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Did they really say that (about education reform in Florida)?

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On May 18, 2012 in Education reporting, Funding, General, rebuttED, Testing and Accountability

As you know, we keep tabs on what’s written and said about school choice and ed reform, particularly in Florida. This week has been a doozy when it comes to head-scratching statements. Today we highlight a few and offer a quick response …

In just a few years, Orlando-based Fund Education Now has become the leading parent group in Florida. Aggressive. Media savvy. Super effective. I respect its members for their passion. I sometimes agree with them. But there are times when the rhetoric is at odds with reality.

After this week’s FCAT fiasco, the group wrote in an action alert to members: “These abysmal FCAT Writes scores are proof that Tallahassee’s ‘education reforms’ are an unmitigated disaster.” I agree the state raised the bar too fast and too fast on some of our standardized tests. But have the state’s policies as a whole flat-out bombed?

In the past four years, Florida has ranked No. 11, No. 8, No. 5 and No. 11 among all 50 states in Education Week’s annual Quality Counts report. And contrary to some critics’ claims, that’s not just because of policies on paper that sound good; it’s also because the state has moved the needle on student achievement, particularly for low-income kids. On the K-12 achievement portion of EdWeek’s rating – which considers performance and progress on NAEP, AP and graduation rates – Florida finished at No. 7, No. 7, No. 6 and No. 12 over the past four years. In 2011, it finished in the Top 10 in eight of nine progress categories. It finished in the Top 3 in six of them.

The reason Florida tumbled out of the overall top 10 this year is because of budget cuts, and because its NAEP scores have stalled in reading and math. That’s troubling when the state is still nowhere near where it needs to be. I think that’s what led the state Board of Education to be too bold in raising the bar.

But Florida’s policy makers, like them or not, have been more right than wrong in the past decade when it comes to standards and accountability and school choice. To deny there’s been progress is good for stoking fury and mobilizing troops. But it’s unfair to the teachers who made it happen. And it could undermine changes that really did make things better for kids.

In an op-ed Sunday, syndicated columnist Bill Maxwell describes what he sees as another round of teacher bashing in Florida and blames “conservative lawmakers who dominate Tallahassee” and are gunning to privatize public schools. The prompt for his outrage: A cost-cutting decision by the Pinellas County School District to curb the use of individual printers by teachers. Continue Reading →

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This time, Florida education reformers hand ammo to critics

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On May 17, 2012 in Education and Public Policy, General, School Choice, Testing and Accountability

The last thing you want to give people waging a scorched-earth campaign against you is a gas can and a match.

Though well intended, the hard-charging Florida Board of Education moved too far, too fast last year when it raised the bar on academic standards. The short-term result for the state’s standardized writing test isn’t pretty. According to scores released this week, the percentage of passing fourth graders alone dropped from 81 to 27.

In an emergency session, the board tried to mitigate. It revised the passing scores downward so the percent passing will be roughly the same this year as it was last year. Education Commissioner Gerard Robinson also admitted the state should have better communicated the new scoring criteria to teachers.

But (sigh) the damage was done. The people who have bitterly fought every major education reform in Florida since Jeb Bush was elected governor – and who will never admit there has been real progress – now have a bit of real ammo. They’ll use it to take fresh aim at everything from new teacher evaluations to expanded school choice. They’ll be even more aggressive ripping into the next batch of reading and math scores, which will also look a lot starker this year.

Conspiracy theories are spinning wildly. This was a well orchestrated plot, goes one, to make traditional public schools look bad so charter schools shine by comparison and the privatization agenda can reign supreme. Never mind that just a few years ago, the state had a record number of A and B schools. Or that charter schools take the same tests. Or that, if the past is any guide, a disproportionate number of them will be tagged with F’s.

You won’t read this in the papers (except, thankfully, in this Orlando Sentinel column), so here’s the backdrop for Florida’s latest ed reform flap. Continue Reading →

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Voucher, charter school advocates talk accountability, too

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On May 4, 2012 in Education and Public Policy, General, Testing and Accountability

The headlines covered Gov. Chris Christie’s passionate call for education options in New Jersey, but the fine print here was equally edifying. In papers and workshops presented Thursday afternoon at the American Federation For Children’s Annual Summit, the policy message was unambiguous and remarkably consistent:

All learning options must be scrutinized and must measure up.

