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.
Under the Americans with Disabilities Act, an employer’s requirement that applicants have a high school diploma must be job-related and consistent with business necessity, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission stated in an “informal discussion letter” posted on its website Dec. 2.
I don’t know of many employers who think twice about requiring a high school diploma. The EEOC letter “does not constitute an official opinion of the commission,” but rather is an indication that at a date not too far in to the future the EEOC will take up this question and make a ruling on whether requiring all job applicants to have graduated from high school is a violation of the ADA.
The letter goes on to note that
if a high school diploma requirement is job-related and consistent with business necessity, but effectively screens out a disabled applicant, the employer still may have to determine whether an individual applicant can perform the essential functions of the job with or without reasonable accommodation.
The EEOC further suggests that the onus will be on the employer to show that job applicants
cannot perform the job’s essential functions with or without a reasonable accommodation, even if he or she does not meet a standard that is job-related and consistent with business necessity, the commission added.
We will have to see how the federal commission will move ahead, but the ramifications of prohibiting such “milestone” job requirements will be many:
Perhaps the inclusion in the workplace of disabled individuals who may either sense a barrier or who are excluded because of the requirement;
An unhelpful signal to those who are struggling in high school that the effort may not be necessary; and
An entirely new industry for lawyers to expand into.
A number of readers of recent posts on virtual (or digital) learning have asked for some definitions around jargon used by proponents and experts. I wanted to share a brief video on “blended learning,” a term that you hear increasingly, especially in states where charter public schools and district schools are attempting to integrate online tools into the classroom.
Blended learning is, if you will, that broad area between the traditional classroom, where you have a teacher lecturing and teaching a class of kids, and exclusive use by a student of online resources to drive their learning. The video embedded below was written by Anthony Kim and Michael Thompson of Education Elements. It is a bit dry and a tad jargony itself (e.g., “unleashing learning velocity”), but it does a nice job of laying out the four principal models emerging in the blended learning area.
Understanding the quality of the choices in the marketplace will have to be informed by more than giddy passion about the promise of virtual learning. A cursory look at the research done on virtual learning suggests that there has been to date more energy than light on the impact of VL on sustained student achievement. …
We are just at the start of the virtual learning movement, and there is so much promise in the short term regarding access to high-quality content, targeted instruction, peer tutoring and resulting stronger socialization around academics (rather than who’s cool and who’s not). …
The fault lines around how best to teach kids how to read, conceptual understanding, and what should be in the standards and curriculum are all important topics well into a virtual future.
And politics will come. It is unavoidable. The NY Times was to run an expose by Stephanie Saul, the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist who has spent much of her career at the Times on the pharmaceutical industry and fertility treatments, on the well-known digital learning company K12. Many in the school choice movement see the article as a likely hatchet job…
All I can say to school reformers who support digital learning is: Such articles and such scrutiny are going to come. It is inevitable and ultimately it is good.
Ms. Saul’s piece on online learning – or really on one company involved in the online space, K12 Inc. – came out five days after my blog. The title of her piece was provocative — Profits and Questions at Online Charter Schools – though not nearly as provocative as the url of the article (which may suggest that it was the original title): “Online Schools Score Better on Wall Street Than in Classrooms.”
It’s important simply because it’s an long investigative piece in the New York Times. And while I am going to stick with my take that criticism is a good thing because it helps you improve, the article has been roundly criticized with good reason.
to interview, for example, the student with disabilities who can work at his own pace or the student in a rural state who would never have had access to AP physics or Mandarin Chinese if it weren’t for online options. Instead, Saul dismisses the benefits that virtual education holds for so many students.
The article does interview Ronald Packard, the CEO of K12 Inc., but the rest of the quotes are from opponents of the school. I get that you need to interview unions folks and superintendents for a full picture, but when the scholar you approach for a comment compares the company and digital learning to “what the banks did with home mortgages” and when Saul herself suggests that the company is acting like “military contractors [that] have capitalized on Pentagon spending,” well, it’s just not credible. Consider just how un-journalistic the tone is in these sentences:
With K12 estimating the market for its schools as high as $15 billion, the company’s manifest destiny is to expand across the United States. Its newest conquest is Tennessee, where the company got legislative approval last May… [my italics]
Other problems with the piece are:
1) The article draws conclusions from an investigation of one company and applies them broadly to digital learning. As Burke notes:
Rocketship Academy, a blended learning school that leverages online learning in combination with the traditional classroom. Out of 3,000 low-income schools in California, Rocketship is the fifth-highest-performing.
Rocketship’s performance is consistent with findings released in 2010 by the U.S. Department of Education. In a meta-analysis of more than 1,000 empirical studies on virtual learning, it found that “online learning has been modestly more effective, on average, than the traditional face-to-face instruction with which it has been compared.”
There are also public virtual schools, including the rightly much-applauded Florida’s Virtual School, which have demonstrated records of success and also provide lessons for the kind of accountability that states like Pennsylvania, which Saul’s focuses on, should insist upon.
