The Book on Rhee’s DC tenure: Pretty Good, Let’s Move On

November 4, 2011

(Guest Post by Matthew Ladner)

I mentioned a couple of weeks ago that the 2011 NAEP would be the first real book on Michelle Rhee’s tenure running DCPS. The 2009 NAEP was a little early, and the 2013 numbers and those going forward will be owned increasingly by those in charge after Rhee, for better or worse.

So this morning I tried to devise a rough and ready analysis that would be informative (if certainly not definitive) and that I could run before making breakfast for the kids (Mrs. Ladner is off on a well-deserved vacation, daddy is gasping for air).

Here is what I came up with: Rhee took command in 2007, so I use the 2007 NAEP scores as the baseline. We all know the level of academic achievement is terrible in DC, but it was when Rhee got there as well, so I decided to focus on growth in scores.

Finally, DC has experienced a good amount of gentrification in recent years, so I chose to focus on the growth of free and reduced lunch eligible children on all four main NAEP exams (4R, 4M, 8R, 8M) for the 2007-2011 period.

Here’s what came out:

That’s pretty close to the top. Rhee’s critics will be quick to note that DC’s gains between 2003 and 2007 were also large. We of course can never know the counterfactual DC’s scores may have been due for a stall, or they may have kept up the same pace whether Rhee had shaken the District up or not. We’ll never know.

The most important point is: DC scores are still a disaster despite the large gains before, during and after Rhee. Rhee has moved on, but the rotten scores are still there.

DC policymakers, in my opinion, should now look to take a deeper dive on reform. Why does the District’s budget continue to swell when the enrollment continues to shrink? If money were allowed to truly follow the child, you’d see an even more robust charter school movement in the District.

When will the District finally clean up the special education disaster? Many blame it on the lawyers, but go and look at the scores in the post below: these guys are shooting fish in a barrel. Special needs vouchers could play an important role in a comprehensive plan to clean up the special needs mess in DC (no litigation, no ultra-Cadillac placements).

While the needle is moving in the right direction in DC, I believe that the Cool Kids came out of the experience sadder, wiser and undeterred. That’s for the best.

14 Comments | competitive effects | Tagged: , , | Permalink
Posted by matthewladner

Los Estados que no desea ser reencarnado en si viene como un niño pobre de los hispanos.

November 4, 2011

(Guest Post by Matthew Ladner)

So how did my English to Spanish translator website do? I studied French while a student, which has come in handy about three times in my life, and may never do so again.

But I digress. The chart here ranks states by the percentage of low-income Hispanic students scoring “Below Basic” on the 4th grade NAEP reading exam in 2011.

Like any of these reincarnation charts, there are any number of factors to bear in mind. Some states have more ELL students than others, generational effects are important, and Hispanics are far from monolithic.

Nevertheless, isn’t it interesting that Oregon yet again makes an appearance in the hall of shame. Last time I visited, Oregon was way up in the Pacific Northwest and far from the southern border.

Now that the mandatory Oregon mocking is complete, let’s talk serious business: California is a disaster. The sheer size and low scores of the California Hispanic population ought to be a national concern. While it is fun to poke at Oregon for a being even worse than California, California’s Hispanic population is a sea to Oregon’s pond.

Matters are far better in Texas, the home of the second vast Hispanic population in America, but still very much in need of improvement.

California and Texas educate more than half the nation’s Hispanics, almost 5.5 million students. We need California to wake up, and for Texas to step up.

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Posted by matthewladner

2011 NAEP: Florida Finally Hits a Wall

November 3, 2011

(Guest Post by Matthew Ladner)

The Florida Age of Public School Improvement hit a wall in the 2011 NAEP. This should not be terribly surprising, as Florida’s improvement seemed certain to plateau in the absence of additional reforms.

Governor Jeb Bush relentlessly pursued a dual strategy- transparency with teeth from the top down, parental choice from the bottom up. Together these reforms drove improvement in the public schools for a number of years.  Accountability measures included school grading (A-F) and earned promotion in the early grades. Parental choice measures included Opportunity Scholarships for children attending F rated schools, the nation’s first special needs voucher program (McKay Scholarships), the nation’s largest scholarship tax credit program (Step Up for Students), a decent charter school law and the nation’s most robust system of digital learning. Florida lawmakers also attempted to thoughtfully incentivize success.

Governor Bush took office in 1999 and left office in 2007. It would be nice if these efforts could indefinitely push progress forward, but there have been plenty of bumps and problems along the way. In 2006, the Florida Supreme Court rendered a logic-free ruling abolishing Opportunity Scholarships (failing school vouchers) for private schools, and followed that up by ruling against a state authorizer for charter schools. Tax-credits, McKay and digital learning continued to incrementally advance, but not at an earth-shattering rate.

