School Choice Wins in 2008; Unrestricted Eligibility in Georgia

June 18, 2008

(Guest post by Greg Forster)

The Washington Post is now reporting that the House Appropriations subcommittee will fund the DC voucher program for another year. People are saying that the future of the program doesn’t look good, because the subcommittee chairman is blustering about how much he doesn’t like it. But read that Post article carefully. He doesn’t say that the program will be killed next year. The Post reports that he says he’s funding the program for another year “to give District leaders a chance to restructure the program.” He is quoted as saying, “I expect that during the next year the District leaders will come forward with a firm plan for either rolling back the program or providing some alternative options.”

That sounds to me like a man who’s looking for a deal. The DC program is already loaded up with monster payoffs to the District’s patronage-bloated public school system. How hard is it to make those payoffs bigger? And maybe the program will have to accept some more politically motivated restrictions on participation, so that critics will have a trophy to hang on their wall.

Whether those tradeoffs are worth it for the school choice movement – there is a real cost, and not just in dollars, associated with them – is a question I leave for another day. And of course this is just the subcommittee; there could still be more trouble ahead. And maybe next year the critics will get a better offer from the unions than the deal they’re apparently angling to get on behalf of the DC patronage machine.

All I want to do is observe that the program’s chances of survival are now looking a lot better than they did yesterday.

As the political season winds to a close, let’s survey the results:

  • A new personal tax credit for private school tuition in Louisiana
  • A new tax-credit scholarship program in Georgia
  • A new voucher program in Louisiana
  • An expansion of Florida’s tax-credit scholarship program, including a $30 million increase in the cap; a bump up in the value of the scholarship and a linking of the scholarship value to state school spending (which always goes up); and a relaxation of the program’s unreasonably stringent accounting rules (which used to allow not one penny of carryover from year to year in the scholarship organizations’ accounts, and not one penny from eligible donations for administrative expenses).
  • A million-dollar funding increase and guaranteed future funding stream for Utah’s voucher program.
  • Preservation (tentatively) of the DC voucher program in a hostile Congress.

That’s three new programs, two expansions of existing programs and an upset victory in DC. Pretty good for a dead movement, wouldn’t you say?

By the way, how did accountability testing do this year? How many new programs? How many existing programs expanded?

How about instructional and curricular reforms? How’s the Massachussetts miracle holding up?

Anyone? . . . Anyone?

Some of these victories did come at a cost. The two programs in Louisiana are going to score poorly when measured against the gold standard of universal choice. The tax credit is limited to a very small amount of money, which means it offers a very small amount of choice. And the new voucher program is only offered to students who are in grades K-3, low-income, and enrolled in public schools (or entering kindergarten) in a chronically failing school district located in a highly populated parish – which currently means only New Orleans. Plus it’s limited by annual appropriations (currently $10 million). A new grade level will become eligible each year (4th grade next year, then 5th grade, etc.) and Baton Rouge may become eligible if its public schools continue to fail. But this is still an inadequate program. And we can also add the prospect of more restrictions in the DC program to the debit column.

But there was also a huge step forward for universal choice. Georgia’s new tax-credit scholarship program offers school choice for all students. It has no demographic restrictions at all. Any public school student can apply. The only limit is the $50 million program cap – and experience in other states pretty consistently shows that dollar caps rise as programs grow to meet them.

Georgia’s new program is basically the same as the Arizona program funded by individual donations, except that Georgia’s program also allows corproate donations. And that makes a big difference, because it greatly expands the pool of available funds – and hence the size of the program.

Come to think of it, Georgia’s program is the first tax-credit scholarship program to include corporate donations and not place demographic restrictions on who can participate. That’s a potentially powerful combination. It will be exciting to see whether Georgia ends up taking school choice to a whole new level.

1 Comment | instructional reform, personal tax credits/deductions, politics, tax-credit scholarships, vouchers | Tagged: , , , , , , , , | Permalink
Posted by Greg Forster

PJM Column Today

June 16, 2008

(Guest post by Greg Forster)

Jay and I have a column on Pajamas Media this morning with our take on Response to Intervention. A sample: 

Five years ago, we published a study with disturbing implications — literally millions of students may have been labeled as “disabled” and placed into special education when they didn’t really have a disability. Since then, we’ve been struggling to get past the many myths and misconceptions surrounding special education, trying to get people to see the problem.

Now there’s finally been a change, and there’s good news and bad news. The good news is, federal special education authorities have at last acknowledged the problem and adopted a policy designed to address it. The bad news is, the policy is no good.