2) Saul is clearly unfamiliar with the field she is writing about. After citing upcoming research from Western Michigan University and the National Education Policy Center to the effect that
only a third of K12’s schools achieved adequate yearly progress, the measurement mandated by federal No Child Left Behind legislation
Saul quotes a school official from Memphis Public Schools to support her point that children need academic and social skills. The problem is that
According to Superintendent Kriner Cash, only about 16% of Memphis City Schools made its ‘Adequate Yearly Progress,’ or AYP. He said about 50 schools made improvements but it wasn’t enough.
Then there is the section of the article where Saul seeks to taint K12 Inc., and the entire digital learning space, with the scarlet letter of lobbying. Taking the Pennsylvania state auditor’s criticism of K12’s use of funds on advertising and lobbying without questioning, Saul shows either naivete or a lack of curiosity surprising because of her profession when she writes that charter schools and digital learning entities
have formed a lobbying juggernaut in state capitals. In Pennsylvania, the company has spent $681,000 on lobbying since 2007.
Juggernaut? It’s not my intention to defend lobbyists, but can Saul really be unaware that taxpayer funds go to teachers’ union lobbying and also that of the superintendents—and that these funds flow through private organizations? If K12’s spending $170,000 a year on lobbying is offensive, then what about these numbers for the Pennsylvania State Education Association, which she quotes throughout her article:
The Pennsylvania State Education Association (PSEA), an affiliate of the NEA, siphoned over $55 million out of its 191,000 members’ and 5,600 agency-fee payers’ wallets in 2010, with help from school districts who deduct the payments.
A number of members and fee-payers would gladly keep their money, if given the choice. National Education Association (NEA) general counsel Robert Chanin acknowledged that fact: “It is well recognized that if you take away the mechanism of payroll deduction, you won’t collect a penny from these people.”
More than $2.5 million of that paid for political fundraising, a gubernatorial debate video, political calling, lobbying, and other political activity…
While dues cannot be used to directly fund candidates’ campaigns, unions also have PACs. Union war chests contributed more than $23 million to campaigns in 2009-2010 — much more than the often vilified natural gas industry. PACE, the PSEA’s political action committee, contributed $2.3 million to state election campaigns in 2009-2010, including $310,000 to Dan Onorato for Governor.
Another example of Saul’s lack of understanding of the field is her broad and unfortunately uninformed assumptions about the kinds of students that may benefit from digital opportunities—suggesting that they are simply those kids with “strong parental commitment and self-motivated students.”
Then there is her lack of understanding of homeschoolers. Citing critics who “argue that states are essentially subsidizing home schooling,” Saul is oblivious to the counter-argument made for decades by homeschoolers that they are the ones who have long subsidized public schools by paying for their kids’ education out of pocket even as they pay taxes for traditional public schools that their kids do not attend.
All that said, there is no reason to go overboard criticizing Saul’s intentions or lack of detailed knowledge with the subject matter. That’s hardly rare in journalism these days, though it is equally clear that the Times‘ Sam Dillon is a far more experienced hand in the education space. Saul’s piece is helpful when it underscores an issue that states interested in expanding digital learning have to get their arms around: How payments and incentives are structured to online vendors is crucial to ensuring accountability for recruitment and retention, as well as student achievement.
For example, Saul writes that
The constant cycle of enrollment and withdrawal, called the churn rate, appears to be a problem at many schools. Records Agora filed with Pennsylvania reveal that 2,688 students withdrew during the 2009-10 school year. At the same time, K12 continued to sign up new students. Enrollment at the end of the year — 4,890 — was 170 students more than at the beginning, obscuring the high number of withdrawals.
A 50 percent “churn” rate is unacceptable, and that Pennsylvania is not insisting on answers suggests that they need to improve their public policy. And while Saul’s wrong on the kinds of students who may benefit from digital learning, we would be wise to listen to disgruntled K12 Inc. staff members when they
say problems begin with intense recruitment efforts that fail to filter out students who are not suited for the program[.]
As the Massachusetts legislature thinks through this issue, it has to pay special attention to the fee structure and timing. Here the public model in Florida may provide important lessons in as much as there is no payment made to the Florida Virtual School until the student completes the course with a satisfactory grade.
Such a payment system would alleviate the pressures of some teachers at K12 who
questioned why some students who did no class work were allowed to remain on school rosters, potentially allowing the company to continue receiving public money for them.
Which still leaves the issue of accountability for performance. Saul describes the experiences of two Tennessee families to underscore the observation that
[S]ome teachers said they were under pressure to pass students with marginal performance and attendance.
She also uses their experiences to ask if K12 Inc. is doing enough to ensure that the student is really doing the work.
Some teachers have complained that it can be difficult to determine whether students are actually doing the work, or getting help from their parents or others. “Virtual schools offer much greater opportunity for students to obtain credit for work they did not do themselves,” said a report in October from the National Education Policy Center, which receives financing from the National Education Association.
