Massachusetts and nine other states made news last week by seeking and receiving waivers from major provisions of the federal No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB). The waiver was never a favorite of mine but I think the way it was upended and why says a lot about the centralizing worldview of federal and state policymakers.
First thing is to separate process and substance. The process on the waivers is wrongheaded—and likely illegal. Stay tuned for more on that. On the substance, US Department of Ed Secretary Arne Duncan outlined the key requirements he wanted Massachusetts to fulfill, on standards (what Sec. Duncan calls college- and career-readiness standards), instruction and leadership, and accountability.
On standards, Massachusetts met the feds’ requirement by adopting new national standards and national assessments in July 2010. No news there, and not good news given the mediocrity of the Common Core national standards (if you’re interested in a good pro and con conversation on Common Core, read this.) Massachusetts met the feds’ requirement on teacher evaluations by adopting statewide regulations on evaluations in June 2011.
The real story on the waivers is about accountability and the education establishment’s antipathy to school choice in any form. NCLB touched on a number of aspects of school life including school safety, communication with parent and teacher qualifications, but at its core was accountability. It never changed state standards, nor did it focus on input requirements (how much to spend, how specifically to teach, etc.). Instead, it relied on accountability to drive its ambitious goal that ALL children would be proficient in reading and math by 2014. It required testing students in reading and math in grades 3-8 and one high school grade.
Here’s a short list of why the waivers are not a great step forward for schoolkids and parents when it comes to education and accountability:
in one of five accountability and assistance levels. Schools meeting their proficiency gap closing goals will be placed in Level 1, schools not meeting their gap closing goals will be placed in Level 2, schools with the largest proficiency gaps for student subgroups and for all students will be placed in Level 3. The state’s lowest performing schools will be placed in Level 4 or 5. Districts will be placed in a level based on the performance of their lowest performing schools.
Will it work? The new Massachusetts accountability system is at best a work in progress. The Bay State used to have a tough state accountability office for schools, but that was shuttered for all intents and purposes in 2008. There’s not been a full-blown district accountability report (covering teacher evaluation, curriculum development, professional development, building upkeep and maintenance, use of data to inform decision-making, student performance by subgroup, etc.) since 2009.
Proficiency for all students is not the same as making progress in closing the proficiency gap.
AYP was a problematic construct but its goal was clear and its provisions were clear. AYP required that ALL (100%) schoolkids be “proficient” (by state definition) by 2014. Each year until 2014, district and charter public schools had to make improvement toward that goal. AYP looked at overall school outcomes, but it also forced districts to break out performance and meet AYP targets for subgroups: Asian & Pacific Islander, Black, Hispanic, American Indian, White, Free/Reduced Lunch, Special education, and Limited English proficiency. (The subgroups had to have 30 or more students to be included.)
The Massachusetts waiver sets a different bar – and it is lower. In its application, Massachusetts promises that it will give districts 6 years to cut the number of students not at grade level in half. Not only does that move the goalposts back time-wise but the state’s press announcement states:
Targets will be differentiated for each school, district, and subgroup based on its starting point in 2010-11.
In lay terms, that means that some districts get treated differently from others.
AYP was a tool that sought to change how schools did business, but schools don’t want to change how they do business.
Schools not meeting NCLB’s AYP goals for
two consecutive years were to give students an opportunity to transfer to a higher-performing district school
three years were to offer students tutoring and other supplemental services, as well as school choice options
five years had to take tougher steps like replacing school personnel or extending the school year
And since the start of NCLB, districts and schools have been very reticent (and in most cases hostile) toward any of these actions. Most of the outside sought by districts has been focused on central office-driven solutions.
Moving away from clear consequences for schools has put the state education department in the driver’s seat, but do they have any destination in mind?
Massachusetts DESE insists that the change will allow it to focus its “most dramatic interventions where they are most needed.” I’m not sure the department is any good at this. In fact, as noted in this blog before, few interventions across the country have actually made a longterm difference. We are about to find out very fast, with the state’s takeover of the Lawrence Public Schools, whether something has magically changed.
Under NCLB’s original goal – 100 percent proficiency for all students by 2014 – rising federal targets resulted in far too many schools and districts being identified as in need of improvement to enable the state to effectively identify those in greatest need of assistance or intervention.
