Tag Archives: Merit Pay

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

The Big Picture: Have High-Stakes Testing and Privatization Been Effective?

The Big Picture
Have High-Stakes Testing and Privatization Been Effective?

by Bill Honig

More and more educators, parents, and community, political, and opinion leaders are becoming aware of the failure of high-stakes accountability based on reading and math test scores (Test-and-Punish) and the failure of privatization hailed as “choice, charters, and competition.” As a result, people are increasingly open to alternative strategies. A viable replacement is staring us right in the face. It is found in our most successful public and charter schools, districts, and states that adopted the more positive, engaging Build-and-Support agenda. This article examines the problem of low student performance and the flawed approach used by conventional reformers who support Test-and-Punish and market-driven solutions. It will summarize the evidence that documents the reform policies’ lack of success and describe the considerable collateral damage these policies have caused.

The Problem of Low Performance: Real or Hype?

The conventional school reform movement began as a response to the perceived low performance of our students. While the reformers’ solutions have been unsound, the problem is very real. Although student performance is currently at its highest level in our history, there is widespread agreement in this country that the increasing educational demands of the job market, the impact of global competition, and the need to preserve our democracy require a substantial improvement in student achievement in our schools and colleges and the narrowing of the performance gap between affluent and low-income, minority, or second-language children. Indisputably, there are excellent classrooms, schools, and districts across the United States. Moreover, there are hundreds of thousands of dedicated teachers, including those teaching in difficult circumstances, who day by day do a superb job with their students. As a result of their efforts, graduation rates and student performance have risen substantially in the past 20 years, although student performance has stalled recently as the harsh policies of the reform movement took hold. At the same time, no one disputes the fact that far too many dysfunctional classrooms, schools, and districts must be improved if students in those settings are going to have any chance at leading a productive life.

In order for our country to stay competitive, virtually every school and district in the US must continually focus on improvement. Some states and districts shine. Massachusetts, for example, outperforms just about every other nation in the world, and Long Beach Unified School District is one of the 20 best districts on the planet. Yet most other states and districts are lagging.

Distressing International Results

Currently, our youngsters significantly underperform students in other industrialized countries—seriously jeopardizing our democratic and economic future. Nor is it just our lower achievers who are lagging. According to one recent international assessment, the Programme for International Assessment of Adult Competencies (PIAAC), recent US college graduates, students with some college, high school graduates, and high school dropouts are average compared to their global counterparts in terms of the practical applications of literacy, but they are near the bottom in numeracy and at the bottom in technical problem solving.

Similarly troubling are our low scores and declining growth on the 2012 Program for International Student Assessment (PISA), given to 15-year-olds worldwide, especially as these scores relate to students’ math skills. Comparable results were found in the 2011 Trends in Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS), which tested eighth graders in math and science. In its 2015 review of international assessments, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) found the US ranking 31st among 76 countries in basic math and science skills, with 23% of our students failing to reach rudimentary levels. The report foresaw a large economic payoff if we are able to improve these results. A recent summary by OECD found no improvement from 2003 to 2012 in the numbers of US students scoring as low performers in math and reading.

Do International Tests Fairly Reflect Socioeconomic Factors?

Analyzing international test results is complex. The failure to accurately account for higher levels of poverty in the US and lower family academic resources (FAR)—such as a mother’s educational level and books in the home—exaggerates our performance gap. In their October 2015 report, Bringing It Back Home, Carnoy, García, and Khavenson adjusted for FAR, which significantly narrowed the gap between the US and other nations, particularly at the lower socioeconomic levels. When our lowest FAR cohorts of students were compared to similar students, the gap closed substantially in both math and reading. However, such adjustments still left our students, on average, performing significantly below other comparable nations.

Overall, our students fared much better in reading than in math—scoring in the middle of other countries. In math, we considerably trailed many postindustrial countries, including France, Germany, and the United Kingdom. Unfortunately, compared to similar FAR cohorts, our middle-range students fell further behind other nations, and our more advantaged levels plunged. Even so, adjusted US TIMSS math scores grew from 1995 to 2011 by a hefty 0.5 standard deviation (SD), or one-half to one year’s added instruction. This growth rate, however, is not sufficient to catch up to many other countries, as they experienced greater increases at the middle and higher socioeconomic levels.

It is important to note that the PISA and TIMSS scores vary widely among US states. Some of our states, when adjustments for FAR are made, surpass results in the highest-performing nations. For example, on the PISA 2012 test, Massachusetts nearly matches Canada and Finland, two of the top-scoring countries in mathematics; matches Germany; and actually surpasses France and the United Kingdom. In reading, the Bay State outscores all nations but one—Korea. For a nuanced view of US national and international rankings on school performance, see the report by the Horace Mann League and the National Superintendents Roundtable.

Are International Tests Useful Measures of Achievement?

Many experts in the field of education question the value of international tests on the grounds that the tests do not measure important aspects of education such as depth of knowledge, interpersonal skills, drive, character, perseverance, ambition, creative thinking, and willingness to challenge accepted orthodoxy. Others contend that the tests are methodologically flawed, although that view has been widely challenged. Some analysts also point to the fact that the United States has traditionally scored in the middle of the industrialized countries yet has consistently outperformed those countries in actual economic growth and scientific innovation.

It is interesting to note that some educational leaders in high-scoring countries are warning us not to place too much emphasis on high test scores. In a recent statement, the deputy minister of education and training in Vietnam, which now places 12th in the world in the cited OECD report, cautions that many Vietnamese students have learned by rote, are unable to solve unique problems, do not have the interpersonal skills needed for work, and subsequently perform poorly in college and careers. For additional comments from educators in that country, see M. I. Hanoi’s article on The Economist website. For a critique of China’s test-driven system, see Diane Ravitch’s review of Yong Zhao’s book Who’s Afraid of the Big Bad Dragon? Why China Has the Best (and Worst) Education System in the World.

It is worth noting that the previously mentioned PIAAC test, which shows US students underperforming, is primarily a problem-solving and application test and is thus arguably more predictive of adult performance. Also worrisome is the slowing growth in performance for our students in the middle and higher socioeconomic groups. Most troublesome is the large number of students failing to reach rudimentary levels. Given that jobs in the future will increasingly demand higher educational levels, it is essential that all students at least reach basic levels, which the international assessments do measure. Therefore, the results of these international assessments do matter, and they matter more now than ever.

Misguided Reform Policies

Consequently, today our country and its educators are faced with a major policy question: Which strategies have the best chance of rectifying our relatively low performance? Two different approaches are vying for acceptance—Test-and-Punish and Build-and-Support.

I can sympathize with the passion that drives reformers’ desire to crack down on low-performing schools and incompetent educators. There are certainly many distressing examples of malfunctioning or mediocre schools and classrooms. We should do everything in our power to address these problems. It is also true that there are individual teachers and entire school staffs who have given up striving for excellence and are merely marking time until retirement. Most are reacting to overwhelming problems: traumatized and alienated students, indifferent parents, a hostile political climate, inept leadership, and extremely high levels of stress. Many of these disaffected practitioners have become angry at their school conditions and constant public vilification. As a result, they resist improvement measures and urge their union representatives to be uncooperative and unyielding.

