whim of state or district bureaucrats. But equal access to quality teaching is a major civil rights issue that cries out for change. It's a long-accepted principle that all children deserve equal access to education funding. These proposed amendments simply extend that resource-equity principle to the single most valuable resource schools have: their teachers. States and districts need to do much more to build schools for low-incomes students that the best teachers will want to work at, and to pay teachers more money for the hardest and most important job in education: helping disadvantaged students learn.
And if there's one theme that runs through both parts of the draft, it's that this committee is really getting serious about improving the quality of teachers for low-income and minority students. Academic research shows that teacher quality has a huge impact on student learning--particularly for academically vulnerable students. It also shows that effectiveness in the classroom varies a lot among individual teachers. If a low-income student gets three to five unusually good (i.e. one standard deviation above the mean or more) teachers in a row, they can catch up to their more privileged peers. If, on the other hand, they get a bunch unusually bad teachers in a row, they're often left so far behind that it's all but impossible to catch up.
The tragedy is that the latter circumstance is far more common than the former. High-poverty schools often have tremendous difficulty attracting and retaining experienced, qualified staff. They have less money, the students are harder to teach, and they often fail to give teachers a safe, supportive working environment. Tthe values and ethos of the teaching profession, moreover, tend to associate the "best" students with the best teachers. Teaching AP students in a wealthy suburb is a high-status, often well-paid job; teaching remedial courses to recalcitrant students in a hollowed-out urban high school is not.
The discussion drafts attack this problem on multiple fronts. First, as discussed earlier, by improving the "comparability" provisions guaranteeing that schools receiving Title I funds must first receive an equal share of state and local funds. Right now there's a huge loophole in that provision which requires districts to count a first-year teacher being paid $30,000 as equal to a veteran teacher making $60,000 per year for the purposes of determining how much money schools receive. The draft would change that and require districts to use the actual dollar amount in question. That, in turn, would obligate districts to put more experienced, well-paid teachers in high-poverty schools (or lower student-teacher ratios).
The amendments to Title II eliminate the so-called High Objective Uniform State Standards of Evaluation (HOUSSE) exception to NCLB's requirement that all students be taught by a "highly-qualified" teacher. To be highly-qualified, you have to have a bachelor's degree, a teaching license, and demonstrated content knowledge in the subject you teach, either by majoring in that subject in college or passing a state certification test. The last requirement was included in part because of studies from people like Penn's Richard Ingersoll showing that a lot students--particularly low-income and minority students--are taught by teachers without enough content knowledge in their field, a particular problem in high school where subjects are more advanced. But a lot of states used the HOUSSE provision to essentially grandfather veteran teachers out of the requirement entirely. The draft would close that loophole.
The Title II amendments also put a big new requirement on the NCLB teacher quality grant program. This is the biggest federal education program you've never heard of, providing $3 billion a year. The draft says the feds "may not provide any assistance" (i.e. money) to states that don't comply with "section 1111(b)(11)(C)" of NCLB. What's that? A little-known section that's actually been on the books since NCLB was enacted five years ago, but has been virtually ignored by the states. It requires states to "determine whether poor and minority students are being taught disproportionately by teachers who are inexperienced, out-of-field, or not highly qualified." If they are (they are), states have to create and implement a plan to fix the problem. Under the proposed language, the Secretary of Education must withhold the state's share of the $3 billion if the state "fails to provide evidence...that the [State Department of Education] is implementing policies designed to eliminate disparities in teacher assignments and school staffing between and within school districts..."
(This last proposal is a perfect illustration of the "ask-then-tell" principle of federal-state policy formation. First you politely ask states to do some difficult but virtuous thing they don't want to do. Then you wait one reauthorization cycle (usually about seven years), carefully documenting their utter refusal to do so. Then you tell them to do the right thing, using the threat of withheld federal funds as the hammer.)
All of these provisions will be hotly debated, because teachers unions are likely to see them as infringing on the autonomy of teachers to decide where to work. To be sure, teachers aren't pawns or soldiers to be deployed at the whim of state or district bureaucrats. But equal access to quality teaching is a major civil rights issue that cries out for change. It's a long-accepted principle that all children deserve equal access to education funding. These proposed amendments simply extend that resource-equity principle to the single most valuable resource schools have: their teachers. States and districts need to do much more to build schools for low-incomes students that the best teachers will want to work at, and to pay teachers more money for the hardest and most important job in education: helping disadvantaged students learn.
Who's Saying What About NCLB Re-Auth
The Hidden Obstacle to Education Reform
(Note: These comments reflect a conversation Kevin and I had earlier this week that he offered me a chance to share with a broader audience through the blog. For more commentary by me, look here.)
Kevin made some good points Tuesday about what he calls "the 'empirical agenda' of the Harper's set on education." But I think Kevin, and other ed reform types, make a mistake when they automatically conclude this agenda is incoherent and contradictory. In fact, if you realize that many of the people who hold these views are looking at education primarily through a social service, rather than an education, lens these views actually make a lot of sense.
If education is just another social service, like public housing, or subsidized nursing home care, or food stamps, it's about consumption rather than investment, and the primary goal is to provide the safest, healthiest, most pleasant set of experiences for kids right now. If that's the measure you're using, rather than student achievement, then schools are doing a pretty good job: They're keeping the kids off the street, most schools are pretty safe, particularly compared to many kids' homes and communities; most teachers are nurturing, and so forth. At the same time, schools, particularly those serving poor kids, are much less pleasant places than they could be. Buildings are the classic example here, but also things like lack of art and music classes. Unlike achievement gaps, these disparities often come down entirely to and could easily be fixed by more money. When you look at schools simply as a service, money actually becomes more important and financial inequities even more troublesome than if you focus on achievement. Most significantly, the idea that schools should be accountable for standards and improving student achievement doesn't make much sense at all in the social service framework--It's like arguing that Medicaid payments to nursing homes should be making the terminally ill better citizens. That's not the point.
This social service view of education is closely connected with progressivist pedagogy. If you disdain content knowledge and believe real education is simply the natural flowering of children's development, then it makes sense that the best way to support education to create as hospitable an atmosphere as possible for children to develop in, and get out of the way. More troubling is the mutually-reinforcing relationship between the social service perspective on education and certain types of progressive economics. If you believe that fundamental inequalities mean that there will always be have-nots who need public assistance to lead decent lives, then it makes sense to focus your energies on redistribution and provision of social services rather than trying to make some people marginally better fit to compete in a fundamentally unfair economy. But then it also becomes a very bad thing to suggest that education or changes in behavior can help the have-nots do better in any way, because it distracts from the larger goals of redistribution and redressing systemic injustice.
The problem with this line of reasoning is that Kevin's "Harper's set" have had far better luck selling progressivist education views than they have had selling more progressive economic policies. This creates the worst possible scenario for poor kids--or, more accurately, the adults they eventually become: Schools that merely deliver services, rather than educating, don't prepare kids to succeed in the workforce, AND there's no social service system for them to fall back on when their lack of preparation means they can't earn a decent living.
Like many liberals, I believe that better health care, public housing, etc., are all important social justice measures. But while public education is also a social service, it is fundamentally different from these services, because it aims not only to give something good to today's have-nots, but also to equip them with the skills to, in the future, get good things for themselves and, more importantly, to contribute to our society and economy. When we lose sight of this, or when we lose the ability to embrace both help for the poor today and help for their children so they won't be poor tomorrow, we all become poorer.
