Winners & Losers

Eduflack offers up a first-rate post today on the winners and losers in the education portion of the President's FY2011 budget.

Claus von Zastrow issues a wise caution regarding federal funding for professional development (UPDATE: as well as a second thought).

The New York Times's Sam Dillon and the National Journal's Eliza Krigman (hat tip: Eduwonk) have the scoop on implications for Elementary and Secondary Education Act reauthorization.

The budget is just at the first step and Congress has yet to have its say. Likewise, I wouldn't bet on reauthorization this election year (yep, congressional elections are only nine months away!). 2011? 2012? Anyone? UPDATE: Here is what the Education Experts at the National Journal's blog think.

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Live By The Sword, Die By The Sword?

The problem with Jay Mathews' defense ("Measuring Progress At Shaw With More Than Numbers") of a Washington, DC school principal who did not demonstrate student learning gains at his school after one year is that the principal operates within an accountability system that demands such a result. In this case, both Mathews -- and DC Schools Chancellor Michelle Rhee, as described in Mathews' WP column -- are right not to have lowered the boom on Brian Betts, principal of the DC's Shaw Middle School at Garnet-Patterson, based on a single year's worth of test scores.

The state superintendent of education's Web site says Shaw dropped from 38.6 to 30.5 in the percentage of students scoring at least proficient in reading, and from 32.7 to 29.2 in math.

But those were not the numbers Rhee read to Betts over the phone.

Only 17 percent of Shaw's 2009 students had attended the school in 2008, distorting the official test score comparisons. Rhee instead recited the 2008 and 2009 scores of the 44 students who had been there both years. It didn't help much.

The students' decline in reading was somewhat smaller; it went from 34.5 to 29.7. Their math proficiency increased a bit, from 26.2 to 29.5. But Shaw is still short of the 30 percent mark, far below where Rhee and Betts want to be....

Despite the sniping at Rhee, the best teachers I know think that what happened at Shaw is a standard part of the upgrading process. I have watched Betts, his staff, students and parents for a year. The improvement of poor-performing schools has been the focus of my reporting for nearly three decades. The Shaw people are doing nearly everything that the most successful school turnaround artists have done.

They have raised expectations for students. They have recruited energetic teachers who believe in the potential of impoverished students. They have organized themselves into a team that compares notes on youngsters. They regularly review what has been learned, what some critics dismiss as "teaching to the test." They consider it an important part of their jobs.

That's how it's done, usually with a strong and engaging principal like Betts.

Mathews' take -- including consideration of contextual factors, such as the fact that only 17% of the school's students had attended the prior year and the contention that school turnaround requires more than a single year -- is how the education world should work. Embrace the complexity of learning and trying to measure it! To do so would disallow the use of single-year changes in test scores for making high-stakes decisions about schools and individual school personnel. It would also remove the unrealistic pressure on school turnarounds to bear fruit in a single year. Test scores would be used responsibly in combination with other data and evidence to paint a fuller picture about individual school contexts and inform judgments about school leadership and student success.

But Michelle Rhee and other education reform advocates have publicly argued that student performance as measured by test scores is basically the be all and end all. According to this Washington Post story ("Testing Tactics Helped Fuel D.C. School Gains"), Rhee supports strengthening No Child Left Behind to "emphasize year-to-year academic growth." Such a stance creates a problem for such reformers when they are leading a district and staking their leadership on uncomplicated test score gains. Others will assess their leadership and judge their success by this measure -- an ill-advised one in its simplest form.

I would argue that, in addition to doing the right thing (as happened in this instance), reform advocates and school leaders like Rhee also have a responsibility to say and advocate for the right thing. They have a responsibility to be honest about the complexity of student learning and the inability of student assessments to accurate capture all of the nuance going on within schools and classrooms. While the reformers' challenge of the adult-focused policies of the educational status quo is often warranted, some reforms -- accountability, chief among them -- have been taken too far. Student learning, school leadership and teaching cannot be measured and judged good or bad based on a single set of test scores. Test scores must be part of the consideration -- and supporting systems such as accountability, compensation and evaluation must be informed by such data -- but they should not single-handedly define success or failure.

The complexity as presented by Mathews in his article -- and, more importantly, by existing research (such as by Robert Linn, Aaron Pallas, Tim Sass, and embedded within Sunny Ladd's RttT comments) about year-to-year comparisons of both overall test scores and test score gains -- strongly suggests that educational accountability systems should be designed more thoughtfully than they have been to date, but unfortunately that does not seem to be the direction that policymaking is headed at either the federal or state levels. Part of being more thoughtful is moving away from NCLB-style adequate yearly progress and toward a value-added approach, but thoughtfulness also requires not making high-stakes decisions based exclusively on volatile student data. Do I hear "multiple measures"? Sure, but Sherman Dorn offers some provocative thoughts on this subject in a 2007 blog post.