Unfortunately, many reformers have responded with a counterproductive solution—upping the ante by exerting more pressure on these disheartened, exhausted, or underperforming educators. There are much more effective ways to improve teacher and school performance, as exemplified by numerous schools that have managed to rekindle the professional energies of a demoralized staff and correct genuinely dreadful situations. These successful programs use a Build-and-Support approach that focuses on instruction, building trust, and creating effective teams.

I can also understand how anti-reformers fuel frustration when they downplay the idea that some schools are underperforming or the idea that many teachers and schools require substantial improvements. For an incisive rebuttal to those who assert that “schools are doing just fine,” see Grant Wiggins’s letter on the subject and Jai Mehta’s article. Reformers’ anger and frustration are understandable. But anger and frustration do not justify ill-advised approaches, especially when effective alternatives exist. To make matters worse, many reform measures have done little good and much harm.

Conventional reformers tend to base their improvement initiatives on a misguided belief in high-stakes testing and market-driven competition. For more than a decade, this two-pronged approach has produced only limited results. Yet these same reform measures have caused considerable collateral damage to schools and resulted in a disastrous drop in teacher morale and the appeal of teaching as a profession.

Reformers assume that schools will not improve by themselves and, therefore, will require external pressure in the form of high-stakes accountability based on standardized reading and mathematics test scores. Reform advocates assert that the best way to improve student performance is to fire the lowest-performing three to five percent of teachers; reward the superstars; encourage competition and disruption by expanding charter schools and choice; and close neighborhood schools with the lowest scores, or replace their staffs, or convert the schools into charter schools. In fact, many reformers promote wholesale privatization of public education by replacing public schools with charters or with private schools funded by vouchers. For a decade since the passage of No Child Left Behind (NCLB), these proposals have been put into practice on every level—nationally, in most states, and in many districts.

Until recently, the federal government and a multitude of states and school districts have heavily promulgated this reigning get-tough-on-teachers-and-schools dogma and the belief in the power of market-based competition, choice, and charters. In December 2015, Congress repealed NCLB and the Race to the Top expansion sponsored by the Obama administration. The new Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) ameliorated some of the more extreme measures of the reform movement sponsored nationally and is a welcome course correction. ESSA shifts much decision making to the states and local levels, so that is where the debate on which way to improve our schools will now primarily occur. Although there is a growing shift away from the “reform” agenda, discredited proposals continue to be supported by far too many political and opinion leaders, wealthy individuals, editorial boards, think tanks, and well-funded organizations. This support persists in spite of the evidence from the most successful districts and states such as Massachusetts and now California, which have adopted an instructionally driven, supportive approach that is grounded in modern management techniques of engagement. For more about exemplary districts and states, see Exemplary Models of Build-and-Support.

Since a mainstay of reform policy is to hold schools accountable for improving test results, it is only fair to judge the reform movement by how well it improved student performance on tests—live by the scores, die by the scores. Admittedly, a once-a-year standardized test only offers a limited measure of student learning, but reformers have had no compunction about using those test results to fire teachers, close schools, and privatize entire districts. Thus, in fairness, they cannot reasonably object to using the same criteria to evaluate their reforms.

Meager National Results

Much to the reformers’ chagrin, their strategies have produced only meager results, though this lack of success has not tempered their advocacy. In the 1990s, the overall average scores of the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), our well-respected national score card, revealed a slow but steady rise in student performance. That was before the enactment of the national No Child Left Behind (NCLB) legislation in 2001, which established the primacy of high-stakes accountability.

After the passage of NCLB, the growth of NAEP scores slowed. During the past few years the adoption of punitive “reform” measures has intensified, fully supported and required by the Obama administration. Since 2009, as test-based teacher evaluations have spread and harsh consequences for failure to meet unattainable goals have been triggered, gains in NAEP scores have essentially halted. In contrast, our most successful districts and the highest-performing nations have continued to improve by adopting a more supportive strategy.

NAEP relies on student samples unconnected to individual teachers or particular schools. Thus, the test cannot be linked to accountability systems and carries no consequences for low performance. Consequently, NAEP is one of the most accurate tests of student achievement, albeit a limited measure. The test avoids artificially inflated results that are generally associated with high-stakes testing. In those cases, results are skewed by damaging behaviors such as spending excessive time on test preparation and outright gaming of the system. The NAEP processes of sampling and lack of consequences also minimize curriculum narrowing for test prep purposes and its deleterious effects on deeper learning and broader instruction. Here are the results from the most recent period. Nationwide, 12th-grade 2013 NAEP reading and mathematics scores were unchanged from 2009. Since 2009, fourth-grade scores were also flat for mathematics and increased only two points in reading; eighth-grade scores increased only one point in reading and declined one point in math.

Equally concerning is the fact that our students are performing significantly below students in industrial countries and are continuing their slide. In 2012, results from Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) show declines from the already low 2007 levels: a six-point decrease in math, four points in reading, and five points in science. See also the Welner and Mathis policy memo for a recent summary of the lack of improvement in student achievement during the proliferation of the more severe reform measures. Similar disappointing results were documented worldwide for countries that pursued test-driven high-stakes accountability systems and competition strategies.

Finally, the gap between high-income and low-income students has substantially increased in the past 25 years due to rising income inequality and, according to one scholar, has widened 30–40%. Gary Sasso writes:

As the income disparity has increased, so has the educational achievement gap. According to Sean F. Reardon, professor of education and sociology at Stanford University, the gap for children from high- and low-income families is at an all-time high—roughly 30 to 40 percent larger among children born in 2001 than among those born 25 years earlier.

High school graduation rates are another measure used to gauge school effectiveness. From 2011 to 2014, these have inched up from 79% to 82%, although they are still falling further behind our competitors. This rise was most likely caused by a combination of efforts initiated by schools, credit recovery strategies for students not qualifying for graduation (some of which are questionable), changing attitudes of students stemming from the increasingly dismal outlook for high school nongraduates, and a more realistic assessment of the importance of educational attainment by low- income, minority, and immigrant families. California, which did not pursue a Test-and-Punish strategy, actually rose at a rate that was higher than the national increase. Furthermore, our country’s college graduation rates are also slipping behind those of many industrial nations.

Another disconcerting finding is that in many urban districts the gap is increasing between low-income, English-language learners, and minority students and other students. This is particularly the case in districts pursuing large-scale expansion of charter schools and “reform strategies.” Similarly, Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT) scores, one of the two major college entrance exams, have tumbled in the past five years—dropping seven points in 2015 alone. ACT scores, the other major college entrance exam, were flat. The drop in SAT scores cannot be explained by changes in the composition of the test takers or the increasing numbers of students who are taking the test.

To be fair, primarily in the early millennial years, there were some positive changes in instruction due to increased pressure from accountability efforts and the availability of test results for neglected subgroups. These changes translated to increases in fourth- and eighth-grade mathematics scores. Also, contrary to conventional opinion, international tests showed our lowest-performing students catching up to but still significantly behind their FAR cohorts in the top-performing countries, while our top students had stalled. In the mid-2000s, we also saw a recovery from a severe dip in the number of students qualified for college, returning to a 40% level in math and reading—about where we were in 1998.