Kevin made some good points Tuesday about what he calls "the 'empirical agenda' of the Harper's set on education." But I think Kevin, and other ed reform types, make a mistake when they automatically conclude this agenda is incoherent and contradictory. In fact, if you realize that many of the people who hold these views are looking at education primarily through a social service, rather than an education, lens these views actually make a lot of sense.
If education is just another social service, like public housing, or subsidized nursing home care, or food stamps, it's about consumption rather than investment, and the primary goal is to provide the safest, healthiest, most pleasant set of experiences for kids right now. If that's the measure you're using, rather than student achievement, then schools are doing a pretty good job: They're keeping the kids off the street, most schools are pretty safe, particularly compared to many kids' homes and communities; most teachers are nurturing, and so forth. At the same time, schools, particularly those serving poor kids, are much less pleasant places than they could be. Buildings are the classic example here, but also things like lack of art and music classes. Unlike achievement gaps, these disparities often come down entirely to and could easily be fixed by more money. When you look at schools simply as a service, money actually becomes more important and financial inequities even more troublesome than if you focus on achievement. Most significantly, the idea that schools should be accountable for standards and improving student achievement doesn't make much sense at all in the social service framework--It's like arguing that Medicaid payments to nursing homes should be making the terminally ill better citizens. That's not the point.
This social service view of education is closely connected with progressivist pedagogy. If you disdain content knowledge and believe real education is simply the natural flowering of children's development, then it makes sense that the best way to support education to create as hospitable an atmosphere as possible for children to develop in, and get out of the way. More troubling is the mutually-reinforcing relationship between the social service perspective on education and certain types of progressive economics. If you believe that fundamental inequalities mean that there will always be have-nots who need public assistance to lead decent lives, then it makes sense to focus your energies on redistribution and provision of social services rather than trying to make some people marginally better fit to compete in a fundamentally unfair economy. But then it also becomes a very bad thing to suggest that education or changes in behavior can help the have-nots do better in any way, because it distracts from the larger goals of redistribution and redressing systemic injustice.
The problem with this line of reasoning is that Kevin's "Harper's set" have had far better luck selling progressivist education views than they have had selling more progressive economic policies. This creates the worst possible scenario for poor kids--or, more accurately, the adults they eventually become: Schools that merely deliver services, rather than educating, don't prepare kids to succeed in the workforce, AND there's no social service system for them to fall back on when their lack of preparation means they can't earn a decent living.
Like many liberals, I believe that better health care, public housing, etc., are all important social justice measures. But while public education is also a social service, it is fundamentally different from these services, because it aims not only to give something good to today's have-nots, but also to equip them with the skills to, in the future, get good things for themselves and, more importantly, to contribute to our society and economy. When we lose sight of this, or when we lose the ability to embrace both help for the poor today and help for their children so they won't be poor tomorrow, we all become poorer.
Tuesday, September 04, 2007
Schrag Weighs In
In the latest issue of Harpers', Education Sector non-resident senior fellow Peter Schrag takes a shot at the Big Education Question of the Day: how much can we expect from the public schools?
The article$ is titled "Schoolhouse Crock: Fifty years of blaming America's education system for our stupidity," which (A) reminds me of why I let my Harper's subscription lapse a few years back: everything has become focused on appeals to cheap liberal cynicism; and (B) isn't really fair to the article itself, which a lot more measured than the title suggests.
That said, I think the piece falls short. This is familiar ground by now--Paul Tough tackled essentially the same question in the Times last year. All the requisite names and events are mentioned: Schrag walks the reader through the Sputnik-A Nation At Risk-NCLB three-step as well as can be expected (I will personally mail a check for $20 to the first person who manages to publish a version of this article in a reputable outlet without using the phrase "rising tide of mediocrity"), and the standard actors are quoted--Finn, Ravitch, Bracey, etc.
The real challenge isn't presenting this material but making sense of it--what can we expect from the public schools? And given that, what should we do? While Schrag does a good job laying out the competing arguments, he never really adjudicates them or ties them toghether into a coherent whole. The result is something like what one could call the "empirical agenda" of the Harper's set on education, i.e. what you get if you try to put their most commonly-voiced criticisms and positions together into a logical sequence. It goes something like this:
1) The public schools are doing a pretty good job; many critiques are over-blown.
But
2) They need a lot more money.
But
3) We can't expect they can do much better than they're doing now (which, to be clear, is pretty good), and so we shouldn't subject them to accountability regimes like NCLB.
This is neither logically coherent nor particularly compelling, which is why the left has been marginalized in a lot of contemporary education debates and decisions.
To be clear, Schrag's article is not this simplistic, containing the requisite caveats about the funding and the potential of good teachers in good public schools to help students learn. But that's the argument lying beneath it all, one ultimately based on the inefficacy of education. It's not a crock to believe that schools matter greatly or that they can be much better than they are.
The article$ is titled "Schoolhouse Crock: Fifty years of blaming America's education system for our stupidity," which (A) reminds me of why I let my Harper's subscription lapse a few years back: everything has become focused on appeals to cheap liberal cynicism; and (B) isn't really fair to the article itself, which a lot more measured than the title suggests.
That said, I think the piece falls short. This is familiar ground by now--Paul Tough tackled essentially the same question in the Times last year. All the requisite names and events are mentioned: Schrag walks the reader through the Sputnik-A Nation At Risk-NCLB three-step as well as can be expected (I will personally mail a check for $20 to the first person who manages to publish a version of this article in a reputable outlet without using the phrase "rising tide of mediocrity"), and the standard actors are quoted--Finn, Ravitch, Bracey, etc.
The real challenge isn't presenting this material but making sense of it--what can we expect from the public schools? And given that, what should we do? While Schrag does a good job laying out the competing arguments, he never really adjudicates them or ties them toghether into a coherent whole. The result is something like what one could call the "empirical agenda" of the Harper's set on education, i.e. what you get if you try to put their most commonly-voiced criticisms and positions together into a logical sequence. It goes something like this:
1) The public schools are doing a pretty good job; many critiques are over-blown.
But
2) They need a lot more money.
But
3) We can't expect they can do much better than they're doing now (which, to be clear, is pretty good), and so we shouldn't subject them to accountability regimes like NCLB.
This is neither logically coherent nor particularly compelling, which is why the left has been marginalized in a lot of contemporary education debates and decisions.
To be clear, Schrag's article is not this simplistic, containing the requisite caveats about the funding and the potential of good teachers in good public schools to help students learn. But that's the argument lying beneath it all, one ultimately based on the inefficacy of education. It's not a crock to believe that schools matter greatly or that they can be much better than they are.
Friday, August 31, 2007
Re-NCLB on English Language Learners
More flexibility and some new requirements sums up the ELL provisions. My two cents on a few points: First, native language tests for 5-plus years instead of 3 years is a good thing- this keeps ELLs in the system and provides the support they need. But the requirements also say that states have to create valid and reliable native language assessments for every language that 10 percent or more ELL students share. Whoa. There is good intent in this but coming out of CA, the development of native language assessments for those languages is no small task (we're talking about 10 percent of the ELL population not 10 percent of the student population, which translates to a lot of languages in a place like California). And then there's the problem with "valid and reliable" assessments for ELLs, which states continue to struggle to develop or find. Requiring valid and reliable assessments is good if states actually can get this done but we haven't seen a lot of this. Also, under this new draft states can use portfolios and alternative assessments for ELLs- now this drives me crazy and I don't know what to make of it because while I support the use of alternative assessments, I also know that states don't have a lot of good models for this. I fear a bunch of half-baked "this is good enough for the ELLs" assessments and that's no better than what we had before we woke up and noticed ELLs in the first place.