With regard to educational accountability, policymakers first should do their homework -- and then they clearly have more work to do in creating a better system and undoing parts of the existing system that aren't evidence-based and accomplish only in simplifying a truly complex art: learning.

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For those of you that have gotten this far, there's a related post on the New America Foundation's Ed Money Watch blog discussing a new GAO report that analyzes state spending on student assessment tests -- $640 million in 2007-08.

The increasing cost of developing and scoring assessments has also led many states to implement simpler and more cost-effective multiple choice tests instead of open response tests. In fact, although five states have changed their assessments to include more open response items in both reading and math since 2002, 11 and 13 states have removed open items from their reading and math tests, respectively over the same time period.... This reliance on multiple choice tests has forced states to limit the content and complexity of what they test. In fact, some states develop academic standards for testing separately from standards for instruction, which are often un-testable in a multiple choice system. As a result, state NCLB assessments tend to test and measure memorization of facts and basic skills rather than complex cognitive abilities.

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And here's a new story hot off the presses from Education Week. It discusses serious questions raised about New York City's school grading system.

Eighty-four percent of the city’s 1,058 public elementary and middle schools received an A on the city’s report cards this year, compared with 38 percent in 2008, while 13 percent received a B, city officials announced this month.

“It tells us virtually nothing about the actual performance of schools,” Aaron M. Pallas, a professor of sociology and education at Teachers College, Columbia University, said of the city’s grades.

Diane Ravitch, an education historian at New York University, was even sharper: She declared the school grades “bogus” in a Sept. 9 opinion piece for the Daily News of New York, saying the city’s report card system “makes a mockery of accountability.”

But Andrew J. Jacob, a spokesman for the New York City Department of Education, defended the ratings, even as he said the district’s demands on schools would continue to rise next year....

The city employs a complex methodology to devise its overall letter grades, with the primary driver being results from statewide assessments in reading and mathematics, which have also encountered considerable skepticism lately.

The city’s grades are based on three categories: student progress on state tests from one year to the next, which accounts for 60 percent; student performance for the most recent school year, which accounts for 25 percent; and school environment, which makes up 15 percent.

Mr. Pallas of Teachers College argues that one key flaw with the city’s rating system is that it depends heavily on a what he deems a “wholly unreliable” measure of student growth on test scores from year to year that fails to account adequately for statistical error.

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Cheerleading for NCLB

I guess my reaction to today's Washington Post shout out to No Child Left Behind ("'No Child' in Action") from former U.S. Education Secretary Margaret Spellings is a question: "If NCLB's accountability alone is such a silver bullet, then how come test scores at the high school level didn't improve?"

Although Spellings mentions that NCLB requires math and reading tests in grades 3-8, it is quite disingenuous of her not to mention that such tests were also required in high school. If the achievement gains aren't sustained through high school, what real difference does it make?

The wise Aaron Pallas offers his take on this issue ("Wishful Thinking"), calling into question Spellings's claims:

But what portion of those trends can be attributed to NCLB? Margaret Spellings refers to changes since 1999, which is convenient for her story, because there were sharp increases in grade 4 reading between 2000 and 2002, and in grade 4 and grade 8 math between 2000 and 2003. But NCLB was signed into law in January, 2002; the first final regulations dealing with assessment were issued in December, 2002; and initial state accountability plans were approved by the U.S. Department of Education no later than June, 2003. The 2003 main NAEP was administered between January and March of 2003. Is it realistic to claim that NCLB affected scores before the 2003 NAEP administration? I, and a great many other analysts, think not.

Only in Margaret Spellings’ world can NCLB affect NAEP scores for the four years before the law was passed and implemented. Now that’s wishful thinking.

UPDATE -- Diane Ravitch comes to similar conclusions in her blog post.

Thus, when one looks at the patterns, it suggests the following: First, our students are making gains, though not among 17-year-olds. Second, the gains they have made since NCLB are smaller than the gains they made in the years preceding NCLB. Third, even when they are significant, the gains are small. Fourth, the Long Term Trend data are not a resounding endorsement of NCLB. If anything, the slowing of the rate of progress suggests that NCLB is not a powerful instrument to improve student performance.

Caveat emptor.

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Federal Funding for Teacher Quality Innovation?

This is a follow-up to my post of two weeks ago about the use of Title II, Part A funding under NCLB. In these tight economic times, it is inevitable that the focus will move from spending more money on education to spending existing dollars more wisely. Currently, most school districts are not using these federal dollars in particularly innovative, let alone effective or impactful ways.

An article by Stephen Sawchuk ('Grants in NCLB to Aid Teaching Under Scrutiny') was published in this week's edition of Education Week. In part, it discusses the findings of a recent Education Sector report on this topic.

