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The California Context: How the CA Reading Wars Got Resolved: A Personal Story

The California Context
How the California Reading Wars Got Resolved: A Personal Story

by Bill Honig

Too many children in the United States do not learn to read well in their early years, and that failure damages them in their future school careers. Yet the research and evidence on how best to teach beginning reading is largely settled. (For a summary of foundational reading research and best practice, see the section below “The Role of Foundational Reading Skills.”) There is no excuse for any youngsters beyond a very small number to fail to learn to read. Our most successful districts incorporate these ideas in instruction, but we still have a major problem in this country. Many less successful districts do not use this evidence-based approach, and a growing number have adopted alternative, discredited strategies such as “balanced literacy” programs that teach beginning readers to sound out only the first letter of a word (rather than all the letters) and use context clues to guess what the word is. Many of the students in these schools and districts never learn to decode properly and, as a result, are destined to remain weak readers. This situation is much like the case of military doctors who fail to put into practice the lessons learned in recent wars on how to minimize battlefield deaths from injuries.
I devoted a substantial part of my educational career to advocate for improved reading instruction based on the most potent research. I founded a group to promulgate these ideas (CORE) and wrote a book on the subject. The following is the story of that effort.

The Rise of Whole Language

Back in the 1970s when I was a member of the California State Board of Education, I wrote a pamphlet on reading instruction with JoEllen Taylor from Far West (now WestEd) entitled Planning an Effective Reading Program and published by them. We integrated using a skills approach to teach decoding and phonics with literature and writing-based strategies—a consensus that was blown apart in the late 1980s by the whole language movement’s opposition to phonics instruction.

During my tenure as California’s superintendent of public instruction, in the late ’80s we developed the Reading and Literature Framework, which stressed the importance of students being well read and encountering and discussing rich, varied literature. The framework mentioned phonics, but as it turned out not forcefully enough to withstand the whole language movement, which was then gathering steam.

The proponents of whole language believe that teaching skills such as phonics hurts children. Instead, they advocate an alternative approach that stresses reading together and using pictures, syntax, and context to guess the meaning of words instead of learning how letters map to sounds to sound out the words on a page in a linguistically justified sequence of instruction. When they do use word attack skills they suggest students sound out the first letter and then use context to guess the word. They provide “leveled readers” that are not designed to practice letter/sound correspondences students have learned and don’t distinguish between the sequence of letter/sound correspondences already taught and the more complex ones still to be addressed. Since English is complex linguistically such a strategy leaves many children confused and frustrated. Their position is based on the mistaken belief that learning to read is like learning to speak—a natural, unconscious process that is hindered by organized skill instruction. It isn’t.

I had seen the deleterious effects of this approach 20 years before when it became widespread in the ’60s as part of the free school movement. As a fourth- and fifth-grade teacher, I noticed that many of my entering students were never taught to read. Sitting them on a couch and giving them a book to read just didn’t cut it.

Because of my work with JoEllen Taylor, I made the mistake of assuming that stressing the importance of literature and rich content would not detract from the necessity of teaching phonics. At the time, I had not yet even heard of the whole language movement and was not aware of its growing strength among educators so I was oblivious to the need to include in the framework very clear and detailed guidance about the importance of phonics.

Jeanne Chall had published the definitive study on teaching children to read, which demonstrated that teaching phonics produced much better readers than the looser strategy being pushed by an unfounded belief system like whole language. I had met and respected Jeanne, and when she saw a draft of the framework she called and warned me that people would use it to stop teaching phonics. I didn’t believe her and assured her that educators would never make such a ridiculous mistake. It turned out she was right and I was wrong because that’s exactly what happened. The framework was hijacked by the whole language movement.

It took a few years to realize what had happened. In one of his more destructive acts, Governor George Deukmejian eliminated the testing program in California in 1990, after a long campaign against me personally and public education in general. The long-standing California Assessment Program (CAP) was one of the best in the nation. We only tested at three grades. We used matrix sampling, which meant that each child only took a portion of the test. This allowed more thorough questions in less testing time and avoided the negative consequences of attaching tests to accountability. The current well-regarded National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) is patterned after CAP.