EdWeek's Mary Ann Zehr posts about this, with lively comments from former NABE director and NCLB critic James Crawford.
EdWeek's Mary Ann Zehr posts about this, with lively comments from former NABE director and NCLB critic James Crawford.
Thursday, August 30, 2007
What You Should Think About the New Version of No Child Left Behind
The House Education and Labor Committee released a discussion draft of a new version of the No Child Left Behind Act this week. It's an important milestone, being the first concrete proposal from one of the committee chairmen who will ultimately write the law. Overall, it goes a long way in addressing the single biggest legitimate complaint about the current law--lack of nuance--but in doing so pushes accountability-based school reform into some uncharted and potentially treacherous waters.
The current system is pretty simple. Once a year, you give every student two standardized tests, one in reading and one in math. You establish a target percentage of students who have to pass the test--say, 50%. As the years pass, that target increases until it reaches 100% in 2014. If a school misses the target in a given year--or if a subgroup of students (i.e. poor, minority, special ed) misses the target--then the school is identified as not having made "adequate yearly progress," or AYP. As a school misses AYP for multiple consecutive years, it's subject to increasingly stringent consequences.
This simplicity--and thus, lack of nuance--drives most of the not-insane critiques of NCLB. Because school identification is binary--you either make AYP or you don't--NCLB is bad at distinguishing between massively dysfunctional schools and those that just need fine-tuning. Because AYP is based on the percent of students who achieve a state-defined "proficient" score, NCLB disincents schools from concentrating on students who are far above or below that line. Because NCLB only tests reading and math (science is soon to come) it short-changes history, art, foreign language, music, civics, etc., as well as the teaching of important non-academic skills. Because NCLB is based on a "status" measure--the percent of students proficient on a given day--it doesn't take into account growth in student learning from one year to the next. Because it's based on a single statewide test, local evaluations are ignored. Etc., etc.
The discussion draft tries, somewhat valiantly, to address all of these concerns. There are two levels of insufficient achievement instead of one--"Priority" and "High Priority" schools, the latter identifying more serious failure. There are three levels of performance that contribute directly to acccountability determinations instead of one--"Basic" and "Advanced" now bookend "Proficient"--which states can use to create a blended "performance index" which takes the percent of students reaching all three into account (some states already do this). States can use "growth models" where student achievement is deemed sufficient if they're proficient or their rate of improvement over time puts them on a trajectory to become proficient within three years (some states already do this too). States can also implement systems of "multiple measures" whereby a portion of a schools' rating is based on host of possible measures beyond standardized tests in reading and math--tests in other subjects, like history, civics, and writing; AP and IB test scores, college enrollment rates, dropout rates, etc.
And in the most radical departure from the current law, up to 15 states could participate in a "pilot program" whereby state tests are jettisoned in favor of "locally-developed, classroom-embedded assessments." There's intuitive appeal to better integrating accountability with the tests that teachers themselves create and use in their teaching. But despite loads of mandatory peer reviews, certfications of alignment and rigor, etc. etc., designed to ensure that this process is legit, the idea of local accountability skirts dangerously close to oxymoron--when you ask people if they themselves are doing a good job, they almost always say "yes." The entire two-decades-long push for educational accountabilty rests on the idea that schools peform better when there's some external check on their performance, and even the most ostensibly well-designed local system puts that correct and important idea at risk.
One thing's for sure: the accountability regime envisioned in this law would be exponentially more complicated than what we have now. So complicated, in fact, that very few people will be able to understand it fully. That's not necessarily disqualifying; very few people fully understand how a Boeing 747 works, but they fly in them anyway because they understand that difficult tasks--like flying across the world or holding schools accountable--often require sophisticated systems to work well, and they can see the end results for themselves. But there's a real tradeoff here--it's for hard for parents and educators to develop a strategy for improving on a measure they can't understand.
The draft would also take the nation from having 50 different versions of one accountability system to 50 different accountability systems. Again, not necessarily the end of the world in theory. But states have proven themselves to be wily innovators when it comes to exploiting their flexibility under NCLB to undermine the law's intent, including (but not limited to) excluding large numbers of minority students from subgroup calculations and using unusually large "confidence intervals" to give schools the statistical benefit of the doubt. All these new options create wide vistas of opportunity for that kind of mischief, or much worse, which puts a huge enforcement burden on a U.S. Department of Education that often hasn't been up to the task enforcing the much more prescribed rules we have today.
Some other things of note:
* The draft cracks down on some of the afore-mentioned statistical trickery--no more "99-percent confidence intervals" and excluded sub-groups larger than 30 students (or in same cases 40). That's a good thing.
* The graduation rate requirements are a lot better than the essentially non-existent standards in the current law.
* While the 2014 goal of 100 percent proficiency is nominally preserved, the combination of the "growth model" and "multiple measures" options effectively moves the deadline out closer to the end of the next decade.
* NCLB currently has an "out" at the very end of the accountability system--once a school has missed AYP for six consecutive years, it's got to shut down, fire all the staff, reconstitute as a charter school, or (and I paraphrase only slightly) "anything else you can think of that might work." Unsurprisingly, most states and districts have been choosing the latter option, which would be eliminated for the "High Priority" (i.e. really failing) schools. That's a good thing too.
* As Eduwonk noted, the draft eliminates a major loophole in the "comparability" provisions that dictate how Title I funds are distributed among schools within districts. NCLB currently requires that before federal funds are sent out, state and local funds must first be distributed so that students in high-poverty schools recieve services that are "at least comparable" to those provided to lower-poverty schools. This kind of "supplement not supplant" provision is designed to ensure that poor children get additional resources above and beyond what they normally receive.
But NCLB undermines that goal by requiring that when districts compare school resources, they pretend that all teachers are paid the same in each school. Of course, they're not--high-poverty schools disproportionately hire younger, lower-paid teachers, because they're often the least desireable place to work. As a result, per-student spending can often be thousands of dollars less in high-poverty schools compared to low-poverty schools--a disparity the law currently requires districts to ignore. Teachers unions, wary of anything that would infringe on the ability of their more senior members to teach where they please, will fight this as reauthorization moves forward.
* In requiring states to create "longitudinal data systems" that track student performance from school to school and year to year (you can't have the above-mentioned "growth models" without them), the draft includes a requirement that student data be matched to a "unique statewide teacher identifier." The unions will oppose this too, and here's why: matching student and teacher records is a precondition for the kind of test-score-based "value-added" measures of teacher effectiveness (essentially, evaluating teachers by calculating the improvement on their students' test scores from the beginning of the year to the end) that many reformers would like to use as part of merit pay reforms. No teacher identifier=no value-added measure=no merit pay.
*There's a huge amount of verbiage in the draft that tries to describe how schools should go about improving, via the submission of hyper-detailed improvement plans and the adoption of various improvement strategies that tend to read like a collection of education jargon words strung together in random order. This is unhelpful; such provisions are largely unenforceable and cut against the important principle that the federal government should be defining the parameters of educational success, not the means.
