Opinion and Analysis

Opinion: Finally, some straight talk on the achievement gap

by Michael J. Petrilli

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 for 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.

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News Analysis: A new day in New Jersey?

Did you spend last week at the Vineyard, or in a cave? If so, you might have missed the excitement in the Garden State. The Star-Ledger summed it up nicely: “The week started with controversy over a botched answer in the state’s 1,000-page application for Race to the Top funding. It ended with Gov. Chris Christie’s messy firing of Education Commissioner Bret Schundler.” The state is forging ahead, however—a spokesman for the governor said education reform efforts will continue despite the setbacks. Rochelle Hendricks, a longtime state education official, will serve as acting commissioner while the governor’s office searches for a permanent replacement. Andy Smarick—our very own Fordham Institute alum—is the new deputy commissioner there, and, according to the Star-Ledger, two sources close to the administration said the governor hopes to install him as Schundler’s permanent replacement. It may come as no surprise that Gadfly (and all the Fordham team) heartily supports this excellent plan. In Smarick, Christie has one of the best imaginable candidates for this post—indeed, one of the nation’s brightest education policy stars—already sitting just a few buildings away. And you don’t have to take our word for it; Education Sector’s Kevin Carey told the Star-Ledger, “Andy is not a bomb-thrower, not an ideologue, not someone who wants to tear down public education. He’s hard-working and sincerely focused on improving education for New Jersey’s children.” We couldn’t agree more!

“Future of N.J. school reform remains uncertain without federal funds, permanent education chief,” by Chris Megerian and Jessica Calefati, Star Ledger, August 29, 2010

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News Analysis: Shining a light or starting a fire?

 There’s no question that schools need to do a better job separating the good, the bad, and the ugly when it comes to teacher quality. And not just so that they can rid themselves of the weakest links; shining a light on high-quality instruction is crucial, too. So asserts the L.A. Times in the latest installment in its controversial series on teacher effectiveness. Everybody and their mothers have already weighed in on the newspaper’s decision to publish the names of effective (and ineffective) teachers, and the merits and drawbacks of the paper’s particular approach to value-added measurement. (We tend to be queasy about the public release of these data-by-name, though it’s surely within a newspaper’s legitimate purview, like publishing politicians’ voting records or restaurants’ results on sanitation inspections. As for the issues with value-added analysis, we say: let not the perfect be the enemy of the good.) But what’s most striking about the Times’s latest salvo is its portrayal of an education culture in LaLa land that is uninterested in celebrating its high-achieving, butt-kicking superstars. “No one is ever really singled out, neither good nor bad,” Aldo Pinto, a hyper-effective teacher, told the Times. “The culture of the union is: Everyone is the same. You can't single out anyone for doing badly. So as a result, we don't point out the good either. When I worked at a bank, I was employee of the month. For LAUSD, for some reason, it’s not a good thing to do.” If we want to get serious about retaining high-performing teachers in our schools, we had best listen to the likes of Mr. Pinto—and recognize their incredible work.

“No Gold Stars for successful L.A. teachers,” by Jason Felch, The Los Angeles Times, August 28, 2010

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Short Reviews

Reviews: A Time for Change: The 42nd Annual Phi Delta Kappa/Gallup Poll of the Public Schools

by Amber M. Winkler, Ph.D.

This latest edition of the PDK/Gallup annual public opinion survey on American schools proves more intriguing than past installments (perhaps because they’ve added a creative thinker or two to the advisory board). In fact, many of the questions are particularly relevant to current education reform. For example, most folks believe that major education decisions should be made on the state level, including setting standards, deciding curriculum, and holding students accountable, as opposed to on the local or federal ones; but they also believe the state should be paying the lion’s share of education costs. On a more granular level, 54 percent believe the best way to deal with a poorly performing school is to flood it with outside support, as opposed to taking more drastic measures like closing it, and 68 percent are in favor of charter schools (up from just 42 percent ten years ago). Sixty percent even favor a “large increase” in the number of charters. Merit pay gets widespread support, too. Seventy-one percent believe that teachers should be paid according to their work quality, not by a standard pay scale, which trumps experience and graduate degrees. And most believe that teacher quality should be education’s top priority. But everyone’s favorite finding has remained the same (now for a quarter century): Americans tend to confer on their own local public schools as much better grade (A or B) than on schools “across the nation as a whole” (which still get a C).

