Thanks to everyone who submitted responses and who voted in our photo caption contest!

Without further ado: the winner of a shiny new copy of Checker Finn’s Troublermaker book is:

“Well, this is how I define business casual, so back off.”

Cheers to the author, Mr. Collin Hitt of the Illinois Policy Institute!

Summers past have brought us front-page firestorms and inane back-to-school stories. But this August might one day be famous for marking the start of a fresh round of honest conversation about the achievement gap—and the relationship between race, poverty and our schools.

For too long these topics have been bogged down by pious assertions and sacrosanct positions, held firmly by combatants on either side of the education policy divide. For “reformers” it’s an article of faith that closing the achievement gap is job number-one—and that highly-effective schools can make a big dent in the gap—maybe even close it entirely—all by themselves. Meanwhile, defenders of the current system view all this talk about the achievement gap with suspicion—asserting, as they do, that schooling is hopelessly intertwined with conditions in the family and community, and thus that we can’t expect results to improve much until we alleviate poverty and racism.

If we lay down our swords and start fresh with a “beginner’s mind,” we can acknowledge that there’s plenty of truth in both positions. Schools do matter a lot, and more than a few exist that have achieved phenomenal results for poor and minority students. (Many, many others take our neediest students and give them the bare minimum—in terms of challenging work, inspirational teachers, and on and on.) Yet we should also concede that intact families, communities with strong social capital, and households with plentiful resources for good health care, healthy meals, enrichment programs, and the like give affluent children an advantage that most of their poor peers will never be able to overcome. Can’t people speak such truths without being accused of giving “excuses” or practicing “the soft bigotry of low expectations”?

With that context in mind, consider two recent milestones in the achievement gap conversation: First, the news that the gap in New York City didn’t narrow nearly as much as had previously been reported. And second, the publication of an ETS paper by Paul Barton and Richard Coley, The Black-White Achievement Gap: When Progress Stopped.

The New York situation might have forever punctured the view that tracking achievement gaps is a useful exercise for gauging the progress of an urban school district. The short story is that Mayor Bloomberg and Chancellor Klein crowed for years about dramatic declines in the gap among white and black students reaching the “proficient” mark—declines that mostly disappeared when New York State recently recalibrated its definition of “proficiency.” This is simply a matter of mathematics. Because of vast differences in average group performance between whites and blacks (the way we usually conceive of the gap), where the proficiency bar is set will determine the size of the “proficiency gap.” Set it high and the gap will be large, because most white students will clear it and most black students won’t. Set it low and the gap will shrink; the white kids are still over the bar but now lots more black kids will exceed it, too.

A similar dynamic played out in Washington, where test scores dropped across the board last year, possibly because the tests inadvertently got harder. Harder tests mean higher proficiency bars—and poof, fewer blacks reached the bar, and the achievement gap grew larger. (This is now a big issue in the current mayoral race.)

Jay Mathews of the Washington Post rightfully calls the achievement gap into question, for these and other reasons. Simply stated, do we really want to root for white students to do worse over time? That would narrow the achievement gap, but nobody believes such an outcome is good for anybody. (Jonathan Chait makes a similar point.)

And that’s the biggest problem with Barton and Cooley’s ETS report: it obsesses about the gap, rather than simply following the achievement trends for African-American students. If they had done the latter, their study would have been titled Black Student Achievement: Moving Steadily Upward Once Again.

It’s right there on page five of their paper: the average NAEP “scale score” in reading for black 9-year-olds rose from 186 in 1999 to 197 in 2004 to 204 in 2008. It was a similar story in math at both the 9-year-old and 13-year-old levels. And upticks can be detected between 2004 and 2008 in reading at Age 13 and Age 17, and in math at Age 17. In other words, the trends are positive across the board!

What’s even more maddening, though, is that we have no firm understanding of what’s driving these improvements.  Barton and Cooley spend most of their time digging into the big gains made by African-American students in the 1970s and 80s—ground well-plowed by Christopher Jencks, Eric Hanushek, and others. They explore various explanations, some having nothing to do with schools (like improvements in black wages and living conditions after the enactment of the Civil Rights Act). Desegregation was almost surely a factor, though nobody knows how much, and Barton and Cooley put forward class-size reduction as the most plausible driving cause. (NCTQ does a nice job debunking that argument here.)