All in all, this draft is a reputable first shot at preserving the underlying principles of NCLB while addressing its most obvious flaws. But a good accountability system is a fragile thing, and making the law more complex also makes it more vulnerable to those who disagree with the principles themselves. It will take a lot of additional hard work to make sure that doesn't come to pass.
The current system is pretty simple. Once a year, you give every student two standardized tests, one in reading and one in math. You establish a target percentage of students who have to pass the test--say, 50%. As the years pass, that target increases until it reaches 100% in 2014. If a school misses the target in a given year--or if a subgroup of students (i.e. poor, minority, special ed) misses the target--then the school is identified as not having made "adequate yearly progress," or AYP. As a school misses AYP for multiple consecutive years, it's subject to increasingly stringent consequences.
This simplicity--and thus, lack of nuance--drives most of the not-insane critiques of NCLB. Because school identification is binary--you either make AYP or you don't--NCLB is bad at distinguishing between massively dysfunctional schools and those that just need fine-tuning. Because AYP is based on the percent of students who achieve a state-defined "proficient" score, NCLB disincents schools from concentrating on students who are far above or below that line. Because NCLB only tests reading and math (science is soon to come) it short-changes history, art, foreign language, music, civics, etc., as well as the teaching of important non-academic skills. Because NCLB is based on a "status" measure--the percent of students proficient on a given day--it doesn't take into account growth in student learning from one year to the next. Because it's based on a single statewide test, local evaluations are ignored. Etc., etc.
The discussion draft tries, somewhat valiantly, to address all of these concerns. There are two levels of insufficient achievement instead of one--"Priority" and "High Priority" schools, the latter identifying more serious failure. There are three levels of performance that contribute directly to acccountability determinations instead of one--"Basic" and "Advanced" now bookend "Proficient"--which states can use to create a blended "performance index" which takes the percent of students reaching all three into account (some states already do this). States can use "growth models" where student achievement is deemed sufficient if they're proficient or their rate of improvement over time puts them on a trajectory to become proficient within three years (some states already do this too). States can also implement systems of "multiple measures" whereby a portion of a schools' rating is based on host of possible measures beyond standardized tests in reading and math--tests in other subjects, like history, civics, and writing; AP and IB test scores, college enrollment rates, dropout rates, etc.
And in the most radical departure from the current law, up to 15 states could participate in a "pilot program" whereby state tests are jettisoned in favor of "locally-developed, classroom-embedded assessments." There's intuitive appeal to better integrating accountability with the tests that teachers themselves create and use in their teaching. But despite loads of mandatory peer reviews, certfications of alignment and rigor, etc. etc., designed to ensure that this process is legit, the idea of local accountability skirts dangerously close to oxymoron--when you ask people if they themselves are doing a good job, they almost always say "yes." The entire two-decades-long push for educational accountabilty rests on the idea that schools peform better when there's some external check on their performance, and even the most ostensibly well-designed local system puts that correct and important idea at risk.
One thing's for sure: the accountability regime envisioned in this law would be exponentially more complicated than what we have now. So complicated, in fact, that very few people will be able to understand it fully. That's not necessarily disqualifying; very few people fully understand how a Boeing 747 works, but they fly in them anyway because they understand that difficult tasks--like flying across the world or holding schools accountable--often require sophisticated systems to work well, and they can see the end results for themselves. But there's a real tradeoff here--it's for hard for parents and educators to develop a strategy for improving on a measure they can't understand.
The draft would also take the nation from having 50 different versions of one accountability system to 50 different accountability systems. Again, not necessarily the end of the world in theory. But states have proven themselves to be wily innovators when it comes to exploiting their flexibility under NCLB to undermine the law's intent, including (but not limited to) excluding large numbers of minority students from subgroup calculations and using unusually large "confidence intervals" to give schools the statistical benefit of the doubt. All these new options create wide vistas of opportunity for that kind of mischief, or much worse, which puts a huge enforcement burden on a U.S. Department of Education that often hasn't been up to the task enforcing the much more prescribed rules we have today.
Some other things of note:
* The draft cracks down on some of the afore-mentioned statistical trickery--no more "99-percent confidence intervals" and excluded sub-groups larger than 30 students (or in same cases 40). That's a good thing.
* The graduation rate requirements are a lot better than the essentially non-existent standards in the current law.
* While the 2014 goal of 100 percent proficiency is nominally preserved, the combination of the "growth model" and "multiple measures" options effectively moves the deadline out closer to the end of the next decade.
* NCLB currently has an "out" at the very end of the accountability system--once a school has missed AYP for six consecutive years, it's got to shut down, fire all the staff, reconstitute as a charter school, or (and I paraphrase only slightly) "anything else you can think of that might work." Unsurprisingly, most states and districts have been choosing the latter option, which would be eliminated for the "High Priority" (i.e. really failing) schools. That's a good thing too.
* As Eduwonk noted, the draft eliminates a major loophole in the "comparability" provisions that dictate how Title I funds are distributed among schools within districts. NCLB currently requires that before federal funds are sent out, state and local funds must first be distributed so that students in high-poverty schools recieve services that are "at least comparable" to those provided to lower-poverty schools. This kind of "supplement not supplant" provision is designed to ensure that poor children get additional resources above and beyond what they normally receive.
But NCLB undermines that goal by requiring that when districts compare school resources, they pretend that all teachers are paid the same in each school. Of course, they're not--high-poverty schools disproportionately hire younger, lower-paid teachers, because they're often the least desireable place to work. As a result, per-student spending can often be thousands of dollars less in high-poverty schools compared to low-poverty schools--a disparity the law currently requires districts to ignore. Teachers unions, wary of anything that would infringe on the ability of their more senior members to teach where they please, will fight this as reauthorization moves forward.
* In requiring states to create "longitudinal data systems" that track student performance from school to school and year to year (you can't have the above-mentioned "growth models" without them), the draft includes a requirement that student data be matched to a "unique statewide teacher identifier." The unions will oppose this too, and here's why: matching student and teacher records is a precondition for the kind of test-score-based "value-added" measures of teacher effectiveness (essentially, evaluating teachers by calculating the improvement on their students' test scores from the beginning of the year to the end) that many reformers would like to use as part of merit pay reforms. No teacher identifier=no value-added measure=no merit pay.
*There's a huge amount of verbiage in the draft that tries to describe how schools should go about improving, via the submission of hyper-detailed improvement plans and the adoption of various improvement strategies that tend to read like a collection of education jargon words strung together in random order. This is unhelpful; such provisions are largely unenforceable and cut against the important principle that the federal government should be defining the parameters of educational success, not the means.
All in all, this draft is a reputable first shot at preserving the underlying principles of NCLB while addressing its most obvious flaws. But a good accountability system is a fragile thing, and making the law more complex also makes it more vulnerable to those who disagree with the principles themselves. It will take a lot of additional hard work to make sure that doesn't come to pass.
Don't Do It, Virginia
Okay, let's check the logic on the no-college-for-undocumented-students debate. You've got a large group of undocumented students, many of whom have been here since kindergarten, who have just graduated from taxpayer-funded public schools. You can either let these students go on to college and benefit from the years of elementary and secondary schooling you've already funded up to this point, or you can drop these high school graduates from the system right when they're poised to refine their skills and advance in the U.S. workforce and society. Hmmm. Well if you pick the latter, which Virginia has, you're setting yourself up for failure. These students are not going "home". I guess we could build a wall around all of the colleges and universities, but there's a better solution here.