Craig Barrett, the former chairman of Intel Corp. (pictured here), may have most succinctly summed up the discussions of accountability for charter schools and private learning options. 

“We have to be willing,” Barrett said, “to shut down schools that aren’t working. We have to be ruthless, and I’m hopeful we’ll have enough pragmatism to do that.”

Summit participants were also handed a three-page document from AFC that described various academic, financial and administrative accountability provisions as essential ingredients to “ensuring the highest level of program quality and sustainability.” 

“Not only are transparency and accountability smart public policies,” the document stated, “but they provide the school choice movement with readily available data and information to improve programs and illustrate the success of those programs.”

AFC has gone so far as to rate the strengths and weaknesses of voucher and tax credit scholarship accountability provisions in 26 different programs across the country. And it didn’t pull many punches. For example, it ranks Arizona’s “Empowerment Scholarships” as measuring up on only two of eight broad accountability measures.

These proclamations won’t end the division over how to measure success, of course, but they demonstrate a policy maturity that is beginning to draw a sharp contrast with some of the opponents of charter and private options - including the New Jersey teachers union with which Gov. Christie is at war. Just as it would be untenable for proponents to reject any public oversight and rely only on market mechanisms, it is also unpersuasive for opponents to argue that every option must be regulated in precisely the same way.

(Image from podtech.net)

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The trouble with California’s test scores

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On January 26, 2012 in General, Testing and Accountability

Public school test scores are almost always suspect. The tests are rarely secure, and the actual questions are often known to teachers in advance. Excluding low-performing students is easy, and large numbers of the weakest students never get tested because they have dropped out.

On November 7, 2011, Los Angeles Times lead education writer Howard Blume wrote a front-page story about teacher cheating, with one anonymous teacher quote after another admitting that “everyone” cheated. As a result, California’s Standardized Testing and Reporting (STAR) test scores have gone up every year for the last nine years, at a time when objective and secure national measurements such as the National Assessment of Educational Progress and the SAT have remained flat.

This next summer our organization, California Parents for Educational Choice, which is closely allied with the American Center for School Choice, will do a publicity campaign timed to coincide with the release of the STAR test scores dramatizing the profound disconnect of the STAR with the NAEP and SAT, and also publicizing statewide the findings on rampant cheating of the Los Angeles Times.

That test score disconnect is present as well in almost all other states. Such a publicity campaign would be easy for activists in other states as well.

In previous blogs posts, I have pointed out that per-student spending numbers in public schools are deceptively low, and that published high school dropout rates are untruthfully low. Taken together, of course this means that the financial resources going into our public schools are understated, while the two main measurements of outputs, test scores and graduation rates, are deceptively high.

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Transparency in education — how the U.S. leads

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On January 11, 2012 in Education and Public Policy, General, School Choice, Testing and Accountability

I wrote recently about the Europe-wide study coordinated by OIDEL, called IPPE: Indicators for Parental Participation in Compulsory Education.

While the United States lags behind most of Europe in recognizing the right of parents to choose schools that reflect their religious convictions without thereby sacrificing the right to publicly funded education enjoyed by their fellow citizens, the IPPE study shows that we are ahead in some other ways. One way in which the U.S. is clearly ahead of most of the countries studied is in the transparency of information about the academic results of local systems, schools and even, in some cases, of individual teachers. While this is quite a new development in the U.S., it is still barely on the horizon in many countries in Europe and elsewhere, largely because of the resistance of the teacher unions.

The IPPE study found that in a number of countries there was little or no information available to parents on school results. In Belgium (a country which is outstanding in terms of parental choice), “assessment is largely communicated by word of mouth with all the errors and bias that this entails. In fact, this all naturally leads to comparative advertising, which the ban on publication of results wanted to avoid … Sooner or later the matter of assessment will have to be addressed with a more critical and responsible approach.”

In Switzerland (where education is controlled at the canton level), “both the authorities and teachers consulted … stressed their desire to prevent data regarding school assessments from appearing publicly.” Italy has a national organization assessing the quality of education (one of my former doctoral students works there), but “results on individual schools are not disclosed. In terms of internal assessment, although the idea of quality and school self-assessment was introduced in 1999, it has hardly been expanded on.”