That’s the way it usually goes in education reform — two steps forward, one step back. And the obstacles to reform in special education are unusually large, so the steps are baby steps.

But you know what they say: the first step is admitting you have a problem. And we’re glad to see that step has been taken.

UPDATE: Whoops, forgot the link.

4 Comments | instructional reform, special ed | Tagged: , , , | Permalink
Posted by Greg Forster

The Shape of Things to Come

June 11, 2008

(Guest Post by Matthew Ladner)

Recently I described how the primordial soup of a market system could transform education. A new article suggests that this is already well under way.

The article How Do We Transform Our Schools? in Education Next by Clayton M. Christensen and Michael B. Horn has created a big buzz. Christensen and Horn have now released a coauthored a book on the same subject: how technology will fundamentally transform American K-12 education:

That schools have gotten little back from their investment in technology should come as no surprise. Virtually every organization does the same thing schools have done when implementing an innovation. An organization’s natural instinct is to cram the innovation into its existing operating model to sustain what it already does. This is the predictable course, the logical course—and the wrong course.

I had always thought of online learning as interesting, but ultimately only a niche activity. Christensen and Horn, however, maintain that filling niches is exactly how a disruptive technology like online learning advances:

The way to implement an innovation so that it will transform an organization is to implement it disruptively—not by using it to compete against the existing paradigm and serve existing customers, but to let it compete against “non-consumption,” where the alternative is nothing at all.

The essence of the argument is this: a disruptive technology starts off as something which is perceived to be of inferior quality to the dominant practice. It gains a foothold however by satisfying the needs of consumers who otherwise would have gone under served by the dominant technology.

Online learning seems to fit the bill. Distance learning for example is very popular in Alaska, where children might otherwise have to commute vast distances through dangerous weather to attend a traditional school. Homeschoolers have taken to online learning and the authors point out that only about a third of American high schools have Advanced Placement courses. Better, many school administrators are now reasoning, to adopt such courses online than not to offer them at all.

Christensen and Horn describe the progress of online learning to date as being broadly similar to past disruptive technologies. The key moment of transformation comes years after the disruptive technology has filled niches here and there. Through the normal course of incremental improvement, the disruptive technology becomes superior to the dominant technology, and displaces it. Projecting from the limited amount of data available, the authors project 50 percent of K-12 courses will be delivered online by 2019.

 Whoa, I know calculus!

Bill, forget the phone booth, I just downloaded our history report straight to my brain dude!!

Out with the old, and in with the new. In this case however, the “old” is the labor intensive method of teaching students which has gone more or less unchanged since before Socrates. Could we really be on the verge of transforming the basic method of content delivery?

When I first read this article, I was skeptical. It seemed to me that the authors had underestimated the political obstacles standing in the way of such a transformation even if online learning does become recognized as a superior form of learning, which to date, it has not.

And yet…

It isn’t that hard to imagine the day coming when online programs would improve to the point where they were of demonstrably better quality than the tried and only sometimes true methods. Innovators are working on computer based learning programs that will adapt to the individual learning styles of children. Such programs will present information in a variety of ways, figure out which way works best for the individual learner and adapt the presentation accordingly.

Enormous promise also resides in the area of personalized, self-paced learning. Both fast and slower learners often find themselves frustrated by the pace of a course which settles on a class average which doesn’t suit them.

Can you imagine some clever team designing an online course around, say, the work of Milton Friedman and coming up with something better than the average high-school or college economics class? It doesn’t sound implausible to me-I can’t remember the name of the graduate student who taught my Econ 101 course, but he wasn’t Milton Friedman. He didn’t adapt his presentation to my learning style either. Come to think of it, I don’t think he spoke English fluently.

Exactly how such a transformation would play out, none can say. This was one of the lessons of Chris Andersen’s excellent book The Long Tail.  Andersen convincingly made the case that the internet is fundamentally transforming society. The transformation is simply different and more subtle than expected during the height of the dot.com bubble. The change isn’t exactly subtle for newspapers and record labels, which are being pushed aside, or network television, which draws starkly smaller audiences for top programs today than 30 years ago despite a much larger population.

I’m inclined to think that education will remain primarily a social enterprise, but mixed models of classroom and online instruction are already underway. The nonsensical notion of teachers being a “guide on the side” instead of a “sage on the stage” might actually make sense when the content comes primarily through technology.

Can technology deliver learning better and cheaper than today’s schools? NAEP shows that thirty four percent of American 4th graders can’t read. Somewhere close to that percentage of students drop out of high school, and many others graduate in need of remediation. The Colossus has feet of clay.