Day later update: Federal court upholds the dismissal of a case in which out-of-state citizen students argued for in-state tuition rates at Kansas colleges and universities if undocumented immigrants (who reside in Kansas and graduated from Kansas high schools) get in-state tuition.
Day later update: Federal court upholds the dismissal of a case in which out-of-state citizen students argued for in-state tuition rates at Kansas colleges and universities if undocumented immigrants (who reside in Kansas and graduated from Kansas high schools) get in-state tuition.
Inside the Higher Ed Lobby
Ben Adler, editor of Campus Progress at the Center for American Progress, has a new article in The Washington Monthly about the higher education lobby here in DC. The top-line conclusion: when it comes to the lobbying game, our colleges and universities are no better than all the other shady operators who employ various back-room gambits and pressure tactics to advance their self-interest, often at the expense of students and the public at large. It's worth reading.
Wednesday, August 29, 2007
Dancing Lemons in the D.C. Central Office
According to an article in today’s Washington Post, D.C.’s new Schools Chancellor Michelle Rhee is looking to restructure the D.C. school system central office, including firing many central office employees. If you read the Post’s series of articles back in June about the jaw-dropping poor management and bad behavior in the D.C. central office, this is a no-brainer first step to making lasting improvements to D.C. schools. Unfortunately, this is a difficult step to take. According to today’s article:
Typically, central office employees who are removed from a position have the contractual right to be placed in a lower-ranking position in the system while maintaining their salary. These rights have hampered superintendents who have sought in the past to downsize the school administration and remove poorly performing employees.
Gee… I can’t imagine how a policy like that would hamper management’s ability to hire and maintain a competent workforce. And I’m sure it has nothing to do with this:
In past years…the central office has allowed thousands of school facility work orders to languish, failed to deliver paychecks to teachers on time and had trouble supplying principals with supplies and equipment.
I understand wanting to protect employees from willy-nilly firings, but these ‘protections’ have gone too far. It has reached the point where the image of all central office employees—good or bad—is colored by the broad-based incompetence and corruption reported in the news. If the Council of School Officers—the union that represents some central office employees—decides to oppose Rhee’s efforts, it will have a difficult time explaining why some of these employees don’t deserve to be fired and I doubt if it will find much support among the schools, parents, and students that have been negatively impacted by the central office’s history of poor performance.
CAP on School Time
Newest report on expanding learning time by the Center for American Progress. CAP is an ardent supporter of more school time so it's not surprising that the report serves to bolster the argument that increasing school time is a necessary strategy for improving low-performing, low-income schools. It provides a great framework for understanding the promise of more school time, describing four main constructs: time as an enabler (helps us to get it all done w/o narrowing curriculum), time as a catalyst (helps schools move toward reform), time as a unifer (brings together community and school b/c it relies on outreach and collaboration); and time as a preference (increases choices for parents/students a la "if you want more school, you can have it"). It also includes examples of "model ELT programs" and a chart of characteristics that these models share- bold leadership, teacher prep and leadership, use of data, community support and partners and focused, aligned use of time that engages students.
Elena Rocha, the author of this CAP report, is right that expanded school time can make a difference for a lot of kids (although it stands to benefit low-income kids most- an important point since many middle class parents will fight increased school time in their districts and states b/c of this). But I have three concerns about the wholesale endorsement of more school time. First, our worst performing schools- the ones that really need help- will have to find that bold leadership (and data and community support, etc) before they can even think about extending the school day or year- otherwise it won't work. Look to Mass2020 for clues about how long this process takes and how careful we need to be in selecting schools and districts that are prepared to do this. Second, those bold leaders and the teachers they bring on board and try to support are going to burn out if we don't look outside of the school for resources to expand learning opportunities. Community-school collaborations are part of this but we need to think harder about how we can create more and better learning opportunities for kids inside and outside of school. Not all learning has to happen inside those same walls. And finally, we can't shy away from the real and very high cost of extending school time. Depending on scope (statewide, districtwide) we're talking about hundreds of millions, potentially billions, of dollars to add two hours to the day, or two weeks to the year for public schools. We don't yet know if this works and certainly have reason to believe it won't w/o other reforms in place (e.g. KIPP is successful not b/c of more time but b/c of time plus its four other core strategies).
Rocha knows this and makes all the right references to the need for quality learning time and well-implemented programs. Still, I feel compelled to remind us that quality learning time is not easy to come by, particularly in low-performing high poverty schools and that well-implemented programs take, well, time. Both to carry out successful school reform, and to evaluate if it works. With that said, kudos to CAP and Rocha for keeping school time alive on the reform agenda. There's something there- I'm just not so sure we really know what it is.
Elena Rocha, the author of this CAP report, is right that expanded school time can make a difference for a lot of kids (although it stands to benefit low-income kids most- an important point since many middle class parents will fight increased school time in their districts and states b/c of this). But I have three concerns about the wholesale endorsement of more school time. First, our worst performing schools- the ones that really need help- will have to find that bold leadership (and data and community support, etc) before they can even think about extending the school day or year- otherwise it won't work. Look to Mass2020 for clues about how long this process takes and how careful we need to be in selecting schools and districts that are prepared to do this. Second, those bold leaders and the teachers they bring on board and try to support are going to burn out if we don't look outside of the school for resources to expand learning opportunities. Community-school collaborations are part of this but we need to think harder about how we can create more and better learning opportunities for kids inside and outside of school. Not all learning has to happen inside those same walls. And finally, we can't shy away from the real and very high cost of extending school time. Depending on scope (statewide, districtwide) we're talking about hundreds of millions, potentially billions, of dollars to add two hours to the day, or two weeks to the year for public schools. We don't yet know if this works and certainly have reason to believe it won't w/o other reforms in place (e.g. KIPP is successful not b/c of more time but b/c of time plus its four other core strategies).
Rocha knows this and makes all the right references to the need for quality learning time and well-implemented programs. Still, I feel compelled to remind us that quality learning time is not easy to come by, particularly in low-performing high poverty schools and that well-implemented programs take, well, time. Both to carry out successful school reform, and to evaluate if it works. With that said, kudos to CAP and Rocha for keeping school time alive on the reform agenda. There's something there- I'm just not so sure we really know what it is.
Tuesday, August 28, 2007
No Secrets in Cyberspace
There's this cool new Web site called Wikipedia scanner that reveals how different organizations are editing Wikipedia. While Wikipedia edits are technically anonymous, the site keeps track of the IP address from which the edits were made. IP addresses, in turn, can be matched up with specific organizations. So while you can't tell exactly what person made a change, you can pretty reliably figure out where they were working when they did it.
For example, on June 18th, 2007, at 6:32 PM, somebody using the National Education Association's IP address changed the following paragraph in the "National Education Association" Wikipedia entry from:
To this:
Interestingly, if you look at the entry today, somebody has gone in and changed them all back. (It wasn't us! We've only got two changes registered, both on a non-education topic. Gotta give those interns more work to do...)
