Posts filed under 'News'
Periodically, over at the Fordham blog, Checker Finn does his best imitation of the cop waving traffic through at the scene of the car crash we like to call Common Core. In a post last week (“The war against the Common Core”), he morphs into good ol’ Sergeant Finn, crabbing at any observers, “Nothing to see here, folks. Move along, move along.” The mishaps around Common Core national standards are simple driver misjudgment, he explains. Steering mistakes. Nobody’s breaking the law. And don’t worry, because even though there have been lots of accidents, the road ahead is not dangerous.
This is classic Checker handwaving, passing off politics as policy. Let’s look at the four arguments he makes.
1. Don’t worry about the quality of the standards, amending them, etc. Checker starts in his usual way by calling people who disagree “zealous assailants” (we were kvetchers a few handwaves back) who have mounted “ceaseless attacks” creating a “tempest in a highly visible teapot.” I suppose he is referring to Pioneer’s four studies (1, 2, 3, 4) on the quality (or lack thereof) of the national standards. Checker argues that
[O]ther states could simply copy the best of those that already exist. But that’s more or less what the Common Core is: an amalgam of good standards put together by people who know a lot—and care a lot—about both content and skills.
No matter how many times Checker and Fordham say this does not matter. It is factually untrue. The experts who conducted our four comparisons of the national standards to specific state standards were the best in the business, far more qualified to make judgments than the ones employed by Fordham. And they found not only that there are a few flaws related to algebra, but that the math standards are a significant step down on algebra; that they have numerous problems with basic arithmetic; they impose an experimental (and not likely to succeed) pedagogical method for teaching geometry; and they aim at community college level math. On the English language arts side of the ledger, they found that the national standards markedly de-emphasize literature, which will slow the acquisition of a rich vocabulary; they put English teachers in the position of teaching technical readings (good luck with that); and they, again, aim far too low.
Checker’s handwaving on the significance of these flaws is a sign of an impractical, overly theoretical approach to education policy, and nothing short of irresponsible:
Insofar as such criticisms are warranted, the Common Core can be revised, states can add standards of their own, and jurisdictions that find the common version truly unsatisfactory can change their minds about using it at all.
The two assertions made here are just wrong. Yes, states can add standards of their own (up to 15% of content), which for places like Massachusetts does little to get us to the same level of expectations we had set before. In addition, content added by specific states will not be included in the national tests, so few schools will teach the add-ons. Finally, the idea that it is oh-so-easy to change the national standards is overindulgent daydreaming. Any state desiring to change a strand of the standards will have to negotiate with 40+ jurisdictions, the non-profits involved in this effort, and of course the federal government. To date, there has been no process established for amending the standards. Just think about that for a second.
On whether states can pull out, well, more below.
2. We the DC People working on the national standards are all of good will and working hard to implement these things. Yup, OK. I do have reservations about the intentions of some, but let’s not go there. What is worth stating clearly though is that Checker and the folks in DC pushing this aren’t serious about upholding the public trust and in devising policy in a responsible and publicly accountable way. Big words, I know. Here are the facts to back my view up.
• We know very well that there is a lack of settlement around the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, and that is due in part to the way it was forced through Congress and the perceived costs of implementing it. (Clearly control of your own health care matters to a large portion of the US population as well.) Including the adoption of national standards in grant program requirements and then having the federal government fund the development of curricular materials and instructional practice guides directly, well, these actions were never even approved by Congress. The reason there has never been a Congressional Budget Office scoring of the cost to states is because, again, it was never approved by Congress. So the lack of settlement around Common Core is even more to be expected than what we’ve seen to date regarding the PPACA.
• Checker holds himself up as working to “cost it all out.” Shouldn’t that have been done before moving ahead? Have we grown so irresponsible as to adopt blank check policy making? That’s ridiculous, and that’s why Pioneer Institute is the only research outfit in the U.S. to have performed an actual cost accounting of the implementation of national standards and tests. Ted Rebarber of AccountabilityWorks conducted a fair and empirical analysis of the cost of implementation, and found that it will cost $16 billion.
