Hot Off the Press — New Report on ESAs

September 27, 2012

Our very own Matt Ladner has a new report out with the Friedman Foundation on Education Savings Accounts (ESAs).  Here’s the summary:

Education savings accounts are the way of the future. Under such accounts—managed by parents with state supervision to ensure accountability—parents can use their children’s education funding to choose among public and private schools, online education programs, certified private tutors, community colleges, and even universities. Education savings accounts bring Milton Friedman’s original school voucher idea into the 21st century.

Arizona lawmakers were the first to create such a program, called Empowerment Scholarship Accounts (ESAs). Through that program, the state of Arizona deposits 90 percent of the funds for a participating child into an account, which can cover multiple educational services through use-restricted debit cards. Parents can choose to use all of their funds on a single method—like private school tuition—or they can employ a customized strategy using multiple methods (e.g., online programs and community college classes). Critically, parents can save some of the money for future higher education expenses through a 529 college savings program. That feature creates an incentive for parents to judge all K-12 service providers not only on quality but also on cost.

A fully realized system of ESAs would create powerful incentives for innovation in schooling practices seeking better outcomes for lower costs. Also, the broader use of funds may help to immunize choice programs against court challenges in some states. Policymakers must fashion their system of accounts to provide reasonable state oversight, fraud prevention, academic transparency, and equity.

If Milton Friedman were alive today, he likely would agree that education savings accounts represent a critical refinement of his school voucher concept. Existing voucher programs create healthy competition between public and private schools, but ESAs can create a much deeper level of systemic improvement. ESAs would allow parents to build a customized education to match the individual needs of every child, thus transforming education for the better.

1 Comment | Education Savings Accounts | Tagged: , , | Permalink
Posted by Jay P. Greene

Why E.D. Hirsch Should re-examine his position on parental choice

September 26, 2012

(Guest Post by Matthew Ladner)

So a few years ago when Sol Stern decided to attack parental choice for reasons that are still largely only known to him, City Journal posted an online debate concerning Sol’s article, which included a full-throated endorsement of Sol’s position by E.D. Hirsch.

I had a hard time making much sense of the Hirsch critique. It seemed to read much more as an indictment of bad state standards than of the parental choice movement.  The parental choice movement’s original sin seemed to be in being a “structural reform” that ignored the vital importance of imposing Core Knowlege on everyone.

Or something to that effect, near as I could tell. I was and still am confused with exactly how this is supposed to happen, but I’m sure someone has a fail-safe plan this time.

My own contribution to the debate attempted to make the point that of course the political constraints facing parental choice programs keep them from being some sort of miracle-drug cure-all, but that was hardly a reason to oppose it. I haven’t seen any other miracle cures either. Moreover, there is no reason to imagine that the parental choice movement and the standards movement need to necessarily be at odds.

In any case, above is a picture of the district middle school in my neighborhood-Shea Middle School in the Paradise Valley School District. Shea is proudly announcing that Hirsch’s Core Knowledge Curriculum will begin in August 2013 in a 9000 point font banner you see above. At least one of the elementary schools that feed in to Shea Middle School has also  adopted Core Knowledge.

Shea’s adoption of Core Knowledge might have something to do with the fact that two of the highest performing charter schools in country opened campuses in the area this fall. Arizona homegrown outfits BASIS and Great Hearts both opened new schools within a few miles of Shea Middle School in the Fall of 2012.  Both BASIS and Great Hearts have an impressive record of academic achievement. Some of the Great Hearts schools have generated 1,000 student waiting lists, and both operators have attracted the interest of out-of-state philanthropists.*

Of course it could be the case that these new schools opening in the neighborhood had nothing to do with the decision to adopt Core Knowledge, or to hang a giant banner advertising the adoption for that matter. Other Paradise Valley schools have used the Core Knowledge curriculum for years. It is within the realm of the plausible that Shea Middle School would have been adopting Core Knowledge in 2013 whether facing competition from BASIS and Great Hearts or not. If I were to have the opportunity to ask PV officials about this, they might very well make such a claim with conviction.