There are a number of options here, including more frequent online visual contact, periodic meetings, and requirements for testing to occur in public spaces with sign-ins. These are precisely the topics of discussion that Massachusetts has to take on seriously as it decides how to exploit technology in a way that advances access to AP courses, specialized courses, customized individual learning, and full schooling online.
Noted “for his work in accountability and assessment,” one could complain (and I have) that the Commissioner should not have waited 3 ½ years to come to that conclusion. Especially with the financial and political missteps made by the previous superintendent.
10 percent of [the students] drop out each year, and only 30 and 40 percent of [students] are proficient or advanced in math and reading, respectively.
Unfortunately, the fact is that the state’s plan to appoint a single person to drive the Lawrence receivership operation is a one-size-fits-all strategy that has almost not chance of success. That’s because there is little evidence that state-driven, command and control efforts yield to anything but marginal improvements. And that is certainly not enough for the kids or even for the state, which currently picks up 95 percent of the education tab in Lawrence.
(Fact is, the state has owned this mess for a long time.)
As noted in the Eagle Tribune, researchers have ample evidence to work from in evaluating the possibility of a successful state-driven turnaround:
Andrew Smarick, a former U.S. deputy assistant secretary of education, has conducted research and concluded that “turnaround efforts have for the most part resulted in only marginal improvements.” He further notes that “turnarounds are not a scalable strategy for fixing America’s troubled urban school systems.”
A few years ago, California targeted the lowest-performing 20 percent of its schools for intervention. Three years later, one of the 394 targeted high schools was categorized as having made “exemplary process.”
Rather than a receiver who will have “all the powers of the superintendent and school committee” to right Lawrence’s schools, what Lawrence families need is access to good options. Options with a proven track record of success.
Instead of the “Superman” strategy, which “has failed repeatedly across the country,” the best way forward is for state leaders (governor, his appointees in the ed bureaucracy, and state legislators from the Greater Lawrence area) need to sit down and craft a comprehensive plan that gives these four options to kids:
More charters, faster. Charters in Lawrence are doing a great job, and parents need more of them. Opening failed urban districts to many more charters has worked quite well in New Orleans and Washington, DC, where 70 and 30 percent of kids are now attending charter schools. The state should go out of its way to invite networks like KIPP, SABIS, and so many others to come in with bold expansion proposals.
Boston and Springfield have access to the METCO interdistrict choice program. Why not Lawrence?
While the Greater Lawrence Vocational Technical School has shown some improvement, it could do better. Regional voc-techs around the state have improved significantly over the past decade (much higher MCAS scores and super low drop out rates). A team of voc-tech peers should be brought in to advise GLVT on how to make even more progress.
Finally, give Lawrence families private options they can’t currently afford. Lawrence’s schools spend well beyond double the amount of tuition needed to attend good area private schools, many of which are Catholic. Archdiocesan schools are high-quality options academically, as well as in terms of teaching good social skills and safety.
Creating a tax credit for businesses that give to create scholarships for Lawrence’s kids would likely pass constitutional muster and it would show that our leaders are serious in trying everything possible to give these kids a chance. Now. Not in five or 10 years. They don’t have that luxury.
If the state sticks with the same old playbook of top-down reforms, somewhere approaching half the kids in the Lawrence public schools don’t have a prayer of a chance of making it into the middle class. It’s time to have the courage to try things that are politically hard but actually work.
“Understand, I am not for monopoly when we can help it,” Louis Brandeis said in 1912. “We intend to restore competition. We intend to do away with the conditions that make for monopoly.” (Wikipedia)
Brandeis had some inkling of what hare-brained schemes philanthropists could come up with. Remember the Simple Spelling Board Andrew Carnegie set up in 1906?
The New York Times noted that Carnegie was convinced that “English might be made the world language of the future” and an influence leading to universal peace, but that this role was obstructed by its “contradictory and difficult spelling.”
105 years later, Sam Dillon of The New York Times produced a terrific piece of journalism in a May 2011 Sunday article on the overweening ambitions of the Gates Foundation and its list of DC-based clients, vendors and trade organizations like the National Governors Association; the Chief State School Officers; the Fordham Institute; Achieve, Inc.; as well as the Gates Foundation’s strategy to leverage, really to drive, federal policy in the Obama Administration’s US Department of Education. In the May article, Dillon wrote:
For years, Bill Gates focused his education philanthropy on overhauling large schools and opening small ones. His new strategy is more ambitious: overhauling the nation’s education policies…In some cases, Mr. Gates is creating entirely new advocacy groups…[The Gates Foundation] is bankrolling many of the Washington analysts who interpret education issues for journalists and giving grants to some media organizations.
Dillon continued:
The foundation spent $373 million on education in 2009, the latest year for which its tax returns are available, and devoted $78 million to advocacy — quadruple the amount spent on advocacy in 2005. Over the next five or six years, Mr. Golston said, the foundation expects to pour $3.5 billion more into education, up to 15 percent of it on advocacy…Given the scale and scope of the largess, some worry that the foundation’s assertive philanthropy is squelching independent thought, while others express concerns about transparency.