And then the gap-closing (and, importantly, gains for African-American students) stopped suddenly around 1988 or 1990, and stayed flat for about a decade. Was this because desegregation lost steam? Because of the crack cocaine epidemic? Because of the decline of two-parent families in the black community? No one knows for sure.

Barton and Cooley are just as perplexed by the gap-shrinking that took place between 1999 and 2004 (not to mention the African-American progress that continues today). Let me offer some obvious possibilities for these positive developments. We know, from work by Eric Hanushek and Macke Raymond, among others, that the adoption of test-based accountability systems boosted achievement in the late 90s in the early-adopter states. As the other states adopted these systems in the 2000s (under pressure from No Child Left Behind) they saw achievement gains too. Improvements were particularly impressive for the lowest-achieving students, many of whom were African-American. There’s also reason to believe that the adoption of scientifically-based reading instruction is helping (especially in Age 9 reading scores).

But we can’t discount demographic factors either. Maybe we’re benefiting from the end of the crack cocaine epidemic. Perhaps the big economic gains made by blacks in the 1990s didn’t show up in improved test scores until the 2000s. Perhaps the various efforts to create a culture of achievement within the African-American community are finally paying off.

The last time the achievement gap stopped narrowing—back in the late 1980s—it was because black achievement flat-lined or worse. This time the achievement gap stopped narrowing because both white kids and black kids are making steady progress. This is one moment when I’m not wistful for the past.

Will these gains continue? Or will they peter out, as the benefits of accountability, research-based reading, and other reforms hit up against the reality of sky-high child poverty rates and out-of-wedlock births in the black community? Who knows. But we’d be smart to keep our eye on the real goal—improvements for all groups of kids—instead of getting distracted by the gap.

-Mike Petrilli

Note: This article appears in today’s Education Gadfly.

Yesterday, the Professional Staff Union of the Ohio Education Association went on strike.  Workers are picketing the union’s downtown Columbus headquarters as well as regional field offices.

The OEA and PSU agree that “mainly economic” issues are in dispute, including pensions, health-care benefits, job security, workload, and compensation. But the PSU, representing 110 OEA staff members, says that the treatment of staff throughout the negotiating process is also a factor.  PSU President Norm Young told the Columbus Dispatch, “OEA officers and managers need to practice what they preach. It’s a pretty high form of hypocrisy for OEA officers and managers to be giving us this treatment when they expect us to protect OEA members from the same treatment out in the schools.”

When it comes to salary at least, the striking workers have something worth fighting for.  The Dispatch reported that most of the PSU members make more than $100,000 per year – $10,000 more than the average district superintendent in Ohio makes each year and about twice what the average Ohio teacher is paid.

- Emmy Partin

There’s a lot to be said about the $10 billion federal jobs bill (“Edujobs”) which will purportedly save 160,000 teachers’ jobs nationally, 5,500 of which were/are/could be? at stake in the Buckeye State. You can choose what part of Edujobs makes you most concerned:

a)      It kicks the can down the road instead of forcing schools/districts to make tough cuts

b)      The money comes from cuts to food stamps

c)       It can actually be used to restore pay raises and give bonuses, not just save jobs

d)      Are there even that many jobs at stake, or are we being deceived?

This week, Ohio indicated that it’d be allocating funds via the state’s primary funding formula rather than through the Title 1 formula (states have a choice to select either) so that funds could cover “a larger percentage of LEAs”  — a move that didn’t surprise us but still means that:

e)      This $361 million further cements Ohio’s status quo (the regular funding formula including Ohio’s evidence- based model) rather than targeting it to the poorest districts.

