Education Reform

The Uncertain Future Of Charter School Proliferation

This is the third in a series of three posts about charter schools. Here are the first and second parts.

As discussed in prior posts, high-quality analyses of charter school effects show that there is wide variation in the test-based effects of these schools but that, overall, charter students do no better than their comparable regular public school counterparts. The existing evidence, though very tentative, suggests that the few schools achieving large gains tend to be well-funded, offer massive amounts of additional time, provide extensive tutoring services and maintain strict, often high-stakes discipline policies.

There will always be a few high-flying chains dispersed throughout the nation that get results, and we should learn from them. But there’s also the issue of whether a bunch of charters schools with different operators using diverse approaches can expand within a single location and produce consistent results.

Charter supporters typically argue that state and local policies can be leveraged to “close the bad charters and replicate the good ones." Opponents, on the other hand, contend that successful charters can’t expand beyond a certain point because they rely on selection bias of the best students into these schools (so-called “cream skimming”), as well as the exclusion of high-needs students.

Given the current push to increase the number of charter schools, these are critical issues, and there is, once again, some very tentative evidence that might provide insights.

Schedule Conflicts

As most people know, the majority of public school teachers are paid based on salary schedules. Most (but not all) contain a number of “steps” (years of experience) and “lanes” (education levels). Teachers are placed in one lane (based on their degree) and proceed up the steps as they accrue years on the job. Within most districts, these two factors determine the raises that teachers receive.

Salary schedules receive a great deal of attention in our education debates. One argument that has been making the rounds for some time is that we should attract and retain "talent" in the teaching profession by increasing starting salaries and/or the size of raises teachers receive during their first few years (when test-based productivity gains are largest). One common proposal (see here and here) for doing so is reallocating salary from the “top” of salary schedules (the salaries paid to more experienced teachers) down to the “bottom” (novice teachers’ salaries). As a highly simplified example, instead of paying starting teachers $40,000 and teachers with 15 years of experience $80,000, we could pay first-year teachers $50,000 and their experienced counterparts $70,000. This general idea is sometimes called “frontloading," as it concentrates salary expenditures at the “front” of schedules.

Now, there is a case for changes to salary schedules in many places – bargained and approved by teachers – including, perhaps, some degree of gradual frontloading (though the research in this area is underdeveloped at best). But there is a vocal group of advocates who assume an all-too-casual attitude about these changes. They seem to be operating on the mistaken assumption that salary schedules can be easily overhauled – just like that. We can drastically restructure them or just “move the money around” without problem or risk, if only unions and "bureaucrats" would get out of the way.**

NAEP Shifting

** Also posted here on “Valerie Strauss’ Answer Sheet” in the Washington Post

Tomorrow, the education world will get the results of the 2011 National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), often referred to as the “nation’s report card." The findings – reading and math scores among a representative sample of fourth and eighth graders - will drive at least part of the debate for the next two years, when the next round comes out.

I’m going to make a prediction, one that is definitely a generalization, but is hardly uncommon in policy debates: People on all “sides” will interpret the results favorably no matter how they turn out.

If NAEP scores are positive – i.e., overall scores rise by a statistically significant margin, and/or there are encouraging increases among key subgroups such as low performers or low-income students – supporters of market-based reform will say that their preferred policies are working. They’ll claim that the era of test-based accountability, which began with the enactment of No Child Left Behind ten years ago, have produced real results. Market reform skeptics, on the other hand, will say that virtually none of the policies, such as test-based teacher evaluations and merit pay, for which reformers are pushing were in force in more than a handful of locations between 2009 and 2011. Therefore, they’ll claim, the NAEP progress shows that the system is working without these changes.

If the NAEP results are not encouraging – i.e., overall progress is flat (or negative), and there are no strong gains among key subgroups – the market-based crowd will use the occasion to argue that the “status quo” isn’t producing results, and they will strengthen their call for policies like new evaluations and merit pay. Skeptics, in contrast, will claim that NCLB and standardized test-based accountability were failures from the get-go. Some will even use the NAEP results to advocate for the wholesale elimination of standardized testing.

