The Other Lake Wobegon

There are a lot of cute references to No Child Left Behind as some sort of Lake Wobegon law, because of its provision that all children must be "proficient" by 2014. The reference is to Garrison Keillor's famous book by the same name, where all the children from the town of Lake Wobegon are above average. Of course, "average" does not mean the same thing as "proficient," so it's not really a fair comparison, unless the speaker intends to express that all kids being "proficient" is just as impossible as all kids being "above average." Regardless, this is a pretty common misconception and one of the biggest (false) critiques of NCLB.

We're about to get some good evidence of a real Lake Wobegon effect in education. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan has asked states to provide, as part of their teacher quality assurances due for stimulus funds, the number and percentage of teachers scoring at each performance level on local evaluations. (Read a write-up of the story at Education Week here.)

These numbers will surprise the general public and embarrass teachers and districts. The new Secretary of Ed. knows a thing or two about this. His administration commissioned the New Teacher Project to analyze its personnel policies, and one of the results was the chart at left. It shows the results of 36,000 teacher evaluations from 2003 to 2006 in Chicago. Over a four year period, 93 percent of all evaluations resulted in a rating of either "superior" or "excellent," while only .3 percent were deemed "unsatisfactory." In a district with its share of failing schools, less than one in twenty gave an unsatisfactory rating to any teacher in four years. Catherine Cullen thinks the data will be taken in stride, but I doubt such Wobegonian evaluation systems will resonate with the average taxpayer, especially as unemployment hits 25-year highs.

Evaluation systems, ideally, would not be just some abstract measure on which everyone scores well. They should be used for real asssessment and improvement, but they're often just drive-by formailities. Yet, ones that are done well can help document a case for dismissing an ineffective or negligent teacher, while ones that are done poorly serve as a major impediment. If a principal makes a mistake on a teacher's evaluation, that too can hamper a district's ability to rid itself of poor teachers.

And, to be honest, there are poor teachers. Evaluation systems that fail to recognize that fact deserve sunlight and scorn.

Sons and Daughters

Secretary Duncan talked with the New York Post editorial board yesterday and had some interesting things to say:

Duncan was surprised that Albany had added $405 million in state aid to public-school districts while hitting charter schools with what amounted to a $50 million cut.

"That doesn't make sense," Duncan said, after shaking his head for a minute. "These are our kids, these are our schools. If we're serious about it, then let's treat them all the same."

Lawmakers are freezing charter-school funding for the coming fiscal year, which critics say guts nearly $1,000 per city charter student.

Duncan suggested the funding inequity was creating unnecessary divisions between traditional public schools and privately managed charters -- even though they serve the same public-school kids.

"I have two children," he said. "I'm not going to treat my son differently than I'm going to treat my daughter."

Ah, but New York is treating its "children" differently. They give their daughter (traditional public schools) a bigger allowance but impose a strict curfew on them. They're definitely not allowed to date. The forgotten son (charters) doesn't get a very big allowance because he's expected to work for it. Since he's making his own money, he has the freedom to carouse around and generally stir up trouble. A stretch? Maybe, maybe not.

Update on Florida Legislation to Curtail Virtual Schooling

On Monday, I wrote about pending legislation in Florida that would severely curtail educational choices available through the public, state-run Florida Virtual School. The bill would eliminate enrollment in any elective courses and funding for any courses beyond a standard six periods. Students would no longer have an option to take electives, including some AP courses, beyond those offered at their traditional schools (especially painful for small or rural schools), nor would they have the opportunity to take extra courses to catch up on graduation requirements or accelerate. The legislation was approved in committee and now goes to the full State Senate. An AP article reporting on the legislation quotes the committee chair:

Sen. Stephen Wise [R-Jacksonville], the committee's chairman, said the measure would encourage public schools to enroll more students in virtual courses and that the Senate plans to increase Florida Virtual School's funding by 29 percent.