Yup. The Gates Foundation and the enormous financial interests associated with the Washington education lobby have decided that the U.S., despite its 222-year history to the contrary, needs a nationalized K-12 education system. No matter that the arguments for it are flimsy:
Nations with national curricula do better than ones without on international tests. Not true.
The national standards raise the bar set by states. For some, for some it’s a wash, and for some it is a step backwards. Prominent researchers and subject experts (Stotsky, Wurman, Milgram, Porter and others) find the standards lacking in comparison to international benchmarks. Basically the Gates folks are setting up a community college readiness set of standards.
The new national standards will give us the ability to craft better tests. No one knows. They are not complete. And we have no idea where proficiency levels will be set, whether they will build off of Massachusetts’ content frame or the frame of other state tests, which are more skills-based.
The new national standards will be serious content-based standards. Uh, no. The fact that one of the Gates Foundation allies, the Council of Chief State School Officers, absorbed the Partnership for 21st Century Skills is more than a whiff of evidence to the contrary.
The new national standards will save money. Implementation of the standards, through textbook purchases and professional developments, as well as technology and other actions necessary to implement the tests will cost tens of billions of dollars. States and localities will pay for 90 percent of this if history is any guide.
The new national standards will improve accountability. The reset of state standards means a loss of longitudinal data on student performance and will take at least half a decade to amass. Again, without the knowledge of where proficiency will be set and what the tests look like, this is fanciful thinking.
The new national standards will help improve teacher quality. Huh? Not sure how they came up with this one. Perhaps it will cure the common cold as well. The fact for Massachusetts is that the new national test and standards will undermine one of the “secret sauces” of the Bay State’s success: the teacher test (MTEL) is aligned with student tests and the standards to ensure that teachers are able to teach the materials required in the state test. We will now have to refight that battle with the unions based on the new national standards – and it will be a tough battle drawing in national lobby groups. That’s going to be hard to win.
The new national standards will drive innovation. Yeesh. I hear this from virtual learning providers all the time. Of course, if you set one set of standards, then your product development is easier and less costly in the short run. But this is the Zune argument (see below) and it’s stupid. Think about this: Most of the countries with national standards (think Finland) are the size of a state in the U.S. and often relatively homogeneous. Instead we are forging standards for 53 million kids from very diverse backgrounds.
We need one set of standards as much as we need one exclusive operating software, one keyboard for the world, and one Zune. You remember the Zune, right?
Thankfully, because consumers have the freedom to choose the products they buy, it got killed by the iPod. Curtis Cartier of The Seattle Weekly blog noted even this past March that
The Zune, Microsoft’s signature paperweight, hasn’t seen a significant upgrade, or really anything in the way of marketing or promotion, in almost two years . . . No, really, they still make the Zune. I know, right?
Microsoft bloodhound Mary Jo Foley writes at ZDNet about “Project Ventura,” a music- and video-based service that seems to be exactly what Zune and the Zune Store is, but thankfully, not the Zune.
Ventura, from what my tipsters tell me, is the name of a set of services being developed by Microsoft’s Entertainment and Devices (E&D) unit. These services are focused on music and video discovery and consumption.
On October 3, 2011, Microsoft announced that it has discontinued all Zune hardware, encouraging users to transition to Windows Phone.
Aw, shucks. And I was waiting for the new and improved Zune. Just holding my breath. And I know we all have such high expectations for Ventura.
Then there is # 9. Experts creating the standards have built off state successes. That’s hardly the case with the Massachusetts standards or the California standards, which were among the best in the country. So, maybe they built off Bob Wise’s West Virginia standards, Gene Wilhoit’s Kentucky standards, Jeb Bush’s Florida, and Checker Finn’s Ohio state standards. These are all people who promote national standards. And their state standards were mediocre and worse. No wonder they look at the community college readiness standards as a step forward.
Make no mistake about it, this is an effort built from the mainframe developed in 1992 by Marc Tucker, then president of the National Center on Education and the Economy, who in his famous 18-page “Dear Hillary” letter called for
a seamless web that literally extends from cradle to grave and is the same system for everyone,” coordinated by “a system of labor market boards at the local, state and federal levels” where curriculum and “job matching” will be handled by counselors “accessing the integrated computer-based program.
Such words may please Bill Gates, given his less than warm view of the liberal arts. The drive to nationalize education is so important to the DC lobbying crowd and the Gates Foundation that they are willing to overlook some “niceties,” such as the fact that it violates provisions in three federal laws (including the original Elementary and Secondary Education Act, the US Department of Education’s 1979 enabling legislation, and No Child Left Behind). Perhaps understanding the rule of law is a 20th-century skill.
Only this time, the DC advocates for this sort of educational lobotomy (which places workforce development above the formation of free citizens) have learned lessons from the past, when national standards efforts died off because they were done in the light of day. As Pioneer’s Jamie Gass noted a year ago in The Providence Journal:
When it comes to the national standards, the line dividing public officials and trade organizations has become so murky that Pioneer Institute recently submitted a Freedom of Information Act request for correspondence between state education officials and organizations like NGA, CCSSO, the Gates Foundation and the Common Core State Standards Initiative. It’s particularly unfortunate that public education is the setting for this circumvention of democracy and the public trust. Even as we teach our children about the sanctity of the Constitution, the Bill of Rights and the Federalist Papers, they watch adults develop ever-more-clever ways to brush aside the principles those documents exemplify.
