THE
EDUCATION GADFLYTHE
EDUCATION GADFLY
A Bulletin of Weekly News and Analysis from the Thomas B. Fordham Institute
Volume 10, Number 15. April 22, 2010.
Find an easier-to-read version here.
This week on The Education Gadfly Show Podcast: Linda Darling-Hammond gets her own theme song
Overview
The Education Gadfly Show Podcast
Avoid fruit salad
What will the Education Department's current $350 million competition to develop new multi-state assessments actually yield? One new "national test"? Two? A bunch? Will they be any good? Will they yield the information that America needs and that many educators and parents crave?
Answers to many such questions will not be known for years. But one key question will get answered, for better or worse, by September 30: How many different test-development initiatives will Secretary Duncan agree to pay for?
And here's the answer to dread: just one. The number of potential applicants has been falling faster than volcanic ash over Europe and a scary rumor says those that remain may yet wrap themselves into a single project before the end-of-June application deadline.
Education Department spokespersons have recently talked talk of funding "at least two" such consortia. Not many weeks ago, however, the field was buzzing with talk that six or more consortia were forming for this purpose. At a big ETS-sponsored conference last month, four new assessment "models" were displayed before an audience of state and district leaders. It was, in effect, an audition, after which states were expected to sign up for the version they liked best—or maybe more than one.
Today, however—nine weeks before proposals are due at ED—there are clear signs that, like the airline industry, consolidation is underway and perhaps just two consortia will even apply (not counting a separate high-school-only assessment development that is widely believed to be a de facto "set-aside" for Marc Tucker's National Center on Education and the Economy). The National Governors Association and Council of Chief State School Officers, which are developing the new "common core" standards with which all the new assessments are supposed to be aligned, recently issued a paper describing the two groups. One—the "Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Career"—is led by Florida, Massachusetts, and Louisiana, and will be managed by Achieve. The other—the "Smarter Balanced Consortium"—is led by West Virginia, Nebraska, and Oregon, among others, with technical assistance from Stanford's Linda Darling-Hammond. A few days ago, however, an astute Education Week follower of this topic blogged that perhaps the two would wind up joining forces and only one single solitary hegemonic consortium would seek Duncan's money (plus Tucker, of course).
That is an outcome devoutly to be shunned. Also to be avoided is a grant competition that yields but a single winner. For while the United States will be well served in 2010 by a single set of "common" academic standards—provided, of course, that these are voluntary, independent of federal control, and possessed of solid, rigorous content—it would be an enormous mistake to slice and dice and recombine the various assessment schemes into a single fruit salad. What the country needs, and what states need, at least for now, is a clear choice between apples and oranges. Indeed, we would favor kumquats, too, and lament the apparent disappearance of an innovative plan sketched (at that ETS conference) by the University of Pittsburgh's Lauren Resnick and Wireless Generation's Larry Berger.
As much as the Education Department wishes this weren't so and has tried in its eighty-plus page grant competition to describe a delectable fruit salad, the fact is that not all assessments can serve all worthwhile ends. In particular, the testing world has long distinguished between assessments meant to inform teachers, improve instruction, and provide useful mid-course feedback to schools and educators—these are often called "formative"—and the kind that are used primarily for accountability purposes, i.e., to gauge what has and hasn't been learned, usually at year's end, usually at the individual, classroom, school, district, and state levels. (The latter are typically termed "summative.")
Oversimplifying, those who emphasize the former—formative—approach tend also to be much taken with "performance" tasks, student portfolios and such, preferably designed and evaluated by teachers, while those more interested in accountability are more apt to craft relatively traditional tests, speedily and inexpensively administered, quickly and objectively scored. Again oversimplifying, the nascent Florida-Achieve "partnership" appears to be squatting in the latter camp while the fledgling West Virginia-Darling-Hammond group is pitching its tent in the former.
