• When Push Comes To Pull In The Parent Trigger Debate

    The so-called “parent trigger," the policy by which a majority of a school’s parents can decide to convert it to a charter school, seems to be getting a lot of attention lately.

    Advocates describe the trigger as “parent empowerment," a means by which parents of students stuck in “failing schools” can take direct action to improve the lives of their kids. Opponents, on the other hand, see it as antithetical to the principle of schools as a public good – parents don’t own schools, the public does. And important decisions such as charter conversion, which will have a lasting impact on the community as a whole (including parents of future students), should not be made by a subgroup of voters.

    These are both potentially appealing arguments. In many cases, however, attitudes toward the parent trigger seem more than a little dependent upon attitudes toward charter schools in general. If you strongly support charters, you’ll tend to be pro-trigger, since there’s nothing to lose and everything to gain. If you oppose charter schools, on the other hand, the opposite is likely to be the case. There’s a degree to which it’s not the trigger itself but rather what’s being triggered - opening more charter schools - that’s driving the debate.

  • The Busy Intersection Of Test-Based Accountability And Public Perception

    Last year, the New York City Department of Education (NYCDOE) rolled out its annual testing results for the city’s students in a rather misleading manner. The press release touted the “significant progress” between 2010 and 2011 among city students, while, at a press conference, Mayor Michael Bloomberg called the results “dramatic." In reality, however, the increase in proficiency rates (1-3 percentage points) was very modest, and, more importantly, the focus on the rates hid the fact that actual scale scores were either flat or decreased in most grades. In contrast, one year earlier, when the city's proficiency rates dropped due to the state raising the cut scores, Mayor Bloomberg told reporters (correctly) that it was the actual scores that "really matter."

    Most recently, in announcing their 2011 graduation rates, the city did it again. The headline of the NYCDOE press release proclaims that “a record number of students graduated from high school in 2011." This may be technically true, but the actual increase in the rate (rather than the number of graduates) was 0.4 percentage points, which is basically flat (as several reporters correctly noted). In addition, the city's "college readiness rate" was similarly stagnant, falling slightly from 21.4 percent to 20.7 percent, while the graduation rate increase was higher both statewide and in New York State's four other large districts (the city makes these comparisons when they are favorable).*

    We've all become accustomed to this selective, exaggerated presentation of testing data, which is of course not at all limited to NYC. And it illustrates the obvious fact that test-based accountability plays out in multiple arenas, formal and informal, including the court of public opinion.

  • Colorado's Questionable Use Of The Colorado Growth Model

    I have been writing critically about states’ school rating systems (e.g., OhioFloridaLouisiana), and I thought I would find one that is, at least in my (admittedly value-laden) opinion, more defensibly designed. It didn't quite turn out as I had hoped.

    One big starting point in my assessment is how heavily the systems weight absolute performance (how highly students score) versus growth (how quickly students improve). As I’ve argued many times, the former (absolute level) is a poor measure of school performance in a high-stakes accountability system. It does not address the fact that some schools, particularly those in more affluent areas, serve  students who, on average, enter the system at a higher-performing level. This amounts to holding schools accountable for outcomes they largely cannot control (see Doug Harris' excellent book for more on this in the teacher context). Thus, to whatever degree testing results can be used to judge actual school effectiveness, growth measures, while themselves highly imperfect, are to be preferred in a high-stakes context.

    There are a few states that assign more weight to growth than absolute performance (see this prior post on New York City’s system). One of them is Colorado's system, which uses the well-known “Colorado Growth Model” (CGM).*

    In my view, putting aside the inferential issues with the CGM (see the first footnote), the focus on growth in Colorado's system is in theory a good idea. But, looking at the data and documentation reveals a somewhat unsettling fact: There is a double standard of sorts, by which two schools with the same growth score can receive different ratings, and it's mostly their absolute performance levels determining whether this is the case.

  • Do Charter Schools Serve Fewer Special Education Students?

    A new report from the U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) provides one of the first large-scale comparisons of special education enrollment between charter and regular public schools. The report’s primary finding, which, predictably, received a fair amount of attention, is that roughly 11 percent of students enrolled in regular public schools were on special education plans in 2009-10, compared with just 8 percent of charter school students.

    The GAO report’s authors are very careful to note that their findings merely describe what you might call the “service gap” – i.e., the proportion of special education students served by charters versus regular public schools – but that they do not indicate the reasons for this disparity.

    This is an important point, but I would take the warning a step further:  The national- and state-level gaps themselves should be interpreted with the most extreme caution.

  • Mind The Gap

    We have been engaged in decades-long public policy debates on gaps and how best to close them: the income gap, the student achievement gap, gender-linked gaps in employment opportunities. But why do we care so much about gaps? In a land of diversity, why are subgroup differences such a concern?

    At a basic level, we care about gaps because (or when) our fundamental assumption is that, on a “level playing field," there should be no systematic differences among people based on ascribed traits, such as race and gender, that are unrelated to the “game." It is “ok” if a specific Hispanic kid performs at a lower level than his/her white counterpart or vice-versa. But it’s not ok if, on average, Hispanic students’ test scores systematically lag behind that of similar white children. Why? Because we know intelligence and ability are normally distributed across racial/ethnic groups. So, when groups differ in important outcomes, we know that this "distance” is indicative of other problems.