Personally, I think it's fine if the NEA wants to support only Democrats; majorities matter in electoral politics and if a group judges that one party best represents its interests, it should be able to support them how it pleases. But there's no reason to be less than up-front about it.
I also note that three years ago someone from the NEA IP address also changed the this sentence in the "Thor" entry:
For example, on June 18th, 2007, at 6:32 PM, somebody using the National Education Association's IP address changed the following paragraph in the "National Education Association" Wikipedia entry from:
In recent decades the NEA has greatly increased its visibility in party politics, endorsing almost exclusively Democratic Party candidates and contributing funds and other assistance to political campaigns. The NEA asserts itself "non-partisan", but critics point out that the NEA has endorsed and provided support for every Democratic Party presidential nominee from Jimmy Carter to John Kerry and has never endorsed any Republican Party or third party candidate for the nation's highest office.
To this:
NEA has played a role in politics since its founding, as it has sought to influence state and federal laws that would have a positive impact on public education. Every political position adopted by NEA was brought by one of its members to the annual Representative Assembly, where it was considered on the floor, debated, and voted on by elected delegates.They also changed this:
Furthermore, based on required filings with the federal government, it is estimated that between 1990 and 2002 ninety-five percent of the NEA's substantial political contributions went to Democratic Partycandidate [http://www.humanevents.com/article.php?id=11785]. Although this has been questioned as being out of balance with the more diverse political views of the broader membership[http://www.opinionjournal.com/editorial/feature.html?id=95000771], the NEA maintains that it bases support for candidates primarily on the organization's interpretation of candidates' support for public education and educators.To this:
The Association tracks legislation related to education and the teaching profession and encourages members to get involved in politics through a comprehensive Legislative Action Center on its website.[http://www.nea.org/lac/] Because of its large membership, the NEA is extremely well-funded and exercises substantial power in the political process.
Interestingly, if you look at the entry today, somebody has gone in and changed them all back. (It wasn't us! We've only got two changes registered, both on a non-education topic. Gotta give those interns more work to do...)
Personally, I think it's fine if the NEA wants to support only Democrats; majorities matter in electoral politics and if a group judges that one party best represents its interests, it should be able to support them how it pleases. But there's no reason to be less than up-front about it.
I also note that three years ago someone from the NEA IP address also changed the this sentence in the "Thor" entry:
Much later, his father Odin decided that Thor had to be taught humility, and so transformed into '''Donald Blake''' (aka '''Don Blake'''), a human medical student who was lame in one leg, and erased his memory.to this:
Much later, his father Odin decided that Thor had to be taught humility,Arcane knowledge of comic book minutiae! That's the basis for shared understanding...
and so transformed into '''Donald Blake''' (aka '''Chad Don Blake'''), a human medical student who was lame in one leg, and erased his memory.
Memo to Future Greedy University Presidents
The criminal prosecution of former Texan Southern University president Priscilla Slade for spending hundreds of thousands of dollars of university funds on "personal luxuries" like a "$1,000 silk canopy for a four-poster bed" immediately recalls the recent ouster of American University president Ben Ladner on similar grounds (The Washingtonian published the definitive account, here.) Ladner's not going to jail because the university board approved paying for things like lavish vacations, a chauffeur and full-time chef.
It also highlights a fundamental principle that college presidents, being smart people, should understand: take cash, not perks.
The American people believe in both success and excess, and there's hardly any amount of money in straight compensation that can shock their conscience. $500,000; $750,000; $1 million -- it's all good! Gordon Gee just got hired back by Ohio State at a seven-figure rate, and few people batted an eye.
But a $1,000 canopy? Well, that's just not right. Perks feel vaguely aristocratic--unearned. People are irrationally attracted to getting free stuff, and thus irrationally angry when other people get free stuff. If Priscilla Slade's salary had been equal to her actual salary plus double what she spent on home renovations, she could have bought whatever crazy useless stuff she wanted, pocketed the difference, and still be president. Instead, she might be going to jail.
This isn't just a higher ed phenomenon -- people got all bent out of shape when the details of former GE CEO Jack Welsh's retirement package, which included free use of a Manhattan apartment and the corporate jet, were revealed. Again, if they'd just added another zero to the end of some number involving his annuities or stock options, nobody would have cared.
So the message to future Priscilla Slades and Ben Ladners is: take the cash and buy your own needless luxuries; everyone will be happier.
It also highlights a fundamental principle that college presidents, being smart people, should understand: take cash, not perks.
The American people believe in both success and excess, and there's hardly any amount of money in straight compensation that can shock their conscience. $500,000; $750,000; $1 million -- it's all good! Gordon Gee just got hired back by Ohio State at a seven-figure rate, and few people batted an eye.
But a $1,000 canopy? Well, that's just not right. Perks feel vaguely aristocratic--unearned. People are irrationally attracted to getting free stuff, and thus irrationally angry when other people get free stuff. If Priscilla Slade's salary had been equal to her actual salary plus double what she spent on home renovations, she could have bought whatever crazy useless stuff she wanted, pocketed the difference, and still be president. Instead, she might be going to jail.
This isn't just a higher ed phenomenon -- people got all bent out of shape when the details of former GE CEO Jack Welsh's retirement package, which included free use of a Manhattan apartment and the corporate jet, were revealed. Again, if they'd just added another zero to the end of some number involving his annuities or stock options, nobody would have cared.
So the message to future Priscilla Slades and Ben Ladners is: take the cash and buy your own needless luxuries; everyone will be happier.
Monday, August 27, 2007
The Case for Community Colleges
In all the hubbub over this, that, or the other ranking of four-year colleges, the 45 percent of American undergraduates who attend a community college are left out. Those students are lower-class citizens in the higher ed world, the wide bottom layer of the status pyramid that ascends to the peaks of the Ivy League. The unquestioned assumption--both for students and faculty--is that every four-year school is better than every two-year school. Resources and attention follow accordingly.
Which is too bad, both as a matter of policy and fact. As policy because in higher education--just as in K-12--it's pretty clear that sensitivity to education quality is inversely proportional to preparation. The rocket-fueled high achievers who attend the richest and most exclusive schools will do well anywhere, so their colleges mostly just have to stay out of their way--which not coincidentally, is often about all they do. It's the first-generation students, the lower-income students who got a bad high school education, the students with jobs and families--the community college students, in other words--for whom quality education matters most. Yet their schools get what's left over after the research university with the Div. I football team is paid for.
As fact because some community colleges are much better than four-year schools, despite the lack of money. This is the gist of two articles I've written for the newest issue of the Washington Monthly. The first, America's Best Community Colleges, uses publicly-available data from the Communitiy College Survey of Student Engagement to identify 30 community colleges that are outperforming not only other two-year schools but also many four-years in the educational practices research says students need most.
The second, Built to Teach: What Your Alma Mater Could Learn from Cascadia Community College explains how one of those top schools, which didn't even exist ten years ago, was designed from the ground up to be give students what they need to do well in college--and how sadly unusual that approach really is.
The idea of ranking community colleges is controversial--the CCSSE people themselves don't like it. Their objections are registered in this InsideHigherEd article, followed by an opinion piece on the same topic from yrs. truly in this morning's edition. But regardless of your stance on rankings, community colleges deserve more attention then they've been getting.
