The Association for Education Finance and Policy just completed its meeting in Boston, punctuated at the end by celebration of St. Patrick’s Day. In Boston.
Department of Education Reform faculty, staff, and students were present in force and did a great job of presenting their research and developing ideas for the future.
Here was one of the best presentations:
UPDATE:
And here is a recording of Mike and Anna (I think) singing in Southie
And their photo:
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Posted by Jay P. Greene
The Department of Health and Human Resources is up to its old tricks of delaying research whose results are likely to undermine their darling program, Head Start. A group of five U.S. Senators sent a letter to HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius last week demanding an explanation for why the latest round of results of the congressionally-mandated study have not been released four years after data collection was complete and one year after the report was scheduled to be released.
In 2010 I told you about how the Department of Health and Human Services delayed the release of the previous round of disappointing research results about the lasting effects of Head Start. When the extremely high quality study, involving a random-assignment design on a representative sample of all Head Start programs nationwide, was finally released three years after the data collection was complete, it found that students randomly assigned to Head Start performed no better on cognitive measures by the end of kindergarten and first grade.
Despite these null results, HHS issued a statement that in typical Orwellian fashion declared the program a huge success. Assistant Secretary for Children and Families Carmen Nazario was quoted in the statement concluding that “Head Start has been changing lives for the better since its inception.” And Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius was quoted declaring that “research clearly shows that Head Start positively impacts the school readiness of low-income children”
If the government’s proclivity to delay the release of politically undesirable results and to manipulate — actually, completely distort — the findings is not enough to engender skepticism among reporters, researchers, and policymakers, I have no idea what will. But I continue to see reporters, researchers, and policymakers invoke government research as authoritative without the least bit of critical scrutiny.
This uncritical acceptance of government press releases as gospel by reporters is particularly disgraceful. I understand that reporters are miserably paid and stretched beyond their limit as staffs are reduced, but the heart of a reporter’s responsibility is to challenge the powerful. And there is no one more powerful than the government. They are so powerful that they can delay the release of research and declare that up is down when the results do come out.
11 Comments | politics, research reports | Tagged: Head Start, Health and Human Services | Permalink
Posted by Jay P. Greene
In case you missed the 60 Minutes segment on the Khan Academy. You can watch the video and read the transcript here.
And the New York Times reports on a study conducted in New York City comparing student achievement at 10 schools using a Core Knowledge approach against the achievement at 10 schools using existing (mostly Balanced Literacy). It find greater gains in the Core Knowledge schools in reading comprehension as well as content knowledge in social studies and science.
Leave a Comment » | instructional reform | Tagged: Core Knolwedge, Khan Academy | Permalink
Posted by Jay P. Greene
Working on education reform can be very discouraging. As student achievement continues to stagnate, as spending steadily climbs higher, and as policy changes only in fits and starts, reformers may be tempted to throw their hands up and declare progress impossible. But there is progress. It can’t be seen from day to day and it certainly hasn’t produced the outcomes we want, but there is progress.
You really notice the strides that have been made when you step back and think abut what the education reform discussion used to be like a decade ago and what it looks like today. A decade ago when people like Greg, Matt, and I were talking about the benefits of school choice and the need to address the perverse incentives of lifetime employment tenure for ineffective teachers and salary schedules that reward endurance more than performance, we were treated like dangerous extremists.
Now the issues of choice, tenure, merit pay, testing, and accountability are a normal part of the discussion. And most interestingly, these are parts of the normal discussion among Democrats — a party that had traditionally been too fearful of the teacher unions to treat discussion of these issues as acceptable.
Matt recently noted this remarkable development of a bipartisan consensus around reform issues. And both Greg and I have touched on this in the past. But I was reminded of just how far the discussion has come, especially among Democrats, while watching this entire show of Morning Joe on MSNBC focused on education reform. It featured a panel, almost all of whom were Democrats, and almost all of whom agreed about the same essential issues of education reform that Matt, Greg, and I could barely utter in polite company a decade ago.
