• The Real Charter School Experiment

    The New York Times reports that there is a pilot program in Houston, called the "Apollo 20 Program" in which some of the district’s regular public schools are "mimicking" the practices of high-performing charter schools. According to the Times article, the group of pilot schools seek to replicate five of the practices commonly used by high-flying charters: extended school time; extensive tutoring; more selective hiring of principals and teachers; “data-driven” instruction, including frequent diagnostic quizzing; and a “no excuses” culture of high expectations.

    In theory, this pilot program is a good idea, since a primary mission of charter schools should be as a testing ground for new policies and practices that could help to improve all schools. More than a decade of evidence has made it very clear that there’s nothing about "charterness" that makes a school successful – and indeed, only a handful get excellent results. So instead of arguing along the tired old pro-/anti-charter lines, we should, like Houston, be asking why these schools excel and working to see if we can use this information productively.

    I’ll be watching to see how the pilot schools end up doing. I’m also hoping that the analysis (the program is being overseen by Harvard’s EdLabs) includes some effort to separate out the effects of each of the five replicated practices. If so, I’m guessing that we will find that the difference between high- and low-performing urban schools depends more than anything else on two factors: time and money.

  • In Ohio, Charter School Expansion By Income, Not Performance

    For over a decade, Ohio law has dictated where charter schools can open. Expansion was unlimited in Lucas County (the “pilot district” for charters) and in the “Ohio 8” urban districts (Akron, Canton, Cincinnati, Cleveland, Columbus, Dayton, Toledo, and Youngstown). But, in any given year, charters could open up in any other district that was classified as a “challenged district," as measured by whether the district received a state “report card” rating of “academic watch” or “academic emergency." This is a performance-based standard.

    Under this system, there was of course very rapid charter proliferation in Lucas County and the “Ohio 8” districts. Only a small number of other districts (around 20-30 per year) “met” the  performance-based standard. As a whole, the state’s current charter law was supposed to “open up” districts for charter schools when the districts are not doing well.

    Starting next year, the state is adding a fourth criterion: Any district with a “performance index” in the bottom five percent for the state will also be open for charter expansion. Although this may seem like a logical addition, in reality, the change offends basic principles of both fairness and educational measurement.

  • How Cross-Sectional Are Cross-Sectional Testing Data?

    In several posts, I’ve complained about how, in our public discourse, we misinterpret changes in proficiency rates (or actual test scores) as “gains” or “progress," when they actually represent cohort changes—that is, they are performance snapshots for different groups of students who are potentially quite dissimilar.

    For example, the most common way testing results are presented in news coverage and press releases is to present year-to-year testing results across entire schools or districts – e.g., the overall proficiency rate across all grades in one year compared with the next. One reason why the two groups of students being compared (the first versus the second year) are different is obvious. In most districts, tests are only administered to students in grades 3-8. As a result, the eighth graders who take the test in Year 1 will not take it in Year 2, as they will have moved on to the ninth grade (unless they are retained). At the same time, a new cohort of third graders will take the test in Year 2 despite not having been tested in Year 1 (because they were in second grade). That’s a large amount of inherent “turnover” between years (this same situation applies when results are averaged for elementary and secondary grades). Variations in cohort performance can generate the illusion of "real" change in performance, positive or negative.

    But there’s another big cause of incomparability between years: Student mobility. Students move in and out of districts every year. In urban areas, mobility is particularly high. And, in many places, this mobility includes students who move to charter schools, which are often run as separate school districts.

    I think we all know intuitively about these issues, but I’m not sure many people realize just how different the group of tested students across an entire district can be in one year compared with the next. In order to give an idea of this magnitude, we might do a rough calculation for the District of Columbia Public Schools (DCPS).

  • Labor In High School Textbooks: Bias, Neglect And Invisibility

    The nation has just celebrated Labor Day, yet few Americans have any idea why. As high school students, most were taught little about unions—their role, their accomplishments, and how and why they came to exist.

    This is one of the conclusions of a new report, released today by the Albert Shanker Institute in cooperation with the American Labor Studies Center. The report, "American Labor in U.S. History Textbooks: How Labor’s Story Is Distorted in High School History Textbooks," consists of a review of some of the nation’s most frequently used high school U.S. history textbooks for their treatment of unions in American history. The authors paint a disturbing picture, concluding that the history of the U.S. labor movement and its many contributions to the American way of life are "misrepresented, downplayed or ignored." Students—and all Americans—deserve better.

    Unfortunately, this is not a new problem. As the report notes, "spotty, inadequate, and slanted coverage" of the labor movement dates at least to the New Deal era. Scholars began documenting the problem as early as the 1960s. As this and previous textbook reviews have concluded, our history textbooks have essentially "taken sides" in the intense political debate around unions—the anti-union side.

    The impact of these textbook distortions has been amplified by our youth’s exposure to a media that is sometimes thoughtless and sometimes hostile in its reporting and its attitudes toward labor. This is especially troubling when membership in private sector unions is shrinking rapidly and the right of public sector unions to exist is hotly contested.

  • Grand Bargaining

    With Labor Day upon us, I’ve found myself thinking about three apparently unrelated pieces of sociological research, and how all point to the role of laws, policies, and institutions as "signalers" of the social values that we share.