In the ’80s, CAP scores, including reading, were improving substantially—proof that our efforts were working. Reading scores leveled off at the end of the decade, but we didn’t yet detect a trend to worry about. The governor claimed he abolished the program as a cost-cutting measure, but no one believed him. The result was a calamity. We were flying blind precisely when whole language started to significantly impair reading instruction. Thus, we made no course correction.

Persuasive Reading Research

In my years as superintendent, I had to think about a broad array of educational issues. When I left office in 1993, I felt it would be a welcome change to concentrate on just one educational area and get deeply involved in it. I picked beginning reading because I felt responsible for the way our framework was used by the whole language movement with such damaging results. So I started reading in depth and talking to experts about how children learn to read. In 1990, Marilyn Adams had published her groundbreaking work, Beginning to Read: Thinking and Learning about Print. It was based on extensive research confirming and extending Jeanne Chall’s previous work on the processes children need to master to learn to read. I had not had time to read Marilyn’s book because of an all-encompassing political conflict with the governor and legal proceedings stemming from that fight, but now tackled the book. The tome was hard for me to understand. I had to read it three times before I could comprehend all of what she was saying. Luckily, I knew Marilyn, and over the course of many phone calls, she graciously played the role of tutor, answering all my questions.

She then invited me to the 1995 meeting of the Society for the Scientific Study of Reading, which had been formed two years before. At the meeting Marilyn introduced me to the top reading researchers in the country. For several years Reid Lyon, who was head of the Behavior and Development branch of the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, had made large grants to a network of research projects investigating why some children learn to read so easily and why others have great difficulty. The studies delved into how children learn to read, identified the difficulties many encounter, provided a broader definition of requisite foundational skills, and confirmed the importance of an organized, structured program for teaching beginning readers.

For those who are interested, what follows is a short description of their research: why, contrary to the claims of whole language advocates, most children do not learn to read naturally in the same way they learn to speak (especially in English, which is linguistically complex) and why children need to be taught in an organized fashion.

The Role of Foundational Reading Skills

First, these researchers examined speaking since print represents spoken words. When we listen to someone speak, a stream of sounds like the phonemes /m/ and /a/ /n/ all run together and we hear the word man. We have been programmed to recognize this sequence of sounds as a word and immediately connect that spoken cluster of sounds to the concept or meaning underlying it. For the process to be rapid, we have learned not to pay attention to or even discern the individual phonemes that make up a word but to perceive groups of these sounds as words. The process is very fast, unconscious, and efficient; otherwise we wouldn’t be able to concentrate on the meaning of what the speaker is saying.

Initially, reading for understanding depends on recognizing the symbols on a page set off with spaces as a word that’s part of our speaking vocabulary—sounding out the letters in the word until it is recognized as if it were being spoken (assuring that students are familiar with the meaning of the word being decoded at the start is crucial especially for English-language learners and low-income children). Later, meaning also comes from more sophisticated strategies that require recognizing syllables and morphemes, navigating complex syntax and text structures, extensively developing vocabulary, connecting to what you know and drawing inferences, and extending meaning by writing or discussing what you read.

So reading initially is a double code. The printed word stands for the spoken sounds of the word, which in turn represent the meaning behind that spoken word. Luckily, English uses the alphabetic system to represent spoken words in print. That system was invented eons ago by some unsung geniuses who figured out that spoken words in a language are made up of a limited number of discrete sounds (about 44 in English), which allowed for millions of potential combinations or words to represent concepts. Crucially, these prodigies also determined that one could represent those sounds by symbols (letters or combinations of letters), which when decoded and combined would generate the spoken word. The catch was how to make the process as rapid, automatic, and unconscious as speech so that a reader could concentrate on thinking about what was being read. Complicating the task of understanding what one reads is evidence that comprehending meaning suffers if more than about five percent of the words are not known automatically. The same is true of speech. It doesn’t take many words that you don’t hear or don’t understand to stop you from comprehending what’s being said.