These increases in NAEP scores, however, were more sporadic than in the decade before high-stakes test-driven accountability became widespread. After NCLB, there were no NAEP score increases at 12th grade and no increases for reading, and overall they seem to have ceased during the recent era of more stringent reforms. Some growth was masked by the Simpson paradox where overall scores can be flat while each subgroup is improving due to a change in the mix of students—more lower-scoring minority or second-language students. Even taking this paradox into account, most of the growth statistics for each subgroup were minimal after 2009, except for the growth demonstrated by Hispanic students in reading.

In stark contrast to the disappointing national scores, during the same period many districts, states, and countries had significant gains in reaching higher average scores or increases in proficiency levels on NAEP. That is because they followed a broader, more supportive approach. For an in-depth discussion of this Build-and-Support approach in action, see the series of companion articles How Top Performers Build-and-Support.

Collateral Damage Caused by Reform

Whatever limited growth resulted from tough accountability measures, it has been overshadowed by the deleterious effects high-stakes test accountability has had on instruction, teacher efficacy, and morale. In addition to lackluster test scores, reform initiatives have led to a severe narrowing of the curriculum due to their focus on high-stakes math and reading tests. Superficial teaching to the test, at the expense of deeper learning, has proliferated. For a scholarly treatment of the concept of deeper learning, see the work of Jal Mehta and Sarah Fine Maggie Lampert, and Mike Amarillas’s blog post.

History, science, humanities, art, and other crucial subjects have been decimated. The Council of the Great City Schools report (2015) found that increases in testing time did not improve instruction but did cause significant collateral damage. For more on this topic, see the FairTest report and the excellent book The Test: Why Our Schools Are Obsessed with Standardized Testing—But You Don’t Have to Be, written by Anya Kamenetz.

Perverse accountability incentives have encouraged teachers and administrators to game the system by devoting inordinate time to test preparation, concentrating only on students near cutoff points, and, in some tragic cases, outright cheating. In many states, reformers have promoted unfair, unproven reward-and-punishment tools, which have discouraged collaboration among teachers, thwarted the building of effective teams, and caused a severe drop in morale. Finally, reform nostrums have diverted attention from, de-emphasized, or belittled Build-and-Support policies that can actually produce substantial results.

Have Individual Components of Reform Worked?

Not only has the reform movement failed to produce results overall, but reputable evaluations of individual reform measures such as turnaround schools, charter schools, merit pay, or test-based school and teacher accountability have either found nonexistent or trivial effects. See the series of companion articles Why Conventional School “Reforms” Have Failed for a detailed discussion of the reasons these measures failed to produce results.

Even when small gains are detected, the gains are substantially below the improvements brought about by the initiatives at the heart of Build-and-Support. To put these findings in perspective, a full standard deviation (1.0 SD) difference in test performance translates to between one and two years of additional instruction. Analyses of reform efforts with increases reveal inconsequential effect sizes of 0.05 to 0.15 SD, which is substantially below programs that actually work. These meager results did not dissuade the reform community from trumpeting the reported increases as major breakthroughs.

In his meta-analysis of 150,000 research studies involving 250 million students, John Hattie lists the effect size of 150 of the most popular school improvement interventions. He found several programs near or above the 1.0 SD level, though it is important to note that 0.4 of that level was expected yearly growth. Among the effective practices were visible learning—making children’s thinking and understanding transparent and enlisting students in the educational process, 1.44 SD; formative evaluation—getting timely information on how well a student is progressing, 0.9 SD; response to instruction—early intervention after good first teaching, 1.07SD; and classroom discussion, 0.82 SD.

Many other measures were close to the 1.0 SD range, which is several times the minimal effect size of 0.04 to 0.05 SD found for urban charter schools compared to their public school counterparts according to a Center for Research on Education Outcomes (CREDO) study. Perhaps most importantly, Hattie found that the largest gains were produced by improvement efforts that focused on developing collaboration, team building, and continuous improvement capacity. He calls this “The Power of Collaborative Expertise.”

Many of the high-scoring programs and ideas are integral to the Build-and-Support strategy and staples of the active classroom instructional approach called for in the Common Core State Standards. These measures offer a clear rebuttal to the claims that the only way to improve public education is through governance reforms such as charters and the competitive pressure they engender or high-stakes accountability based on tests. Of the 150 improvement strategies evaluated, charter schools were 114 on the list, in the bottom range of Hattie’s effect size with almost no advantage over expected normal growth.

Alyson Lavigne and Thomas Good conducted an extensive review of the efficacy of reform measures such as turnaround schools and merit pay. In their 2014 book, Teacher and Student Evaluation: Moving Beyond the Failure of School Reform, they report finding either insignificant gains or no effect at all. Likewise, Grover Whitehurst discovered small increases of between 0.05 and 0.15 SD gains for some reform strategies and no gains for many others. He compared these small improvements to the much larger boosts achieved by programs such as dropout prevention (1.0 SD) and excellent early reading phonics programs (0.8 SD). He also points to the What Works Clearinghouse, which lists a raft of programs with effect sizes many multiples of those found for charter schools, turnaround schools, or merit pay.

This article has supported the contention that while we have much to do to improve our schools, the “reform agenda” was not the right medicine and has not produced results. The series of companion articles Why Conventional School “Reforms” Have Failed explains why this agenda has been unsuccessful.

A Tale of Two Cities

Two New Jersey school districts provide powerful examples of the difference between Test-and-Punish and Build-and-Support. Union City, New Jersey, undertook extremely effective but low-key school improvement measures. The success of its Build-and-Support approach is chronicled in David L. Kirp’s recent book, Improbable Scholars: The Rebirth of a Great American School System and a Strategy for America’s Schools. Just seven miles away, the Newark, New Jersey, district implemented a “reform strategy” that was highly disruptive to schools and communities and had minimal positive outcomes for students. After five years of a very public and controversial school improvement effort, Newark’s experiment was unsuccessful. For a complete account of what went wrong, see The Prize: Who Is in Charge of America’s Schools? by Dale Russakoff, and for an illuminating contrast of the two approaches see an article by David L. Kirp, “How to Fix the Country’s Failing Schools: And How Not To.”

School leaders in Union City, New Jersey, followed an incremental, basic approach concentrating on long-term improvement of instruction through strong content, team and trust building, collaboration, and continual reevaluation. Student achievement rose substantially as did teacher and community engagement. From being on the brink of a state takeover in 1989 due to low performance, by 2014, 89% of Union City students were graduating from high school in four years. Across the grades, test scores have nearly caught up to those of suburban New Jersey students, who are among the top performers in the US. A recent report by Stanford researchers Reardon, Kalogrides, and Shores found a strong correlation between socio-economics and student performance as well as connections between levels of segregation and opportunity gaps. A few districts substantially beat the odds. Union City was one.

An abstract of Kirp’s Improbable Scholars provides a cogent summary of the lessons learned from Union City:

No school district can be all charismatic leaders and super-teachers. It can’t start from scratch, and it can’t fire all its teachers and principals when students do poorly. Great charter schools can only serve a tiny minority of students. Whether we like it or not, most of our youngsters will continue to be educated in mainstream public schools.

