Tag Archives: Charter Schools

How Top Performers Build-and-Support: Exemplary Models

How Top Performers Build-and-Support
Exemplary Models

by Bill Honig

Build-and-Support strategies not only have been based on extensive research but have proved to significantly improve performance in those districts, states and provinces, and nations that have followed their ideas.

School Districts

There are examples of stellar districts that have achieved successful results by following Build-and-Support ideas. These include Long Beach, Garden Grove, Sanger, Whittier High School, Elk Grove, the High-Tech High School Summit, and the Aspire charter school networks, all in California; Montgomery County, Maryland; and Union City, New Jersey. All have pursued this more comprehensive, positive approach for years and place in the top ranks of international assessments. Conversely, Dallas, Texas, and Newark, New Jersey, are examples of the damage caused by a full “reform” strategy and its failure to produce results.

Sanger’s journey—from a low-performing, high-poverty district suffering from substantial labor strife to a high-performing district where teachers and administrators have forged a close working relationship—demonstrates the power of the Build-and-Support strategy. Ironically, as a prime example of the deleterious effect of federal policy, in 2014 Sanger accepted a federal waiver under duress to avoid the severe penalties of NCLB (imposed by the feds even though Sanger grew faster than almost every other district in the state). However, district leaders then became worried that forced implementation of a test-driven evaluation would reverse its successful collaboration efforts. The problem should be solved in 2016 when the new ESSA measure becomes operative and when required high-stakes evaluation of teachers can no longer be mandated.

Similarly, Long Beach Unified School District, identified as one of the three top school jurisdictions in the country and among the top 20 in the world, has been building professional capacity around a strong, core curriculum for several decades with significant results. According to its superintendent, Chris Steinhauser, Long Beach’s success stems from its attention to human and social capital development, including clinical experiences for new teachers; treating educators, parents, and community members with respect and trust; providing extensive coaching support for teachers and principals; orienting the district administrators to support schools; building teams at schools; implementing a strong liberal arts curriculum with a districtwide focus; developing cooperation with colleges and community organizations; and continuing a shared focus by all on instructional and curricular quality. Again, Long Beach has had consistent leadership for the past two decades under Carl Cohn (1992–2002) and Superintendent Steinhauser (2002–present). Long Beach has pursued educational improvement by developing a districtwide strategy that engages all teachers and schools in the effort as opposed to a punitive approach aimed at the lowest-performing schools. For why this is important, see Fiske and Ladd’s comments. Finally, Long Beach has struck the right balance between school and teacher autonomy and district leadership, which is crucial in allowing each school to implement improvement efforts in its own way while adhering to an overall district strategy. For a perceptive article on this issue, see Larry Cuban’s blog.

Another example is Garden Grove, which has one of the largest percentage of English-language learners in large districts in California yet has improved performance substantially in the last 15 years. Under the exemplary leadership of Laura Schwalm, superintendent from 1999 to 2013, and Gabriela Mafi since 2013, the district, among other Build-and-Support measures, has developed a robust human resources development program with two aspects. First, the district finds and keeps the best teachers by developing effective systems of recruiting, proper placement, inducting, granting tenure, and compensation. Second, it builds the capacity of current staff by comprehensive professional development, creates effective school site teams, and offers career advancement pathways that allow our best teachers a hybrid teaching and leadership role and the possibility of higher earnings.

These successful jurisdictions don’t ignore accountability. But effective accountability must not rely solely or primarily on test scores. It should be designed around providing useful, timely feedback that will assist school, district, and local community efforts in improving instruction and student performance. And it should assiduously avoid causing the type of extensive collateral damage we have seen under high-stakes testing: narrowing the curriculum, discouraging cooperation, and emphasizing looking good on tests rather than providing quality instruction.

This more supportive philosophy guides the accountability system being developed in California and many other states. The state will be establishing an integrated hybrid of state and local indicators such as graduation rates, college preparation, career preparation, passing advanced placement courses, curriculum breadth and depth, student and teacher engagement, school climate, student suspensions or teacher absences, reclassification rates for English-language learners, and implementation and team-building efforts. The main locus of accountability is the school and district with local community participation, under the assumption and trust that the professionals in the school, not the federal government or the state, will be the driving force for improvement if they have the support they need. For an up-to-date report on these broader accountability ideas, see a 2016 paper by Linda Darling-Hammond and colleagues, Pathways to New Accountability Through the Every Student Succeeds Act. In addition, see a 2016 report by Cook-Harvey and Stosich of the Stanford Learning Policy Institute, Redesigning School Accountability and Support: Progress in Pioneering States.

Data based on reasonable student testing and just-in-time student assessment are helpful when such data provide information back to the teachers, schools, and local communities to assist their continuous improvement efforts. California is a member of the Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortium (SBAC) and administered the first state assessments in 2015. However, results won’t be used for accountability purposes until enough data are available for growth measures and potential targets can be validated. The state also wants to give teachers a chance to implement the curricular changes envisioned by the Common Core State Standards (CCSS). However, as mentioned above, these end-of-year, broad-scale tests should be only one part of a broader accountability system and need to be combined with more sophisticated, accurate, and authentic measures of student performance such as end-of-course and periodic assessments, passing competency-based measures such as certificates, performances, portfolios, and projects.

Furthermore, state and district policy should recognize that negative fallout from testing is minimized if tests are not used primarily for formal, high-stakes teacher or school evaluations or to assess school progress toward impossible goals established by political entities that are far removed from the facts on the ground. Test results are most useful when viewed as one aspect of the main driver of improvement—a broad, collaborative, well-resourced effort to improve school, student, and teacher performance over the long haul.

There will be schools that struggle and need assistance. Site visits and support need to be organized, as envisioned by the new California Collaborative for Educational Excellence. The group will offer help, support, and site visits to struggling schools. For a national proposal along these lines, see Marc Tucker’s blog post “ESEA Reauthorization and Accountability: A Chance to Do It Right.”

Successful jurisdictions do not neglect the problem of incompetent teachers. It turns out that giving low-performing teachers a chance to improve is more effective when the efforts are part of a cooperative endeavor to improve instruction. First, many low-performing teachers will improve with helpful support. Second, low performers cannot easily hide in their classrooms if a concerted team effort is under way. For many, the exposure pushes them to improve or resign. California districts such as Long Beach, San Jose, and Garden Grove, as well as places such as Montgomery County, Maryland, and Massachusetts, are examples of jurisdictions that have embedded teacher evaluations in a broader instructional improvement effort, obtained union and teacher support, and used peer review techniques. They have found that this approach has proved more successful in dismissing or counseling out the worst teachers who cannot or will not improve, with considerably less collateral damage than the traditional method that relies entirely on a negative, high-pressure strategy.

A 2016 Aspen Institute report, Teacher Evaluation and Support Systems: A Roadmap for Improvement, chronicles exemplary practices in the nation exemplifying this more supportive approach.

Nations and States

What have the most successful nations and states done to improve student performance?

On the world stage, high-performing Finland had a mediocre system two decades ago. It initiated a long-term positive engagement strategy and revitalization of the teaching force and now substantially outscores Norway, which has a similar population and demographics but is stuck in a test-driven accountability mode. Finnish Lessons 2.0: What Can the World Learn from Educational Change in Finland? is one of the best books on the topic. The author is Pasi Sahlberg, one of the primary leaders of the reforms.

William Doyle spent a year on a Fulbright scholarship studying the Finnish success story. He writes of a fantastic school in rural Finland and conversations with one of its top teacher educators. He contrasts the Finnish attention to revitalizing the teaching profession to the prevailing conventional “reform” strategy in this country:

[I]n the U.S., instead of control, competition, stress, standardized testing, screen-based schools and loosened teacher qualifications, try warmth, collaboration, and highly professionalized, teacher-led encouragement and assessment.

I should note, however, that Finland has stalled or declined in recent Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) and Trends in Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS) tests. For a contrary view of Finland’s rise and recent stall or decline, see The Real Finnish Lessons: The True Story of an Education Superpower. The author attributes Finland’s past successes not to its education initiatives, but to the prominence teachers always enjoyed in that country as nation builders, the determination of families stemming from Finland’s recent industrialization, and traditional teaching methods. The author further argues that the abatement of these factors is causing Finland’s test results to decline. This report was prepared by a conservative think tank in England created by Margaret Thatcher, comparable to our Hoover Institution. The author doesn’t think much of student or teacher collaboration. But there has been a raft of studies showing that collaboration among teachers and improving social capital and the prestige of the profession do make a significant difference. It will be interesting to see the analysis of this contrarian position.

In Canada, the province of Ontario has followed the same successful trajectory—revitalizing the teaching profession, creating effective professional learning communities at each school around teaching a vigorous curriculum, and using the capacity-building approach. The result was a substantial improvement in student performance. Poland has undergone a similar transformation using team building and continuous improvement strategies to boost performance. Also, Poland has chalked up enviable progress, as described in Amanda Ripley’s book The Smartest Kids in the World: And How They Got That Way. (Ripley visited three foreign countries for examples of world-class educational efforts—it’s a shame she didn’t visit comparable examplesin the US, for example, Massachusetts.) Many Asian countries such as Japan, Korea, and Singapore and the city of Shanghai are among the highest performers in the world. All have been implementing continuous improvement strategies for decades. See, for example, Developing Shanghai’s Teachers. On the flip side, Chile and Sweden adopted wholesale charter and voucher approaches and suffered severe negative consequences.

There are many success stories closer to home, but, unfortunately, they are the exception not the rule. Massachusetts is a poster child for why Build-and Support works. Over the past 20 years, the state has consistently pursued the comprehensive positive approach engaging, not vilifying, educators. It placed instruction at the core of its reforms, built capacity around improving classrooms and schools, upgraded the quality of the teaching force, and substantially increased funding. The Commonwealth carefully avoided most of the extreme reform approaches such as widespread charterization, attacking unions and weakening due process protections, and adopting punitive measures. Most importantly, Massachusetts has stayed the course for nearly two decades.

Specifically, in 1993 under the leadership of Commissioner of Education David Driscoll, the Bay State approved standards and curricular frameworks, developed an assessment system geared toward instructional improvement based on those standards and frameworks, organized professional development around the documents, raised requirements for graduation, installed rigorous charter school evaluations for approval, and initiated more stringent requirements and support for incoming teachers. Policymakers in Massachusetts also insisted that teachers earn a master’s degree over the course of their careers. (For a comparison with Finnish initiatives, see Lisa Hansel’s post “Seeking Confirmation” on the Core Knowledge blog.)

As a result, Massachusetts scores number one in our national NAEP scores by a wide margin. In international assessments it ranks right near the top in math and science, and at the top in mathematics in growth and performance level. Yes, it is home to numerous universities with high-level candidates who pursue teaching careers, a well-educated population, and a history of educational excellence, but such benefits aren’t enough to explain its phenomenal world-class performance. Why the Massachusetts model has not become the guide for national and other states’ improvement efforts, as Marshall Smith suggested several years ago, is bewildering.

Reference Notes

School Districts
Ravitch, D. (2015, Jun 23). Mike Miles Resigns as Dallas Superintendent. http://dianeravitch.net/2015/06/23/breaking-news-mike-miles-resigns-as-dallas-superintendent/

David, J. L., & Talbert, J. E. (2012). Turning Around a High-Poverty School District: Learning from Sanger Unified’s Success. http://web.stanford.edu/group/suse-crc/cgi-bin/drupal/publications/report

Amadolare, S. (2014, Feb 27). Which Is Worse? A California District Makes a Tough Choice Between No Child Left Behind and Obama Education Policies. http://hechingerreport.org/which-is-worse-a-california-district-makes-a-tough-choice-between-no-child-left-behind-and-obama-education-policies/

Long Beach Unified School District. About Long Beach Unified School District. http://www.lbschools.net/District/

Mongeau, L. (2016, Feb 2). How One California City Saved Its Schools. http://hechingerreport.org/how-one-california-city-saved-its-schools/

Steinhauser, C. (2015). Personal conversation with author. See also Freedberg, L. (2016, Feb 22). State Must Adopt Guidelines for Parent Engagement in Schools. http://edsource.org/2016/report-state-must-adopt-guidelines-for-parent-engagement-in-schools/95124?utm_source=Feb.+23+daily+digest+–+Michael&utm_campaign=Daily+email&utm_medium=email

Fiske, E. B., & Ladd, H. F. (2016, Feb 13). Learning from London About School Improvement. The News & Observer. http://www.newsobserver.com/opinion/op-ed/article60118256.html

Cuban, L. (2016, Feb 17). Reflecting on School Reforms: Scaling Up versus Short, Happy Life or Hanging In. https://larrycuban.wordpress.com/2016/02/17/reflecting-on-school-reforms-scaling-up-versus-short-happy-life-or-hanging-in/

Knudsen, J. (2013, Sep). You’ll Never Be Better Than Your Teachers: The Garden Grove Approach to Human Capital Development. http://www.cacollaborative.org/publications

Darling-Hammond, L., Bae, S., Cook-Harvey, C.M., Lam, L., Mercer, C., Podolsky, A., & Stosich, E. (2016, Apr). Pathways to New Accountability Through the Every Student Succeeds Act. Learning Policy Institute. https://learningpolicyinstitute.org/our-work/publications-resources/pathways-new-accountability-every-student-succeeds-act/

Cook-Harvey, C. M., & Stosich E. L. (2016, Apr 5). Redesigning School Accountability and Support: Progress in Pioneering States. Stanford Center for Opportunity Policy in Education. https://edpolicy.stanford.edu/publications/pubs/1406

Tucker, M. (2015, Dec 3). ESEA Reauthorization and Accountability: A Chance to Do It Right. http://blogs.edweek.org/edweek/top_performers/2015/12/esea_reauthorization_and_accountability_a_chance_to_do_it_right.html

Brown, C., Partelow, L., & Konoske-Graf, A. (2016, Mar 16). Educator Evaluation: A Case Study of Massachusetts’ Approach. https://www.americanprogress.org/issues/education/report/2016/03/16/133038/educator-evaluation/

Thompson, J. (2015, Mar 30). John Thompson: A Teacher Proposes a Different Framework for Accountability. https://educationpost.org/john-thompson-a-teacher-proposes-a-different-framework-for-accountability/

The Aspen Institute. (2016, Mar). Teacher Evaluation and Support Systems: A Roadmap for Improvement. http://www.aspendrl.org/

Nations and States
Hancock, L. (2011, Sep). Why Are Finland’s Schools Successful? Smithsonian Magazine. http://www.smithsonianmag.com/innovation/why-are-finlands-schools-successful-49859555/?no-ist=

Sahlberg, P. (2015). Finnish Lessons 2.0: What Can the World Learn from Educational Change in Finland? New York: Teacher’s College Press.

Doyle, W. (2016, Feb 18). How Finland Broke Every Rule—and Created a Top School System. http://hechingerreport.org/how-finland-broke-every-rule-and-created-a-top-school-system/

Sahlgren, G. H. (2015, Apr). Real Finnish Lessons: The True Story of an Education Superpower. Centre for Policy Studies. http://www.cps.org.uk/publications/reports/real-finnish-lessons-the-true-story-of-an-education-superpower/

Ripley, A. (2014). The Smartest Kids in the World: And How They Got That Way. New York: Simon & Schuster.

Tucker, M. (2016, Feb 29). Asian Countries Take the U.S. to School. The Atlantic. http://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2016/02/us-asia-education-differences/471564/

Zhang, M., Ding, X., & Xu, J. (2016, Jan). Developing Shanghai’s Teachers. http://www.ncee.org/developing-shanghais-teachers/

Alliance for Excellent Education. David Driscoll. http://all4ed.org/people/david-driscoll/

Chang, K. (2013, Sep 2). Expecting the Best Yields Results in Massachusetts. The New York Times. http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/03/science/expecting-the-best-yields-results-in-massachusetts.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0 See also Khadaroo, S. T. (2012, Sep 5). Is Top-Ranked Massachusetts Messing with Education Success? The Christian Science Monitor. http://www.csmonitor.com/USA/Education/2012/0905/Is-top-ranked-Massachusetts-messing-with-education-success

Hansel, L. (2015, Jul 9). Seeking Confirmation. http://blog.coreknowledge.org/2015/07/09/seeking-confirmation/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+TheCoreKnowledgeBlog+%28The+Core+Knowledge+Blog%29

Carnoy, M., García, E., & Khavenson, T. (2015, Oct 30). Bringing It Back Home: Why State Comparisons Are More Useful Than International Comparisons for Improving U.S. Education Policy. Economic Policy Institute. http://www.epi.org/publication/bringing-it-back-home-why-state-comparisons-are-more-useful-than-international-comparisons-for-improving-u-s-education-policy/

How Top Performers Build-and-Support: Provide Adequate School Funding

How Top Performers Build-and-Support
Provide Adequate School Funding

by Bill Honig

Many reformers argue that expenditure levels are not a key component of quality and claim that school spending is out of control. Both assertions are false. According to recent research and even reports by moderate and conservative institutions, the level of school funding matters. Increasing funding results in improved student performance and conversely, cutting school budgets depresses outcomes. When adjusted for personal income, school spending has not increased in the past generation. Teacher salaries in the US are now significantly below those in other industrial nations in terms of the percentage of salaries earned by professionals with comparable levels of education.
Unfortunately, the money-doesn’t-matter philosophy, combined with political antipathy toward public education, has severely hampered school funding in this country. As I explained in Reformers Target the Wrong Levers of Improvement, boosting student achievement requires comprehensive reform and an understanding of the many powerful leverage points that directly influence school quality and student achievement. Without adequate funding, many of these necessary initiatives—such as capacity and team building efforts—will be underfunded, teacher morale and engagement will suffer, and chances for improved instruction thwarted.

The Importance of Adequate Funding

There is extensive research confirming the link between per-pupil spending and student outcomes. For an excellent review of the literature, see Does Money Matter in Education? by Bruce Baker. For more recent reports, see The Effects of School Spending on Educational and Economic Outcomes: Evidence from School Finance Reforms and “At the Intersection of Money Reform, Part III: On Cost Functions & the Increased Costs of Higher Outcomes,” part of a series Baker wrote for his blog, School Finance 101. According to a paper written by Julien Lafortune, Jesse Rothstein, and Diane Whitmore Schanzenbach for the National Bureau of Economic Research, student performance improved when courts forced increased state spending.

In January 2014, the prestigious Center for the Budget and Policy Priorities (CBPP) reported the results of its survey of K–12 state and local funding. The report provides further evidence that money matters and documents the damage caused by massive cuts in education expenditures. Quoted by the authors of the report:

As common sense suggests, money matters for educational outcomes. For instance, poor children who attend better-funded schools are more likely to complete high school and have higher earnings and lower poverty rates in adulthood.

Drawing on the CBPP report, Jeff Bryant forcefully argues that increased funding is one of the most effective school improvement strategies, whereas decreased funding is a major cause of low performance:

Importantly, as the CBPP commentary states, “money matters for educational outcomes,” especially for low-income children, whose best interest, many have said, is the main intention of federal education policy. The CBPP commentary points to two recent studies showing the positive impact of increased school funding on students.

The most recent of the two studies found “a 20 percent increase in per-pupil spending each year for all 12 years of public school for children from poor families leads to about 0.9 more completed years of education, 25 percent higher earnings, and a 20 percentage point reduction in the annual incidence of adult poverty. . . . The magnitudes of these effects are sufficiently large to eliminate between two-thirds and all of the gaps in these adult outcomes between those raised in poor families and those raised in non-poor families.”

In the executive summary of the second edition of Does Money Matter in Education?, Bruce Baker states:

This second edition policy brief revisits the long and storied literature on whether money matters in providing a quality education. It includes research released since the original brief in 2012 and covers a handful of additional topics. Increasingly, political rhetoric adheres to the unfounded certainty that money doesn’t make a difference in education, and that reduced funding is unlikely to harm educational quality. Such proclamations have even been used to justify large cuts to education budgets over the past few years. These positions, however, have little basis in the empirical research on the relationship between funding and school quality.

In the following brief, I discuss major studies on three specific topics: (a) whether how much money schools spend matters; (b) whether specific schooling resources that cost money matter; and (c) whether substantive and sustained state school finance reforms matter. Regarding these three questions, I conclude:

Does money matter? Yes. On average, aggregate measures of per-pupil spending are positively associated with improved or higher student outcomes. The size of this effect is larger in some studies than in others, and, in some cases, additional funding appears to matter more for some students than for others. Clearly, there are other factors that may moderate the influence of funding on student outcomes, such as how that money is spent. In other words, money must be spent wisely to yield benefits. But, on balance, in direct tests of the relationship between financial resources and student outcomes, money matters.

Do schooling resources that cost money matter? Yes. Schooling resources that cost money, including smaller class sizes, additional supports, early childhood programs and more competitive teacher compensation (permitting schools and districts to recruit and retain a higher quality teacher workforce) are positively associated with student outcomes. Again, in some cases, those effects are larger than in others, and there is also variation
 by student population and other contextual variables. On the whole, however, the things that cost money benefit students, and there is scarce evidence that there are more cost-effective alternatives.

Do state school finance reforms matter? Yes. Sustained improvements to the level and distribution of funding across local public school districts can lead to improvements in the level and distribution of student outcomes. While money alone may not be the answer, more equitable and adequate allocation of financial inputs to schooling provide a necessary underlying condition for improving the equity and adequacy of outcomes. The available evidence suggests that appropriate combinations of more adequate funding with more accountability for its use may be most promising.

While there may in fact be better and more efficient ways to leverage the education dollar toward improved student outcomes, we do know the following:

  • Many of the ways in which schools currently spend money do improve student outcomes.
  • When schools have more money, they have greater opportunity to spend productively. When they don’t, they can’t.
  • Arguments that across-the-board budget cuts will not hurt outcomes are completely unfounded.

In short, money matters; resources that cost money matter, and a more equitable distribution of school funding can improve outcomes. Policymakers would be well advised to rely on high-quality research to guide the critical choices they make regarding school finance.

The crucial point of these studies: The effect size of these increased expenditures dwarfs the effect sizes of the most commonly proposed reform measures by Test-and-Punish advocates.

Alarming, Widespread Cuts in Educational Funding

In 2015, most states were spending below their 2008 funding level, and some were cutting even further, according to the CBPP report. In 15 states, the cuts exceeded 10%, and 12 states have imposed new cuts. This is happening even as our national economy continues to improve post-recession. Arizona has cut its state education funding by a whopping 23% in the face of widespread voter support for ameliorating the cuts. The CBPP report then documents some of the serious consequences of states’ funding decreases. Bryant lists some of the specifics for those states that have drastically reduced state funds:

In Virginia—where education funding is still over 11 percent below 2008 levels, according to CBPP—the Washington Post reports schools have cut 11,200 staff members statewide while student enrollment increased more than 42,000 students during the same time period.

Many of the additional students pose greater challenges to more time-strapped teachers—39 percent more are economically disadvantaged, 33 percent more don’t speak English as their first language, and the number of homeless students is up 73 percent.

In Pennsylvania, an ongoing funding crisis has driven many schools to borrow in order to make payroll. Some schools that are closing for the upcoming Winter break may not have the money to open up when the students return in January.

In North Carolina—where education funding is still nearly 14 percent below 2008 levels, according to CBPP—the impact of funding cuts are especially glaring.

As education correspondent Lindsay Wagner reports from the Tar Heel State, since 2008, “the economy has recovered significantly, but state spending on education has not. And that is reflected in the disappearance of teacher assistants and in schools left scrambling for supplies, textbooks, and professional development for their educators.”

Wagner’s ground level reporting from districts across the state reveals schools where lack of funding has bloated class sizes to out-of-hand levels and eliminated one-to-one assistance for struggling students. In many of these schools, lack of money means textbooks and teaching supplies are scarce, vital art, music, and other elective programs are a memory, and classes that help low-performing students no longer exist.

“There’s no turnaround in sight,” Wagner reports. “For fiscal 2015, state lawmakers cut funding for at-risk student services programs by more than $9 million.”

The chaos that ensued after Indiana slashed its education funding is well documented. From 2009 to 2013, public school funding was cut by more than $3 billion. During the same period, charter funding was increased by $539 million, vouchers by $248 million, and virtual schools by $143 million. Students who attend public schools account for 94% of Indiana students and took a huge hit. The remaining 7% gained more than $900 million.

Are Teachers Overpaid?

Another argument put forward by some “reformers” is that school funding should be cut because teachers are overpaid. The evidence shows this claim also to be unfounded. A major report by the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), as quoted by the National Center for Education and the Economy’s Center on International Education Benchmarking states:

Around the world, teachers continue to be underpaid relative to their level of education. Across OECD countries, teachers earned, on average, 80 percent of what similarly educated workers did, in line with top performers Finland, Poland, and Estonia. The U.S. has an even greater disparity between the earnings of its teachers and similarly educated workers: it pays its teachers only 68 percent of what similarly educated workers earn.

The Facts on School Spending

Finally, “reform” advocates and their supporters in the media question the need for increased school funding contending that inflation-adjusted spending for schools has doubled in the past 45 years yet school performance has declined. The second part of the statement is patently false since performance on National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), especially among lower-income students, had risen steadily for the past 30 years until it slowed with the advent of No Child Left Behind (NCLB) and then stalled altogether when tough high-stakes consequences became widespread. But the first part of the statement is also very misleading. A large percentage of the increase (25%) in funding was to accommodate special-education students who were substantially ignored before 1970—surely a legitimate new expenditure. Spending for the regular education program has grown much more slowly.

But most importantly, adjusting only for inflation is approximately 2% a year less than personal income growth (standard of living growth) over the past 45 years, especially for professionals. So if personal income growth were used as the fair measure of how much school funding should increase to allow teachers and other staff to share in standard-of-living growth, you would expect expenditures to grow faster than inflation.

If you add the 2% extra for personal income growth to inflation, it would double every 35 years due to compounding. A shorthand way to calculate this is to divide 70 by the percentage growth, 2%, which is 35 years. Expenditures actually doubled over 45 years. Since over two-thirds of school spending is for staff members, to keep them sharing in prosperity would mean total expenditures adjusted for inflation would need to double over the 45-year period, which is exactly what happened. In contrast, successful nations worldwide have increased the salaries of teachers in relation to other professionals. In the US, teachers earn only two-thirds of average college graduates—ranking us 28th out of 33 OECD countries. See also Baker and Weber’s reportDeconstructing the Myth of American Public School Inefficiency.

Conclusion

What a difference it would have made had the US Department of Education and many “reform” states and districts implemented policies that followed what top-performing districts and states have pursued instead of a narrow, punitive agenda. The new Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) now gives states the opportunity to shift direction and model their improvement efforts on the success of states such as Massachusetts. California has adopted this strategy, and the companion articles in The California Context tell its story.

Recent Developments

8/9/16 According to a new report by EPI: The teacher pay penalty is bigger than ever. In 2015, public school teachers’ weekly wages were 17.0 percent lower than those of comparable workers—compared with just 1.8 percent lower in 1994http://www.epi.org/publication/the-teacher-pay-gap-is-wider-than-ever-teachers-pay-continues-to-fall-further-behind-pay-of-comparable-workers/

7/30/2016 Another source demonstrating the extremely low pay of US teachers compared to professionals in other industrial nations. One of the results: lower numeracy scores. http://blogs.edweek.org/edweek/curriculum/2016/07/us_teachers_score_below_average_numeracy_skills.html?utm_source=feedblitz&utm_medium=FeedBlitzRss&utm_campaign=curriculummatters

7/30/2016 Class size matters. William Mathis has compiled the latest research showing lower class sizes pay off. http://nepc.colorado.edu/publication/research-based-options

BBS Companion Articles

Why Conventional School “Reforms” Have Failed
Reformers Target the Wrong Levers of Improvement
The California Context
California Policymakers and Educators Shift from Test-and-Punish to Build-and-Support
How the California Reading Wars Got Resolved: A Personal Story

Reference Notes

Sawhill, I. V. (2015, Sep 8). Does Money Matter? Brookings Institution. http://www.brookings.edu/research/opinions/2015/09/08-does-money-matter-education-sawhill See also Jackson, C. K., Johnson, R. C., & Persico, C. (2015, Fall). Boosting Educational Attainment and Adult Earnings. Education Next. http://educationnext.org/boosting-education-attainment-adult-earnings-schoolspending/

The Importance of Adequate Funding
Baker, B. D. (2012). Does Money Matter in Education? Second Edition. Albert Shanker Institute. http://www.shankerinstitute.org/resource/does-money-matter For the first edition, see http://eric.ed.gov/?q=ed528632

Jackson, C. K., Johnson, R., & Persico, C. (2015, Jan). The Effects of School Spending on Educational and Economic Outcomes: Evidence from School Finance Reforms. National Bureau of Economic Research. http://www.nber.org/papers/w20847

Baker, B. D. (2015, Dec 16). At the Intersection of Money and Reform, Part III: On Cost Functions & the Increased Costs of Higher Outcomes. https://schoolfinance101.wordpress.com/2015/12/16/at-the-intersection-of-money-and-reform-part-iii-on-cost-functions-the-increased-costs-of-higher-outcomes/?blogsub=subscribed#blog_subscription-3 See also Baker, B. D. (2015, Dec 28). School Finance Reality vs. the Money Doesn’t Matter Echo Chamber. https://schoolfinance101.wordpress.com/2015/12/28/school-finance-reality-vs-the-money-doesnt-matter-echo-chamber/

Lafortune, J., Rothstein, J., & Whitmore Schanzenbach, D. (2016, Feb). School Finance Reform and the Distribution of Student Achievement. National Bureau of Economic Research. http://www.nber.org/papers/w22011

Leachman, M., Albares, N., Masterson, K., & Wallace, M. (2016, Jan 25). Most States Have Cut School Funding, and Some Continue Cutting. Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. http://www.cbpp.org/research/state-budget-and-tax/most-states-have-cut-school-funding-and-some-continue-cutting

Jackson, C. K., Johnson, R., & Persico, C. (2015, Oct 1). The Effects of School Spending on Educational and Economic Outcomes: Evidence from School Finance Reforms. Quarterly Journal of Economics. http://www.nber.org/papers/w20847

Bryant, J. (2015, Dec 16). The Important Education Issue Leaders Are Still Ignoring. http://educationopportunitynetwork.org/the-important-education-issue-leaders-are-still-ignoring/

Baker, B. D. (2016). Does Money Matter in Education? Albert Shanker Institute. http://www.shankerinstitute.org/resource/does-money-matter

Alarming, Widespread Cuts in Educational Funding
Bryant, J. (2015, Dec 16). The Important Education Issue Leaders Are Still Ignoring. http://educationopportunitynetwork.org/the-important-education-issue-leaders-are-still-ignoring/

Ravitch, D. (2015, Oct 20). Indiana: Less Money, More Chaos. http://dianeravitch.net/2015/10/20/indiana-less-money-more-chaos/

Are Teachers Overpaid?
Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD). (2015). Education at a Glance 2015. http://www.oecd-ilibrary.org/education/education-at-a-glance-2015_eag-2015-en

Driskell, N. (2015, Dec 17). International Spotlight: New Data Abounds in OECD’s 2015 Education at a Glance. Center on International Education Benchmarking (CIEB). http://www.ncee.org/2015/12/international-spotlight-new-data-abounds-in-oecds-2015-education-at-a-glance/

The Facts on School Spending
Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD). Education at a Glance 2015: OECD Indicators. http://www.keepeek.com/Digital-Asset-Management/oecd/education/education-at-a-glance-2015/united-states_eag-2015-86-en#page7

Baker, B.D., & Weber, M. (2016). Deconstructing the Myth of American Public School Inefficiency. Albert Shanker Institute. http://www.shankerinstitute.org/resource/deconstructing-myth-american-public-schooling-inefficiency

How Top Performers Build-and-Support: Build Teams and Focus on Continuous Improvement

How Top Performers Build-and-Support
Build Teams and Focus on Continuous Improvement

by Bill Honig

Reformers fundamentally misunderstand how schools and districts work. As a result, they have focused their school improvement efforts on indirect structural changes and top-down governance reforms. Research has shown that the top-performing schools, districts, states, and nations take a very different approach. There is one strategy that is invariably used by these top performers—districts have in place a strategic plan to build on-site capacity and establish systems for continuous improvement of curriculum and instruction. Top performers respect teachers’ professionalism and engage them in improving their craft knowledge and pedagogical practice. They provide positive working conditions and create a learning community that generates social and decisional capital. And instead of using test results and teacher appraisals to reward or punish, they use performance results to support the school’s improvement efforts.

Professional Learning

Successful strategies for increasing teacher effectiveness are aimed at individual teachers—to build knowledge and technique—and at collaborative teams—to support teachers’ efforts and continuously improve the school’s overall performance. Linda Darling-Hammond and her colleagues produced one of the best guides to professional learning for teachers and instructional leaders. Maximizing the Use of New State Professional Learning Investments to Support Student, Educator, and School System Growth was developed under the auspices of Darling-Hammond’s new think tank, the Learning Policy Institute and the Stanford Center for Opportunity Policy in Education (SCOPE). These researchers and practitioners created it to help districts in California determine how best to spend the $500 million allocated for improving teaching and learning. The report provides a thorough review of the research, specific policy recommendations, and links to many important professional learning documents, including the standards for professional learning from Learning Forward, the Superintendent’s Quality Professional Learning Standards (QPLS) from the state of California, Greatness by Design, and Professional Learning in the Learning Profession. The report also includes numerous exemplars of good practice.

In the Learning Policy Institute/SCOPE report, Darling-Hammond and colleagues offer this underlying rationale:

A starting point for building a system that develops teaching capacity is to consider what professional learning is and how it occurs. The National Staff Development Council, now referred to as Learning Forward, defines professional learning as “a product of both externally provided and job-embedded activities that increase teachers’ knowledge and change their instructional practice in ways that support student learning. Thus, formal professional development represents a subset of the range of experiences that may result in professional learning.”

Meaningful professional learning is not a product, but is a process comprised of multiple opportunities for educators to learn and practice skills that advance their expertise. Both teachers and principals can benefit from ongoing professional learning that is closely tied to student learning and the realities of practice, and that builds off of the expertise of colleagues.
Research in the field has demonstrated that effective learning for educators has, at minimum, the following four qualities:

  1. Professional learning should be intensive, ongoing, and connected to practice.
  2. Professional learning should focus on student learning and address the teaching of specific curriculum content.
  3. Professional learning should align with school improvement priorities and goals.
  4. Professional learning should build strong working relationships among teachers and provide time to collaborate.

Support Structures for Professional Learning

The development of effective professional learning depends on effective support structures. To quote a further section of the Learning Policy Institute/SCOPE report:

Even when these elements of professional learning are put in place, more needs to be done to ensure instructional quality. Instructional quality is dependent on both the knowledge and skills of individual educators and on the workplace conditions that allow effective practices to take root and flourish across classrooms.

This instructional capacity relies on at least four kinds of interdependent resources:

  1. Instructional knowledge (including knowledge of content, pedagogy, and students), which can be built through professional learning;
  2. Instructional materials (e.g., curriculum, instructional tools, textbooks, teaching materials, assessments—and know-how to use these materials);
  3. Instructional relationships among staff that are characterized by trust, mutual respect, recognition of instructional expertise, and openness to interpersonal learning;
  4. Organizational structures that support the identification, development, and use of instructional resources (e.g., common learning time for subject and/or grade-level teachers; formal instructional leadership roles and organizational mechanisms that foster teacher collaboration, learning from peers, and communication pattern that develop a shared understanding of teaching practices that are linked to student learning).

Finally, the Learning Policy Institute published a report by Kini and Podolsky, Does Teaching Experience Increase Teacher Effectiveness? A Review of the Research. The report debunks the idea that teachers don’t continue to become more effective after the first three-year learning spurt. Obviously, well-constructed professional learning will enhance the normal growth process.

Team Building, Capacity Building, and Collaboration

Almost every school and district that has substantially improved student performance is developing and supporting school teams. With fellow teachers and administrators, a teacher can wrestle with the best way to implement a new demanding curriculum, such as the one envisioned by the Common Core State Standards. Teachers compare notes, visit one another’s classrooms, and continually revise instruction. They collect relevant data on student work and rely on their colleagues’ assessment of student performance and engagement to devise next steps. Teachers receive effective professional development around implementing the core curriculum, adapting craft knowledge to their classrooms, acquiring quality materials, and working with one another. Top-performing districts hire and train principals and coaches who understand how to develop collaborative teams, encourage distributed leadership and decision-making capabilities, and connect staff with best practices and where to find the best resources aimed at improving instruction.