That’s almost assuredly going to be an unfunded mandate. Fordham’s working on it? The fact is that when our report came out, they assigned someone with no ability to review the study. Kathleen Porter-Magee’s criticisms of the report for Fordham are flimsy in the extreme. For example, KP-M wants the study’s author Ted Rebarber to build into his cost estimates something outside of empirical data—an assumption that as yet unheard of reforms by the feds will lead to big cost reductions. It is worth nothing that this is just more evidence that the quality of Fordham’s work has fallen quickly these past years as the good Sergeant and his troops have taken up handwaving and pom-poms for the national standards. We’re supposed to skip empirical evidence and assume reforms in order to make the numbers work?
We saw the same thing with the Fordham Institute’s review of the Massachusetts state standards prior to our state board’s vote to adopt Common Core. Then, Fordham’s researcher(s) did not include key aspects of the Bay State’s revisions to its English standards.
Sloppy stuff. Reason #4212 why DC players, who don’t know what they’re talking about, should stay out of state education policy.
• While the Fordham Institute and its friends who are supporting the Common Core might find it a pesky reality, the advancement of standards, tests, curricular materials and instructional practice guides is illegal. Go back and read that sentence. Perhaps the view of two former counsels general doesn’t matter to Checker and his fellow travelers, but you are breaking three federal laws—the General Education Provisions Act, the Department of Education Organization Act, and the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965. The three laws prohibit the direction, supervision or control in any way of standards, curricula and curricular materials and instructional practice. For example, the GEPA clearly states:
No provision of any applicable program shall be construed to authorize any department, agency, officer, or employee of the United States to exercise any direction, supervision, or control over the curriculum, program of instruction, administration, or personnel of any educational institution, school, or school system, or over the selection of library resources, textbooks, or other printed or published instructional materials by any educational institution or school system, or to require the assignment or transportation of students or teachers in order to overcome racial imbalance.
If I were Checker, I would think hard on this one, especially with attorneys general not shy in taking on expansions of federal power (at the end of March the Supreme Court of the United States will be hearing oral arguments on the PPACA presented by state AGs).
3. States can pull out of the Common Core and go it alone any time they want. For rhetorical reasons, Checker has separated his argument on this issue into two points (#4 and #6) but they all are closely related. Yes, Texas and Virginia and a handful of states have not adopted the Common Core. Checker admits that the likelihood (not fear) that
Uncle Sam won’t be able to keep his hands off the Common Core—which means the whole enterprise will be politicized, corrupted and turned from national/voluntary into federal/coercive … is probably the strongest objection to the Common Core.
I say this is is likely because this has been the march of the Department since 1979. It is the reason why the Department (and supporters like Checker) thinks that breaking three federal laws is the acceptable price of progress. They know their intentions are good, so breaking the law is in the interests of the country, and therefore the right thing to do. That mindset makes what Checker calls fears and suspicions a likely outcome. But it’s not fear telling us that but rather judgment based on past experience. It’s an incontrovertible fact that Democrats and Republicans have grown the Department’s reach and budget enormously in the past three decades.
In Checker’s telling, all opposition is related to “suspicion” and “lingering fears” about past attempts. Conveniently, he then pivots to his political exercise of pointing fingers at an “over-zealous Education Secretary and the President he serves.” You know, it’s a simple steering error.
The problem is that Checker has no more standing on this issue. He didn’t fight back when remarks by the Secretary and President made their intentions clear. He did not fight back when the administration created a “fiscal ‘incentive’ in Race to the Top for states to adopt the Common Core.” Calling the department out now for that is just political posturing on Checker’s part.
Then, of course, there’s the “incentive” built into the NCLB waiver process for states to adopt the Common Core. When Arne Duncan announced his decision to move ahead with waivers that posed conditions on the states that had never been approved by Congress (and which violated the aforementioned three federal laws), Fordham’s Mike Petrilli was reduced in his blog to begging Sec. Duncan not to overreach:
Walk away from this one, Mr. Secretary. Please, those of us who support the Common Core are begging you.