I don't understand how the Senator's first statement is possible, but I can check the budget figures on the second. In the committee's proposal (see page 27), the overall statewide per student funding remains flat at $6,860 per student. Here's the proposed budget for Florida Virtual School:

Yes, funding is increased by 29%. But enrollment, which is entirely based on student demand, is projected to go up 40.5%. Per student funding for the virtual school declines by 8.1%.

I live in Washington, DC, where one of the biggest issues is the rapidly declining enrollment in our city's public schools. Our schools are generally considered a mess and ground zero for reform battles.

In Florida, there is a public school program that is seen as a national model, rapidly increasing enrollments, and proving that public schools can compete for students and educate in new and different ways. This public school is being rewarded with significant budget cuts (double the per student cut of any other district) and significant limitations on its programs.

PS - A commenter on Monday asked for more information about Florida Virtual School (FLVS). I just finished work looking into the school's data for an article that will be published next month. My interest in the school stems primarily from the fact that it breaks free from many stereotypes common in education policy debates. The school is extremely innovative and has built a distinct educational philosophy, approach, and culture. At the same time, it is state-run, has maintained its identity as a public school, and remains part of the system. For persons who want to see innovation within public schools, this is an extremely important model. A few quick facts from that article:

• The school is a supplemental virtual school—students attend bricks-and-mortar schools and take FLVS courses in addition to their traditional classes. While the vast majority of FLVS students come from public high schools, the school is open to charter, private, and even home-schooled students.


• The school has been extremely popular with students and their families. In the 2008–09 school year, approximately 84,000 students will complete 168,000 half-credit courses, more than a tenfold increase since 2002-03. Much of the school’s recent growth has been driven by minority enrollments. Between June 2007 and July 2008, African-American enrollments grew by 49 percent, Hispanic enrollments by 42 percent, and Native American enrollments by 41 percent.


• The school employs more than 715 full-time and 29 adjunct teachers—all Florida-certified and “highly qualified”under the federal No Child Left Behind law.

You can read more about the school in a December 2007 Department of Education profile on "Innovations in Education" and more about virtual schooling in Education Week's 2009 Technology Counts publication.

Uncomfortable Truths

The University of Wisconsin-Madison has recently launched an initiative to leap toward a tuition model that involves greater degrees of price discrimination. It plans to increase tuition significantly, capitalize on those students who can pay the higher costs, and re-distribute excess money to low-income students. It's a bad idea for a variety of reasons (read the Edu-Optimists here and here for more), not least of which is making the true cost of higher education ever more opaque, but it's also forcing Wisconsin to admit some hard truths:

To sell the Madison Initiative, [Wisconsin's Chancellor] has had to be candid about some shortcomings at the institution. Offering need-based aid simply hasn't been part of the "tradition" at Wisconsin, and that's left a gap of about $20 million in annual unmet need at the university, according to [the chancellor]. The Madison Initiative is expected to provide $10 million to close the gap, and a simultaneous fund-raising effort is designed to raise the remaining $10 million.

Historically, Wisconsin has put most of its money toward funding students based on merit -- not need. In 2006-7, the university awarded $23 million in merit-based aid to undergraduates, compared with $6.5 million in need-based aid, according to university officials.

Unfortunately, offering need-based aid isn't part of the "tradition" at most elite colleges and universities. And not only do they not give much aid, they don't enroll very many low-income students, either. Below are the percent of students enrolled with Pell Grants, a good proxy for low-income college students, at selected prestigious institutions across the country:

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign: 15.9%
University of Michigan Ann Arbor: 12.9%
University of Virginia: 7.9%
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill: 14.0%
University of Wisconsin-Madison 12.5%
Stanford University: 13.5%
Yale University: 10.4%
Harvard University: 8.7%
Princeton University: 9.5%
University of Pennsylvania: 9.3%
Duke University: 10.1%
Northwestern University: 9.2%

Some of these institutions received a lot of good press in the last couple years for announcing generous financial aid programs for low-income students. The dirty secret is they tend not to enroll very many low-income students in the first place. And, while the rest of the country experienced a 36.7 percent rise in Pell Grant participation between 2000 and 2006, elite colleges and universities enrolled 1.9 percent fewer. Thanks to Wisconsin for nothing else than forcing these realities into the public.