    First, in an unpublished paper, Stanford University’s Cristobal Young examines the role of unemployment insurance in encouraging prolonged job search effort. Second, in a talk earlier this month at the annual meeting of the American Sociological Association, Shelley Correll (also at Stanford) discussed how greater awareness of laws such as the Family and Medical Leave Act (FMLA) make it harder for employers to discriminate against those who take it. Third, a recent article by Bruce Western (Harvard University) and Jake Rosenfeld (University of Washington) argues that unions contribute to a moral economy that reduces wage inequality for all workers, not just union members.

    I think that these three pieces of scholarship tell a similar story: policies, laws and institutions have impact beyond their primary intended purpose. Unemployment benefits are more than the money one receives when jobless; laws pertaining employment rights are more than rules enforced by the imposition of sanctions; and unions are more than organizations seeking to improve their members’ wages and working conditions. These policies, programs, and institutions also have a symbolic importance—they signal a consensus about what we value and desire as a society which simultaneously shapes the lens through which we judge our own behavior and that of others.

  • Predicaments Of Reform

    Our guest author today is David K. Cohen, John Dewey Collegiate Professor of Education and professor of public policy at the University of Michigan, and a member of the Shanker Institute’s board of directors. This is a response to Michael Petrilli, who recently published a post on the Fordham Institute’s blog that referred to Cohen’s new book.

    Dear Mike:

    Thank you for considering my book Teaching And Its Predicaments (Harvard University Press, 2011), and for your intelligent discussion of the issues. I write to continue the conversation. 

    You are right to say that I see the incoherence of U.S. public education as a barrier to more quality and less inequality, but I do not "look longingly" at Asia or Finland, let alone take them as models for what Americans should do to improve schools. 

    In my 2009 book (The Ordeal Of Equality: Did Federal Regulation Fix The Schools?), Susan L. Moffitt and I recounted the great difficulties that the "top-down" approach to coherence, with which you associate my work, encountered as Title I of the 1965 ESEA was refashioned to leverage much greater central influence on schooling. Susan and I concluded that increased federal regulation had not fixed the schools, and had caused some real damage along with some important constructive effects. We did not see central coherence as The Answer.

  • Quality Control, When You Don't Know The Product

    Last week, New York State’s Supreme Court issued an important ruling on the state’s teacher evaluations. The aspect of the ruling that got the most attention was the proportion of evaluations – or “weight” – that could be assigned to measures based on state assessments (in the form of estimates from value-added models). Specifically, the Court ruled that these measures can only comprise 20 percent of a teacher’s evaluation, compared with the option of up to 40 percent for which Governor Cuomo and others were pushing. Under the decision, the other 20 percent must consist entirely of alternative test-based measures (e.g., local assessments).

    Joe Williams, head of Democrats for Education Reform, one of the flagship organizations of the market-based reform movement, called the ruling “a slap in the face” and “a huge win for the teachers unions." He characterized the policy impact as follows: “A mediocre teacher evaluation just got even weaker."

    This statement illustrates perfectly the strange reasoning that seems to be driving our debate about evaluations.

  • Charter And Regular Public School Performance In "Ohio 8" Districts, 2010-11

    Every year, the state of Ohio releases an enormous amount of district- and school-level performance data. Since Ohio has among the largest charter school populations in the nation, the data provide an opportunity to examine performance differences between charters and regular public schools in the state.

    Ohio’s charters are concentrated largely in the urban “Ohio 8” districts (sometimes called the “Big 8”): Akron; Canton; Cincinnati; Cleveland; Columbus; Dayton; Toledo; and Youngstown. Charter coverage varies considerably between the “Ohio 8” districts, but it is, on average, about 20 percent, compared with roughly five percent across the whole state. I will therefore limit my quick analysis to these districts.

    Let’s start with the measure that gets the most attention in the state: Overall “report card grades." Schools (and districts) can receive one of six possible ratings: Academic emergency; academic watch; continuous improvement; effective; excellent; and excellent with distinction.

    These ratings represent a weighted combination of four measures. Two of them measure performance “growth," while the other two measure “absolute” performance levels. The growth measures are AYP (yes or no), and value-added (whether schools meet, exceed, or come in below the growth expectations set by the state’s value-added model). The first “absolute” performance measure is the state’s “performance index," which is calculated based on the percentage of a school’s students who fall into the four NCLB categories of advanced, proficient, basic and below basic. The second is the number of “state standards” that schools meet as a percentage of the number of standards for which they are “eligible." For example, the state requires 75 percent proficiency in all the grade/subject tests that a given school administers, and schools are “awarded” a “standard met” for each grade/subject in which three-quarters of their students score above the proficiency cutoff (state standards also include targets for attendance and a couple of other non-test outcomes).

    The graph below presents the raw breakdown in report card ratings for charter and regular public schools.

  • What Americans Think About Teachers Versus What They're Hearing

    The results from the recent Gallup/PDK education survey found that 71 percent of surveyed Americans “have trust and confidence in the men and women who are teaching children in public schools." Although this finding received a fair amount of media attention, it is not at all surprising. Polls have long indicated that teachers are among the most trusted professions in the U.S., up there with doctors, nurses and firefighters.

    (Side note: The teaching profession also ranks among the most prestigious U.S. occupations – in both analyses of survey data as well as in polls [though see here for an argument that occupational prestige scores are obsolete].)

    What was rather surprising, on the other hand, was the Gallup/PDK results for the question about what people are hearing about teachers in the news media. Respondents were asked, “Generally speaking, do you hear more good stories or bad stories about teachers in the news media?"

    Over two-thirds (68 percent) said they heard more bad stories than good ones. A little over a quarter (28 percent) said the opposite.