You could read that last sentence as stating for the umpteenth time that NCLB was okay until it started to bite. But it also underscores that the state believes that its own technical interventions are what will fix our schools. That is a very different mindset from what I consider a strength of NCLB. Rather than thinking that bureaucrats (the state department of ed) will reform bureaucratic systems (our districts), NCLB gave safety valve choices to parents who were in districts that were failing to meet the law’s goals. The idea behind that was to ensure that we adults don’t simply push back the goal posts whenever big goals promised at big press conferences get pushed back.
It is no surprise that the department’s press release clearly states that “Massachusetts will no longer mandate NCLB school choice and supplemental educational services.” I get that NCLB was not working, but I also get that this waiver is not a step forward.
It’s the usual goal-post shifting we have come to expect in education.
By Joshua Archambault February 13th, 2012 Add comment
The Connector made a “big” announcement about the Business Express program today– that all carriers are now selling in the exchange. But a little context is needed before we throw a party. In a September 2010 paper, I addressed the limited benefit of the Business Express program in the Connector.
…Business Express (BE) also suffers from design limitations and does little to address the underlying reasons behind premium increases. It does reduce the monthly fee that small employers typically pay to third-party administrators from $35 per subscriber to $10 per subscriber, saving employers roughly $300 per employee per year. However, this reduced fee is not unique to the Connector. The Massachusetts Business Association contends that it offers a similarly low-priced plan.
The truth is that the Connector’s Business Express program does little to add value for small businesses. A small administrative fee savings may be nice, but the program design will not bend the cost curve. In that same paper I outline the many instances where the Connector has moved to limit choice and competition in the exchange, not expand it.
In the future, the more powerful incentive for small companies to join the Connector may be the state tax credits that are on the table (and future ones under the federal ACA). The fact that the Connector is the exclusive distribution channel of these tax credits should concern any person that believes that market forces can help to control costs. (We live with the lack of true market forces in our current health care system. When is the last time you called a doctor to ask for a quote before a visit?) When a quasi-public agency with regulatory power is given an exclusive benefit, we all should think long and hard about its impact on the aggregate insurance sector. Would you like this Cadillac insurance plan or that Cadillac insurance plan?
By Joshua Archambault February 8th, 2012 Add comment
The Division of Health Care Finance and Policy (DHCFP) plays an important role in the Bay State with their regular data reports. This data helps policymakers and those outside government plan and adjust to changes in the market.
So, I have been wondering for months why DHCFP has fallen way behind releasing a number of regular reports. For example, a Key Indicators report was due in December 2011. This is a quarterly report that the Division has released religiously for years. The last report on-line is from May. What gives?
Transportation is another cost, rising to $80 million in the FY13 budget, with an increase of several million over last year and a much larger increase anticipated for FY14. One of the drivers of these costs is the complex assignment system splits the city into 3 zones and allows choice within each zone (resulting in lots of busing). I ponder that topic in greater depth in February’s Boston Magazine. Go take a look.
You know you’re in for trouble when a school district with major graduation and dropout rates problems announces a new budget and leads with the hiring of five new nurses. That is not the definition of urgency.
The big new Boston budget of $856 million came with big headlines about more nurses and an overhaul of Roxbury’s Madison Park Vocational Technical High School. $856 million for about 54,000 students. That breaks down to almost $16,000. Of course it does not include additional funding sources and is not the complete picture. Last year’s NCES estimates pegged Boston as the most expensive urban school district in the country, clocking in at around $21,000 per student.
There is an obvious problem with the results we are getting. You don’t have to believe that “everyone has to be a college graduate” to see that a system that gets less than a third of its students to be truly college ready and that graduates 64 percent of its freshman class is in trouble. A study in 2008 showed that among 50 urban districts Boston was well behind many of its peers. San Jose and Nashville had graduation rates of 77 percent, Virginia Beach and even Sacramento outpaced Boston. We were clumped together with districts like Fort Worth and Houston (two districts whose numbers reflected the admittance of New Orleans transplants after Katrina.
Since 2008, when our graduation rate stood at 57 percent, we have seen steady but very slow progress. 2011 data shows that
Of the students who entered high school in the 2006/2007 school year, 63.2% graduated within four years. This 2010 data is an increase of 1.8 percentage points from 2009 and more than 5 percentage points since 2007. BPS calculates the dropout rate fell from 6.4% in 2009 to 5.7% in 2010.
That’s good news but hardly anything to crow about. It means Boston, Massachusetts’ district schools rank right up there with Memphis district schools on graduation and that we’ve gone from a 26 percent dropout rate to a 23 percent dropout rate.