What I want is a debate on the merits of this effort before we call the game over. And when we have that argument, the national standards folks lose. Consider the fact that in August the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), an association of conservative legislators, debated the merits of model legislation to pull out of the national standards at their quarterly meeting in New Orleans. Given the fact that most state legislatures and legislators are Republican, this is an influential group.
They did and instead set up a series of sessions debating the issue at the end of November in Scottsdale, Arizona. The debate was open and frank. And as Catherine Gewertz of EdWeek reported, and Lindsey Burke of the Heritage Foundation notes in her blog, the ALEC Education Task Force debated model legislation that would aid states seeking to “exit the national standards project and regain control over what is taught in local schools.”
Philanthropy is a wonderful American tradition. I wonder when the Gates Foundation is able to flood the education ideas market with dollars whether we have the institutional fortitude to withstand the stupid ideas GF is generating. The national standards effort is slightly more plausible than the Simple Spelling Board, but not by much. And worse, it is illegal.
A century ago, the “People’s Lawyer” Louis Brandeis took on monopolistic industries in order to ennoble democratic principles articulated in the Constitution. Today, no one in DC has the courage to stand up to our era’s education Robber Baron. That’s hardly a surprise. But do the states?
There is so much energy in the virtual learning space right now, with a number of products that are maturing and others that are continuing to grow exponentially. The free Khan Academy has provided almost 100 million exercises, now boasts about 3.5 million discrete users, and is growing at a rate of about 300,000 users a month (with the pace of growth increasing). That opens up all kinds of possibilities in terms of partnerships, branding and funding. That product is going worldwide fast, and branching out into many new academic areas.
Getting the promise of digital learning right is going to be a challenge on a number of fronts. One challenge is that the two tons of money going into building and marketing product are not necessarily focused on high-quality academics. The general public has gotten so used to a low-quality public education product that their expectations may not be altogether high. I am willing to bet my best necktie that a look at the American users of Khan Academy, for example, will tell you that most of the users are from wealthier homes. These are homes that are more used to high-quality academics, homes where hard work and self-direction are more the norm, or wealthier homes where kids just are not fitting into the rubric of the traditional school.
That’s still a great thing, because it means that Khan Academy can help address the high-end achievement gap (wealthier underachievers relative to other countries). The data from Khan Academy shows that, with self-paced learning, a lot of kids who would have otherwise been relegated to slow-learner status actually catch up to and outpace the supposed smarty-pants in the class.
Khan Academy is also collecting reams of data on how users interact with the site and how they learn. Sal Khan noted in Boston a couple of weeks ago that the enormous amount of data the Academy collects is astounding. As Khan pithily put it, the Academy probably collects more data in a week than any PhD candidate in education has ever used in his or her dissertation.
Understanding the quality of the choices in the marketplace will have to be informed by more than giddy passion about the promise of virtual learning. A cursory look at the research done on virtual learning suggests that there has been to date more energy than light on the impact of VL on sustained student achievement. Some of that is simply because it is relatively new and that the products are very different. The Florida Virtual School, for example, has a very different public system from other private market products. There are products that work from specific curricular requirements, others that seek only to achieve a specific goal (say, proficiency in French) and so on.
One thing I would urge reformers to do, though, is to avoid filling this as yet undefined area of innovation with particular wish lists. I hear so many people tell me that VL is going to decimate teachers unions, address low- (poor, underachievers) and high-end achievement gaps, fix budget problems, make testing a thing of the past, make learning student-centered (some see this as an end in itself), make students creative and give access to global learning opportunities, cure the common cold and cancer in one fell swoop, and alleviate cavities, hang nails and acne.
We are just at the start of the virtual learning movement, and there is so much promise in the short term regarding access to high-quality content, targeted instruction, peer tutoring and resulting stronger socialization around academics (rather than who’s cool and who’s not). Long term, virtual learning has more muscle to grow organically than other reforms in the past, given that a large group of virtual learning vendors are aiming to meet the needs of the individual market. As a result, VL is not subject to the whims of policymaking (and the politics behind it).
But policy will rear its head. The fault lines around how best to teach kids how to read, conceptual understanding, and what should be in the standards and curriculum are all important topic well into a virtual future.
And politics will come. It is unavoidable. The NY Times was to run an expose by Stephanie Saul, the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist who has spent much of her career at the Times on the pharmaceutical industry and fertility treatments, on the well-known digital learning company K12. Many in the school choice movement saw the article as a likely hatchet job.
All I can say to school reformers who support digital learning is: Such articles and such scrutiny are going to come. It is inevitable and ultimately it is good.