The good news, as David L. Kirp reveals in Improbable Scholars, is that there’s a sensible way to rebuild public education and close the achievement gap for all students. Indeed, this is precisely what’s happening in a most unlikely place: Union City, New Jersey, a poor, crowded Latino community just across the Hudson from Manhattan. The school district–once one of the worst in the state–has ignored trendy reforms in favor of proven game-changers like quality early education, a word-soaked curriculum, and hands-on help for teachers. When beneficial new strategies have emerged, like using sophisticated data crunching to generate pinpoint assessments to help individual students, they have been folded into the mix.

The results demand that we take notice–from third grade through high school, Union City scores on the high-stakes state tests approximate the statewide average. In other words, these inner city kids are achieving just as much as their suburban cousins in reading, writing, and math. What’s even more impressive, nearly ninety percent of high school students are earning their diplomas and sixty percent of them are going to college. Top students are winning national science awards and full rides at Ivy League universities. These schools are not just good places for poor kids. They are good places for kids, period.

The experience in Newark is in stark contrast to the success in Union City. Current US senator Cory Booker, then the Democratic mayor of Newark, joined forces with New Jersey’s Republican governor Chris Christie and persuaded Mark Zuckerberg to donate $100 million. Another $100 million of matching contributions were made. The reformers’ goal was to make Newark a national model of high-stakes accountability and the market-driven reform agenda—test-based teacher and school evaluation with rewards and punishments, large-scale expansion of charters, and the closure of underperforming public schools.

Newark had been taken over by the state previously. Booker and Christie, with advice from a small group of state reform leaders and donors, hired Cami Anderson as superintendent. At the time, Anderson had limited school management experience but was a staunch supporter of reform. Under her leadership, expensive consultants were hired and decisions were made with virtually no transparency. Test-and-Punish was ardently pursued. Anderson did hire some effective principals, and many dedicated educators in the district recommitted themselves to improving low-performing schools. However, fiscal mismanagement and a top-down management style frustrated their efforts.

Initially, Anderson opposed the wholesale conversion of public schools to charters, viewing that effort as detrimental. Her focus was on building up low-performing schools rather than closing them, albeit with a management style that excluded and alienated teachers and principals. Unfortunately, Anderson eventually succumbed to pressure from Christie, Zuckerberg, and her reform advisors, who believed that public schools would never perform, could not be improved, and therefore should be replaced by charters. The district closed large numbers of neighborhood schools, disrupting communities, children, and families and draining needed improvement resources from the remaining public schools. Anderson rightly complained that she was “expected to turn Newark’s public schools into a national model, yet as children left for charters—and state funds followed them—she would be continually closing schools and dismissing teachers, social workers, and guidance counselors.”

Some Newark charters performed well, but on the whole the majority of students wound up in worse schools farther from home. Christie did not help matters when he slashed public school funds and supported increased resources for charters. The project in Newark was a bust. Five years after it began, student gains were minimal but parents and an entire community were left seething. Educators in Newark were utterly demoralized. A chastened Zuckerberg then switched philosophies, investing $120 million in low-income Bay Area schools that were committed to pursuing a more collaborative and supportive approach.

BBS Companion Articles

Why Conventional School “Reforms” Have Failed
Reformers Target the Wrong Levers of Improvement
Teacher and School Evaluations Are Based on Students’ Test Scores
Charter Schools Are Not the Key to Improving Public Education
Four Nostrums of Conventional School Reform
Reformers Allowed Their Rhetoric to Be Hijacked
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

The Problem of Low Performance: Real or Hype?
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/

Distressing International Results
Goodman, M. J., Sands, A. M., & Coley, R. J. (2015). America’s Skills Challenge: Millennials and the Future. Educational Testing Service. http://www.ets.org/s/research/29836/

Barshay, J. (2013, Dec 3). Top US Students Fare Poorly in International PISA Test Scores, Shanghai Tops the World, Finland Slips. http://educationbythenumbers.org/content/top-us-students-fare-poorly-international-pisa-test-scores-shanghai-tops-world-finland-slips_693/

Hanushek, E.A., & Woessmann, L. (2015). Universal Basic Skills: What Countries Stand to Gain. OECD. http://www.keepeek.com/Digital-Asset-Management/oecd/education/universal-basic-skills_9789264234833-en#page1

Sparks, S. D. (2016, Feb 10). OECD: U.S. Efforts Haven’t Helped Low Performers on Global Math, Reading Tests. http://blogs.edweek.org/edweek/inside-school-research/2016/02/OECD_American_efforts_low_performers.html?cmp=eml-enl-eu-news2-RM

Do International Tests Fairly Reflect Socioeconomic Factors?
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/

The Horace Mann League and the National Superintendents Roundtable. (2015, Jan). School Performance in Context: Indicators of School Inputs and Outputs in Nine Similar Nations. The Horace Mann League and the National Superintendents Roundable. http://www.hmleague.org/fullreport/

Are International Tests Useful Measures of Achievement?
Strauss, R. (2013, Feb 1). Do International Test Scores Matter? Renewing America. http://blogs.cfr.org/renewing-america/2013/02/01/education-do-international-test-scores-matter/ See also Tucker, M. (2016, Nov 19). The Iceberg Effect: A Reply to James Harvey and Charles Fowler. http://blogs.edweek.org/edweek/top_performers/2015/11/the_iceberg_effect_a_reply_to_james_harvey_and_charles_fowler.html and Ravitch, D. (2013, Dec 3). My View of the PISA Scores. https://dianeravitch.net/2013/12/03/my-view-of-the-pisa-scores/ and Tucker, M. (2015, Nov 24). ESEA reauthorization and Standards: A Chance to Do It Right. Top Performers. http://blogs.edweek.org/edweek/top_performers/2015/11/

Thanhnien News. (2013, Dec 7). Vietnam Deputy Education Minister Not Convinced by Global Test. Thanhnien News. http://www.thanhniennews.com/education-youth/vietnam-deputy-education-minister-not-convinced-by-global-test-18276.html

Hanoi, M. I. (2013, Dec 12). Very Good on Paper: Education in Vietnam. http://www.economist.com/blogs/banyan/2013/12/education-vietnam

Ravitch, D. (2014, Nov 20). The Myth of Chinese Super Schools. The New York Review of Books. http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2014/nov/20/myth-chinese-super-schools/

National Governors’ Association. (2013–2014). America Works: Education and Training for Tomorrow’s Jobs: The Benefits of a More Educated Workforce to Individuals and the Economy. National Governors Association Chair’s Initiative. http://www.nga.org/cms/home/nga-center-for-best-practices/center-publications/page-other-publications/col2-content/main-content-list/america-works-the-benefit-of-a-m.html

Misguided Reform Policies
Hart, M. (2015, Jul 6). Research: Collaboration Is Key for Teacher Quality. The Journal. http://thejournal.com/articles/2015/07/06/research-collaboration-is-key-for-teacher-quality.aspx

Wiggins, G. (2013, Oct 23). Is Significant School Reform Needed or Not?: An Open Letter to Diane Ravitch (and Like-Minded Educators). https://grantwiggins.wordpress.com/2013/10/23/is-significant-school-reform-needed-or-not-an-open-letter-to-diane-ravitch-and-like-minded-educators/

Mehta, J. (2014, Jul 18). Five Inconvenient Truths for Traditionalists. http://blogs.edweek.org/edweek/learning_deeply/2014/07/five_inconvenient_truths_for_traditionalists.html