So here are my takeaways on the new budget:
It still does not reflect a change in the school selection zones and therefore expends far too much money on transportation rather than actually educating kids.
More nurses can be helpful but their presence has little impact on improving students’ academic outcomes. And the simple fact is that when your budget announcement underscores the hiring of five nurses as a major victory, the real story is a lack of vision and leadership.
The overhaul of Madison Park Vocational Technical High School strikes me as falling in the “as yet undefined” category. On the face of it, it is tepid. A strong proposal would have allowed Madison Park to function as an autonomous school, much like the regional vocational technical schools that have performed tremendously since the early 2000s (and have incredibly low dropout rates). But superintendents are by definition incapable of giving up control of portions of their fiefdom.
The emphasis on turning around underperforming schools will allow a few gems to shine, like Up Academy, which really seems to have turned the school in a new direction. But the ability to replicate that level of focus is extremely limited. The charter model, which does not require the same level of involvement from all the institutional players and, you know, is by now proven on a consistent basis, is a far better way to go. I am not mentioning here the less interesting turnaround efforts—which do not bring the level of talent seen at Up Academy.
The superintendent’s plan includes extended day at two middle schools, funded by foundations and driven by Chris Gabrieli’s work at Mass 2020. In writing about this, the Globe’s Jamie Vaznis notes that “The schools hope to replicate the success of the Edwards Middle School in Charlestown, where an extended day has helped boost test scores and has offered students more enrichment opportunities.” That is devoutly to be wished for. What Vaznis and others often don’t mention because Chris Gabrieli is a terrific person and of really good will is that the data on Extended Learning Time is that the record of success is not that great. (A recent Abt Associates three-year review of ELT noted “no statistically significant effects of ELT after one, two, or three years of implementation on MCAS student achievement test outcomes for 3rd, 4th, or 7th grade ELA; 4th, 6th, or 8th grade math; or 5th or 8th grade science.”)
The pace of improvement is faster in many other cities, including Washington DC and New Orleans. You can note that they started out below Boston, but Boston, Massachusetts has to aim higher. There are three big things that we could do to amp up our progress:
Go back and expand charter schools from 18 percent to 25 percent of the student body. This is good for the kids in the charters and also good for the larger system. We are now in the five millionth month of teacher contract negotiations. The fact is that once charters wrest a 25 percent market share of the total public schools from the district schools, the teacher contract negotiations will change drastically. Look at the change in other cities when that happened.
Expand METCO on the basis of socio-economic status, from the 3,000 Boston kids in it to even 5,000 kids. While certain Boston suburban districts have experienced significant student growth in the past few years, others can accommodate METCO students—as long as the state fully funds the program.
Set Madison Park Vocational Technical free from the superintendent’s control. Carol Johnson and Mayor Menino have to know that the regional VTEs have demonstrated striking success on student achievement, graduation and dropout rates. They have long waiting lists now, and it is because they have the flexibility that comes with control at the school level. The Superintendent and Mayor could assemble a crack team of advisors from the heads of the state’s regional VTEs to create a plan that is practical and effective.
There is data to back up each of these recommendations. And embracing them would demonstrate the kind of urgency we need for kids in public schools today. Not some ephemeral tomorrow that we’ve been hearing about for decades.
The exciting thing is that these are reforms that are within reach. The frustrating thing is that theses are reforms that are within reach.
Manufacturing has a bad image these days. For those of us inside Route 128 , it can feel like there’s nothing left. But the reality for the rest of the state is very different.
For Massachusetts, this may be the moment to secure existing jobs and create new ones in manufacturing. One place to start is addressing our high electricity costs. And I’m hopeful that the new community college/workforce development initiative from the Governor bears fruit (although inaction on years worth of comparative data makes me skeptical).
Contrary to the views of some, manufacturing remains an important employer in Massachusetts. Can we take advantage of this moment to make it even more so?
Think you’ve had a tense few weeks at work? Consider potential targets of US Attorney Carmen Ortiz’s probe into wrongdoing at the state’s Probation Department.
The Globe Spotlight Team and the Ware Report detailed the madness, absurdity, and outright corruption of the Probation Department. It’s tough to do it justice in a few words — rigged hiring, pay-to-play promotions, alleged quid pro quo between department leaders and legislators, and on and on.