The Ratings Game: New York City Edition

Gotham Schools reports that the New York City Department of Education rolled out this year’s school report card grades by highlighting the grades’ stability between this year and last. That is, they argued that schools’ grades were roughly the same between years, which is supposed to serve as evidence of the system’s quality.

The city’s logic here is generally sound. As I’ve noted before, most schools don’t undergo drastic changes in their operations over the course of a year, and so fluctuations in grades among a large number of schools might serve as a warning sign that there’s something wrong with the measures being used. Conversely, it’s not unreasonable to expect from a high-quality rating system that, over a two-year period, some schools would get higher grades and some lower, but that most would stay put. That was the city’s argument this year.

The only problem is that this wasn’t really the case.

The Teachers' Union Hypothesis

For the past couple of months, Steve Brill's new book has served to step up the eternally-beneath-the-surface hypothesis that teachers’ unions are the primary obstacle to improving educational outcomes in the U.S. The general idea is that unions block “needed reforms," such as merit pay and other forms of test-based accountability for teachers, and that they “protect bad teachers” from being fired.

Teachers’ unions are a convenient target. For one thing, a significant proportion of Americans aren’t crazy about unions of any type. Moreover, portraying unions as the villain in the education reform drama facilitates the (mostly false) policy-based distinction between teachers and the organizations that represent them – put simply, “love teachers, hate their unions." Under the auspices of this dichotomy, people can advocate for changes , such as teacher-level personnel policies based partially on testing results, without having to address why most teachers oppose them (a badly needed conversation).

No, teachers’ unions aren’t perfect, because the teachers to whom they give voice aren’t perfect. There are literally thousands of unions, and, just like districts, legislatures and all other institutions, they make mistakes. But I believe strongly in separating opinion and anecdote from actual evidence, and the simple fact is that the pervasive argument that unions are a substantial cause of low student performance has a weak empirical basis, while the evidence that unions are a primary cause of low performance does not exist.

Trouble In Paradise

According to the principles of market-based education reform, there’s at least one large, urban public school district operating at max power: District of Columbia Public Schools.

For the past 2-3 years, DCPS has been a reformer’s paradise. The district has a new evaluation system (IMPACT), which it designed by itself. The system includes heavily-weighted value-added estimates (50 percent for teachers in tested grades/subjects), and the results of teachers’ evaluations are used every year to fire the teachers who receive the lowest evaluation ratings, or receive the second lowest score for two consecutive years. “Ineffective teachers” are being weeded out – no hearing, no due process, no nothing.

Furthermore, these evaluation scores are also used to award performance bonuses, and very large ones at that – up to $25,000. This should, so the logic goes, be attracting high-achieving people to DCPS, and keeping them around after they arrive. And, finally, as a result of many years of growth, the city has among the largest charter school sectors in the nation, with almost half of public school student attending charters. Theoretically, this competition should be upping the game of all schools, charter and regular public alike.

Basically, almost everything that market-based reformers think needs to happen has been the reality in DCPS for the past 2-3 years. And the staff  has been transformed too. The majority of principals, and a huge proportion of teachers, were hired during the tenure of either Michelle Rhee or her successor, Kaya Henderson.

The district should be in overdrive right about now. Is it?

What The "No Excuses" Model Really Teaches Us About Education Reform

** Also posted here on “Valerie Strauss’ Answer Sheet” in the Washington Post

In a previous post, I discussed “Apollo 20," a Houston pilot program in which a group of low-performing regular public schools are implementing the so-called “no excuses” education model common among high-profile charter schools such as KIPP. In the Houston implementation, “no excuses” consists of five basic policies: a longer day and year, resulting in 21 percent more school time; different human capital policies, including performance bonuses and firing and selectively rehiring all principals and half of teachers (the latter is one of the "turnaround models" being pushed by the Obama Administration); extensive 2-on-1 tutoring; regular assessments and data analysis; and “high expectations” for behavior and achievement, including parental contracts.