Meager National Results
Ratner, G. M. (2015, Feb 11). Independent Test Results Show NCLB Fails. Fair Test. http://www.fairtest.org/independent-test-results-show-nclb-fails

The Nation’s Report Card. (2013). Are the Nation’s Twelfth-graders Making Progress in Mathematics and Reading? http://www.nationsreportcard.gov/reading_math_g12_2013/#/

Burns, D., & Darling-Hammond, L. (2014, Dec 18). Teaching Around the World: What Can TALIS Tell Us? Stanford Center for Opportunity Policy in Education. https://edpolicy.stanford.edu/publications/pubs/1295

Welner, K. G., & Mathis, W. J. (2015, Feb 12). Reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act: Time to Move Beyond Test-Focused Policies. National Education Policy Center. http://nepc.colorado.edu/publication/esea

Masters, G. N. (2014, Dec). Is School Reform Working? Australian Council for Educational Research. http://research.acer.edu.au/policyinsights/1/

Reardon, S. F. (2013, Apr 27). No Rich Child Left Behind. http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/04/27/no-rich-child-left-behind/?_r=1

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/

Ujifusa, A. (2015, Dec 15). National Graduation Rate Increases to All-Time High of 82 Percent. http://blogs.edweek.org/edweek/campaign-k-12/2015/12/national_graduation_rate_incre.html?cmp=eml-enl-eu-news2-RM

Pondiscio, R. (2016, Jan 13). The Phoniest Statistic in Education. http://edexcellence.net/articles/the-phoniest-statistic-in-education?mc_cid=6794bd3d0d&mc_eid=ebbe04a807

Brounstein, K., & Yettick, H. (2015, Feb 24). Rising Graduation Rates: Trend or Blip? Education Week. http://www.edweek.org/ew/articles/2015/02/25/rising-graduation-rates-trend-or-blip.html?cmp=ENL-EU-NEWS2

DeArmond, M., Denice, P., Gross, B., Hernandez, J., Jochim, A., & Lake, R. (2015, Oct). Measuring Up: Educational Improvement and Opportunity in 50 Cities. Center on Reinventing Public Education. http://www.crpe.org/publications/measuring-educational-improvement-and-opportunity-50-cities

Strauss, V. (2015, Sep 8). What the New SAT Scores Reveal About Modern School Reform. https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/answer-sheet/wp/2015/09/08/what-the-new-sat-scores-reveal-about-modern-school-reform/

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

Carnoy, M., & Rothstein, R. (2013, Jan 28). What Do International Tests Really Show about U.S. Student Performance? Economic Policy Institute. http://www.epi.org/publication/us-student-performance-testing/

Petrilli, M. J., & Finn, C. E., Jr. (2015, Apr 8). College Preparedness Over the Years, According to NAEP. http://edexcellence.net/articles/college-preparedness-over-the-years-according-to-naep

The Nation’s Report Card. National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP). http://www.nationsreportcard.gov/

Masters, G. N. (2014, Dec). Is School Reform Working? Australian Council for Educational Research. http://research.acer.edu.au/policyinsights/1/

Collateral Damage Caused by Reform
Mehta, J., & Fine, S. (2015, Dec). The What, Where and How of Deeper Learning in American Secondary Schools. Jobs for the Future. http://www.jff.org/publications/why-what-where-and-how-deeper-learning-american-secondary-schools

Lampert, M. (2015, Dec). Deeper Teaching. Jobs for the Future. http://www.jff.org/publications/deeper-teaching

Amarillas, M. (2016, Feb 4). Deeper Learning, Metacognition, and Presentations of Learning. http://blogs.edweek.org/edweek/learning_deeply/2016/02/deeper_learning_metacognition_and_presentations_of_learning.html?utm_source=feedblitz&utm_medium=FeedBlitzRss&utm_campaign=learningdeeply

Hart, R., Casserly, M., Uzzell, R., Palacios, M., Corcoran, A., & Spurgeon, L. (2015, Oct). Student Testing in America’s Great City Schools: An Inventory and Preliminary Analysis. Council of the Great City Schools. http://cgcs.org/site/default.aspx?PageType=3&ModuleInstanceID=312&ViewID=7B97F7ED-8E5E-4120-848F-A8B4987D588F&RenderLoc=0&FlexDataID=2146&PageID=257

Fair Test. (n.d.). Reports: High Stakes Testing Hurts Education. http://fairtest.org/reports-high-stakes-testing-hurts-education See also Švigelj-Smith, M. (2015, Feb 5). The High Cost of High-Stakes-Testing: (Spoiler Alert! It Hurts Students with Disadvantages the Most!) https://msvigeljsmith.wordpress.com/2015/02/05/the-high-cost-of-high-stakes-testing-spoiler-alert-it-hurts-students-with-disadvantages-the-most/

Kamenetz, A. (2015). The Test: Why Our Schools Are Obsessed with Standardized Testing—But You Don’t Have to Be. New York: PublicAffairs/Perseus Book Group.

Have Individual Components of Reform Worked?
Hattie, J. (2009). Visible Learning: A Synthesis of Meta-Analyses Relating to Achievement. New York: Routledge.

Center for Research on Education Outcomes. (2015). Urban Charter School Study: Report on 41 Regions. Stanford University. http://urbancharters.stanford.edu/summary.php

Hattie, J. (2015, Jun 16). What Works Best in Education: The Politics of Collaborative Expertise. Australian Policy Online. http://apo.org.au/resource/what-works-best-education-politics-collaborative-expertise See also Hirsh, S. (2015, Nov 18). Leverage the Power of Collaborative Expertise. http://blogs.edweek.org/edweek/learning_forwards_pd_watch/2015/11/leverage_the_power_of_collaborative_expertise.html?utm_source=feedblitz&utm_medium=FeedBlitzRss&utm_campaign=learningforwardspdwatch

Lavigne, A.L., & Good, T.L. (2014). Teacher and Student Evaluation: Moving Beyond the Failure of School Reform. New York and London: Routledge, See also three excellent books on the failure of the “reform” program: Ravitch, D. (2013). Reign of Error: The Hoax of the Privatization Movement and the Danger to America’s Public Schools. New York: Alfred A. Knopf; Ravitch, D. (2010). The Death and Life of the Great American School System: How Testing and Choice Are Undermining Education. New York: Basic Books; and DuFour, R. (2015). In Praise of American Educators and How They Can Become Even Better. Bloomington, IN: Solution Tree.

