Flypaper

Child-centered school proposals should prompt rigorous authorizing—not lazy denials

Alex Medler
May 24, 2017

A recent Fordham Institute study, Three Signs That a Proposed Charter School Is at Risk of Failing, compared the details of charter school applications to the performance of the resulting schools. According to authors Anna Nicotera and David Stuit, schools trying to implement “child-centered” models were more likely to struggle academically than schools pursuing other models.

There weren’t many such schools in the study, so it’s a better prompt for discussions about their issues than “proof” of anything. That said, I wasn’t surprised by its results. They echoed my experience as an authorizer and a researcher.

It’s important to first note that what makes a school “child-centered” is not rigidly defined, and some schools from every model have been more successful than others. Several well-known versions, like Montessori and Waldorf, primarily serve younger kids. Other models, like the Big Picture and Expeditionary Learning, serve older students. The details of these programs vary depending on the grades they serve and their founders’ philosophies. Generally, however, their students are actively working to direct their own learning, and teachers guide or facilitate this experience, rather than being responsible for delivering pre-established content. Child-centered schools, whatever they do, tend to avoid a single,...

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Whether the Common Core is working, and what research is needed

Victoria McDougald
May 24, 2017

Almost seven years after the Common Core State Standards (CCSS) were originally developed and adopted, inquiring minds want to know: Have they improved educational outcomes for students? Dr. Morgan Polikoff explores this very question in a recently published article, “Is Common Core “Working?” And where does Common Core Research Go from Here?.” It’s part of a broader AERA Open special topic on Common Core.

Polikoff’s article summarizes existing research in two key areas: how well Common Core has been implemented to date; and how it has affected student results. Neither question, it turns out, is especially easy to answer.

While measuring implementation at scale is challenging, research suggests that Common Core has increased states’ sharing of instructional resources and opportunities, such as professional development offerings. Polikoff also cites several informative teacher surveys conducted by organizations such as RAND and the Center on Education Policy that assess whether content and instruction is truly Common Core-aligned. In sum, these surveys reveal that, as recently as 2015, “large proportions” of math and English language arts and literacy teachers still had misconceptions about Common Core, “suggesting that their instruction is likely to be questionably aligned at best.” (Fordham came to similar conclusions in...

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How school lunch quality affects student achievement

Jessica Poiner
May 24, 2017

The Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids Act of 2010 was intended to improve student health and reduce childhood obesity by increasing the minimum nutritional standards that schools must meet. Despite its good intentions, the changes mandated by this act were met with immediate backlash. In response to the criticism and as part of its commitment to repeal a host of Obama-era regulations, the Trump administration recently put a stop to some of the new standards.

But could returning to the days of anything-goes in school cafeterias negatively impact student achievement? The results from a recent NBER study suggest it’s possible. In the past, analyses of school meals have been limited to examinations of whether providing meals can increase test scores (it does). This study is unique because it investigates whether the nutritional quality of meals can boost test scores.

The researchers examined a dataset of California public elementary, middle, and high schools that report state test results. From there, they determined whether these schools had a contract with a private meal provider. In total, approximately 143 districts overseeing 1,188 schools—12 percent of California’s public schools—did so, contracting with a total of forty-five different vendors. The remaining 88 percent of...

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The politics & partisanship of the education reform debate: Why being 'right' isn't enough

Derrell Bradford
May 23, 2017

Editor's note: This is the first essay of a three-part series (parts two and three can be found here) that examines the major challenges facing education reformers. The author adapted these essays from his keynote address at the Yale School of Management’s Education Leadership Conference in April.

I voted for President Barack Obama twice and pulled the lever for Hillary Clinton last fall. I also know Education Secretary Betsy DeVos and was one of the few folks to support her nomination.

I’ve worked with business groups in New York and moms and dads in New Jersey to raise the bar for our kids. I worked on New Jersey’s teacher evaluation framework and helped pass its tenure law TEACH NJ with the state’s teachers unions. I’ve supported public charter schools alongside the thousands of New York and New Jersey families whose children fill them.

I grew up in the same neighborhood Freddie Gray did in Baltimore, and I went to private school on a scholarship, so I also support vouchers and tax credits, fiercely.

All of this is to say I believe in education reform, in all its flavors, and I’ve worked with all sorts of people, from all...

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Fancy private schools swim in Lake Wobegon

Chester E. Finn, Jr.
May 19, 2017

As more and more elite independent schools price themselves out of the upper-middle class parent market, as more of their traditional distinguishing features—things like honors courses, ample Advanced Placement offerings, library and technology access, small classes, oodles of art and music—get picked up by ever more district and charter schools, and as selective colleges seek to fill their entering classes with more variegated kids from a wider array of high schools, many private schools are struggling to devise new ways of setting themselves apart from the masses (and, presumably, justifying their lofty price tags).

These schools are now awash in internships and expeditions to destinations near and far, esoteric summer opportunities, Chinese, Russian, and Arabic language classes, dance and theater and more. Nothing wrong with any of those, and I’m all for maximizing the variety of quality school choices available to students—the more so as states enact voucher and tax-credit scholarship programs that draw more families closer to affording private options. And it’s surely a fine thing that some private schools are getting out of their stodgy education ruts—in which surprisingly little has changed in fifty years save for the arrival of computers—and seeking worthy innovations.