And if I hadn’t seen an email from a Parent-Teacher group from one of the feeder elementary schools full of steely determination not to lose students to the new charter schools, I might have even believed them. The email expressed (rational) concern about losing students and listed a number of possible strategies including the adoption of IB, foreign language immersion and (yes) Core Knowledge as reform strategies….and now the banner.

Smoking gun? No. Enough to convince a reasonable person? Certainly.

Parental choice mechanisms have done a great deal to satisfy parental demand for Core Knowledge and CK type schools. If we had more of it, we would also have a higher use of CK and similar curriculum both in district and non-district schools. Hopefully it will prove useful for Shea Middle School. Alternatively, we could dream of a master plan that transforms millions of public school teachers into Allan Bloom in one great non-incremental stroke, but I think we all know how that story ends.

Oh well, back to the old super-genius drawing board…

Personally I am a fan of traditional curriculum and want it to be available to those who desire it. I’m also leery of imposing it on those who don’t. I view American schools as having serious curriculum problems, but plenty of other problems as well. Dirigisme got us into this mess, and some of us are naturally skeptical that a new and improved version is going to get us out of it all by itself.

* Disclosure: I serve on the board of a BASIS school (not the one discussed here) and two of my children very happily attend a Great Hearts Academy (but not the school alluded to here).

Edited for Typos

11 Comments | charter schools, instructional reform | Tagged: , , , , | Permalink
Posted by matthewladner

Mahatma Kozol Takes Cash Only

September 26, 2012

(Guest post by Greg Forster)

Over the email transom from George Mitchell comes a publicity item for Jonathan Kozol’s latest weeper. Here’s the part that really stood out to me:

We should let folks know there are signing restrictions for this event. Mr. Kozol will only personalize copies of Fire in the Ashes, and will only sign the most recent editions of four of his backlist titles that are purchased at the event.

What a selfless and noble tribune of generosity! What a titanic warrior against the greed of capitalism!

For my money (if Kozol will pardon the expression) nobody’s ever managed to top Tucker Carlson’s 1995 classic “Jonathan Kozol’s Crying Game.” One of the best things WS published even back in its glory days.

PS “Mahatma Kozol” courtesy of the Fordham Institute, during Kozol’s ridiculous “partial fast” in 2007. The image seems to have disappeared from Fordham’s site but it lives on at Alexander Russo’s blog.

8 Comments | money myth | Tagged: , | Permalink
Posted by Greg Forster

Rob Pondiscio on Writing

September 25, 2012

Rob Pondiscio has a great piece about how we teach writing in The Atlantic.  It’s worth reading the whole thing, but here are some tasty bites:

Every decent human impulse we have as teachers shouts in favor of not imposing rules and discipline on students, but liberating them to discover the power of their voice by sharing their stories. Of course children will be become better writers if they write personal narratives instead of book reports. Obviously children will be more engaged and motivated if they can write from the heart about what they know best, rather that trudge through turgid English essays and research papers.

Grammar? Mechanics? Correcting errors? Please. Great writing is discovery. It is the intoxicating power of words and our own stories, writing for an audience and making things happen in the world. We know this works. We all saw the movie Freedom Writers, didn’t we?

Like so many of our earnest and most deeply humane ideas about educating children in general, and poor, urban children in particular, this impulse toward authenticity is profoundly idealistic, seductive, and wrong. I should know. I used to damage children for a living with that idealism….

Every day, for two hours a day, I led my young students through Reader’s and Writer’s Workshop. I was trained not to address my kids as “students” or “class” but as “authors” and “readers.” We gathered “seed ideas” in our Writer’s Notebooks. We crafted “small moment” stories, personal narratives, and memoirs. We peer edited. We “shared out.” Gathered with them on the rug, I explained to my 10-year-olds that “good writers find ideas from things that happened in their lives.” That stories have “big ideas.” That good writers “add detail,” “stretch their words,” and “spell the best they can.”

Teach grammar, sentence structure, and mechanics? I barely even taught. I “modeled” the habits of good readers and “coached” my students. What I called “teaching,” my staff developer from Teacher’s College dismissed as merely “giving directions.” My job was to demonstrate what good readers and writers do and encourage my students to imitate and adopt those behaviors….

“When our students resist writing, it is usually because writing has been treated as little more than a place to expose all they do not know about spelling, penmanship and grammar,” observes Lucy Calkins, probably the workshop model’s premier guru. She is almost certainly correct.