Politics will doubtlessly play an inhibiting role, but bet on the better mouse trap in the long run.

6 Comments | instructional reform | Tagged: , | Permalink
Posted by matthewladner

Can RTI Work? We Went To The Moon, Right?

June 10, 2008

(Guest post by Reid Lyon)

Jay’s analysis of Response to Instruction, also known as Response to Intervention (RTI), and the need for additional reforms to help ensure effectiveness is provocative and informative. I agree with a good deal of his analysis but feel the need to expand the discussion a bit.

First off, his piece offers a wake-up call to those who are prone to fall in love with magic bullets that will close the achievement gap and reduce referrals to special education. One of my dreams is to provide policymakers and educational leaders two free tattoos to be placed anywhere they want on their persons that read: (1) “Necessary but not sufficient,” and (2) “Great policy idea, but implementation is a bitch.” Jay’s points address both tattoos.

RTI is a noble and well researched concept. One of its major goals is to reduce referrals to special education by documenting that the student’s learning difficulties are not because of inadequate instruction in general education classrooms but because of a disability. Years ago, S. Allen Cohen provided us with a more interesting term for lousy teaching which he called “dyspedagogia” (I believe this was tongue in cheek). 

But the fact is most kids identified for special education and labeled as having a Learning Disability (LD) are not LD but achieve poorly because of “dyspedagogia”. In fact, our research over the past 20 years has taught us that scientifically based early reading intervention provided through a tiered approach to instruction can reduce the percentage of LD from upwards of 22% to between 2% and 10% in some states and LEAs. This is a very good thing given that LD referrals and placements constitute about 50% of all referrals to special education, and reading disabilities comprise about 80% of kids identified with LD. 

Those working on the development of RTI knew that classroom teachers and special educators are from different planets, with entirely different backgrounds in curriculum and instruction and entirely different professional languages. This makes collaboration and the provision of coherent and systematic instruction impossible. In essence, RTI was developed, in part, to underscore the need to develop a common assessment and instructional language between well intentioned teachers with different specializations so that instruction was not so fragmented, and so kids would not feel like ping-pong balls when receiving entirely different types of instruction on the same day from classroom teachers and special educators. There was no other alternative – typical colleges of education would not provide the professional development necessary to accomplish the level of shared training and collaboration skills  essential for effective and differentiated instruction. 

Related to this, RTI as a concept was also developed to take advantage of the converging research that prevention through early identification and intervention provides a more effective approach to reducing academic failure than hanging out waiting until the kid chucks his books through the window in the third or fourth grade. RTI procedures can differ across LEAs but they typically screen all students in kindergarten or early first grade to determine which students require enhanced instruction in the classroom or more intensive instruction in smaller groups, while still under the direction of the regular classroom teacher. If the kid demonstrates little academic (or behavioral) growth following more intense instruction, then special education becomes a possibility. It is critical to remember that being placed in special education is also a tiered process. The questions are: Does the student have a disability?  (RTI contributes to answering this question); and, if yes, does the student require special education? (RTI contributes to answering this question).

So we have two elements in RTI that we know can increase achievement (at least in reading): (1) collaboration/common language and (2) prevention is where it’s at. These elements are inseparable. But we know that these two elements cannot work the way they are supposed to unless the folks who run the system know all of the potential barriers to the implementation of RTI and ensure that essential conditions to support the initiative are in place. There are examples of districts implementing successful RTI initiatives that increase students’ reading achievement and reduce referrals to special education. There are other examples where the initiative has not resulted in changes in achievement or referral outcomes.

So what is going on?  It will be important to figure out what works in some districts and not others. Susan Hall has recently published a very user-friendly book that lays out what districts and schools did in implementing RTI in a way that resulted in substantial reductions in referrals and significant increases in reading achievement: A Principal’s Guide: Implementing Response to Intervention. I am not hawking this book, as there are others that lay out the conditions that are essential for implementing RTI and scaling it (see Dianne Haager et al. for specific evidence of effectiveness).

The bottom line is that effective implementers of RTI have had to do a tremendous amount of study and planning to ensure that the initiative actually makes a difference. Jay lays out some the barriers, including problems with implementing a program that actually takes funding away from your district or schools, and persuading educators to replace programs and procedures that they have used for some time.