Late Choices

Secretary of Education Arne Duncan today released a letter to chief state school officers regarding regulations passed back in October. In what is no April Fool's joke, his letter rolls back a regulation that could have helped provide parents of children enrolled in unsuccessful schools the option of choosing a better one.

No Child Left Behind mandates that, for every school labeled in need of improvement, districts must notify parents of an option to transfer to another, more successful school within the district. Unfortunately, only meager fractions of eligible students take up this provision, and its implementation has a lot to do with that.

The law requires districts to give parents notice by at least at least the first day of school of the following year. So, if you're a parent, imagine going through the school registration process in the fall, buying supplies for your child, and believing that your child will begin attending school X. Then, on the first day of school, your child brings home a letter that says her school failed to make adequate yearly progress last spring, and she now has the option to transfer to another school. She only wasted one day in this school, and maybe you weren't particularly keen on it in the first place, maybe the supplies will be the same everywhere, and maybe the other options would be on your route to work or your child could easily find some other way to attend the new school...in other words, a lot of maybes.

Instead, imagine you, as a parent, were notified at least two weeks in advance of the new school year, as the October regulations dictated. You would have time to consider your options, visit new schools (maybe even new teachers), and plan transportation. You might be altogether more interested in exercising your right to choose.

So who cares whether it's one day our fourteen? The truth is, for a number of reasons (including an over-burdened testing industry), states have proven to be quite poor at turning test results into accountability data. Paul Manna analyzed 2005-6 school year data to determine the date at which states released determinations of whether schools had met or failed to meet proficiency targets. Of students who were tested in the spring of 2006, only five states were able to return school and district data by the end of July. Sixteen managed to do so in the first half of August, and 16 more in the second half. After school started in most states, twenty had failed to report the spring test results: ten finished in September, four in October, three in November, and three states failed to release the data by the end of November.

Secretary Duncan's waiver allows this problem to fester. (Although you could argue the fourteen day regulation was illegal, since it expands the original law, you won't find any support in Duncan's letter: he makes it clear this is just a one year waiver. The fourteen day provision would still take effect for the 2010-2011 school year.) His waiver makes it less urgent for states to turn around test results promptly, which has implications beyond just an under-used school choice provision. Late data results also penalize schools labeled in need of improvement, because it gives them little time to implement a real school improvement plan. Instead of having a summer to figure out how best to reconfigure their school, which sections of the student body need the most help, which subjects students are most behind in, or which turnaround specialist to hire, the school and district often have to make these adjustments on the fly. That makes the process even more difficult, and it's too bad federal policy is moving in the opposite direction.

A Move to Limit Educational Choice in Florida

While reformers hope that the country's fiscal crisis will lead to much needed educational changes, there's at least one move underway to do the exact opposite. Under the guise of budget cuts, the Florida legislature is attempting to severely curtail educational choices available through the state-run Florida Virtual School (see page 12 of bill text).

If the bill, which is making its way through the Florida Senate, passes, students would no longer have the option to take additional credits through the virtual school. Want to extend the school day virtually? Nope. Fail algebra I your freshman year and want to take an extra course online to catch up to the college track? No dice. Want to graduate early (and save the state money)? Not gonna happen. Excited about school and want to take a high school course while in middle school? Way too ambitious. Stuck because you need to pass a course and there is no summer school option? Sit in the same class again next year. [Even though we know what will happen is that it will be much more likely for teachers to just pass kids along.]

The bill would also limit the virtual school's offering to "core curricula courses" only. Forget choice and a market-driven mechanism to allow students options to take AP Art History, Computer Science, or any number of other courses. Elective options are limited to what your bricks and mortar school can offer.

The irony here is too much. Just last week, an entire special edition of Education Week detailed the rise to prominence and potential of virtual schooling. And by all accounts, Florida Virtual School is a national model. Every other state is trying to match Florida's current success. Despite this success, the Florida legislature keeps trying to sabotage the program.