Even if the Edison charter model in the 90s had not come under close scrutiny for business practices and impact on achievement, there would have been articles on charters that failed to live up to their fiduciary responsibility. And the resulting frameworks set up around charter schools have been beneficial to the quality of the schools. The state requirement that edu-entrepreneurs who want to start a charter school in Massachusetts must submit a detailed business plan that is reviewed and must be approved by the state’s charter school office is good for the quality of our charters.
Political shenanigans can come into play, as we saw in Gloucester and also in Brockton recently, but we do have human beings in public office and they sometimes fail to do their duty. That stuff comes out too, and we need to be vigilant. But, over the years, we cannot lose sight of the fact that the rigorous approval and closure processes have given Massachusetts’ charters a level of consistency that is not found across the country.
Once any reform touches the public realm, a higher level of scrutiny is required, because we are talking about tax dollars and the public trust. If reformers embrace virtual technology as holding out the promise “to transform” education (in quotes because it is such a worn phrase in ed circles), they will need to understand that the policy and political battles have to be won. And won on the merits. Once these products move from individual purchases (or in the case of the free Khan Academy, individual users) to the public domain, there will necessarily be the need for accountability.
Already some states have found their own path forward. Florida has chosen to set up a single statewide virtual school, which ensures accountability by only receiving funding on the basis of a successful course completion. But even with such a system, the Florida Virtual School has all kinds of standards and accountability measures to ensure that there is no cheating, that teachers are well-prepared, and that kids across the state have access to their product.
Recent changes allowing new entrants into the Florida public virtual market will challenge the Sunshine State’s model. Other states have taken very different paths. Massachusetts needs to catch up with other states and attempt to craft its own way to do virtual learning. Right now, we aren’t getting it right; in fact, after the 2010 education law allowed for the expansion of virtual learning, the state department of education has promulgated some pretty stupid regulations, setting numerical and geographic requirements on virtual schools.
Massachusetts has a lot going for it, including many lessons learned about what works in its 20 years of education reform. In recent years, we have not been the state all other states wanted to learn from. With virtual learning expanding across the country, can we catch up again provide the kind of thought leadership needed to make sure we and other states get it right?
I don’t know why (well, actually, I do) the national standards project reminds me of France. Yesterday the quote from Jean Cocteau, today … Cardinal Richelieu. Armand-Jean du Plessis, later known to us as Cardinal Richelieu was responsible for expanding the reach of weak-willed King Louis XIII by weakening the regional noble powers and instituting a system of administrative enforcers (intendants). The good Cardinal made possible the Sun King, the king who went so far as to say L’etat c’est moi.
A shrewd and cruel strategist, Richelieu defined the term eminence grise; in reality, he was bolder than a simple strategist waiting in the shadows. He earned himself the moniker of Red Eminence, red being of course the bright royal (and church) colors. Richelieu is known to college graduates in Art History as a man of culture and patron of the arts, but his vision of culture was one of control. And the arts were always an expression of political power. He created the Academie Francaise, which policed the arts and even language. It still does: Yes, they’re the dumb-dumbs who still debate over whether French people can say “hot dog” or “chien chaud.”
Americans have never had a state-sanctioned dictionary, nor such a ministerial. statist view of the arts.
Richelieu coined many phrases worth remembering but the one that comes to mind when thinking about the national standards project is:
To know how to disguise is the knowledge of kings.
Again drawing from friends in the academic world, let me share a third myth. Myth 3: The Common Core standards do not dictate the curriculum. States are free to define their own curricula based on the Common Core.
In laying out the second myth, I noted how powerful the pull of myths can be—and that is especially so when policy gets politicized and when so much money and so many business opportunities are at stake. Interests always color judgment, but especially when entire careers and enormous wealth are at stake. That is life and it is why the founders recognized the need for our institutions to address ambition. From the time of Renaissance political theorists like Machiavelli and Guicciardini, ambition was taken as a fact of life, especially in politics.
And 500 years ago, the ubiquitous parsings by politicians of all their altruistic intentions would have seemed a trough of hogwash. It struck the founding generations of the American project the same way.
Ambition is not a reprehensible quality, nor are ambitious men to be censured, if they seek glory through honorable and honest means. In fact, it is they who produce great and excellent works. Those who lack this passion are cold spirits, inclined more toward laziness than activity. But ambition is pernicious and detestable when it has as its sole power, as is generally the case with princes. And when they make it their goal, they will level conscience, honor, humanity, and everything else to attain it.
Our founders recognized that successful societies depended on ambition. And, given the less structured and hierarchical society of the early Americans than was prevalent in Europe (and so much less structured than in Renaissance italy), the founding generations of Americans were accustomed to thinking of ambition as a kind of raw passion. That was the reason they strongly believed in the horizontal separation of powers across the executive, judicial and legislative branches and also the vertical separation between the new federal government and the “several” states. The goal was, as James Madison put it, that:
Ambition must be made to counteract ambition.
Defenders of the national standards profess that the Common Core do not dictate state and ultimately local curricula. In this way, they tell us, don’t worry, you state and local folks aren’t giving up any real authority.