But there are others as well. For example, how do you overcome the fact that intervention services in schools are often funded by separate entitlement programs, especially Title I and IDEA, that have specific eligibility criteria that make it difficult to co-mingle funds to support school-wide programs? How do you implement programs that have been typically isolated from general education? And how can school leaders and teachers avoid the mistakes that result in limited or no effectiveness, not to mention that the excitement for change and increased morale will be crushed?

If you did a factor analysis of all the crap that can derail the implementation of RTI, these are the most common errors:

–Focusing Too Many Resources on Administering and Collecting Assessment Data Rather Than Ensuring  that Staff Use the Data to Inform Instruction
-Viewing Purchased  Programs as Silver Bullets Rather Than Aides to Help Well Prepared Teachers Make Informed Instructional Decisions
-Confusing Awareness Training with Implementation Training
-Using Ineffective Practices to Train Teachers
-Underestimating the Magnitude of Change
-Taking on Too Many Grade Levels and Schools the First year
-Beginning the Implementation Without a Comprehensive Implementation Plan
-Failure to View the Implementation as a Systems-Wide Change

The good news is that districts and schools that have effective RTI programs in place know they can’t make the mistakes above and provide incentives that have trumped the traditional financial rewards that have potential for increasing referral rates.

I am sure that I have taken up too much space with details that may be of little interest to policymakers. But the details are what make RTI effective, and when RTI works, it really works. However, if you can’t deal with complexity, either-or concrete thinking, or have an allergic reaction to human and systems change, you might as well blow off trying to implement RTI.

Jay has done a service laying out the big picture issues. Implementing additional reforms to increase the probability that RTI can succeed is essential, as he has articulated. But the return on investment is only as good as understanding and addressing the amount of grunt work involved. It’s that “necessary but not sufficient” thing. I know this is self-evident, but we sure keep trying to do one without the other.

4 Comments | instructional reform, special ed | Tagged: , | Permalink
Posted by Greg Forster

Standardized Testing Jumps the Shark in AZ

June 4, 2008

(Guest Post by Matthew Ladner)

In an attempt to keep viewers tuning-in after many years on the air, the sitcom Happy Days produced an episode where Fonzie jumped a Great White shark on water-skis. This episode brought the phrase “Jumping the Shark” into the pop-culture lexicon. Jumping the Shark denotes a tipping point in which something becomes absurd and suffers a noticeable decline. Arizona once was a leader in the standards and accountability movement, but those days are long gone. Days ago, Arizona lawmakers dispensed with AIMS as a graduation requirement, making the sad decline of AIMS into farce complete.

The credibility of Arizona’s K-12 testing has suffered the death of a thousand cuts. In 2004, Arizona schools faced a problem in that No Child Left Behind requires schools to be judged by ethnic subgroups, and Hispanic scores were all but certain to force many schools to be ranked failing under federal guidelines.

Instead, the state simply made AIMS much, much easier to pass. Presto-chango, Arizona Hispanic students (and others) were transformed from having been projected to fail the federal standards in almost all subjects at all grade levels in 2005 to passing almost all of them. A study by Peterson and Hess noted that Arizona’s dummy-down was the largest in the country.

Where were you when we needed you Jaws?

Hop on over, the water’s fine!

Around that same time, the Arizona Department of Education recommended replacing the Stanford 9 exam with an Arizona version of the Terra Nova to imbed into AIMS. Happily, the new “Terra Zona” exam found that Arizona students are above the national average in every grade and in every subject tested.

One small problem: the results aren’t the least bit credible. The Arizona Department of Education recently mailed out the latest state report card, and the evidence of the farcical nature of this home-grown exam can be found in ADE’s own booklet.

On the one hand, the ADE touts the above average Terra Nova scores, but in the same booklet, it presents an analysis from the RAND Corporation showing that if you control for student demographics, Arizona’s scores on the Nation’s Report Card are average instead of rock bottom. The Nation’s Report Card- or NAEP- represents the nation’s most highly respected source of K-12 testing data.

The RAND report is entirely credible. Arizona has a far more difficult to educate student body than the national average- with a much higher percentage of low-income students, English language learners and minority students than the national average.

Controlling for demographic factors is a huge step to take. For instance, Arizona has a percentage of children eligible for a free or reduced price lunch more than twice as large as the national average. Our ratio of children who are English Language Learners is almost four times the national average.

If you pretend that Arizona has an ELL population one fourth its actual size, and about half the number of low-income children that we actually have, and some similar heroic assumptions, Arizona’s adjusted scores near the Minnesota middle instead of close to the bottom.