Granted, I’m happy that Ohio districts – especially its urban ones – will be getting funds during a time of fiscal distress. Dayton City Schools will be getting $4.4 million, Columbus $7.9 million, Cincinnati $4.6 million, Toledo $7.6 million, Canton $3.5 million, Akron $6.7 million, Youngstown $2.9 million, and Cleveland $17.6 million. That’s a lot of money and I hope it can be used as intended – to save the teachers’ jobs that are at risk (though I still am WAY skeptical of the estimated 5,500 number.) (You can find estimated allocations for other Ohio districts here.)

But wait – the guidance from USDOE has some new information that might take the cake. Districts are allowed to not just use the money to save teachers’ jobs.

f)       It can also go toward: “tuition reimbursement, student loan repayment assistance, transportation subsidies, and reimbursement for childcare expenses.”

And this is available to just about anybody who works within 100 yards of a school building (librarians, aides, counselors, interpreters, security officers, maintenance staff, bus drivers, and nurses, as well as actual teaching staff).

So let me get this straight: we’re not only cutting food stamps for poor (hungry) families, prolonging states’ move to right-size themselves and making the future funding forecast even worse, and giving teachers raises so that they make virtually no concessions at all despite the worst recession in my lifetime – but also allowing Ms. Jones to pay for her master’s degree, the librarian to pay for her kid’s child care, and the principal to get reimbursements for his parking pass?

- Jamie Davies O’Leary

The University of Florida “cuts faculty and budgets” but manages to spend, spend, spend on the important things.

—Liam Julian

“Public school employment has risen 10 times faster than enrollment. There are only 9 percent more students today, but nearly twice as many public school employees.’’

— Andrew Coulson, director of Cato’s Center for Educational Freedom

“Column: Increased education spending won’t solve problems,” The Oklahoma Daily

22,000

The amount of per-pupil spending in New Jersey’s Newark schools.

“Newark Schools Chief Out,” Wall Street Journal

September’s already here (how shocking!), so get ready for National Punctuation Day by submitting your own punctuation haiku here. And if you’re a teacher from LA. don’t forget to submit your comments (haiku-formatting not required). You can also vote for your top ten education books of the decade here, and maybe some will make it into the revamped Scholastic Book Club. In other news, 4-year colleges are a myth and K-8 beats middle school.

-Kyle Kennedy, Fordham Intern

The UK’s least-productive primary schools will be converted into “academies” (basically, charter schools), says the country’s secretary of state for education, Michael Gove.

UPDATE: More on charter-school-like developments in Britain, from the Economist.

—Liam Julian

Standardized tests are biased against students who don’t care. (If rough language offends you, don’t click the link. And don’t leave your house.)

—Liam Julian

Each year the Fordham Institute’s Ohio team analyzes the academic performance of schools in Ohio’s Big 8 cities (the largest eight urban districts). We examine things like the number of kids in schools rated A, B, C, D, or F, the number who attend schools that meet (or fail to) value-added, performance over time, etc.

This year we partnered again with our friends at Public Impact, who just finished the fuller report, Ohio Urban School Performance 2009-10.

There are several interesting trends worth lifting up, some of which are the fact that:

• Only two percent of charters and two percent of district schools had high growth and high achievement – an even lower percentage than last year. While urban charters tended to show stronger growth than their district counterparts on average, neither sector showed particularly strong achievement, with only seven percent of charters and four percent of district schools in the highest tier of the Performance Index.
• Among schools with low achievement and low growth in 2007-08, charters were far more likely to improve by 2009-10, with 23 percent showing enough improvement to make moderate achievement and above expected growth, compared with only two percent of district schools. Still, most of 2007-08’s struggling schools remained low-performing in 2009-10. Seventy-one percent of these charter schools and 90 percent of these district schools remained within the bottom Performance Index tier.
• In both Cleveland and Dayton, charters outperformed their district counterparts. In Columbus, district and charter results were comparable. In the other five cities, district schools outperformed charters.
• Urban charter schools showed stronger value-added growth than their district counterparts, with 79 percent of charters making expected or above expected growth in reading, compared with 68 percent of district schools.