This leaves exactly two options: The first is to de-emphasize spelling and grammar. The other is to teach spelling and grammar. But at too many schools, it’s more important for a child to unburden her 10-year-old soul writing personal essays about the day she went to the hospital, dropped an ice cream cone on a sidewalk, or shopped for new sneakers. It’s more important to write a “personal response” to literature than engage with the content. This is supposed to be “authentic” writing. There is nothing inherently inauthentic about research papers and English essays.

Earlier this year, David Coleman, the principal architect of the widely adopted Common Core Standards, infamously told a group of educators, “As you grow up in this world, you realize people really don’t give a shit about what you feel or what you think.” His bluntness made me wince, but his impulse is correct. We have overvalued personal expression. The unlived life is not worth examining. The pendulum has swung too far.

 

1 Comment | instructional reform | Permalink
Posted by Jay P. Greene

This is How You Pay for That 16% Pay Raise

September 25, 2012

How will virtually bankrupt Chicago pay for the 16% pay raise over 4 years that is in the new teacher contract?

As I suggested last week, this headline in the Chicago Tribune answers the question:

Pushing the charter school agenda

With the CTU strike over, Mayor Rahm Emanuel pushes to grow charter schools
If you reduce the unionized teacher work force by 20% over the next four years by continuing to open new charter schools and close under-enrolled traditional public schools, the city might even come out ahead.  The new contract does nothing to stop this process from continuing and yet the unions are crowing like they scored a major victory.

4 Comments | charter schools, teacher pay, teacher union | Permalink
Posted by Jay P. Greene

Florida Education Association Bemoans their Self-Imposed Exile

September 24, 2012

(Guest Post by Matthew Ladner)

Andy Ford, President of the Florida Education Association wrote a piece for the Orlando Sentinel complaining about Florida’s accountability system. Ford’s piece connects the usual dots- complaining about the status-quo while offering no specifics for how a system of academic transparency should operate. Mr. Ford warms up with this doozy of a paragraph:

The former education commissioner, Gerard Robinson, recently resigned after a year on the job. Robinson inherited a flawed and punitive accountability system laden with standardized tests that was put in place 13 years ago by Gov. Jeb Bush, overseen by Patricia Levesque at his Foundation for Florida’s Future and endlessly promoted by legislators who favor for-profit schools, and the Florida Chamber of Commerce.

Before I get to the accountability system, let me briefly address the Jeb Bush/Foundation for Florida’s Future conspiracy theory bit. Florida operates as a democracy, complete with elections in which citizens choose their officials who then make decisions regarding K-12 and other sorts of state policy. The voters twice chose Jeb Bush to serve as their governor, but he has been a private citizen since **ahem** 2007.

The Foundation for Florida’s Future does indeed seek policies to improve Florida public schools. This however occurs within a typical system of democratic pluralism in which many groups contend for influence, including of course Mr. Ford’s Florida Education Association. Guidestar reveals that the FEA had revenues more than twenty times larger than those of the Foundation in 2010 (the latest year available).

The FEA’s difficulties originate with their suspect ideas rather than their flush bank account. Ford’s characterization of Florida’s accountability system as “flawed and punitive” is a fine example. This “flawed” system has in fact produced remarkable results, especially for disadvantaged children. The chart below for instance compares the literacy gains on the Nation’s Report Card for Free and Reduced lunch eligible Florida students in 1998 (the year before Florida’s reforms) and 2011 (the most recent results available).

Notice that the “good ole days” in Florida (pre-reform) were a disaster for low-income children. A whopping 37% of Florida’s low-income 4th graders had learned to read according to NAEP’s standards in 1998. A lack of transparency and accountability may have suited the FEA fine, but it was nothing less than catastrophic for Florida’s low-income children. Thirteen years into the “flawed” system, that figure was up to 62 percent. The goal of Florida policymakers should clearly be to accelerate this impressive progress rather than to go back to the failed practices of the past.

Put another way, if Mr. Ford considers this system “flawed” then Florida lawmakers should quickly implement something that he would judge to be “catastrophically flawed.” Note also that Florida’s public school teachers deserve to celebrate these gains as much as anyone. The FEA however opposed the reforms that produced them tooth and nail, costing them credibility (especially when they continue to complain today).