Arizona’s Terra Nova, however, does not control for demographics at all but somehow finds our students above the national average in every single subject without any adjustment whatsoever. If you are willing to buy that, I’ve got a bridge I’d like to sell you in Brooklyn.

Finally, AIMS has suffered what ought to be its final indignity. The legislature passed “AIMS Augmentation” in order to allow 6,000 high school seniors to graduate despite an inability to pass what at most amounts to a test of basic skills.

If you can’t pass a 10th grade level test, the original thinking went, you don’t deserve to graduate. A diploma should mean something. After delaying the graduation requirement several times, the augmentation bill has effectively killed it.

State policymakers should rethink our entire system of testing. Research shows that children who fail to learn to read in the early grades later drop out in huge numbers. Using AIMS as a graduation requirement addresses the problem at the back end. Arizona should look to Florida, which uses testing to require students to repeat grades if they don’t learn to read in the early years. Florida’s 4th grade reading scores used to scrape the bottom with Arizona, but now they greatly exceed us. Florida’s system set kids up to succeed, rather than to fail.

Parents, teachers, administrators and policymakers all require a credible and transparent system of student data. The AIMS/Terra Nova exam is not delivering. ABC eventually cancelled Happy Days and replaced it with another program. Arizona policymakers should do the same with AIMS.

1 Comment | instructional reform | Tagged: , , , | Permalink
Posted by matthewladner

Make Every Day Count

June 3, 2008

In Arkansas, as in many states, standardized tests are given well before the end of the school year.  This year the augmented benchmarks for grades 3 through 8 were administered April 13-17 and the “end of course exams” for geometry, algebra, and biology were given April 21-29.  Apparently the end of the course occurs 6 weeks before school breaks for the summer.

After the tests are done academic work grinds to a halt.  Instead, academic content is increasingly replaced with field days, watching movies in school, parties, etc… as the end of the year approaches.

Don’t get me wrong, field days, watching movies, parties, etc… all have their place in a healthy school environment.  It’s just odd that some educators who so often complain that testing narrows the curriculum and prevents them from pursuing the higher order instruction they really want seem at a loss about what to do when they no longer have the test bearing down on them.  One would think that they would use those last 6 to 8 weeks to find their inner Alfie Kohn.  Instead, a lot of it is used as play time.

Given how important time spent on instruction is to academic achievement, it would be great if we made full use of the academic year.  Perhaps we can push back the tests closer to the real end of the school year.  I know that grading tests, especially with open-ended items, is very slow.  But frankly open-ended items add nothing to the predictive power of standardized tests, so eliminating that would allow faster grading, later testing, and fewer wasted days.

20 Comments | instructional reform | Tagged: , , | Permalink
Posted by Jay P. Greene

Responding to Response to Intervention

June 2, 2008

(Editorial Note — See also follow-up post here)

Like many well-meaning instructional reforms, Response to Intervention (RTI) is likely to fail if it is not coupled with other reforms that address the perverse incentives blocking its proper implementation.

The idea behind RTI is that we could avoid placing many students in special education if only we provided them with well-designed instructional approaches in the early grades.  The huge increase in special education enrollments consists almost entirely of growth in Specific Learning Disability (SLD), which is an ambiguous category that is difficult for practitioners to diagnose properly.  Almost any student with a normal range IQ but sub-par achievement could be labeled as SLD.  But of course, students may lag in their achievement because they have been poorly taught, not because they have a problem processing information, as is characteristic of a true SLD.  Schools have a variety of incentives to discount the former explanation and instead push students into special ed.

RTI is a federally-backed program that attempts to address this problem by allowing schools to divert 15% of their special education money into well-designed instructional programs for the early grades.  If students are taught well, they won’t be lagging academically and so will not end up being identified as disabled.

This all sounds great, but it is almost certainly doomed to failure if we do not also address why schools were not previously providing well-designed instruction in early grades or why they are so motivated to identify students as disabled.  Essentially, RTI frees-up money to get schools to do what they presumably should have been doing already — providing well-designed instruction in the early grades.  Unless we think that the main impediment to well-designed instruction was that schools lacked the funding to do it, diverting 15% of special education money to early-grade instruction will not get them to do anything significantly different from what they were already doing.  Even if we thought that the problem was that schools were unaware of the effective approaches that RTI offers, we have no reason to believe that schools will truly adopt or effectively implement those strategies. 