And while we lamented in yesterday’s special Ohio Gadfly that achievement is stagnant in Ohio’s Big 8, there are at least a handful of schools in Ohio’s Big 8 that are both high-achieving in reading and math (as measured by Ohio’s Performance Index score) and whose students grow by at least a year’s worth of progress. These schools are worth lifting up. (Note: These only include schools serving some mix of grades 4 through 8 and which have value-added scores.)

Table 1. High-performing urban schools

 Source: Ohio’s interactive Local Report Card

Kudos to these schools for serving their students well and for reminding us that quality urban schools do exist and are making a difference.

Read more of our thoughts in yesterday’s special Ohio Gadfly, and check out our website for more on the 2009-10 Ohio report card results.

The U.S. Department of Education just announced “that a consortium of states led by Massachusetts will receive a $170 million federal grant to come up with a standardized testing system that would replace a patchwork of tests used by individual states.”

—Liam Julian

Wendy Kopp, founder of Teach for America, writes in today’s Wall Street Journal that she is optimistic about the future of K-12 education.

—Liam Julian

I was sorry not to make Education Next’s top 40 education books of the decade.  (The polls are still open; vote for three.)  That could be because I haven’t written it yet!  Details, details.   

If I were to write an education book, it would be called, Don’t Know Whether to Laugh or Cry: Life on the School Board.*   Of all the emotions accompanying these events — and school board meetings are more full of emotion than anything else – the feeling of not knowing whether to laugh or cry is one of the more common and consistent ones – for me.  I can’t speak for my colleagues. (In fact, I think it is illegal for a member of the board to speak for his or her colleagues. See School Law below.)

We had our Special Meeting this week, ostensibly to decide how to spend $584,579, our tiny district’s piece of the EduJobs pie.  This was a big deal here:  ten jobs, five percent of the teaching corps.  (During our budget debate the previous spring, my suggestion that we could save ten jobs if staff took a salary freeze was soundly defeated. I love the joyful collaboration moments that teacher unions foster.) 

There were nearly 40 people in the audience, a few of them laid-off teachers come to see if they would be among the call-backs.  The board was given a sheet of paper that listed the ten positions the Superintendent wanted to restore, with salary and benefits. Note: No names (take that! Los Angeles Times.) It ranged from a high school Social Studies Teacher for $47,158 to Psychologist for $65,000.  (Note: This is not DC or NYC or LA: median household income around here is $31k. Teachers are among the highest paid people in the county!)  

One of the minor dramas here was that the social studies teacher slated to get his job back – this was one of those little secrets board members get to keep, a job perk that is not often talked about — was sitting next to me.  Angered over losing that job in May, because of budget cuts (and loving colleagues who wouldn’t freeze their salaries), he had run for school board. He finished, like New Jersey, just out of the money. But wait, it so happened that a sitting board member – not the two who had just won seats, although one of those was an incumbent who lost her seat but won a different one  – announced she was quitting. Actually, she had announced that before the election, effective after the election. Are we following this?  (Remember my book, Don’t Know Whether to Laugh or Cry, coming out, I hope, in time for Ed Next’s 20^th Anniversary.)  So, as I was saying, we, the board, had to appoint a replacement (well, we didn’t have to, but we decided we would) and the only person to apply for the opening was – you guessed it – the angry, laid-off social studies teacher.  He was sworn in about a month ago. And this, the EduJobs meeting, was only his second appearance at the table — and he had to recuse himself from voting because he was, thanks to union seniority rules,  the person who would be filling the social studies position. And then – I’ll give away the ending – after he was reinstated, he had to resign. I’m not sure if there is Guinness Book entry for shortest term on a school board, but this would probably be on a top-ten list.)

Where was I?

Oh yes, School Law.  Section 2:75. “Do board members have a right to inspect personnel records?”  School Law, of course, prepared by the state’s School Board Association, is supposed to the Board’s Bible (at 838 pages of small print, it probably is shorter than the Bible, but considering that it is only a summary of school laws…..)  (It is rarely consulted, but I made it a minor cause célèbre when… to be continued.)  