Which is too bad, both as a matter of policy and fact. As policy because in higher education--just as in K-12--it's pretty clear that sensitivity to education quality is inversely proportional to preparation. The rocket-fueled high achievers who attend the richest and most exclusive schools will do well anywhere, so their colleges mostly just have to stay out of their way--which not coincidentally, is often about all they do. It's the first-generation students, the lower-income students who got a bad high school education, the students with jobs and families--the community college students, in other words--for whom quality education matters most. Yet their schools get what's left over after the research university with the Div. I football team is paid for.
As fact because some community colleges are much better than four-year schools, despite the lack of money. This is the gist of two articles I've written for the newest issue of the Washington Monthly. The first, America's Best Community Colleges, uses publicly-available data from the Communitiy College Survey of Student Engagement to identify 30 community colleges that are outperforming not only other two-year schools but also many four-years in the educational practices research says students need most.
The second, Built to Teach: What Your Alma Mater Could Learn from Cascadia Community College explains how one of those top schools, which didn't even exist ten years ago, was designed from the ground up to be give students what they need to do well in college--and how sadly unusual that approach really is.
The idea of ranking community colleges is controversial--the CCSSE people themselves don't like it. Their objections are registered in this InsideHigherEd article, followed by an opinion piece on the same topic from yrs. truly in this morning's edition. But regardless of your stance on rankings, community colleges deserve more attention then they've been getting.
Gifted Children and the Scourge of "Unintended Consequences"
A few thoughts on today's WaPost op-ed arguing that No Child Left Behind is ruining public education for gifted students:
1) The authors assert that the law is having "unintended but disastrous consequences" for gifted kids. Can I just say -- a pox on "unintended consequences." They're the Lay's potato chips of argumentation, a cheap, substance-free rhetorical device that newspaper editors are apparently helpless to resist consuming, even though (I hope) they know they should. It's not that unitended consequences don't exist, but if you're going to assert them you should have to offer some evidence that what you're saying is actually true. Which leads to:
2) Is there any reputable, empirical evidence to support the contention that NCLB is hurting the education of gifted students? If there is, I haven't seen it, and it's certainly nowhere in this op-ed. NAEP scores, SATs, some kind of "ceiling" effect on high-end scale scores -- anything? One thing I am 100 percent sure of: next spring I'm going to be reading a spate of newspaper articles about how a record number of students managed to--somehow--overcome the depradations of NCLB, ace the SATs, accumulate a freakishly accomplished resume of extracurricular activities, and yet get turned down by Harvard.
3) NCLB was enacted over five years ago, and it way too late to be criticizing the law without offering anything in the way of solutions. Yet right at the point this op-ed should be telling the reader what Congress should do, if not try to help all students attain at least minimal proficiency in reading and math, it veers off into a wholly unrelated discussion of...vouchers. Huh? I imagine this is because actually proposing solutions would lay bare the fact that NCLB's authors made a conscious choice to focus attention on the lowest-performing, most disadvantaged students, because, unlike the gifted, and more or or less by definition--they need those resources the most. That's not to say some kind of growth-model approach isn't warrented, it is. But life is about hard choices, and op-eds like this simply don't have the courage to admit that they're advocating for a return to the days where the least got the least and the most got the most. Which leads to:
4) Between this, complaints about affirmative action, and the so-called "boys crisis," we've reached the point where people are actually arguing, with a straight face, that the real crisis in American education is the shameful neglect--the injustice--of how we educate smart white men. There's only one more place to go here--somewhere in the depths of the Heritage foundation lurks a 22-year old policy analyst who is undoubtedly preparing to launch a career in wingnuttery on just this issue--and it's this: how NCLB discriminates against rich people. Surely it's the smart white wealthy man who's the true victim here, kept down by a law and a nation that refuses to recongnize his special needs.
1) The authors assert that the law is having "unintended but disastrous consequences" for gifted kids. Can I just say -- a pox on "unintended consequences." They're the Lay's potato chips of argumentation, a cheap, substance-free rhetorical device that newspaper editors are apparently helpless to resist consuming, even though (I hope) they know they should. It's not that unitended consequences don't exist, but if you're going to assert them you should have to offer some evidence that what you're saying is actually true. Which leads to:
2) Is there any reputable, empirical evidence to support the contention that NCLB is hurting the education of gifted students? If there is, I haven't seen it, and it's certainly nowhere in this op-ed. NAEP scores, SATs, some kind of "ceiling" effect on high-end scale scores -- anything? One thing I am 100 percent sure of: next spring I'm going to be reading a spate of newspaper articles about how a record number of students managed to--somehow--overcome the depradations of NCLB, ace the SATs, accumulate a freakishly accomplished resume of extracurricular activities, and yet get turned down by Harvard.
3) NCLB was enacted over five years ago, and it way too late to be criticizing the law without offering anything in the way of solutions. Yet right at the point this op-ed should be telling the reader what Congress should do, if not try to help all students attain at least minimal proficiency in reading and math, it veers off into a wholly unrelated discussion of...vouchers. Huh? I imagine this is because actually proposing solutions would lay bare the fact that NCLB's authors made a conscious choice to focus attention on the lowest-performing, most disadvantaged students, because, unlike the gifted, and more or or less by definition--they need those resources the most. That's not to say some kind of growth-model approach isn't warrented, it is. But life is about hard choices, and op-eds like this simply don't have the courage to admit that they're advocating for a return to the days where the least got the least and the most got the most. Which leads to:
4) Between this, complaints about affirmative action, and the so-called "boys crisis," we've reached the point where people are actually arguing, with a straight face, that the real crisis in American education is the shameful neglect--the injustice--of how we educate smart white men. There's only one more place to go here--somewhere in the depths of the Heritage foundation lurks a 22-year old policy analyst who is undoubtedly preparing to launch a career in wingnuttery on just this issue--and it's this: how NCLB discriminates against rich people. Surely it's the smart white wealthy man who's the true victim here, kept down by a law and a nation that refuses to recongnize his special needs.
Friday, August 24, 2007
America's Worst Colleges
According to RADAR Online, via TNR. In an alternate universe where I can't besmirch the good name of Education Sector, I get to freelance the 2008 version of this....
The Gray Area Between Church and State
Today’s New York Times has a thought-provoking article about a Hebrew charter school in Florida
As charter schooling has grown, so too have the number of schools that teeter on the border between church and state or that could be considered exclusionary because of an intense focus on one culture or language. It’s an issue that is likely to gain prominence as the growth of choice in schooling allows parents and students to choose more customized schools—to some, this allows students to find a school that meets their academic and social needs, to others it means the re-segregation of public schooling. As usual, the answer is probably a little bit of both.
Compete or Litigate?
Earlier this week I received a press release from the American Association of Colleges for Teacher Education (AACTE) annoucing, with enthusiasm, that "a coalition of parents, students, community groups, and legal advocates sued the United States Department of Education and Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings for violating the teacher quality provisions of the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) Act."
The essence of the suit is this: NCLB requires all teachers to be "highly qualified," the components of which include full certification by the state in which the teacher happens to live. In most states, a prerequesite for full certification is completion of an approved teacher training program--i.e. the programs represented by AACTE. But some states also have "alternative certification" programs that allow teachers to skip the teacher prep program, or start teaching first and complete the program while they're on the job. Alt-cert is what allows programs like Teach for America, which puts freshly-minted graduates of top colleges directly into the classroom (after an intensive summer training program run by TFA itself, not an AACTE institution), to exist. AACTE is saying that under the NCLB "highly qualified" definition, alt-cert programs are illegal.