    What problems exactly? That is a more complex question.

  • Louisiana's "School Performance Score" Doesn't Measure School Performance

    Louisiana’s "School Performance Score" (SPS) is the state’s primary accountability measure, and it determines whether schools are subject to high-stakes decisions, most notably state takeover. For elementary and middle schools, 90 percent of the SPS is based on testing outcomes. For secondary schools, it is 70 percent (and 30 percent graduation rates).*

    The SPS is largely calculated using absolute performance measures – specifically, the proportion of students falling into the state’s cutpoint-based categories (e.g., advanced, mastery, basic, etc.). This means that it is mostly measuring student performance, rather than school performance. That is, insofar as the SPS only tells you how high students score on the test, rather than how much they have improved, schools serving more advantaged populations will tend to do better (since their students tend to perform well when they entered the school) while those in impoverished neighborhoods will tend to do worse (even those whose students have made the largest testing gains).

    One rough way to assess this bias is to check the association between SPS and student characteristics, such as poverty. So let’s take a quick look.

  • Gender Pay Gaps And Educational Achievement Gaps

    There is currently an ongoing rhetorical war of sorts over the gender wage gap. One “side” makes the common argument that women earn around 75 cents on the male dollar (see here, for example).

    Others assert that the gender gap is a myth, or that it is so small as to be unimportant.

    Often, these types of exchanges are enough to exasperate the casual observer, and inspire claims such as “statistics can be made to say anything." In truth, however, the controversy over the gender gap is a good example of how descriptive statistics, by themselves, say nothing. What matters is how they’re interpreted.

    Moreover, the manner in which one must interpret various statistics on the gender gap applies almost perfectly to the achievement gaps that are so often mentioned in education debates.

  • The Education Reform Movement: Reset Or Redo?

    Our guest author today is Dr. Clifford B. Janey, former superintendent for the Newark Public Schools, District of Columbia Public Schools, and Rochester City School District. He is currently a Senior Weismann Fellow at the Bankstreet College of Education in New York City, and a Shanker Institute board member.

    For too many students, families, and communities, the high school diploma represents either a dream deferred or a broken contract between citizens and the stewards of America's modern democracy. With the reform movement’s unrelenting focus on testing and its win/lose consequences for students and staff, the high school diploma, which should signify college and work readiness, has lost its value.

    Not including the over seven thousand students who drop out of high school daily, the gap between the percentage of those who graduate and their readiness for college success will continue to worsen the social and income inequalities in life. Recent studies report that America has the highest number of people (46.2 million) living in poverty since data collection began in 1959. While poverty and its conditions have been unforgiving, policy makers and education reformers have largely ignored this reality. Rebuttals to this argument are interesting, but, without fundamental change, the predictable growth within the ranks of poverty will continue.

    A framework within which solutions will thrive requires a redo of the national reform focus, not merely a reset of existing efforts—including teacher evaluation systems, closing low performing schools (and opening up new ones that are at best marginally better), and increasing the opportunity for mayoral control (which still commands attention but with little assurance of transparency).

  • Reviving Labor After Wisconsin: Unions Need A New Approach Emphasizing Civil Rights

    Our guest authors today are Richard D. Kahlenberg, a senior fellow at The Century Foundation, and Moshe Z. Marvit, a civil rights attorney. They are authors of the book Why Labor Organizing Should Be a Civil Right: Rebuilding a Middle-Class Democracy By Enhancing Worker Voice.

    Conservatives are calling the failure of public sector unions to recall Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker labor’s “Waterloo.”  Just as private sector unionism has declined from a third of the workforce in the 1950s to less than 7 percent today, Charles Krauthammer writes in the Washington Post, “Tuesday, June 5, 2012, will be remembered as the beginning of the long decline of the public-sector union."

    This forecast seems an exercise in hyperbole (many voters don’t think recall elections are an appropriate response to policy disputes) but the setback for labor was indeed serious.  One of the lessons of Wisconsin is that if public sector unions want to survive, they need to find ways to help revive trade unionism in the private sector.

    The fates of the two sectors are deeply intertwined.

  • The Landmark Case Of Us V. Them

    Patrick Riccards, CEO of the education advocacy group ConnCAN, has published a short piece on his personal blog in which he decries the “vicious and fact-free attacks” in education debates.

    The post lists a bunch of “if/then” statements to illustrate how market-based reform policy positions are attacked on personal grounds, such as, “If one provides philanthropic support to improve public schools, then one must be a profiteer looking to make personal fortunes off public education." He summarizes the situation with a shot of his own: “Yes, there are no attacks that are too vicious or too devoid of fact for the defenders of the status quo." What of his fellow reformers? They “simply have to stand and take the attacks and the vitriol, no matter how ridiculous."

    Mr. Riccards is dead right that name-calling, ascription of base motives, and the abuse of empirical evidence are rampant in education debates. I myself have criticized the unfairness of several of his “if/then” statements, including the accusations of profiteering and equating policy views with being “anti-teacher."

    But anyone who thinks that this behavior is concentrated on one “side” or the other must be wearing blinders.