A couple of weeks ago, Harvard professor Roland Fryer, the lead project researcher, released the results of the pilot’s first year. I haven’t seen much national coverage of the report, but I’ve seen a few people characterize the results as evidence that “’No excuses’ works in regular public schools." Now, it’s true that there were effects – strong in math – and that the results appear to be persistent across different model specifications.

But, when it comes to the question of whether “no excuses works," the reality is a bit more complicated. There are four main things to keep in mind when interpreting the results of this paper, a couple of which bear on the larger debate about "no excuses" charter schools and education reform in general.

Making (Up) The Grade In Ohio

In a post last week over at Flypaper, the Fordham Institute’s Terry Ryan took a “frank look” at the ratings of the handful of Ohio charter schools that Fordham’s Ohio branch manages. He noted that the Fordham schools didn’t make a particularly strong showing, ranking 24th among the state’s 47 charter authorizers in terms of the aggregate “performance index” among the schools it authorizes. Mr. Ryan takes the opportunity to offer a few valid explanations as to why Fordham ranked in the middle of the charter authorizer pack, such as the fact that the state’s “dropout recovery schools," which accept especially hard-to-serve students who left public schools, aren’t included (which would likely bump up Fordham's relative ranking).

Mr. Ryan doth protest too little. His primary argument, which he touches on but does not flesh out, should be that Ohio’s performance index is more a measure of student characteristics than of any defensible concept of school effectiveness. By itself, it reveals relatively little about the “quality” of schools operated by Ohio’s charter authorizers.

But the limitations of measures like the performance index, which are discussed below (and in the post linked above), have implications far beyond Ohio’s charter authorizers. The primary means by which Ohio assesses school/district performance is the state’s overall “report card grades," which are composite ratings comprised of multiple test-based measures, including the performance index. Unfortunately, however, these ratings are also not a particularly useful measure of school effectiveness. Not only are the grades unstable between years, but they also rely too heavily on test-based measures, including the index, that fail to account for student characteristics. While any attempt to measure school performance using testing data is subject to imprecision, Ohio’s effort falls short.

A Few Other Principles Worth Stating

Last week, a group of around 25 education advocacy organizations, including influential players such as Democrats for Education Reform and The Education Trust, released a "statement of principles" on the role of teacher quality in the reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA). The statement, which is addressed to the chairs and ranking members of the Senate and House committees handling the reauthorization, lays out some guidelines for teacher-focused policy in ESEA (a draft of the full legislation was released this week; summary here).

Most of the statement is the standard fare from proponents of market-based reform, some of which I agree with in theory if not practice. What struck me as remarkable was the framing argument presented in the statement's second sentence:

Research shows overwhelmingly that the only way to close achievement gaps – both gaps between U.S. students and those in higher-achieving countries and gaps within the U.S. between poor and minority students and those more advantaged – and transform public education is to recruit, develop and retain great teachers and principals.

This assertion is false.

The Cutting Edge Of Teacher Quality

The State of Michigan is currently considering a bill that would limit collective bargaining rights among teachers. Under the proposal, paying dues would be optional. This legislation, like other so-called “right to work” laws, represents an attempt to defund and create divisions within labor unions, which severely weakens teachers' ability to bargain fair contracts, as well as the capacity of their unions to advocate on behalf of of public schools and workers in general.

Last month, Michigan State Senate Majority Floor Leader Arlan Meekoff (R- West Olive) was asked whether he thought the bill would pass. He responded in the affirmative, and added:

It's an opportunity to let teachers get farther away from union goons. That should give them a better chance to break away from the mediocrity. That should make things better for our schools and our children.

Well, there you have it, folks. We’ve been wasting our time by designing rigorous standards and overhauling teacher evaluations. The key to improving teacher quality is not training, compensation or professional development.

It’s goon proximity.