As for “punitive” well…Florida’s school grades have improved along with their NAEP and FCAT scores. Just how “punitive” can a system be when it delivers 10 times as many A/B grades as D/F grades?

If and when the FEA matches coherent child-centered policy with their massive financial and human resources, there can be little doubt that they will exercise a large amount of influence over Florida K-12 policy. Until then they can continue to bemoan their self-imposed exile from the adult conversation over how to provide Florida children with a genuine shot at the American Dream.

14 Comments | school accountability | Tagged: , | Permalink
Posted by matthewladner

Mike Thomas: Journey from Skeptic to Reformer

September 20, 2012

(Guest Post by Matthew Ladner)

The Foundation for Excellence in Education has launched a new blog, and kicked it off with a great post by Mike Thomas explaining how an examination of evidence led him from being a reform skeptic to a reform supporter.

Lightbulb!

Welcome to the fight Mike!

1 Comment | Uncategorized | Tagged: , | Permalink
Posted by matthewladner

In Chicago — Phony Merit Pay is Dead, Long Live True Merit Pay

September 19, 2012

The dust hasn’t yet settled from the resolution of the Chicago teacher strike, but it appears that the reforms the city were able to retain will result in a better “true” merit pay system than the “phony” merit pay plan they were forced to concede.

Let me explain the difference between true and phony merit pay.  True merit pay — the kind of compensation for job performance found in most industries — provides effective employees with continued employment and regular raises while ineffective workers lose their jobs.  If you do a good job you get to keep getting a pay check and if you don’t you have to look for work somewhere else.  That’s true payment for merit because un-meritorious workers stop getting paid altogether.

In phony merit pay — the kind that hardly exists in any industry — there is a mechanistic calculation of performance that determines the size of a small bonus that is provided in addition to a base salary that is essentially guaranteed regardless of performance.  You can stink and still keep your job and pay.  The worst that can happen is you miss out on some or all of a modest bonus.  To make it even more phony, in the few cases where this kind of phony merit pay has been tried, the game is often rigged so that virtually all employees are deemed meritorious and get at least some of the bonus.

According to the initial reports, the city of Chicago abandoned its efforts to institute this latter, phony merit pay.  As the Chicago Teachers Union put it: “The Board agreed to move away from ‘Differentiated Compensation,’ which would have allowed them to pay one set of teachers (based on unknown criteria) one set of pay versus another set of pay for others.”

But the city preserved key provisions that result in at least some amount of true merit pay.  Specifically, the city preserved the ability to continue opening new, non-unionized charter schools at a rapid clip.  It is already the case that almost 50,000 of the 400,000 students in Chicago’s public schools attend charter schools.  As students migrate from traditional to charter schools, enrollment in the unionized sector has plummeted, causing 86 traditional public school closures over the last decade.  Enrollment is so low in many existing traditional public schools that 120 additional schools are eligible for closure next year.  As long as the city can continue to open charter schools and as long as there is demand by students to leave for charters, traditional public schools will continue to be closed in large numbers.

When Chicago closes a traditional public school for low enrollment the teachers are laid off.  The new contract appears to place some limits on this, but the practice has generally been preserved.  In addition, unlike in some other big cities, principals in Chicago are free to hire teachers as they see fit and are not forced to take teachers laid off from school closures.  The new contract does require that half of all newly hired teachers come from those laid off and guarantees re-hiring only for the highest rated teachers, but according to the city’s summary of the agreement: “Principals maintain full authority to hire whichever teacher they deem best.”

The net effect of growing charter schools, closing under-enrolled traditional public schools, and only hiring back the best and most desired teachers from those schools is a true merit pay system.  Bad teachers are let go.  Good teachers not only get their job back, but they also get an extremely generous pay raise over the next four years for staying and being good.  That’s real merit pay.

The Gates Foundation, Michelle Rhee, and various other reform groups have pressed ahead with efforts to build a machinery to rate teachers and provide bonuses to the ones that have higher ratings.  They’ve pulled out the stops, devoted millions of dollars, and even twisted the truth to advance these merit pay systems because they are convinced that this is the most politically feasible and effective way forward.  Choice, especially vouchers, holds little appeal to them because they see it as a political dead-end.