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

What Works Clearinghouse. U.S. Department of Education. Institute of Education Sciences. http://ies.ed.gov/ncee/wwc/

A Tale of Two Cities
Kirp, D. L. (2013). Improbable Scholars: The Rebirth of a Great American School System and a Strategy for America’s Schools. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

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

Kirp, D. L. (2016, Jan 9). How to Fix the Country’s Failing Schools: And How Not To. The New York Times. http://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/10/opinion/sunday/how-to-fix-the-countrys-failing-schools-and-how-not-to.html?ref=opinion&_r=1

Berwick, C. (2013, Apr 1). Can the Model for Urban School Reform Be Found in Union City, New Jersey? https://nextcity.org/daily/entry/can-the-model-for-urban-school-reform-be-found-in-union-city-nj

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

Goldman School of Public Policy. (2013). Abstract of Kirp, D. Improbable Scholars: The Rebirth of a Great American School System and a Strategy for America’s Schools. https://gspp.berkeley.edu/research/selected-publications/improbable-scholars-the-rebirth-of-a-great-american-school-system-a-strateg

Cramer, P. (2015, Sep 10). When an Outsider Arrives to Shake Up a School System, a Tightrope Walk Follows. http://ny.chalkbeat.org/2015/09/10/when-an-outsider-arrives-to-shake-up-a-school-system-a-tightrope-walk-follows/#.VlFOETZdE2w

Nocera, J. (2015, Sep 8). Zuckerberg’s Expensive Lesson. The New York Times. http://www.nytimes.com/2015/09/08/opinion/joe-nocera-zuckerbergs-expensive-lesson.html?ref=todayspaper See also Weber, M. (2015, Sep 8). Book Review: “The Prize” by Dale Russakoff. http://jerseyjazzman.blogspot.com/2015/09/book-review-prize-by-dale-russakoff.html?m=1. For another thoughtful analysis of Russakoff’s book, see 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/

Why Conventional School “Reforms” Have Failed: The Reformers Target the Wrong Levers of Improvement

Why Conventional School “Reforms” Have Failed
The Reformers Target the Wrong Levers of Improvement

by Bill Honig

The school reform movement has failed to produce results overall, and reputable evaluations have shown that individual reform measures also have proved to be ineffective. Turnaround schools, charter schools, merit pay, and test-based school or teacher accountability have had either nonexistent or trivial effects. In his book Visible Learning: A Synthesis of Over 800 Meta-Analyses Relating to Achievement, John Hattie (2008) writes that even when reforms produce small gains, they fall far below the improvements brought about by validated initiatives.

Reformers have operated under an extremely unsophisticated view of the educational landscape and how best to influence it. This causes two fundamental errors. First, they target their improvement efforts on a limited and weak set of levers for change. Secondly, they undertake solutions that have either little or no basis in research or experiential support.

Reformers fundamentally misunderstand how schools and districts work. They have primarily focused their efforts on indirect structural changes and governance reforms—limiting the power of teachers’ unions and scaling back workplace protections, using threats and incentives to pressure teachers and administrators, and promoting competition by expanding charter schools. These strategies fail to appreciate the complex factors that impact school quality and the appropriate places to focus improvement efforts. Other direct and more powerful leverage points have been shown to influence educational performance more than those areas traditionally targeted by reformers.

Factors That Impact School Quality and Student Achievement

Schools are complicated. Among the factors that influence school quality and student achievement are:

  • individual teachers and all the potential influences on those teachers including the type of content they provide, their pedagogical practice, and their level of engagement
  • members of the school community who are responsible for resource allocation, team building, and developing capacity for continuous improvement—the principal, key teachers, parents, and community leaders
  • parents’ role in supporting their child’s education
  • the district—superintendent, staff, and board—which hires teachers and principals, establishes curricular guidelines and creates curriculum, adopts materials, provides professional development and other supports for schools and teachers, allocates broad resources, defines accountability, involves the community, and ideally creates a positive climate
  • the state apparatus—the governor, state school boards, and the legislature—which funds schools, adopts standards and curricular frameworks, administers special programs, sometimes reviews instructional materials, approves charter schools, establishes state accountability systems, and provides social supports for needy children
  • the federal government, which influences all these actors through the requirements of numerous federal programs such as the strict conditions that were mandated by the now-repealed No Child Left Behind (NCLB), the Individual Disabilities Education Act (IDEA), or even the new more flexible Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA)
  • poverty levels and range of social support systems
  • several more key stakeholders such as schools of education, textbook publishers, the research community, the blogosphere, think tanks, opinion makers, and political leaders

Any successful improvement effort must include strategies to improve the performance of each of these major stakeholders and, crucially, engage them in working toward a common goal. This requires a much more positive, comprehensive, and considered approach than the school reform community has offered thus far. An example of comprehensive policy can be found in Greatness by Design (2012), which was developed for California by Tom Torlakson, the state superintendent of public instruction. He formed a prestigious commission chaired by Linda Darling-Hammond, one of the most respected school improvement researchers in the country, and Chris Steinhauser, superintendent of the Long Beach Unified School District, which was designated one of the top districts in the world. The resulting policy document is a superb example of the more supportive and comprehensive strategy needed.

Another example of this more sophisticated approach is the excellent guide pertaining to professional development found in the Learning Policy Institute’s (2015) publication Maximizing the Use of New State Professional Learning Investments. An example of policy that addresses all the necessary components of reform at the district level is the Leadership Planning Guide California, which was produced by the California Consortium for the Implementation of the Common Core State StandardsThese topics are fully covered in Lessons Learned from Successful Districts.

Individual Reform Initiatives Are Based on Misguided Assumptions

Even when reformers’ Test-and-Punish and Choice, Charters, and Competition strategies are directed at weak leverage points, their individual measures must still succeed and avoid causing extensive collateral damage. Unfortunately, the specific measures in the reform playbook rely on discredited and faulty assumptions about the best ways to improve schools. This is why these individual reforms have produced limited or nonexistent results.

The rest of this article focuses on two of the faulty assumptions of the school reform movement: the belief that threats, pressure, and incentives work and the use of standardized math and reading test scores as the most important measures of student learning. For a detailed discussion of the lack of overall success of conventional reform initiatives, see Have High-Stakes Testing and Privatization Been Effective?

Threats and Pressure Are Not Effective

One major fallacy underlying the “reform” strategy is the flawed assumption that teachers and administrators do not care about improving educational performance and will not try to improve unless they are threatened or pressured by positive and negative incentives. This is often communicated in a politically seductive way: “It is unconscionable that many low-income students are failing. Schools and teachers must be held accountable.” Yet, while the sentiment is superficially appealing, pressure usually backfires.

Almost all school staffs want to do the best job possible. As professionals, they desire to perfect their performance and improve student achievement, but they do not necessarily possess the strategic or tactical know-how to accomplish those goals. Many work in extremely difficult school situations—bereft of capacity-building resources and student social supports such as health clinics, isolated from collaborating with other teachers, and lacking structures and techniques to help them grow professionally. The fear engendered by high-stakes accountability makes the situation worse by narrowing the curriculum, focusing on test preparation to the detriment of deeper learning, gaming the system, discouraging collaboration, and increasing widespread disaffection. A more productive strategy relies on a positive, engaging approach and concentrates on developing the leadership and infrastructure to bolster continuous improvement efforts of all teachers at a school.

The punitive strategy of Test-and-Punish has little evidentiary support and only meager backing from questionable research conducted by a few economists. For example, Milton Friedman and Eric Hanushek have argued that improvement will occur only if strong incentives push schools and districts to upgrade. Reformers have leaned heavily on those ideas—advocating the necessity of competition, consequences, and high-stakes evaluation.

However, the belief that positive or negative incentives work has been thoroughly discredited by a long history of findings that show such strategies do not produce improved student performance. In 2010, the National Research Council released Incentives and Test-Based Accountability in Education, a report edited by Michael Hout and Stewart Elliot. Hout and Elliot reviewed the research on incentives, specifically whether positive incentives such as bonuses for teachers or negative incentives such as threats of dismissal had any positive effect. They found that these policies did not produce improvements in student achievement nor bring about changes in instruction.