The larger problem may have come in the top down measures. The chart below presents the distribution of district and charter school grades, with one line being the A/B grades and the other D/F grades. The dotted lines represent instances when the state board raised school grading standards.

The setting of these standards represents far more of an art than a science. Set them far too high and disaster follows (this happened in Arizona). Set them too low, and you remove the tension in the system needed to drive improvement. Even after the last increase in grading standards, more than 10 times as many Florida schools received A/B grades as D/F grades.

Florida’s policymakers raised standards four times, and last year (wisely) put in an automatic trigger to raise standards by a preset amount when a certain ratio of schools get A or B grades. In addition, a fresh set of reforms passed the Florida legislature in 2011, revamping teaching and increasing charter school and digital learning options.

Just as it is impossible to exactly pinpoint how much of what caused the gains, it is likewise impossible to say exactly what made them stall. Note however that one of the favorite explanations of the anti-reform crowd, the pre-school, finally saw the advent of children old enough to have participated in the program and age into the 4th grade NAEP sample. I hope that someone is carefully studying variation in participation and corresponding trends in FCAT data, but the results at the aggregate level thus far seem underwhelming.

Plenty of other things, however, have been going on- including the collapse of a housing bubble, cutbacks in public school funding (including of some of the incentive funding programs) and a variety of other very bad things. My advice to Florida policymakers: roll up your sleeves and get back at it. Despite the enormous amount of progress seen on NAEP (and no one loves celebrating it more than me) too great of a gulf lies between a state system awarding ten times as many top grades as low grades but still  suffering from large minorities of students scoring below basic on the NAEP exams.

Governor Bush has consistently said for years that success is never final, and reform is never finished. The 2011 pause in progress demonstrates that he called it correctly.  Moving the needle on student learning on a meaningful scale and at a sustained basis represents one of the greatest public policy challenges of our times. Governor Bush has passed the torch to a new generation of Florida reformers, and they must now find new ways, and fine-tune the old ways, to push academic progress forward.

Edited for typos

4 Comments | personal tax credits/deductions, school accountability, social promotion, vouchers | Tagged: , | Permalink
Posted by matthewladner

The New No Excuses: Where Not to be Reincarnated a Rich White Kid

November 3, 2011

(Guest Post by Matthew Ladner)

So the plot thickens, as many JPGB readers (including this author) was born as an American White kid who was not eligible for a Free or Reduced Lunch. In the Great Reincarnation to Come, maybe that is always how it works out!

Or maybe not.

In any case, you ought not to feel overly reassured. Assuming again that you want to learn to read, the above chart shows achievement levels from the 2011 NAEP for non-FRL eligible White students.

Before proceeding to dwell on West Virginia and others, I should note that DC has finally come in first place in something! If you are an ultra-wealthy White student going to one of the highly exclusive public schools in Georgetown, your reading ability rocks. Congratulations to the portion of the DC school into which few poor kids ever step foot much less attend.

Something has been going wrong in West Virginia, as their NAEP scores have been declining. Alaska is a different sort of place that obviously needs to get their act together on K-12. Tennessee can’t be happy to see themselves near the top of this list, and Nevada needs to let go of the idea that you don’t need to be well-educated to deal blackjack.

And then, there’s Oregon. Someone please explain to me why 21% of middle and upper income Anglos in Oregon should be illiterate.

 

 

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Posted by matthewladner

2011 NAEP Guide Where to Avoid Being Reincarnated as a Student with a Disability

November 2, 2011

(Guest Post by Matthew Ladner)

I’m back from SLC, where I had the honor of serving as the opening act to Indiana Superintendent of Public Instruction Tony Bennett. Getting back to the mad science of exploring the 2011 NAEP, and keeping with a sudden OCD fear that I have developed over the possibility of being reincarnated, I present to you the states you want to avoid and those you want to pray to be born into in the next go-around if you happen to be born as a child with a learning disability, and you would like to learn how to read by the 4th grade.

So, whatever you do, try to load the dice to stay out of Washington DC, Hawaii, South Carolina, Alaska and Arizona if you think you might be coming back as a child with a disability.

Conversely, you’ve hit the relative jackpot if you land in Maryland, Massachusetts, Kentucky,New Jersey or Florida.

Seriously DC? 153?!? A mere 60+ point difference between next door neighbor Maryland?