Florida Virtual School is also the most prominent case study for the "disruptive innovation" theory that posits virtual education as a transformational opportunity for greater personalization in education. The seemingly arbitrary nature of a few words inserted into a long amendment make this type of innovation so much more fragile in the public sector.

PS - Before you start pointing your fingers at the nefarious teachers unions, note that this time its the Republican-dominated Florida State Senate that's proposing these changes.

Not Exactly

Fred Hiatt sat down with Bill Gates to talk education reform, producing a pretty straightforward reformist summary in the Post yesterday. One point, however, deserves clarification. Hiatt said:

In fact, Gates said, evidence shows no connection between teaching quality and most of the measures used in contracts to determine pay. Seniority, holding a master's degree or teacher's certification, and even, below 10th grade, having deep knowledge of a subject -- these all are mostly irrelevant.

A lot depends on what you mean by "mostly," I suppose, but you really can't characterize each of those factors in exactly the same way. Holding a master's degree has been proven to be pretty definitively irrelevant; this is one of the most consistent findings in the research and really quite shocking when you think about it. The effect of certification is a little tricky to measure because the vast majority of all teachers are certified and those who aren't tend to differ from the general population in specific ways, positive (TFA) and negative (the district needed a body in the classroom and literally hired someone off the street.) Master's degrees, by contrast, split about 50/50. They are an advanced postseconary credential in education granted by an accredited institution of higher learning and yet when you control for other factors they have no impact on classroom effectiveness, as measured by student learning gains, at all. This is one of those public policy scandals that's so big and ubiquitous and long-standing that it's hard to see, becuase it's everywhere. 

Experience, by contrast--that is, "seniority"--really does make a big difference in the early years of teachers' careers. Nearly everyone is a lot better after five years in the classroom than they are right out of the box. Then effectiveness flattens out and actually declines near the end of teachers' careers. Of course it's true that some first-year teachers, while much worse than their future fifth-year selves, are still better than the current fifth-year selves of other teachers. But still, we shouldn't lose sight of seniority--low-income, low-performing and minority students tend to be disproportionately assigned to rookie teachers with terrible consequences. I know a former teacher who in her first year of teaching was assigned all the low-performing students in her grade, and when she asked why, her principal said "We figured you'd be gone by November anyway." 

The Unmatched

New York City released the results of its mandatory high school admission process last week. It's receiving a lot of negative attention at online parent forums (like this one) for the fact that 7,500 students (nine percent) received no placement at all. These students will have to submit preferences to a supplementary round for placement at new or under-subscribed schools. Understandably, parents and the unmatched students are upset, but, while the 7,500 number seems large, for some missing perspective here are the numbers of unmatched students over the last several years:

2009: 7,455
2008: 7,722
2007: 8,340
2006: 8,097
2005: 10,217
2004: 16,609
2003: 34,837

These numbers are incredibly important: they are the number of students who did not get one of their top twelve choices in a system that prides itself on choice. These are the failures of the choice system. But, as the numbers above show, New York has gotten a lot better. In a city where roughly 90,000 eighth graders apply to high school each year, they are now able to give more than 90 percent of students one of their choices, when just six years ago more than one out of three students was administratively assigned a school in a choice system.

The fact that the number of unmatched students continues to fall is a good thing, but it also poses the question of how many is acceptable. How do we know what's good enough? Do the positives of school choice--harnessing the power of parental preferences, opening more schools to more students--outweigh the non-trivial pain experienced by the unmatched families? Not to mention the costs of implementing a choice system, the school fairs, the public relations efforts to explain choice options, the investments in technology to match students, etc.

In almost every other public school system in the country, seats are filled based on who lives nearby. If a student happens to live in a neighborhood zoned to a crappy school, they don't have many options. New York City has been one of the leaders in changing that paradigm; unmatched students are a side effect of that process, but fortunately, a diminishing one.