Fifty years ago, W. Edwards Deming warned of the negative side effects of an overreliance on evaluation strategies. Fear tends to make employees disengage, narrow their efforts, or game the system so they appear compliant. It diverts attention from and diminishes motivation to participate in developing cooperative teams and structures for continuous improvement. This ruinous situation is well known in the social sciences and articulated as Campbell’s law as explained by Diane Ravitch (2012):

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.

A New York Times opinion piece by Robert Wachter (2016), a prominent physician, reinforces the point that emphasis on evaluation of teachers, or doctors, actually causes more harm than good.

Incentive Schemes Sabotage Collaboration

Specifically, reliance on incentive schemes hampers or diverts attention from collaboration—one of the main strategies for improving school performance. In fact, in The Missing Link in School Reform (2011), Carrie Leana argues 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 school 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:

  • 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

Esther Quintero (2015), a management expert, has published a series of articles on the crucial importance of building social capital. In addition to being ineffective, pressure and illegitimate negative incentives lower morale and undermine positive working conditions at the school site—another key component of successful school improvement. A post by John Papay and Matthew Kraft (2015) 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 conclusion, increasing accountability pressure on schools has not produced the promised results and has sabotaged the very collaboration and engagement necessary for improvement.

Standardized Tests Are Not the Best Measures of School or Teacher Quality

Another major defect in school reform thinking is the misplaced faith that a one-time annual snapshot offered by a multiple-choice test in math and language arts is the best, or even an accurate, way to gauge school or teacher performance. These widely used tests do have a legitimate role—if used sparingly. They can feed back to schools, districts, or even individual teachers identifying potential areas that need improvement or confirming that the school is on the right track. Standardized tests do give some sense of where a school or district ranks with comparable jurisdictions, and they do provide crucial sub-group information for low-income, minority, learning-disabled, or ELL students. But these expensive, ubiquitous assessments are one of the least useful measures for improving instruction and performance, and they come with huge educational costs, especially when they are tied to evaluation or reward schemes.

To begin with, testing only math and reading (and a smidgeon of science) ignores important areas of instruction—history, civics, humanities, the arts, physical education, and most of science. It also devalues other central aims of education. The result has been a considerable narrowing of instruction and a constricted view of educational purposes. For a broader perspective on educational purposes, see The Three Goals of Public Education.

Another limitation of these large-scale tests is that scores almost wholly mirror the income levels and special needs of a school’s students, which raises the question: “What is being tested?” Even within math and language arts, the end-of-year general tests currently used for school and teacher accountability usually emphasize limited, basic skills. Thus, the tests encourage teachers to neglect the deeper learning required for highly educated students, which can only be assessed by measures like essays, complex applications, and performances.

Moreover, there are much better ways to provide schools and teachers the data they need to improve instruction. Most teachers know how their students are doing. Utilizing teacher judgment of performance, enhanced by locally administered formative assessments, is a much more powerful strategy.

Essays, end-of-unit, and end-of-course tests, performances, experiments, certificates of mastery, projects, extracurricular activities, and portfolios are all more helpful than existing state or national tests. These authentic performance assessments provide a richer array of information that goes beyond content knowledge to application. They also assess important life skills such as perseverance, the ability to work in groups, communication skills, and self-monitoring. The Innovation Lab Network Performance Assessment Project at Stanford, the New Hampshire Performance Assessment Network, and the New York Performance Assessment Consortium are good sources of these types of assessments. Linda Darling-Hammond and her colleagues (2014) have written an excellent thought piece on the subject, and Stanford sponsors the Performance Assessment Resource Bank, which identifies the best K–12 performance tasks in math, English language arts, science, and history-social studies.

Regrettably, although formative, authentic assessments provide the best data to assist in improving instruction, conventional school reformers have not embraced them. There is the perception that the assessment instruments are not independent enough for high-stakes accountability. This may be due to a misplaced distrust of teachers and educators or because the assessments are viewed as too expensive, time consuming, and subject to manipulation. The new nationwide Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortium (SBAC) and Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers (PARCC) tests, which many states gave in 2015, are an improvement from previous tests. Still, to provide a more accurate picture of student achievement, their results need to be substantially augmented by the classroom and school measures I’ve described.

More importantly, too much emphasis on tests for accountability purposes ignores other gauges of school effectiveness such as graduation rates, course taking, honors, extracurricular activities, career preparation, and student and teacher engagement. So whether or not test scores improve or lag, they only partially measure how students are doing, and they are not informative enough to sufficiently evaluate the effectiveness of schools or teachers. The new Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) passed in 2015, which replaced NCLB and Race to the Top, allows states to use a much broader array of assessment measures.

In Mission High: One School, How Experts Tried to Fail It, and the Students and Teachers Who Made It Triumph, Kristina Rizga (2015) chronicles how measuring school effectiveness by test scores alone can lead to harmful conclusions. Diane Ravitch reviewed Rizga’s book in “Solving the Mystery of the Schools” (2016) in The New York Review of Books. Ravitch comments:

Mission is a “failing school” because it has low test scores. When Rizga [the author] first entered Mission in 2009, it was one of the lowest-performing schools in the nation, as judged by standardized test scores. And yet, contrary to the test scores, 84 percent of its graduates were accepted to college, and other indicators were positive.

Rizga followed several students who had recently moved to the US and who consequently scored low on standardized tests while making substantial academic progress.

In her review, Ravitch explains:

One of the six students Rizga followed closely, an immigrant from El Salvador named Maria, asked her, “How can my school be flunking when I’m succeeding?” Maria arrived at Mission High School knowing no English. After only one year in the U.S., she had to take the same state tests as other students.

Kristina Rizga writes:

By eleventh grade she was writing long papers on complex topics like the war in Iraq and desegregation. She became addicted to winning debates in class . . . . In March 2012 Maria and her teachers celebrated her receiving acceptance letters to five colleges, including the University of California at Davis, and two prestigious scholarships.

Ravitch sums up:

Rizga devotes chapters to the students she gets to know well, who blossom, as Maria did, as a result of their interactions with dedicated Mission teachers. She also devotes chapters to teachers who devote themselves to their students with intense enthusiasm. What the teachers understand that reformers . . . do not is that human relationships are the key to reaching students with many economic and social problems.

Rizga realized that standardized test scores are not the best way to measure and promote learning. Typically, what they measure is the demographic profile of schools. Thus, schools in affluent white suburbs tend to be called “good” schools. Schools that enroll children who are learning English and children who are struggling in their personal lives have lower scores and are labeled “failing” schools. Hundreds, if not thousands, of such schools have closed in the past decade. . . .

Ravitch gives Rizga the final word:

Some of the most important things that matter in a quality education—critical thinking, intrinsic motivation, resilience, self-management, resourcefulness, and relationship skills—exist in the realms that can’t be easily measured by statistical measures and computer algorithms, but they can be detected by teachers using human judgment. America’s business-inspired obsession with prioritizing “metrics” in a complex world that deals with the development of individual minds has become the primary cause of mediocrity in American schools.