To be sure, there is much to do before we make real progress in education. But at least we are having a productive discussion about ideas that may bear fruit. That’s progress.
One striking thing about the discussion on Morning Joe and among other groups of Democrats is that none of them acknowledge the change that has occurred in the last decade. None of them acknowledge that the people who raised the same issues a decade earlier were branded (often by people like them) as right-wing radicals. They all just act as if they had discovered these education reform ideas all on their own.
At first this annoyed me, but Greg reminded me that victory requires not caring about who takes credit. If the Democrats for Education Reform-types want to believe that they invented ed reform, who cares as long as it helps produce progress. And those DFER folks are making huge strides, at least in getting us to talk and think about useful reforms. And frankly, that progress could only be achieved by having them talk about it, not us.
That’s what victory looks like — someone else who is more likely to be effective taking your ideas forward even if they do so without acknowledging you.
7 Comments | politics | Permalink
Posted by Jay P. Greene
(Guest Post by Jim Stergios)
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 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).
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.
14 Comments | National Standards | Permalink
Posted by Jay P. Greene
I wrote last week about the release of the final research results from Milwaukee’s school choice program. On Sunday the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel devoted its entire editorial page to a discussion of those results. Check out the succinct summary of the findings by Patrick Wolf and John Witte.
Also be sure to check out the response from the head of the teachers union, Bob Peterson. His rebuttal consists of noting that many students switch sectors, moving from choice to traditional public schools as well as in the opposite direction. He thinks that this undermines the validity of Wolf and Witte’s graduation rate analysis, but he fails to understand that the researchers used an intention to treat approach that attributes outcomes to students’ original selection of sector regardless of their switching. And on the special education claim he simply reiterates the Department of Public Instruction’s (DPI) faulty effort to equate the percentage of students who are entitled to accommodations on the state test with the percentage of students who have disabilities.
For more on how DPI under-stated the rate of disabilities in the Milwaukee choice program by between 400% and 900%, check out the new article Wolf, Fleming, and Witte just published in Education Next. It’s not only an excellent piece of research detective work on how DPI arrived at such an erroneous claim, but it is also a useful warning to anyone who thinks that government issued claims provide the authoritative answer on research questions. Government agencies, like DPI, can lie and distort as much or more than any special interest group. They just do it with your tax dollars and in your name.
3 Comments | vouchers | Tagged: Bob Peterson, John Witte, Milwaukee, Patrick Wolf, school choice, vouchers | Permalink
Posted by Jay P. Greene
NBC has a new series, Awake, on Thursday nights at 8 CT/ 9 ET that has the potential to fill the void in our blog pop culture discussion left by the departure of Lost. The premise of Awake is that homicide detective, Michael Britten, is in a car crash involving his wife and son. He then faces two realities. In one his son survives and his wife is killed and in the other it is the other way around. He goes to sleep and wakes up in the other reality.
In both realities he sees a therapist who tries to convince him that he is simply dreaming the other reality. Each therapist is very persuasive. But both scenarios feel equally real to Britten. And he’s not entirely sure he wants to give up being able to continue his relationships with his wife and son, even if they occur in alternative and potentially illusory realities.
Besides the engaging premise, the show provides some nice twists to make it all a little more complicated and interesting. Events in one reality help provide clues to solving crimes in the other. And the varying personalities of his therapists seem to reflect what he is lacking in each scenario: a stern and confrontational figure or a compassionate and nurturing one. The varying color themes in the alternative realities add a nice visual touch.
Of course, many promising premieres have fizzled quickly (e.g. Flash Forward or Once Upon A Time), but let’s hope Awake holds up and fills our geeky need for pop culture blog posts.
2 Comments | random pop culture | Tagged: awake, Pass the Clicker | Permalink
Posted by Jay P. Greene
My colleague at the University of Arkansas, Patrick Wolf, along with John Witte at the University of Wisconsin and a team of researchers have released their final round of reports on the Milwaukee school choice program. You can read the press release here and find the full set of reports here.