I then proceeded to read from Section 2:75 (the answer, not surprisingly, was “Yes, but….”) and from my request to see the records of the folks we would be re-hiring, emailed to the Superintendent  the previous Friday… 

 I quit. I mean, I’ll stop now.  I invite readers to finish this story — if you’ve been able to follow it — and guess the final vote on the EduJobs resolution.  (Hint: there are total of 7 board members, one of whom was absent that night.)

 –Peter Meyer

 ——-

*Alternative title:  Shorten Your Life: Join a School Board. 

The commandant of the Rick Hess Straight Up blog was deflated by what he heard from Education Secretary Arne Duncan and the head of the American Federation of Teachers, Randi Weingarten, on ABC’s Sunday-morning, political talk show, This Week. With “banal utterings” did Duncan and Weingarten respond to the questions of moderator Christiane Amanpour, Hess writes. But those utterances were not just banal; they were also disingenuous and wrong. Here, for example, is Duncan:

Let me be clear: We have to educate our way to a better economy . . . We have to get that dropout rate to zero as quick as we can. We have to dramatically increase graduation rates. And we have to make sure every single student that graduates from high school is college- and career-ready. So the status quo is not going to work for the country.

Misleading and incorrect. It is far from “clear” that the nation’s economy depends on public education, and an honest “dropout rate” will never be “zero.” One can, of course, “dramatically increase graduation rates”—if one makes it dramatically easy for pupils to graduate. And no, not “every single student that graduates from high school” will be “college- and career-ready.”

Hess is right to write that “smart policy and practice start with calling things by their proper names and accepting honest disagreements” and that Duncan and Weingarten’s performance was an “embarrassment.” One acknowledges that the Sunday-morning political programming has become a weekly dreck-fest, but nonetheless: what does it say about the K-12 scene that pabulum-spouts like Weingarten and Duncan are its leaders?

—Liam Julian

New Jersey’s former education commissioner, Bret Schundler, is now claiming that the state’s governor “defamed” him. “I will not accept being defamed by the governor for something he knows I did not do,” Schundler wrote.

—Liam Julian

The critic Carlin Romano, writing in the Chronicle of Higher Education, wonders if ten years hence books will be largely vestigial:

My own peculiar worry about Academe 2020, offered with less than 20/20 foresight, may seem less catastrophic: the death of the book as object of study, the disappearance of “whole” books as assigned reading. Does that count as a preposterous figment of extreme academe, or is it closer than we think?

And he muses on the worthiness of today’s penchant for having everything published, everything archived:

But are we worse for not having archived the ephemera of mankind, for having devoted libraries and syllabi to books—the weightiest, most important, most enduring forms of communication? The old criterion of librarianship and pedagogy was right: Save and study the substantive, don’t worry about the insignificant.

 —Liam Julian

Since Ohio won Race to the Top money last week, districts that didn’t sign on to the state’s proposal (nearly half of them) have gone on the defensive about why they didn’t accept the federal dollars.  And that’s no easy task with the governor assuring the public that RttT won’t mean new, additional reforms but will merely fund his education plan that was put in place more than a year ago, and with teachers unions and winning superintendents echoing him.

The superintendent of Oak Hill Union Local Schools, a small district near my hometown in southern Ohio, told the local newspaper about his district’s decision to decline RttT:

I am reminded of the Bible story of Esau where he gave up his birthright for a bowl of porridge. To be honest, I am unwilling to relinquish some of our local control over temporary dollars that may have a hundred pages of strings attached.

Local control is a BIG deal in the Buckeye State.  But is relinquishing it an act of Biblical proportion?  Especially for a district like Oak Hill and the many, many others for which the local control argument is one based on historical legacy, not operational reality?  Even before the influx of federal stimulus money last year (and Edujobs this year), Oak Hill received 70 percent of its revenue from the state and another 10 percent from the federal government.  And Ohio’s education laws, policies, and operating standards for public schools dictate much of what schools do and how they do it.