For a comprehensive look at how the most successful nations in the world build effective professional development, collaborative teams, and continuous improvement, see the National Center for Education and the Economy’s (NCEE) 2016 publications Beyond PD: Teacher Professional Learning in High-Performing Systems and Developing Shanghai’s Teachers. Such policies engender the crucial ingredient of performance improvement—teacher engagement and intrinsic motivation. For example, a large district in Melbourne, Australia, that contains significant numbers of hard-to-educate children found teacher engagement the secret to improved performance.

Commenting on these two reports, Marc Tucker, president of NCEE, explained (I have quoted him in depth because he captures the essence of the argument for restructuring schools into learning organizations):

Professional development looks very different in all these places than it typically does in the United States. It is the main driver of school improvement. Far from something that takes the teacher out of her school and away from her students, it is woven into the very fabric of the teacher’s work in every way. Professional development is not synonymous with workshops. In the United States, teachers appear to develop increasing expertise during their first three years on the job and then stop. But in the systems Jensen [president of Learning First, Melbourne, who authored the study of how successful nations improve] researched, they never stop learning–from other teachers, from their reading, from the research they do, from the data they get on the results of their work.

That is because their workplace has been restructured so that almost everything they do in the course of a normal workday is intended to contribute to their learning. First, in all of these systems, teachers spend less time facing students than American teachers do and more time working collaboratively to improve student performance. Teachers work in teams organized by the subjects they teach, by the grade or grade span they teach in and the research and development projects they choose to work on together.

Second, when teachers are working together, they are not just hanging out in discussion groups. They have specific goals, whether it is to develop a much more effective way to teach a particular topic in mathematics or to figure out why a whole group of students in the fourth grade are falling behind and fix the problem.

Whatever the project they take on is, they have a general method for dealing with these problems. It starts with collecting data on the problem, then systematically identifying the best research in the world that bears on that problem and seeing what it says, then using that research to formulate a response to the problem, then putting together a research plan that will enable them to collect data on the difference that their intervention makes, then implementing their intervention, then collecting the data and analyzing it, then revising their intervention in the light of the data and doing that repeatedly until they get the results they are after. When they are done, they not only implement their intervention, but they write it up and, in some of these countries, publish it in journals that other teachers in other schools, sometimes throughout their whole country, can read and profit from.

What I have just described is a continuous improvement cycle. It is a very powerful engine for school improvement. Indeed it is a model of school improvement that puts classroom teachers, not university researchers or central office bureaucrats, in charge of improving schools. It is a professional model of school improvement.

This model for continuous improvement of student performance is also, as Jensen points out, a model for continuous learning, an engine for professional development. It both produces incentives for school professionals to learn and, at the same time, supports that learning in myriad ways. In this model, teachers are constantly consulting the best research in order to diagnose the problems they are facing and to find solutions to those problems. They are in each other’s classrooms all the time, observing teachers who are piloting their group’s interventions, learning from the best teachers and critiquing each other’s teaching. More experienced teachers are mentoring less experienced teachers. Teachers learn when they are leading and they learn when they are collaborating with others.

Jensen reports that, in these systems, principals are evaluated by their supervisors on their skill at organizing these high performance professional environments and at providing opportunities for teachers to grow and learn. They are expected to identify exceptionally skilled teachers who can be given leadership roles on the teams whose operation I just described. These teachers are tasked with helping to develop the skills of their colleagues and helping them to implement the effective practices that the whole process identifies and promotes. They are expected to become champions of those effective practices in and beyond their own school.

A network of teachers has banded together to improve instruction and provide advice on capacity building.

Management Science

A collaborative approach based on continuous improvement and informed by data is used throughout the business world and taught in business schools. It was originally pioneered 50 years ago by W. Edwards Deming, whose ideas were instrumental in revamping Japanese industry (initially, no one would listen here) and eventually in US manufacturing. Management gurus such as Peter Drucker then applied these ideas to knowledge enterprises and knowledge workers. The argument against these ideas then was similar to what is being said now about teachers—the American workforce is weak and that is why we can’t compete. When Japanese auto companies opened plants here and saw huge productivity increases using American workers and applying Deming techniques, it became clear that lackluster performance was the fault of management and organizational strategy, not the capabilities of the workforce.

The power of teamwork has been significantly corroborated by Alex Pentland, a professor at MIT, who heads the Human Dynamics Lab and is the author of the groundbreaking book Social Physics: How Social Networks Can Make Us Smarter. Professor Pentland has been one of the major proponents of the efficacy of group decision-making in improving performance. He and his team point to the number and quality of team interactions and the ability to seek out innovative ideas through exploration, work them through the group, and engage the whole team in the effort. He proposes developing collective intelligence by shaping and changing organizations to foster the growth of this social capital. Social Physics provides several remarkable examples of how performance is enhanced by interaction and engagement.

Carrie Leana, George H. Love Professor of Organizations and Management at the University of Pittsburgh, maintains that collaboration at the school site is the most powerful strategy for improving instruction. She found that instructional conversation and help from fellow teachers outweigh all other improvement initiatives. Professor Leana calls into question reforms that pursue test-driven rewards and punishments. Since, according to Professor Leana, only about an estimated five percent of US schools are actually managed this way, the unrealized potential in expanding this approach far outweighs other strategies. Team building around powerful instruction and curriculum should be one of our major priorities. She also emphasizes that this approach requires the following:

  • training principals how to promote collaboration and holding them accountable for it
  • building the infrastructure to support instructional improvement and team building
  • striving to get more talented people into our schools
  • avoiding rhetoric and policies that make collaboration more difficult

Positive Working Conditions

Management expert Esther Quintero, writing for the Albert Shanker Institute blog, has also published a series of articles on the crucial importance of building social capital. Quintero explains that conventional Test-and-Punish reform measures lower morale and undermine positive working conditions—a key component of successful school improvement.

Thus, good schools, led by capable principals collaborating with the most talented and activist teachers at the site, build on and enhance individual strengths and ameliorate weaknesses. They accomplish this by engaging teachers, creating effective teams, and establishing a positive, professional working environment. In a recent article, Brown University professors John Papay and Matthew Kraft summarized the research on the importance of a positive professional environment:

An emerging body of research now shows that the contexts in which teachers work profoundly shape teachers’ job decisions and their effectiveness. Put simply, teachers who work in supportive contexts stay in the classroom longer, and improve at faster rates, than their peers in less-supportive environments. And, what appear to matter most about the school context are not the traditional working conditions we often think of, such as modern facilities and well-equipped classrooms. Instead, aspects that are difficult to observe and measure seem to be most influential, including the quality of relationships and collaboration among staff, the responsiveness of school administrators, and the academic and behavioral expectations for students.

In their 2014 report, Papay and Kraft found large benefits for a supportive workplace environment states:

Our analyses show that teachers working in more supportive professional environments improve their effectiveness more over time than teachers working in less supportive contexts. On average, a teacher working in schools at the 75th percentile of professional environment ratings improved 38 percent more than teachers in schools at the 25th percentile after ten years.

See also a recent University of Michigan and Vanderbilt University survey of 9,000 teachers in 336 Florida schools and “Educating Amidst Uncertainty” an article demonstrating why paying attention to the professional environment is especially important in urban schools.

Reformers would be well advised to shift gears and concentrate on building social capital (the ability to work together) as one of the best ways to improve schools since neither Test-and-Punish nor close-public-schools-and-replace-with-charters strategies come close to matching the potential for impressive gains in teacher and student performance.

Craft Knowledge and Pedagogical Practice

Finally, one crucial aspect of continuous improvement is connecting the professional learning communities with the best content and pedagogical knowledge and the most effective practices used in other districts, states, and the nation. In her recent book, Building a Better Teacher, Elizabeth Green explains the value of craft or pedagogical knowledge in improving schools based on the work of such renowned educators as Lee Shulman from Stanford University and Deborah Ball from University of Michigan, whose work is discussed in Provide High-Quality Instruction.

Much like other professional fields during the past decades, powerful understandings of how best to address a range of educational issues have emerged. A current shibboleth assumes that all a teacher needs is knowledge of a subject such as math. But knowing how to use fractions or percentage is not the same as knowing how best to teach these procedures and concepts, understanding where students usually have trouble, and offering the best ways to assist them if they are having difficulty.

Unfortunately, many efforts of team building never reach their potential by turning into unstructured and unproductive discussions disconnected from craft knowledge. Team building and continuous improvement activities must be focused on improved instruction, and it takes time and proficient leadership for faculties to learn how to successfully work together. David Sherer and Johanna Barmore have written a perceptive piece on how to increase the chances that teacher collaboration becomes effective. Larry Cuban has also written an excellent piece on this topic. Jal Mehta cautions that team building alone often is insufficient for effective professional learning and that it must be part of a greater capacity building effort.

Susan O’Hara and Bob Pritchard have developed the Strategic Observation and Reflection (SOAR) rubric which helps teachers and administrators focus on deeper learning in each discipline. The rubrics are organized around high-impact instruction, including:

  • Acquisition of Disciplinary Language
  • Disciplinary Thinking Processes
  • Disciplinary Perseverance
  • Disciplinary Communication
  • Disciplinary Discussion
  • Disciplinary Use of Evidence

The authors also have identified three cross-cutting practices teachers need: fostering meta-cognition for disciplinary learning, fostering a culture for disciplinary learning, and monitoring and guiding disciplinary learning.

Richard DeFour’s In Praise of American Educators: And How They Can Become Even Better provides detailed recommendations for creating effective learning teams that continuously improve school performance as well as strategies for preventing professional learning communities from becoming unproductive.

Finally, Learning Forward has cooperated with the National Commission on Teaching and America’s Future to produce a comprehensive report on increasing teacher agency and developing successful professional development: Moving From Compliance to Agency: What Teachers Need to Make Professional Development Work.

Community Schools and Wraparound Services

Successful districts provide the resources for school and community social support and the time necessary for the school improvement efforts. In examining what worked in the top-performing Chicago schools, Tony Bryk found five key elements. One was strong parent/community ties. The Coalition for Community Schools defines community schools in this way:

A community school is both a place and a set of partnerships between the school and other community resources. Its integrated focus on academics, health and social services, youth and community development and community engagement leads to improved student learning, stronger families and healthier communities. Community schools offer a personalized curriculum that emphasizes real-world learning and community problem-solving. Schools become centers of the community and are open to everyone—all day, every day, evenings and weekends.

Using public schools as hubs, community schools bring together many partners to offer a range of supports and opportunities to children, youth, families and communities. Partners work to achieve these results: Children are ready to enter school; students attend school consistently; students are actively involved in learning and their community; families are increasingly involved with their children’s education; schools are engaged with families and communities; students succeed academically; students are healthy—physically, socially, and emotionally; students live and learn in a safe, supportive, and stable environment, and communities are desirable places to live.

For information about building community schools with wraparound services, see the National Education Association (NEA) policy brief Wraparound Services and these resources: Coalition for Community Schools, the Schott Foundation for Public Education, a report from a coalition of educational groups, and Geoffrey Canada’s Harlem Children’s Zone.

In 2016, Governor Andrew Cuomo proposed expansion of community schools in New York, and scholars at Harvard University have created a six district network to coordinate services for children.

Systems for Continuous Improvement

Deming’s ideas on continuous improvement by line workers using crucial data has become the basis for what is now known as “improvement science.” In Learning to Improve: How America’s Schools Can Get Better at Getting Better, Tony Bryk and his team utilize ideas from improvement science, taking examples from medicine, and apply them to upgrading school performance. They recommend six basic ideas:

  1. Make the improvement work problem specific and user centered.
  2. Focus on variation in performance.
  3. See the system that produces the current outcomes.
  4. Measure the effects of interventions to go to scale.
  5. Create a cycle of continuous disciplined inquiry to drive improvement efforts.
  6. Accelerate learning and problem solving through supportive networks.

These researchers offer this example from medicine: Some hospitals saw tremendous differences in results from asthma interventions among socioeconomic groups; others found few discrepancies. Through improvement science processes, the improvement team discovered that some institutions were much more thorough than others about focusing on a major cause of asthma—the incidence of mold and cockroaches in patients’ homes. When the processes changed so did the results.

Bryk and his team then picked two specific educational problems grounded in the workplace and applied the principles stated above. The first problem was that few entering community college students eventually graduated or transferred to a four-year college; the second dealt with the efficacy of coaches. The team started small with a few classrooms and participants, including a perceptive teacher and administrator playing various roles. After brainstorming, the group narrowed the problem to a major barrier—that most students failed remedial math in their first year. The team then examined whether it was the students, the teachers, the instruction, the curriculum, or another factor. It turned out to be a combination. For example, in the case of African-American males, if those students didn’t connect in the first few weeks, most were lost. In response, initial improvement efforts were aimed at giving these students early success through a more active and supportive instructional program. The team shifted instruction to a more student-centered approach. The results were impressive, and more and more classrooms and community colleges joined the effort. Team members kept revisiting and fine-tuning their interventions, and the program got better with better outcomes. This type of effort is gaining traction nationwide.

Another example of improvement science in action occurred in the Fresno Unified School District/University of California, Merced partnership. The district wanted to increase the embarrassingly low number of students attending college. The transmission to both two-year and four-year colleges was like a leaky pipe. The district examined all the places where students got off track academically and procedurally and discussed with its schools and colleges ways to fix the leaks. The results were spectacular. As one example, students qualifying for a four-year college (California’s A–G subject requirements) increased by 50%, from 32% to 48%; and students meeting A–G subject requirements in technical education fields rose from 4% to 48%. College attendance soared.

Unfortunately, despite these persuasive findings, a plethora of statements continue to belittle or ignore collaboration by business thought leaders (and like-minded political and media fellow-travelers) who should know better. Many of the same business thought leaders who advocate a Test-and-Punish regime for schools follow very different, more supportive team-building strategies in their own enterprises. The exceptions are the financiers and hedge fund operators who thrive on pressure, super-salesmanship, and bonuses—an inappropriate management style for manufacturing and knowledge-based entities such as schools, law firms, hospitals, and research organizations. Increasing accountability pressure on schools has not produced the promised results but has sabotaged the collaboration and engagement necessary for improvement.

The Build-and-Support approach fosters the capacity of teachers, schools, and districts to work together to improve school performance and student outcomes. It is informed by the best educational and management scholarship, irrefutable evidence, and the practices adopted by the most successful schools, districts, and states in this country and abroad.

For a comprehensive look at how the most successful nations in the world deliver effective professional development, build collaborative teams, and achieve continuous improvement, see the National Center for Education and the Economy’s 2016 publication Beyond PD: Teacher Professional Learning in High Performing Systems. In addition, Marc Tucker’s article about the importance of importance of a mutual reinforcing system of individual improvement components argues that treating and evaluating each policy as separate will frustrate results—each is necessary but not sufficient.

Recent Developments

7/30/2016 Another piece on the efficacy of team building by the important website Learning Forward, reviewing the Learning Policy Institutes latest report on how teachers continually improve over time:

The report, Does Teaching Experience Increase Teacher Effectiveness? A Review of the Research, finds that, by and large, teachers become more effective at their jobs the longer they teach. The report draws on 30 recent research studies to highlight key findings and make policy recommendations.

Among the findings, the report says that “teachers make greater gains in their effectiveness when they work in a supportive and collegial working environment” — which includes the leadership of a strong principal, opportunities for collaboration, and a shared vision for student achievement.

Several policy recommendations conclude the report, including: “Create conditions for strong collegial relationships among school staff and a positive and professional working environment.” The report stresses the promise of principal career pathways and particular attention to scheduling. http://blogs.edweek.org/edweek/learning_forwards_pd_watch/2016/06/research_underscores_collaborations_impact.html?r=226965518

BBS Companion Articles

How Top Performers Build-and-Support
Provide High-Quality Instruction

Reference Notes

Professional Learning
Bishop, J., Darling-Hammond, L., & Jaquith, A. (2015, Nov). Maximizing the Use of New State Professional Learning Investments to Support Student, Educator, and School System Growth. Learning Policy Institute / Stanford Center for Opportunity Policy in Education (SCOPE). https://edpolicy.stanford.edu/publications/pubs/1394

Learning Policy Institute. https://learningpolicyinstitute.org

Learning Forward. https://learningforward.org/

California Department of Education. (2015, Mar). The Superintendent’s Quality Professional Learning Standards (QPLS). http://www.cde.ca.gov/pd/ps/qpls.asp

Tom Torlakson’s Task Force on Educator Excellence. (2012). Greatness by Design: Supporting Outstanding Teaching to Sustain a Golden State. California Department of Education. http://www.cde.ca.gov/eo/in/ee.asp

Wei, R. C., Darling-Hammond, L., Andree, A., Richardson, N., & Orphanos, S. (2009, Feb 4). Professional Learning in the Learning Profession: A Status Report on Teacher Development in the U.S. and Abroad. Stanford Center for Opportunity Policy in Education (SCOPE). https://edpolicy.stanford.edu/publications/pubs/187

Support Structures for Professional Learning
Darling-Hammond, L. (2011). Effective Teaching as a Civil Right: How Building Instructional Capacity Can Help Close the Achievement Gap. Voices in Urban Education. http://annenberginstitute.org/publications/effective-teaching-civil-right-voices-urban-education-31

Jaquith, A. (2009). The Creation and Use of Instructional Resources: The Puzzle of Professional Development. Education. ProQuest Dissertations. http://eric.ed.gov/?id=ED513238

Jaquith, A. (2015). Site-Based Leadership for Improving Instruction. The Educational Forum, 79. http://eric.ed.gov/?q=Site-Based+Leadership+for+Improving+Instruction&id=EJ1049380

Kini, T., & Podolsky, A. (2016). Does Teaching Experience Increase Teacher Effectiveness? A Review of the Research. Learning Policy Institute. https://learningpolicyinstitute.org/our-work/publications-resources/does-teaching-experience-increase-teacher-effectiveness-review-research/

Team Building, Capacity Building, and Collaboration
Tucker, M. (2015, Aug 13). Organizations in Which Teachers Can Do Their Best Work: Part I. http://blogs.edweek.org/edweek/top_performers/2015/08/organizations_in_which_teachers_can_do_their_best_work_part_i.html

National Center on Education and the Economy. (2016). Beyond PD: Teacher Professional Learning in High-Performing Systems. http://www.ncee.org/beyondpd/

National Center on Education and the Economy. (2016). Developing Shanghai’s Teachers. http://www.ncee.org/developing-shanghais-teachers/

Schwartz, K. (2016, Feb 29). Tapping Teachers’ Intrinsic Motivation to Develop School Improvements. http://ww2.kqed.org/mindshift/2016/02/29/tapping-teachers-intrinsic-motivation-to-develop-school-improvements/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+kqed%2FnHAK+%28MindShift%29

Tucker, M. (2016, Jan 14). Professional Development Transformed. http://blogs.edweek.org/edweek/top_performers/2016/01/professional_development_transformed.html

Tucker, M. (2016, Jan 21). Top Performers Offer U.S. Much More Effective Models of Teacher PD. http://blogs.edweek.org/edweek/top_performers/2016/01/new_reports_on_teacher_professional_development_kick_off_us_policy_debate_on_system_reform.html See also OECD. (2015). Education at a Glance 2015: OECD Indicators. OECD Publishing.

Doctor, J., & Parkerson, E. (2016, Feb 17). Building a Culture of Improvement in the Context of External Accountability. http://www.carnegiefoundation.org/blog/building-a-culture-of-improvement-in-the-context-of-external-accountability/

Management Science
Gabor, A. (2014, Nov 15). Lessons for Education Reformers from W. Edwards Deming, America’s Leading Management Thinker. http://andreagabor.com/2014/11/15/lessons-for-education-reformers-from-w-edwards-deming-americas-leading-management-thinker/

Pentland, A. (2014). Social Physics: How Social Networks Can Make Us Smarter. New York: Penguin Books.

Leana, C. R. (2011, Fall). The Missing Link in School Reform. Stanford Social Innovation Review. http://www.ssireview.org/articles/entry/the_missing_link_in_school_reform/

Positive Working Conditions
Quintero, E. (2015, May 21). Trust: The Foundation of Student Achievement. http://www.shankerinstitute.org/blog/trust-foundation-student-achievement

Papay, J. P., & Kraft, M. A. (2015, May 28). Developing Workplaces Where Teachers Stay, Improve, and Succeed. http://www.shankerinstitute.org/blog/developing-workplaces-where-teachers-stay-improve-and-succeed

Kraft, M. A., & Papay, J. P. (2014). Can Professional Environments in Schools Promote Teacher Development? Explaining Heterogeneity in Returns to Teaching Experience. Educational Effectiveness and Policy Analysis. http://scholar.harvard.edu/mkraft/publications/can-professional-environments-schools-promote-teacher-development-explaining

Gnagey, L. T. (2015, Jul 1). Collaboration with Colleagues Can Spell Success for Teachers, Students. http://record.umich.edu/articles/collaboration-colleagues-can-spell-success-teachers-students

Kraft, M., Papay, J. P., Charner-Laird, M., Johnson, S. M., Ng, M., & Reinhorn, S. (2015). Education Amidst Uncertainty: The Organizational Supports Teachers Need to Serve Students in High-Poverty, Urban Schools. Educational Administration Quarterly. http://scholar.harvard.edu/mkraft/publications/committed-their-students-need-support-how-school-context-influences-teacher-turn See also Green, E. (2014). Building a Better Teacher: How Teaching Works (and How to Teach It to Everyone). New York: W. W. Norton.

Craft Knowledge and Pedagogical Practice
Green, E. (2014). Building a Better Teacher: How Teaching Works (and How to Teach It to Everyone). New York: W. W. Norton.

Sherer, D., & Barmore, J. (2015, Dec 8). What Makes Teacher Collaboration Work? http://www.shankerinstitute.org/blog/what-makes-teacher-collaboration-work

Cuban, L. (2016, Mar 4). School and Classroom Cultures: Easy to Describe but Tough to Create and Sustain. https://larrycuban.wordpress.com/2016/03/04/school-and-classroom-cultures-easy-to-describe-but-tough-to-create-and-sustain/

Mehta, J. (2016, Mar 8). From PD to Professional Learning: Organizing for a New Paradigm. http://blogs.edweek.org/edweek/learning_deeply/2016/03/from_pd_to_professional_learning_organizing_for_a_new_paradigm.html?utm_source=feedblitz&utm_medium=FeedBlitzRss&utm_campaign=learningdeeply

Frontline Technologies. SOAR Literacy Frames. http://www.frontlinek12.com/Products/mlp_elevate_soar.html

DuFour, R. (2015). In Praise of American Educators: And How They Can Become Even Better. Bloomington, IN: Solution Tree Press.

Calvert, L. (2016). Moving from Compliance to Agency: What Teachers Need to Make Professional Learning Work. Learning Forward. http://learningforward.org/publications/teacher-agency#.VuIHfI-cFPb

Community Schools and Wraparound Services
Bryk, A. S. (2010, Apr). Organizing Schools for Improvement. Phi Delta Kappan. http://eric.ed.gov/?id=EJ882366

Coalition for Community Schools. What Is a Community School? http://www.communityschools.org/aboutschools/what_is_a_community_school.aspx

National Education Association (NEA). Wraparound Services. http://www.nea.org/home/37004.htm?q=wraparound%20services

Coalition for Community Schools. http://www.communityschools.org/

Schott Foundation for Public Education. http://schottfoundation.org/

Superville, D. R. (2016, Feb 23). Ed. Groups Urge “Whole Child” Approach to Counteract Poverty. Education Week. http://www.edweek.org/ew/articles/2016/02/24/ed-groups-urge-whole-child-approach-to-counteract.html

Harlem Children’s Zone. http://hcz.org/about-us/leadership/geoffrey-canada/

Shapiro, E. (2016, Jan 14). Cuomo, Echoing deBlasio, Bets on “Community Schools.” http://www.capitalnewyork.com/article/albany/2016/01/8587990/cuomo-echoing-de-blasio-bets-community-schools

Klein, R. (2016, Mar 8). Harvard University Has a Bold Plan to Transform K–12 Education. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/harvard-education-redesign-lab_us_56dddbace4b0ffe6f8ea3201

Systems for Continuous Improvement
Bryk, A. S., Gomez, L., Grunow, A. & LeMahieu, P. (2015). Learning to Improve: How America’s Schools Can Get Better at Getting Better. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Education Press. See also Bryk, A. S. (2015, Dec). Accelerating How We Learn to Improve. Educational Researcher 44. http://edr.sagepub.com/search/results?fulltext=Accelerating+How+We+Learn+to+Improve&x=0&y=0&submit=yes&journal_set=spedr&src=selected&andorexactfulltext=and

Mathews, J. (2013, Jul 30). Schools Are Working to Replace the Placement Test Barrier to Community College Success. The Washington Post. http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/grade-point/wp/2015/07/30/schools-are-working-to-remove-the-placement-test-barrier-to-community-college-success/

Haxton, C., & O’Day, J. (2015, Oct 8). Improving Equity and Access in Fresno: Lessons from a K12-Higher Education Partnership. American Institutes for Research. http://www.air.org/resource/improving-equity-and-access-fresno-lessons-k12-higher-education-partnership

Jensen, B., Sonnemann, J., Robert-Hull, K., & Hunter, A. (2016). Beyond PD: Teacher Professional Learning in High-Performing Systems. Center on International Education Benchmarking. http://www.ncee.org/beyondpd/

Tucker, M. (2016, Mar 9). Why Education Research Has So Little Impact on Practice: The System Effect. http://blogs.edweek.org/edweek/top_performers/2016/03/why_education_research_has_so_little_impact_on_practice_the_system_effect.html?r=704713625&utm_source=feedblitz&utm_medium=FeedBlitzRss&utm_campaign=top_performers

Why Conventional School “Reforms” Have Failed: Reformers Allowed Their Rhetoric to Be Hijacked

Why Conventional School “Reforms” Have Failed
Reformers Allowed Their Rhetoric to Be Hijacked

by Bill Honig

One of the unfortunate side effects of the reform movement is that it has allowed anti–public school advocates to hijack the rhetoric that demonizes teachers and trumpets market-based solutions for schools. Policymakers have used negative reform rhetoric to justify severe, highly damaging cuts in public education as they pursue an aggressive agenda of privatizing public schools through unrestricted charter school expansion or voucher plans, emasculating teacher unions, and significantly reducing workplace protections for teachers.

Damaging Cuts in Public Education

Many of these destructive schemes were recently enacted in several states that were once staunch supporters of public education. In Indiana, for example, from 2009 to 2013 public school funding was cut by more than $3 billion. During the same period, charter funding was increased by $539 million, vouchers by $248 million, and virtual schools by $143 million. Students who attend public schools account for 94% of Indiana students and took a huge hit. The remaining seven percent gained more than $900 million.

Similarly, in North Carolina, which had been a lighthouse state in the nation, scoring among the top-performing districts on the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), Diane Ravitch reports:

Tea Party Republicans took control of the legislature in 2010, and a Republican governor was elected in 2012, the first time in a century that Republicans controlled the state. Since taking power, the Republicans have slashed the budget for public education at all levels. They have enacted a law to authorize charter schools, including for-profit charters. They enacted a voucher law. They welcomed for-profit virtual schools. They have set out to shrink government and diminish the public sector. Per-student spending is now near the lowest in the nation, as are teacher salaries. The legislature has gone after teachers’ tenure and benefits. It shut down a five-year career teaching preparation program at the University of North Carolina, called the North Carolina Teaching Fellows, yet allocated almost the same amount of money to pay for Teach for America recruits, who will come and go.

See also a series of articles published in the North Carolina Observer decrying the severe cuts and negative legislation affecting public schools. Michael Leachman and his colleagues drafted a report for the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities that documents the severe cuts in education nationally since the 2009 recession:

At least 31 states provided less state funding per student in the 2014 school year (that is, the school year ending in 2014) than in the 2008 school year, before the recession took hold. In at least 15 states, the cuts exceeded 10 percent.

Antigovernment and Antiunion Forces at Work

The extreme-right-wing American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) has convinced many Republican-led legislatures and Republican governors to enact a privatization agenda driven by antagonism to government services in general and public schools specifically. This is a continuation of the nineteenth-century fight waged by antitax forces that opposed funding public education and resisted government-sponsored schools, objecting to the cost of educating other people’s children. For an excellent summary of these battles, see Dana Goldstein’s book, The Teacher Wars.

Luckily for this nation, the counterargument won the day and proved to be accurate—public schools for all has a beneficial influence on the economic and democratic health of our country. Public education is universally recognized as the cornerstone of the spectacular growth the country experienced in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Regrettably, ALEC and some of its billionaire supporters such as the Kochs are trying to re-litigate the issue. An alarming account of how the libertarian Koch brothers and their billionaire fellow travelers foisted an extreme right-wing agenda on the Republican Party nationally and in many states and thus in much of the country is chronicled chapter and verse in Jane Mayer’s 2016 book, Dark Money.

As an example, Rick Hess, who has solid reform credentials, has taken his fellow reformers to task for the motives underlying the way they structured the passing levels on the Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortium (SBAC) and Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Career (PARCC), the new assessments aligned with the Common Core State Standards. Hess claims reformers advocated setting the passing levels arbitrarily high; then they used the discontent engendered by mass failures to drive their agenda of harsh accountability and privatization of public schools. He argues that their strategy was particularly effective in suburban districts.

Moreover, many wealthy “reform” advocates have spent huge amounts of money promoting wholesale expansion of charter schools and vouchers. One example is the Walton Foundation, which announced in 2016 that it will spend $1 billion on new charter schools. Similarly, Netflix’s Reed Hastings’s new foundation will spend $100 million on charter expansion. His expressed goal is to convert all public schools to charters. The Bradley Foundation in Wisconsin has spent more than $100 million to encourage the privatization of public schools, including voucher programs. A final example is the advocacy group headed by Campbell Brown and heavily funded by the same cast of characters. The former anchor is helping the billionaire-backed charter lobby spread the gospel of educational reform.

Alas, much of the negative reform rhetoric is also driven by a desire to break or curtail teacher unions for political reasons or because reformers believe unions prevent the dismissal of low-performing teachers. Ironically, the most unionized states have the best educational records. Massachusetts is a case in point. Recent research supports this view—the extent of unionization doesn’t lower performance but rather enhances it. As further evidence, many states with weak or no teacher unions lag considerably in student achievement.

Almost all of our highest-performing districts have figured out how to work closely with their unions to focus on improving instruction. Often, the push for enhancing instruction and continuous improvement originates with union advocacy. It is also true that local union recalcitrance sometimes frustrates genuine improvement efforts such as making it difficult to create learning teams at schools. For an example of a cooperative approach, see “Teacher-Community Unionism: A Lesson from St. Paul” and “Turning Around a High-Poverty School,” which discusses how Sanger Unified in California, a high-scoring district, developed working partnerships with its unions. Finally, Humphrey, Koppich, and Tiffany-Morales in their 2016 report Replacing Teacher Evaluation Systems with Systems of Professional Growth: Lessons from Three California School Districts and Their Teachers’ Unions demonstrated how San Jose, Poway, and San Juan school districts created effective working relationships between their district administrations and teachers’ unions.

A Toxic Narrative

One disturbing aspect of the current reform storyline is particularly galling to educators. It is bad enough that reformers and the media ignore the fact that Test-and-Punish measures do not work and fail to consider the compelling body of research that shows the efficacy of Build-and-Support. But there also exists a tendency among reformers and their advocates to ascribe all examples of educational excellence to charter or private schools and to ignore exemplary practices in public schools despite their widespread existence. This is a flagrant case of bias.

In our political, cultural, and social spheres a superficial narrative has taken hold—“Public schools and their teachers are bad; charter schools are good.” We’ve gone from Goodbye, Mr. Chips; To Sir, with Love; and Dead Poets Society to Bad Teacher and the hanger-on teacher in Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt. One of the most egregious examples of the media’s anti–public school bias and attacks on teachers’ unions is the 2010 documentary Waiting for “Superman.” Sponsored by reformers and praised by the press, the film gives a hallowed view of every charter school. Every vignette from the public school is horrendous. The film could just as easily have profiled a superstar public school and an appallingly ineffective or fraudulent charter school, which would have been similarly one sided and dishonest.

Positive stories about public schools are seldom seen. Two good examples are an article about an inner-city school in Lawrence, Massachusetts, and a story about a low-income public school in Watts whose success was powered by veteran teachers and effective teamwork. Although the story is highly positive overall, its headline begins with a gratuitous slap: “In a desert of school failure …” Another account of home-grown school improvement appears in Dale Russakoff’s book, The Prize. It describes the valiant success of Brick Avon School, a public school in Newark, New Jersey, that faced detrimental district policies.

Even some supporters of the Build-and-Support approach fall into the trap of biased reporting. The book Building a Better Teacher: How Teaching Works makes the case for the importance of craft and pedagogical knowledge. In the otherwise impressive book, author Elizabeth Green writes only about charter schools when providing examples of excellence. She contends that many started out with a narrow educational philosophy based on a strict, behavioristic “no excuses” approach focusing on reading, math, and test prep. After realizing that this did not produce results, a few responsive leaders shifted to a broader curriculum and an evidence-based educational philosophy that recognizes the importance of engagement. This evolution should be commended. But countless excellent public schools with a rich educational program never succumbed to a prison-like, test-prep atmosphere. They have been producing extraordinary results for years. Green never mentioned them.

Impossible Goals and Severe Consequences

The toxic narrative was exacerbated by federal and state policies that set impossible goals with severe consequences. For example, a decade ago reformers at the national level established an absurd standard: Every school had to reach 100% “proficiency” by 2014. The No Child Left Behind (NCLB) legislation may have sounded reasonable on its face, but the standard was based on the NAEP proficiency levels that equate to A or B work and designed to predict readiness for a four-year college curriculum. Only about a third of US students intend to attend four-year institutions. Increasing the number of students prepared for four-year colleges was a laudable goal and should be part of any accountability system given the rising demand for college graduates. But to enshrine that goal as the only measure of success was inappropriate and unfair for a large number of our students who could profit from rigorous alternative pathways. It was also patently unfair for the educators who were working with them.

Tellingly, no country, district, and almost no schools performed at that unrealistic 100% proficiency level. Our highest-performing state, Massachusetts, which scores among the world’s best, had just over 50% of its students reaching proficiency. Widespread failure was built in at the start because politicians were afraid to set reasonable goals for fear of looking weak or reducing pressure on schools. Most of our political and opinion leaders were completely indifferent to the devastating effect that setting this unreachable goal would have on public education. Others were more purposeful—intentionally attempting to discredit public education as more and more schools would be labeled failures. Sadly, the media has joined in this unfair characterization. Although the new Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) eliminates this impossible requirement, most accountability schemes including the SBAC and PARCC tests as well as media reports of test scores continue to use this level as a standard. Any student not meeting the four-year college preparation level is labeled a “failure.”

During his tenure as US secretary of education, Arne Duncan gave waivers to large numbers of states when it became apparent that under NCLB almost every school in the country was going to be deemed a “failing school.” Unfortunately, he required states to adopt certain policies in exchange for the waiver—one of them being a discredited teacher evaluation system based on student test scores. A few states, including Washington, balked at the requirements and had their waivers terminated. That state was in the ludicrous position of having to brand nearly every school in the state a failure, which would have devastated teacher, parent, and student morale and further eroded public support. Again, the new ESSA legislation not only eliminates unrealistic national goals but abolishes the secretary of education’s ability to unilaterally enforce reform policy.

Lessons from New Orleans

In some extreme instances, states have privatized entire districts, converting all public schools to charter schools. A decade ago in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, the Louisiana forced New Orleans to follow this path. What ensued was the wholesale elimination of the public schools that were the center of many communities, the firing of most teachers, and the creation of nonaccountable institutions under the umbrella of the state-run New Orleans Recovery School District (RSD). Unquestionably, prior to Katrina the district was severely dysfunctional and one of lowest scoring in the country. But the drastic measures taken in the name of reform created new problems. This is tragic given that better, less disruptive alternatives could have been pursued.

The New Orleans experience has been hyped by reform advocates as an extraordinary success story and, until recently, uncritically covered by the media. Adam Johnson wrote an excellent critique of the fawning media coverage. More objective analyses of the RSD have questioned the purported gains and detailed significant collateral damage: hours-long bus rides and other hardships foisted on children, substantial resegregation, and unaccountable schools as well as community erosion and alienation.