Both approaches have value and each of the two consortia has appealing elements in its preliminary design. But they simply aren't the same thing and neither will—or can, or should be expected to—serve every worthy purpose in the realm of assessment. Although Secretary Duncan's team understandably dreams of a single, tidy, new national assessment system that serves both formative and summative purposes, any new system also needs to be valid, reliable, affordable, manageable, and a bunch of other things. It's folly to suppose that dreaming about a single combined approach will make it real. And everything we know about assessments gives us pause regarding the feasibility of such a hybrid.
Far better to let multiple teams—preferably more than two—develop different designs, each with its own integrity and viability. Then let states select the approach that suits them. Let Congress decide how to revise NCLB/ESEA to take account of these new assessments. Let NAEP continue to serve as external auditor—and comparer—of states' performance, regardless of what they use for their own tests. Let's see what works. Let's encourage some experimentation. Let's allow pears to be separate from mangoes. Let's avoid fruit salad.
Then there is the awkward, sensitive matter of Professor Darling-Hammond and her earnest, deep, and well-reasoned view that assessment is mainly for the purpose of improving instruction, not for tallying, ranking, evaluating, judging, or scoring. Indeed, she seems none too interested in external standards or in aligning assessments with them. Were there to be but one single new assessment, and were she to play a leadership role in that project (as we must assume would happen), the assessment that results would not likely foster either stronger student achievement or better results-based accountability.
One clue: The Palo Alto charter school most prominently identified with Ms. Darling-Hammond (and, indeed, with the Stanford ed school) has produced abysmal results on the current California state test. So abysmal that its charter is not being renewed. We suspect that this school is a cheerful place full of eager teachers, plenty of portfolios, performances and formative feedback, maybe even contented, fulfilled students. The problem is that they're not learning what the state of California, in its wisdom, has said they ought to learn.
In a matter of months, the "Common Core" state standards initiative is going to finalize its version of what young Americans ought to learn. We don't know what the final edition will look like or whether we'll like it. But the March draft was good, better than I for one expected, and I foresee many states concluding—round two Race to the Top applicants are supposed to conclude this by August—that the "common core" standards are superior to what they've been using.
That's a promising but risky move for American education, one far too important to compromise with a single, flawed new assessment system that tries to serve too many different purposes, that confuses peaches with pineapples, and that is designed in large measure by a respected academic who has many virtues but who also has a lackluster track record when it comes to kids actually learning.
By Chester E. Finn, Jr.
Earning its name at last
Will alternative certification finally be alternative? In New York State, at least, the answer is yes. Under a pilot plan passed unanimously by the State Board of Regents on Tuesday (and ushered through by a former ed school dean, David Steiner), alternative teacher preparation programs such as Teach For America and New York City Teaching Fellows will no longer have to concurrently enroll their participants in traditional education school master's programs. New York State still requires teachers to obtain a master's degree within five years of entering the classroom, but TFA, NYCTF, and other alt cert organizations will be able to create their own master's programs, with the Regents awarding the degree themselves; the degree-recipient would have to commit to work in a high-needs school for four years. Many states have alt cert pathways, but only a few, such as Rhode Island and Louisiana, let those alternative programs effectively certify their own teachers. As a result, in most other states, the "alternative" route looks a whole lot like a traditional ed school experience. No more. In what's a nod to both criticisms that ed schools aren't up to snuff and that these alternative programs are producing teachers at least as good as, if not better than, traditionally trained teachers, New York's alternative certification programs will now be just that: alternative. Let's hope more states follow suit.
"Regents Plan New Route to Master's in Teaching," by Lisa W. Foderaro, New York Times, April 20, 2010
"Alternative Path for Teachers Gains Ground," by Lisa W. Foderaro, New York Times, April 18, 2010
Musical chairs
The feds want serious change for their "School Improvement Grants" bucks, but several of Iowa's thirty-five lowest-rated schools aren't buying it. The state received $18.7 million in turnaround funds to help the lowest-performing 5 percent of schools, which could win $50,000 to $2 million each. But despite feeling pressured by tight budgets, eleven of the thirty-five simply won't apply, citing the money's strings as a "federal intrusion" into what's an issue of "local control." More troubling is the ways in which other schools are getting around the rules. To fulfill the necessary replacement of a school's principal under the "transformation model," schools in Columbus, Iowa are going to have the principal of the lowest-performing junior high school and lowest-performing high school simply switch jobs. Another district simply promoted the principal to a central office gig. We could call it principal musical chairs. But one thing's for sure, there's only one winner in that game, and it certainly won't be the kids. States beware: There are lots of ways to "turnaround" a school, and many of them are not up to par. Just ask Columbus, Iowa.