That’s a rather unbecoming act for a citizen in a free republic: Americans don’t generally like begging our federal officials. Yet that is what we all will be doing forward. And that was made clear to South Carolina, which recently debated leaving the Common Core. That earned a press release directly from Secretary Duncan’s mouth, “lambasting” lawmakers and the governor for even considering such a thing.
Checker downplays the feds’ funding of national assessments, admitting that it is a “third federal entanglement.” Conveniently, while he notes some requirements that come with the national tests, he skips over the fact that these assessments come with curricular materials and instructional practice guides—which are again illegal.
4. “National” is the right way to go. Let me be as kind as I can (at east to start).
- It’s illegal. We are a nation of laws, not megalomaniacs.
- Just as many nations with national standards score below as above the United States on international tests.
- Most of the nations with national standards are much smaller and often more homogeneous than the United States.
- Did I mention that it’s illegal? (I’d love to see your argument on that one, Checker.)
- The U.S. Department of Education has no track record of improving schools.
I would also note that I bristle at the thought that Massachusetts or other states should follow the advice of the Fordham Institute, which has a limited record of improving schools. I would invite readers to take a look at Ohio’s NAEP scores, as well as the performance of Ohio’s charter schools, an issue on which Fordham has been very active.
Once again, Checker gives us so many good reasons and so many good opportunities to demonstrate that he is wrong, and it’s largely because he is playing politics not policy. Obviously, he is a smart man and someone, to be honest, that has done important work in the past. But right now everything he is writing ostensibly on standards policy smacks of political positioning. He’s always looking to angle for what he thinks observers will read as the mid-range, reasonable position. Checker’s latest schtick of being for national standards but harboring thoughtful concerns about the people in power just doesn’t pass the laugh test.
Sarge, I have a couple of constructive suggestions to help you deal with that incessant handwaving tick you have.
The above Providence, RI, traffic cop has taken to dancing in the middle of the street to entertain rush hour. Such a set of moves would allow you to take people’s minds off of the Common Core crash-up and do it redirecting your handwaving to productive ends.
Or perhaps we could celebrate good ol’ Sergeant Finn’s retirement in style, as was done for this fine officer on his last day of service, marked by a box of donuts.
Crossposted at Boston.com’s Rock the Schoolhouse. Follow me on twitter at @jimstergios, or visit Pioneer’s website.
March 6th, 2012
I had the pleasure of doing Bradley Jay’s radio show on WBZ a few weeks back. We talked about the MBTA, but what really lit up the phone lines was our discussion of potential savings from reform of the T’s Ride paratransit program. Most of the callers were concerned that eligibility reforms would take away their transportation.
But it appears that the MBTA could save a lot of money just by restructuring the service, before even dealing with eligibility issues. The state’s Inspector General has come out with a report that analyzes the Ride alongside other paratransit programs operating within in the state and determined that a key difference in business practices between the Ride and other paratransit providers results in very different costs per trip. The report concludes that the cost gap between the two results in $60 million in excess costs per year for the MBTA (on a program budget of approximately $90 million).
The T has responded noting that they are held to a higher service standard and that their data is more systematic. But tellingly, they also note that they are bound to their current contracts until 2014 and then will be exploring these reforms.
Crossposted at Boston Daily.
March 2nd, 2012
The back-and-forth over the MBTA finances has seen a great deal of attention to the MBTA’s $5.2 billion in debt. A portion of that debt has been tagged with the nearly toxic label ‘Big Dig Debt’, and it’s important to be precise about what that actually means.
The MBTA’s debt comes from three sources — $1.85 billion from spending since the 2000 start of forward funding, $1.65 billion that was transferred to the MBTA under forward funding and was related to previous transit projects, and $1.7 billion in funding for projects mandated under a Big Dig-related agreement. (N.B. All above figures are from the MBTA Advisory Board’s Budget and Fiscal Analyst Brian Kane’s invaluable Born Broke report. Kane, of course, shouldn’t be held responsible for the opinions in this blog.)