They find that access to a private school with a voucher in Milwaukee significantly increases the probability that students will graduate from high school:
“Our clearest positive finding is that the Choice Program boosts the rates at which students graduate from high school, enroll in a four-year college, and persist in college,” said John Witte, professor of political science and public affairs at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. “Since educational attainment is linked to positive life outcomes such as higher lifetime earnings and lower rates of incarceration, this is a very encouraging result of the program.”
They also find that “when similar students in the voucher program and in Milwaukee Public Schools were compared, the achievement growth of students in the voucher program was higher in reading but similar in math.” Unfortunately, the testing conditions changed during the study because the private school testing went from being low stakes to high stakes, making it difficult to draw strong conclusions about the effects of the program on test scores.
In addition, it should be remembered that the design of the Milwaukee study is a matched comparison, which is less rigorous than random-assignment. The more convincing random-assignment analyses are significant and positive in 9 of the 10 that have been conducted, with the tenth having null effects. You can find a summary and links to all of them here.
Perhaps the most interesting part of the new Milwaukee results is the report on special education rates in the choice program. As it turns out, Wisconsin’s Department of Public Instruction grossly under-stated the percentage of students in the choice program who have disabilities. Some reporters and policymakers act as if the Department of Public Instruction’s reports are reliable and insightful because they are a government agency, while the reports of university professors are distorted and misleading. Read this report on special education rates and I think you’ll learn a lot about how politically biased government agencies like the Department of Public Instruction can be.
6 Comments | vouchers | Tagged: Milwaukee, Patrick Wolf, school chocie, vouchers | Permalink
Posted by Jay P. Greene
Education Secretary Arne Duncan’s press statement on South Carolina was a bizarre display of the opposite of what it intended. As Greg pointed out, the statement’s harsh and threatening tone did nothing to support the claim that Common Core national standards and assessments are a purely voluntary consortium of the states. Instead, the statement was a not so veiled threat that South Carolina would lose out on the opportunity for federal grants like Race to the Top and lose the opportunity to receive waivers from impossible to satisfy NCLB requirements if it followed through with a proposal to withdraw from Common Core. If it is purely voluntary, why the need for threats and intimidation from the Education Secretary?
In addition to this abuse of power given the legal prohibitions on the US Department of Education from establishing national standards, testing, and curriculum, Duncan’s statement also displayed an abuse of research. He distorted the findings of a National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) analysis to suggest that South Carolina had particularly weak performance standards when the research had not shown that. Duncan claimed:
[Prominent Republicans] have supported the Common Core standards because they realize states must stop dummying down academic standards and lying about the performance of children and schools. In fact, South Carolina lowered the bar for proficiency in English and mathematics faster than any state in the country from 2005 to 2009, according to research by the National Center for Education Statistics.
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.
One of the potential benefit of state control over performance standards is that they can raise or lower them so that they are not too easy so that everyone passes or so hard that everyone fails. You have to hit the sweet spot between these points to motivate students and educators to improve without crushing them. Each state may have a different sweet spot and needs the flexibility to adjust in case they miss the mark (as SC initially did) or in case achievement improves (as has occurred in FL).
We actually had Jack Buckley, the Commissioner of NCES, out to give a lecture in Arkansas during which he presented this analysis. You can see a summary and the slides here.
Compared to what we could have had as an education secretary, Duncan has been pretty good. He’s shown some independence from the teachers unions and supported some promising reforms, like charter schools. But he’s ignored his own department’s research in seeking (multiple times) to kill the DC voucher program. And he seems oblivious to the limits of power that he and the federal government have over education policy. When people abuse their power they may also be more likely to abuse research.
4 Comments | National Standards | Tagged: Arne Duncan, common core, South Carolina | Permalink
Posted by Jay P. Greene
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