While it is technically true that the national standards don’t dictate curriculum by themselves, they are the foundation for national tests already being prepared by federally-funded assessment consortia—and, once institutionalized, the national tests will necessarily force the creation of a national curriculum.
My opinion? Roll out the evidence and the expert tape.
develop model curriculum frameworks that teachers can use to plan instruction and gain a deep understanding of the CCSS, and released items and tasks that teachers can use for ongoing formative assessment (p. 57)
unpack the standards to a finer grain size as necessary to determine which standards are best measured through the various components … To do this, the Partnership will engage lead members of the CCSS writing teams … and the content teams from each state, assessment experts and teachers from Partnership states(p. 174)
So, you might say, well, that’s just the application (don’t understand the logic behind that statement but it’s what I heard from a local support of Common Core recently). Well the Curriculum Frameworks were released by PARCC on November 9, 2011. Look at them yourself.
translate the standards into content/curricular frameworks, test maps, and item/performance event specifications to provide assessment specificity and to clarify the connections between instructional processes and assessment outcomes (p. 35)
provide “a clear definition of the specific grade-level content skills and knowledge that the assessment is intended to measure (p. 48)
develop cognitive models for the domains of ELA and mathematics that specify the content elements and relationships reflecting the sequence of learning that students would need to achieve college and career-readiness (p. 76)
It’s not possible to create good state assessments without considering the curriculum. Otherwise, you wind up with tests that don’t measure what is taught, tests which may not even measure material that should be in the curriculum.
Make no mistake about it: National standards is part of a project that aims to change the face of education in the United States. Arne Duncan has done a Richelieu-esque job of masking the real impacts. I don’t really believe that the impacts will be very positive as regards student achievement; there are many reasons for that, but you could summarize my feelings with the simple assertion of a fact: US DOE has oversight responsibility for the Washington DC schools. Their work cannot be compared to the kind of improvements we’ve seen in Massachusetts or that have been observed in Florida.
One impact I am sure of: Governance of our schools will shift to Washington. And it won’t come back any time soon. Mr. Duncan’s office will function much more as European Ministries of Education. Perhaps it will be like the French system of which the late President Mitterand once boasted that at any minute during the day he knew precisely what French students, whether in Paris or some rural hamlet in Brittany, were learning.
Yes, to know how to disguise is the knowledge of kings.
The French painter, poet, novelist, director, etc., Jean Cocteau noted the following about our need for myths:
Man seeks to escape himself in myth, and does so by any means at his disposal. Drugs, alcohol, or lies. Unable to withdraw into himself, he disguises himself. Lies and inaccuracy give him a few moments of comfort.
With education so rife with mediocrity, those satisfied with the status quo often resort to myth for comfort. Some schools don’t perform well, the myth goes, because poor and minority kids cannot excel; there’s the myth that if we only added more class time everything would be fine; there’s the myth that classroom size always or even most of the time matters. And, of course, most recently there are all the myths about how nationalizing education decisions will somehow magically help improve our schools.
The need for myths is so powerful that the call for national standards allows even the smartest people to seek excuses for illegal behavior. Because of their need for myths, otherwise smart people will even make excuses for the US Secretary of Education’s recent push to create “conditional” waivers, even though the conditions he is setting for states have no basis in law.
In a previous post, I noted that proponents of the Common Core standards may like to claim that these new national standards are internationally benchmarked. They’re not. Myth #2 about national standards is that they’re aligned with workplace needs and college readiness.
Again drawing from friends in the academic world, let me share some thoughts on these myths. Myth 2: The Common Core standards are aligned with workplace requirements and also with college readiness.
The statement is not true on workplace requirements and not true on college readiness. My opinion? Roll the expert tape.
My concern is the assertion in the draft that the standards for college and career readiness are essentially the same. This implies the answer is yes to the question of whether the same standards are appropriate for 4 year universities, 2 year colleges, and technical colleges. The burden of proof for this assertion rests with CCSSO/NGA …
The ELA standards hedge this issue by saying “the evidence strongly suggests that similar reading, writing, speaking, and listening skills are necessary for success in both the college and workplace.” There is no similar wording preceding the math standards. I have reviewed the sources included in the draft, and cannot follow how the panel deduced that college and career readiness standards are the same.
Since most of the career opportunities for today’s students will require some form of postsecondary education, there are many times when students will not be able to acquire the necessary academic, technical or employability skills in high school that will allow them to be career-ready without further education and training. Additional knowledge and specialization in one or more of these areas is often required either immediately after high school or in the future, depending on a student’s career choices. [emphasis added]
What about college readiness? Are the national standards aligned with such a vision?
The fact is no. One cannot define an authentic college-readiness and expect 100% of students to meet it. The Common Core chose to dumb-down its definition of college-readiness so it can make the political claim that its standards are “college ready.” Common Core standards are set to prepare students only for non-selective community colleges.
No country in the world realistically expects to send 100% of its high school students to college, which is what the Common Core promises and what the U.S. Department of Education seeks to enforce through new regulations. The best performing nations send about 70% of students to both two- and four-year colleges, which is precisely the percentage of students in the U.S. going on to college.