The research community, relying on the latest brain research, discovered how good readers do it. The secret is to develop a growing corpus of automatically recognized words so that a word instantly pops into your head by just looking at it. Then students can read material with large numbers of automatically recognized words and keep growing their lexicon by reading new text, sounding out or decoding (eventually assisted by pattern recognition, as explained below) the few previously unencountered printed words found there.

What did these researchers discover about how people learn to automatically recognize a word? One of the most important findings was that both sounds (phonemes) and symbols (graphemes, or letters and letter combinations) were crucial to rapid retrieval of words. Hearing-impaired children, for example, usually read several grades below expected levels because their information about a word is limited to its letters. When they are taught to substitute signing for the sound information they reach grade level.

To make use of the full bundle of necessary information for rapid retrieval, a student must initially read through the whole word (sounding it out), which requires attending to all of the letters, connecting the letters and letter combinations to the sounds they represent, blending the sounds together, and linking the sounds to the meaning of the word in the context. When this process is successfully repeated several times, the student forms a neural model of that specific word in the brain that gets automatically activated upon seeing the word in print. The sounds of the word are stored in one part of the brain, the symbols connected to those sounds in another, and both are connected to the meaning stored in the frontal cortex. After a student has analyzed and correctly read a word several times, a neural model with all the information necessary for rapid retrieval is formed. (Some reading-disabled youngsters need focused interventions to succeed because they have brain-processing issues that make creating these connections or retrieving the information difficult.)

Thus, the royal road to master beginning reading is to develop the decoding tool—the ability to sound out words thoroughly so that they can eventually be stored and retrieved rapidly. As more and more words become automatic, students can read increasingly difficult text.

After a time, when students have mastered enough letter/sound correspondences, pattern recognition speeds up the decoding process. For example, if a student has learned to automatically recognize the word weight, by using analogy the student can more easily read and create a neural model for the word freight. This can only take place after the spelling pattern eight and its corresponding sounds were initially sounded out, practiced several times, and stored in permanent memory.

A critical piece of eye research demonstrated that effective readers see every letter in a word as they scan it, which activates the exact spelling and associated sounds stored in memory. I’m getting older now and sometimes catch myself misreading an i for an e in a word, which changes the meaning and makes me stop but proves I’m seeing each letter.

When teachers shortchange the process by teaching students guessing strategies such as looking only at the first letter and using context to “infer” what the word is, the full package of information never gets stored and quick retrieval is hampered the next time the student encounters the word (unless after guessing, the student uses phonics to sound out the word and confirm it’s correct and then has enough practice to store the word—a process the whole language advocates discourage). Repeating the guessing strategy each time a word is encountered is far too cumbersome and error prone for efficient reading.

Most importantly, guessing from context, even if given the first letter of a word, doesn’t work that well. In our Consortium on Reaching Excellence trainings (more about CORE later) we show a paragraph from Jack London’s Call of the Wild, with every fifth word redacted except for the first letter. We then ask teachers who believe context can help them decode words to read the passage. In hundreds of trainings, not one person could read and understand the excerpt until, finally, one teacher read the entire passage fluently. I was amazed and asked her how she did it. It turns out she has a photographic memory and had stored the passage in her brain from previous readings. It is important to note that context clues are useful to determine if a word has been correctly decoded and makes sense in the context. There are also occasions when context clues can help readers figure out a word that is not yet in their vocabulary, but context strategies can’t replace decoding. Finally, students need enough flexibility in decoding to try out various potential solutions to generating and combining sounds until they hit on a word that makes sense. For example, trying to break a word into syllables in different ways with different vowel sounds—“Is it re•cent or rec•ent?”