For those of you who aren't Ed Week subscribers and may not be able to access the story, here is a peek at the story:

The Teacher and Principal Training and Recruiting Fund—better known as Title II, Part A of NCLB—is the federal government’s second-largest K-12 investment, after the Title I grants for disadvantaged students. Ninety-five percent of the funds flow to school districts, and they come with few strings attached.

Although the fund has promoted some promising local practices, Title II, in general, “is not especially aligned with leading-edge [teacher-quality] efforts, and it’s the federal government’s big entry in this sweepstakes,” said Andrew J. Rotherham, the co-director of Education Sector, a Washington think tank, and the report’s author.

...

In his paper, Mr. Rotherham stakes out one conceptual approach that Mr. Obama and legislators could consider when they revise the program as part of the reauthorization of the NCLB law: to transform Title II into a fund for seeding innovations to the education human-capital continuum, and to disallow a handful of currently authorized activities, including class-size reduction.

...

Nationally representative U.S. Department of Education survey data show that districts in 2007-08 spent 6 percent of their Title II funds on professional-growth initiatives—such as mentoring programs or incentives for teachers to pursue certification from the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards—and 4 percent on recruitment, including performance-based pay and teacher loan-forgiveness programs.

More than three-quarters of districts’ Title II allocations subsidize professional development and smaller class sizes. In his paper, Mr. Rotherham deems those activities “low leverage” because they typically lack quality-control mechanisms and reinforce traditional human-capital structures, rather than altering them.

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Teacher Quality and Title II

Education Week published an incredibly important story this week by Stephen Sawchuk ("Spending On Federal Teacher-Quality Funds Questioned") and Education Sector issued an incredibly important report (Title 2.0: Revamping The Federal Role in Education Human Capital) on Title II, Part A dollars in No Child Left Behind. The notion of better utilizing existing resources is especially critical in light of the economic downturn and budgetary challenges which will make new resources harder to come by.

As I wrote in two recent posts ($29 Billion Buys You A New Education System? and Will The New President Support New Educators?), it is abundantly clear that Title II, Part A's $3 billion are not flowing toward the most impactful initiatives in schools and districts. Most are going to class-size reduction and professional development (of questionable quality).

In a nutshell, Education Sector recommends shifting "the federal government’s role from enabler of existing activities largely irrespective of quality to a driver of reform through strategic investments in new initiatives, institutions, and policy schemes to recruit, train, support, and evaluate and compensate teachers."

Easy stuff, right?

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Wither Education?

An article ("Obama is Expected to Put Education Overhaul on Back Burner") in today's Wall Street Journal that reads more like an opinion piece than a new story suggests that President-elect Obama will not prioritize education in the face of other policy challenges.

I disagree with the likes of the Brookings Institution's Tom Loveless (my grad school professor) whose comments alone basically provide the article's headline. Loveless says that "he expects Mr. Obama to sidestep most major issues involving public schools and instead focus on small, symbolic initiatives in the mold of former President Bill Clinton's promotion of school uniforms as a way to instill discipline in classrooms." Obama has shown a deep personal commitment to issues involving schools and urban communities as a U.S. Senator and in his prior life. Despite the economic and foreign policy challenges he faces, I don't see Obama walking away from this commitment and interest to focus on marginal educational pronouncements. Deep engagement and substantive proposals may not be offered in his first 100 Days -- a concept that should be left to history books -- or even in his first year in office, but Obama WILL expend political capital on education reform during his presidency.

The wise Jack Jennings of the Center on Education Policy gets it right on this one. He suggests that Congress will likely take the lead -- especially on contentious issues related to the reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (AKA NCLB) -- and that President Obama will wait for them to hash out a consensus before acting. In talking to a key Hill staffer in Washington, DC yesterday, however, it is clear that congressional Democrats are looking for signals from an Obama Administration to inform their work. Some core principles from the President will help to influence congressional action and provide structure to an eventual compromise that must win passage in both houses of Congress and earn the president's signature.

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What's Next?

Let the prognostication begin!!!

So how does President-elect Obama (boy, that sounds good!) move forward on education given the twin obstacles of a bad economy and a ballooning federal deficit -- along with opportunities presented by the pending reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (AKA NCLB) in 2009 or 2010 and a Democratic-controlled Congress?

It seems that education will inevitably take a back seat to economic recovery and foreign policy issues (Afghanistan, Iraq, Russia, etc.). However, the good news is that some amount of deficit spending on infrastructure and investments in areas such as education will likely occur. I expect to see ESEA reauthorization as the primary vehicle for enactment of many of Obama's k-12 education reform ideas. In addition, Obama will likely rhetorically link education to economic revitalization and future American competitiveness. Aspects of his proposed focus on math and science will find a policy niche here.