Failing Grades

According to blogger and education activist Mercedes Schneider, one decade later most New Orleans Recovery School District (RSD) charter schools received Ds or Fs by a charter-friendly state education department. Out of 57 schools, 15 received Fs or were so low as to be in turnaround status; 17 received Ds; only 7 received Bs; and none earned an A. The RSD schools still rank among the lowest-scoring schools in the country. Schneider also cites a recent report that showed only an embarrassing 12% of the high school students in the district who took the ACT college preparation test scored high enough under the state’s regent requirement to qualify for a Louisiana four-year college. Schneider has also debunked claims of better-than-average graduation rates.

Other people have documented the continued extremely low performance of the RSD despite a decades’ worth of effort. Among them are Julian Vasquez Heilig and Andrea Gabor, who raised potent questions about the viability of the New Orleans model for reform when she wrote a response to the defenders of the district in The New York Times. See also “The Uncounted,” Owen Davis’s blog post that raises the possibility that the New Orleans reform effort harmed the city’s most vulnerable children:

A decade after Hurricane Katrina spurred New Orleans to undertake a historic school reform experiment—a shift to a virtually all-charter district with unfettered parent choice—evidence of broader progress is shot through with signs that the district’s most vulnerable students were rebuffed, expelled, pushed out or lost altogether.

For another negative report on the supposed success of the RSD, see Ten Years after Katrina, New Orleans’ All-Charter School System Has Proven a Failure. Finally, an editorial in The New Orleans Tribune, a major African-American newspaper, decried the reform efforts in New Orleans and its meager results.

In 2015, Frank Adamson, Channa Cook-Harvey, and Linda Darling-Hammond produced the most comprehensive and exhaustive examination of the New Orleans experiment in districtwide charters. Whose Choice? Student Experiences and Outcomes in the New Orleans School Marketplace is their 72-page report developed for the Stanford Center on Opportunity Policy in Education (SCOPE). The authors came to conclusions similar to those I have previously discussed. The New Orleans experiment led to the creation of a stratified system, which more often than not produced low-quality education and was highly detrimental to large numbers of vulnerable students and their communities. They demonstrated that claims of increased performance for the RSD were not warranted and that schools in the RSD still scored extremely low on measures using accurate data.

Limited Gains and Unnecessary Damage

Even reports that found some progress demonstrate that in light of the extremely low starting point, the gains in New Orleans have been minimal. After 10 years, the effect size ranges from only 0.2 to 0.4 SD—still leaving the district as one of the lowest scoring in the nation, with one of the country’s highest levels of economic and educational disparities according to race.

The alleged gains could just as easily be attributed to the substantial increases in funding that occurred over the last decade or to changes in demographics since large numbers of low-achieving students left New Orleans after Katrina. Clearly, these small increases were hardly worth the major disruptions caused by closing just about every local school and firing 7,000 teachers, most of whom formed the backbone of the African-American middle class in the city. For a heart-wrenching account of the callous treatment of New Orleans teachers, see “Death of My Career: What Happened to New Orleans’ Veteran Black Teachers?” in Education Week and the extensive quotations in the SCOPE report cited above. For a forum with differing points of view on the New Orleans experience, see the Albert Shanker Institute’s series of conversations “Ten Years After the Deluge: The State of Public Education in New Orleans.” Finally, Charter Schools, Race, and Urban Space: Where the Market Meets Grassroots Resistance, by Kristen Buras (2014), provides a devastating look at the harm caused in New Orleans by the abandonment of public schools.

Unquestionably, some excellent charter schools have been created in New Orleans, and many dedicated teachers and principals are making heroic efforts to improve instruction. Yet better schools and outcomes could have been produced without such drastic measures. Even researchers who supported the reforms have declared that New Orleans should not be held up as a model for the nation.

Other Failed Examples: State Takeovers

Problems similar to those in New Orleans have been found with the Achievement School District (ASD) in Tennessee, which is now being touted as a model for the rest of the country. The ASD forces low-scoring schools into a state-run district. Its mission was to increase schools scoring at the fifth percentile or below to the 25th percentile in five years. Three years into the project, of the six original schools, the percentile scores of two had decreased; two stayed the same; and two increased to only the sixth percentile. Hardly a success story. Chris Barbic, the district’s superintendent, had been promising significant growth. He resigned at the end of the third year. In 2015, Memphis requested a halt to expansion of the Achievement District due to low performance. Other reports show that recovery districts in Philadelphia and Michigan have been similarly ineffective. According to a balanced review of state achievement districts, state-run districts have not been able to turn around most low-performing schools. The Center for Popular Democracy published a report titled State Takeovers of Low-Performing Schools: A Record of Academic Failure, Financial Mismanagement & Student Harm. The report includes a summary of its findings:

The rapid proliferation of the takeover district as an educational panacea is alarming. In this report, we examine the record of the three existing takeover districts, and find that there is no clear evidence that takeover districts actually achieve their stated goals of radically improving performance at failing schools. We find that:

  1. Children have seen negligible improvement—or even dramatic setbacks—in their educational performance.
  2. State takeover districts have created a breeding ground for fraud and mismanagement at the public’s expense.
  3. Staff face high turnover and instability, creating a disrupted learning environment for children.
  4. Students of color and those with special needs face harsh disciplinary measures and discriminatory practices that further entrench a two-tiered educational system.

Similarly, the National Educational Policy Center issued a well-researched report, The “Portfolio” Approach to School District Governance, documenting the harm done to communities by portfolio or recovery districts closing neighborhood schools. The report instead advocates solutions aimed at improving existing neighborhoods and their schools.

Incredibly, some other states and districts are now pursuing the creation of “district-wide recovery districts.” As a potential model for his state, the governor of Georgia recently visited New Orleans—despite the district’s poor performance. A local editorial took the governor to task for looking at New Orleans, instead of taking his delegation to Massachusetts, which has world-class schools. A conservative Republican legislator objected to the proposal, citing its crony capitalism and support from ALEC. On a more hopeful note, parents, educators, and other citizens in Arkansas recently defeated a statewide privatization attempt by the Walton Family Foundation that would have replaced public schools with charters.

Privatization Failures

Washington, DC, in the past decade and Milwaukee 20 years ago instituted extensive voucher and choice plans, and both continue to score at the bottom of urban districts on the NAEP test, state assessments such as PARCC, and college attendance and graduation rates. Arizona’s 20-year-old voucher program, disguised as a tax credit, has been the object of similar criticism. Denver instituted the full Test-and-Punish and privatization agenda several years ago and remains near the bottom of urban districts.

An evaluation of the Louisiana voucher program found that students using vouchers to enroll in private schools did substantially worse—a 0.4 SD drop in mathematics and a large drop in other subjects. The report states: “Attendance at an LSP-eligible private school lowers math scores by 0.4 standard deviations and increases the likelihood of a failing score by 50%. Voucher effects for reading, science and social studies are also negative and large. The negative impacts of vouchers are consistent across income groups, geographic areas, and private school characteristics, and are larger for younger children.” David Lubienski has summarized recent research showing that vouchers do indeed harm students.

Those responsible should have examined the harm caused when countries such as Sweden, Chile, and Colombia pursued aggressive privatization agendas. Sweden, which adopted wholesale voucher and choice approaches, suffered a drastic drop in educational performance on international assessments and is reconsidering its privatization policies.

Chile provides another perfect case study on what not to do. Twenty years ago, acolytes of Milton Friedman engineered a privatization voucher scheme. Results were a dramatic decrease in educational funding and a substantial rise in inequality caused by the steady decline into a two-tiered educational system. Chile scores near the bottom on the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) tests, and the country is now revising its entire educational plan, including eliminating for-profit voucher schools.

Finally, the argument made by voucher advocates that they assist low-income students turns out to be false. According to a 2016 report by the Southern Education, Race and Ethnicity in a New Era of Public Funding for Private School, recent voucher plans have exacerbated the problems of segregation by diverting over $1 billion to less diverse private schools.

There is evidence from both home and abroad that the privatization of public schools is not the answer. Yet many states—those with newly elected Republican majorities as well as New York—have intensified their interest in reform measures that are actually thinly disguised voucher plans. These initiatives offer substantial business tax credits for “scholarship” plans or donations. The initiatives have not produced worthwhile results but have drained large sums from public schools. Public school budgets must initially absorb the costs of paying tuition for up to 10% of students presently in private schools. Then they suffer further financial burdens when students opt to leave a public school for a private school. The cost to the public schools has been substantial. As an example, in Wisconsin, “according to the nonpartisan Legislative Fiscal Bureau, the voucher program will cost Wisconsin taxpayers over $1.1 billion from 2011 through the end of the 2015–17 budget cycle. Meanwhile, a new report found that Wisconsin schools have suffered the 4th biggest cuts in the nation through 2014.” In light of these realities, in 2016 a Nevada court found that the recently enacted voucher program in that state violated the state constitution and halted the program, saying vouchers diverted funds from public education to the private sector.

Even the most ardent defenders of free-market competition would never countenance requiring their industry to pay for potential competitors, yet that is exactly what states are demanding of public schools.

In many states, governors and legislators are responding to pressure from well-heeled owners of charter school franchises who make sizable political contributions. With minimal financial or educational accountability and transparency, they are pushing through lucrative property deals and public bond funding to replace large numbers of public schools. This type of giveaway is reminiscent of Russia’s gifting billion-dollar state enterprises to a favored few. In a recent interview, Preston Green contends that unregulated charter school expansion will result in a catastrophe comparable to the subprime mortgage crisis.

Finally, while the costs of a few charters do not put a district in jeopardy, if charter expansion becomes widespread, at some point a tipping point is reached. At that point, schools serving the non-charter student must substantially cut back and the district becomes extremely vulnerable. Further widespread privatization plans severely impact communities.

It is disappointing how many politicians from both parties have joined forces with or played into this agenda. One example is New York governor Andrew Cuomo, who has vowed to “break” public education. At the urging of a small number of billionaire hedge funders, he has been a forceful advocate for the Test-and-Punish approach. Unlike other states, New York rashly began high-stakes testing before teachers had a chance to implement the Common Core State Standards. It took part in setting the proficiency levels way too high, which forced large-scale failure rates. State leaders then berated the schools and teachers for their low performance. Cuomo has publically denounced teachers and their unions and, most disturbingly, has persuaded Republicans and Democrats in the state legislature to enact an extremely punitive teacher evaluation plan that incorporates all the damaging components of Test-and-Punish. Mike Petrilli, president of the conservative Thomas B. Fordham Institute, labeled Cuomo’s proposal “insane.” Cuomo is also pursuing voucher plans for private schools. Faced with mounting opposition, the governor backed off some of these proposals in late 2015.

Seeking Common Ground

Thankfully, some original supporters of Test-and-Punish strategies are now revising their views in light of stalled performance gains and evidence of massive disruption and backlash. Chester Finn, president emeritus of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, is a strong advocate of choice and charters, but he now admits that he undervalued the importance of instruction and capacity building. Mike Petrilli, the institute’s current president, has been promoting a more balanced, less punitive approach to reform. Petrilli has also changed his view on what he now perceives as federal overreach. We do disagree on two issues: the relative importance of charters and the supposed harm caused by unions.

Katy Haycock from EdTrust initially argued that it was necessity to put pressure on the schools because without coercion schools would not attend to the needs of minority children. She now supports a more nuanced position, also emphasizing the need for positive engagement and capacity building. Robert Pondiscio, a senior fellow at the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, is another thought leader who recommends a balanced view of teacher evaluation and accountability. Here is an excerpt from his blog post:

Test data also fueled the teacher accountability movement, perhaps the greatest overreach in the reform playbook and surely the source of much of the anger driving the opt-out movement. Hess observed that the reform agenda “was crafted with the troubles of the inner-city in mind . . . many suburban and middle-class parents have issues when those reforms are extended to the schools that educate their children.” He’s right. When well-loved teachers at popular suburban schools tell parents, fairly or not, that testing undermines their work and keeps them awake at night worrying about their jobs, reformers cannot expect those parents to sit idly by.

If reformers want the data that testing provides, they may simply have to abandon attempts to tie test scores to individual teachers. Personally, I think that’s a fair exchange. Test scores in a single classroom can have at least as much to do with class composition, curriculum, and district-mandated pedagogies as teacher effectiveness. Uncoupling tests from high-stakes teacher accountability to preserve the case for higher standards, charters, and choice might be the reasonable way forward. Ultimately, there may be no other choice.

Many Democrats and some Republicans are backing away from severe anti-school and anti-teacher rhetoric. The new ESSA legislation coauthored by Senators Lamar Alexander (Republican) and Patty Murray (Democrat) responded to perceived federal overreach and rejects test-driven high-stakes teacher and school evaluations. President Obama, himself, has warned of the dangers of over-testing and in his 2016 budget proposed $1 billion to engage and support teachers. John King, who replaced Arne Duncan as secretary of education, has also embarked on an effort to reconcile with teachers. In addition, many states and districts are retreating from questionable teacher evaluation programs and devoting more resources to teacher support and development. The school system in Washington, DC, is one example.

Recently, advocates from the two camps—conventional reform and Build-and-Support—have been engaged in finding common ground. Steve Barr, who ran the Green Dot public charter schools in Los Angeles, is now the head of the California branch of Democrats for Education Reform (DFER), whose parent organization and state affiliates have been strong advocates of an aggressive reform agenda. In several meetings, it became apparent that both camps could reach agreement on 80–90% of the Build-and-Support ideas championed on this website.

Barr is somewhat of an outlier among reform advocates, having said: “Don’t lead with test-driven teacher evaluation. That would not even make my top ten list of important measures to pursue.” But he seems to represent a growing number of reformers who want to get beyond the conflict and who increasingly agree with many of the planks in the Build-and-Support approach:

  • school- and district-level capacity building
  • continuous improvement
  • implementation of the Common Core State Standards
  • focus on attracting, training, and supporting the next generation of high-caliber teachers

Importantly, almost all of the conventional “reform” and Build-and-Support groups have banded together in TeachStrong, a new coalition of organizations that advocates measures that will strengthen the teaching profession. Another group looking for common areas of agreement is Third Way. I would agree with many (but not all) of their proposed compromises.

Nationally, there is also some movement toward the more engaging Build-and-Support model. In his blog post “One Size Fits Most,” Mike Petrilli offers a window into a potential compromise. He argues that education reform doesn’t have to be an either-or proposition between two of the most powerful strategies for how to improve our schools. He describes the two views as the Coherence Camp, which aims to build the teaching profession around teaching and learning (Build-and-Support), and the Dynamic Camp, which wants to enlist American ingenuity to create new methods of schooling. He does not define the reform group by test-driven high-stakes accountability. He believes that the coherence idea should be the default position with opportunities for the dynamic bunch to create alternatives.

Here is the way Mike Petrilli describes the Coherence Camp:

The Coherence Camp looks longingly at Europe and Asia, where many (national) systems offer teachers the opportunity to work as professionals in environments of trust, clarity, and common purpose. (Japan envy yesterday, Finland envy today?) The members of this camp praise national standards, a national (or at least statewide) curriculum that gathers the best thinking about how to reach these standards and shares this thinking with the teaching corps, authentic assessments that provide diagnostic information, and professional development (pre-service and in-service) that is seamlessly woven into all of the rest. These countries can (and do) pore over their latest PISA results, identify areas for improvement, and get their educators to row in unison toward stronger performance. And their scores go up and up and up.

I would only add that many schools and districts in this country are also raising their scores by following these ideas. The next series of companion articles How Top Performers Build-and-Support address these measures in detail.

Recent Developments

9/14/2016 14 out of 15 schools in Michigan’s state takeover district are still “failing” https://dianeravitch.net/2016/09/07/michigan-14-of-15-eaa-schools-are-failing/

7/30/2016 A recent publication by Eunice Han, who has a PhD in Economics from Harvard, shows that unionized districts experience increased retention of the best teachers, more layoffs of incompetent teachers, and as a result produce higher quality learning. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/answer-sheet/wp/2016/07/21/think-teachers-cant-be-fired-because-of-unions-surprising-results-from-new-study/

7/30/2016 Another report demonstrating that massive cuts to education funding are harming kids. https://ourfuture.org/20160610/mindless-underfunding-of-schools-continues-doing-harm-to-kids

BBS Companion Articles

How Top Performers Build-and-Support
Ground Efforts in Unassailable Research
Provide Engaging Broad-Based Liberal Arts Curriculum
Provide High-Quality Instruction
Build Teams and Focus on Continuous Improvement
Provide Adequate School Funding
Lessons Learned from Successful Districts
Exemplary Models of Build-and-Support

Reference Notes

Bryant, J. (2015, Jul 9). State Governments Continue an Assault on Public Schools. http://educationopportunitynetwork.org/state-governments-continue-an-assault-on-public-schools/ See also Hursh, D. (2015). The End of Public Schools: The Corporate Reform Agenda to Privatize Education. New York and London: Routledge.

Damaging Cuts in Public Education
Ravitch, D. (2015, Oct 10). Indiana: Less Money, More Chaos. http://dianeravitch.net/2015/10/20/indiana-less-money-more-chaos/

Ravitch, D. (2015, Dec 13). North Carolina: Important Discussion of Wrecking Ball Crew Trying to Demolish Public Education. http://dianeravitch.net/2015/12/13/north-carolina-important-discussion-of-wrecking-ball-crew-trying-to-demolish-public-education/

Seward, C. (2015, Dec 19). “Altered State” Report Measures the Toll of NC’s Shift to Right. The News Observer. http://www.newsobserver.com/opinion/editorials/article50687995.html

Leachman, M., Albares, N., Masterson, K., & Wallace, M. (2016, Jan 25). Most States Have Cut School Funding, and Some Continue Cutting. Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. http://www.cbpp.org/research/state-budget-and-tax/most-states-have-cut-school-funding-and-some-continue-cutting

Antigovernment and Antiunion Forces at Work
Resseger, J. (2016, Mar 14). ALEC Relentlessly Cashes in on Kids and their Public Schools. https://janresseger.wordpress.com/2016/03/14/alec-relentlessly-cashes-in-on-kids-and-their-public-schools/ See also The Center for Media and Democracy. (2015, Jul 14). Alec Exposed. http://www.alecexposed.org/wiki/ALEC_Exposed

Goldstein, D. (2014). The Teacher Wars: A History of America’s Most Embattled Profession. New York: Doubleday.

Ehrenhalt, A. (2016, Jan 19). “Dark Money,” by Jane Mayer. The New York Times. http://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/24/books/review/dark-money-by-jane-mayer.html

Hess, R. (2012, Nov 30). The Common Core Kool-Aid. http://blogs.edweek.org/edweek/rick_hess_straight_up/2012/11/the_common_core_kool-aid.html.

Ravitch, D. (2016, Jan 10). Walton Family Foundation Will Spend $1 Billion to Start New Charters Across the Nation. http://dianeravitch.net/2016/01/10/walton-family-foundation-will-spend-1-billion-to-start-new-charters-across-the-nation/

Brown, E. (2016, Jan 13). Netflix Chief Announces $100 Million Fund for Education. The Washington Post. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/education/wp/2016/01/13/netflix-chief-announces-100-million-fund-for-education/

One Wisconsin Institute. (2015, Dec 17). Bradley Foundation’s Radical Education Privatization Campaign Rolls On. http://onewisconsinnow.org/institute/press/bradley-foundations-radical-education-privatization-campaign-rolls-on/

Holloway, K. (2016, Mar 28). Campbell Brown: The New Leader of the Propaganda Arm of School Privatization. http://www.alternet.org/education/campbell-brown-new-leader-propaganda-arm-school-privatization

Bryant, J. (2015, Dec 8). Study Finds Unions Improve Teacher Quality, Lead to Lower Dropout Rates. https://ourfuture.org/20151208/study-finds-unions-improve-teacher-quality-high-school-dropout-rates

DuFour, R. (2015). In Praise of American Educators: And How They Can Become Even Better. Bloomington, IN: Solution Tree.

Ricker, M. C. (2015, Jul 20). Teacher-Community Unionism: A Lesson from St. Paul. http://www.learningfirst.org/teacher-community-unionism-lesson-st-paul

David, J. L., & Talbert, J. E. (2012, Oct). Turning Around a High-Poverty School District: Learning from Sanger Unified’s Success. Final Report. S. H. Cowell Foundation. http://web.stanford.edu/group/suse-crc/cgi-bin/drupal/sites/default/files/Sanger%20Turnaround%2010-14-12.pdf

Humphrey, D., Koppich, J., & Tiffany-Morales, J. (2016, Mar). Replacing Teacher Evaluation Systems with Systems of Professional Growth: Lessons from Three California School Districts and Their Teachers’ Unions. SRI International. https://www.sri.com/work/publications/replacing-teacher-evaluation-systems-systems-professional-growth-lessons-three

A Toxic Narrative
Miles, K. H., & Baroody, K. (2015, Jul 2). Schools Succeeding Because of the System, Not in Spite of It. http://www.realcleareducation.com/articles/2015/07/02/schools_succeeding_because_of_the_system_not_in_spite_of_it_1206.html

Stewart, J. (2015, Aug 3). In a Desert of School Failure, 96th Street Elementary in Watts Soars by Rewriting the Rules. LA Weekly. http://www.laweekly.com/news/in-a-desert-of-school-failure-96th-street-elementary-in-watts-soars-by-rewriting-the-rules-5865357

Russakoff, D. (2015). The Prize: Who’s in Charge of America’s Schools? Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.

Green, E. (2014). Building a Better Teacher: How Teaching Works (And How to Teach it to Everyone). New York: W. W. Norton & Company.

Lessons from New Orleans
Johnson, A. (2015, Aug 28). Katrina’s “Golden Opportunity”: 10 Years of Corporate Media Celebrating Disaster. http://fair.org/home/katrinas-golden-opportunity-10-years-of-corporate-media-celebrating-disaster/

Thompson, J. (2015, Jun 15). The New Orleans Charter Mentality of “My Way or the Highway” Is Not the Path Toward Building Learning Communities, and Breaking the Cycles of Poverty. http://www.livingindialogue.com/questions-persist-about-new-orleans-test-score-gains/

Failing Grades
Schneider, M. (2015, Jun 16). A Bad Day for the RSD “Improvement” Narrative: The History of La. Graduation Rates. https://deutsch29.wordpress.com/2015/06/16/a-bad-day-for-the-rsd-improvement-narrative-the-history-of-la-graduation-rates/

Schneider, M. (2013, Mar 5). New Orleans’ Recovery School District: The Lie Unveiled. https://deutsch29.wordpress.com/2013/03/05/new-orleans-recovery-school-district-the-lie-unveiled/

Sims, P., & Rossmeier, V. (2015, Jun). The State of Public Education in New Orleans: 10 Years After Hurricane Katrina. Cowen Institute for Public Education Initiatives at Tulane University. http://www.speno2015.com/

Heilig, J. V. (2015, Aug 28). Should Louisiana and the Recovery School District Receive Accolades for Being Last and Nearly Last? http://www.networkforpubliceducation.org/2015/08/policy_brief_louisiana/

Gabor, A. (2015, Sep 9). Why Jon Alter Needs to Do More Homework on Charters. http://andreagabor.com/2015/09/09/why-jon-alter-needs-to-do-more-homework-on-charters/

Davis, O. (2015, Aug 28). The Uncounted. http://www.ibtimes.com/uncounted-2062614

Kimmett, C. (2015, Aug 28). Ten Years after Katrina, New Orleans’ All-Charter School System Has Proven a Failure. In These Times. http://inthesetimes.com/article/18352/10-years-after-katrina-new-orleans-all-charter-district-has-proven-a-failur

Miller, L. (2015, Aug 9). New Orleans Recovery District Called a Dismal Failure by the City’s Leading African American Newspaper. https://millermps.wordpress.com/2015/08/09/new-orleans-recovery-district-called-a-dismal-failure-by-the-citys-leading-african-american-newspaper/

Adamson, F., Cook-Harvey, C., & Darling-Hammond, L. (2015, Sep 30). Whose Choice? Student Experiences and Outcomes in the New Orleans School Marketplace. Stanford Center for Opportunity Policy in Education. https://edpolicy.stanford.edu/publications/pubs/1374

Limited Gains and Unnecessary Damage
DeArmond, M., Denice, P., Gross, B., Hernandez, J., Jochim, A., & Lake, R. (2015, Oct). Measuring Up: Educational Improvement and Opportunity in 50 Cities. http://www.crpe.org/publications/measuring-educational-improvement-and-opportunity-50-cities See also Prothero, A. (2015, Aug 4). New Orleans Test Scores Have ‘Shot Up’ 10 Years after Katrina, Report Says. http://blogs.edweek.org/edweek/charterschoice/2015/08/new_orleans_test_scores_improved_with_charter_schools_after_huricane_katrina.html

Berkshire, J. C. (2015, Aug 3). “Reform” Makes Broken New Orleans Schools Worse: Race, Charters, Testing and the Real Story of Education After Katrina. http://www.salon.com/2015/08/03/reform_makes_broken_new_orleans_schools_worse_race_charters_testing_and_the_real_story_of_education_after_katrina/

Mitchell, C. (2015, Aug 19). “Death of My Career”: What Happened to New Orleans’ Veteran Black Teachers? Education Week. http://neworleans.edweek.org/veteran-black-female-teachers-fired/?cmp=eml-sr-nola10

Albert Shanker Institute. (2015, Sep 9). Ten Years After the Deluge: The State of Public Education in New Orleans. http://www.shankerinstitute.org/event/public-education-new-orleans

Buras, K. L. (2014). Charter Schools, Race, and Urban Space: Where the Market Meets Grassroots Resistance. New York and London: Routledge.

Harris, D. N. (2015, Aug 31). How Everyone Is Getting It Wrong on New Orleans School Reform. The Washington Post. https://www.washingtonpost.com/posteverything/wp/2015/08/31/how-everyone-is-getting-it-wrong-on-new-orleans-school-reform/

Other Failed Examples: State Takeovers
Rubenstein, G. (2014, Jul 31). Underachievement School District 2014 Edition. https://garyrubinstein.wordpress.com/2014/07/31/underachievement-school-district-2014-edition/ For a 2015 Vanderbilt report showing little or negative effect for the Achievement District, see also Zimmer, R., Kho, A., Henry, G., & Viano, S. (2015, Dec). Evaluation of the Effect of Tennessee’s Achievement School District on Student Test Scores. http://www.tnconsortium.org/projects-publications/turn-around-schools/index.aspx

Rubenstein, G. (2015, Jul 31). The Underachievement School District 2015 Edition, Part 1. https://garyrubinstein.wordpress.com/2015/07/31/the-underachievement-school-district-2015-edition-part-i/

Ravitch D. (2015, Dec 19). Tennessee: Memphis School Board Calls for Moratorium for Achievement School District. http://dianeravitch.net/2015/12/19/tennessee-memphis-school-board-calls-for-moratorium-for-achievement-school-district/

Felton, E. (2015, Oct 19). Are Turnaround Districts the Answer for America’s Worst Schools? http://hechingerreport.org/are-turnaround-districts-the-answer-for-americas-worst-schools/

Electablog. (2015, Dec 6). The Sad, Predictable, Outrageous, and Infuriating History of the Education Achievement Authority in 127 Headlines. http://www.eclectablog.com/2015/12/the-sad-predictable-outrageous-and-infuriating-history-of-the-education-achievement-authority-in-127-headlines.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+eclectablog%2FkInS+%28Eclectablog%29

Sen, A. (2016, Feb 5). State Takeovers of Low-Performing Schools: A Record of Academic Failure, Financial Mismanagement & Student Harm. The Center for Popular Democracy. http://populardemocracy.org/news/publications/state-takeovers-low-performing-schools-record-academic-failure-financial See also Downey, M. (2015, Aug 19). Opinion: Who Sees Greatest Opportunities from Deal’s Opportunity School District? http://getschooled.blog.ajc.com/2015/08/19/opinion-gov-deals-opportunity-school-district-offers-opportunity-but-not-for-students/

Mathis, W. J., & Welner, K. G. (2016, Mar). The “Portfolio” Approach to School District Governance. National Education Policy Center. http://nepc.colorado.edu/publication/research-based-options

The Center for Media and Democracy. (2015, Jul 14). Alec Exposed. http://www.alecexposed.org/wiki/ALEC_Exposed

Holloway, K. (2015, Sep 1). How the Billionaire Kingpins of School Privatization Got Stopped in Their Own Back Yard. http://www.alternet.org/education/how-billionaire-kingpins-school-privatization-got-stopped-their-own-back-yard

Privatization Failures
Ravitch, D. (2015, Dec 1). D.C. Test Scores Are Disastrous. http://dianeravitch.net/2015/12/01/d-c-test-scores-are-disastrous/ See also the massive evaluation report on Washington, DC, schools, which found mixed results: Merrow, J (2015, Dec 8). A Premature Celebration in DC. http://themerrowreport.com/2015/12/08/a-premature-celebration-in-dc/ and Heitin, L. (2016, Mar 2). 3rd Grade Reading Scores in D.C. Show No Improvement. http://blogs.edweek.org/edweek/curriculum/2016/03/3rd_grade_reading_scores_in_dc_show_no_improvement.html?utm_source=feedblitz&utm_medium=FeedBlitzRss&utm_campaign=curriculummatters

Luzer, D. (2015, Aug 5). Arizona’s Magic Private School Tax Credits Don’t Work. Washington Monthly.
http://www.aauwarizona.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/10/SCDC-vouchers-article_revised.pdf

Kaplan, J. (2016, Feb 29). Parents, Teachers, Students, Communities Unite and Fight: A Speech to Boston’s Teachers and Communities. https://kaplanforkids.wordpress.com/2016/02/29/parents-teachers-students-communities-unite-and-fight-a-speech-to-bostons-teachers-and-communities/ See also Kaplan, J. (2016, May 17). What’s Next? https://kaplanforkids.wordpress.com/2016/05/17/whatsnext/

Abdulkadiroglu, A., Pathak, P. A., & Walters, C. R. (2016, Mar 25). School Vouchers and Student Achievement: Evidence from the Louisiana Scholarship Program. National Bureau of Economic Research.http://www.nber.org/papers/w21839 See also Bryant, J. (2015, Jun 26). Lessons to Be Learned from New Orleans Style Education Reform. http://educationopportunitynetwork.org/lessons-to-be-learned-from-new-orleans-style-education-reform/ and National Education Policy Center. (2015, Jul 13). New Orleans Recovery School District Not Quite as Recovered as Advertised. http://nepc.colorado.edu/newsletter/2015/07/new-orleans-recovery and Bigard, A. (2015, Aug 13). From New Orleans: Washing Machine-Style Education Reform. The Progressive. http://www.progressive.org/news/2015/08/188260/new-orleans-washing-machine-style-education-reform?mc_cid=53865994c1&mc_eid=efac155d28

Lubienski C. (2016, Mar 7). New Studies of Vouchers Show Harm to Students. http://dianeravitch.net/2016/03/07/christopher-lubienski-new-studies-on-vouchers-show-harm-to-students/

Ravitch, D. (2014, Apr 20). Swedish Experiment in Privatizing Schools Floundering. http://dianeravitch.net/2014/04/20/swedish-experiment-in-privatizing-schools-floundering/ See also Pollard, N. (2013, Dec 10). Insight: Sweden Rethinks Pioneering School Reforms, Private Equity Under Fire. Reuters. http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/12/10/us-sweden-schools-insight-idUSBRE9B905620131210#0GQKi5YX6VylbD1j.97 and Hargreaves, A. (2016, Mar 2). Teachers and Professional Collaboration: How Sweden Has Become the ABBA of Educational Change. http://www.shankerinstitute.org/blog/teachers-and-professional-collaboration-how-sweden-has-become-abba-educational-change

Hatch, T. (2014, Oct 29). Proposals for Change in Chile. http://internationalednews.com/2014/10/29/proposals-for-change-in-chile/ See also Ravitch, D. (2014, Apr 20). Chile: Dismantling the Most Pro-Market Education System in the World. http://dianeravitch.net/2014/04/20/chile-dismantling-the-most-pro-market-education-system-in-the-world/ and Carnoy, M., & McEwan, P. (2014, Jul 25). Does Privatization Improve Education? The Case of Chile’s National Voucher Plan. Research Gate. http://www.researchgate.net/profile/Martin_Carnoy/publication/237545374_DOES_PRIVATIZATION_IMPROVE_EDUCATION_THE_CASE_OF_CHILE’S_NATIONAL_VOUCHER_PLAN/links/53d28d770cf228d363e94866.pdf

Southern Education Foundation. (2016). Race and Ethnicity in a New Era of Public Funding for Private Schools. http://www.southerneducation.org/PubliclyFundedPrivateSchoolSegregation

One Wisconsin Institute. (2015, Dec 17). Bradley Foundation’s Radical Education Privatization Campaign Rolls On. http://onewisconsinnow.org/institute/press/bradley-foundations-radical-education-privatization-campaign-rolls-on/

Education Law Center. (2016, Jan 11). Court Declares Nevada Voucher Law Violates State Constitution. http://www.edlawcenter.org/news/archives/national/court-declares-nevada-voucher-law-violates-state-constitution.html See also Heilig, J. V., & Portales, J. (2012, Nov 10). Are Vouchers a Panacea or Problematic? http://cloakinginequity.com/?s=are+vouchers+a+panacea+or+problematic&submit.x=0&submit.y=0&submit=Go

Berkshire, J. (2016, Jan 4). Are Charter Schools the New Subprime Mortgages? http://edushyster.com/are-charter-schools-the-new-subprime-mortgages/ See also Grant, P. (2015, Oct 13). Charter-School Movement Grows—for Real-Estate Developers. The Wall Street Journal. http://www.wsj.com/articles/charter-school-movement-growsfor-real-estate-investors-1444750383

Heilig, J. V. (2016, Jan 25). Updated: Hostile Charter Takeovers Sideline Communities. http://cloakinginequity.com/2016/01/25/hostile-charter-takeovers-sideline-communities/

Clukey, K. (2015, Dec 9). Common Core Panel to Call for Teacher Evaluation Moratorium, Test Overhaul. http://www.politico.com/states/new-york/albany/story/2015/12/common-core-panel-to-call-for-teacher-evaluation-moratorium-test-overhaul-028942

Taylor, K. (2015, Nov 25). Cuomo, in Shift, Is Said to Back Reducing Test Scores’ Role in Teacher Reviews. The New York Times. http://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/26/nyregion/cuomo-in-shift-is-said-to-back-reducing-test-scores-role-in-teacher-reviews.html?ref=topics&_r=0

Joseph, G. (2015, Mar 19). 9 Billionaires Are About to Remake New York’s Public Schools—Here’s Their Story. The Nation. http://www.thenation.com/article/9-billionaires-are-about-remake-new-yorks-public-schools-heres-their-story/ See also Di Carlo, M. (2015, Mar 9). How Not to Improve New Teacher Evaluation Systems. http://www.shankerinstitute.org/blog/how-not-improve-new-teacher-evaluation-systems

Seeking Common Ground
Finn, C. E., Jr. (2014, Jul 30). Education Reform in 2014. http://edexcellence.net/articles/education-reform-in-2014

Petrilli, M. J. (2015, Mar 9). How to End the Education Reform Wars. http://edexcellence.net/articles/how-to-end-the-education-reform-wars

Petrilli, M. J. (2015, Aug 12). The New ESEA Will Be “Loose-Loose” Because Arne Duncan Went Overboard with “Tight-Tight.” http://edexcellence.net/articles/the-new-esea-will-be-%E2%80%9Cloose-loose%E2%80%9D-because-arne-duncan-went-overboard-with-%E2%80%9Ctight-tight%E2%80%9D

Pondiscio, R. (2015, May 8). Four Lessons from the Opt-Out Debate. http://edexcellence.net/articles/four-lessons-from-the-opt-out-debate?utm_source=Fordham+Updates&utm_campaign=31e674bf67-051315_EducationGadflyWeekly5_13_2015&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_d9e8246adf-31e674bf67-71491225

Sawchuk, S. (2016, Feb 12). Could $1 Billion Make Teaching the Best Job in the World? http://blogs.edweek.org/edweek/teacherbeat/2016/02/could_1b_make_teaching_the_best_job.html

Brown, E. (2016, Feb 20). John King Is Trying to Repair the Obama Administration’s Frayed Relationship with Teachers. The Washington Post. https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/education/john-king-is-trying-to-repair-the-obama-administrations-frayed-relationship-with-teachers/2016/02/19/a28b88de-d666-11e5-9823-02b905009f99_story.html

Brown, E. (2016, Feb 10). D.C. Public Schools, Closely Watched for its Reform Efforts, Is Overhauling Teacher Evaluation and Training. The Washington Post. https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/education/dc-public-schools-to-overhaul-teacher-evaluation-and-training/2016/02/10/bdb9ed2a-cf41-11e5-b2bc-988409ee911b_story.html?wprss=rss_education

TeachStrong. http://teachstrong.org/

Hiler, T., & Hatalsky, L. E. (2016, Feb 22). The New Normal in K–12 Education. http://www.thirdway.org/report/the-new-normal-in-k-12-education

Petrilli, M. J. (2011, Aug 26). One Size Fits Most. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/michael-j-petrilli/one-size-fits-most_b_937850.html

Why Conventional School “Reforms” Have Failed: Four Nostrums of Conventional School Reform

Why Conventional School “Reforms” Have Failed
Four Nostrums of Conventional School Reform

by Bill Honig

The reform movement has failed to produce results overall, and reputable evaluations have shown that individual reform measures also proved to be ineffective. Turnaround schools, charter schools, incentive schemes, or test-based school and teacher accountability have had either nonexistent or trivial effects. In his book Visible Learning, John Hattie writes that even when reforms produced small gains, they fall far below the improvements brought about by validated initiatives. In this article, I examine four other nostrums of reform.