By Joshua Archambault January 27th, 2012 Add comment
The Blue Cross Blue Shield Foundation of Massachusetts (BCBSF) put out an annual survey this week on the Massachusetts health reform law, along with a Health Affairs piece that has left me shaking my head. The presentation of the results seems to overstate the findings and draws unlikely conclusions about the federal law.
In my humble opinion, Health Affairs has lost some credibility with the pieces they publish on Massachusetts. Editor-in-chief Susan Dentzer admitted the publication’s bias in a recent speech to the Massachusetts Association of Health Plans.
On the actual BCBSF report, just a couple of comments:
The survey is a great way to capture a snapshot of what is taking place in Massachusetts, but the phone survey method should always be taken with a grain of salt.
Self-reported ER visits are predictably unreliable. Individuals know they should not have gone to the ER for their care, so they are prone to underreport their true actions. One year of a slight decline in visits is not worth a major finding; only a multi-year downward trend in ER visits will be noteworthy. Most state data has shown the opposite for ER visits. So, survey results from one year and one state report using administrative data (cited in the Health Affairs article) should be cautiously interpreted. I hope the trend holds, but the survey data should not be used as a talking point in support of the Massachusetts law– yet.
The study has a odd way to define affordability: “…there have been gains in the affordability of care for adults since 2006, as evident in a lower burden from out-of-pocket health care spending (excluding premiums)…” Why would you exclude premiums in your definition? This exclusion is like celebrating a decrease in the price of printer ink while ignoring the increase in the price of the actual printer.
The discussion section of the Health Affairs article contains a heavy does of spin and takes every opportunity to highlight a positive slant on the data. There is only minor passing mention of possible differences in states, and no mention of differences between the Massachusetts and Federal laws.
Taken together, Massachusetts’s experience under the 2006 reform initiative, which became the template for the structure of the Affordable Care Act, highlights the potential gains and the challenges the nation now faces under federal health reform.
….
Just as Massachusetts’s 2006 health reform legislation provided the template for the Affordable Care Act, so the state’s experience under that legislation provides an example of the potential gains under federal health reform. Of course, the trajectory of policy and health reform will vary across the states, given the wide differences in their political, economic, and cultural environments and the wide range in the different states’ starting points
The comparison has become a messaging tactic by liberals and supporters of the federal law, most recently illustrated by John McDonough in his Families USA piece. These folks want the public to think Massachusetts is the same as the rest of the country, and the ACA will have the exact same impact nationally as it has locally.
I will offer just two examples why this is unlikely:
1) Do health policy officials really believe that the outcomes from a
high-income; geographically compact; historically heavily regulated insurance market; non-profit dominated insurer and provider market; medically and technologically advanced state, with a younger and more active demographic makeup; and a culture of health insurance
state, such as Massachusetts play out in the same manner in as a
low-income; geographically spread out; drastically different regulated insurance environment; mixed with both private and non-profit insurers; dealing with scarcity in medical infrastructure; heavily employed in service and tourism industries; ethnically diverse; and without a culture of insurance
state, such as New Mexico?
2) Differences between the two health care laws will lead to significantly different behavior and outcomes. One example: In Massachusetts, if employees are offered employer based insurance, they are not allowed into the exchange. (The only way into the exchange is if employees were to go uninsured for 6 months.)
In the ACA, entry into the exchange is based on an “affordability” threshold of 9.5% of your income or an actuarial value of your employer based insurance of less than 60. In other words, it is much easier to access the exchange and the economics are very good for employers to dump their employees into the exchange. This is a completely different world in public policy and a much more expensive one at that.
Like most places, Massachusetts uses elections to insure accountability in government. Don’t like how things are being run? Vote’em out.
So, it’s interesting to note that some of the most egregious breakdowns in public accountability over the past few years have occurred in that netherworld between bureaucrats and elected officials — the board of directors.
To be sure, the private sector has struggled with how to insure the accountability of boards of directors, but the public sector seems to be far behind in this area.
In each case, a board appointed by elected officials has egregiously failed to protect the public interest — either through ‘capture’ by a powerful chief executive or an inability or unwillingness to understand what exactly they were approving.
Massachusetts’ public sector governance is marbled through with hundreds of appointed boards designed to protect the public interest. If we can’t solve the seeming intrinsic weakness of this level of oversight, we risk wasting more of the taxpayers’ money.
Charter school approvals are granted in February. They shouldn’t be.
They should have been granted on January 16th this year–Martin Luther King Day–for one simple reason: No education policy change has done more in Massachusetts to alleviate achievement gaps than charters. None.