Leaving the legal issues aside (and as the Gadfly pointed out this week, NCLB is ambiguous and perhaps even contradictory on this point), here's what this boils down to:
We have a group of colleges and universities, represented by AACTE, who are selling a service.
We have a group of people who want to be teachers who don't want to buy the service.
We have a group of school districts who want to hire those teachers, knowing full well that they haven't bought the service.
We have a lot of research, like this, saying that the service, and the certification process to which it's tied, seems to have very little impact on the likelihood of a teacher succeding in the classroom.
Faced with this situation, AACTE members have two options: 1) Improve the quality of their service and convince people it's worth buying. 2) Sue the federal government to compel people to spend a lot of time and money on something they don't want and which research says they don't need.
That they chose (2) says a lot.
The essence of the suit is this: NCLB requires all teachers to be "highly qualified," the components of which include full certification by the state in which the teacher happens to live. In most states, a prerequesite for full certification is completion of an approved teacher training program--i.e. the programs represented by AACTE. But some states also have "alternative certification" programs that allow teachers to skip the teacher prep program, or start teaching first and complete the program while they're on the job. Alt-cert is what allows programs like Teach for America, which puts freshly-minted graduates of top colleges directly into the classroom (after an intensive summer training program run by TFA itself, not an AACTE institution), to exist. AACTE is saying that under the NCLB "highly qualified" definition, alt-cert programs are illegal.
Leaving the legal issues aside (and as the Gadfly pointed out this week, NCLB is ambiguous and perhaps even contradictory on this point), here's what this boils down to:
We have a group of colleges and universities, represented by AACTE, who are selling a service.
We have a group of people who want to be teachers who don't want to buy the service.
We have a group of school districts who want to hire those teachers, knowing full well that they haven't bought the service.
We have a lot of research, like this, saying that the service, and the certification process to which it's tied, seems to have very little impact on the likelihood of a teacher succeding in the classroom.
Faced with this situation, AACTE members have two options: 1) Improve the quality of their service and convince people it's worth buying. 2) Sue the federal government to compel people to spend a lot of time and money on something they don't want and which research says they don't need.
That they chose (2) says a lot.
Lies My Teachers Told Me
Over at the Huffington Post, Marc Lampkin from ED in 08 notes that the NEA's characterization of the merit pay conversation at the recent Democratic presidential debate in Iowa was...less than accurate. The NEA press release said:
But Lampkin points out that:
In the long run, I think this militant anti-merit pay stance is going to be very, very bad for the NEA.
The optics are terrible, first of all. While it's true that there are few jobs where pay is tied to performance in a purely meritocratic way, it's equally true that fewer and fewer people have jobs likes those in teaching where (A) your employer is prohibited from even taking merit into consideration when setting pay, and (B) your above-inflation pay increases occur automatically based on longetivity. Highlighting this difference isolates teachers from everyone else. There's a reason this is the issue where Democrats are increasingly likely to challenge union doctrine.
In the long run, moreover, opposition to merit pay is bad for individual teachers. The unionization of teachers that occurred in the 1960s was undeniably beneficial for teacher pay, raising compensation up to at least a decent standard of living. But that flattened out in the 1970s, and since then the average teacher salary has been stagnant. While other professions shared in the huge increase in national wealth that's occured since then, teachers were left out.
But at the same time, the overall amount of money spent on teacher pay has increased enormously, because while we haven't been paying teachers more, we've been paying a lot more teachers--the ratio of students to teachers is lower than it's ever been. This makes perfect sense--if you treat something like a commodity, and people want more of it, they're going to buy quantity, not quality. The only way the public is going to spend more money than they are now on an individual teacher is if they feel like they're getting something back in return--merit. And of course there are literally tens of thousands of unusually meritorious teachers out there right now who can't be paid what they're worth because the contracts under which they work don't allow it.
The NEA's problem is that it's so big and so rich that it can get away with the kind of thing Lampkin describes. It can bully Democrats trying to win primaries and have an impact, at least for a while. But there's a difference between a group politicians have to listen and a group politicians want to listen to, and the distinction tends play out in a lot of subtle but important ways down the road. To be clear, I don't think teachers shouldn't have a powerful national union--they should. But sometimes power gives you the ability to avoid hard choices, and becomes its own worst enemy in the end.
"Democrats running for president reject any mandatory pay-for-performance schemes as part of the reauthorization of the federal No Child Left Behind Act. The candidates also reject any plan to tie teacher pay to student test scores. The candidates stated their opposition to merit pay during a nationally
televised debate in Des Moines, Iowa."
But Lampkin points out that:
...one candidate who stated his support for performance pay said teachers "can't be judged simply on standardized tests that don't take into account whether children are prepared before they get to school or not [...]." To me, the word "simply" means he's against using test scores as the only way to evaluate teacher performance. And the words "don't take into account whether children are prepared" mean he's open to performance pay based on "value-added" gains in student test scores -- a method that takes into account how much students know when they enter a teacher's classroom.That candidate was very careful on Sunday to say he is only for performance pay plans that get buy-in from teachers. But that is happening in many places across the country. Denver's teacher union led the effort to win support for a new performance-based compensation system for teachers there -- one that includes gains in student test scores as one measure. And just last week the New York Times published a story with the headline, "Teachers Say Yes to Pay Tied to Scores." Just because the national NEA opposes something doesn't mean that teachers in general -- or even their local affiliates -- do too.
In the long run, I think this militant anti-merit pay stance is going to be very, very bad for the NEA.
The optics are terrible, first of all. While it's true that there are few jobs where pay is tied to performance in a purely meritocratic way, it's equally true that fewer and fewer people have jobs likes those in teaching where (A) your employer is prohibited from even taking merit into consideration when setting pay, and (B) your above-inflation pay increases occur automatically based on longetivity. Highlighting this difference isolates teachers from everyone else. There's a reason this is the issue where Democrats are increasingly likely to challenge union doctrine.
In the long run, moreover, opposition to merit pay is bad for individual teachers. The unionization of teachers that occurred in the 1960s was undeniably beneficial for teacher pay, raising compensation up to at least a decent standard of living. But that flattened out in the 1970s, and since then the average teacher salary has been stagnant. While other professions shared in the huge increase in national wealth that's occured since then, teachers were left out.
But at the same time, the overall amount of money spent on teacher pay has increased enormously, because while we haven't been paying teachers more, we've been paying a lot more teachers--the ratio of students to teachers is lower than it's ever been. This makes perfect sense--if you treat something like a commodity, and people want more of it, they're going to buy quantity, not quality. The only way the public is going to spend more money than they are now on an individual teacher is if they feel like they're getting something back in return--merit. And of course there are literally tens of thousands of unusually meritorious teachers out there right now who can't be paid what they're worth because the contracts under which they work don't allow it.
The NEA's problem is that it's so big and so rich that it can get away with the kind of thing Lampkin describes. It can bully Democrats trying to win primaries and have an impact, at least for a while. But there's a difference between a group politicians have to listen and a group politicians want to listen to, and the distinction tends play out in a lot of subtle but important ways down the road. To be clear, I don't think teachers shouldn't have a powerful national union--they should. But sometimes power gives you the ability to avoid hard choices, and becomes its own worst enemy in the end.
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