Major Problems with Teach for America (TFA)

Teach for America (TFA) attracts bright, motivated graduates from our top colleges who agree to teach in public or charter schools for two years. They receive just five weeks of training and then are thrown into schools to sink or swim. Not surprisingly, many flounder and, at the end of their two-year commitment, leave the classroom in large numbers. By the end of five years, large numbers have left teaching. You cannot build a profession on a two-year commitment with minimal training.

Gary Rubenstein is a former TFA teacher. For a devastating, ongoing critique of TFA’s practices, see his blog. In another alumni critique, Andrew Gerst offers suggestions for improvement based on the Aspire charter management organization training model. Aspire has a one-year internship, which results in large numbers of neophytes performing well in their second year and staying in the profession. Both critics claim that TFA is unwilling to spend its considerable profits to fix flagrant deficiencies. Many former TFA teachers, now dissident apostates, have written about major flaws with the program. See also an interview with Daniel Katz who recommends that his students not consider Teach for America. The organization has been addressing some of these issues. TFA has a small pilot that requires a longer commitment and provides an initial year’s internship, is beginning to invest more heavily in first year coaching, and is allowing local TFA regions to institute changes in the model.

One of Rubinstein’s most powerful points is that although many TFA teachers leave at the end of two years, some stay in education and wind up as unseasoned principals and superintendents. Despite the teachers’ limited backgrounds in education and minimal experience, good political connections enable them to move into these important positions. Many of these young TFA veterans prove to be disasters as administrators. In part, this is due to their unwillingness to learn from competent educators and their ignorance of educational best practice. Of course, it did not help matters that they often were cast as knights in shining armor coming to save inept over-the-hill educators.

Mathematica conducted an evaluation of a small number of high school TFA teachers and found essentially no advantage in hiring them. The analysis found no difference in reading scores and only a negligible difference in math. A recent report on elementary TFA teachers also found no effects and revealed that most were planning to leave the profession quickly. In addition, their view of the training received had fallen compared to that of participants in previous years. For a critical review of the report, see Vasquez Heilig’s blog.

Barbara Veltri is a former TFA trainer. She wrote a disparaging analysis of TFA’s practices claiming, among other deficiencies, that a large number of TFA teachers are especially ill equipped to teach math. Katie Osgood adds to the discussion by describing how TFA’s heavy indoctrination of teachers hampers their classroom effectiveness. The hundreds of millions of dollars spent on the program and its infrastructure could have been invested in supporting new teachers who wanted to make education a career and who were willing to get the proper training. Finally, Julian Heilig and Jameson Brewer have produced several podcasts titled Truth for America detailing the shortcomings of TFA by former TFA teachers.

Teach for America has turned into a massive financial enterprise—with assets worth nearly $500 million and managers earning absurdly high salaries. In 2013, its two co-CEOs received $382,000 and $342,000, respectively, and TFA founder Wendy Kopp received $156,000 for an eight-hour workweek during that same year. TFA obtains large federal and state grants as well as funding from conservative foundations that seem eager to replace competent experienced teachers with cheap raw recruits. For providing these low-cost replacements, TFA charges districts a hefty sum. In 2013, it received grants of $74 million in “government grants” and charged districts an additional $32 million in “service fees.” Not bad for a supposedly charitable nonprofit organization staffed by raw recruits, many of whom will be gone in two years. Fortunately, the word is getting out about TFA. Its enrollments are down, and districts are starting to eliminate the program.

In 1969 I was part of a similar federally funded project called Teacher Corps, which truly was a solid program. Our cycle had 40 people from different walks of life and different ethnic/racial backgrounds. We were 10 African-Americans, 10 Asian-Americans, 10 Hispanics, and 10 whites. The major difference between Teacher Corps and Teach for America’s program was that we did not limit our commitment to two years, and a respected school of education at San Francisco State University managed the program. We were given extensive training, not only in the summer before we started as interns, but for one full year after that. The education I received both at the college and on-site in the schools was excellent. No sink or swim. The Aspire charter school network has a similar internship program as do some of our best performing public school districts.

In promoting itself, Teach for America has used rhetoric closely aligned with the narrative used by some of the more extreme members of the “reform movement.” Its leaders have the unfortunate habit of claiming that public schools and teachers are inept and have nothing of value to teach TFA, and that only its recruits can save America’s failing schools. This is how the organization attempts to energize and motivate its trainees—by tearing down the existing structure. We got some of that in Teacher Corps, but were very quickly disabused of this arrogant attitude when it turned out that our supervising teachers in the schools actually knew what they were doing. We learned a great deal from them.

Many Teach for America teachers who chose to stay in education have become stellar professionals. Many others have left under duress after two years or to take more lucrative jobs in the corporate sector. But it is absolutely indefensible to build up your own organization by castigating public schools, allowing your teachers to replace qualified veteran teachers because they are cheaper, and allying yourself with extreme reformers who are bent on privatizing public education.

How About Merit Pay?

Merit pay sounds like a good idea. Pay our best teachers more and teachers will strive harder and stay in the profession longer. Unfortunately, just about every study has found that merit pay does not improve student or teacher performance. A few evaluations have reported gains from merit pay, but the increases were negligible. Merit pay schemes cause considerable collateral damage by forcing teachers to compete against each other, instead of encouraging and rewarding team-building and collaboration. Often merit pay proposals also use ill-conceived mechanisms for determining who gets rewarded. The result is that a significant number of deserving teachers get overlooked, while low-performing teachers get rewarded. Ironically, the extra money is not what motivates most teachers; they would rather be part of an effective group effort.

At any rate, there is a much better way to reward our best teachers and keep them in the profession—career ladders. Let our most proficient educators earn more money, but we should require them to mentor existing or new teachers and take on instructional development or leadership roles in addition to their classroom duties. They would earn more pay, but instead of merit pay’s something-for-nothing approach, they would contribute their talents to the continuous improvement efforts at the school. See the report written by Catherine F. Natale and her colleagues, Creating Sustainable Teacher Career Pathways: A 21st Century Imperative. Why pay our best teachers stipends without receiving additional help from them? Most teachers strongly oppose merit pay, but few have objections to paying our best practitioners for taking on additional responsibilities. In fact, there is already a strong precedent for career ladder strategies. In secondary schools, department chairs receive a stipend when assuming additional duties.

Is Test-Based Retention Effective?

Similar problems occur when test results have high-stakes consequences for students. Comparable to using test performance for teacher evaluations and merit pay, single application tests should not be used to decide whether a third grader gets promoted to fourth. As discussed in the companion article Have High-Stakes Testing and Privatization Been Effective?, performance on a standardized test isn’t sufficiently accurate, and there are much better ways to determine student progress. It might be acceptable to use the information from once-a-year test results as one piece of data (albeit a very weak source of information) to ascertain what a student knows and to fashion appropriate instruction or intervention. But relying primarily on a broad-scale assessment to determine a high-stakes decision such as promotion is especially dangerous and unfair.

Many states that have adopted retention schemes offer students alternative methods to avoid being retained. Even so, holding students back is still an unsound policy. Sadly, many districts have lately been forced to adopt retention policies under state legislation authored by conservative governors and legislatures, many of whom are at the beck and call of the right-wing American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC). These harsh legislative mandates were passed under the guise of ending “social promotion.” This flies in the face of 30 years of research that has shown this strategy does not work and causes substantial harm to those children held back. These policies are tantamount to educational malpractice—research condemns them as academically, emotionally, and socially harmful to the student retained and to the class he or she is placed in. Retention is also very expensive—costing about $11,000 per student for one additional year of schooling. The money could be spent on far more effective approaches. See also David Berliner and Gene Glass’s 50 Myths & Lies That Threaten America’s Public Schools and the Education Week article “Should 3rd Grade Be the Pivot Point for Early Reading?” Thankfully, some states are now retreating from such an ill-advised policy after witnessing its disastrous results. However, Nevada just adopted a retention scheme.

This valid and reliable research has found that when compared to the performance of students who are held back, the performance, graduation rates, and emotional health of similar struggling students who are promoted are all appreciably higher. The retention strategy often is based on noneducators’ unsound assumption that first-, second-, and third-grade students fail because they are not trying hard enough, and if they are held back or threatened with retention, they will exert more effort. The fact is that these students do not lack motivation. I have yet to encounter a child who doesn’t possess an intense desire to learn how to read. But I have witnessed the pain caused to youngsters who are separated from classmates and made to feel like failures because of misguided policies.

Two reports that studied retention found improvement in performance in later years. But, as critics of the reports and the report writers themselves point out, what the studies actually showed was that intensive intervention will lower failure rates. They never compared intensive intervention for comparable students not held back with intensive intervention and retention, which of course is the issue.

Virtually all cases of reading failure stem from a deficiency in initial reading instruction and the lack of proper intervention, even in kindergarten. There really is no excuse for not implementing the powerful knowledge about how to teach youngsters to read. Successful reading instruction and timely intervention will teach almost every student to read, and for those still having problems, support in the next grades will be much more fruitful than retaining those students. In addition, most retention plans concentrate policy on the third grade, which is several years too late. For a review of this research covering best first teaching practices and timely intervention, see the white paper on foundational skills in the California ELA/ELD framework and an article by Linnea Ehri summarizing what is known about beginning reading. Struggling students should not pay the price for a school’s failure to provide evidence-based instruction and early intervention. See also David Kilpatrick’s Essentials of Assessing, Preventing, and Overcoming Reading Difficulties and Louise Spear-Swerling’s The Power of RTI and Reading Profiles: A Blueprint for Solving Reading Problems.

Further, all too often the retained student encounters the same instruction in the new class that the student received previously, thus producing little improvement. Then too, placing a resentful, older, and usually male student in a third-grade class when he is chronologically and socially ready for fourth grade, isolated from friends, and labeled a failure is a recipe for a problem-plagued year.

Forced retention of elementary students is a cruel and mean-spirited policy. What is frustrating for educators is that this politically imposed “solution” to reading difficulties hardly ever helps struggling students but does cause tremendous damage to those children and the school. It is another example of a highly touted “reform” that ignores a compelling body of research, adopts a simple but wrong solution to a complex problem, fails to pursue what does work, and then blames the victim.

How destructive this “reform” could be was brought home to me personally a decade ago. I will never forget the poignant conversation I had with a retained first grader. I was at the park with my three-year-old granddaughter, Annika. While she was playing, I struck up a conversation with a boy who was amazingly skillful on the monkey bars and who turned out to be quite engaging—overall, a great kid. In the course of our chat, I asked him how old he was (since he was so physically coordinated) and what grade he was in. He was old enough for second grade but had been retained in first. This was his previous teacher’s recommendation as the best approach for helping his struggles with reading. All of a sudden, these strong emotions emerged as he started to talk about being held back, his sadness over being cut off from his friends, his anger at what had been done to him and not knowing why they did it, and his sense of personal failure.

All this surfaced during a 15-minute conversation. I did talk to his grandparents who were with him at the park and counseled them to raise the issue with the parents, but they seemed reluctant to challenge the teacher or the school on the issue. What has never left me was how mature and outgoing this child was—even while suffering from a profound sadness from what had happened to him. And I was struck by how the people in the system, while thinking they were doing something helpful, had in fact caused him tremendous humiliation and anguish for naught by following such a benighted policy. What also bothered me enormously was that he was made to pay for the school’s mistakes. The school did not know how best to teach him to read, did not have support systems in place to help him other than holding him back, and placed misguided faith in the efficacy of retention. It reminded me of the doctors hundreds of years ago who caused patients substantial harm by bleeding them, under the mistaken belief that such a practice was beneficial.

A similar heartbreaking story unfolded for thousands of children in Mississippi who were held back when the governor sponsored legislation for strict retention but never funded support for early intervention.

Is Technology Innovation Key to School Improvement?

Many reform advocates tout technology as a critical disruptive element that will enable schools to perform better at less cost. Many opponents of conventional market-driven reform strategies initially worried that the movement to incorporate more technology in schools or to replace teachers with computers was just a ploy to sell unneeded devices or an invitation to corporate America to privatize education by replacing public schools with low-cost corporate schools. The experience in many states gives credence to these concerns. The terrible results from virtual charter schools, discussed at the end of this article and in the companion article Charter Schools Are Not the Key to Improving Public Education, are clearly a cautionary tale. For a 306-page handbook on the corporate takeover of our schools, see American Revolution 2.0: How Education Innovation Is Going to Revitalize America and Transform the US Economy.

A second objection to the use of technology to improve schools is based on Clayton Christensen’s disruptive innovation, one of the theories promoted by reformers. Christensen’s innovation has wreaked havoc on many neighborhood community schools without actually improving student or teacher performance. Critics argue that massive disruption does not seem appropriate for important public institutions like our schools. Jill Lapore seriously questions Christensen’s research in “The Disruption Machine: What the Gospel of Innovation Gets Wrong.”

Finally, the critics of technology express concerns that standards, test production and grading, and newly required materials and training are all being proposed in order to create huge new markets for the private sector. I am less apprehensive about this point. There is plenty of room for a vibrant public school sector to use the expertise of private and charitable entities in its pursuit of an effective Build-and-Support strategy. Proprietary instructional materials can supplement open-source materials. For an excellent example of the growing open-source material segment, visit the ISKME website. For an article about open-source materials, see “Free Online Content Helps Teachers Meet Common Core Demands.” See also the Common Sense Media website for reviews of digital and other educational materials or the tips for blended learning.

The more active curriculum envisioned by the Common Core standards and the Next Generation Science standards could profit from digitally delivered activities that are sophisticated, dynamic, and engaging. For example, a digital platform offers students the chance to investigate an epidemic in another country using online synchronous collaboration, access digital content that explains why the Industrial Revolution started in England, or participate in virtual science labs with simulations and graphic modeling. Relevant materials could be organized for these activities, thus avoiding open-ended Internet searches that are often overwhelming and unproductive for students.

Further, Universal Design for Learning (UDL) principles developed by the Center for Applied Special Technology (CAST) demonstrate how technology has the potential to provide all students with access to rich, effective curricula, including those with physical disabilities, learning differences, or limited proficiency in English.

For information about web tools, see the links provided by EdTechReview. Adaptive technology can drive instructional improvement by giving students immediate feedback, adjusting content and the amount of scaffolding to their individual needs, and organizing and reporting student performance data to help teachers track growth in important standards in real time. See, for example, the GOORU site.

One exciting development in the educational technology sector is the growing interest in gamification, or the use of game-design mechanics and principles to motivate and engage students. The Joan Ganz Cooney Center is at the forefront of research in this field. For a list of 100 websites in this area, see “Play to Learn: 100 Great Sites on Gamification” and The Game Believes in You, a recent book on the subject by Greg Toppo. See also the article “Frontiers of Digital Learning Probed by Researchers” and “Can Digital Games Improve Our Schools?,” a nuanced perceptive article by John Thompson.

Two books offer a critical analysis of eLearning games and digital simulation, questioning whether virtual activities actually produce results or work for all children. Our past experience with other supposedly “breakthrough” innovations suggests that the most appropriate approach is to avoid going overboard and to insist on balance.

Some educators and parents are worried about student privacy issues, but with proper prohibitions against selling data and restricting its use to feedback to teachers, those fears can be minimized. The potential power of these initiatives is too important to ignore.

Finally, there is the push for blended learning and performance-based instruction using technology. In blended-learning settings, a student works with a teacher and digital devices. In proper balance and if done right, blended learning could greatly enhance the curriculum. For an example, see Blackboard K–12. However, as widely documented, blended learning can be misused. For an international cautionary note, see a recent report that recommends a balanced approach after finding that too much technology in the classroom actually lowered student performance.

The jury is still out on whether technology innovation will improve instruction or suffer the same fate as previous technological fixes such as hyped teaching machines several decades ago, which turned out to be a huge fiasco.

As mentioned previously, virtual or online charter schools have had major problems in performance. Investigations have revealed some high-profile scams and exploitation. A 2015 report produced by the Center on Reinventing Public Education (CRPE), Mathematica Policy Research, and the Center for Research on Education Outcomes (CREDO) found that virtual charters result in the loss of a full year’s worth of instruction—a disastrous result. Both Samuelsohn and Stober have questioning the value of virtual schools have been published by many different sources.

Unquestionably, some technology advocates go too far and envision a future where machines and software replace expensive teachers and eliminate the social aspects of learning under the guidance of a competent, caring teacher. So far, that nightmare has not been realized.

Several major issues need to be more fully explored. One major question is how different students profit or fail to profit from technological solutions. Some youngsters have no problem with digital learning, while others become easily flummoxed or bored. Another concern is how to avoid overindulgence in unproductive games, prevent the hampering of social development, and escape the tendency to replace robust traditional instructional activities with low-level computer-based busywork.

Summing Up: The Failure of Conventional Reform

The ineffectiveness of current federal and state policies based on conventional reformers’ agendas should not have been surprising. Fifty years ago, W. E. Deming warned of the negative side effects of an overreliance on evaluation strategies and incentive schemes. Fear tends to make employees disengage, narrow their efforts, or game the system so they appear compliant. It diverts attention from and decreases motivation for collaborative teams and local structures that allow for continuous improvement. This ruinous situation is well known in the social sciences, articulated as Campbell’s law.

As Diane Ravitch explains:

The more any quantitative social indicator is used for social decision-making, the more subject it will be to corruption pressures and the more apt it will be to distort and corrupt the social processes it is intended to monitor.

That is exactly what has occurred far too often in our educational system during the past decade under policies pursued by conventional “reformers.” Knowledgeable educators predicted that these initiatives would fail, but their warnings were ignored. As foretold, high-stakes, test-driven accountability has resulted in narrowing the curriculum, gaming the system or cheating, using unproven and unfair reward and punishment tools (such as the recent teacher evaluation debacles in many states), and encouraging superficial teaching to the test to the detriment of deeper learning. It has diverted attention from, de-emphasized, or belittled the policies that actually produce substantial results. No wonder the results have been disappointing.

More importantly, punitive management techniques and demonization of teachers and schools have not only eroded support for the institution of public education but have created widespread alienation among teachers.

This is why recent polls found that teachers in the US score among the highest on scales of liking their profession but among the lowest on satisfaction with their working environment, the very opposite of the engaged professionals we need to perform effectively in the difficult circumstances encountered in schools across the country. For example, a recent survey of 30,000 teachers by the American Federation of Teachers found high stress levels among teaching staff:

  • Only one in five educators feels respected by government officials or the media.
  • Fourteen percent of educators strongly agree with the statement that they trust their administrator or supervisor.
  • More than 75% say they do not have enough staff to get the work done.
  • Seventy-eight percent say they are often physically and emotionally exhausted at the end of the day.
  • Eighty-seven percent say the demands of their job are at least sometimes interfering with their family life

A MetLife survey found that in the face of ill-conceived reforms and political and societal censure, the percentage of teachers who were “very satisfied” dropped dramatically from 62% in 2008 to 39% in 2012. See also Jeff Bryant’s blog post “We Won’t Get Great Teachers by Treating Them Badly.”

Worse yet, the Test-and-Punish regime has convinced many teachers to leave the profession, a costly decision for schools and students, as reported in Revolving Door of Teachers Costs Schools Billions Every Year. High-stakes testing is one of the major causes of the wholesale flight of teachers from harsh “reform states” to more supportive jurisdictions. There are serious shortages of teachers in states such as North Carolina, Utah, Indiana, and Kansas. England has suffered similar effects from a Test-and-Punish regime.

Ironically, these studies also show that teachers yearn to break out of the traditional isolated culture of most schools and work together with their colleagues in an effort to become better at what they do. We should give them the chance to enlist in this crucial effort.

Broad swaths of the public have begun to turn against Test-and-Punish and privatization strategies; it is time for our political and opinion leaders to follow suit. The reaction to Arne Duncan’s resignation on October 1, 2015, as national secretary of education is instructive. Of the 228 comments written in response to a New York Times article reporting the event, it was hard to find even one supporting the aggressive policies the Obama administration had pursued. The comments were uniformly negative and angry—accusing the administration of devastating public education and providing the least effective educational leaders in recent history.

A statement by the Network for Public Education captures the spirit of the commentators:

The policies of the US Department of Education [under Duncan’s (and Obama’s) watch] have inflicted immeasurable harm on American public education. The blind faith in standardized testing as the most meaningful measure of students, teachers, principals, and schools has distorted the true meaning of education and demoralized educators. Punitive policies have created teacher shortages across the nation, as well as a precipitous decline in the number of people preparing to become teachers. The Race to the Top preference for privately managed charter schools over public schools has encouraged privatization of a vitally important public responsibility.

As I stated in the conclusion to the introductory remarks on this website: Public education has always been central to the continued health of our democracy and our way of life. So-called reformers have foisted a set of initiatives on our schools based on an outmoded management philosophy and a flawed analysis of what it takes to improve education. These policies ignore history, research, and experience, which is why our best schools and districts have studiously avoided them. The reformers’ proposals not only thwart the measures actually needed to improve our schools but their initiatives threaten to put the whole enterprise of public education at risk. We need an immediate course correction to follow the lead of our most successful schools and districts in creating effective learning communities at each school and, finally, building the educational profession that this country deserves.

Recent Developments

9/1/2016  A new report by the US Department of Education finds teacher incentive schemes ineffective. https://www.cabinetreport.com/curriculum-instruction/teacher-bonus-pay-barely-moves-the-dial-on-test-scores

7/30/2016 On-line Algebra students fare worse than those taught by a face-to-face teacher. http://blogs.edweek.org/edweek/DigitalEducation/2016/07/online_algebra_worse_for_high-performing_students.html?r=1556213501

7/30/2016 Larry Cuban questions whether the hype on blending learning is accurate. https://larrycuban.wordpress.com/2016/06/10/proof-points-selling-and-marketing-blended-learning-to-educators-and-parents/

BBS Companion Articles

The Big Picture
Have High-Stakes Testing and Privatization Been Effective?
Why Conventional School “Reforms” Have Failed
Charter Schools Are Not the Key to Improving Public Education

Reference Notes

Hattie, J. (2008). Visible Learning: A Synthesis of Over 800 Meta-Analyses Relating to Achievement. London: Routledge.

Major Problems with Teach for America (TFA)
Blanchard, O. (2013, Sep 23). I Quit Teach for America. The Atlantic. http://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2013/09/i-quit-teach-for-america/279724/

Rubinstein, G. (2015, Sep 19). Category Archives: Teach for America. https://garyrubinstein.wordpress.com/category/teach-for-america/

Gerst, A. (2015, Jun 2). How I Would Fix Teach for America. http://dianeravitch.net/2015/06/02/a-tfa-teacher-how-i-would-like-to-fix-teach-for-america/

Davis, O. (2013, Aug 2). Teach for America Apostates: A Primer of Alumni Resistance. http://www.truth-out.org/articles/item/17750-teach-for-america-apostates-a-primer-of-alumni-resistance See also Brewer, J., & Matsui, S. (2015, Aug 3). Teach for America Counter-Narratives: Two Alumni Books Frame the Discourse. http://www.livingindialogue.com/teach-for-america-counter-narratives-two-alumni-books-reframe-the-discourse/ and Brewer, T. J., & deMarrais, K. (eds.). (2015). Teach for America Counter-Narratives: Black Studies and Critical Thinking. New York: Peter Lang Publishing; and Schaefer, P. (2015, Sept 11). After 25 Years, Teach for America Results Are Consistently Underwhelming. http://nonprofitquarterly.org/2015/09/11/after-25-years-teach-for-america-results-are-consistently-underwhelming/

Katz, D. (2015, Dec 18). Advice for My Students: Don’t “Teach for America.” http://www.huffingtonpost.com/danielkatz/advice-for-my-students-do_b_8840714.html

Sawchuk, S. (2016, Jan 20). At 25, Teach for America Enters a Period of Change. Education Week. http://www.edweek.org/ew/articles/2016/01/15/at-25-teach-for-america-enters-period.html?cmp=eml-enl-eu-news1-RM

Decker, P. (2001–2004). National Evaluation of Teach for America 2001–2004. Mathematic Policy Research. http://www.mathematica-mpr.com/our-publications-and-findings/projects/teach-for-america

Vasquez Heilig, J. (2015, Mar 10). Do You Have Five Minutes to Understand Whether Teach for America Is Effective? http://cloakinginequity.com/2015/03/10/do-you-have-five-minutes-to-understand-whether-teach-for-america-is-effective/

Veltri, B. (2015, Jun 3). Inside Information and Reflections from a Former TFA Instructor. http://cloakinginequity.com/2015/06/03/inside-information-and-reflections-from-a-former-tfa-trainer/

Osgood, K. (2016, Feb 10). The Dangers of Teach for America Indoctrination. http://mskatiesramblings.blogspot.com/2016/02/the-dangers-of-teach-for-america.html

Ravitch, D. (2016, Apr 23). Truth for America Podcast Episode 5. https://dianeravitch.net/2016/04/23/truth-for-america-podcast-episode-5/

Schneider, M. (2015, Jul 28). Teach for America Seeks Help Promoting Itself on Capitol Hill. https://deutsch29.wordpress.com/2015/07/28/teach-for-america-seeks-help-promoting-itself-on-capitol-hill/comment-page-1/

How About Merit Pay?
Moran, M. (2010, Sep 21). Teacher Performance Pay Alone Does Not Raise Test Scores. Vanderbilt News. http://news.vanderbilt.edu/2010/09/teacher-performance-pay/ See also Lavigne, A. L., & Good, T. L. (2014). Teacher and Student Evaluation: Moving Beyond the Failure of School Reform. New York: Routledge.

Tucker, M. (2016, Apr 14). How to Get a First-Rate Teacher in Front of Every Student. http://blogs.edweek.org/edweek/top_performers/2016/04/how_to_get_a_first-rate_teacher_in_front_of_every_student.html?utm_source=feedblitz&utm_medium=FeedBlitzRss&utm_campaign=top_performers

Natale, C., Gaddis, L., Bassett, K., & McKnight, K. (2013). Creating Sustainable Teacher Career Pathways: A 21st Century Imperative. National Network of State Teachers of the Year and Center for Educator Learning and Effectiveness at Pearson http://researchnetwork.pearson.com/educator-effectiveness/personal-perspective-creating-sustainable-teacher-career-pathways-21st-century-imperative

Is Test-Based Retention Effective?
The Center for Media and Democracy. Alec Exposed. http://www.alecexposed.org/wiki/ALEC_Exposed See also Berger, E. 2016, Jan 25). Arizona: Strangled by an Organized Minority. http://edwardfberger.com/arizona-strangled-by-an-organized-minority/

Xia, N., & Glennie, E. (January 2005). Grade Retention: A Flawed Education Strategy. Center for Child and Family Policy at Duke University. http://childandfamilypolicy.duke.edu/pdfs/pubpres/FlawedStrategy_PartOne.pdf See also Stipek, D., & Lombardo, M. (2014, May 20). Holding Kids Back Doesn’t Help Them. Education Week. http://www.edweek.org/ew/articles/2014/05/21/32stipek.h33.html

Berliner, D., & Glass, G., et. al. (2014). 50 Myths & Lies That Threaten America’s Public Schools. New York: Teachers College Press.

Sparks, S. D. (2015, May 13). Should 3rd Grade Be the Pivot Point for Early Reading? Education Week. http://www.edweek.org/ew/articles/2015/05/13/should-3rd-grade-be-the-pivot-point.html?cmp=ENL-EU-NEWS1

Heitin, L. (2015, Jun 12). Can Most Kindergarteners Really Tackle ‘Emergent-Reader’ Texts? Most Coaches Say Yes. http://blogs.edweek.org/edweek/curriculum/2015/06/can_kindergartners_tackle_emer.html?utm_source=feedblitz&utm_medium=FeedBlitzRss&utm_campaign=curriculummatters

Yopp, H. (2015). Resource Guide to the Foundational Skills of the California Common Core State Standards for English Language Arts and Literacy in History/Social Studies, Science, and Technical Subjects. California Department of Education. http://www.cde.ca.gov/search/searchresults.asp?cx=001779225245372747843:gpfwm5rhxiw&output=xml_no_dtd&filter=1&num=20&start=0&q=Yopp%202015%20Resource%20guide

Ehri, L. C. (2013, Sep 26). Orthographic Mapping in the Reading of Sight Word Reading, Spelling Memory, and Vocabulary Learning. Scientific Studies of Reading 18 (1). http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/10888438.2013.819356#.VXr1tOsqvzI

Chiles, N. (2015, May 28). As Mississippi Delivers Bad News to 5,600 Third Graders, Stressed-Out Parents Say There Must Be a Better Way. http://hechingerreport.org/as-mississippi-delivers-bad-news-to-5600-third-graders-stressed-out-parents-say-there-must-be-a-better-way/

Is Technology Innovation Key to School Improvement?
Strauss, V. (2015, Oct 31). Study on Online Charter Schools: “It Is Literally as if the Kid Did Not Go to School for an Entire Year.” The Washington Post. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/answer-sheet/wp/2015/10/31/study-on-online-charter-schools-it-is-literally-as-if-the-kid-did-not-go-to-school-for-an-entire-year/

Moe, M. T., Hanson, M. P., Jiang, L., & Pampoulov, L. (2012, Jul 4). American Revolution 2.0: How Education Innovation Is Going to Revitalize America and Transform the U.S. Economy. GSV Asset Management. http://gsvadvisors.com/wordpress/wp-content/themes/gsvadvisors/American%20Revolution%202.0.pdf

Lepore, J. (2014, Jun 23). The Disruption Machine: What the Gospel of Innovation Gets Wrong. The New Yorker. http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/06/23/the-disruption-machine

Institute for the Study of Knowledge Management in Education. http://www.iskme.org/

Ellison, K. (2015, Oct 15). Free Online Content Helps Teachers Meet Common Core Demands. http://edsource.org/2015/free-online-content-helps-teachers-meet-common-core-demands/88916

Common Sense Media. https://www.commonsensemedia.org/

Blackboard. http://www.blackboard.com/k12/index.aspx

CAST. (2011, Feb 1). Universal Design for Learning Guidelines–Version 2.0. Universal Design for Living. http://www.udlcenter.org/aboutudl/udlguidelines See also CAST. (2011). Universal Design for Learning Guidelines–Version 2.0: Research Evidence. Universal Design for Living. http://www.udlcenter.org/research/researchevidence/checkpoint5_1

Gupta, P. (2015, Dec 31). 100 Popular (from 2015) Web 2.0 Tools for Teachers and Educators to Explore. EdTech Review. http://edtechreview.in/research/2256-web-2-0-tools-for-teachers-educators?utm_source=EdTechReview%E2%84%A2+Weekly+Newsletter&utm_campaign=cb71fd3b7a-Top_11_Complementary_Guides_2_1_2016&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_94aed71205-cb71fd3b7a-105652173

Gooru. http://www.gooru.org/#home

The Joan Ganz Cooney Center. http://www.joanganzcooneycenter.org/

Play to Learn: 100 Great Sites on Gamification. http://top5onlinecolleges.org/gamification/

Toppo, G. (2015). The Game Believes in You: How Digital Play Can Make Our Kids Smarter. New York: St. Martin’s Press.

Herold, B. (2015, May 6). Frontiers of Digital Learning Probed by Researchers. Education Week. http://www.edweek.org/ew/articles/2015/05/06/frontiers-of-digital-learning-probed-by-researchers.html?cmp=ENL-CM-NEWS2-RM

Thompson, J. (2015, Sep 1). Can Digital Games Improve Our Schools? http://www.livingindialogue.com/can-digital-games-improve-our-schools/

Clark, R. E., Yates, K., Early, S., & Moulton, K. (2009). An Analysis of the Failure of Electronic Media and Discovery-based learning: Evidence for the Performance Benefits of Guided Training Methods. In Silber, K. H., & Foshay, R. (eds.) Handbook of Training and Improving Workplace Performance, Volume I: Instructional Design and Training Delivery. New York: John Wiley and Sons. http://www.cogtech.usc.edu/recent_publications.php See also Kirschner, P. A., Sweller, J., & Clark, R. E. (2006). Why Minimal Guidance During Instruction Does Not Work: An Analysis of the Failure of Constructivist, Discovery, Problem-Based, Experiential, and Inquiry-Based Teaching. Educational Psychologist. http://www.cogtech.usc.edu/recent_publications.php

Blackboard. http://www.blackboard.com/k12/index.aspx

Strauss, V. (2015, Jun 21). Blended Learning: The Great New Thing or the Great New Hype. The Washington Post. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/answer-sheet/wp/2015/06/21/blended-learning-the-great-new-thing-or-the-great-new-hype/ See also Corcoran, B. & Madda, M. J. (2015, Aug 8). Blended Learning and Flipping the Classroom: You’re Doing It Wrong. https://www.edsurge.com/n/2015-08-08-blended-learning-and-flipping-the-classroom-you-re-doing-it-wrong and Dobo, N. (2015, Feb 10). What Mistakes Did They Make? Lessons from Blended Learning’s Early Adopters. http://hechingerreport.org/what-mistakes-did-they-make-learning-from-blended-learnings-early-adopters/ and Zhao, Y. (2015, Dec 6). ”Never Send a Human to Do a Machine’s Job”: Five Big Mistakes in Education Technology and How to Fix Them. https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/answer-sheet/wp/2015/10/06/never-send-a-human-to-do-a-machines-job-five-big-mistakes-in-education-technology-and-how-to-fix-them/

OECD. (2015). Students, Computers and Learning: Making the Connection. PISA, OECD Publishing. http://www.oecd.org/publications/students-computers-and-learning-9789264239555-en.htm For an erudite discussion of this dilemma, see Cuban, L. (2016, Jan 19). Technology Integration in Districts and Schools: Next Project (Part 1). https://larrycuban.wordpress.com/2016/01/19/technology-integration-in-districts-and-schools-next-project-part-1/ and Cuban, L. (2016, Jan 22). New Project in Technology Integration in Schools and Classrooms (Part 2). https://larrycuban.wordpress.com/2016/01/22/new-project-in-technology-integration-in-schools-and-classrooms-part-2/

Glass, G. V. (2015, Oct 14). Outrageous “Class” Sizes at a Virtual Charter School. http://ed2worlds.blogspot.com/2015/10/outrageous-class-sizes-at-virtual.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+EducationInTwoWorlds+%28Education+in+Two+Worlds%29 See also Miron, G., & Urschel, J. L. (2012, Jul). Understanding and Improving Full-Time Virtual Schools. nepc.colorado.edu/files/nepcrbk12miron.pdf

Pazhouh, R., Lake, R., & Miller, L. (2015, Oct). The Policy Framework for Online Charter Schools. The Center on Reinventing Public Education. http://www.crpe.org/publications/policy-framework-online-charter-schools

Samuelsohn, D. (2015, Sep 23). Virtual Schools Are Booming: Who’s Paying Attention? http://www.politico.com/agenda/story/2015/09/virtual-schools-education-000227;

Stober, D. (2015, Oct 16). Massive Open Online Courses Haven’t Lived Up to the Hopes and the Hype, Professors Say. http://phys.org/news/2015-10-massive-online-courses-havent-hype.html

Summing Up: The Failure of Conventional Reform
Ravitch, D. (2012, May 25). What Is Campbell’s Law? http://dianeravitch.net/2012/05/25/what-is-campbells-law/

American Federation of Teachers. (2015, May 13). Survey Shows Need for National Focus on Workplace Stress. http://www.aft.org/news/survey-shows-need-national-focus-workplace-stress

Bryant, B. (2015, Jul 30). We Won’t Get Great Teachers by Treating Them Badly. http://educationopportunitynetwork.org/we-wont-get-better-teachers-by-treating-them-badly/

Phillips, O. (2015, Mar 30). Revolving Door of Teachers Costs Schools Billions Every Year. http://www.npr.org/blogs/ed/2015/03/30/395322012/the-hidden-costs-of-teacher-turnover

Bangert, D. (2015, Aug 3). Ed Reform’s Next Trick? Teacher Shortage. http://www.jconline.com/story/opinion/columnists/dave-bangert/2015/08/01/bangert-ed-reforms-next-trick-teacher-shortage/30981611/

Klein, R. (2015, Aug 8). A Memo to States: This Is How You Create a Teacher Shortage. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/kansas-teacher-shortage-recipe_55c28ce6e4b0f1cbf1e3a2d7

Gilbert, F. (2016, Mar 1). Here’s the Real Reason Teachers Are Quitting (It’s Not Just the Money). http://theconversation.com/heres-the-real-reason-teachers-are-quitting-its-not-just-the-money-55468

Harris, G., & Rich, M. (2016, Oct 3). Arne Duncan, Education Secretary, to Step Down in December. The New York Times. http://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/03/us/politics/arne-duncan.html

Amrein-Beardsley, A. (2015, Oct 3). U.S. Secretary Arne Duncan Resigning in December. http://vamboozled.com/u-s-secretary-arne-duncan-resigning-in-december/

Why Conventional School “Reforms” Have Failed: Charter Schools Are Not the Key to Improving Public Education

Why Conventional School “Reforms” Have Failed
Charter Schools Are Not the Key to Improving Public Education

by Bill Honig

The reform movement has failed to produce results overall, and reputable evaluations have shown that individual reform measures also proved to be ineffective. Turnaround schools, charter schools, merit pay, or test-based school and teacher accountability have had either nonexistent or trivial effects. In his book Visible Learning, John Hattie writes that even when reforms produced small gains, they fall far below the improvements brought about by validated initiatives. In this article, I examine the failure of one of the major initiatives of the reform movement: the expansion of charter schools.