Declining a bit more federal cash via Race to the Top, to do what is already going to be required of you, seems foolish – and makes the superintendents, local teachers unions, and school boards involved look far more like Esau’s father Isaac than anybody else in the Bible. (Isaac was duped into giving away Race to the Top money – I mean Esau’s birthright – to his brother Jacob in a scandalous little plot involving goat hair and an old man’s bad eyesight.)

HT to Jamie for her knowledge of Biblical characters!

Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

- Emmy Partin

Last Friday, we laid down a challenge of great intellectual might.  We asked you, our intrepid readers, to give a caption to the following picture:

Now, we call on you again to tell us: Which caption is the best? The winner will receive a free copy of Checker Finn’s Troublemaker. Vote early (but, unfortunately, not often).

I’ve always been your ardent defender. I buy peanut butter buckeye candy for people out of state and I have a t-shirt with a red outline of you that says “Midwest is Best.” And I really believe it.

I’ve lived in other states, and worked in far more thriving metropolises than what Ohio has to offer, but it always felt like testing out furniture in the IKEA showroom – colorful, textured, wonderful – but a little too much so. These places were my Karlstad sofa – comfortable for a while – but I ultimately couldn’t settle in them.  They weren’t home, good ol’ heart-aching post-industrial-job-loss Ohio, in need of folks who believed in it.

And so I returned.

But here’s my problem with you, Ohio. You don’t make it easy. You’re fighting a brain drain: young, bright people are fleeing the state en masse, and you’re not drawing them back. We’re a state full of soon-to-be runaways.

You’ve heard it before, but hear it again: you need to attract talent, and now. You need to be a magnet five times stronger than Indiana or Pennsylvania, Massachusetts or California, if you hope to reverse the insidious decline toward irrelevance. You are the mom-and-pop shop in the middle of a strip mall, about to go out of business. You need to get it together.

Luckily, someone in your shop had a brain-drain-fighting cape on when s/he wrote into your winning Race to the Top application that you will be seeking “partnerships with alternative teacher programs like Teach For America and The New Teacher Project.” Alums of the programs rejoiced at that clause. I am writing to implore you to follow through with it.

Alternative teacher programs are not just about filling teacher shortages, but about creating climates ripe for reform, entrepreneurship, and Richard-Florida-like hubs of innovation. (By the way, you never fare well on his little scatter plots.) Alternative programs like Teach For America and The New Teacher Project not only place teachers into the schools that need them the most, but also create education leaders who form an attachment to place, who will not just buy a Midwest-themed t-shirt but may grow to love Cleveland or Columbus or Cincinnati or Dayton fondly enough to stay for the long haul. To be clear, this isn’t a tradeoff – attracting or retaining would-be educators via these non-traditional programs doesn’t come at the expense of children’s learning. These teacher training programs aren’t less effective than the traditional ones, usually the opposite.

I know you’re not North Carolina or Louisiana or elsewhere, but multiple studies show the effectiveness of these alternative programs in places facing similar educational challenges (if not the extent of your brain drain problem). This recent study of TNTP (conducted by researchers at LSU) giving the program top ratings for preparing exceptionally effective teachers should reaffirm your promise to bring the program Ohio-side. You may argue that Louisiana is a more challenged place than Ohio, but try telling that to kids in some of our lowest performing cities. 

The point is, we need these programs not just to improve our urban schools, but to fight the brain drain that threatens to whittle us down even further. 

Last year, some 1,100 of Ohio’s top graduates applied to Teach For America (I don’t have the numbers for TNTP). Though not all got accepted, this flock of over one thousand of our best and brightest attempted – or did—leave the state because such programs don’t exist here.

At least not yet. But now you’ve made a promise – a worthwhile one – and I hope you keep it. I’ve met lots of alums of both of these programs, and education reformers and young professionals all over the place who’d consider a move to the heartland if an ed reform climate were thriving here. But let me tell you – not all of them are as sentimental as I am. Do your part to win them over, Ohio.

Picture courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

- Jamie Davies O’Leary

See Martin West’s blog this morning at Education Next about the new research from Jonah Rockoff and Benjamin Lockwood (Columbia Business School) showing serious negative side effects from standalone middle schools. 

–Peter Meyer