Alternatively, memorization strategies don’t work either. If students try to memorize the unique configuration of each word they quickly are overwhelmed. There are just too many words in English for that approach to be successful, and children who rely on memorizing words without learning phonics flame out quickly.

As a caution, when educators use the word decoding, they may be referring to two distinct ideas, which is confusing. First, there is the automatic recognition of words that are stored for rapid and unconscious retrieval. Second, there is the conscious, effortful process of sounding out the word that must occur several times before it becomes automatic.

So why is this latter process difficult to master for many students? One complicating factor with learning to read in English is the linguistic complexity of the language. Learning to read in Spanish is much easier than learning to read in English because Spanish is almost completely transparent—there is nearly a one-to-one correspondence between the 22 phonemes in the Spanish spoken in the Americas and the 29 letters that represent those sounds. What you see is what you get. English, on the other hand, is all over the map reflecting the various historical contributions to the language—Anglo-Saxon, Danish, Norman French, Spanish, and so on, each with different linguistic patterns.

As a result, there are 44 sounds in English but only 26 letters, so some sounds are spelled with letter combinations. A student has to decide whether to look at one letter or a combination to generate the correct sound. Second, in English, unlike Spanish and other more transparent languages, there are many individual letters that stand for more than one sound. The letter a, for example, represents different sounds in the words cake, hat, and along. Conversely, many sounds are represented in several ways such as the long-a sound, which is spelled a in basin, a with silent e in late, ai in paid, ay in day, and so on. This lack of regularity confuses many children when they are first learning to read. Many get so frustrated they give up.

One major breakthrough in teaching reading in English was to structure the sequence of initial instruction to make it more like the transparent languages so that children aren’t overwhelmed by the multiple ways sounds are represented in English—that is, make it more like Spanish. Beginning instruction should focus on the highest-frequency sound/spelling correspondences (single consonants and short vowels) and avoid multiple representations of sounds until students begin to understand how the alphabetic system works and get the hang of sounding out words. Then the less frequent and more complex combinations can be added without causing as much confusion.

That’s why experienced researchers and practitioners advocate a sequenced rolling out of sound/spellings—from simple to complex—and teaching children how to read through, or sound out words thoroughly so the words are stored and can be automatically retrieved. It takes some time and practice for most children to master this skill, while others learn it without much effort. To support beginning readers, teachers must also provide reading materials that are made up primarily of words containing the sound/spelling relationships they have taught (decodable text). The materials should also include some irregular high-frequency words such as was and of, which must be memorized with the help of explicit instruction. Carefully selecting materials for decoding practice avoids overwhelming students with multiple sound/spellings they have not yet encountered.

Learning to sound out words in late kindergarten and early first grade—the tool a student needs to become automatic with a growing number of words—depends on the acquisition of several key precursor concepts and skills. Students must know print concepts (e.g., English text is read from left to right), be fluent in recognizing letters, be able to name letters and connect them with sounds, and extremely important, be able to hear the discrete sounds in spoken words (phonemic awareness), beginning, ending, and medial. In this last task, students must unlearn what has become second nature in understanding speech—they have learned to ignore the discrete sounds in words and just hear the whole word. Now we are asking them to reinstate their ability to hear the discrete sounds. For some that takes a bit of work. In fact, many adults, including teachers, have difficulty identifying the discrete sounds in words. For example, how many sounds do you hear in the word French? (There are five: /f/ /r/ /e/ /n/ /ch/.)

Most students can identify beginning sounds by mid-kindergarten and ending and medial sounds by the conclusion of kindergarten. Playing sound games especially with kids who haven’t developed these abilities can help them master the technique. Many finally nail the skill of hearing discrete sounds as they learn to match sounds with letters in the course of phonics instruction.