As I think the events in Chicago help demonstrate and as I had feared in the Ed Next piece I wrote with Stuart Buck, the political calculations of these reformers are entirely mistaken.  Building reform around a top-down system of teacher evaluations and merit pay is too easily blocked, diluted, or co-opted.  But expanding choice continues to be a political winner and will result in real merit pay… and I believe real progress in student learning.

9 Comments | charter schools, teacher pay, vouchers | Tagged: , | Permalink
Posted by Jay P. Greene

Diane Ravitch, Historian Who Changes History

September 18, 2012

Diane Ravitch continues to provide considerable comic relief.  I noted last week that she has adopted the role of super-villain by declaring that she, personally, can control the outcome of the presidential election and that President Obama should “heed my advice.”

Well, now the world’s most over-rated historian has decided to change history by erasing her blog post as if she never said those things.  This is not only very un-scholarly, but it is also a major internet no-no.  You can’t just erase a blog post if you are now embarrassed by what you wrote.  You can’t un-say something that you’ve said.  You can apologize, you can amend, you can elaborate, but you can’t just make it as if it never happened.

But the most over-rated historian appears to have simply tried to change history and erase her blog post.  If you click on  my old link, you just get a message that the page cannot be found.   And if you try to find the post by going through the chronology of September posts for September 9 (the date on which it was originally posted), you just won’t see her megalomaniac declaration: “I can determine the winner of the presidency.”  It’s gone.  Erased.

Except that the Internet Archive Wayback Machine happens to keep track of old web sites and you can still see her post here in the web cache.  If only, Ravitch could employ her own Winston from 1984, whose job was to alter and erase history so that the Party was never wrong.  As Orwell writes:

This process of continuous alteration was applied not only to newspapers, but to books, periodicals, pamphlets, posters, leaflets, films, sound-tracks, cartoons, photographs — to every kind of literature or documentation which might conceivably hold any political or ideological significance. Day by day and almost minute by minute the past was brought up to date. In this way every prediction made by the Party could be shown by documentary evidence to have been correct, nor was any item of news, or any expression of opinion, which conflicted with the needs of the moment, ever allowed to remain on record. All history was a palimpsest, scraped clean and reinscribed exactly as often as was necessary.

Unlike Ravitch whose own historical record is thankfully preserved by the WayBack Machine despite efforts to the contrary, Winston only had to take the offending writings and then he “dropped them into the memory hole to be devoured by the flames.”  As the 1984 Party slogan goes: “”Who controls the past controls the future; who controls the present controls the past.”

All of this would be hilarious if it weren’t so pathetically sad.

[Edited for a typo and to update link to old web page]

2 Comments | Uncategorized | Tagged: | Permalink
Posted by Jay P. Greene

Chicago Charter Students aren’t just in school today, they are learning more than their district peers

September 13, 2012

(Guest Post by Matthew Ladner)

So I was curious as to how charter schools in Chicago compare academically to the district. I ran the NAEP numbers from the Trial Urban District Assessment for free and reduced lunch eligible general education students. This is about as close to an apples to apples comparison as you can get in the NAEP data-much smaller range in variation in family income, general education students.

Here are the results:

This is the part where edu-reactionaries will start to stare at their feet to mutter stories about how these differences must be all about the differences in motivation between parents. The random assignment studies have consistently demonstrated however that charter school students perform better on charter schools for inner city kids. The whole “motivated parents” question is irrelevant until such time that charter schools don’t have a waiting list in any case, unless of course you are willing to sacrifice the interests of children over those of adults.

The Economist recently reviewed the evidence on charter schools and concluded:

In rich countries, this generation of adults is not doing well by its children. They will have to pay off huge public-sector debts. They will be expected to foot colossal bills for their parents’ pension and health costs. They will compete for jobs with people from emerging countries, many of whom have better education systems despite their lower incomes. The least this generation can do for its children is to try its best to improve its state schools. Giving them more independence can do that at no extra cost. Let there be more of it.

 

7 Comments | charter schools, teacher union | Permalink
Posted by matthewladner

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