It’s also important to define what that $1.7 billion was spent on. The projects were agreed to in 1990 by the Sec’y of Transportation and the Conservation Law Foundation (see Exhibit A here) and have ‘evolved’ over time.
The key point is that despite the moniker “Big Dig Debt,” all of these projects directly relate to transit expansion or improvements like extending the commuter rail on the South Shore and to Worcester, adding parking spaces, building out the Fairmount Line — not roadways and, certainly, not the Big Dig. They came about as a result of an agreement that had to be signed in order for the environmental permitting around the Big Dig to take place. Some suggest that another driver behind the signing was to lock in a commitment to transit expansion and that the air quality justification for the agreement was flawed.
The state has now said it will fund future MBTA expansion and has started to put some money on the table. But, unless they take some things out of the existing state capital plan, the state has limited ability to finance major projects. Not to mention, the state has no capacity to take debt off of the MBTA unless they come up with a new revenue stream or breach their current debt affordability standards.
Part of the conversation around the MBTA — and transportation finance, more generally— should be how to fund the debt. But let’s at least be clear about what the ‘Big Dig Debt’ funded: Transit expansion and improvement, not roadways.
March 1st, 2012
The last decade has seen an explosion in the number of middle and high schools mandating volunteerism. I am not a fan of forcing volunteerism, and “mandatory volunteerism” offends those who treasure meaningful language. But within a set of courses and activities aimed at rounding out children so that they will become effective participants in civil society, such requirements may make sense. That is especially so if students can choose the volunteer program and not be restricted to school-approved activities. Choosing what you are passionate about is critical to being a good citizen.
Clearly, such mandates are not things we impose on adults. Which is why it is so disconcerting to see the federal department of education treat state and local education leaders like children.
Way back in 2009, when U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan announced the Race to the Top competition, it was couched in closely scripted remarks about how this was a voluntary competition that would not upend 200 years of history around state and local primacy in education policy. Even as he saluted former North Carolina Governor Jim Hunt in June 2009 for supporting “common national standards when it wasn’t politically popular,” Sec. Duncan extolled the federalist system:
I am continually struck by the profound wisdom underlying the American political experiment. The genius of our system is that much of the power to shape our future has, wisely, been distributed to the states instead of being confined to Washington.
Our best ideas have always come from state and local governments, which are the real hothouses of innovation in America.
That hymnal was clearly distributed to national and local partners, with the National School Boards Association, Achieve, Inc., the National Governors Association’s lobby and other fellow travelers who made a point of employing words like “state-led,” “voluntary,” and “partnership” to counter suggestions that the feds were driving the effort. Anyone who questioned how long this representation of intent would last was relegated to the realm of overly dramatic, a kvetcher, or a conspiracy theorist.
We are now on the second and perhaps third act of this piece of theater. In round one, legislatures made affirmative choices to expand charter schools. In round two, states only got funding if they complied with federal definitions of reform and innovation; and in all but five cases without legislative action and, frankly, without legislative awareness. Round three has the federal government directly funding the development of national assessments that explicitly come with curricular materials and instructional practice guides.
And now a number of states are getting antsy. The photo-op public announcements of federal grants long past, we are now into implementation—and state legislators are facing a rude awakening. Only now are they hearing about the mediocre quality of the national standards, the as-yet-undefined assessments, the imposition of curricular materials, the never stated costs, and the possibility that this whole effort actually breaks three federal laws. Only now are they recognizing the potential political mess to come with the feds’ establishment of definitions of proficiency.
The great innovators inside the Lyndon Baines Johnson Department of Education Building did not take kindly to the barrage of reports on the mediocre quality of the national education standards (1, 2, 3, 4). Nor did they take kindly to reports showing that they are breaking three federal laws by directing and funding the development of national tests, curricular materials and instructional practice guides. A recent report that implementation of the national standards and tests will cost $16-plus billion (90% of which will come from states and localities) didn’t sit well with them either.
