Testing and Accountability

Two approaches to ed reform, but one may do little to reform

Doug Tuthill April 27, 2011

Two divergent approaches to education reform are operating in public education today. Both are focused on improving the effectiveness and efficiency of human capital, but while one seeks greater centralization of power the other seeks greater decentralization.

Recent tenure, evaluation, seniority and merit pay reforms are examples of state government trying to improve education by giving school boards more power and mandating that they use this power to increase teacher productivity. Teacher unions, which were created to curb the power of school boards, oppose this power transfer since it’s their power that is being redistributed to school boards.

School board members seem ambivalent about receiving more centralized management power. They like having this additional power but know teacher unions, which play a significant role in local school board races, will fight them if they use it. So board members are trapped between governors and state legislators who will expect them to use these new powers to improve teaching and learning and teacher unions who will demand board members maintain the status quo.

When faced with this dilemma in Florida, our school boards have traditionally followed the letter of the law to satisfy the state while maintaining the status quo in the districts to keep peace with their unions. I predict school boards in states such as Indiana and Ohio will do the same when implementing their states’ new tenure and merit pay laws. Even though these new state tenure and merit pay laws are intended to benefit low-income children, particularly low-income children of color, they won’t because low-income families lack the political clout to counterbalance the pressure school boards will receive from college-educated, middle-class teachers.

Parental empowerment is the other education reform approach sweeping the country. Magnet schools, homeschooling, virtual schools, dual enrollment, tax credit scholarships and charter schools, among others, are enabling more parents to customize their children’s education by matching them with the learning options that best meet their needs. This latter approach is shifting power from school boards to parents and is opposed by board members and teacher unions.

Ultimately parental empowerment will be what generates systemic and sustainable improvements in publicly-funded education. As parents demand more and better learning options for their children, teachers will have more opportunities to be innovative and entrepreneurial, thereby allowing them to be more empowered, also. Unleashing the knowledge and skills of teachers and parents is the best way for public education to maximize its human resources.

Why teacher unions oppose both teacher and parent empowerment is an interesting story I’ll address in a future post.

April 27, 2011 0 comment

Achievement Gap Blog Administration Education and Public Policy Testing and Accountability

Friends and foes of Jeb Bush overlook the real reason for Florida’s gains

Doug Tuthill January 11, 2011

Doug Tuthill

Supporters and critics of former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush’s education reforms have long missed the mark. In 1998, when he was first elected, Bush used the tools available to him, most notably the bully pulpit, to drive gains in student achievement, but he did not make the systemic changes necessary to sustain these large yearly gains. He’s advocating for those systemic improvements today and making progress, but we’re not there yet.

One of the former governor’s more sophisticated critics is Michael Martin, a research analyst at the Arizona School Boards Association, who recently analyzed Florida’s reading gains on the National Assessment of Education Progress (NAEP) from 1998 to 2009, and issued this challenge:

People who claim various programs were responsible for the improvement in NAEP test scores in Florida over the past decade must explain why their improved NAEP reading scores primarily occurred among the lowest scoring students while other student scores largely stagnated, and why those increases were most dramatic from 1998 to 2002, diminishing afterward.

Based on what I saw and heard in schools and school districts during this period, the primary reason for these initial reading gains was Bush’s leadership. Beginning with his election in 1998, he used his political power to pressure school districts to improve the basic literacy skills of low-income and minority students, and the districts responded. Educators are good people who care about children and want them all to succeed, but the message from the top has never identified the achievement of low-income and minority children as a top priority. That changed when Bush took office.

After he turned up the heat, talk about improving the literacy skills of low-performing students started dominating formal and informal meetings in school districts across the state. Even Bush’s harshest in-state critics admit no other leader in Florida history put as much focus on improving the achievement of low-income and minority students as he did.

Initiatives such as eliminating social promotion, grading schools and bringing more professional development into high-poverty schools reinforced Bush’s commitment to increasing the achievement of low-performing students, but it was the governor’s drive and forceful personality that convinced schools and school districts to reorder their priorities.

Martin asked why the impressive reading gains from Bush’s first term tapered off in his second. I’ll address that in a post tomorrow.

January 11, 2011 7 comments

Blog Administration Charter Schools Customization Testing and Accountability

The cameras focused on Rhee and Scott, but the school was really the star attraction

Adam Emerson January 7, 2011

Adam Emerson

When Michelle Rhee visited a Miami charter school on Thursday to announce that Florida would be the first state to partner with her Students First initiative, it may have been easy for most observers to focus on the star power of the event and not the venue. But the reason that Rhee and newly elected Florida Gov. Rick Scott chose the Florida International Academy for their joint announcement is the same reason why the school’s waiting list for seats has more than 200 names.

The school reaches out to an impoverished community, where all students are children of color and nearly all qualify for free or reduced-price lunch, and it delivers on results. In 2002, the state of Florida gave the school a failing grade, based on its dismal core performance in reading and writing. Today, that school has an A grade with a nearly identical demographic, and the majority of its students are now meeting high standards in those subjects.

How it got there exemplifies what Rhee and Scott and President Obama and Arne Duncan have been insisting on: Customizing a public education that best meets a child’s needs, and giving disadvantaged children more educational alternatives than they might otherwise have.

For Florida International, that means following the state’s curriculum standards but constantly redesigning the instruction based on its students’ needs, targeting teaching strategies to the individual student, if necessary, and revisiting those strategies every week, according to Principal Sonia Mitchell, who spoke with redefinED Friday.

January 7, 2011 0 comment

Blog Administration Private Schools Testing and Accountability

Private schools with public students need oversight

Jon East December 6, 2010

Jon East

A new report from Andrew Coulson helps bring context to one of the most bedeviling issues we face when sending public school students to otherwise private schools: What’s the right way to hold these schools accountable?

Let’s respect that Coulson, the astute director of Cato Institute’s Educational Freedom Center and a free-market advocate, is focused on what he views as the potential for “regulatory suffocation” of tax credit scholarship and voucher schools in 15 states. His report nonetheless presents an intriguing contrast between the levels of regulation. He finds that voucher regulations in places such as Ohio, Louisiana, and D.C., are multiple orders of magnitude more strenuous than those for tax credit scholarship programs in states such as Georgia, Arizona and Pennsylvania.

Coulson controlled for enough variables that he can plausibly make the case that “tax credits seem significantly less likely than vouchers to suffer the Catch-22 described in the introduction – less likely to suffocate the markets to which they aim to expand access.” But let’s leave aside the question of whether there is a genuinely different political impulse for accountability between these two programs, and address the responsibility for advocates of private choice.

Coulson is right that regulating private schools in precisely the same way as public schools tends to undermine their uniqueness and defeat the purpose of offering them as alternatives. But it is simply untenable in a public education world that is being measured and forced to account for student outcomes to suggest that private options are exempt. If tax money is being spent, directly or indirectly, then the schools need to answer for it.

December 6, 2010 3 comments