Similar resistance in education circles to the provision of objective data on school results, even on a value-added basis, is found in many other countries, including outside Europe. Last weekend, in editing one of the country profiles from Latin America for the 2012 edition of Balancing Freedom, Autonomy, and Accountability in Education, I learned that its new law on educational assessment, in a provision added at the last minute, states that “diffusion of this information will safeguard the identity of the students, the teachers, and the schools, in order to avoid any sort of stigmatization and discrimination.” As a result, the author concluded, “it seems likely that the process of accountability to parents and to citizens in general will be limited if information on results is provided only at a very general level. Perhaps this could be valid information for policy discussions at the macro level, but it will certainly inhibit discussion at the intermediate level and that of individual schools, which is where the processes of citizen participation and, as a result, accountability are more evident.”

We can be grateful that, as a result of state initiatives and NCLB, American parents and education reformers now have access to information that can help to guide both reforms and school choice. This is a recent accomplishment, and we have not figured out yet how best to use this information. We have a long way to go before the results available address a broad-enough range of outcomes and take appropriate account of differences among pupils and schools. There have been blunders along the way, and there will no doubt be more.

If you doubt, however, that the current focus on measurement of and accountability for outcomes is a necessary means toward the fundamental reforms that American education (and I include higher education, where the process has barely started) needs, I invite you to consider the fervent opposition expressed by the vested interests of the status quo.

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Accountability 2.0 requires balance between regulations and choice

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On January 5, 2012 in General, School Boards, School Choice, Testing and Accountability

Similar to food, medicine, and housing, accountability in public education is a balance of government regulations and customer choice, and finding the proper balance is increasingly important as parental choice becomes more prevalent. Generally regulations and choice are inversely related such that as one increases the other decreases.

When I was growing up we had only one choice for phone service, which meant our phone company was highly regulated. Government regulators determined the services we were provided and their costs, and even prohibited consumers from owning phones. This began to change in 1984 when the government broke up AT&T’s monopoly and allowed more companies to enter telecommunications. More providers led to consumers having more choices and the telecommunications industry being less regulated. Today consumers may own phones and may pick from a plethora of service and cost plans.

A similar rebalancing of regulations and consumer choice is occurring in public education. School district dominance is slowly eroding as public education expands and incorporates new providers such as charter schools, virtual schools, dual enrollment programs and private schools accepting publicly funded vouchers and scholarships.

School boards and teacher unions are resisting this transformation and arguing that overregulated district schools are unfairly having to compete with less regulated choice schools. But their solution — to require that all publicly funded schools adhere to the same regulations — ignores the consumer choice component of accountability. Choice schools should be less regulated than non-choice schools, just as telecommunications companies today are less regulated that AT&T was in 1980. If school districts want to reduce the regulatory burdens on their schools and level the regulatory playing field, they should convert them to charter schools.

The macro forces driving change throughout our society are also transforming public education. Inevitably the future of public education will include more customer choice, more diverse providers and less regulation. Therefore, public education needs a well balanced accountability system that reflects these new realities.

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A modest, yet radical proposal

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On December 21, 2011 in Funding, General, Teacher quality, Testing and Accountability

Now that MacArthur “genius” Roland G. Fryer’s new paper on school inputs and effectiveness is beginning to get attention, it seems appropriate to look back at the most pioneering of studies on inputs and student achievement, the Coleman Report of 1966.

Sociologist James S. Coleman (1926-1995) released “Equality of Educational Opportunity” after conducting one of the largest studies of its kind in American history and one which ultimately found that how well we enhance school inputs — money, teacher credentials, library materials — has little correlation to how well students perform. Fryer and co-author Will Dobbie, both of Harvard University, similarly looked at the input measures at 35 charter schools and found that the most traditional measures — class size, per-pupil spending, certified or uncertified teachers — are not correlated with school effectiveness. Instead, Fryer and Dobbie show that frequent teacher feedback, the use of data to guide instruction, high-dosage tutoring, increased instructional time and high expectations “explains approximately 50 percent of the variation in school effectiveness.”

Modern-day reform critics and even historians tend to lose sight of the suggestions Coleman himself proposed in journal after journal in the years following his landmark report. In particular, Coleman took to The Public Interest in 1966 to suggest what he called “a modest, yet radical proposal” to achieve equality of educational opportunity.