In addition to the lagging time to grasp the real policy questions before them, the past three years have brought a sea-change in the political landscape. The 2010 elections changed the make-up of state legislatures dramatically, with a greater number of fiscal conservatives who look warily at unfunded federal mandates and overreach. With the new conditions, never approved by Congress, that Sec. Duncan is advancing, there is a growing realization among state legislators that the national standards are not truly voluntary. Even a stalwart supporter of a big USDOE like Mike Petrilli of the DC-based Fordham Institute recognizes that with the No Child Left Behind waivers Sec. Duncan:
seems compelled to attach mandates to his forthcoming NCLB waivers that will require adoption of the Common Core standards.
No, his team won’t mention the Common Core, but everybody knows that’s what he’s talking about when he calls for “college and career-ready standards.”
Fearful of stoking a backlash that will “lose many of the states that have already signed on,” Petrilli in his blog is reduced to begging Sec. Duncan not to overreach:
Walk away from this one, Mr. Secretary. Please, those of us who support the Common Core are begging you.
That’s a rather unbecoming act for a citizen in a free republic: We don’t generally like begging our federal officials. That is in fact something state legislators abhor.
Unsurprisingly, there are state officials who are running for the exits. Hearings have been held in Indiana and South Carolina on bills that would prohibit implementation of the national standards and tests. More bills are working their way toward hearings in other states, as a number of state legislators and governors are showing the audacity to question whether national standards and assessments are actually a good idea.
In Indiana, notwithstanding former Bush budgetmaster and sitting Governor Mitch Daniels’ support for Common Core, the legislature is insisting on a study of the cost of implementation:
Members of the Senate Committee on Education today unanimously approved a resolution authored by Sen. Scott Schneider (R-Indianapolis) urging a more in-depth study on Common Core State Standards and the impact on Indiana’s nationally recognized education benchmarks.
In some states, both governors and legislators are asking questions–and even reaching a position of opposition. For example, in South Carolina, prior to an education subcommittee hearing on S.604, a bill that would prohibit the state from implementing the national standards and tests, Governor Nikki Haley took the bold step of calling for the state to pull out.
My testimony to the subcommittee drew on reports on the lack of quality, the cost and the illegality of the national standards and assessment project. But I also made one additional important argument, which is built off of the fact that South Carolina has been recognized as having the best U.S. History standards in the country. South Carolina and other states that choose to exit the national standards should not simply say no. They could draw from Texas’ efforts:
Consulting with top academicians in the U.S. and taking note of Singapore’s much-vaunted standards, Texas re-designed its state standards. Today, Texas not only has excellent English standards but also has among the best math standards in the country—far stronger than the Common Core.
South Carolina has rigorous US history standards and high-quality state standards. Saying “no” to Common Core is a matter of good judgment—but I would urge you additionally to use the opportunity of this debate to move forward with positive improvements to the Palmetto State’s standards and assessments.
States must aim higher than Common Core. Common Core aims at community college readiness, and that is not good enough for Massachusetts–and not going to make the U.S. internationally competitive.
As Catherine Gewertz of EdWeek noted, the bill “got voted down in a state Senate subcommittee, but was still going to move on to the full education committee.”
But US Ed Secretary’s reaction to the South Carolina legislature’s and the governor’s actions was instructive. The day after the subcommittee vote, Sec. Duncan issued a formal statement on the happenings in South Carolina, which Gewertz described as “swipe” at the Palmetto State and “designed to dismantle support for the proposed legislation”:
The idea that the Common Core standards are nationally-imposed is a conspiracy theory in search of a conspiracy. The Common Core academic standards were both developed and adopted by the states, and they have widespread bipartisan support.
Noting that states must stop “dummying down academic standards and lying about the performance of children and schools,” he accused the Palmetto State of “lower[ing] the bar for proficiency in English and mathematics faster than any state in the country from 2005 to 2009.”
You could analyze the secretary’s formal statement for style points, such as
- Why didn’t Sec. Duncan ask a surrogate to make such a statement rather than personally get involved? Previous secretaries would certainly not have been so heavy-handed.
- Who writes the secretary’s releases? “Dummying down”? They don’t teach that at Harvard, so I am going to guess it’s a Chicago-ism. And does the secretary hope to convince state legislators toward a course of action by berating them as if they were little children?