Charters Do Not Perform Better Than Their Public School Counterparts

Charter schools have not been the panacea that reformers have been promising the nation for decades. The lack of accountability for charters has allowed significant corruption, diversion of public funds, and a high tolerance for low performance. Charters educate about six percent of US students. Some are excellent such as the Aspire, Summit, and High-Tech High networks. Coupled with the best public schools, they are beacons of best practice for everyone. However, many charter schools are educational disasters. The worst are plagued by self-dealing, embezzlement, or undue political influence that allows them to engineer preferential sweetheart deals. Many exposés of charters have been written detailing hundreds of millions of dollars in waste, fraud, and mismanagement. Most states allow charters or charter organizations, whether they are nonprofit or profit making, to operate with minimal accountability and transparency.

According to the well-regarded Center for Research on Education Outcomes (CREDO) research group from Stanford, only about one-quarter of charter schools score better in reading and math than their public school counterparts. Of course, reading and math test results are not the be-all and end-all of school quality. Even so, one-quarter of charters score worse, and the remainders’ performance is no different from non-charter public schools. Specifically, the study 2 found virtually no difference in overall test scores between charters and public schools with comparable students. In another finding, about 31% of charter schools did statistically worse in math than their local public school counterparts; only 29% did better. The findings were even less impressive in reading: 19% of charters did worse; just 25% did better.

Other major evaluations identified similar outcomes—some of our best schools are charters; they are also some of our worst. Most perform similarly to their district’s non-charter public schools. Comparable findings were reported by strong charter advocates, and a report focusing on New York City schools found no difference between public schools and charters. In 2015, CREDO evaluated charter schools in Texas and found on the whole they did worse than the public schools with matched students. For an extensive review of the research on charter school performance, see Charter Schools in Perspective: A Guide to Research and Charter Schools: A Survey of Research on Their Characteristics and Effectiveness.

In 2015, CREDO published a follow-up to the national study. It found that charters in urban districts scored slightly higher than their non-charter public school cousins, but the effects sizes were tiny—0.05 of a standard deviation (SD) in reading and 0.04 in math—many multiples less than the alternative, more effective initiatives successful districts have undertaken. Nonetheless, CREDO did hype the results by reporting them as equivalent to 45 days of extra instruction in math and 28 days in reading and by labeling the results “significant,” which in statistical terms just means “not by chance.”

Comparable results were found in 2015 by University of California, Berkeley scholar Bruce Fuller and his team in a large sample of 66,000 Los Angeles District students from charter and traditional public schools. Essentially, there are two types of charters in LA—startups and conversions. Startups, or schools that started from scratch and are independent from the district, are found in more low-income areas. Conversions of neighborhood schools to semi-charter status, and their relief from some district rules, are found mostly in higher-scale neighborhoods. Conversion school students entered with higher scores and made somewhat more progress than their public school counterparts. After adjusting for entry scores and socioeconomics, the report found statistically insignificant or small advantages for elementary and high school. They did find moderate advantages for middle schools, especially among startups.

The report states: “The benefits of attending a charter middle school appear to be consistent across subgroups and moderate in magnitude, especially for students in startups. Most other charter advantages remain small in magnitude or statistically insignificant. We detected no achievement differences between pupils attending charter versus TPS high schools.”

Other studies have shown charters demonstrating no effect in suburban areas or producing lower scores. Writing in TheNew York Times, Susan Dynarski summarized the research: “This pattern—small but positive results in some low-income city neighborhoods, zero to negative results in relatively affluent suburbs—holds in lottery studies in Massachusetts as well as in a national study of charter schools funded by the Education Department.”

To put those findings in perspective, as I explained in the companion article Have High-Stakes Testing and Privatization Been Effective? a full standard deviation difference in test performance translates to one or two years of additional instruction, or many multiples of the charter advantage identified by CREDO. In his book Visible Learning for Teachers, John Hattie lists many strategies that actually produce that elevated effect size and generate improvements several times those found by CREDO and by Russ Whitehurst of the conservative Brookings Institute.

Many independent researchers claim that charter schools always benefit in performance comparisons with their public school counterparts due to “selective advantage” from more motivated parents and “better peer support” from students who receive support from those more motivated parents.

In addition, according to Stephanie Simon in an exposé in Reuters entitled “Special Report: Class Struggle—How Charter Schools Get Students They Want,” many charters driven by competition to produce high test scores adopt practices to screen out potentially low-performing students by assessing such measures as parental support, motivation, disciplinary history, and academic performance. Simon found charters using such strategies as:

  • Applications that are made available just a few hours a year.
  • Lengthy application forms, often printed only in English, that require student and parent essays, report cards, test scores, disciplinary records, teacher recommendations and medical records.
  • Demands that students present Social Security cards and birth certificates for their applications to be considered, even though such documents cannot be required under federal law.
  • Mandatory family interviews.
  • Assessment exams.
  • Academic prerequisites.
  • Requirements that applicants document any disabilities or special needs. The US Department of Education considers this practice illegal on the college level but has not addressed the issue for K–12 schools.

Many charters, backed by state law, specialize in serving low-income and minority children. Some of the best-known charter networks, such as KIPP, Yes Prep, Green Dot, and Success Academy, use simple application forms that ask little more than name, grade, and contact information, and actively seek out disadvantaged families. Most for-profit charter school chains also keep applications brief. But stand-alone charters, which account for more than half the total in the United States, make up their own admissions policies. Regulations are often vague, oversight is often laxand principals can get quite creative.

Confirmation of the Reuter’s report is provided by a North Carolina study that found the student population of the state’s charter schools was substantially less diverse than their public school cousins. Further, many charters put pressure on low performers to leave and never backfill the vacancies, resulting in an arbitrarily high-performing student body, addressed below. Thus, researchers argue that charters should be significantly outperforming their counterparts, and the fact that they do not demonstrates a major flaw in the charters as a “viable alternative” to public schools.

In response, a few researchers have compared the performance of students who are accepted in charter school lotteries to that of students from similar socioeconomic backgrounds who are not selected. But extrapolating the results to all charters is not warranted because only the most popular and, presumably, highest-performing schools have lotteries. Further, these studies still do not adjust for the difference in student bodies between charter schools that select their students and nonselective public schools that the rejected charter applicants attend.

A fascinating online debate about the pros and cons of charters took place between a hedge fund “reform” advocate, Dimitri Mehlhorn, and Mark Weber whose has a blog called Jersey Jazzman. Jazzman effectively dismissed many of Mehlhorn’s contentions, echoing the arguments I have been making in this article. However, one of Mehlhorn’s most vulnerable main points was not rebutted. He asserted that even though the results of charter evaluations have shown tiny effects, no one has produced better alternatives. He reasons, therefore, that small increases are better than the status quo and that these increases eventually will add up. Given Hattie’s and others’ research, that claim is patently erroneous. The Build-and-Support strategy is based on highly successful alternatives to charter school expansion. These alternatives will be fully explored in the series of companion articles How Top Performers Build-and-Support.

What the CREDO evaluation of urban schools found, which is very useful, is the existence of a significant number of high-performing charters in some urban districts and a comparable number doing terribly in other urban districts. Charters and non-charter public schools should look to the best charters and the best public schools along with their supportive structures. A charter approach should not be hyped as the only way to improve public education.

Similarly, on closer examination the much heralded success of widespread charter expansion in districts such as New Orleans and Washington, DC, turns out to be tenuous and accompanied by severe collateral damage, including resegregation and community disruption. On segregation, a 2016 National Education Policy Center report by William Mathis and Kevin Weiner, Do Choice Policies Segregate Schools? answers yes. For a full examination of the negative results of charters in these districts, see the companion article Have High-Stakes Testing and Privatization Been Effective? and the research cited there.

Charter School Stats

During the past 15 years, 2,500 charter schools have either failed or been closed —impacting 288,000 children. In 2015, there were about 6,500 operating charter schools so the number of failures represents a large amount of disruption when compared to the total number.

Richard Whitmire, a strong supporter of charter schools, estimates that about 1,200 of the existing 6,500 charter schools, or less than one-fifth, are high performers. For the health of the reform movement, Whitmire recommends that about 1,000 failed charters be shut down immediately. For facts and figures on the charter school movement in the United States documented by a pro-charter group, see The State of the Charter School Movement.

Dishonest Success Stories: The Refusal to Backfill

Many of the overhyped charter success stories turn out to be based on charter schools that enroll fewer English-language learners (ELLs) and fewer students with disabilities or learning differences than public schools. For example, in Arizona, the successful schools touted by reformers actually enroll much richer and easier-to-educate children.

This, of course, makes any comparison invalid. More telling are the many documented examples of charters that push low-performing students out and then do not backfill the openings when they leave. Their public school cousins must take all comers. Many charters claim they have the same attrition rates as public schools, but annual attrition rates are not the right metric. Even if charters and non-charters have the same annual attrition rate, if the public school must fill all the vacant slots, but the charter does not, the charters’ student body will be increasingly high performing.

The schools in these faux success stories start with, say, 100 students and then, owing mainly to academic pressure, a few grades later only have 30. At this point the schools claim high scores and elevated graduation rates or college attendance for the refined, smaller group. An opinion piece in TheWall Street Journal exposed this practice explaining that charters do it to keep test scores arbitrarily high. In a similar vein, critiques by Horace Meister on Diane Ravitch’s blog and Leo Casey on the highly respected Albert Shanker Institute blog provide ample evidence of this practice at the highly promoted Success Academy charter schools in New York City—demonstrating that claims of tremendous success are not borne out by the facts. As is the case with test-driven teacher evaluation schemes, more opinion leaders and politicians are speaking out against these questionable practices. Even charter school advocates, such as Dimitri Mehlhorn, propose requiring charter schools to backfill.

Thus, some charter advocates argue that since charters function as ostensible public schools they should be required to backfill; others argue that schools such as science magnet schools should be allowed to be selective. But, in any case, there should be no false advertising about educational outcomes. Charters that do not backfill should not be allowed to proclaim their effectiveness in raising test scores. If they want to compare test results, their students’ performance should be measured against a similar rarified group in the public schools—if the original charter cohort is only 50% of its original numbers, then those students should be compared to the top 50% of its public school counterparts. Since many charters at present do no better than public schools, the results would not be impressive. As an example, magnet schools in Los Angeles, which also benefit from parental choice and involvement and draw from the entire district, significantly outperform charter schools—even after gifted magnets are removed.

The Problematic “No Excuses” Approach

There are also many examples of charter schools trumpeting the results of a “no excuses” approach, which delivers narrow, test-driven instruction at the expense of deeper learning. Many students subjected to this harsh, boot camp regime flounder as they move on to other educational settings. See “Are @KIPP Charter Schools Pathological?,” Julian Vasquez Heilig’s critique of the much ballyhooed KIPP schools (some of which are excellent but most mediocre). Vasquez’s comments appear in a review of Jim Horn’s 2016 book about KIPP, Work Hard, Be Hard: Journeys Through “No Excuses” Teaching.

Jamaal Bowman, principal of the Cornerstone Academy for Social Action in the Bronx (New York City), laments:

Consider KIPP’s first graduating class. Ranked fifth in NYC in mathematics in the 8th grade, but only 21% graduated college. Why? Because KIPP test prepped the kids to death and the kids never built their character or learned to manage their own freedom. KIPP and many charters standardize and try to control everything from how kids walk through the halls to how they ask to go to the bathroom. But teaching and learning is organic; it is human. When are we going to ask ourselves why must poor communities of color be treated like this, whereas middle class and upper class parents would NEVER go for this treatment!

On the other hand, see KIPP’s research on the performance of their first cohorts of eighth- grade KIPP graduates. Their research found a 44% four-year college graduation rate (compared to the 29% national average) and an additional 5% who graduated from two-year institutions. This is a commendable record. Whether these statistics hold after the large scale-up of KIPP schools remains to be seen.

Jacqueline Ancess is a professor at Teachers College, Columbia University, whose research focuses on urban school reform, performance assessment, small schools, and accountability. In a post on Diane Ravitch’s blog, she describes the supposed success of some of the highly flogged charter schools:

Some charters are continually referred to as “successful” without any identification of criteria for a successful school or a successful charter school. Some charters may produce standardized test scores that are higher than “peer” schools, but when examined are not scores that indicate that students are strong readers. Success Academy Charters are regularly referred to as successful, yet their 2014 8th grade graduation rate was 44 percent! What is successful about a 44 percent graduation rate? Despite claims of high scores on NY State tests, not one Success Academy Charter school student has made the cut score for admission to NYC’s specialized high schools.

Approximately 80 percent of KIPP students who go to college do NOT graduate. What is successful about that? These test scores are Pyrrhic victories. Furthermore, let’s drop the erroneous idea the charters were supposed to be centers of innovative practice which would be adopted by other schools–there was plenty of innovation before charters and no excuses discipline policies and kindergarten suspension practices are hardly innovative or the kinds of policies and practices we want to scale up in traditional schools!

Recently, Success Academy has been the subject of media attention for its abusive teaching practices. On Diane Ravitch’s blog, a former Success Academy teacher describes why she resigned in the post “A Success Academy Teacher Quits and Explains Why.” An article in The New York Times describes how an “honored” teacher tore up a first grader’s paper in front of the class and berated the student as not being good enough. The sickening incident was captured in a short video posted online with the article. Stories about the incident generated calls for Success Academy schools to be shut down. Eva Moscowitz, the outspoken leader of Success Academy (and shamefully many of her supporters), attempted to dismiss the occurrence as a one-time lapse by the teacher. Yet even stalwart advocates of conventional school reform disagreed with this defense and pointed out that the practice was encouraged by Success Academy schools.

Another critic of the “no excuses” approach is the ex-dean of students of a New Orleans charter school. He found it extremely degrading to students. Another disgusted teacher writes two posts about a “no excuses” charter school: Part 1 and Part 2. For a distressing description of a school day in a “no excuses” Brooklyn charter, see Emily Talmadge’s essay. As a further example, see the comments posted by Emily Kaplan on the Curmudgucation blog. Kaplan was a teacher in a highly touted charter school in Boston. She resigned due to the school’s authoritarian, test-prep culture. After describing the dehumanizing and test-prep orientation of instruction, Emily Kaplan asserts:

The school is one of several Boston area “no excuses” charters that receive major accolades (and many hundreds of thousands of dollars in grants and prizes) for their high scores on state standardized tests. Supporters and leaders of these schools claim that the high scores extracted using these methods prove that the schools are “closing the achievement gap.” Look, they say, pointing to the score reports: poor black kids in Boston are outperforming rich white kids in Newton and Brookline and Wellesley.

And, indeed, this data is compelling. Its very existence teaches a powerful lesson that this country needs to hear: children of color from low-income homes can outperform wealthy white children on standardized tests, which are the metrics that we as a society have decided mean …well, something.

The problem is that standardized test scores mean very little. On the only tests that do mean a tremendous amount for these students—the SSATs—students at the school I taught at perform abysmally. Subsequently, these same middle schoolers who often dramatically outperform their wealthy white peers on these tests are not accepted in large numbers to the most selective high schools (and most of those who do struggle socially and emotionally when thrust into student bodies that aren’t upwards of 98 percent students of color); struggle to succeed academically in high school (81 percent earn high school grade-point averages below 3.0 in the first semester); and certainly do not thrive after high school, graduating from college at very low rates and, among those who don’t go to college, failing in large numbers to secure full-time employment.

For a student’s perspective on the deficiencies of “no excuses” schools, see “Control Experiment.”

Beyond the Viral Video: Inside Educators’ Emotional Debate about “No Excuses” Discipline is a very thoughtful paper by Elizabeth Green. In it, she discusses the pros and cons and underlying philosophy of the no-excuse movement. Green explains the genesis of the approach, including supporters’ belief in the primary importance of student behavior in creating classroom effectiveness. This led to intolerance for even the most minor infractions.

Green also delineates three major arguments against the approach—the establishment of order at the expense of deeper learning, the psychological harm done to students even if they test well, and the problem of strict discipline as a form of racist control. Those favoring no-excuse approaches counter that it is antiracist to insist on strict behavior if that is what it takes to provide low-income and minority children a good education, that negative consequences for breaking even minor behavioral norms actually help students, and that the best no-excuse charter schools are adapting to embed strict discipline in an overall warm, supportive atmosphere.

Green sides with those arguing against harsher version of “no excuses”:

Ultimately, I think that critics inside “no excuses” schools are right that the “no excuses” approach to teaching needs radical overhaul. The behavior first, learning second formula prescribed by broken-windows theory—and for that matter, by most American schools—can successfully build compliant, attentive students, at least in the short term. But it cannot produce students who think creatively, reason independently, and analyze critically.

She also believes it is possible for no-excuse charters to change for the better. Responding to the problematic nature of the approach, many charter schools are rethinking their commitment. These schools are attempting to embed strict discipline in a loving and supportive atmosphere and avoid privileging control over deeper learning—discipline yes, abuse no.

The theory behind the no-excuse philosophy is also forcefully challenged by Paul Tough in his 2016 book, Helping Students Succeed: What Works and Why and his article in the Atlantic “How Kids Learn Resilience.” Tough asserts that frequent punishment doesn’t work in helping the most severely traumatized students, but engagement in a welcoming atmosphere does.

Finally, Sarah Garland reports on a charter school network in North Philadelphia, Mastery Charter Schools, which is abandoning the no-excuse approach. According to Garland’s interview with Scott Gordon, CEO of Mastery Charter Schools:

Gordon worried that Mastery was in danger of confirming what many critics often charge about charter schools: That while many of them may do a good job of preparing kids to do well on standardized tests and get into college, their students founder once they arrive on campus. That the mostly white leaders of urban charter networks are, at best, out of touch with the mostly black and Hispanic communities they serve, or, at worst, guilty of a paternalistic racism that undermines their mission of uplift.

My own experience teaching in inner-city schools supports the idea that classroom control is important but should never become abusive, a barrier to deep learning, or an excuse for a non-nurturing classroom.

Undoubtedly, there are parents and teachers who are satisfied with their charter school, but we must examine the outlandish marketing and political claims that continue to describe charters as the best way to improve public education.

Debunking the Theory: Public Schools Are Not Inherently Unproductive

Originally, charters were seen as a positive alternative to public schools. They enabled energetic and like-minded teachers, parents, and educators to organize around common goals and run their own school. These schools would draw students from a broad geographic area thereby combating some of the ills of housing segregation. This was in keeping with the very successful magnet schools that operated in most urban school districts and offered parents more choices. The original idea was for charter schools to cooperate with the best non-charter public schools in order to become high-performing models for others to emulate. This had broad support. Regrettably, a more negative philosophy began to take hold and drive the charter school movement—the belief that most public schools cannot perform and should be replaced by charters or even for-profit franchisers.

This negative view has its foundation in an ideology that is hostile to government institutions. Charter school advocates view those institutions, including public schools, as inherently unproductive and resistant to change. They believe that only private-like entities such as charter schools, freed from bureaucratic constraints and responding to market forces, will produce high performance. They pursued reform under the banner of “charters, choice, and competition.”

The theory was so seductive that large numbers of academics, opinion leaders, wealthy businesspeople, foundations, and politicians became its passionate defenders. These folks believe that untouched by market forces, public institutions become paralyzed—captured by interest groups, unions, and bureaucrats who are all resistant to improvement. Thus, low-performing public schools had to be replaced by private, market-driven entities under the guise of choice and competition. In their view, only charters had the autonomy and freedom from regulations to become world-class schools. For many “reformers,” trying to improve low-performing schools was not possible or was too difficult; it was much easier to just close a low performer and replace it with a charter school.

A half century ago, Milton Friedman advocated public choice in education. His ideas were subsequently popularized by Terry Moe and John Chubb. Their work has become the intellectual argument for charter school expansion embraced by a small group of extremely wealthy businesspeople and accepted as fact by Republicans and Democrats alike. As a result, in many states Republican and Democratic governors are starving or closing public schools and increasing funds for charters.

Many charter proponents want to go further. They want to close all or a significant number of public schools and replace them with charters. This would be accomplished either through direct closure or indirectly by diverting substantial funds from public to charter schools. This occurred in New Orleans, Newark, and Washington, DC. See the companion article Have High-Stakes Testing and Privatization Been Effective? for a description of the meager results of such efforts.

Billionaire Eli Broad’s foundation is advocating converting one-half of Los Angeles schools to charters, and Broad himself is raising $500 million for the project, although he has since backed off his original plan and now wants to spend those funds on expansion of charters, magnet schools, and high-performing public schools. For a trenchant critique of Broad’s proposal, see John Thompson’s analysis “Dare Anyone Say No to Eli Broad?”

Across the country, some mayors of large cities have aggressively pushed for charter school expansion. Mayor Rahm Emanuel closed 53 schools in Chicago—mostly in low-income minority neighborhoods. Although this was ostensibly done for financial reasons (while providing over $100 million to a private university to build a football stadium supported by his wealthy donors), he called for 60 additional charters with many using the same buildings as the schools targeted for closure. Emanuel was following the strategy of New York mayor Bloomberg and superintendent Klein who supported charter expansion while closing non-charter public schools. Many of these actions were promoted by billionaire hedge fund managers, business acolytes, and the charter school industry, which wielded enormous influence through political donations and PR campaigns.

The current mayor of New York, Bill de Blasio, is under incessant attack by these same groups for daring to attempt to use scarce funds to improve the regular public schools. They want him to use the funds to support charter expansion. To compound de Blasio’s troubles, New York governor Andrew Cuomo is supporting major charter school expansion and cutting funds for regular schools, refusing to provide New York City with court-ordered funding.For an excellent account of these events, see Alan Singer’s article “Despite Big Problems Charters Attract Hedge Fund Support and Presidential Candidates Hungry for Dollars.” Democratic governor Dannel Malloy of Connecticut also has been heavily influenced by charter school advocates to the detriment of public schools.

There is only one problem with the “public sphere can’t deliver” creed—the theory that privatization increases performance does not hold up. In the broader context, the same ideas brought us financial deregulation and the resulting financial meltdown, brutal private prisons, and widespread corporate pollution. It also ignores examples of stellar public performance. Consider the remarkable contributions of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, local fire departments, or DARPA, the defense department think tank that has one of the most incredible records of innovation in human history. DARPA developed the Internet, nanotechnology, cloud computing, the research behind Siri, digital libraries, and autonomous vehicles. The Entrepreneurial State by Marianna Mazzucato extols the value of government entrepreneurship.

In their recent article “The Public School Advantage: Why Public Schools Outperform Private Schools,” Christopher and Sarah Lubienski debunk the “public choice theory” that has been used to justify dismantling public schools and replacing them with charters. The Lubienskis reviewed vast student databases and found, to their own surprise, that public schools outperformed private schools and charters when comparable students were matched. Of course, this was contrary to received opinion and what was predicted by public choice theory. These findings are consistent with the research I have cited above.

The Lubienskis offered several reasons why this was so. Certain societal enterprise is of a public nature and better performed by a public institution that is staffed by dedicated professionals committed to broader social purposes, and subject to democratic control. Market forces and parental choice actually constrain instructional innovation because of charters’ need to attract students based on average test scores and the resulting narrowing of the curriculum and inordinate time devoted to test prep. Many charter schools overspent on marketing and high-priced CEOs, and the idea that public schools could not innovate without competitive external pressure turned out to be false. Paul Horton also wrote a perceptive essay on why market-driven reform does not produce improved educational outcomes as did Kern Alexander, who stressed the lack of useful information parents receive before they choose a school and debunked “efficient market” theories used to justify charters and vouchers. Andy Rotherham, a major supporter of reform initiatives, wrote an article arguing that market forces often cause detrimental choices. Diane Ravitch summarized findings from extensive research that show private firms taking over public functions often cause harm by putting profits above service. Moreover, widespread charter expansion often results in considerable resegregation.

Finally, one of the main justifications for charters has been that they are responding to market forces and parental choices. This turns out to be largely fallacious. It is not free market forces that are in effect, but government policies that favor privately managed charters over publicly run schools by closing neighborhood schools and replacing them with a charter. It is not even true that charters relieved of government regulation will be more efficient and spend less on administration. According to a summary of the research by Gary Miron, one the leading scholars on charter schools, they spend more. Nor do charters give more bang for the buck. A study in New Mexico found that the state spends more on charters without the charters outperforming their public school counterparts.

Further, what choice do parents really have if their local school is closed or neglected? Even if they are satisfied with their local school or would prefer its revitalization rather than applying to a charter, the only real choice parents are given is the uncertain chance to enroll their child in a charter school.

Minimal Accountability for Fraud, Mismanagement, or Low Performance

Despite the fact that most for-profit charters perform abysmally, for-profit charter operators who made substantial political contributions have enjoyed political support in many states. One example is Ohio, where for many years charter owners successfully lobbied the legislature and Governor Kasich against any effective financial transparency and performance accountability. As a result, a shocking amount of fraud, mismanagement, and self-dealing has taken place. William Phillis, a retired deputy commissioner of education in Ohio, offered his critique on Diane Ravitch’s blog. To turn things around, others have proposed 10 ideas for correcting the rampant corruption of Ohio’s Wild West era.

In late 2015, a reasonable accountability measure supported by the governor was finally passed, but closure of the large numbers of existing low-performing charters still remained problematic. An article in the mainstream Columbus Dispatch castigated charter lobbyist’s attempts to water down the accountability provisions.

In a telling postscript to the disastrous performance by Ohio charter schools, just before he resigned as US secretary of education Arne Duncan awarded charters in Ohio a whopping $71 million. So much for rewarding schools for high performance.

Florida’s experience with charters did not fare better. According to one report:

One person who has paid close attention to the spread of charter schools in Florida is Sue Legg. As a public school teacher, college professor and an administrator of state school assessment contracts at the University of Florida for over 30 years, Legg has had a ringside seat to the Florida charter school circus. In a series of reports produced for the Florida chapter of the League of Women Voters, Legg revealed the many ways charter schools in Florida spread political corruption and financial opportunism while doing little to improve the academic performance of their students.

Her year-long 2014 study, conducted in 28 Florida counties, found a 20 percent closure rate for charters due to financial problems or poor academic performance—a closure rate that has now increased to over 40 percent. The charter schools studied generally did not perform better than public schools, and tended to be more racially segregated. A significant number of these charters operated for-profit and operated in church related facilities.

The failure of Florida’s charter schools has been well documented. The Sun Sentinel published an excellent exposé, and an investigation by the Miami Herald found that the state lost $70 million on charters that were forced to close. The lost capital came from public education funds. John Romano wrote a devastating article in the Tampa Bay Times about the double-dealing in the legislature related to many Florida charter schools.

In 2014, a comparable yearlong investigation of Michigan’s charter schools by the Detroit Free Press decried the charters’ failure to be transparent, accountable, or demonstrably better than Michigan’s public schools. Reporters concluded that Michigan charters, of which 80% were for-profit, got worse results than traditional public schools, drained $1 billion a year from their public counterparts, and were never held accountable for waste, fraud, abuse, or poor outcomes. The Chicago Sun-Times reported similar results for charter schools in Illinois. Finally, The Salt Lake Tribune castigated charter school fraud and low performance by some well-connected charter operators. The editorial begins:

A handful of private companies have banked more than $68 million from Utah taxpayers over the past three years. The money is delivered through no-bid contracts by people who don’t work for government, but the companies are often connected to political officials.

Another ploy used by a growing number of charter schools and franchises is to acquire multiple sponsors to avoid any real accountability or to hop to another authorizer to avoid closure or strong accountability.

There is the instructive example of stalwart “reformer” Kevin Huffman. He was commissioner of education in Tennessee from 2011 to 2015. To his credit, Huffman tried to close the worst school in the state—a virtual school operated by K–12, Inc., a for-profit company working nationwide. Through political donations and extensive lobbying, K–12, Inc., was able to fend off any attempts to hold it accountable. Sadly, most virtual schools, including K–12, Inc., have been nothing short of an educational disaster. In California, the San Jose Mercury News also exposed the disastrous record of K–12 virtual schools in the state and how they exploited California’s charter and charitable laws.

In 2015, the Center for Media and Democracy issued a report castigating the federal government for a lack of oversight and financial accountability. The report claimed that millions of dollars in expenditures went to ghost schools that never opened. State accountability boards had been captured by the charter industry, which refused to collect performance and financial probity data under the guise of “flexibility.”

Finally, at the local level, although charters claim they are public institutions, many resist transparency and complaint procedures leaving disgruntled parents with nowhere to go to register problems.

Many charter advocates have understood that fraud, low performance, and lack of effective accountability could kill the charter school movement and have supported corrective action. Some states, such as California, have enacted a much more rigorous charter accountability system. In addition, under the leadership of Jed Wallace the California Charter School Association has been advocating for stricter accountability for low-performing charters and for questionable financial practices. It has also sponsored legislation to restrict for-profit charters in the state.

However, the California Charter School Association and other charter advocates have been extremely aggressive in promoting charter expansion, limiting the ability of local boards of education to deny charter formations when deemed harmful, and supporting pro-charter legislators and board members. For a discussion of the problematical charter situation in California, see “Failing the Test,” a series of articles on Capital & Main, and a blog post about the frustrations a local district encountered in opposing the creation of a franchise-sponsored charter.

Charters Drain Funds from Non-Charter Public Schools

Many charters, even if performing adequately, drain substantial resources from neighborhood public schools or serve as a vehicle for massive privatization schemes. The end result has been a two-tiered and more racially segregated educational system. This was the experience in Newark and some of the other heavily privatized districts such as Denver, Milwaukee, Washington, DC, and New Orleans. In these districts, performance gaps between low-income and minority students and their more privileged peers increased sharply.

Charters drain funds from public school districts in several important ways. First, at the state and national levels funds for public schools have been reduced while funds for charters have been increased. For example, in Indiana from 2009 to 2013, public school funding was cut by over $3 billion, charter funding was increased by $539 million, vouchers by $248 million, and virtual schools by $143 million. Students who attend public schools account for about 94% of Indiana students, yet they took a huge hit, while the other seven percent gained over $900 million.

Second, charters and their more pernicious cousin, vouchers, attract many students who were previously attending private schools paid for by their parents. Public school budgets must then be charged for these additional students.

Third, local districts can reach a tipping point if too many charters are created in their boundaries since districts have fixed costs and at some point must make drastic cuts in services to adjust. This is precisely what happened in Detroit. Schools are akin to a public utility, and it has long been recognized that it is extremely inefficient to create competing organizations to deliver services such as electricity or public transportation.

Moreover, too often public school funds get diverted from instruction to pay for dubious expenses ranging from a charter’s high-priced CEO to extensive marketing, real estate manipulations, and a significant amount of fraud and embezzlement in the absence of effective accountability.

Finally, there are numerous examples of highly successful public schools jeopardized or forced to close by the unnecessary creation or co-location of a charter. For example, a stellar school in North Carolina was closed for lack of financial support after a charter was created to compete with it.

In Massachusetts, a local board succumbed to pressure and created a charter high school to compete with Brockton High School, one of the most successful turnaround high schools in the country. The recently elected Republican governor of Massachusetts, Charlie Baker, has proposed a hefty expansion of charter schools that will require diverting funds from public schools. His proposals created a severe backlash in Boston. Why anyone would jeopardize the fantastic success of education in Massachusetts, one of world’s top performers, by dismantling the Build-and-Support strategy is beyond comprehension—a triumph of a discredited ideology over reality.

Charters and Crony Capitalism Create Sweetheart Deals

Finally, the combined lobbying power of corporations and charters leads to questionable sweetheart deals—bonds for real estate where the public picks up the tab for land acquisition and construction that are ultimately owned by the charter’s sponsor, not the public. The taxpayers also pay for high-priced fees and the interest on these bonds. The accumulated debt owed by public funds is substantial. According to Bruce Baker:

Charter school operators use public tax dollars to buy land and facilities that were originally purchased with other public dollars … and at the end of it all, the assets are in private hands! Even more ludicrous is that the second purchase incurred numerous fees and administrative expenses, and the debt associated with that second purchase likely came with a relatively high interest rate because—well—revenue bonds paid for by charter school lease payments are risky. Or so the rating agencies say.

In a major 2015 report by Bruce Baker and Gary Miron, The Business of Charter Schooling: Understanding the Policies That Charter Operators Use for Financial Benefit,the authors chronicle the multiple ways charter organizations siphon taxpayer funds without any benefit to students or the public. A summary of the report lists four major conclusions:

  1. A substantial share of public expenditure intended for the delivery of direct educational services to children is being extracted inadvertently or intentionally for personal or business financial gain, creating substantial inefficiencies;
  2. Public assets are being unnecessarily transferred to private hands, at public expense, risking the future provision of “public” education;
  3. Charter school operators are growing highly endogenous, self-serving private entities built on funds derived from lucrative management fees and rent extraction, which further compromise the future provision of “public” education; and
  4. Current disclosure requirements make it unlikely that any related legal violations, ethical concerns, or merely bad policies and practices are not realized until clever investigative reporting, whistleblowers, or litigation brings them to light.

As Jeff Bryant, one reviewer of the report, commented:

In one of the more bizarre schemes the authors examine, charter operators will use third-party corporations to purchase buildings and land from the public school district itself, so taxpayer dollars are used to purchase property from the public. Thus, the public ends up paying twice for the school, and the property becomes an asset of a private corporation. In other examples, charter operators will set up leasing agreements and lucrative management fees between multiple entities that end up extracting resources, which might otherwise be dedicated to direct services for children.

Another example of questionable practice is the phony formula Texas uses to reimburse charters. Through legislative manipulation, the state now pays large charters and charter chains about $1,000 more per child than comparable public schools due to the way it classifies the charters. An article by John Savage in the Texas Observer states: “If school districts ‘were funded like charters,’ public schools would cost the state more than $4.7 billion a year extra.” Finally, there is the obvious point that the vast sums being spent on charters could have been devoted to helping the 94% of students attending public schools.

Charter Schools Should Be Nonprofit, Accountable, and Fully Transparent

The horrible record of for-profit virtual schools shows what happens when we allow profit making to drive an educational institution. These schools ignored quality to increase the bottom line and were an educational disaster for the students they pledged to serve. For this reason, some states and nations allow only nonprofit charters. If this became standard practice, many questionable financial and political dealings would be avoided. Unfortunately, the number of for-profit management charter organizations and fronts for business interests is growing, with an increasing impact in some states. Clearly, charters are no longer grassroots, mom-and-pop organizations. Ominously, the for-profit charter school sector has run into major problems, and failures are occurring across the nation. For a list of such disasters, see “These Charter Schools Tried to Turn Public Education Into Big Business. They Failed.”