We too often hear about how education is the civil rights issue of the 21st century. The fact is that education was the Civil Rights issue of the 20th century, starting with the landmark Brown v. Board of Education ruling and the battle to ensure that all kids, regardless of race or creed, had equal access to good schools.
So with approvals to be announced in February, how is implementation of the 1993 Education Reform Act’s charter provisions and the 1997 and 2010 expansions of charter schools going?
The 1993 education reform act articulated two broad goals for charter schools:
by giving schools greater autonomy while holding them accountable for results, stimulate innovations in public education, and
provide kids high-quality learning environments as demonstrated by state assessments
In 2010, the legislature, Governor Patrick, and Mayor Menino lifted several caps (and imposed some new restrictions) on charters, allowing them to serve up to 18 percent of the total number of students in urban districts where test scores continued to be low.
In 2011, the largest crop of charters was approved. So far so good. But pop the hood and there are some troubling cracks in the charter engine.
First, the charter school process, and the Commissioner of Education’s role, has grown cloudy. When David Driscoll was commissioner (1997-2006), he was hired by the Board of Education, which jealously guarded its independence from political interference. Strong leaders in the Senate (Senate President Birmingham) and the House (Speaker Finneran) agreed with Governors Weld, Cellucci, Swift, and Romney to let the Board act with independence. In part they were seeking to shield themselves from the day-to-day battles in implementing academic standards and testing.
The departure of strong educational leaders in the State House left a void, which Governor Patrick, in particular, filled by getting the legislature to dramatically change governance of education policy. In 2008 laws were changed to create a new Secretary of Education position and give the governor the ability to truncate terms and add new Board members (translation: to pack the board).
The current commissioner of education, Mitchell Chester, serves at the pleasure of the governor’s Board of Education. His budget is set by the Secretary, Paul Reville, also appointed by the governor.
On charter policy that puts the commissioner between a rock and a hard place, as seen in the infamous midnight email from the secretary to the commissioner urging him to approve the Gloucester Community Arts Charter School’s application.
The secretary asked for the commissioner’s help in order to keep the Boston Globe and the Boston Foundation on his side politically. The fact is that there are several other recent examples where interference is likely, including charter decisions in Lowell and Lynn.
One-offs? The fact is that the current approval process is much sloppier and harder to understand than before. Do the charter school office’s criteria stand as the source of decisions? Is it the commissioner who’s calling the shots? The secretary–and therefore the governor?
How does one read the commissioner’s announcement, made without any previous communication, that a decade-old charter in Fitchburg (the North Central Charter Essential School) was being placed on “probation”? How is that possible after, as the Fitchburg Sentinel notes, the school
had been lauded by state officials for the school’s academic improvements as recently as last fall.
How to make sense of the earthquake that occurred in the education department’s charter school office (CSO), where seasoned staff simply got up and left last year? Dramatic shifts in personnel always occur for reasons. And the state’s history of having a highly professional CSO has done a lot to distinguish Massachusetts charters from those in other states.
We will have to see how this plays out. The new head of the charter school office, Marlon Davis, brings real-life experience from the Benjamin Banneker Charter School, but he and new staff members will have to get up to speed fast–and demonstrate the quality and independence of their analyses.
And what to make of the governor and the secretary of education’s push to direct which specific city districts to target for charter applications? The 2010 education law lifted the caps for all lower-performing, poorer districts. But in implementing the law, they have unilaterally decided to focus last year on Boston charter applications, and this year on cities outside Boston.
Their political impulse is to package charter approvals for maximum press, but that’s not what the law says. Short term, what about kids in districts that don’t fall into “target” areas chosen by the administration?
Long term, it’s hard to see a more opaque, personality (and politically) driven process helping advance the Massachusetts brand of consistently strong charters. After all, here’s what we know:
Charter schools in some states have a mixed record, often because the state approval and closure processes lack rigor, and state standards and testing are weak.
Charters work where state public policy works.
Massachusetts charter schools have a far better batting average than those in many other states. By far the majority of Massachusetts charters outperform their sending districts; moreover, a large percentage of our charters perform at the highest levels in the state.
For a very long time, Massachusetts boasted an approval and accountability system that was a national model, with objectively determined approvals and closures.
This administration has changed course on key elements in the original 1993 education reform, including accountability, standards, and (soon) testing. Now it is chipping away at our charter school model.
By Jim Stergios
By Joshua Archambault
By Steve Poftak