But there are two important, substantive conclusions to draw from the secretary’s broadside.
- The secretary is, in essence, accusing South Carolina of cooking the books on student performance. As Jay Greene notes, that is factually inaccurate, and the secretary is either ignorant of state practice or his is shading the truth to suit his argument:
South Carolina did significantly lower its performance standards between 2005 and 2009. But they did so because they had earlier raised those performance standards to well-above the national average. In the end, South Carolina had math and reading performance standards that were close to the national average and close to the NAEP standard for Basic.
- It’s unseemly for the secretary of education of the federal government to make a formal statement about a legislative proposal related to education standards in the state of South Carolina. That is especially true if Common Core is truly a state-led effort. More directly: if all this talk about state-led standards is true, why is the U.S. Secretary of Education flying off the handle when a single state expresses interest in pulling out? As CATO’s Neal McCluskey put it, “Apparently, if you try to undo something the feds want you to do, they’ll slap you around until you confess they’ve never threatened you.”
The feds want Common Core really bad. This is mandatory volunteerism of the worst kind. It is a power play that is advancing a mediocre product, with high undisclosed and unfunded costs for states and localities, and it is illegal. Those are three really big strikes against it.
But worst of all, it treats states like children. However critical I can be of education leaders in our and other states, I cannot see a record of any accomplishment by the so-called adults in Washington that compares with the demonstrated gains in Massachusetts, Florida and many other states.
Crossposted at Boston.com’s Rock the Schoolhouse. Follow me on twitter at @jimstergios, or visit Pioneer’s website.
February 26th, 2012
The waiver from the federal No Child Left Behind Act will, as noted yesterday, have a number of effects, with three big ones being:
- It moves the goalposts for accountability back years (at least 2017, more likely 2024) and weakens the accountability goal (from proficiency for all students to making progress on the achievement gap)
- It gets rid of all of the law’s school choice and parental options, which were to kick in after a number of years of continued school failure
- It centralizes innovation and change strategies in Malden (the world HQ of the state department of education)
The first effect listed above is a simple punt on accountability. But the last two bullets mark a move away from empowering parents and reinvigoration of the state’s education bureaucracy. It also lots of questions:
If parents are not empowered in the process, where will accountability come from? After all, if the state is the great innovator and also the keeper of accountability (the accountability office now directly reports to the education commissioner), why would the bureaucracy feel any pressure? They define the terms of the debate and the solutions.
There is also the question about whether central bureaucracies can ever really “innovate.” Innovation comes from competition and new ideas that often take on conventional wisdom. Digital was unable to innovate from the inside and therefore it was replaced by other computer companies, etc. There is a lot written on the topic, and I guess the educrats are too busy to look at such research.
US Secretary Arne Duncan has ignored this as well, considering DC as the driver of innovation in the states, on standards, testing, instructional practice, curricula, and teacher evaluations. He has staked his claim to be an innovator on his work in Chicago, when he was Superintendent of Chicago Public Schools.
And for the most part, he and the state education bureaucracies who are working with him, have advanced the view that they can “turn around” schools and districts from central offices. I’ve noted the research on the absolute paucity of successful turnarounds before, but if thought it is worth sharing recent research that is focused on Duncan’s own home town and its record with school turnarounds:
One day before Chicago School Board members vote on whether to “turn around” a record number of flagging schools, a new study emerged Tuesday that dumped on the results of the city’s major turnaround vendor.
About 33 neighborhood schools with at least 95 percent low-income students not only outscored equally poor schools cleared out of all staff and “turned around’’ by the Academy for Urban School Leadership, but even beat the city test score average, the study by Designs for Change indicated.
And the neighborhood schools did so without the average $7 million per school in funds and facility improvements over five years given the typical AUSL school — and with far less teacher turnover, the study said.