It is a a seductive but entirely mistaken reform approach to believe that schools are eagerly awaiting to be told by the federal government or philanthropists how to teach effectively but are just lacking the critical resources and knowledge to do it.  Schools already hire certified professionals who have been exposed to countless hours of pre-service and in-service training.  Why would we think that the only reason that they are failing to employ an effective technique is because they are unaware of it?  And with school budgets increasing every year, why would we think that the next bit of money is the one that they finally need to pursue effective strategies?

Instead, we have to recognize that educators have reasons for doing what they are doing.  They generally believe that the techniques they’ve adopted are effective, even if they aren’t.  Getting them to switch to something else takes more than just offering it to them.  This is especially the case when they’ve seen untold failed instructional fads come their way.  They’ve learned to tuck their heads down and do what they think works based on their own limited experience and inertia. 

RTI does nothing to address these barriers to instructional reform.  In addition, it does nothing to address the incentives that schools have to place students in special education.  In most states schools receive additional funding when a student is identified as disabled.  If a student is lagging academically and the school would have to devote some resources to helping that student catch-up, the school could either choose to say “my bad” and pay for those extra resources out of their existing budget, or they could say that the student is disabled and get additional money to help that student catch-up.  Of course, they have strong financial incentives to choose the latter explanation.  Research that I’ve done with Greg Forster and that Julie Cullen at UC San Diego has done, confirms that these positive financial incentives play a large role in the growth of special education.  That is, special education is growing, in large part, because we reward schools financially for increasing their special ed enrollment.

I know that many people claim that special education is a horrible financial burden on schools because it costs far more than the subsidies they receive.  But people who say this are either simply advocating for more subsidies or don’t properly understand what a “cost” is.  A cost is an expenditure that one would not otherwise make.  Simply showing that more is spent on special education students than subsidies received does not prove that the subsidy is less than the cost of identifying a student as disabled.  More is spent on students lagging academically whether they are identified as disabled or not. 

The positive financial incentive for identifying students as disabled exists when the subsidy is greater than the expenditure required by the special ed label beyond what would have been spent on that student anyway.  Because proper accounting is almost entirely absent in education, it is difficult to measure these additional costs directly.  But from the research showing the response to financial incentives, we know that there is often a financial reward for putting students in special education.

I don’t mean to suggest that educators are cynically gaming the school finance system or are even aware of its details.  My point is that the systems that school districts have adopted for the evaluation and identification of disabilities are shaped by these financial incentives so that even well-meaning practitioners will tend to over-identify disabilities when there are financial rewards for doing so.

Of course, RTI does nothing to address these financial incentives for increasing special ed enrollments.  In fact, it may contribute to those perverse incentives because schools are rewarded even more by placing more students in special education because they now get to divert 15% of that money for general education, which is essentially fungible.  And to make matters worse, diverting 15% of special education money away from disabled students may short-change truly disabled students who need those resources.

I’m sure that the people backing RTI are completely sincere in their confidence that we could prevent disabilities (and save money) if only we had proper instruction.  But wishing does not make that happen.  Reformers need to stay focused on combining promising instructional reforms with fixing the perverse incentive systems that undermine those instructional approaches. 

The incentive reforms should include changing the process by which we provide financial subsidies so that there are not strong rewards for over-identification of disabilities.  One way to do that is to provide vouchers for students with disabilities equal to the full value of what is spent on them in public schools.  That way schools would have to think twice before identifying a student as disabled.  Sure, they’ll get extra resources if they put a kid in special ed, but they also risk having that student walk out the door with all of his or her resources.  It places a check on perverse financial incentives. 

RTI with special ed vouchers could be a winning combination.  RTI by itself is just increasing federal subsidies for the status quo.

28 Comments | instructional reform, special ed, vouchers | Tagged: , , , , | Permalink
Posted by Jay P. Greene

Ask Reid Lyon – Reading First Implementation

May 19, 2008

(Guest post by Reid Lyon)

“The implementation of Reading First has been a hot topic, especially since the release of the recent impact study. Has the implementation of the program been successful?  What were the most important issues that arose regarding the implementation of Reading First? What lessons have been learned?”

 

With respect to whether the implementation of the program has been successful, the short answer is it depends.  Amber Winkler, the research director for the Fordham Foundation, recently reported in the Gadfly that Reading First is “perhaps the best-implemented education program in federal history.”  This may be true in some states, but not in others.  Dr. Winkler highlights Georgia, Oregon, and California as states that got the implementation process right.