In conclusion, using test scores alone can easily misrepresent the performance of a school. Focusing on limited, basic-skills tests and attaching potential high-stakes consequences to them cause substantial harm to instruction, engagement, and student performance.

As discussed in Have High-Stakes Testing and Privatization Been Effective?, test-driven threats and incentives lead to narrowing of the curriculum, devoting inordinate time and resources to test preparation, concentrating on those students just below cut-points, gaming the system, and discouraging collaboration among teachers. This is all to the detriment of good instruction and deep, lasting student learning.

A Council of the Great City Schools (2015) report found that increases in testing time did not improve instruction but did cause significant collateral damage. For a heart-wrenching testament to the devastation done by the US obsession with test-driven education, read The Test: Why Our Schools Are Obsessed with Standardized Testing—But You Don’t Have to Be by Anya Kamenetz (2015).

In 2015, President Obama and former secretary of education Arne Duncan issued a “mea culpa.” They cautioned against over-testing and the harm caused by too much attention to standardized tests. President Obama stated, “Learning is about so much more than filling in the right bubble,” and he called for “tests to be high-quality, a limited part of the curriculum, and just one measurement of a student’s progress.”

In a letter to Arne Duncan, Georgia state school superintendent Richard Woods aptly described our system of test-based accountability:

Our broken model of assessment is too focused on labeling our schools and teachers, and not focused enough on supporting our students. Our current status quo model is forcing our teachers to teach to the test. We need an innovative approach that uses tests to guide instruction, just as scans and tests guide medical professionals. Oftentimes, we hear teachers called professionals because they have the knowledge and skill set to reach the needs of their individual students, yet in our accountability measures we have not supported or given value to diagnostic tools and tests that teachers need to fully utilize that knowledge or those skills. We must find a balance between accountability and responsibility.

Resistance to over-testing has been gathering steam in many local districts and states and at the national level as exemplified in the spreading opt-out movement. Unfortunately, testing still looms large in the daily life of most teachers and students. Simply reducing the time devoted to the administration of standardized tests does not repair the damage caused by spending inordinate instructional time on test preparation, narrowing the curriculum, or the questionable use of test scores for high-stakes personnel decisions.

Recent Developments

7/30/2016 Consistent with the failure of pay for performance efforts in education, such schemes also are problematic for hospitals. http://harvardmagazine.com/2016/06/are-hospital-pay-for-performance-programs-failing

BBS Companion Articles

The Big Picture
The Three Goals of Public Education
Have High Stakes Testing and Privatization Been Effective?
How Top Performers Build & Support
Lessons Learned from Successful Districts

Reference Notes

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

Factors That Impact School Quality and Student Achievement
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

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. https://edpolicy.stanford.edu/publications/pubs/1394

Consortium for the Implementation of the Common Core State Standards. (2013, Oct). Leadership Planning Guide California: Common Core State Standards and Assessments Implementation. California County Superintendents Educational Service Association (CCSESA). http://www.scoe.net/castandards/Pages/default.aspx

Individual Reform Initiatives Are Based on Misguided Assumptions
Threats and Pressure Are Not Effective
Hout, M. & Elliott, S. W., eds. (2011). Incentives and Test-Based Accountability in Education. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. http://www.nap.edu/openbook.php?record_id=12521

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/

Ravitch, D. (2012, May 25). What Is Campbell’s Law? http://dianeravitch.net/2012/05/25/what-is-campbells-law/

Wachter, R. M. (2016, Jan 16). How Measurement Fails Doctors and Teachers. The New York Times. http://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/17/opinion/sunday/how-measurement-fails-doctors-and-teachers.html?_r=1

Incentive Schemes Sabotage Collaboration
Leana, C. R. (2011, Fall). The Missing Link in School Reform. http://www.ssireview.org/articles/entry/the_missing_link_in_school_reform/

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

Standardized Tests Are Not the Best Measures of School or Teacher Quality
Tienken, C. (2015, May 7). Predictable Results. http://christienken.com/2015/05/07/predictable-results/

Nehring, J. (2015, Aug 26). We Must Teach for “Range” and “Depth.” http://www.edweek.org/ew/articles/2015/08/26/we-must-teach-for-range-and-depth.html?cmp=eml-enl-eu-news2-RM

Haq, H. (2016, Jan 20). Harvard Study Says SATs Should Be Optional. Here’s Why. The Christian Science Monitor. http://www.csmonitor.com/USA/USA-Update/2016/0120/Harvard-study-says-SATs-should-be-optional.-Here-s-why  In a Harvard Study, it has been shown that grades are actually a better predictor of college success than the state tests being used, or even SAT or ACT scores.

Innovation Lab Network Performance Assessment Project. https://edpolicy.stanford.edu/projects/1188

NH Performance Assessment Network. http://education.nh.gov/assessment-systems/

New York Performance Standards Consortium. http://performanceassessment.org/

Darling-Hammond, L., Wilhoit, G. & Pittenger, L. (2014). Accountability for College and Career Readiness: Developing a New Paradigm. Education Policy Analysis Archives 22 (86). http://epaa.asu.edu/ojs/article/view/1724

Performance Assessment Resource Bank. http://www.performanceassessmentresourcebank.org/

Rizga, K. (2015). Mission High: One School, How Experts Tried to Fail It, and the Students and Teachers Who Made It Triumph. New York: Nation Books. http://www.missionhighbook.com/

Ravitch, D. (2016, Mar 24) Solving the Mystery of the Schools. The New York Review of Books. http://www.nybooks.com/articles/2016/03/24/solving-the-mystery-of-the-schools/

Council of the Great City Schools. (2015). Student Testing in America’s Great City Schools: An Inventory and Preliminary Analysis. http://www.cgcs.org/site/default.aspx?PageType=3&ModuleInstanceID=312&ViewID=7B97F7ED-8E5E-4120-848F-A8B4987D588F&RenderLoc=0&FlexDa

Kamenetz, A. (2015). The Test: Why Our Schools Are Obsessed with Standardized Testing—but You Don’t Have to Be. New York: PublicAffairs.

Serrano, R. A. (2015, Dec 17). Obama Proposes Capping Standardized Testing at 2% of Classroom Time. The Los Angeles Times. http://www.latimes.com/local/education/la-na-obama-testing-policy-20151024-story.html See also Emma, C. (2015, Oct. 24). Education Department: Too Much Testing, Partly Our Fault. http://www.politico.com/story/2015/10/education-department-too-much-testing-215131?utm_source=News+and+Updates+from+NCEE&utm_campaign=62476d01c8-TopPerformers_TooMuchTesting&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_4cd9241b4a-62476d01c8-337853085

Downey, M. (2015, Jan 27). Georgia School Chief to Feds: Stop the “Measure, Pressure, and Punish” Approach. The Atlantic Journal Constitution. http://getschooled.blog.myajc.com/2015/01/27/georgia-school-chief-to-feds-stop-measure-pressure-and-punish-approach/#__federated=1

Tucker, M. (2015, Oct 27). Too Much Testing in U.S. Schools: The Department of Education’s “Mea Culpa.”  http://blogs.edweek.org/edweek/top_performers/2015/10/too_much_testing_in_us_schools_the_department_of_educations_mea_culpa.html

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