Specifically, he wrote:

a) For those children whose family and neighborhood are educationally disadvantaged, it is important to replace this family environment as much as possible with an educational environment — by starting school at an earlier age, and by having a school which begins very early in the day and ends very late.

b) It is important to reduce the social and racial homogeneity of the school environment, so that those agents of education that do show some effectiveness — teachers and other students — are not mere replicas of the student himself. In the present organization of schools, it is the neighborhood school that most insures such homogeneity.

c) The educational program of the school should be made more effective than it is at present. The weakness of this program is apparent in its inability to overcome initial differences. It is hard to believe that we are so inept in educating our young that we can do no more than leave young adults in the same relative competitive positions we found them in as children.

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Embracing a new dialogue of accountability

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On October 31, 2011 in General, Parental Choice, Testing and Accountability

Accountability in public education is comprised of customer choice and government regulations, but since consumer choice in K-12 has historically been rare, most accountability discussions today focus exclusively on regulations. These lines from a recent editorial in The New York Times about the proposed reauthorization of No Child Left Behind illustrate my point:

The revised No Child Left Behind Act that passed out of the Senate education committee last week goes too far in relaxing state accountability and federal oversight of student achievement … Lawmakers are right that No Child Left Behind needs to be overhauled. But Congress needs to do this carefully, without retreating from core provisions that require states to do better by children in return for federal aid.

The core provisions the Times is referring to are all regulatory since the NCLB legislation assumes better government regulations are the key to improving student learning. A proper regulatory environment is necessary for a high-performing public education system, but regulations alone are insufficient. Empowered consumers are also necessary, which is why accountability in public education needs to include the proper balance of both.

Finding this healthy balance will be more challenging in public education than it’s been in areas such as food, housing, medicine, and finance because these other sectors have a history of consumer choice. Beginning in the mid-1800s, public education began phasing out consumer choice until by the early 1900s only the wealthy had choice. Had we decided to manage food in the mid-1800s the same way we decided to manage education, every local community today would have an elected food board that would assign each family to a neighborhood food center where they would eat their approved food each day. The only exception would be families wealthy enough to pay food taxes and still purchase food from private providers. Accountability in the food centers would be regulatory only since no choice would exist.

The parental choice movement is expanding rapidly across the country, which means the dialogue around what constitutes accountability in public education should increasingly include consumer choice. To help accelerate this transition, those of us who support full parental choice need to be more explicit and consistent about including consumer choice in our accountability discussions.

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Graduating to a new conversation about choice

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On October 18, 2011 in Education and Public Policy, General, School Choice, Testing and Accountability

The Fordham Institute’s enterprise in Ohio weighed in over the weekend on the prospects of additional school options in the Buckeye State, and it did so with characteristic balance. Neither Terry Ryan nor Mike Petrilli are ever bashful to highlight the mixed results of many school options, and they’re smart to embrace “accountability done right” in a way that many advocates for choice do not. But just as importantly, they’re deft at bringing clarity to debates that too quickly rage out of control.

“The genie of school choice is out of the bottle,” Ryan wrote in the The Columbus Dispatch in response to the coming political storm in Ohio over the proposed Parental Choice and Taxpayer Saving Scholarship Program. In other words, though one more private option may feel like “piling on to some,” Ryan says, private and public options have thrived in Ohio since the 1990s, and it’s time we had a new conversation where we leave old fears behind.

More than 75,000 students are enrolled in some 350 charter schools. The EdChoice Scholarship Program provides vouchers to students in failing schools, and it is set to expand from 14,000 to 30,000 students next year. The Autism Scholarship Program now serves more than 1,300 youngsters. More than 7,200 students participate in the Cleveland scholarship program, Ohio’s oldest. In June, Ohio added a special-needs voucher program that will provide support of up to $20,000 to eligible students to attend private schools.

Ohio’s school districts also have a number of choice programs: magnet schools and alternative programs, STEM high schools and Early College Academies. And 429 districts allow students from anywhere in the state to attend their schools via open enrollment. (Another 90 allow students from adjacent districts to enroll.) And thousands of families have moved in pursuit of better educational options for their children.