In any case, given the large amount of fraud and their lack of success, charters should be required to share the facts about their operation. Charter advocates like to say they are “public schools,” but many then resist transparency and accountability provisions. And finally, we need to stop the “crony capitalism” that allows huge profits for private entities underwritten by the public purse such as social impact bonds and real estate purchases for charters funded by public dollars.

Is Replacing Neighborhood Schools with Charters Worth the Risk?

The question of charter expansion becomes critical when a neighborhood school is slated for closure to be replaced by a charter. The trade-off should be framed as follows: based on the evidence, closing a public school for a charter will improve performance about one-fourth of the time and will make it worse about one-fourth of the time. Thus, the one-in-four chance of an improved school must be weighed against the massive dislocations local school closures cause families, students (e.g., long bus rides or walking through alien turf), and communities. In addition, the very real chance of worsening school performance one-quarter of the time must be factored in. Further, widespread charter expansion can reach a financial tipping point crippling the school district’s ability to improve the remaining open public schools. One underreported consequence of charter expansion is that the remaining schools must rely increasingly on late placements and substitutes, which substantially harms student performance. So even if some students are able to attend a successful charter school, many more are stranded in the remaining starved public ones. The experience in Newark exemplifies this tragedy:

What parent would agree to a policy that benefits one of her children but seriously damages one or two of her other kids? The Prize [a recently published book about Newark] does an invaluable service in helping to explain how true believers in top-down reform may or may not have benefitted many of the 30 percent of students headed for charters. They did so, however, by harming the schools serving the majority of poor children. They created even more intense concentrations of children from extreme poverty and trauma; they took failing schools and made them worse.

Stated that way, the widely advocated policy prescription of replacing low-performing schools with charters looks horribly off the mark. Of course, if there are stringent controls to assure that only the better performing charters (determined by legitimate measures and practices) can replace a low-performing public school, then the odds of increased student achievement improve. Whether the increased benefit to the individual student who qualifies for a high-performing charter justifies the larger number of students who are left behind and neglected is a tough question each community must address.

An Unsustainable Business Model

A last point. Many charters rely on younger teachers with no union protections, work them extremely hard, impose stultifying working conditions, and as a consequence suffer from large turnover and burnout. Many reformers falsely believe that most veteran teachers are incompetent or over the hill and can profitably be replaced by energetic neophytes. Even if it were true, which it is not, the odds of long-term success are questionable for replacement strategies that rely on low-cost neophytes with high turnover. In an insightful article, Andy Hargreaves argues that England has followed this questionable model (which he defines as a “business capital model”) to its detriment; to its benefit, Scotland has followed a longer-term Build-and-Support model.

Summing Up the Many Problems with Charter Schools

An exhaustive summary of the research supporting these many criticisms of charters is found in a report by the National Education Policy Center (NEPC) that eviscerates the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools 2014 document Separating Fact & Fiction: What You Need to Know About Charter Schools. This NEPC document attempted to rebut what the Charter School Alliance labeled as 21 myths underlying objections to charter schools, but as delineated in the NEPC report the alliance document’s arguments could not stand scrutiny and were invalidated by the vast majority of research studies. NEPC awarded the document its annual Bunkum Award for shoddy research.

On his blog Cloaking Inequity, Julian Vasquez Heilig also has compiled an extensive list of the most powerful research that identifies the perils of charter schools and summarizes the findings.

The public is becoming increasingly aware of and concerned about the problems with charter schools. To quote from a 2016 survey:

Voters overwhelmingly favor charter school reform proposals. Large majorities of voters back proposals to strengthen transparency and accountability, teacher training and qualifications, implement anti-fraud measures, ensure high-need students are served and making sure neighborhood public schools are not adversely affected.

Charters, contrary to reform promises, are not destined to become the holy grail of school improvement. They should return to their original useful mission of working in partnership with public schools to become community lighthouse schools. As an example, see the article about Uncommon Schools by Richard Whitmire. The best charters have pioneered innovations such as videotaping teacher lessons for purposes of discussion, strong principal instructional leadership, and greater school site flexibility. But we must reject for-profit chains siphoning off substantial public funds for high-priced CEOs and charters serving as fronts for lucrative real estate deals. We must also reject ideological charters that are used as stalking horses to replace public education, and we must insist that charter school leaders eschew their role in wholesale privatization plans. This is the main argument of A Smarter Charter: Finding What Works for Charter Schools and Public Education, an insightful book written by Richard D. Kahlenberg and Halley Potter. See also Charters: The Illusion of Change, an informative 13-minute film in the same vein, and Arthur Camins’s eloquent plea, warning policymakers to be wary of “choice” arguments.

Recent Developments

10/15/2016 Sky-high attrition rates for Boston’s charter high-schools. https://deutsch29.wordpress.com/2016/09/22/why-massachusetts-voters-should-think-twice-about-charter-expansion/

10/15/2016 From Diane Ravitch’s blog. Parent Group: A Charter School is Ruining Our Neighborhood School. https://dianeravitch.net/2016/09/21/new-jersey-parent-a-charter-school-is-ruining-our-neighborhood-public-school/

9/14/2016 A compilation of articles demonstrating the problems with charter schools. http://www.scoop.it/t/charter-choice-closer-look

9/14/2016 The sad story of how one wealthy family made massive political donations to block charter accountability in Michigan https://dianeravitch.net/2016/09/06/outrage-how-the-devos-family-paid-the-michigan-gop-to-block-charter-accountability/

9/14/2016 KIPP charter schools found that large numbers of their graduates were not doing well in college and too many were failing to graduate. KIPP made significant changes to improve subsequent college performance which bore fruit–better tracking from eighth grade, transparency about college graduation rates, support mechanisms in college, and changes in curriculum and instruction. http://www.chalkbeat.org/posts/us/2016/09/12/how-kipp-learned-the-truth-about-its-students-college-completion-and-inspired-others-to-do-the-same/#.V9b2lYWcFPZ

9/1/2016 Private prisons have been a disaster–cutting costs causes shoddy management and hardship to prisoners. https://dianeravitch.net/2016/08/19/the-failure-of-prison-privatization/

9/1/2016  Another example of financial irregularities closing a charter school causing disruption–this time in Livermore, California. http://www.mercurynews.com/2016/08/22/east-bay-hundreds-flee-charter-schools-district-braces-for-influx/ and the Pennsylvania auditor questioning suspect charter school lease payments. http://www.post-gazette.com/news/education/2016/08/03/Charter-school-payments-draw-scrutiny-from-Pennsylvania-auditor-general-Eugene-DePasquale/stories/201608030189 For a comprehensive view of the problems caused by regulatory gaps in California, see the article by Carol Burris, https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/answer-sheet/wp/2016/09/09/how-messed-up-is-californias-charter-school-sector-you-wont-believe-how-much/ which is the first of four articles about charter problems in California.

9/1/2016 Julian Heilig comments on the resolutions against widespread charter expansion passed by the national NAACP and the Movement for Black Lives, a group of 50 advocacy organizations, and provides ten important comments about the charter school debate, all consistent with the above article. http://www.progressive.org/pss/10-things-know-about-charter-school-debate

9/1/2016 Los Angeles Unified magnet schools (non-charter choice public schools) continue to outscore charters in the latest 2016 state test results. (Some of the magnets are gifted schools but even when they are removed magnets still significantly out-perform charters) http://laschoolreport.com/lausd-magnets-outscore-charters-on-state-tests/?utm_content=bufferac9c0&utm_medium=social&utm_source=twitter.com&utm_campaign=buffer

9/1/2016 National Labor Relations Board finds that charter schools are not public schools. https://dianeravitch.net/2016/08/30/its-official-nlbr-says-charter-schools-are-not-public-schools/

8/4/2016 A California report finds that at least one out of five charter schools in the state actively exclude low-performing students. https://edsource.org/2016/report-charges-many-charter-schools-exclude-children-in-violation-of-the-law/567622

8/4/2016 Texas study finds no effect on test scores and earnings of charter school students lower than their public school counterparts. http://kevanharris.princeton.edu/sites/default/files/wdobbie/files/texas_charters.pdf

7/30/2016 Another study, this time from Michigan, showing that proliferation of charter schools has harmed the remaining public schools. http://www.metrotimes.com/Blogs/archives/2016/07/18/study-the-proliferation-of-charter-schools-in-michigan-hurt-traditional-districts; http://www.education.msu.edu/epc/library/papers/documents/WP51-Which-Districts-Get-Into-Financial-Trouble-Arsen.pdf and an interview Jeff Bryant with an author: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/answer-sheet/wp/2016/07/15/how-charter-schools-in-michigan-have-hurt-traditional-public-schools-new-research-finds/

Bryant’s quote from the interview: “We saw very significant and large impacts of charter penetration on district fund balances for different thresholds, whether there were 15, 20 or 25 percent of the students going to charter schools. That was really striking. At every one of those thresholds, the higher the charter penetration, the higher the adverse impact on district finances. They’re big jumps, and they’re all very significant statistically. What’s clear is that when the percentage gets up to the neighborhood of 20 percent or so, these are sizeable adverse impacts on district finances.”

7/30/2016 Further evidence of the disastrous performance of virtual schools, this time from Georgia. http://www.myajc.com/news/news/local-education/massive-online-school-serves-students-inexpensivel/nr3t3/

7/30/2016 Some more articles about the lower performance of charter schools compared to the public school counterparts. Duval County, Florida http://www.firstcoastnews.com/news/charter-school-test-scores-show-many-scored-below-duval-district-schools/257140953; Georgia https://scsc.georgia.gov/sites/scsc.georgia.gov/files/related_files/site_page/GOSA%20SCSC%20Report%20FINAL-%202016%20R.pdf; Detroit http://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/29/us/for-detroits-children-more-school-choice-but-not-better-schools.html?ref=todayspaper&_r=0; and Denver http://www.alternet.org/education/new-education-reform-model-should-be-warning-sign

7/30/2016 Jeff Bryant refers to a New York Times article about dire results when public services such as prisons are contracted out to private equity firms and lists similar problems with equity supported charter schools. A recent article in the New York Times looked at the “dire effects” when private equity firms gain some control over public services like emergency care and firefighting. The reporter should have added education to the list. http://educationopportunitynetwork.org/are-public-schools-and-private-equity-a-bad-mix/

7/30/2016 William Mathis and Tina Trujillo have edited a massive compilation of the research demonstrating the severe problems with market-based reforms, Learning from the Federal Market-Based Reforms; Lessons for ESSA (2016) The book has twenty-eight chapters in five sections.

  • The Foundations of Market-Based Reforms;
  • Test-Based Sanctions: What the Evidence Says
  • False Promises
  • Effective and Equitable Reforms
  • Lessons for the Every Student Succeeds Act

The research and examples in the book are further support for many of the claims and research provided in this website.

7/30/2016 Mercedes Schneider’s book on the failures of the schools choice movement is now available in paperback. School Choice; The End of Public Education (2016)

To quote from an announcement of the book: Proponents of market-driven education reform view vouchers and charters as superior to local-board-run, community-based public schools. However, the author of this timely volume argues that there is no clear research supporting this view. In fact, she claims there is increasing evidence of charter mismanagement–with public funding all-too-often being squandered while public schools are being closed or consolidated. Tracing the origins of vouchers and charters in the United States, this book examines the push to ”globally compete” with education systems in countries such as China and Finland. It documents issues important to the school choice debate, including the impoverishment of public schools to support privatized schools, the abandonment of long-held principles of public education, questionable disciplinary practices, and community disruption. School Choice: The End of Public Education? is essential reading for anyone seeking a deeper understanding of the past and future of public education in America.https://www.amazon.com/School-Choice-End-Public-Education/dp/080775725X/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1468030602&sr=1-1 This book makes a similar case for the problems of schools choice as my article above.

7/30/2016. Further support for the failure of for-profit educational efforts has just been thoroughly documented in Samuel Abrams 2016 book, Education and the Commercial Mindset. He tells the instructive story of Edison, founded on the belief that public schools were so inefficient that applying the best business practices would save enough money to allow both high profits and high performance if private companies managed them. Chris Whittle, the super-salesman of ChannelOne fame (in return for TV’s schools agreed to have their students watch a slickly produced news show with commercials–Channel One eventually went belly-up due to negative evaluations and educator resistance), convinced foundations and the investment community to sink hundreds of millions of dollars in such a private management scheme. In the 1990’s the company took off with a bang, hired high-profile executives, and secured contracts to manage schools in such places as Philadelphia and Baltimore.

Contrary to promises the company produced no better and, in many cases, worse results than comparable public schools, alienated the communities they were in, narrowed the curriculum for test preparation, and couldn’t even keep order in many of their schools. Losses forced the company  to keep borrowing to stay alive. This did not stop Edison from providing top salaries and perks for its executives and spending large amounts on advertising and marketing. Edison eventually lost all but a few of its management contracts. By 2013 after being taken private, the remnant which had been reduced to a shell was sold for a pittance. Investors along the way lost most of their investment. The book also describes a similar fate for other Educational Management Organizations (EMOs) especially the on-line virtual academies referred to above in the Article. He also gives chapter and verse on the rise and fall of for-profit schools in Sweden as mentioned above.

Abrams argues that such a demise was inevitable. He quotes economic researchers who claim that  privatizing some services are easily monitored such as school busing or constructing buildings. Other services, however, where there is a mismatch of information or clout, run into difficulty in assuring quality service. Clients or contracting government entities in privatized prisons, elderly homes, or especially schools don’t have the power of correction or expertise to tell if the private company is cutting corners to increase returns or executive pay or if the service such as education students are receiving is worthwhile.

Abrams also provides a chapter on the non-profit Charter Management Organizations (CMOs) especially KIPP schools. As stated above, he finds that some are very good and others are spotty. He contends that even the best cannot be scaled because they rely on large foundation support, teachers who are unsustainably over-worked (and leave at much higher rates than the public school counterparts), and students and parents who are willing to endure a harsh “no excuses” management style. He also confirms the point I raised that CMOs can control who they accept,  many don’t backfill when underperforming students drop-out leaving a smaller, higher achieving remnant, benefit from a more committed student body and their parents which makes comparisons difficult, and since they live or die by test-scores narrow the curriculum and spend inordinate amounts of time on test-preparation which harms children later in high-school and college.

Finally, he shows how Finland took a different path. They raised teacher pay, improved teacher training and autonomy, used sampling strategies for test assessment instead of wide-spread testing, and provided a broad liberal arts education. Unlike Sweden, whose PISA results declined substantially after adopting privatization measures, Finland improved from mediocre results to become one of the top countries in the PISA assessments.

7/30/2016 In the culmination of the shoddy story of the on-line, for-profit virtual school K-12’s fraudulent behavior exposed by the San Jose Mercury, Kamela Harris, California’s Attorney General, cracked down on the outfit for multiple frauds including falsified records and overstating student performance and secured a $168.5 million settlement with the beleaguered company. http://www.mercurynews.com/california/ci_30105819/california-attorney-general-probe-leads-168-5-million

10/15/2016 More evidence of problems with Ohio’s charter schools. http://www.realcleareducation.com/articles/2016/09/19/ohio_charter_schools_terrible_horrible_1308.html

7/30/2016 Senator Sherrod Brown from Ohio weighed in on Ohio’s failure to police its charter school sector. https://greatschoolwars.files.wordpress.com/2016/06/sherrod-letter.pdf

7/30/2016 Finally, after being completely shut out of qualifying for New York’s elite high schools for two years, a few Success Academy graduates (of a rarified cohort due to high attrition rates) get accepted. http://www.nydailynews.com/new-york/education/success-charter-kids-nab-elite-nyc-high-school-slots-article-1.2677005

BBS Companion Articles

The Big Picture
Have High-Stakes Testing and Privatization Been Effective?
How Top Performers Build-and-Support
Ground Efforts in Unassailable Research
Provide Engaging Broad-Based Liberal Arts Curriculum
Provide High-Quality Instruction
Build Teams and Focus on Continuous Improvement
Provide Adequate School Funding
Lessons Learned from Successful Districts
Exemplary Models of Build-and-Support

Reference Notes

Hattie, J. (2008). Visible Learning: A Synthesis of Over 800 Meta-Analyses Relating to Achievement. London: Routledge.

Charters Do Not Perform Better Than Their Public School Counterparts
ProPublica. (2014). Evaluating Charter Schools. http://www.propublica.org/series/evaluating-charter-schools See also Center for Popular Democracy. (2015, Apr). The Tip of the Iceberg: Charter School Vulnerabilities to Waste, Fraud, and Abuse.https://populardemocracy.org/news/tip-iceberg-charter-school-vulnerabilities-waste-fraud-and-abuse

Center for Research on Education Outcomes. (2015). National Charter School Study. Stanford University. http://urbancharters.stanford.edu/summary.php

Miron, G., Mathis, W. J., & Welner, K. G. (2015, Feb 23). Separating Fact & Fiction: What You Need to Know About Charter Schools. http://nepc.colorado.edu/thinktank/review-separating-fact-and-fiction See also Maul, A. (2015, Apr 27). Urban Charter School Study 2015. http://nepc.colorado.edu/thinktank/review-urban-charter-school

Finn, C. E., Jr., & Manno, B. V. (2015, Summer). A Progress Report on Charter Schools. National Affairs, 24. Hertog Foundation. http://www.nationalaffairs.com/publications/detail/a-progress-report-on-charter-schools

Rubinstein, G. (2015, Oct 5). Do Charter Schools Outperform Public Schools in New York City? https://garyrubinstein.wordpress.com/2015/10/05/do-charter-schools-outperform-public-schools-in-new-york-city/

Center for Research on Educational Outcomes. (2015, Jul 22). Charter School Performance in Texas. https://credo.stanford.edu/

In Perspective. Charter Schools in Perspective: A Guide to Research. http://www.in-perspective.org/pages/a-guide-to-research

Epple, M., Romano, R., & Zimmer, R. (2015, Jun). Charter Schools: A Survey of Research on Their Characteristics and Effectiveness. National Bureau of Economic Research. http://www.nber.org/papers/w21256

Center for Research on Education Outcomes. (2015). National Charter School Study. Stanford University. http://urbancharters.stanford.edu/summary.php

Jeong Shin, H., Fuller, B., & Dauter, L. (2015, Dec 2). Differing Effects from Diverse Charter Schools: Uneven Student Selection and Achievement Growth in Los Angeles. https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/2650330-FINAL-Berkeley-L-a-Charter-Report-December-2015-2.html See also a review of the report by Blume, H. (2015, Dec 21). Students at Charters Start Off Higher Academically by Some Also Learn Faster, Study Finds. Los Angeles Times. http://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-ln-charter-students-start-off-higher-20151221-story.html

Dynarski, S. (2015, Nov 20). Urban Charter Schools Often Succeed. Suburban Ones Often Don’t. The New York Times.http://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/22/upshot/a-suburban-urban-divide-in-charter-school-success-rates.html?rref=upshot

Hattie, J. (2011). Visible Learning for Teachers: Maximizing Impact on Learning. London: Routledge

Whitehurst, G. J. (2009, Oct.). Don’t Forget Curriculum. Brookings. http://www.brookings.edu/research/papers/2009/10/14-curriculum-whitehurst

Simon, S. (2013, Feb 15). Special Report: Class Struggle: How Charter Schools Get Students They Want. http://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-charters-admissions-idUSBRE91E0HF20130216

Forest, D. (2016, Jan 6). Charter Schools in NC Less Diverse Than Traditional Schools, Report Shows. The News & Observer. http://www.newsobserver.com/news/local/education/article53438435.html

Ravitch, D. (2015, Dec 3). John Thompson: The Failed Claims for Market-Driven Reforms. http://dianeravitch.net/2015/12/03/john-thompson-the-failed-claims-for-market-driven-reforms/

Weber, M. (2015, Nov 11). Charter Schools, An Exchange: Part VI (Final). http://jerseyjazzman.blogspot.com/2015/11/charter-schools-exchange-part-vi-final.html

National Education Policy Center. (2016, Mar 31). Do Choice Policies Segregate Schools? http://nepc.colorado.edu/newsletter/2016/03/choice-segregation

Charter School Stats
Persson, J. (2015, Sep 22). CMD Publishes Full List of Closed Charter Schools (with Interactive Map). PR Watch: The Center for Media and Democracy. http://www.prwatch.org/news/2015/09/12936/cmd-publishes-full-list-2500-closed-charter-schools

Whitmire, R. (2015, Oct 2). 5 Ways to Stop Bad Charters from Derailing Education Reform. https://www.the74million.org/article/whitmire-5-ways-to-stop-bad-charters-from-derailing-education-reform

Mead, S., Mitchel, A. L., & Rotherham, A. J. (2015, Sep 10). The State of the Charter School Movement. Bellwether Education Partners. http://bellwethereducation.org/publication/state-charter-school-movement

Dishonest Success Stories: The Refusal to Backfill
Glass, G. V. (2016, Feb 17). They Recruit, They Skim, They Flunk Out the Weak … They Are Arizona’s Top Charter Schools. http://ed2worlds.blogspot.com/2016/02/they-recruit-they-skim-they-flunk-out.html

Lyles, P., & Clark, D. (2015, Feb 2). Keeping Precious Charter-School Seats Filled. The Wall Street Journal. http://www.wsj.com/articles/princess-lyles-and-dan-clark-keeping-precious-charter-school-seats-filled-1422923960 See also Brown, E. (2015, Apr 10). New York City Charters Leave Thousands of Seats Unfilled Despite Exploding Demand, Study Finds. The Washington Post. http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/local/wp/2015/04/10/new-york-city-charters-leave-thousands-of-seats-unfilled-despite-exploding-demand-study-finds/

Meister, H. (2015, Dec 17). The Myth of Charter School “Success”: Hillary Was Right. http://dianeravitch.net/2015/12/17/horace-meister-the-myth-of-charter-school-success-hillary-was-right/

Casey, L. (2016, Feb 18). Student Attrition and ”Backfilling” at Success Academy Charter Schools: What Student Enrollment Patterns Tell Us. http://www.shankerinstitute.org/blog/student-attrition-and-backfilling-success-academy-charter-schools-what-student-enrollment

Strauss, V. (2015, Nov 8). Hillary Clinton: Most Charter Schools “Don’t Take the Hardest-to-Teach Kids, or, If They Do, They Don’t Keep Them.” The Washington Post.https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/answer-sheet/wp/2015/11/08/hillary-clinton-most-charter-schools-dont-take-the-hardest-to-teach-kids-or-if-they-do-they-dont-keep-them/

Weber, M. (2015, Nov 11). Charter Schools, An Exchange: Part VI (Final). http://jerseyjazzman.blogspot.com/2015/11/charter-schools-exchange-part-vi-final.html

Warhaftig, A. (2015, Oct 12). Why Is It So Hard to Believe Good News About Public Schools? http://blogs.edweek.org/edweek/on_california/2015/10/why_is_it_so_hard_to_believe_good_news_about_public_schools.html.

The Problematic “No Excuses” Approach
Vasquez Heilig, J. (2015, Nov 3). Review of Journeys: Are @KIPP Charter Schools Pathological? http://cloakinginequity.com/2015/11/03/review-of-journeys-are-kipp-charter-schools-pathological/?utm_content=buffer2e8c7&utm_medium=social&utm_source=twitter.com&utm_campaign=buffer See also Rubinstein, G (2016, Jan 22). Whatever Happened to KIPP? https://garyrubinstein.wordpress.com/2016/01/22/whatever-happened-to-kipp/

Horn, J. (2016). Work Hard, Be Hard: Journeys Through “No Excuses” Teaching. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield.

Naison, M. (2015, Feb 24). Bronx Principal Jamaal Bowman Debunks Common Charter School Myths. http://withabrooklynaccent.blogspot.com/2015/02/bronx-principal-jamaal-bowman-debunks.html

KIPP. (2013). The Promise of College Completion: 2013 Alumni Data Update. http://www.kipp.org/results/college-completion-report/2013-alumni-data-update

Ravitch, D. (2015, Dec 3). Jacqueline Ancess: What Counts as “Success” for a Charter School? http://dianeravitch.net/2015/12/03/jacqueline-access-what-counts-as-success-for-a-charter-school/

Ravitch, D. (2016, Jan 19). A Success Academy Teacher Quits and Explains Why. http://dianeravitch.net/2016/01/19/a-success-academy-teacher-quits-and-explains-why/

Taylor, K. (2016, Feb 12). At Success Academy School, a Stumble in Math and a Teacher’s Anger on Video. The New York Times. http://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/13/nyregion/success-academy-teacher-rips-up-student-paper.html?emc=eta1&_r=1,

Singer, A. (2016, Feb 15). Success Academy’s War Against Children. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/alan-singer/success-academys-war-agai_b_9235556.html

Biddle, R. (2016, Feb 16). Success Academy Merits No Defense. http://dropoutnation.net/2016/02/16/success-academy-merits-no-defense/

griff519. (2014, Mar 24). Colonizing the Black Natives: Reflections from a Former NOLA Charter School Dean of Students. http://cloakinginequity.com/2014/03/24/colonizing-the-black-natives-reflections-from-a-former-nola-charter-school-dean-of-students/

Vasquez Heilig, J. (2016, Jan 26). Horror Inside: A No Excuses Charter School #SCW. http://cloakinginequity.com/2016/01/26/horror-inside-a-no-excuses-charter-school/

Vasquez Heilig, J. (2016, Jan 7). Horror Inside Pt. 2: Charter Teacher Turns Whistleblower #SCW. http://cloakinginequity.com/2016/01/27/horror-inside-pt-2-charter-teacher-turns-whistleblower-scw/

Talmage, E (2015, Sep 28). Teach Like a Champion … Or Like a Robot? http://emilytalmage.com/2015/09/28/teach-like-a-champion-or-like-a-robot/

Kaplan, E. (2015, Nov 15). No Excuse: An Argument Against Deceptive Metrics and School Success. http://curmudgucation.blogspot.com/2015/11/guest-post-no-excuse.html

Berkshire, J. (2015, Dec 7). Control Experiment.http://edushyster.com/control-experiment/

Disare, M. (2016, Mar 7). “No Excuses” No More? Charter Schools Rethink Discipline After Focus on Tough Consequences. http://ny.chalkbeat.org/2016/03/07/no-excuses-no-more-charter-schools-rethink-discipline-after-focus-on-tough-consequences/?utm_source=Master+Mailing+List&utm_campaign=416104ca63-Rise_Shine_Amid_3_7_2016&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_23e3b96952-416104ca63-75668293#.Vt2iTY-cFPZ

Tough, P. (2016). Helping Students Succeed: What Works and Why. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.

Tough, P. (2016, Jun). How Kids Learn Resilience. The Atlantic.http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2016/06/how-kids-really-succeed/480744/

Garland, S. (2016, Mar 27). The End of “No Excuses” Education Reform? A Philadelphia Charter School CEO Leads the Way as More Schools Question the Get-Tough School Model. http://hechingerreport.org/the-end-of-no-excuses-education-reform/

Debunking the Theory: Public Schools Are Not Inherently Unproductive
Greene, P. (2015, Oct 11). The Social Justice Argument. http://curmudgucation.blogspot.com/2015/10/the-social-justice-argument.html?m=1

Blume, H. (2015, Sep 21). Backers Want Half of LAUSD Students in Charter Schools in Eight Years, Report Says. Los Angeles Times.http://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-ln-broad-draft-charter-expansion-plan-20150921-story.html

Ravitch, D. (2015, Oct 9). John Thompson: Dare Anyone Say No to Eli Broad? http://dianeravitch.net/2015/10/09/john-thompson-can-anyone-say-no-to-eli-broad/

Bryant, J. (2015, Oct 2). Education “Reformers” Wage a Misdirected War on Mayor De Blasio. http://educationopportunitynetwork.org/education-reformers-wage-a-misdirected-war-on-mayor-de-blasio/

Singer, A. (2015, Oct 1). Despite Big Problems Charters Attract Hedge Fund Support and Presidential Candidates Hungry for Dollars. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/alan-singer/despite-big-problems-char_b_8225840.html

Ravitch, D. (2016, Feb 24). Connecticut: Gov. Malloy Appoints Charter Operator to State Board of Education. http://dianeravitch.net/2016/02/24/connecticut-gov-malloy-appoints-charter-operator-to-state-board-of-education/

Mazzucato, M. (2015). The Entrepreneurial State: Debunking Public vs. Private Sector Myths. New York: PublicAffairs|Perseus Group. http://marianamazzucato.com/the-entrepreneurial-state/

Lubienski, C. A., & Lubienski, S. T. (2013, Dec 9). The Public School Advantage: Why Public Schools Outperform Private Schools. Stanford School Innovation Review. http://ssir.org/articles/entry/the_public_school_advantage_why_public_schools_outperform_private_schools

Horton, P. (2015). The Irrationality of the Market “Reform” of Education. http://www.livingindialogue.com/the-irrationality-of-the-market-reform-of-education/

Alexander, K. (2012, Fall). Asymmetric Information Parental Choice, Vouchers, Charter Schools and Stigliz. http://horacemannleague.blogspot.com/2013/01/asymmetric-information-parental-choice.html

Rotherham, A. J. (2015, Oct 6). Public Goals, Private Ownership. U.S. News & World Report. http://www.usnews.com/opinion/knowledge-bank/2015/10/08/amplify-and-the-cost-of-going-public-for-private-education-companies

Ravitch, D. (2016, Jan 29). The Perils of Privatization. http://dianeravitch.net/2016/01/29/the-perils-of-privatization-2/

Siegel-Hawley, G., & Frankenberg, E. (2016, Jan). Review of The Integration Anomaly: Comparing the Effect of K-12 Education Delivery Models on Segregation in Schools. http://nepc.colorado.edu/thinktank/review-integration

Baker, B. D. (2015, Nov 10). Pondering Chartering: False Markets & Liberty as Substitutes for Equity? https://schoolfinance101.wordpress.com/2015/11/10/pondering-charters-false-markets-liberty-as-substitute-for-equity/

Ravitch, D. (2016, Jan 21). Miron: Charter Schools’ Administrative Costs More than Public Schools. http://dianeravitch.net/2016/01/21/miron-charter-schools-administrative-costs-more-than-public-schools/

Lee, M. (2016, Jan 18). Report: New Mexico Charter Schools Cost More, Perform Same. Albuquerque Journal.http://www.abqjournal.com/707820/news-around-the-region/report-new-mexico-charter-schools-cost-more-perform-same.html

Minimal Accountability for Fraud, Mismanagement, or Low Performance
Ravitch, D. (2015, Jul 6). Ohio: The One Reform That Is Forbidden. http://dianeravitch.net/2015/07/06/ohio-the-one-reform-that-is-forbidden/ See also Gross, A. (2015, Aug 24). Under John Kasich, Ohio’s Charter Schools Became a “National Joke.” Mother Jones. http://m.motherjones.com/politics/2015/08/ohio-charter-schools-john-kasich-imagine

Smith, D. (2015, Nov 9). Takata and Volkswagen. Hmm, What If Charters Were Also Subject to Recalls? http://www.plunderbund.com/2015/11/09/takata-and-volkswagen-hmm-what-if-charters-were-also-subject-to-recalls/ For a perceptive article questioning the rationale underpinning choice, see Bryant, J. (2016, Jan 28). The School Choice We Have vs. The Choice We Want. http://educationopportunitynetwork.org/the-school-choice-we-have-vs-the-choice-we-want/

Ravitch, D. (2015, Dec 11). Ohio: Charters Are a “Parasitic Industry.” http://dianeravitch.net/2015/12/11/ohio-charters-are-a-parasitic-industry/

Smith, D. (2015, Aug 17). Dollars, Details, and the Devil: Top 10 Needed Charter School Reforms. http://www.plunderbund.com/2015/08/17/dollars-details-and-the-devil-top-10-needed-charter-school-reforms/

Dyer, S. (2015, Oct 9). A Great Day for Ohio’s Kids. http://www.10thperiod.com/2015/10/a-great-day-for-ohios-kids.html

Editorial: Charter Schools’ Purpose Forgotten. (2016, May 26). The Columbus Dispatch.http://www.dispatch.com/content/stories/editorials/2016/05/26/1-charter-schools-purpose-forgotten.html?utm_content=buffere8a62&utm_medium=social&utm_source=twitter.com&utm_campaign=buffer

Bryant, J. (2015, Oct 11). The Ugly Charter School Scandal Arne Duncan is Leaving Behind. http://www.salon.com/2015/10/11/the_ugly_charter_school_scandal_arne_duncan_is_leaving_behind_partner/ See also objections to the grant in Dyer, S. (2015, Dec 8). Charters Fixing Youngstown? Data Say “Not So Fast.” http://www.10thperiod.com/2015/12/charters-fixing-youngstown-data-say-not.html

Bryant, J. (2015, Aug 9). The Big Jeb Bush Charter School Lie: Why His Florida Education Miracle Is Hogwash. http://www.alternet.org/education/big-jeb-bush-charter-school-lie-why-his-florida-education-miracle-hogwash

Yi, K., & Shipley, A. (2014, Jun). Florida’s Charter Schools Unsupervised: Taxpayers, Students Lose When School Operators Exploit Weak Laws. SunSentinel. http://interactive.sun-sentinel.com/charter-schools-unsupervised/investigation.html and http://interactive.sun-sentinel.com/charter-schools-unsupervised/map.html See also Guerrieri, C. (2015, Sep 3). Florida Hits a Milestone, Over Three Hundred Charter Schools Have Failed. http://jaxkidsmatter.blogspot.com/2015/09/florida-hits-milestone-over-three.html?m=1 and Schneider, M. (2015, Oct 7). Paramount Charter School: A Chaotic “Free for All” That Cannot Be Immediately Shut Down. https://deutsch29.wordpress.com/2015/10/07/paramount-charter-school-a-chaotic-free-for-all-that-cannot-be-immediately-shut-down/?blogsub=confirming#blog_subscription-2

Fineout, G., Spencer, T., & Veiga, C. (2015, Dec 13). Florida Gave About $70 Million to Charter Schools That Later Closed; State Recouped Little. Miami Herald. http://www.miamiherald.com/news/local/education/article49565370.html See also Editorial: Taxpayers Assume Risk, Little Gain for Charter Schools. (2015, Dec 24). Tampa Bay Times.http://www.tampabay.com/opinion/editorials/editorial-taxpayers-assume-risk-little-gain-for-charter-schools/2258977

Romano, J. (2016, Feb 13). The Topsy-Turvy Tale of Charter Schools and Whom They Really Serve. Tampa Bay Times. http://www.tampabay.com/news/education/k12/romano-the-topsy-turvy-tale-of-charter-schools-and-whom-they-really-serve/2265292

Ravitch, D. (2014, Jun 23). Detroit Free Press Investigation: Michigan Charters Get Poor Results, Have No Accountability. http://dianeravitch.net/2014/06/23/detroit-free-press-investigation-michigan-charters-get-poor-results-have-no-accountability/

Mihalapoulos, D. (2015, Dec 16). The Watchdogs: Charter Firm Suspected of Cheating Federal Grant Program. Chicago Sun-Times. http://chicago.suntimes.com/politics/the-watchdogs-charter-firm-suspected-of-cheating-federal-grant-program/

Editorial: Charter School Profiteers. (2016, May 25). The Salt Lake Tribune.http://www.sltrib.com/opinion/3923608-155/editorial-charter-school-profiteers

Doyle, D. (2014, Oct 15). Authorizer Hopping: Motivations, Causes, and Ways to Stop It. National Association of Charter School Authorizers. http://publicimpact.com/authorizer-hopping-motivations-causes-and-ways-to-stop-it/

Huffman, K. (2015, Dec 6). An Ed Commissioner’s Confession: How I Tried (and Failed) to Close the Worst School in Tennessee. https://www.the74million.org/article/an-ed-commissioners-confession-how-i-tried-and-failed-to-close-the-worst-school-in-tennessee

Strauss, V. (2015, Oct 31). Study on Online Charter Schools: “It is Literally as If the Kid Did Not Go to School for an Entire Year.” The Washington Post.https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/answer-sheet/wp/2015/10/31/study-on-online-charter-schools-it-is-literally-as-if-the-kid-did-not-go-to-school-for-an-entire-year/

Calefati, J. (2016, Apr 17). California Virtual Academies: Is Online Charter School Network Cashing in on Failure? The Mercury News. http://www.mercurynews.com/educat, ion/ci_29777973/is-california-online-school-cashing-failure?source=pkg