Researchers also found that if students fail to master decoding by late kindergarten to mid–first grade to sound out and recognize simple words they haven’t seen, their chances of ever becoming on-grade readers rapidly diminish. Since they don’t have a workable method for automatically recognizing a growing number of words, they fall further and further behind. Many become confused or frustrated with the complexities of English and eventually give up or become alienated from reading. That is why Response to Instruction (RtI) strategies are found to be so effective. Good initial reading instruction teaches most to decode early, and the teacher intervenes rapidly when a student is not catching on. Giving students “the gift of time” by waiting to assist under the mistaken belief that they will eventually understand the process when they are more “developmentally ready” condemns large numbers of faltering readers to a lifetime of grief. Of course, teaching phonics and decoding must be accompanied by a rich oral language, literature, writing, discussing, and vocabulary development program as described in the California ELA/ELD Framework, explicated below.

One of the more unfortunate developments currently is the tendency in many schools and districts to ignore the significant number of students not mastering beginning reading because of the absence of a research-based beginning reading program and then assigning them to intervention groups when they are not making progress. A much better strategy is to teach them well initially and support those students who are confused immediately and not wait until the damage is done and they have become frustrated.

In later grades, students are taught how to decode multisyllabic words by recognizing syllable types and division patterns; using prefixes, suffixes, and knowledge of root words; and identifying larger patterns, or chunks, encountered in similar words already learned to help them decode new words. For more about multisyllabic word instruction and assessment, see Word ID: Assessment Across the Content Areas.

Also children should receive fluency instruction, if needed, to smooth out and speed up their oral reading. All these efforts should be accompanied by extensive reading of good stories and literature by and to kids, discussing stories, a good spelling or encoding program aligned with the sound/spelling instructional sequence, assigned writing, and the buildup of content knowledge.

Three Important Decisions

Reading researchers were reporting on exciting stuff, which explained a great deal about how best to teach our children. What they were saying was powerful, but it was presented in fairly esoteric technical language. I thought there might be a needed role for a translator—to put the research findings in a form that practitioners could readily understand and to work with schools to promulgate their ideas. So I made three important decisions. I started the Consortium on Reading Excellence (CORE) with Linda Diamond, Sheila Mandel, Ann Cunningham, and Ruth Nathan to work with teachers and administrators on incorporating this powerful research into practice. I also I wrote a succinct book published in 1996, Teaching Our Children to Read: The Role of Skills in a Comprehensive Reading Program. Here is the dedication:

This book is dedicated to those teachers, researchers, and leaders who have kept their common sense and are beseeching the educational community to reach an effective, working consensus on how best to teach our children to read. I hope the information provided here—which summarizes and highlights a tremendous amount of research and thinking by the leading experts in the literacy field—will help them achieve this laudable goal.

The third decision was to lobby at the state level for policies reflecting this new research. After leaving the state superintendent’s office, I teamed up with Marion Joseph, a true force of nature, who had become convinced that the whole language movement was ruining the teaching of reading to California’s children. I met Marion in 1965 when I was working for Pat Brown, then California governor, and she was working with Wilson Riles, then state superintendent. We became close (she always said she viewed me as her younger brother) but fell out when I ran against her boss in 1982. After I won, she withdrew from education and we lost contact. When I was the subject of a lawsuit brought by the state, she came to see me to find out if there was anything she could do to help. After the Language Arts Framework was disseminated, Marion noticed her granddaughter was not learning to read. After hearing gobbledygook from the teacher, she checked with her extensive school contacts. Marion was horrified at what she discovered about how reading instruction was being conducted under the influence of whole language.

Together we started lobbying key people in the state to change direction. The legislature, the new superintendent Delaine Eastin, Governor Wilson, and subsequently Governor Gray Davis got behind the effort. Marion was appointed to the State Board of Education, along with other phonics advocates, the legislature passed phonics bills and appropriated funds for professional development, and new textbooks were eventually adopted that were based on the new compelling research. An engrossing account of this effort was written by the well-respected Nicholas Lemann, published in The Atlantic magazine in 1997. The article captures how heated the controversy was during that decade.