(Education at A Glance 2011: OECD Indicators, chart C2.3, page 312. Note the misleading nature of chart C2.1 on page 308.)
Common Core defines less than a full Algebra 2 and Geometry courses as its “college readiness.” Current reality is that in a survey of public four-year state colleges in the top 20 states by population, only the University of Maryland, University of Virginia, and one campus of the University of Massachusetts (Lowell) require less than 3-years of high school math, including Algebra 1, Algebra 2, & Geometry. Want me to make that clearer? That’s only 3 systems in the top 20 states by population.
(R. James Milgram, Z. Wurman, “List of major four-year state colleges from larger states that require for admission at least 3 years of high school math, including Algebra 1, Algebra 2, & Geometry, or higher” Unpublished document, distributed at the joint MAA-AMS meeting, January 2010.)
If that last statistic is not enough to demonstrate to you the level of mythologizing going on with Common Core, then perhaps you prefer to read myths. Here’s one—a recent Common Core “validation study” from the EPIC center, which was funded by the hyper-pro-Common Core Bill Gates Foundation and which has severe methodological problems. (Read here and here.) The study was performed by a member of Common Core’s Validation Committee who had already certified a year before the study that Common Core’s “college readiness” is “reflective of the core knowledge and skills in ELA and mathematics that students need to be college- and career-ready.”
Escaping in myth by any means possible. The current moments of comfort some derive from the national standards will not serve us well into the future.
When it comes to American education, the myths that are bandied about most frequently these days are related to the “Common Core” national standards. Proponents make a number of important claims about them: They’re internationally benchmarked. They’re aligned with workplace needs and also college readiness. They don’t dictate state curricula; and they’re voluntary. Each of these assertions by proponents of the Common Core is highly questionable and in some cases outright false.
Friends in the academic world pulled together a series of Five Big Myths about Common Core Standards that I want to share with you. Today, I am going to focus on Myth 1: The Common Core standards are high and internationally benchmarked to those of high achieving nations.
In other words, will the new national standards make our classroom content comparable to the content taught in the best-performing nations? The answer is no.
In this case, the facts show the Common Core standards to be mediocre in rigor and below what high achieving nations expect of their students.
My opinion? As they say, roll the tape from the experts:
Prof. R. James Milgram of Stanford University, the only mathematician on Common Core Validation Committee, refused to sign on to them and wrote in his refusal letter:
This is where the problem with these standards is most marked. While the difference between these standards and those of the top states at the end of eighth grade is perhaps somewhat more than one year, the difference is more like two years when compared to the expectations of the high-achieving countries — particularly most of the nations of East Asia.
(Milgram’s e-mail to Chris Minnich of CCSSO and the Validation Committee on May 30, 2010.)
Prof. Sandra Stotsky of the Univeristy of Arkansas, the only literacy expert on the Common Core Validation Committee, refused to sign on to them and wrote:
The two English-speaking areas for which I could find assessment material (British Columbia and Ireland) have far more demanding requirements for college readiness. The British Commonwealth examinations I have seen in the past were far more demanding in reading and literature in terms of the knowledge base students needed for taking and passing them. No material was ever provided to the Validation Committee or to the public on the specific college readiness expectations of other leading nations in mathematics or language and literature.
Prof. Jonathan Goodman of the Courant Institute at the NYU, who compared them to programs of high achieving nations, wrote about them:
The proposed Common Core standard is similar in earlier grades but has significantly lower expectations with respect to algebra and geometry than the published standards of other countries.
Prof. Andrew Porter, the dean of the University of Pennsylvania Graduate School of Education, wrote in a research paper after studying them:
Those who hope that the Common Core standards represent greater focus for U.S. education will be disappointed by our answers. Only one of our criteria for measuring focus found that the Common Core standards are more focused than current state standards … some state standards are much more focused and some much less focused than is the Common Core, and this is true for both subjects. …
We also used international benchmarking to judge the quality of the Common Core standards, and the results are surprising both for mathematics and for ELAR. … High-performing countries’ emphasis on “perform procedures” runs counter to the widespread call in the United States for a greater emphasis on higher order cognitive demand.
(Andrew Porter et al., “Common Core Standards: The New U.S. Intended Curriculum,” Educational Researcher, April 2011)
Finally, Prof. William McCallum of the University of Arizona, one of the three writers of the mathematics standards—and the only mathematician among them—said the following about the standards, when speaking to a forum of mathematicians:
While acknowledging the concerns about front-loading demands in early grades, [McCallum] said that the overall standards would not be too high, certainly not in comparison [with] other nations, including East Asia, where math education excels.
Intellectually curious people who are considering which side of the “standards” fence they should be need to be aware of what academicians think of the national standards. They are not all they were advertised to be.
In coming days, I’ll post four other myths about the Common Core standards. If we were a state without a proven record in improving our schools, this discussion would be “academic.” Given the efforts and results we’ve attained for our students, we cannot settle for myths.