"Schools reluctant to take reform money," by Staci Hupp, Des Moines Register, April 18, 2010
Teacher re-recall
What do you do when you've got a surplus in one area, and a shortage in another? California's got an answer. Forced to pink-slip 23,000 regular education teachers this year due to budget shortfalls, the state plans on retraining some of them to help ease the shortage in special education classrooms. Through a partnership between the California Teacher Corps and local school districts, the pink-slipped teachers can work toward alternative special education certification, and can then be rehired by their districts as SPED teachers. In most professions, hiring the folks who're fired to serve the neediest population might seem backwards (and, hey, immoral). But this is teaching, where tenure-strangled human capital decisions mean layoffs typically have much more to do with longevity than quality. So props to California, which has found a way to keep young and enthusiastic teachers in its classrooms and address the SPED teacher shortage at the same time.
"Special Education a Second Chance for Pink-Slipped Teachers," by Katy Murphy, Oakland Tribune, April 14, 2010
Act your age, not your shoe size
Bullies have been stealing other students' lunch money for years. But students at one New York elementary school face a new adversary: their teacher. A third grade educator faces charges of petty larceny and endangering the welfare of a child after he repeatedly ate the noontime repasts of three students who receive free lunches under the federal National School Lunch Program, effectively stealing lunch money from the government (and food from his hungry students' mouths). The district was able to track the lunches because the students used their personal identification numbers to purchase them. They then delivered the lunches to the teacher's classroom. Gadfly can't help but be nostalgic for the times when we brought our teachers an apple for their desks. Here's a solution that might be more effective than prison: This teacher should be put on an all-cheese-sandwich diet.
"Third Grade Teacher Arrested for Stealing School Lunches," 13WHAM.com (Rochester, NY), April 13, 2010
Flypaper's Finest
A weekly selection of the best offerings from Flypaper, Fordham's blog.
Maybe there's no "teacher quality gap" after all, Mike Petrilli
It's taken as an article of faith in the education reform community: we're screwing poor kids by giving them less effective teachers than their more affluent peers enjoy. The evidence seems pretty much open-and-shut. Poor schools are home to more rookie teachers, those with less subject-matter knowledge, lower certification exam scores, you name it….But what if it's not true? In a brand-new Education Next forum, Eric Hanushek and Kati Haycock square off on the question of teacher equity….Read it here.
MD's vision on failing schools, Andy Smarick
Seldom do stakeholder committees convened by state departments of education put forward truly bold recommendations. Instead, their reports are too often full of requests for more money and status quo-friendly "reforms." And since most work nowadays related to failing schools is dominated by the deeply flawed "turnaround" craze, I had doubly modest expectations for Maryland's "Policy Practitioners' Workgroup" on chronically underperforming schools.
But to my surprise and delight, the workgroup's report is excellent…Read it here.
The Education Gadfly Show Podcast
Linda Darling-Hammond gets her own theme song
This week, Mike and Andy discuss Charlie Crist's veto, Linda Darling-Hammond's charter school, and Race to the Test's quickly narrowing field. Then Amber tells us about a new PEPG study on teacher compensation, and Stafford eats a cold cheese sandwich—and loves it! Click here to listen through our website and peruse past editions. To download the show as an mp3 to your computer, click here (no iPod required—this link will play through any music software on your computer, including Windows Media Player or RealPlayer).
Do more effective teachers earn more outside of the classroom?