But please let us...

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Unless they want to flunk virtually all high-poverty schools, policymakers should go for growth

Aaron Churchill
May 17, 2017

Sixteen states and the District of Columbia have already submitted plans to the U.S. Department of Education to meet their obligations under the Every Student Succeeds Act, and the remaining thirty-four will do likewise in September. These publicly available documents describe, among other things, how the state intends to hold its schools accountable, including, in most cases, how it will calculate annual summative school ratings.

Unfortunately, many of the first batch of plans overemphasize “status measures” that are correlated with pupil demographics and/or prior achievement. Mainly they rely on test-based academic “proficiency” and (for high schools) graduation rates. While a certain amount of weight should be placed on such indicators, overweighting them in summative grading systems will cause almost all high-poverty campuses to fail for the simple, beyond-their-control reason that the pupils they enroll tend to enter school behind their more prosperous age-mates.

Growth measures, on the other hand, are more poverty-neutral gauges of school performance. They look at the trajectory of achievement over time, regardless of where students start the year. Such metrics should be the primary component of annual school ratings. What policymakers should care most about when evaluating schools is whether they’re giving their students an upward...

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Preparing students for work is the job of every educator—even English teachers

Jeff Murray
May 17, 2017

My first job out of college was in a construction company. I was hired as the office manager, receptionist, typist, and gofer. But I also transported enormous saw blades, delivered Christmas gifts to our best customers, called deadbeat clients to ask them politely but firmly when they were going to pay up, and even directed traffic on a busy commuter road during summer rush hour once in a while.

I graduated with a bachelor of arts degree in creative writing.

I had pursued that field of study because I wanted to be a writer and the English department at Ohio State University was pretty fertile ground for that. I took seminar classes from poets and award-winning short-story writers. Passed ’em all, too. I evolved from a lover of pulpy science fiction to an aspiring writer of literary fiction. It was thinky and boho and maybe even pretentious occasionally. The work was important, and we were all going to be the next great novelist, poet, or essayist.

And then I graduated. And life called me to dust and driving and deadlines. And you might think that nothing about my four years as an English major or my hard-earned degree mattered. Certainly...

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Resuscitating the science of reading

Robert Pondiscio
May 17, 2017

Cognitive neuroscientists are the Cassandras of education.

Recall that in Greek mythology, Cassandra was blessed with the gift of prophecy by the god Apollo. But when she refused to sleep with him, Apollo didn’t rescind the gift, he added a curse: poor Cassandra could still see the future, but she was doomed never to be believed. Mark Seidenberg probably envies Cassandra. He writes like someone who wonders exactly whom he has to sleep with to get people to pay attention to him.

Seidenberg is a University of Wisconsin cognitive neuroscientist who has been studying reading “since the disco era.” His indispensable new book, Language at the Speed of Sight, lays out in clear, readable English much of what we have learned over the past several decades about reading; he labors to “cheerfully destroy a few myths” about how we process and make sense of the printed word, but Seidenberg is no happy warrior. He wants his readers to share his fury at the “profound disconnection between the science of reading and educational practice” that he deftly unpacks.

The first two-thirds of the book covers the current state of reading science, starting with a brief history of human language development and...

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Are we asking charter schools to do too much?

Jason Crye
May 17, 2017

Every day I learn about another charter school that has found a way to help low-income, often minority, students graduate from high school and get accepted into college at an unbelievably high rate.

For the community that I work with, Latinos, this is fantastic news. Statistics from the Pew Research Center show that the high school dropout rate for Latinos is higher than all other groups: 12 percent. Additionally, 66 percent of Latino high school graduates polled told the National Journal that they intended to enter the workforce or join the military directly after high school.

Sure, not every kid has to go to college, but the benefits of a college degree are well known, so I wholeheartedly cheer on the work of these charters. The reality is that the kids in the neighborhoods these schools serve haven’t been avoiding college to follow some other fruitful path—they’re falling into a seemingly inescapable cycle of poverty. When charter schools break that cycle, they change the trajectory of entire families.

But, in a dubious new trend, critics of charters—and even some supporters—are focusing on their graduates’ college drop out rate. Not long ago, an article in USA Today...

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Don't let personalized learning become the processed food of education

Michael J. Petrilli
May 16, 2017

There’s a lot that’s appealing about personalized learning, properly construed. Rather than march a classroom of students through academic material at the exact same pace, regardless of their discordant levels of readiness or their varying degrees of background knowledge, personalized settings allow schools to target instruction to the exact needs of individual children. It’s not meant to be a euphemism for “computer-based instruction,” but a version of differentiation that uses a variety of approaches, from tutoring to peer discussions to teacher-led lessons and, yes, some digital resources. Done right, it doesn’t give up on academic standards, either. Instruction may be personalized but all students are still expected to master all the knowledge and skills that will prepare them for the next step in their learning and for eventual success beyond school.

Hooray for all that. But after seeing a version of personalized learning in action recently, I’m worried that it may be reinforcing some of the worst aspects of standards-based, data-driven instruction. Namely: It might be encouraging a reductionist type of education that breaks learning into little bits and scraps and bytes of disparate skills, disconnected from an inspiring, coherent whole.

Personalized learning enthusiasts might look to the food industry...

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