 

On the other hand, Texas and several other states made successful implementation unbearably difficult.  In Texas, for example, a process was initially in place to award districts Reading First funding if their proposals were rated above a particular score by the grant review group.  Proposals from districts scoring below a threshold value were to be resubmitted following technical assistance to equip the district with in depth understanding of Scientifically Based Reading Research (SBRR) and to incorporate those concepts in their resubmission along with assessment and accountability requirements.  For some reason, a decision was made to award all districts Reading First funding irrespective of the quality of their applications.  Moreover, eligible districts received Reading First funding before any technical assistance was in place and before any baseline reading assessments could be administered for program evaluation purposes.  Not good.

 

But there is a great deal more involved in the implementation of a complex program beyond ensuring the quality of grant applications, and few states and districts had their hands around all of the essential conditions that must be in place to embed and bring to scale an initiative as intricate as Reading First.  At first blush, it would seem that the existence of a converging body of evidence relevant to reading development, reading difficulties, and reading instruction would have facilitated implementation fidelity.  But a substantial research base, bipartisan political support, and hefty funding only go so far.  The devil is in the details, and strategies for implementation at the federal level and in many states either were not appraised of the details or simply felt, as in Texas, that the money had to flow immediately no matter what, reflecting education’s love affair with entitlement programs.

 

One detail that gets right in your face immediately when you are implementing a program as complex as Reading First is that you have to manage coordinated systems change at federal, state, district, school and classroom levels.  Complexity theorists like W.L. Miller and his team use the metaphor of a jazz band when discussing how individuals within an effective system perform their own tasks in concert with others in achieving a desired goal.  Each contributor is responsible for certain tasks, but always listening to the other members of the orchestra to determine how their own actions contribute to the whole. This is tough to do when the band members come from different generations and different musical perspectives.  Getting into the groove takes a good deal of practice and a willingness to expand one’s thinking.  These are not features that characterize public education.   Basically, any evaluation of a program like Reading First must drill down into how this coordination played out and how long it took.  

 

Another common-sense detail that was not planned for in the implementation schedule was the fact that many hard-working folks in schools and classrooms who have gotten used to doing things in a certain way were being asked to change their routines and to try something new. In some cases this meant a decision was made to stop certain programs and replace them with others that many were unfamiliar with. When this occurs, teachers and leaders must have confidence that what is being implemented provides advantages to students over existing practices – and, in many instances, the case for this was not made prior to implementation.  While this may seem a bit fluffy, it is important to understand that public-school educators are under a constant barrage of new magic bullets, fads, and aggressive textbook company representatives all selling materials “based on SBRR.”  Implementation experts will tell you that without teacher and leader buy-in, any program, no matter how effective, will not realize its potential.  Fortunately, the majority of those leading and teaching in Reading First districts and schools saw the clear advantages offered students by the program as they observed poor readers become good readers.  But this took a while. 

 

In my interactions with many Reading First programs over the past six years, I did notice some common conditions that were in place when implementation fidelity was strong.  In addition to the details noted above, strong implementers embraced data and accountability for results.  States like Alabama integrated robust professional development with continuous coaching and feedback for both teachers and leaders.  Instructional programs were selected not only on the basis of their alignment with SBRR but because they were practical, useful, and beneficial to students.  Teachers were treated as self-determined professionals and responded by taking ownership and responsibility for their parts in the jazz band.  And building-level leadership ensured that teachers and coaches had the necessary time to plan, review student data, and collaborate in differentiating instruction for individual students based on their performance data.

 

The lessons learned are many, but I can think of three big ones.  Let’s start with the way Congress and the feds typically expect complex programs to be in place, in full operation, as soon legislation is passed.  Reading First embodied so many new concepts and requirements that, in my view, the first year should have been spent in providing technical assistance and professional development to states and districts even prior to the submission of Reading First grants.  I can’t tell you the number of times I saw the thousand-yard stare following my mention of SBRR, progress monitoring, data-driven instruction, or comprehensive reading programs.  We are talking significant mismatch between the requirements of the legislation and the background knowledge of many grant applicants; not to mention that the grants were competitive – a novel concept in education formula funding.

 

And if you were on the ground during the first two years of the program, this is what you would typically observe:  Teachers were first learning to understand, administer and use the results of assessments to inform instruction.  As they were learning these new concepts, they were also taking part in state reading academies to learn more about  the foundation of SBRR (in 5 areas of reading in k-1, in 4 areas  of reading in 2-3). In addition, as they were learning and using new assessments and taking part in professional development academies and workshops, they were simultaneously learning how to use a new approach to instruction and how to integrate core program instruction with additional interventions when required to meet individual student needs. This was done at the same time they were learning about center activities, grouping students for instruction and aligning and using supported classroom libraries.