A major question, of course, is who will be the next Education Secretary. Easy answer: Probably not someone from Texas. Hard answer: Who exactly from the other 49 states? Well, in my opinion, the likely candidates might include Michigan Governor Jennifer Granholm, Arizona Governor Janet Napolitano, Kansas Governor Kathleen Sebelius, former West Virginia Governor and president of the Alliance for Excellent Education Bob Wise, former New Jersey Governor (a Republican) and Drew University president Tom Kean, former South Carolina Superintendent of Education Inez Tenenbaum, New York City Schools Chancellor Joel Klein, and Paul Vallas, New Orleans superintendent and former Chicago Public Schools chief.

(UPDATE: Scratch Vallas off the list - he has agreed to stay in New Orleans through the 2009-10 school year. Scratch Napolitano as she has been tapped as Homeland Security secretary.)

I'm not basing these possibilities on any special inside knowledge (c'mon, I live in Wisconsin now -- wadda I know?!?!)-- just an educated guess. So it means that the next Ed Secretary will be someone NOT on this list. Other education leaders who probably won't be appointed Secretary but who are likely to play a important leadership role in the U.S. Department of Education or more broadly in the Obama Administration include Linda Darling-Hammond, Danielle Gray, Heather Higginbottom, Michael Johnston, Andy Rotherham, and Jon Schnur.

OK, that's the Obama side. What about the Republicans? I agree with Eduwonk that the Republican Party is probably headed for what he terms possibility #2.

We could see a return to the slash and burn and culture war approach of the 1990s (or its last gasp). Sarah Palin hasn’t been hostile to public schools in Alaska but if she sees these sorts of politics as a way to a political future in 2012 it’s hard to imagine she wouldn’t turn on a dime and others wouldn’t follow. This would mean a lot of ideas to effectively eviscerate the federal role in education, cut spending, devolve authority to the states and so forth. In a tight fiscal climate state “flexibility” can have a siren-like appeal because it gives states more flexibility around using federal dollars to plug other budget holes. The likely lack of Republican moderates on the Hill will only add to this dynamic.

But, if the experience in some states as well as the likely composition of the House and Senate after the dust settles is any guide, I’d bet on the second option. That means a lot of theater, but not good news if you want to see a serious national debate about ideas for improving our public schools.

Don't expect to see a major national debate about education, but probably modest changes to existing policies (a lessening of NCLB's rigid accountability provisions and an increased emphasis on value-added methodologies), some targeted investments (early childhood education, differentiated teacher pay, teacher professional development & support, dropout intervention), a focus on higher education (a college tax credit, financial aid simplification, student success at 2- and 4-year colleges), and, if the economy permits in a couple of years, some greater across-the-board investments.

My overall bet is that education policy will not transform itself nearly as much as some other policy areas -- health care, environment, energy, foreign policy -- under Obama's watch. While I think that Jay Mathews's take on this question in last Friday's Washington Post is a bit strong -- certainly the headline is ("Why The Next Education President Will Be Like Bush") -- he's definitely on the right track.

But the devil is in the details, and I predict that many important changes will be made to improve public education in general and ESEA specifically, enhance the quality of teaching, and create more successful and sensible pathways to higher education over the next four years.

Optimism, indeed, is back.

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Reaction to McCain's Speech

As seems to be typical in this presidential campaign, education got short shrift in John McCain's speech to the Republican National Convention this evening. Here's what he had to say:

Education -- education is the civil rights issue of this century. Equal access to public education has been gained, but what is the value of access to a failing school? We need to shake up failed school bureaucracies with competition, empower parents with choice. Let's remove barriers to qualified instructors, attract and reward good teachers, and help bad teachers find another line of work. When a public school fails to meet its obligations to students, parent -- when it fails to meet its obligations to students, parents deserve a choice in the education of their children. And I intend to give it to them. Some may choose a better public school. Some may choose a private one. Many will choose a charter school. But they will have the choice, and their children will have that opportunity. Senator Obama wants our schools to answer to unions and entrenched bureaucrats. I want schools to answer to parents and students. And when I'm president, they will.

Yawn.

The education portion of McCain's speech served up the same boring, rehashed Republicanism as the rest of his speech. Basically, it's all about choice and competition--and firing bad teachers. You always need an enemy. News to John McCain: The No Child Left Behind Act already has provisions for school choice. The trouble is that federal law doesn't allow children who attend failing schools in failing districts (where there aren't enough good schools to go around) to choose a school in a different district. For example, a Chicago Public Schools student can't choose to attend school in Evanston; a District of Columbia Public Schools student can't attend school in Montgomery County, Maryland or Arlington County, Virginia. And so on.

Unless McCain is willing to take a stand and allow largely urban, low-income students to storm the barracades of suburban schools (school districts where lots of wealthy Republicans live), then his hankering for more choice and competition in education ain't straight talk--just more empty rhetoric.

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