My Cosmic Awareness/Spidey Sense just told me that you were just thinking “yeah, but hey no fair, because Maryland is far wealthier than DC.”

Except, well, it doesn’t really matter so much in terms of the gap. Below you will see a chart for Free and Reduced Lunch Eligible students with disabilities. The top 5 get shuffled a bit, but there is still an appalling gap between DC and the top performing states.

So as you make your reincarnation plans, just remember to stay away from DC, whereas if you have the misfortune of being born with a disability the chances of being academically warehoused seem to approach a near certainty.

Sadly, DC has plenty of company at the bottom.

9 Comments | myth of helplessness | Tagged: , | Permalink
Posted by matthewladner

Review the Charter Research, Don’t Pick the Outlier

November 2, 2011

Julian Betts and Emily Tang at the University of California at San Diego have a new systematic review of the research on charter schools.  They look at more than 30 studies that meet minimal criteria for research quality.  They find that charters have statistically significant positive effects on math and reading achievement in elementary grades and on math in middle school.  There are no significant effects for reading in middle school or for high school student achievement.  The size of the effects are modest, ranging between 2% and 6% of a standard deviation.  (See Table 2)

It’s important to step back and review an entire literature, rather than focus on a single study.  It is sensible to focus on higher quality research, since results are highly sensitive to research design.  But it is completely inappropriate and misleading to pick a single study while ignoring all others of equal or higher quality simply because that one study produces the result you like.

Of course, highlighting the one study she likes is Diane Ravtich’s stock in trade.  All we hear from Ravitch and her Army of Angry Teachers is about the CREDO study.  That’s one study — and not a high quality one.  And even then Ravitch distorts what CREDO finds.

But Betts and Tang’s review includes CREDO and dozens of other studies.  When we look at the full set of research, we see some significant and positive results.  And in Table 4, Betts and Tang show us that if you exclude the CREDO study, the positive effects for charters get stronger so that charters significantly improve math achievement across all grades.

Of course, you shouldn’t exclude that one study, but it is informative that the one study that Ravitch and her Army of Angry Teachers hold up as proof of their view that charters don’t work is clearly an outlier from the full set of research.  And if we focus on the highest quality random-assignment studies of charter schools, the positive results are even stronger.

I wonder if Diane does this in her historical research.  Does she pick the one quotation or document that supports her argument while misleading readers about the entire set of information?  It’s harder to catch Ravitch in this sort of deceptive scholarship in historical work, but in quantitative empirical research, it is the essence of what she does.

(edited for typos)

5 Comments | charter schools | Tagged: , | Permalink
Posted by Jay P. Greene

Make Sure Not to Be Born in Michigan when Poor and Black

November 1, 2011

(Guest Post by Matthew Ladner)

If you want to learn how to read anyway, you need to stay away from Michigan, that is to say Detroit, if you are concerned about being born a poor Black child in the next life. The 2011 NAEP says to stay away from Iowa, Maine and DC for good measure.

On the other end of the scale: MA, NJ, DE, MD and FL are looking relatively good. Low-income Black children in Massachusetts reads a mere 2.5 grade levels ahead of their peers in Michigan on a 4th grade test.

Must run to the airport now. More later…

4 Comments | myth of helplessness | Tagged: | Permalink
Posted by matthewladner

The 2011 NAEP Guide Where Not to be Reincarnated as a Poor Child

November 1, 2011

(Guest Post by Matthew Ladner)

The chart on the right presents scores for Free and Reduced Lunch Eligible students on the 2011 NAEP 4th grade reading test. Memo to self: remember not to come back as a poor kid in Alaska or DC in the next life. Ten points roughly equals a grade level worth of progress. Low-income kids in Alaska and DC are reading almost as poorly as 1st graders in Massachusetts, which is to say, not much all.

Florida hit a wall in terms of improvement (more on that later), DC saw nice math gains but not much progress in reading, Arizona finally started to move the needle a bit, and it is not entirely isolated to Hispanic children.

The 2009-2011 scores are pretty “meh” so far, and this biggest story I am finding is something big and positive going on with Maryland’s reading scores: 8 point gain for FRL kids between 2009 and 2011, and a nothing to sneeze at five point gain among middle and high income students.

More to come…

13 Comments | myth of helplessness | Tagged: | Permalink
Posted by matthewladner

Save a Pretzel for the Gas Jets

November 1, 2011

There’s a hilarious series of videos of “bad lip reading” of presidential candidate’s speeches.  Check out these to get you started.  And for your information, I am in 100% agreement with Perry that we should “save a pretzel for the gas jets.”

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Posted by Jay P. Greene

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