 

It is important to ask whether any program that has added this amount of new learning to a teacher’s other responsibilities – including going to IEP meetings, attending parent conferences, preparing for their instruction in math, social studies and science, serving on school-wide committees and a host of other tasks – could demonstrate substantial gains after three years.  Give me a break.  What is amazing is that despite this unbelievable load, Reading First coordinators, teachers and their leaders rose to the occasion and have done and are doing a superb job.

 

Lesson Number One: Take a year to develop the infrastructure essential for program implementation. 

 

Lesson Number Two: During this first year,  make sure that all involved at every level understand the essential conditions that have to be in place to coordinate and implement a massive and unique program and to anticipate the need to customize some of its features based on individual district and school characteristics.

 

Lesson Number Three – and this is for the Department of Education: The next time Congress gives you $25 million dollars a year for six years to carry out an ongoing evaluation of a program, for God’s sake design and implement the evaluation commensurate with the initiation of the program.  This was no time to carry out a delayed and abbreviated evaluation when the complexity and uniqueness of a program demanded comprehensive, continuous and systematic feedback to ensure improvements in implementation where needed.

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Posted by Greg Forster

I’ll Have What Florida is Having

May 18, 2008

(Guest Post by Matthew Ladner)

In a recent article for the Goldwater Institute, I found that Florida’s Hispanic students outscore Arizona’s statewide average on fourth grade reading exams. Some readers emailed and wanted to know if this could be attributed to the fact that Florida’s Hispanic population is predominantly Cuban. The short answer is no, because the Hispanic population was also predominantly Cuban in the 1990s when scores were much, much lower.

Other inquiries involved questions about student poverty. Statewide averages for low-income students for Arizona and Florida are broadly similar, but I decided to investigate using the NAEP data. What I found was extraordinary.

Using the data analysis features on the NAEP website, you can get fourth grade reading scores broken down by both race and income. It is not only the case that Florida’s Hispanic students outscore the statewide average in Arizona, Florida’s low-income Hispanic students outscore the average Arizona student.

Arizona is not alone in this. Florida’s Free and Reduced lunch Hispanics also outscored the statewide average for all students on 4th grade reading of California, Hawaii, Louisiana, Mississippi, Nevada and New Mexico. They tied the statewide average for Alaska and South Carolina, and fell one scale point below Oregon and West Virginia.

In 2007, a family of four needed to earn $20,650 to qualify for a free lunch, $38,203 for a reduced price lunch. Nationwide, approximately 80 percent of free or reduced lunch children qualify for a free lunch.

Median family income in California, by comparison, is $64,563.

I appeared on a conference panel recently, and a fellow panelist noted the difference between a problem and a condition. A problem, she said, was something you tried to fix. A condition was something you had given up on and just grown to accept.

Low academic achievement for low-income and minority children is a problem not a condition. Florida under Jeb Bush put in testing and accountability with real consequences, implemented parental choice, reformed reading instruction, curtailed social promotion, liberalized teacher certification, and put in merit pay.

The results speak for themselves. To paraphrase that famous line from When Harry Met Sally: I’ll have what Florida is having.

UPDATE: The Wall Street Journal weighs in on the historic vote by Florida Democrats to expand the Step Up for Students tax-credit program.

34 Comments | competitive effects, instructional reform | Tagged: , | Permalink
Posted by matthewladner

Hans Brix? Oh no!

May 14, 2008

(Guest Post by Matthew Ladner)

In Team America: World Police Hans Blix shows up at the palace of Kim Jong Il. Blix demands to inspect North Korean nuclear facilities, “or else.” Kim Jong Il asks or else what, and Blix threatens to send “a very angry letter” from the United Nations. Kim proceeds to open a trap door, dropping Blix into a shark tank.

I would include a youtube link, but this is a family blog.

So just to sum up what I have gathered on Reading First: we have decades worth of high quality evidence showing that public schools are using terribly ineffective reading methods. When the Bush administration finally tries to do something about it, with serious money involved, lobbyists water down the bill language and the program administrator is subjected to a witch hunt. Essentially the schools take the billions and barely implement the program. When the program is evaluated, it “doesn’t work.”

The next time one of my fellow reformers suggests that they can fix things once they get to be the ones with their firm grip on the ship wheel, I’ll humbly suggest that they have the phrase “READING FIRST” tattooed to their forehead to serve as a constant reminder of how education policy actually works. Meaningful education reform can be done, but it works best when there is pressure from both the top down and the bottom up.

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Posted by matthewladner

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