Matthew Chingos and Martin West
Program on Education Policy and Governance, Harvard University
March 2010
This sophisticated and novel study can answer its title with one word: Yes. Chingos and West examined Florida public school income records and value-added data between 2001-02 and 2006-07 for 90,000 classroom teachers and 20,000 teachers who left the classroom during that time. They found that the majority (roughly 60 percent) of exiters remained employed by public school districts in Florida. (Only 4 percent moved to private schools, for example.) Further, when those fulltime exiters made a move, their median earnings increased, perhaps because many fled to higher-paying districts. Then, Chingos and West examined the relationship between pay (in the real world) and teacher effectiveness (in the classroom). First, they found that when they entered other industries, teachers had much wider variation in earnings than when they were in schools (not surprising if we take into account rigid teaching-salary schedules). More importantly, they found that, among grade 4-8 teachers leaving for other professions, there was a positive relationship between a teacher's increase in value-added math and reading student achievement and higher earnings outside of teaching. Admittedly, the sample was small, not randomly-selected, and only from one state, but the authors' conclusion makes sense: "Although teaching is surely a unique endeavor requiring specialized skills, the same attributes that make for effective teachers also appear to be rewarded in the broader labor market." It's too bad that Florida's inflexible teacher pay system doesn't allow for those attributes to be rewarded in our schools. You can find the study here.
Educational Economics: Where Do School Funds Go?
Marguerite Roza, Center on Reinventing Public Education
Urban Institute Press
2010
This short book is an essential primer on the fundamental and systemic problems in education funding, drawing from CRPE's own research and other important sources. One is reminded how the complexities, multiple layers, and many actors in schooling cause a half trillion dollars spent annually on K-12 education to flow in perverse and sometimes surprising ways. Some of these problems start with districts—CRPE, for example, found school-to-school spending differences in one district of a whopping $14,000 per student, and in another district, a principal who controlled just $4,000 of her school's entire budget. And yet districts are also at the mercy of state and federal constraints, while teacher contracts layer on even more rigidities and perversions. The authors report that 54 percent of teacher salaries support "automatic wage increases for longevity," and health benefits outpace those in comparable fields by $1,900 per teacher. The sum of it all is a "wicked problem," a phrase drawn from social planning literature (not from New England slang), wherein budgets act like a "house of cards, and any effort to dismantle or overhaul one piece will always require a new prop." To top all of this off, districts operate in a black financial box; they have no idea what anything costs, and wind up "flying blind" on financial decisions. The most fundamental paradox might lie in how to solve these wicked problems: To hedge against the unintended consequences of budgetary change, we might choose incremental, cautious solutions, but the depth and tragedy of these school funding flaws cry for a more radical approach, even for starting over. For highlighting this challenge, and for its accessible approach to a complicated but unavoidable topic, this book deserves spots on every ed reformer's bookshelf and every school finance professor's classroom. Buy it here.
By Eric Osberg
An Analysis of Academic Performance of Students Affected by Hurricane Katrina
Student Assessment Division, Department of Assessment, Accountability, and Data Quality
Texas Education Agency
March/April 2010
The Texas Education Agency wanted to know whether moving to Texas in the wake of Hurricane Katrina improved the achievement of the displaced students. It matched Katrina students (defined as pupils from Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, and Florida arriving in Texas and enrolling in Lone Star State schools after June 1, 2005) and "native" students with similar demographic characteristics. Using TAKS data from 2006 to 2009, researchers found that Katrina students in grade 3, 5, and 8 started out with lower TAKS scores than "native" matched students in 2006—no surprise there. But TEA also found that those same Katrina students made bigger gains in the intervening four years, resulting in marginally higher actual scores than their "native" peers in 2009. Compared to all Texas test takers, however, Katrina students didn't do so well: Scores ranged from 2 percent better (grade 3 reading) to 12 percent worse (grade 8 math) than all students in Texas in 2009. Further, the "native" matched Texas students also performed significantly worse than total Texas test takers. This paper provides an interesting second perspective to the August 2009 National Bureau of Economic Research working paper on Katrina evacuees, which looked specifically at the effect of those transferred-in students on native student achievement. It found that an influx of Katrina students had a distinctly negative effect on receiving schools' students' test scores and an increase in disciplinary problems; but while native students struggled, this TEA report tells us that Katrina students actually benefited from their stint in Texas schools. Read the TEA report here.