The challenge, Ryan adds, “is to ensure that quality keeps pace with quantity and availability.” Regulation is a four-letter word to many voucher proponents, but Ryan makes the case that “accountability is the partner of choice”:

The latter creates space for innovation and new options, while the former drives change and pushes for continuous improvement. Accountability exposes poor performers and charlatans, while also highlighting successful schools.

The challenge facing policymakers is that, while many voices clamor for widened choice and the opportunities that go with it, far fewer demand accountability for performance. Getting the balance right will determine whether school choice in Ohio succeeds or fails to improve student outcomes. It also could serve as the basis for political détente around school-choice issues.

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How Jerry Brown makes a case for parental empowerment

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On October 17, 2011 in Education and Public Policy, General, Parental Choice, School Choice, Testing and Accountability

Editor’s note: This entry comes from Peter H. Hanley, the executive director of the American Center for School Choice, which last week joined an alliance with redefinED.

California Gov. Jerry Brown’s veto message for a bill that would have expanded the criteria that the state’s Academic Performance Index (API) would utilize in evaluating the quality of a school raises interesting questions about the proper role of data versus softer quality measures, such as parent satisfaction. In deriding the bill as full of “ill-defined” and “impossible to design” indicators, Brown quotes Einstein’s maxim, “Not everything that counts can be counted and not everything that can be counted counts.” He goes on to query:

What about a system that relies on locally convened panels to visit schools, observe teachers, interview students, and examine student work? Such a system wouldn’t produce an API number, but it could improve the quality of our schools.

I agree with those that say the entire assessment of school quality should not be laid on the outcomes of once-a-year high stakes tests, but for this the status quo forces in California that have so long dominated education policy have mostly themselves to blame. The 1999 Public Schools Accountability Act, which created the API, clearly mandated the inclusion of attendance and graduation rates as well as other indicators, but the resistance to and outright obfuscation of accountability has been and continues to be intense. Just a decade ago, the California Department of Education asserted the dropout rate was about 3 percent, when in fact it was closer to 10 times that level. Only in the last two years have we moved closer to accurate dropout rates. Moreover, the perfect is always the enemy of the good in any California debate about school or teacher evaluation.

Instead, we have heard incessant complaints about “teaching to the test” when in fact if you are teaching the standards and the test is aligned, that is what is supposed to be happening. If schools have devolved to rote “drill and kill” curriculum, that is on them, not the testing system. Reading and math can be taught across the curriculum and the best schools do that in engaging ways.

The largest fault with the API and the annual California Standards Tests (CST) is never discussed — it’s a high stakes test for schools and a no stakes test for students. CST results do not go to colleges or appear on a transcript. They have no effect whatever on who graduates or moves on to the next sequenced course. The state, in the 12 years since the Act was passed, has been unable to figure out how to get the results of tests taken in April and May back to the schools before the end of August, thus rendering them virtually useless in placing students in the most appropriate courses or doing any immediate remediation, either for students or for faculty that may be lacking in teaching particular standards. Although impossible to quantify, undoubtedly student performance is affected, especially for middle and high school students that have figured out that the tests mean nothing to them personally.

But Brown, probably unintentionally, makes an excellent case of why we need more parental choice in the Golden State. Not only, as Jack Coons noted in his recent post on redefinED, do parents know their children’s needs in ways that no one else can, but they can do the kind of school assessment that Brown noted in his message, visiting the school, observing teachers, and reviewing student work and then aligning those with their child’s needs. This is perhaps one of the most reliable methods of ensuring school quality.

Every survey shows that parent satisfaction in the charter school community is off the charts compared with those parents who have not been able to have choice. Like any other measurement, it’s not perfect. Some parents, particularly in our cities, define a good school as one where their child will not be shot or stabbed, but overall expanding choice options has been a strong positive for families.

California charter schools remain under unceasing attacks that attempt to limit their flexibility and make them exactly like the traditional public schools. Instead, we need to seek ways to expand parental choice and authority for their children’s education as well as increase their access to good schools with diverse methods of attaining achievement. Introducing a tax credit scholarship program could do this and would likely save the California budget some money. Clearly, this is working well in other states such as Florida. We are losing some excellent private schools, particularly in California’s urban communities, which have served those areas well for decades and which parents would continue to choose if funding were available. If Governor Brown follows his reasoning to a logical conclusion, trusting parental choice and satisfaction should become a key and leading indicator for school accountability and making more schools accessible.

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