Bryant, J. (2015, Oct 21). New Report: Federal Funds for Charter Schools Go into a “Black Hole.” http://educationopportunitynetwork.org/new-report-federal-funds-for-charter-schools-go-into-a-black-hole/ For the original report, see also PRWatch. (2015, Oct 21). Charter School Black Hole: CMD Special Investigation Reveals Huge Info Gap on Charter Spending. http://www.prwatch.org/charter-school-black-hole

Cohen, D. (2016, Feb 29). Are Publicly Funded Charter Schools Accountable to Parents and Taxpayers? Apparently Not. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/donald-cohen/are-publicly-funded-chart_b_9342100.html

California Charter Schools Association. Accountability. http://www.ccsa.org/advocacy/accountability/

Capital & Main. (2016, Jun). Failing the Test: Charter Schools, Privatization, and the Future of Public Education in Los Angeles and California. http://capitalandmain.com/failingthetest/

Ravitch, D. (2016, May 30). California: The Charter Game Is Rigged. https://dianeravitch.net/2016/05/30/california-the-charter-game-is-rigged/

Charters Drain Funds from Non-Charter Public Schools
DeArmond, M., Denice, P., Gross, B., Hernandez, J., Jochim, A., & Lake, R. (2015, Oct). Measuring Up: Educational Improvement and Opportunity in 50 Cities. http://www.crpe.org/publications/measuring-educational-improvement-and-opportunity-50-cities See also Strauss, V. (2015, Oct 19). What Are Bill and Melinda Gates Talking About? The Washington Post.https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/answer-sheet/wp/2015/10/19/what-are-bill-and-melinda-gates-talking-about/

Ravitch, D. (2015, Oct 20). Indiana: Less Money, More Chaos. http://dianeravitch.net/2015/10/20/indiana-less-money-more-chaos/

Schneider, M. (2016, Mar 17). Charter Co-location: Where Parasite Is Meant to Kill its Host. https://deutsch29.wordpress.com/2016/03/17/charter-co-location-where-parasite-is-meant-to-kill-its-host/

Fitzsimon, C. (2016, Feb 17). The Canary in the School Privatization Coal Mine. http://www.ncpolicywatch.com/2016/02/17/the-canary-in-the-school-privatization-coal-mine/

Dillon, S. (2010, Sep 27). 4,100 Students Prove “Small Is Better” Rule Wrong. The New York Times. http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/28/education/28school.html See also Edushyster2012. (2016, Feb 24). What’s the Point? http://edushyster.com/whats-the-point/

Gurley, G. (2016, Apr 7). The Great Diversion: Charter Schools May or May Not Improve Student Outcomes–But They Divert Funds from Other Public Schools. http://prospect.org/article/great-diversion-0

Charters and Crony Capitalism Create Sweetheart Deals
Baker, B. D. (2015, Dec 10). Picture Post Week: Subprime Chartering. https://schoolfinance101.wordpress.com/2015/12/10/picture-post-week-subprime-chartering/ See also In the Public Interest. (2015, Dec 9). A Guide to Evaluating Pay for Success Programs and Social Impact Bonds. http://www.inthepublicinterest.org/a-guide-to-evaluating-pay-for-success-programs-and-social-impact-bonds/

Baker, B. D., & Miron, G. (2015, Dec 10). The Business of Charter Schooling: Understanding the Policies That Charter Operators Use for Financial Benefit. National Education Policy Center. http://nepc.colorado.edu/publication/charter-revenue

Bryant, J. (2015, Dec 10). New Report Shines a Light Into the Charter School Black Box. http://educationopportunitynetwork.org/new-report-shines-a-light-into-the-charter-school-black-box/

Savage, J. (2015, Dec 7). New Report Challenges Claim Charters Do More with Less. The Texas Observer. http://www.texasobserver.org/charter-schools-report-taxpayer-dollars/

Sasso, G. M. (2016, Jan 7). To the 1 Percent Pouring Millions Into Charter Schools: How About Improving the Schools That the Vast Majority of Students Actually Attend? http://www.salon.com/2016/01/07/to_the_1_percent_pouring_millions_into_charter_schools_how_about_improving_the_schools_that_the_vast_majority_of_students_actually_attend/

Charter Schools Should Be Nonprofit, Accountable, and Fully Transparent
Strauss, V. (2015, Oct 31). Study on Online Charter Schools: It is Literally as if the Kid Did Not Go to School for an Entire Year. The Washington Post.https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/answer-sheet/wp/2015/10/31/study-on-online-charter-schools-it-is-literally-as-if-the-kid-did-not-go-to-school-for-an-entire-year/

Baker, B. D. (2015, Dec 7). Picture Post Week: Follow up On Who’s Running America’s Charter Schools. https://schoolfinance101.wordpress.com/2015/12/07/picture-post-week-follow-up-on-whos-running-americas-charter-schools/ See also Baker, B. D. (2015, Jul 22). Pondering Chartering: Who’s Actually Running America’s Charter Schools? https://schoolfinance101.wordpress.com/2015/07/22/whos-actually-running-americas-charter-schools/

Huseman, J. (2015, Dec 17). These Charter Schools Tried to Turn Public Education Into Big Business. They Failed. http://www.slate.com/blogs/schooled/2015/12/17/for_profit_charter_schools_are_failing_and_fading_here_s_why.html

Is Replacing Neighborhood Schools with Charters Worth the Risk?
Vasquez Heilig, J. (2015, Dec 14). Ghastly Impact of Closing Schools on Students and Communities. http://cloakinginequity.com/2015/12/14/ghastly-impact-of-closing-schools-on-students-and-communities/ See also Cohen, R. M. (2016, Apr 11). School Closures: A Blunt Instrument: Shuttering “Failed Schools” Can Have Painful Consequences for Children and Neighborhoods. http://prospect.org/article/school-closures-blunt-instrument-0

Thompson, J. (2015, Oct 10). Will Reformers Learn a Lesson From Newark?: Dale Russakoff’s “The Prize” Could Help. http://www.livingindialogue.com/will-reformers-learn-a-lesson-from-newark/

An Unsustainable Business Model
Torres, A. C. (2015, Oct 20). How Teacher Turnover, Burnout Can Impact “No-Excuses” Charter Schools. Journalist’s Resource. http://journalistsresource.org/studies/society/education/teacher-turnover-burnout-charter-schools

Mehta, J. (2014, July 16). Five Inconvenient Truths for Reformers. http://blogs.edweek.org/edweek/learning_deeply/2014/07/five_inconvenient_truths_for_reformers.html

Hargreaves, A. (2016, Feb 20). Why England is in the “Guard’s Van” of School Reform. https://www.tes.com/news/school-news/breaking-views/why-england-guards-van-school-reform

Miron, G., Mathis, W. J., & Welner, K. G. (2015, Feb 23). Review of Separating Fact & Fiction. http://nepc.colorado.edu/thinktank/review-separating-fact-and-fiction

Vasquez Heilig, J. (2015, Nov 20). Charters and Access: Here Is Evidence. http://cloakinginequity.com/2015/11/20/drinking-charter-kool-aid-here-is-evidence/

ü62.1 Education Opportunity Network. (2016, Mar 3). The Positive Aura of Charter Schools is Wearing Thin. http://educationopportunitynetwork.org/the-positive-aura-of-charter-schools-is-wearing-thin/

Summing Up the Many Problems with Charter Schools
GBA Strategies. (2015, Feb 18). Charter School Reform Poll Memo. http://www.inthepublicinterest.org/charter-school-reform-poll-memo/

Whitmire, R. (2016, Feb 28). Richard Whitmire: Dogs and Cats, Working Together. New York Daily News. http://www.nydailynews.com/opinion/richard-whitmire-dogs-cats-working-article-1.2545397

Kahlenberg, R. D., & Potter, H. (2014). A Smarter Charter: Finding What Works for Charter Schools and Public Education. New York: Teacher’s College Press. http://www.tcf.org/bookstore/detail/a-smarter-charter See also The Century Foundation. Richard D. Kahlenberg. http://www.tcf.org/experts/detail/richard-d.-kahlenberg and The Century Foundation. Halley Potter. http://www.tcf.org/experts/detail/halley-potter

Teachers Democracy Project. Charters: The Illusion of Change. https://vimeo.com/133868233

Camins, A. (2015, Jun 24). Democrats: There Are Better Choices Than School Choice to Improve Education. http://www.arthurcamins.com/?p=342

Why Conventional School “Reforms” Have Failed: Teacher and School Evaluations Are Based on Test Scores

Why Conventional School “Reforms” Have Failed
Teacher and School Evaluations Are Based on Test Scores

by Bill Honig

The reform movement has failed to produce results overall, and reputable evaluations have shown that individual reform measures also proved to be ineffective. Turnaround schools, charter schools, merit pay, or test-based school and teacher accountability have had either nonexistent or trivial effects. In his book Visible Learning, John Hattie writes that even when reforms produced small gains, they fall far below the improvements brought about by validated initiatives. In this article, I examine the failure of one of the major initiatives of the reform movement: high-stakes teacher and school evaluations based on student test scores.

Firing Teachers Based on Students’ Test Scores Is Not the Answer

A major problem with the “reform” strategy is its tremendous overemphasis on removing incompetent teachers based on students’ test performance and enshrining mass firings as a key objective in school improvement efforts. For those who are seeking a “simple” way to improve educational outcomes, this approach has broad superficial appeal. Up until the repeal of No Child Left Behind (NCLB) and the passage of the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) in late 2015, test-based accountability of teachers was a key component of the Obama administration’s educational policy and the price for relief—in the form of waivers—from arbitrary federal requirements. ESSA eliminates a national teacher evaluation system based on standardized tests scores and the federal government’s ability to grant waivers.

Incompetent teachers should be let go if, and only if, credible and fair methods are used. But personnel changes must be part of a broader push for instructional improvements and efforts to raise the performance of all staff—measures that produce much higher effects on student achievement. For examples of these more positive measures, see the Aspen Institute March 2016 report Evaluation and Support Systems: A Roadmap for Improvement.

Up until several years ago, the reform agenda had primarily relied on test-driven, high-stakes accountability systems to punish or reward schools—a questionable enough approach, as discussed later in this article. A recent shift compounded the error when districts and states began to use the tests to also evaluate teachers and administrators and mete out punishment, termination, or rewards.

Often accompanied by hostile, anti-teacher rhetoric, teacher evaluation systems based on test scores became a central plank in the reform movement. That is why some “reformers” have virulently campaigned against teachers’ unions and due process (tenure) rights for teachers. They see these protections (which should be streamlined when they become too cumbersome) preventing the unfettered ability to eliminate incompetent teachers and frustrating what in their minds is the most viable strategy to improve schools—firing bad teachers and pressuring the rest to improve.

As an aside, the article “Tenure: How Due Process Protects Teachers and Students” explains tenure in the context of due process rights and provides a cogent rationale for fair process protections during dismissal proceedings. Also, see Dana Goldstein’s excellent book The Teacher Wars: A History of America’s Most Embattled Profession, which provides a gut wrenching picture of historical harm and arbitrary treatment teachers received before these due process rights were secured.

Many reformers as well as their political and media supporters frame the current debate about educational direction as a clash between themselves—the only ones who are trying to improve schools—and lazy or incompetent teachers and their unions. They contend that those who attempt to block their reform efforts are just trying to protect teacher prerogatives. This is why many policymakers and pundits take a confrontational rather than a cooperative stance. But educators’ opposition to the reform platform is much broader and goes much deeper than this all-too-common specious analysis. It is not that teachers (and their representatives) do not want to improve performance or that they do not see the need for schools to get better at what they are doing. Almost every professional wants that. What teachers and most district and school administrators object to is the path reformers have laid out toward accomplishing that goal. They view reformers’ Test-and-Punish reform initiatives as ill advised and ineffective at best and detrimental at worst. And they are correct.

Teacher Quality: Putting the Issue in Perspective

Contrary to the reform movement’s superficial and overheated rhetoric, the quality of teachers, while significant, is not the only important influence on student performance. According to various research studies, it accounts for only about 10% of student achievement. Bashing and blaming teachers is not a new trick. As recounted in Goldstein’s The Teacher Wars, this destructive ploy has emerged several times in our history, driven by “moral panic.” It is unjust to single out teachers as the primary cause of underperforming students and schools and, at the same time, fail to address more influential factors.

As one example, family and social dysfunction is on the rise and has had a devastating effect on educational performance. This is particularly true among working-class families. Robert Putnam’s important new book, Our Kids: The American Dream in Crisis, reveals the alarming growth in recent decades of social pathology among white working-class families. During the same period, professional families have stayed much more stable. Socioeconomic levels continue to significantly outrank all other influences on student performance.

Of course, it is easier to blame teachers for not reversing the damage done by wage stagnation and the dramatic decrease in blue-collar jobs in this country over the past decades rather than tackle these larger problems directly. In the US, we have seen rising levels of inequality, the increase of single-parent families, a steady climb in drug use, and the dearth of supportive services. Reformers’ penchant for blaming teachers and school administrators for low school performance conveniently absolves other societal institutions and actors of their responsibility for ameliorating injurious socioeconomic trends. Stanford professor Linda Darling-Hammond, one of the most respected commentators on how best to improve schools, offers an alternative view. She has called for “reciprocal accountability,” which requires that all major stakeholders share the responsibility for school performance improvement, not just teachers who are so easily scapegoated.

Julie Rummel provides a poignant much-needed teacher’s perspective of the harsh reality encountered in many of our schools. She moved from a dysfunctional poverty-stricken school where she was labeled a “mediocre” teacher to a more upscale campus where she was regarded as great. She essentially made no changes in how she taught or connected with her students.

In a new infographic, Kevin Welner of the National Center for Education Policy reinforces the unfairness of expecting schools to reverse the deleterious effects of poverty by themselves.

Finally, A Broader, Bolder Approach to Education, an organization devoted to addressing these broader issues, just relaunched its efforts following the enactment of the federal ESSA legislation.

Isabel Sawhill and Edward Rodrigue list three measures that had a major effect on whether an individual would remain in poverty. They found that graduating from high school, being in a family with at least one full-time worker, and being at least 21 and married before having children correlated closely with economic success. They describe this as “the success sequence.” According to these researchers, only 2.4% of those Americans who follow the success sequence will live below the poverty line, while over 70% enjoy at least middle-class incomes, defined as at least 300% of that poverty measure. For those who do not meet the three criteria, 79% will live in poverty. Only one of these measures is directly school related—graduation rates. Having an adult with a full-time job depends on successful job creation efforts.

According to Isabel Sawhill, “If we want to reduce poverty, one of the simplest, fastest and cheapest things we could do would be to make sure that as few people as possible become parents before they actually want to.” Here is an example of what could be done to substantially lower teen pregnancy and thus improve educational performance. From 2009 to mid-2015 a dramatically successful program in Colorado slashed the teen pregnancy and abortion rates by nearly 50% by providing free long-term birth control devices such as IUDs for teenagers. The Susan Thompson Buffett Foundation initially funded the program, but when the grant ended in 2015, the Republican-controlled legislature killed a bill to support this successful effort. Private donations saved the program for a year.

Tests Are Not Reliable Measures of Teacher Performance

Considering in-school issues, the technical ability of current student tests to accurately identify high- and low-performing teachers is woefully inadequate. In the past few years, a compelling body of research has emerged that demonstrates the dangers of test-based teacher evaluations. Three major research institutes—American Education Research Association (AERA), the National Academy of Education, and the American Statistical Association (ASA)—have forcefully warned against employing these measures for teacher evaluations. The AERA issued standards for teacher evaluation measures, which virtually no existing instruments meet.

Currently, Value-Added Measures (VAMs) is a popular tool. It claims to assess growth by aggregating individual scores adjusted for socioeconomic measures. Like other tools in widespread use, it is not accurate enough for evaluating teachers. A seminal critique of the growing use of test scores and value-added measures was written by Linda Darling-Hammond, Audrey Amrein-Beardsley from Arizona State University, Edward Haertel from Stanford, and Jesse Rothstein from University of California, Berkeley. Their research revealed how inexact the measures were, and they present case studies of egregious misidentification—when excellent teachers have been misidentified as low performing and unfairly dismissed. In Teacher and Student Evaluation: Moving Beyond the Failure of School Reform, Alyson Lavigne and Thomas Good provide a comprehensive analysis of the history of teacher evaluations. Their analysis also found the present strategies to be defective. Further, Rick Stigins in his 2014 book, Defensible Teacher Evaluation: Student Growth through Classroom Assessment, reviews the major deficiencies in current high-stakes, test-driven teacher evaluation.

In March 2015, the respected publication Educational Researcher devoted an entire issue to critiques of the most common VAMs, plus some supporting statements with caveats. For a list of the top 15 research articles that discredit the use of test scores and VAM approaches, see Amrein-Beardsley’s VAMboozled website. The site includes a recommended reading list and lists 86 articles that have raised major technical concerns about VAM. For an exhaustive list, more information, and research articles that discredit the use of test scores and VAM approaches, see briefing paper Problems with the Use of Student Test Scores to Evaluate Teachers and the article “Studies Highlight Complexities of Using Value-Added Measures.” Both make a compelling case against test-driven teacher evaluation. Professor Edward Haertel from Stanford has written a particularly persuasive admonition against this practice, as has Leo Casey in his article published in the esteemed, peer-reviewed journal Teachers College Record titled “The Will to Quantify: The “Bottom Line” in the Market Model of Education Reform.”

Two reports published in 2016 underscore the serious limitations of VAM. The first describes how VAM use failed in the Houston Independent School District (HISD); the second, produced by REL at WestEd, discusses how deficient VAM is in predicting teacher quality.

For further reading on the limits of VAM as a measure of teacher quality, see also “A Reanalysis of the Effects of Teacher Replacement Using Value-Added Modeling” by Stuart S. Yeh, Beardley’s blog post “The (Relentess) Will to Quantify,” and a critique of New York’s plan to use VAM methods to evaluate teachers. Finally, the Melbourne Graduate School of Education website has a compelling video lecture on why test score evaluation does not work.

Evaluations Based on Test Scores Misidentify Teachers

These well-respected researchers make the following points. The section “Standardized Tests Are Not the Best Measures of School or Teacher Quality” in companion article Reformers Target the Wrong Levers of Improvement made the case that such scores fail to accurately measure deeper and broader learning.

As importantly, student tests were never designed to be used for teacher evaluation and suffer from high levels of misidentification, or noise. Studies have shown that if we use current tests, a teacher who is ranked at the 50th percentile could be anywhere from the 85th percentile to the 15th. A significant number of teachers bounce from top to bottom, or vice versa from year to year. A recent report from the US Department of Education found very high misidentifications—even with three years of data per teacher. One-fourth of the teachers identified as “low performers needing remediation” were actually at the mid-range of performance, and one-fourth of teachers who were deemed “average” were actually in need of professional development and support. That level of imprecision should be unacceptable for any respected profession.

A team of renowned researchers set out to demonstrate the absurdity of using student tests to determine teacher effectiveness. They found that changes in the height of students, which is obviously independent of teacher influence, was nearly as predictive of teacher effectiveness as test scores.

Examples of Test-Based Evaluations That Fail Exemplary Teachers

As a result of districts using these suspect measures, there have been numerous cases of top-flight teachers receiving negative scores and of teachers who were identified one year as “stellar” receiving a low rating the next. In some cases this occurred because a teacher voluntarily agreed to take a more difficult class. Then the teacher suffered by comparison with the easier class (s)he taught in the previous years.

The telling case of Pascale Mauclair clearly demonstrates how dangerous it can be to use such dubious evaluation measures. She agreed to teach a harder-to-educate class and did a superb job, but instead of getting congratulated she was identified by the press as “One of the Worst Teachers in the City.” A study conducted by Darling-Hammond and her colleagues also documented tragic cases of misidentification.

Finally, some teachers are taking the issue to court claiming the current evaluation procedures are so arbitrary that they are fatally flawed. An example is Sheri Lederman’s case before the New York courts. Each year she works with students who achieve double the average student proficiency rates in the state, but since her students scored so high in previous years, she did not meet the state’s ill-conceived standard requiring growth from year to year. As a result, Lederman received a low rating. The trial court held the existing system was “arbitrary and capricious” as it applied to her, and voided the rankings based on test scores.

Consequently, when such growth measures are used, results can be extremely arbitrary at the upper ends. My favorite example is the ludicrous case of Carolyn Abbott, an exemplary teacher of gifted students in New York City. Her students made huge gains each year, invariably scoring at the highest levels. In one year, her previous gifted class scored at the 98th percentile and, based on that high performance, her predicted next year’s score became the 97th percentile. The actual score landed at the 89th percentile. Many of her gifted students saw no reason to try hard on the state test since they were doing much more advanced work. On other tests that had consequences for students, they scored in the highest ranks. Even though Abbott was doing an exemplary job, the newspapers dubbed her the “Worst 8th Grade Teacher in the City.” The real story was the complete opposite.

I have some important feedback for the news media in this country: Shame on you for rushing to publish teacher rankings when you know, or should know, that these lists are bogus and prone to error. Even the more thoughtful advocates of VAMs caution against their use for high-stakes personnel decisions.

Other Flaws in Test-Based Evaluation Systems

As previously mentioned, test scores and even evaluations by principals tend to track the socioeconomic status of the student population. So schools in low-income areas have a significantly higher number of low evaluations and fewer high evaluations—a clearly unjust situation and a surefire detriment to attracting our best teachers to these areas in need.

In addition, no one yet has solved the problem that most teachers are not math and reading teachers. Thus, they do not teach the math and reading content tested on the new PARCC and SBAC assessments, yet they are still held accountable based on those test scores. As a result, many teachers are now suing after receiving low evaluations based on the test performance of students they never taught. Another major defect in the measures being used for evaluation is that different assessment instruments yield widely dissimilar results. This is further confirmation of the inaccuracy and inadequacy of these measures.

Further, individual evaluations do not take into account school context, which has a large influence on teacher performance. The students of two similarly talented teachers will score differently if one group of students is in a school led by an effective principal with working teams, a good school climate, and active engagement of students and parents while the other is in a dysfunctional school with none of these attributes.

Finally, yearly decisions about which students get assigned to which teachers can tremendously skew a teacher’s evaluation. Nonrandom assignment of students vitiates a key requirement of valid teacher evaluation systems, subjecting teachers to potential principal favoritism and pressure from parents. Newer VAMs that are being used more and more were supposedly designed to correct this, but apparently they have not. Conversely, one of the best predictors of student achievement is whether teachers are assigned to teach classes in their areas of expertise or classes that match their skill set. Ironically, when districts use the information from test-based evaluations as a proxy for mis-assignment and then reassign teachers to subjects aligned with their preparation and experience, students enjoy a much greater boost to performance than performance improvements resulting from firings using value-added teacher accountability. Perhaps the best use of high-stakes testing is holding administrators accountable for proper assignment of teachers, instead of serving as the unsound basis for teacher evaluation.

Test-Based Evaluations Do Not Measure Good Teaching and Harm the Profession

Do evaluations based in large part on math and reading test scores actually measure “good teaching”? A 2014 report by well-regarded researchers Martin Polikoff and Andrew Porter says no. They looked at six districts nationwide and found that measures of students’ opportunity to learn (OTL) the content specified in standards and measures of instructional quality, both of which have been found to be highly predictive of student learning, showed weak or zero correlation with the VAM tests being used to evaluate teachers.

The upshot of all this research is that not only is test-based teacher evaluation unfair to the limited number of teachers who can benefit from professional support, but the arbitrary threat issued to all teachers impairs their performance and discourages them from remaining in the profession. The Test-and-Punish approach has also had a damaging effect on efforts to recruit new talent. Defective evaluation schemes have many negative consequences, including teachers avoiding hard-to-teach children and resisting collaborative team-building efforts. The demeaning rhetoric about widespread teacher incompetence is another key factor contributing to growing teacher demoralization. For more on this topic, see the companion article Reformers Allowed Their Rhetoric to Be Hijacked.

The op-ed piece “Standardized Tests Don’t Help Us Evaluate Teachers” is an in-the-trenches summary by a Los Angeles Unified attorney who helped create teacher evaluations and now finds them defective. In The Teacher Wars, Dana Goldstein offers an excellent account of the disastrous consequences of personnel decisions tied to student test scores. For an excellent summary of why test scores should not be used for consequential evaluations, see David Berliner’s piece.

Finally, a 2016 extensive report on teacher evaluation policies by Thomas Toch recommends using evaluative information primarily for program and teacher improvement. This shifts the major purpose of evaluations from rooting out the lowest performers to policies aimed at lifting the whole staff.

The business community has been moving away from ranking schemes for decades, recognizing that such evaluations are superficial, work against team building, cause lower performance, and discourage risk taking by employees. In a clear case of hypocrisy, many business leaders have no compunction about recommending such discarded measures for schools.

Fortunately, many school districts and states have been withdrawing from or minimizing the use of mandatory test-based teacher evaluations leading to dismissal proceedings. Many others are using teacher evaluations as just one of many data sets that provide useful information and feedback to teachers and faculties about where to concentrate improvement efforts. Three examples are Tulsa, the state of Michigan, and Houston. State Action to Advance Teacher Evaluation, a comprehensive report by the Southern Regional Education Board, and the California blueprint, Greatness by Design, advocate using evaluations to feedback useful information for teacher improvement.

One of the most prominent architects of teacher evaluation, Charlotte Danielson, whose rubrics are in widespread use, has castigated the present way evaluations are being conducted and used. Even New York governor Andrew Cuomo, who was a strong advocate for test-based high-stakes teacher evaluation, has backtracked, and the New York Regents have halted required state test-based teacher evaluations for four years. Many educational leaders such as New York’s Nassau County superintendents had warned against this practice. Some political leaders , such as Hillary Clinton, are also beginning to speak out about the dangers of test-based teacher evaluation. Finally, a court in New Mexico found that using VAM scores based on tests is too imprecise to be used to attach consequences to the results.

Bill Gates, one of the strongest proponents of teacher evaluation strategies, has issued warnings about their overuse:

Too many school systems are using teacher evaluations as merely a tool for personnel decisions, not helping teachers get better. . . . Many systems today are about hiring and firing, not a tool for learning.

In response, to this growing resistance to test-based teacher evaluation, the recent reauthorization of the federal Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA), now named the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA), ignores test-based teacher evaluation.

A More Effective Approach to Teacher Evaluation

Preliminarily, advocates of high-stakes teacher evaluation have a misguided view of “teacher quality.” They think it is a static individual attribute that—after the first few years—can’t really change. A more sophisticated viewpoint sees teacher quality as dynamic, which does and should grow over time. Esther Quintero, a management expert, supports this point of view. Writing for the Albert Shanker Institute blog, Quintero explains:

In the US, a number of unstated but common assumptions about “teacher quality” suffuse the entire school improvement conversation. As researchers have noted . . . instructional effectiveness is implicitly viewed as an attribute of individuals, a quality that exists in a sort of vacuum (or independent of the context of teachers’ work), and which, as a result, teachers can carry with them, across and between schools. Effectiveness also is often perceived as fairly stable: teachers learn their craft within the first few years in the classroom and then plateau, but, at the end of the day, some teachers have what it takes and others just don’t. So, the general assumption is that a “good teacher” will be effective under any conditions, and the quality of a given school is determined by how many individual “good teachers” it has acquired.

In British Columbia, Hong Kong, Shanghai and Singapore, none of these assumptions seems to be at work. Teacher effectiveness is not something fixed that individual teachers do or don’t possess. Rather, effectiveness is both a quality and an aspiration of schools: Schools ought to be organized and resourced so that teachers continuously and collaboratively improve. In these high performance systems, the whole (school effectiveness) is greater than the sum of its parts (individual teacher effectiveness) because, as Susan Moore Johnson argues:

Whatever level of human capital schools acquire through hiring can subsequently be developed through activities such as grade-level or subject-based teams of teachers, faculty committees, professional development, coaching, evaluation, and informal interactions. As teachers join together to solve problems and learn from one another, the school’s instructional capacity becomes greater than the sum of its parts.

The Learning Policy Institute published a report by Kini and Podolsky, Does Teaching Experience Increase Teacher Effectiveness? A Review of the Research, which debunked the idea that teachers don’t continue to become more effective after the first three-year learning spurt. Obviously, well-constructed professional learning will enhance the normal growth process.

It is important to dismiss incompetent teachers if their dismissal is done fairly and is part of an overall effort that gives teachers the support and time they need to improve before they are dismissed. With the right resources and approach, many low-performing teachers become good teachers. Our most successful districts do not ignore struggling teachers. They use effective assessments that include feedback, peer participation and review, and support. They have organized schools to be learning institutions in which all staff can continuously improve. These districts are also careful when making initial hiring decisions and granting tenure. Ironically, districts that follow these more supportive evaluation strategies often end up with higher dismissal rates than those following the pure Test-and-Punish approach. See the policy brief Evaluation, Accountability, and Professional Development in an Opportunity Culture, which outlines proven, more positive approaches to teacher evaluation.

Lavigne and Good have surveyed the best research and practices in the field. In their 2015 book, Improving Teachers Through Observation and Feedback, they offer powerful suggestions for correctly conducting evaluation in the service of improved performance. Their proposals markedly differ from what most districts are currently doing. In fact, Lavigne and Good emphasize useful feedback and cooperative effort, as opposed to formal evaluations. Information from a teacher’s student tests can help that teacher improve instruction when valid methods, measures, and strategies are employed, and checked for accuracy. Again, student test data should not be used in personnel decisions but as part of a broad-scale effort to collect evidence that will help teachers and schools improve. The current emphasis on narrowly conceived test-based, high-stakes teacher evaluation is unfair and ineffective.

A major report by the Network for Public Education, Teachers Talk Back: Educators on the Impact of Teacher Evaluation, reinforces the view that test-based teacher evaluation is harmful and evaluations should instead focus on improving instruction as some states such as California have done.

Does Dismissing Incompetent Teachers Improve Student Outcomes?

This is the most crucial question for those who support Test-and-Punish. First, after a decade of intensive effort to pursue teacher evaluation schemes, the results have been negligible. Rick Hess reports on a study conducted by Matt Kraft and Allison Gilmour. According to Hess:

[The authors] look at teacher evaluation results in 19 states that have adopted new evaluation systems since 2009. Unfortunately, all that time, money, and passion haven’t delivered much. Kraft and Gilmour note that, after all is said and done, the share of teachers identified as effective in those 19 states inched down from more than 99% to a little over 97% in 2015.

Second, the fact is that fixating on just the three to five percent sliver of teachers who are not performing, even if the evaluation process were fair and accurate, affects only a small fraction of teachers with limited payoff. In a school of 20 teachers, eliminating one incompetent teacher will help one class of students but does nothing for the other 19 classes. However, making test-based evaluations and dismissals a major policy component drags 19 other teachers into the vortex of legally justified yet burdensome and what are often superficial evaluation schemes.

When compared to schoolwide initiatives aimed at improving the entire staff and unleashing their potential as a coordinated team, the effect sizes of firing a failing teacher on overall student performance are small. Contrary to recent reform rhetoric, even if three to five percent of incompetent teachers were dismissed tomorrow, student gains would be minimal. There are much more productive strategies to improve student performance.

Recently, a media frenzy erupted over a research report that claimed a huge benefit from firing the worst teachers. This report sensationalized the effect of replacing a poor teacher with an average teacher by stating that the lifetime earning benefits of a given class would increase by $266,000. Diane Ravitch has questioned the methodology used in the research report. Even if the research were valid and findings accurate, the boost in earnings is quite trivial. As the report itself states, the figure amounts to about a discounted $7,000 per student per lifetime, or less than $200 per year. Put another way, the reported effect sizes are tiny compared to the payoff from other improvement strategies. Finally, the report admits that correlations are low at 0.5, which means that large numbers of teachers are identified as lacking who aren’t, and similar numbers are identified as proficient who are actually struggling.

Measures of Effective Teaching (MET) was a major study sponsored by the Gates Foundation. It found that the measures of teacher effectiveness did predict student performance in mathematics, although, again, effect sizes were small. Significant technical issues were raised about the methodology of this study as well. Critics have asked: Were random assignments fully carried out? Did the teachers of hard-to-educate students participate in sufficient numbers to validate the results? Were all the data reported? Is the report based on the flawed assumption that test scores, principal evaluations, and student surveys predicted the same thing?

However, the most damning objection to using the MET report to support high-stakes testing for personnel decisions comes from the report itself. It cautions against such use, saying the researchers did not determine or even consider if evaluation for high-stakes personnel decisions might well negate their findings. The report makes the conjecture that teaching to the test, narrowing curriculum, gaming the system, and failing to cooperate with other teachers competing for bonuses could very well lower student performance. Finally, and critically, this report does not present any evidence that identifying who is a high- or low-quality teacher resulted in improving instruction.

As demonstrated by the extensive research cited above, there is thin to nonexistent evidence suggesting that a reform strategy focused on firing incompetent teachers produces any significant gains in student achievement. Further, policymakers’ misplaced emphasis on the few suspected lowest performers comes with a huge cost. Frequently, all teachers regardless of their demonstrated capabilities are evaluated by expensive, hugely complicated, and time-consuming procedures. These evaluations gravitate toward a checklist mentality of individual items, which trivializes teaching instead of seeing it through a more complex and accurate lens. In addition to the previously mentioned Teacher and Student Evaluation: Moving Beyond the Failure of School Reform (Lavigne and Good, 2014) and The Teacher Wars (Goldstein, 2014), a video produced by WestEd provides an excellent summary of the best research and principles of effective professional evaluation systems.

Can Evaluations by Principals Fix the Problems of Test-Based Accountability?

Relying on principals’ classroom observations cannot obviate the deficiencies of using test scores to evaluate teachers. Evaluations of teachers by principals are heavily influenced by the socioeconomic levels of their students. According to Alisha Kirby:

As the components of teacher evaluations remain under debate among policymakers, a new study suggests the results of classroom observation may hinge more on the students’ capabilities than the teacher’s.

Analysis from the American Institutes for Research and the University of Pennsylvania’s Graduate School of Education found that students’ behavior and prior academic achievement weighs heavily on teacher performance and can skew the results of an evaluation.

“When information about teacher performance does not reflect a teacher’s practice, but rather the students to whom the teacher is assigned, such systems are at risk of misidentifying and mislabeling teacher performance,” reported Rachel Garrett of the American Institutes for Research and Matthew Steinberg from the University of Pennsylvania’s Graduate School of Education.

Two papers reached the same conclusions. One paper is Leading via Teacher Evaluation: The Case of the Missing Clothes? The other one is Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis.

Further, most principals are not adequately prepared to conduct accurate teacher evaluations. Many now find themselves spending an inordinate amount of time conducting formal classroom observations with extensive item checklists in hand. They are visiting each classroom several times a year rather than spending the time needed for schoolwide efforts that will improve curriculum and instruction. It is a case of evaluation run amok. Lavigne and Good provide a chilling example of this pathology. Under Tennessee’s byzantine and excessive teacher evaluation system, principals must visit each teacher’s classroom four to six times a year. In a school of 20 teachers, that means spending between 176 and 260 hours per year on observation, not assistance. Some research even suggests that classroom observations for purposes of evaluation actually reduce performance.

A pilot report from Chicago found small effects when principals used an evaluation strategy that included two observations of reading teachers per year. The results of the evaluations were used for teacher and school improvement, not harsh consequences. A key finding was that extensive training of principals in observation techniques and how to use the evaluations in program improvement made a large difference. Finally, many walkthroughs by principals miss the essence of good teaching and instead concentrate on trivia, according to Peter DeWitt.

A Narrow Focus on Dismissing Teachers Detracts from Effective Improvement Measures

Crucially, such a narrow policy focus on dismissing a few teachers often leads to a failure to address other vital in-school measures, which significantly influence the performance of all teachers and the achievement of students. For example, large numbers of teachers leave inner-city schools each year. Teacher churn and the resulting heavy use of substitutes are a major reason for low student performance. Excellent teachers are leaving the profession due to the stress of teaching in low-income urban schools and dreadful working conditions. This problem overshadows the damage done by a few underperforming teachers.

Several researchers have recommended policies aimed at encouraging the retention of our best teachers. The New Teacher Project (TNTP) published a report in 2013 entitled The Irreplaceables: Understanding the Real Retention Crisis in America’s Urban Schools. The report laments that most districts do not have policies to encourage the highest-performing 20% of teachers to stay, and as a result the districts suffer high attrition rates. Top teachers want collegiality, being part of effective teams, better working conditions, somebody paying attention to them, and career paths that allow them to keep teaching but take on additional responsibility helping other teachers or solving school performance problems and earn more money. Districts that solely concentrate on firing incompetent teachers miss this much larger and more productive target.