“A Time for Change: The 42nd Annual Phi Delta Kappa/Gallup Poll of the Public’s Attitudes Toward the Public Schools” (Bloomington, IN: Phi Delta Kappan International, September 2010)

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Reviews: International Association for the Evaluation of Educational Achievement: Initial Findings from the International Civic and Citizenship Education Study

by Kyle Kennedy

This rather dense study gives a broad look at student knowledge and understanding of civics and citizenship in thirty-eight countries. Though it unfortunately omits the U.S., it still provides a wealth of information about changes in knowledge of civics since 1999 (using a previous IEA study), engagement in public life, student perceptions of threats to civil society, schools’ and education systems’ impact on attitudes towards citizenship, and how students’ backgrounds relate to their knowledge of civic and citizenship education. Most notable is the degree of variation from country to country and, even more interestingly, within them. For example, female students, students from higher socioeconomic backgrounds, and students whose parents are interested in political and social issues tended to have more civic knowledge. Depressing, though unsurprising, is that student civic knowledge has declined in the last decade. What to do about this, however, is far from clear. Indeed, the study’s overview of how schools and communities foster civic knowledge raises more questions than provides answers.

Wolfram Schulz, John Ainley, Julian Fraillon, David Kerr, and Bruno Losito, “Initial Findings from the International Civic and Citizenship Education Study” (Amsterdam, The Netherlands: International Association for the Evaluation of Educational Achievement, 2010)

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From The Web

The Education Gadfly Show Podcast: We catch Rick wearing Paris's purse

This week on the Education Gadfly Show, Mike Petrilli and Rick Hess explain why everyone’s wrong about Race to the Top, go tit-for-tat over the L.A. Times, and ponder life in D.C. after Michelle Rhee. Then Amber Winkler disses Education Next and Kyle Kennedy explores a different kind of tracking.

Click to listen to the podcast on our website. You can also download the podcast here or subscribe on iTunes here.

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Flypaper's Finest (The best from Flypaper, Fordham's blog): Heads Spin in Albany

by Peter Meyer

Arne Duncan landed in New York’s state capital [this week] but it wasn’t to boost the spirits of the city’s “heroic” education reformers or stop by the state’s first all-girls charter high school (which was celebrating its opening). Nope. It was to cheer up the Empire State’s beleaguered New York State United Teachers (NYSUT), which has spent billions lobbying against education reform over the years.

Read the rest on Flypaper.

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Flypaper's Finest (The best from Flypaper, Fordham's blog): Dear Ohio,

by Jamie Davies O'Leary

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.

Read the rest on Flypaper.

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Gadfly Studios: Video: Think Tank + Sponsoring Charter Schools = Harder than it Looks

Watch last week’s frank discussion about the lessons Fordham has learned as a charter school sponsor in Ohio, culled from our new book, Ohio’s Education Reform Challenges: Lessons From the Frontline. Speakers included Fordham’s Terry Ryan (who co-wrote the book with Checker Finn and Mike Lafferty), plus Alex Medler of NACSA, Perry White of the Citizens Academy in Cleveland, and educational consultant Joey Gustafson.

Think Tank + Sponsoring Charter Schools = Harder Than it Looks from Education Gadfly on Vimeo.

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Extras

Briefly Noted: Outsmart Bill Gates

Briefly Noted: Outsmarting Bill Gates

• The Khan Academy is the most popular education site on the web, and counts Bill Gates and his son as fans. Find out why.
• “It's possible the nation wouldn't be having this debate about teachers if it weren't for the work of one man—a Stanford economist named Eric Hanushek.” So begins this American RadioWorks documentary on teacher quality. Listen to see if you agree.
• It’s either a fantastic money-saving idea or an Orwellian nightmare come true: Contra Costa, California is placing “electronic monitoring devices” on pre-school kids to make attendance-taking and other tasks more efficient. Who says schools are like prisons?

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Announcements: Attention Creative Types!

Are you a “new media” guru? Internet, audio, and video savvy? Interested in translating the complex issues of education policy into a variety of new formats? Working with a dynamic, education-reform team? Then this position might be for you.

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