Education Unbound: The Promise and Practice of Greenfield Schooling
Frederick M. Hess
ASCD
2010
What if it's the system that's the problem? That's the question AEI's Rick Hess tackles in this discussion of what he calls "greenfield" schooling. He copped the word from the vocabularies of investors, engineers, and builders, who use it to describe "an area where there are unobstructed, wide-open opportunities to invent or build." There aren't a lot of those in American K-12 education. In fact, the system, he argues, is doing a downright terrible job of laying a path for creative problem-solvers, and it's to their own detriment. These folks have more cost-effective and time-efficient ways to do most anything in education, from training teachers, to conducting student assessments, to the actual nuts and bolts of classroom practice, and yet our bankrupt, failing, and archaic system goes out of its way to make life hard for them. Hess explains how we could change this, and what these problem-solvers need to succeed: human capital, venture capital, fewer bureaucratic hurdles, effective quality control mechanisms, and above all, an open mind on the part of the system they so desperately want to help. Even better, the system could learn from these organizations' recruiting processes, quality control standards, and cost-effective measures, as they blaze ahead despite the daily assaults from every front. This isn't about grand solutions or silver bullets; it's about long-term sustainable overhaul that changes the way we think about education service delivery and the policies that support or hinder it. And that is certainly a field worth tilling. Buy your copy here.
Celebrate Cinco de Mayo at el Instituto Fordham
This discussion sure will be a party (though dry until 5 pm—after the panel!). On May 5 from 3:30 to 5 pm, Paul Hill and Paul Peterson will present and discuss their new respective works on the history and future of school choice Learning As We Go (Hill) and Saving Schools (Peterson).Then Richard Kahlenberg (The Century Foundation) and Bill Tucker (Education Sector) will weigh in, while Fordham's Mike Petrilli ensures everything in moderation (get it?). Put on your party hats and RSVP to [email protected].
Calder will show you the money
The Louis Calder Foundation is seeking proposals from charters, parochial schools, charter management organizations, and community-based partnerships to develop "content based core curriculum education programs." They hope that supporting more organizations delivering strong content-based curricula will encourage others to follow suit. Eligible organizations serve students in K-8 and operate in the Northeast corridor, as far west as the Mississippi River. Inquiries including background information on your community, schools, curriculum and project budget should be sent to [email protected]. Find more information here.
About Us
The Education Gadfly is published weekly (ordinarily on Thursdays), with occasional breaks, by the Thomas B. Fordham Institute. Regular contributors include Amy Fagan, Daniela Fairchild, Chester E. Finn, Jr., Marisa Goldstein, Mickey Muldoon, Jamie Davies O'Leary, Eric Osberg, Stafford Palmieri, Emmy Partin, Michael J. Petrilli, Laura Elizabeth Pohl, Terry Ryan, Janie Scull, and Amber Winkler. Have something to say? Email us at [email protected]. Would you like to be spared from the Gadfly? Email [email protected] with "unsubscribe gadfly" in the text of your message. You are welcome to forward Gadfly to others, and from our website you can also email individual articles. If you have been forwarded a copy of Gadfly and would like to subscribe, you may either email [email protected] with "subscribe gadfly" in the text of the message or sign up online here. To read archived issues or obtain other reviews of reports and books, go to www.edexcellence.net and click on the Education Gadfly link.
The Thomas B. Fordham Institute is a nonprofit organization that conducts research, issues publications, and directs action projects in elementary and secondary education reform at the national level and in Ohio, with a special emphasis on our hometown of Dayton. (For Ohio news, check out our Ohio Education Gadfly, published bi-weekly, ordinarily on Wednesdays.) The Institute is neither connected with nor sponsored by Fordham University.