It is also important to recognize that the quality of the curriculum and instructional materials is just about as important as teacher quality. For more about the importance of curriculum and educational resources, see the companion article Provide High-Quality Instruction.

In addition, the level of school funding matters. Yes, money does make a difference. Recent reports by moderate and conservative institutions refute reformers’ often expressed claim that expenditure levels are not a key component of quality. The reports find that increased funding results in improved student performance, and conversely, cutting school budgets depresses outcomes. Similar results were found in Indiana after the state drastically cut educational support. The companion article Provide Adequate School Funding covers the role of funding in its discussion of district/state support for improving schools.

For a review of the literature that has revealed funding matters, see Does Money Matter in Education? Unfortunately, the “money doesn’t matter philosophy” and political antipathy to public education in this country have substantially hampered school funding. Most states are spending below their 2008 expenditures, and some are cutting even more.

Equally important is site and district leadership, particularly as they relate to building systems that connect teaching, curriculum, and instruction; to continuously improving these elements; and to improving the school climate by increasing the degree of engagement of teachers, students, and parents and community. A recent report by Thomas Kane from Harvard found teacher perception of the school being a good place to work improved performance. In math, the amount of professional development and teacher feedback also helped. Principal leadership accounts for about one-quarter of in-school measures of student performance, teacher quality about one-third.

For a perceptive two-part series on how to best train principals to lead and a description of efforts currently under way in four states, see the Marc Tucker’s blog posts “Organizations in Which Teachers Can Do Their Best Work,” Part 1 and Part 2. For a comprehensive report on principal training, see The School Principal as Leader: Guiding Schools to Better Teaching and Learning and the standards for school leadership approved by the National Policy Board for Educational Administration in 2015.

There are other essential components of effective improvement efforts: provision of social support and medical services, ongoing professional development and team building for all teachers, and the use of just-in-time assessment systems and valid data on each student’s progress to inform instruction.

Reform measures that emphasize terminating incompetent teachers based on questionable methods not only lower teachers’ morale and efficacy, but inevitably lead to conflict with staff who understand the underlying flaws in the strategy. The evidence is clear—conflict between key stakeholders tends to sabotage the cooperative efforts needed to achieve effective reform. As many have said, “You can’t fire your way to educational greatness.”

Targeting the Lowest-Performing Schools with Closure and Other Drastic Measures Is Usually Ineffective

When it comes to evaluating schools, high-stakes accountability based on tests has been just as ineffective and just as problematic in terms of unintended consequences. Concentrating on five percent of low-testing schools and responding to their performance with drastic measures—closures, mass firings, or conversion to charters—has produced negligible results. Such reform measures do, however, severely impact those schools, their students, and the surrounding communities. This is even more concerning given that many of the affected schools were unfairly misidentified. They were actually progressing equal to or better than the remaining schools in the district. The failure of school turnaround policies has been documented by a number of respected sources. According to the National Education Policy Center’s description of a meta-analysis by Tina Trujillo of University of California, Berkeley and Michelle Renée of Brown’s Annenberg Institute for School Reform, Trujillo and Renée stated that school turnaround policies are “more likely to cause upheaval than to help.” See also pages 96–97 of the previously cited Teacher and Student Evaluation: Moving Beyond the Failure of School Reform, and for an overall study of turnaround strategies, see Emerging State Turnaround Strategies, a report prepared by the Education Commission of the States.

States that used tests to grade schools have found major problems with accuracy, and many have reversed the policy. For a critique of Florida’s 15-year failed effort to get school grades right, see “School Scandals Reveal Problem with Grading Schools.” For a broader, balanced critique of Florida’s reform initiatives, see the Shanker Institute’s policy brief. Many have questioned whether the state reform formula and direction were actually the driving force behind the early gains. Instead, they point to the efforts made by excellent local superintendents who stressed the Build-and-Support approach. Florida’s gains have since stalled following school-funding cutbacks, massive charter expansion, and stringent accountability measures. There are reports showing that segregation and in-school deficiencies considerably outweigh school-to-school comparisons in predicting achievement gaps.

This research demonstrates that, as of yet, the knowledge base for identifying failing schools is not sufficiently developed to allow for fair assessments. As a result, many local sites are labeled as failures simply because they have large numbers of poor and/or students of color. In addition, there is no clear research-based consensus regarding the best ways to intervene in low-performing schools. For example, recent evaluations of the federal School Improvement Grants program aimed at the lowest-underperforming schools found a slight overall improvement, but one-third of the grantees actually had falling scores. The feds are currently providing a bit more flexibility to applicants under the program, admitting that their previous prescriptions were off base. Moreover, even if reform efforts were fair and successful, focusing on the few schools at the bottom ignores the vast majority of children. As Michael Fullan, one of the most respected leaders of the Build-and-Support approach, has pointed out, policies aimed at improving all schools have far better results. Edward Fiske and Helen Ladd made a similar point in an op-ed about successful low-income districts in London. The districts that flourished pursued a districtwide strategic improvement plan as opposed to targeting the lowest performers, used broad accountability systems that went beyond test scores, and provided support for low-income students.

Recent Developments

9/14/2016 Where school turnarounds have been successful they have been embedded in over-all district efforts to improve and have avoided a punishment approach. A new report by the Center for American Progress https://www.americanprogress.org/issues/education/report/2016/09/13/143922/7-tenets-for-sustainable-school-turnaround/ has found seven important issues for successful school turnarounds:

Grant districts, and ultimately the state, the authority to intervene in failing schools.

Provide significant resources to support planning and restructuring and leverage competitive grants.

Treat the district as the unit of change and hold them accountable for school improvement.

Create transparent tiers of intervention and support combined with ongoing capacity building and sharing best practices.

Promote stakeholder engagement.

Create pipeline programs for developing and supporting effective turnaround school leaders.

Embed evaluation and evidence-based building activities in school implementation

7/30/2016 Audrey Amerain-Beardsley reviewed an excellent piece from twenty years ago by Ed Haertel on the deficiencies of test-based evaluations of teachers. http://vamboozled.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/01/Haertel_1986.pdf She details six major points Haertel makes, all consistent with the article above.

7/30/2016 Another researcher debunks the value of value added measures for teacher evaluation. http://vamboozled.com/vams-are-never-accurate-reliable-and-valid/ Another district eliminated VAMS for teacher evaluation. http://vamboozled.com/no-more-evaas-for-houston-school-board-tie-vote-means-non-renewal/

BBS Companion Articles

Why Conventional School “Reforms” Have Failed
Reformers Target the Wrong Levers of Improvement
How Top Performers Build-and-Support
Provide High-Quality Instruction
Provide Adequate School Funding

Reference Notes

Hattie, J. (2008). Visible Learning: A Synthesis of Over 800 Meta-Analyses Relating to Achievement. London: Routledge.

Firing Teachers Based on Students’ Test Scores Is Not the Answer
Aspen Institute. (2016, Mar). Evaluation and Support Systems: A Roadmap for Improvement. http://www.aspeninstitute.org/publications/teacher-evaluation-support-systems-roadmap-improvement  See also Brown, C., Partelow L., & Konoske-Graf, A. (2016, Mar 16). Educator Evaluation: A Case Study of Massachusetts’ Approach. https://www.americanprogress.org/issues/education/report/2016/03/16/133038/educator-evaluation/  Humphrey, D., Koppich, J., & Tiffany-Morales, J. (2016, Mar). Replacing Teacher Evaluation Systems with Systems of Professional Growth: Lessons from Three California School Districts and Their Teachers’ Unions. https://www.sri.com/work/publications/replacing-teacher-evaluation-systems-systems-professional-growth-lessons-three  Taylor Kerchner, C (2016, Mar 21). Five Lessons for Creating Effective Teacher Evaluations. http://blogs.edweek.org/edweek/on_california/2016/03/five_lessons_for_creating_effective_teacher_evaluation.html

Kahlenberg, R. D. (2015, Summer). Tenure: How Due Process Protects Teachers and Students. American Educator. http://www.aft.org/ae/summer2015/kahlenberg

Goldstein, D. (2014). The Teacher Wars: A History of America’s Most Embattled Profession. New York: Doubleday.

Teacher Quality: Putting the Issue in Perspective
Haertel, E. H. (2013). Reliability and Validity of Inferences About Teachers Based on Student Test Scores. Educational Testing Service. http://www.ets.org/research/policy_research_reports/publications/publication/2013/jquq

Putnam, R. D. (2015). Our Kids: The American Dream in Crisis. New York: Simon & Schuster. For other works on the same topic, see Morsy, L., & Rothstein, R. (2015, Jun 10). Five Social Disadvantages That Depress Student Performance: Why Schools Alone Can’t Close Achievement Gaps. Economic Policy Institute. http://www.epi.org/publication/five-social-disadvantages-that-depress-student-performance-why-schools-alone-cant-close-achievement-gaps/?utm_source=Economic+Policy+Institute&utm_campaign=26b9c8a34e-EPI_News_06_12_156_12_2015&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_e7c5826c50-26b9c8a34e-55876685 Berliner, D. C. (2013). Effects of Inequality and Poverty vs. Teachers and Schooling on America’s Youth. www.tcrecord.org/content.asp?contentid=16889 See also Summers, L. H., & Balls, E. (2015, Jan). Report on the Committee for Inclusive Prosperity. https://www.americanprogress.org/issues/economy/report/2015/01/15/104266/report-of-the-commission-on-inclusive-prosperity/

Rich, M., Cox, A., & Bloch, M. (2016, Apr 29). Money, Race, and Success: How Your School District Compares. The New York Times. http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2016/04/29/upshot/money-race-and-success-how-your-school-district-compares.html?_r=3

Darling-Hammond, L., Wilhoit, G., & Pittenger, L. (2014, Oct 16). Accountability for College and Career Readiness: Developing a New Paradigm. Stanford Center for Opportunity Policy in Education. https://edpolicy.stanford.edu/publications/pubs/1257

Glass, Gene. V. (2016, Apr 5). Take All the Credit? You’ll Get All the Blame. http://ed2worlds.blogspot.com/2016/04/take-all-credit-youll-get-all-blame.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+EducationInTwoWorlds+%28Education+in+Two+Worlds%29

Strauss, V. (2016, Mar). No, Great Schools Can’t Close Achievement Gaps All by Themselves. The Washington Post. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/answer-sheet/wp/2016/03/21/no-great-schools-cant-close-achievement-gaps-all-by-themselves/

A Broader, Bolder Approach to Education. http://www.boldapproach.org/

Sawhill, I. V., & Rodrigue, E. (2015, Nov 18). An Agenda for Reducing Poverty and Improving Opportunity. Brookings. http://www.brookings.edu/research/papers/2015/11/campaign-2016-presidential-candidates-poverty-and-opportunity

Kerwin McCrimmon, K. (2015, Aug 27). Private Money Saves Colorado IUD Program as Fight Continues for Public Funding. Kaiser Health News. http://khn.org/news/private-money-saves-colorado-iud-program-as-fight-continues-for-public-funding/ See also Tavernise, S. (2015, Jul 5). Colorado’s Effort Against Teenage Pregnancies Is a Startling Success. The New York Times. http://www.nytimes.com/2015/07/06/science/colorados-push-against-teenage-pregnancies-is-a-startling-success.html

Tests Are Not Reliable Measures of Teacher Performance
American Education Research Association and National Academy of Education. Getting Teacher Evaluation Right: A Brief for Policymakers. https://edpolicy.stanford.edu/publications/pubs/421

American Statistical Association. (2014, Apr 8). ASA Statement on Using Value-Added Models for Educational Assessment. OpEd News. http://www.opednews.com/Quicklink/ASA-Statement-on-Using-Val-in-Best_Web_OpEds-Administration_Caution_Mandates_Teacher-140412-203.html

American Education Research Association. (2015, Nov). AERA Statement of Use of Value-Added Models (VAM) for the Evaluation of Educators and Educator Preparation Programs. Educational Researcher. http://online.sagepub.com/search/results?submit=yes&src=hw&andorexactfulltext=and&fulltext=AERA+Statement+of+Use+of+Value-Added+Models+%28VAM%29+for+the+Evaluation+of+Educators+and+Educator+Preparation+Programs&x=0&y=0

Darling-Hammond, L., Amrein-Beardsley, A., Haertel, E., & Rothstein, J. (2012, Mar 15). Evaluating Teacher Evaluation: We Know About Value-Added Models and Other Methods. Phi Delta Kappan. http://www.edweek.org/ew/articles/2012/03/01/kappan_hammond.html

Lavigne, A. L., & Good, T. L. (2013). Teacher and Student Evaluation: Moving Beyond the Failure of School Reform. New York: Routledge.

Stigins, R. J. (2014). Defensible Teacher Evaluation: Student Growth Through Classroom Assessment. Thousand Oaks, CA: Corwin Press.

Ballou, D., & Springer, M. G. (2015). Using Student Test Scores to Measure Teacher Performance: Some Problems in the Design and Implementation of Evaluation Systems. Educational Researcher. http://edr.sagepub.com/content/44/2/77.full.pdf+html?ijkey=WSTBFIHcTyO9I&keytype=ref&siteid=spedr

Amrein-Beardsley, A. (n.d.). Top 15 Research Articles About VAMS. http://vamboozled.com/research-articles-on-vams/

Amrein-Beardsley, A. (n.d.). All Recommended Articles About VAMS. http://vamboozled.com/recommended-reading/value-added-models/

Shavelson, R. J., Linn, R. L., Baker, E. L., et al. (2010, Aug 27). Problems with the Use of Student Test Scores to Evaluate Teachers. Economic Policy Institute. http://www.epi.org/publication/bp278/

Yettick, H. (2014, May 13). Studies Highlight Complexities of Using Value-Added Measures. Education Week. http://www.edweek.org/ew/articles/2014/05/13/32value-add.h33.html

Haertel, E. H. (2013). Reliability and Validity of Inferences About Teachers Based on Student Test Scores. Educational Testing Service. http://www.ets.org/research/policy_research_reports/publications/publication/2013/jquq

Casey, L. M. (2013). The Will to Quantify: The “Bottom Line” in the Market Model of Education Reform. Teachers College Record. http://www.tcrecord.org/Content.asp?ContentId=17107

Amrein-Beardsley A., Collins, C., Holloway-Libell, J., & Paufler, N. (2016, Jan 5). Everything is Bigger (and Badder) in Texas: Houston’s Teacher Value-Added System. Teacher’s College Record. http://www.tcrecord.org/Content.asp?ContentId=18983

Lash, A., Makkonen, R., Tran, L., & Huang, M. (2016, Jan). Analysis of the Stability of Teacher-Level Growth Scores from The Student Growth Percentile Model. WestEd. https://relwest.wested.org/resources/210?utm_source=REL+West+Mailing+List&utm_campaign=05c37febff-ee-4-1&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_316bfe94f7-05c37febff-92259833

Yeh, S. (2013). A Reanalysis of the Effects of Teacher Replacement Using Value-Added Modeling. Teachers College Record. http://www.tcrecord.org/Content.asp?ContentID=16934

Amrein-Beardsley, A. (2015, Apr 30). The (Relentless) Will to Quantify. http://vamboozled.com/the-relentless-will-to-quantify/

Anrig, G. (2015, Mar 25). Value Subtracted: Gov. Cuomo’s Plot to Tie Teacher Evaluations to Test Scores Won’t Help Our Public Schools. Slate. http://www.slate.com/articles/life/education/2015/03/gov_andrew_cuomo_and_teacher_evaluations_standardized_test_scores_are_the.html

Berliner, D. C. (2015, Aug 11). Teacher Evaluation and Standardized Tests: A Policy Fiasco. Melbourne Graduate School of Education. http://education.unimelb.edu.au/news_and_activities/events/upcoming_events/dean_lecture_series/dls-past-2015/teacher-evaluation-and-standardised-tests-a-policy-fiasco

Evaluations Based on Test Scores Misidentify Teachers
Schochet, P. Z., &. Chiang, H. S. (2010, Jul). Technical Methods Report: Error Rates in Measuring Teacher and School Performance Based on Student Test Score Gains. National Center for Education Evaluation and Regional Assistance. https://ies.ed.gov/ncee/pubs/20104004/

Bitler, M. P., Corcoran, S. P., Domina, T., & Penner, E. K. (2014, Spring). Teacher Effects on Student Achievement and Height: A Cautionary Tale. The Society for Research on Educational Effectiveness. https://archive.org/stream/ERIC_ED562824/ERIC_ED562824_djvu.txt

Examples of Test-Based Evaluations That Fail Exemplary Teachers
Hirsch, M. (2012, Mar 1). The True Story of Pascale Mauclair. New Politics. http://newpol.org/content/true-story-pascale-mauclair

Darling-Hammond, L., Amrein-Beardsley, A., Haertel, E., & Rothstein, J. (2012, Mar 15). Evaluating Teacher Evaluation. Phi Delta Kappan. http://www.edweek.org/ew/articles/2012/03/01/kappan_hammond.html

Ravitch, D. (2015, Aug 7). Bruce Lederman Explains the Challenge to New York State Teacher Evaluation System. http://dianeravitch.net/2015/08/07/bruce-lederman-explains-the-challenge-to-new-york-state-teacher-evaluation-system/

Harris, E.A. (2016, May 10). Court Vacates Long Island Teacher’s Evaluation Tied to Student Test Scores. The New York Times. http://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/11/nyregion/court-vacates-long-island-teachers-evaluation-tied-to-student-test-scores.html

Pallas, A. (2012, May 16). Meet the “Worst” 8th Grade Math Teacher in NYC. The Washington Post. http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/answer-sheet/post/meet-the-worst-8th-grade-math-teacher-in-nyc/2012/05/15/gIQArmlbSU_blog.html

Other Flaws in Test-Based Evaluation Systems
Whitehurst, G. J., Chingos, M. M., & Lindquist, K. M. (Winter 2015). Getting Classroom Observations Right. EducationNext. http://educationnext.org/getting-classroom-observations-right/ See also Kirby A. (2016, Jan 21). Study Finds Flaws in Teacher Performance Observations. https://www.cabinetreport.com/human-resources/study-finds-flaws-in-teacher-performance-observations

Amrein-Beardsley, A. (2015, Oct 8). Teacher Evaluation Systems “At Issue” Across U. S. Courts. http://vamboozled.com/teacher-evaluation-systems-at-issue-across-u-s-courts/

Paufler, N. A., & Amrein-Beardsley, A. A. (2013, Jul 25). The Random Assignment of Students into Elementary Classrooms: Implications for Value-Added Analyses and Interpretations. American Educational Research Journal. http://aer.sagepub.com/content/51/2/328.

Condie, S., Lefgren, L., & Sims, D. (2014, Jun). Teacher Heterogeneity, Value-Added and Education Policy. Economics of Education Review. http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0272775713001647

Test-Based Evaluations Do Not Measure Good Teaching and Harm the Profession
Polikoff, M. S., & Porter, A. C. (2014, May). Instructional Alignment as a Measure of Teaching Quality. Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis. http://www.aera.net/Newsroom/RecentAERAResearch/InstructionalAlignmentasaMeasureofTeachingQuality/tabid/15510/Default.aspx See also Barshay, J. (2014, May 13). Researchers Give Failing Marks to National Effort to Measure Good Teaching. http://educationbythenumbers.org/content/researchers-say-pennsylvanias-measurement-teacher-effectiveness-doesnt-measure-good-teaching_1238/ and Ravitch, D. (2016, Mar 16). John Thompson: The Utter Failure of Standardized Teacher Evaluation. http://dianeravitch.net/2016/03/16/johnthompson-the-utter-failure/

Johnson, S. M. (2015, Jul 29). Four Unintended Consequences of Using Student Test Scores to Evaluate Teachers. The Washington Post. http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/answer-sheet/wp/2015/07/29/four-unintended-consequences-of-using-student-test-scores-to-evaluate-teachers/

Kirby, A. (2015, Aug 27). High-Stakes Teacher Evaluations May Not Help. https://www.cabinetreport.com/human-resources/high-stakes-teacher-evaluations-may-not-help See also Bryant, Jeff (2016, April) We Won’t Improve Education by Making Teachers Hate Their Jobs. http://educationopportunitynetwork.org/we-wont-improve-education-by-making-teachers-hate-their-jobs/

Kwalwasser, H. (2015, Sep 15). Standardized Tests Don’t Help Us Evaluate Teachers. Los Angeles Times. http://www.latimes.com/opinion/op-ed/la-oe-0910-kwalwasser-standardized-testing-problems-20150910-story.html

Goldstein, D. (2014). The Teacher Wars: A History of America’s Most Embattled Profession. New York: Doubleday.

Amrein-Beardsley, A. (2015. Dec 29). VAMboozled!: Why Standardized Tests Should Not Be Used to Evaluate Teachers (and Teacher Education Programs). http://nepc.colorado.edu/blog/why-standardized-tests

Toch, T. (2016, May). Grading the Graders: A Report on Teacher Evaluation Reform in Public Education. Center on the Future of American Education. https://georgetown.app.box.com/s/f47qnfh63wfxhxqu88pu5r0y0tkbo6bk

Feintzeig, R. (2015, Apr 21). The Trouble with Grading Employees. The Wall Street Journal. http://www.wsj.com/articles/the-trouble-with-grading-employees-1429624897 See also Korkki, P. (2015, Jul 11). Why Employee Ranking Can Backfire. The New York Times. http://mobile.nytimes.com/2015/07/12/business/why-employee-ranking-can-backfire.html?_r=1&referrer

Ravitch, J. (2015, Oct 21). John Thompson: The Gates Plan Failed in Tulsa, Now What? http://dianeravitch.net/2015/10/21/john-thompson-the-gates-plan-failed-in-tulsa-now-what/

Kirby, A. (2015, Nov 9). Michigan Bill Rolls Back Test Scores in Teacher Evaluations. https://cabinetreport.com/politics-education/michigan-bill-rolls-back-test-scores-in-teacher-evaluations

Amrein-Beardsley, A. (2015, Nov 9). Houston Board Candidates Respond to Their Teacher Evaluation System. http://vamboozled.com/?s=Houston+board+candidates&submit=Search&__bcf_gupi=1DCE61EDFC3F0001C87B1A304D9B1E821DCE61EDFC4000013A7E99739110F630

Gandha, T. (2016, Feb). State Actions to Advance Teacher Evaluation. Southern Regional Education Board. http://www.sreb.org/publication/state-actions-advance-teacher-evaluation

Tom Torlakson’s Task Force. (2012, Sep). Greatness by Design; Supporting Outstanding Teaching to Sustain a Golden State. http://www.cde.ca.gov/eo/in/ee.asp

Danielson, C. (2016, Apr 18). Charlotte Danielson on Rethinking Teacher Evaluation. Education Week. http://www.edweek.org/ew/articles/2016/04/20/charlotte-danielson-on-rethinking-teacher-evaluation.html?cmp=eml-enl-eu-news2-RM

Taylor, K. (2015, Nov 25). Cuomo, in Shift, Is Said to Back Reducing Test Scores’ Role in Teacher Reviews. The New York Times. http://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/26/nyregion/cuomo-in-shift-is-said-to-back-reducing-test-scores-role-in-teacher-reviews.html?ref=topics&_r=0

Disare, M. (2015, Dec 14). In Big Shift, Regents Vote to Exclude State Tests from Teacher Evals Until 2019. http://ny.chalkbeat.org/2015/12/14/breaking-in-big-shift-regents-vote-to-exclude-state-tests-from-teacher-evals-until-2019/?utm_source=Master+Mailing+List&utm_campaign=f54d1b9f78-Rise_Shine_201912_15_2015&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_23e3b96952-f54d1b9f78-75668293#.VnA8EI-cE2y

Tyrrell, J. (2015, Nov 21). Nassau Superintendents: End Teacher Evals Tied to Test Scores. Newsday. http://www.newsday.com/long-island/nassau/nassau-superintendents-end-teacher-evals-tied-to-test-scores-1.11150791

Layton, L. (2015, Nov 16). Clinton Says “No Evidence” That Teachers Can Be Judged by Student Test Scores. The Washington Post. https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/education/clinton-says-no-evidence-that-teachers-can-be-judged-by-student-test-scores/2015/11/16/303ee068-8c98-11e5-baf4-bdf37355da0c_story.html

Ravitch, D. (2015, Dec 17). John Thompson: The Beginning of the End of VAM? http://dianeravitch.net/2015/12/17/john-thompson-the-beginning-of-the-end-of-vam/

Sawchuk, S. (2013, Apr 4). Bill Gates: Don’t Overuse Tests in Teachers’ Evaluations. http://blogs.edweek.org/edweek/teacherbeat/2013/04/bill_gates_dont_overuse_tests_in_teachers_evaluations.html See also Layton, L. (2015, Oct 7). Improving U.S. schools Tougher than Global Health, Gates Says. The Washington Post. https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/education/improving-us-schools-tougher-than-global-health-gates-says/2015/10/07/56da9972-6d05-11e5-b31c-d80d62b53e28_story.html

A More Effective Approach to Teacher Evaluation
Quintero, E (2016, Feb 23). Beyond Teacher Quality. http://www.shankerinstitute.org/blog/beyond-teacher-quality

Johnson, S. M. (2015, Jun 25). Will Value-Added Reinforce the Walls of the Egg-Crate School? http://www.shankerinstitute.org/blog/will-value-added-reinforce-walls-egg-crate-school

Kini, T., & Podolsky, A. (2016). Does Teaching Experience Increase Teacher Effectiveness? A Review of the Research. Learning Policy Institute. https://learningpolicyinstitute.org/our-work/publications-resources/does-teaching-experience-increase-teacher-effectiveness-review-research/

Public Impact. (2015). Evaluation, Accountability, and Professional Development in an Opportunity Culture. Opportunity Culture. http://opportunityculture.org/evaluation-policy-brief/

Lavigne, A. L., & Good, T. L. (2015). Improving Teachers Through Observation and Feedback: Beyond State and Federal Mandates. New York: Routledge.

Network for Public Education. (2016). Teachers Talk Back: Educators on the Impact of Teacher Evaluation. http://networkforpubliceducation.org/2016/04/6468/

Does Dismissing Incompetent Teachers Improve Student Outcomes?
Kraft, M.A., & Gilmour, A.F. (2016, Feb). Revisiting the Widget Effect: Teacher Evaluation Reforms and the Distribution of Teacher Effectiveness. Brown University. http://scholar.harvard.edu/mkraft/publications/revisiting-widget-effect-teacher-evaluation-reforms-and-distribution-teacher

Hess, R. (2016, Mar 8). When Fancy New Teacher-Evaluation Systems Don’t Make a Difference. http://mobile.edweek.org/c.jsp?cid=25920011&item=http%3A%2F%2Fapi.edweek.org%2Fv1%2Fblog%2F76%2F%3Fuuid%3D57146

Lowrey, A. (2012, Jan 6). Big Study Links Good Teachers to Lasting Gain. The New York Times. http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/06/education/big-study-links-good-teachers-to-lasting-gain.html?_r=0

Ravitch, D. (2014, Aug 11). The Holes in the Chetty et al VAM Study as Seen by the American Statistical Association. http://dianeravitch.net/2014/08/11/the-holes-in-the-chetty-et-al-vam-study-as-seen-by-the-american-statistical-association/

Rothstein, J., & Mathis, W. J. (2013, Jan 31). Review of Two Culminating Reports from the MET Project. National Education Policy Center. http://nepc.colorado.edu/thinktank/review-MET-final-2013

DeWitt, P. (2015, May 11). 3 Reasons Why Your Observations May Be a Waste of Time. http://blogs.edweek.org/edweek/finding_common_ground/2015/05/3_reasons_why_your_observations_may_be_a_waste_of_time.html

WestEd. (2015, Sep). Video: Making Meaningful Use of Teacher Effectiveness Data. https://relwest.wested.org/resources/198

Can Evaluations by Principals Fix the Problems of Test-Based Accountability
Kirby, A. (2016, Jan 21). Study Finds Flaws in Teacher Performance Observations. https://www.cabinetreport.com/human-resources/study-finds-flaws-in-teacher-performance-observations

Hallinger, P., Heck, R. H., & Murphy, J. (2013, Jul 30). Leading via Teacher Evaluation: The Case of the Missing Clothes? Educational Researcher. http://ecs.force.com/studies/rstudypg?id=a0r70000003ql6SAAQ

American Educational Research Association. (2016, Mar). Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis. http://eepa.aera.net See also Di Carlo. M. (2015, Feb 25). Student Sorting and Teacher Classroom Observations. http://www.shankerinstitute.org/blog/student-sorting-and-teacher-classroom-observations and Garret, R., & Steinberg, M. P. (2015, May 21). Examining Teacher Effectiveness Using Classroom Observation Scores. http://epa.sagepub.com/content/early/2014/06/13/0162373714537551

Lavigne, A. L., & Good, T. L. (2015). Improving Teaching Through Observation and Feedback: Beyond State and Federal Mandates. New York: Routledge.

Devaney, L. (2016, Jan 19). Classroom Observations May Hurt Teachers More Than They Help, Study Says. eSchool News. http://www.eschoolnews.com/2016/01/19/classroom-observations-may-hurt-teachers-more-than-they-help-study-says/

DiCarlo, M. (2015, Dec 4). Evidence from a Teacher Evaluation Pilot Program in Chicago. http://www.shankerinstitute.org/blog/evidence-teacher-evaluation-pilot-program-chicago

DeWitt, P. (2016, Apr 19). The Myth of Walkthroughs: 8 Unobserved Practices in Classrooms. http://blogs.edweek.org/edweek/finding_common_ground/2016/04/the_myth_of_walkthroughs_8_unobserved_practices_in_classrooms.html

A Narrow Focus on Dismissing Teachers Detracts from Effective Improvement Measures
American Education Research Association and National Academy of Education. Getting Teacher Evaluation Right: A Brief for Policymakers. https://edpolicy.stanford.edu/publications/pubs/421

Thompson, J. (2015, Sep 10). The Rhino in the Room: Time to End Disruptive Reform. http://www.livingindialogue.com/the-rhino-in-the-room-time-to-end-disruptive-reform/

The New Teacher Project. (2013, Jul 30). The Irreplaceables: Understanding the Real Retention Crisis in America’s Urban Schools. http://tntp.org/publications/view/retention-and-school-culture/the-irreplaceables-understanding-the-real-retention-crisis

Knudson, J. (2013, Sep). You’ll Never Be Better Than Your Teachers: The Garden Grove Approach to Human Capital Development. http://eric.ed.gov/?q=source%3a%22California+Collaborative+on+District+Reform%22&id=ED557950 See also Tucker, M. (2016, Apr). How to Get a First-Rate Teacher in Front of Every Student. http://blogs.edweek.org/edweek/top_performers/2016/04/how_to_get_a_first-rate_teacher_in_front_of_every_student.html?utm_source=feedblitz&utm_medium=FeedBlitzRss&utm_campaign=top_performers

Sawhill, I. V. (2015, Sep 8). Does Money Matter? http://www.brookings.edu/research/opinions/2015/09/08-does-money-matter-education-sawhill See also Jackson, C. K., Johnson, R. C., & Persico, C. (2015, Fall). Boosting Educational Attainment and Adult Earnings. http://educationnext.org/boosting-education-attainment-adult-earnings-schoolspending/

Ravitch, D. (2015, Oct 20). Indiana: Less Money, More Chaos. http://dianeravitch.net/2015/10/20/indiana-less-money-more-chaos/

Baker, B. (2012). Revisiting That Age Old Question: Does Money Matter in Education? http://eric.ed.gov/?q=Does+Money+Matter+in+Education&id=ED528632 See also Baker, B. (2016). Does Money Matter in Education? Second Edition. http://www.shankerinstitute.org/resource/does-money-matter and Spielberg, B. (2015, Oct 20). The Truth About School Funding. http://34justice.com/2015/10/20/the-truth-about-school-funding/

Leachman, M., Albares, N., Masterson, K., & Wallace, M. (2016, Jan 25). Most States Have Cut School Funding, and Some Continue Cutting. http://www.cbpp.org/research/state-budget-and-tax/most-states-have-cut-school-funding-and-some-continue-cutting

Kane, T. J., Owens, A. M., Marinell, W. H., Thal, D. R. C., & Staiger, D. O. (2016, Feb). Teaching Higher: Educators’ Perspectives on Common Core Implementation. http://cepr.harvard.edu/teaching-higher See also Hull, S. J. (2015, Oct 14). Principals Matter—And They Need the Right Start. http://www.learningfirst.org/principals-matter-and-they-need-right-start?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+LFA+%28Public+School+Insights%3A+What+is+WORKING+in+our+Public+Schools%29 and Center for Education Policy Research. (2014–16). Teaching Higher: Educator’s Perspectives on Common Core Implementation. http://cepr.harvard.edu/teaching-higher

Tucker, M. (2015, Aug 13). Organizations in Which Teachers Can Do Their Best Work: Part I. http://blogs.edweek.org/edweek/top_performers/2015/08/organizations_in_which_teachers_can_do_their_best_work_part_i.html

Tucker, M. (2015, Aug 20). Organizations in Which Teachers Can Do Their Best Work: Part II. http://blogs.edweek.org/edweek/top_performers/2015/08/organizations_in_which_teachers_can_do_their_best_work_part_ii.html

The Wallace Foundation. (2013, Jan). The School Principal as Leader: Guiding Schools to Better Teaching and Learning. http://www.wallacefoundation.org/knowledge-center/Pages/The-School-Principal-as-Leader-Guiding-Schools-to-Better-Teaching-and-Learning.aspx

Superville, D. R. (2015, Oct 23). New Professional Standards for School Leaders Are Approved. http://blogs.edweek.org/edweek/District_Dossier/2015/10/new_professional_standards_for.html?r=608789257

Targeting the Lowest-Performing Schools with Closure and Other Drastic Measures Is Usually Ineffective
Miller, T. D., & Brown, C. (2015, Mar 31). Dramatic Action, Dramatic Improvement. Center for American Progress. http://nepc.colorado.edu/thinktank/review-school-turnaround See also Burris, C. (2015, Sep 4). School Closures: A National Look at a Failed Strategy. http://www.networkforpubliceducation.org/2015/09/school-closures-a-national-look-at-a-failed-strategy-2/?can_id=012f354d90b87664b362dda6a4b2980d&source=email-school-closures-a-national-look-at-a-failed-strategy&email_referrer=school-closures-a-national-look-at-a-failed-strategy and American Institutes for Research and Mathematica Policy Research. (May 2015). Evaluation Brief: State Capacity to Support School Turnaround. National Center for Education Evaluation and Regional Assistance. https://ies.ed.gov/ncee/pubs/20154012/

Trujillo, T., & Renée, M. (2012, Oct 1). Democratic School Turnarounds: Pursuing Equity and Learning from Evidence. National Education Policy Center. http://nepc.colorado.edu/publication/democratic-school-turnarounds

Aragon, S., & Workman, E. (2015, Oct). Emerging State Turnaround Strategies. Education Commission of the States. http://www.ecs.org/press-release-emerging-state-turnaround-strategies/ See also Felton, E. (2015, Oct 19). Are Turnaround Districts the Answer for America’s Worst Schools? http://hechingerreport.org/are-turnaround-districts-the-answer-for-americas-worst-schools/

Ehrenhalt, A. (2013, Oct). School Scandals Reveal the Problem with Grading Schools. Governing. http://www.governing.com/columns/col-school-scandals-reveal-testing-ignorance.html

Di Carlo, M. (2015, Jun). The Evidence on the “Florida Formula” for Education Reform. Albert Shanker Institute. http://www.shankerinstitute.org/resource/evidence-florida-formula-education-reform

Sparks, S. D. (2015, Oct 6). Studies Probe How Schools Widen Achievement Gaps. Education Week. http://www.edweek.org/ew/articles/2015/10/07/schools-help-widen-academic-gaps-studies-find.html?r=258221469&cmp=eml-enl-eu-news1-RM

Klein, A. (2014, Sep 15). New Turnaround Options Detailed in Draft SIG Guidance. Education Week. http://www.edweek.org/ew/articles/2014/09/17/04sig.h34.html

Fullan, M. (2011, Nov 17). Choosing the Wrong Drivers for Whole System Reform. http://education.qld.gov.au/projects/educationviews/news-views/2011/nov/talking-point-fullan-101117.html

Fiske, E. B., & Ladd, H. F. (2016, Feb 13). Learning from London About School Improvement. The News & Observer. http://www.newsobserver.com/opinion/op-ed/article60118256.html

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