As the Chicago Sun-Times notes:
The analysis ranked 210 city neighborhood schools with at least 95 percent low-income students, based on the percent of students passing their 2011 state reading tests. It found that AUSL placed only three schools among the top 100 — Howe (53rd), Morton (84th) and Johnson (88th). AUSL’s lowest scorer was Bethune, at 199th. Two CPS-run turnaround schools — Langford and Fulton — came in 150 and 206th, respectively.
Often, the study found, neighborhood schools outperformed equally-poor AUSL turnaround schools located only a few miles away. For example, in the South Shore neighborhood, Powell came in No. 14, while AUSL’s Bradwell was No. 194.
Massachusetts will see in Lawrence Public Schools if somehow we will prove the exception and find a way to get the schools there on a strong path toward improvement. The state has taken over the schools in Lawrence and is crafting a central plan for lots of turnaround activity. Will it work? I really hope so, but given the data so far, and there’s lots of it, the turnaround supporters frankly are just spewing a lot of spin.
It would be far smarter for the state to give parents more charter options, create an additional vocational-technical schools that operates autonomous of the district structure, and interdistrict choice options.
Funny how empowering parents has, unlike turnaround strategies, a very good empirical record.
Crossposted at Boston.com’s Rock the Schoolhouse. Follow me on twitter at @jimstergios, or visit Pioneer’s website.
February 23rd, 2012
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:
Will the new accountability system work? We have no idea.
With the waiver in hand, Massachusetts will now unify state and federal requirements regarding school and district accountability and assistance through a new five-tier system. The state’s education department will from summer 2012 classify schools and districts
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.
The state’s menu of interventions (expanded learning time, fixing long-broken professional development, and wrap-around social services) is not very promising in terms of empirical record. And its process-heavy description of why it needed a waiver does not bode well either.
At one time NCLB provided useful feedback on district and school performance
But
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.
Crossposted at Boston.com’s Rock the Schoolhouse. Follow me on twitter at @jimstergios, or visit Pioneer’s website.
February 20th, 2012
Education spending is one of those things that makes everyone feel good — we all want the best for kids, right?
But that good feeling begins to fade when you see that many of the drivers of increased spending aren’t directly related to classrooms. In the (laudably detailed) proposed budget for FY13, Superintendent Johnson notes that health insurance is flat for the upcoming year but will increase by $7.7m in FY14 (on a base of $127.7m in total benefit spending). As noted in a 2010 research report, spending on health benefits increased by more than the increase in state education aid from 2000 to 2007. In other words, all the additional tax dollars the state spent on education during that time was spent on health insurance, not improving classroom instruction.
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.
February 8th, 2012
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.
Crossposted at Boston.com’s Rock the Schoolhouse. Follow me on twitter at @jimstergios, or visit Pioneer’s website.
February 4th, 2012
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.
Manufacturing still employs approximately 260,000 people or 8% of the workforce. And these people are working in good jobs at good wages – in the areas where manufacturing is still going on, wages in the industry are above the area median.
If you’d like to know more about manufacturing in Massachusetss, I’d encourage you to look at work by the state’s Commonwealth Corporation and Northeastern’s Barry Bluestone.
With Obama’s State of the Union, there’s increased attention to the industry. (I’m happy to see the attention paid to the industry but I’m far from convinced that his proposed tax credits are the answer.)
More important than government tax credits, US manufacturing is poised to regain at least some of its competitive position. A Boston Consulting Group report comes up with a surprising finding – the always-high (relative and absolute) level of productivity in the US is combining with rising labor costs in China to make US manufacturing competitive once again.
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?
Crossposted at Boston Daily.
February 3rd, 2012
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.
On January 17, the Globe reported that the US Attorney’s office had “essentially completed their investigation” and indictments were imminent. Given the number of legislators mentioned prominently in the Ware Report, this had to be cause for concern.
Tick, tick, tick. Still waiting.
Ten days later, the Lowell Sun ratcheted up the pressure, stating that “two sitting senators and two sitting representatives could face criminal charges. Plus, one former state legislator and 10 outsiders could also face charges.”
Beacon Hill is still waiting for the US Attorney to make her move.
Crossposted at Boston Daily.
January 31st, 2012
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