The research findings on teaching reading I discovered in 1995, incorporated in my book which was used to start CORE, were the basis for the lobbying effort in California and were eventually enshrined in the 2000 National Reading Panel report, which was developed by some of the country’s leading reading experts. The panel reviewed more than 100,000 studies and recommended the explicit and systematic teaching of phonemic awareness and phonics, a guided oral reading strategy, and fluency and comprehension strategies. A recent neuroscience research project from Stanford confirmed the earlier findings that supported the role of phonics and decoding. For a current summary of the latest research, see Linnea Ehri’s article in the 2014 issue of Scientific Studies of Reading. The Power of RTI and Reading Profiles: A Blueprint for Solving Reading Problems by Louise Spear-Swerling and Essentials of Assessing, Preventing, and Overcoming Reading Difficulties by David Kilpatrick are among the best research-based books on how to teach children to read and explain some current misguided reading approaches that are still in widespread use. For an article featuring top educators affirming that almost all students can learn to read if they are initially taught correctly, see Liana Heitin’s post in Education Week.

For a useful compendium on research-based reading instruction and strategies, see Honig, Diamond, and Gutlohn’s Teaching Reading Sourcebook, Updated Second Edition, and its companion book, Assessing Reading: Multiple Measures, 2nd Edition. Both books were produced by CORE, where I am president. The Sourcebook was one of only 10 publications endorsed by the National Council on Teacher Quality to cover beginning reading adequately. Of the 10, it was the fourth most used publication for preservice teachers.

The same ideas were incorporated in the recently developed Common Core State Standards and in the new California ELA/ELD Framework based on those standards, which also stressed wide reading and the importance of a systematic buildup of content knowledge in the major disciplines. For a useful executive summary on the California ELA/ELD standards, go to this website.

Here is a short quote from a 2014 article authored by Jo Ann Isken, Carol Jago, and myself, which explains the ideas behind the framework:

The outer ring of the graphic [a symbol used in the framework] identifies the overarching goals of ELA/ELD literacy and instruction. By the time California’s students complete high school, they should have developed readiness for college, career, and we added civic life; attained the capacities of literate individuals; become broadly literate; and acquired the skills for living and learning in the twenty-first century.

California has grounded the framework in these broader purposes of the language arts. We want students to be able to understand complex text and ideas as well as reason, analyze, persuade, and problem solve. We also wish them to encounter a rich liberal arts education—learning about the world, civic life, and the human heart, being well-read, and helping them reach their potential. We would like our youngsters to encounter a significant representation of the best classic and contemporary literature including novels, biographies, essays and plays as well as coherent content informational text in science, history, and the humanities. We would like them to experience the joy of reading engrossing stories and fascinating material.

So the ELA/ELD framework is about two main thrusts: First, attention to the totality of what students read both on their own in independent reading and in school in their liberal arts disciplines (including literature) during their school years, and second, the analytical, reasoning and literacy skills necessary to comprehend and apply knowledge gleaned from a variety of text structures. Both ideas are stressed in the multi-state Common Core ELA standards. To this end, the framework also recommends an organized independent reading program for each student to supplement what is read in school and provides advice on how to implement such a strategy in Chapter 2.

The developers of the ELD standards made a crucial decision from the start. They designed the standards to aid the large number of English-language learners in mastering the California Common Core Standards, which greatly facilitated the integration of the two sets of standards. They organized the ELD standards around five overarching themes—foundational skills, language, written and oral expression, content knowledge, and meaning-making strategies such as drawing inferences and making connections. The integrated ELA/ELD Framework adopted this architecture. All five themes work together to develop student comprehension.

The first strand is foundational skills. To understand the ideas in a text, the reader needs to automatically recognize almost all the words. For words already in the reader’s speaking vocabulary, that is the role of foundational skills—to teach them a process for becoming automatic with a growing number of words. Foundational skills address how to teach them these skills and include phonics, word attack skills (learning how to sound out new words, handle multisyllabic words, and recognize word structures such as prefixes, suffixes, and root words), and fluency instruction. The foundational skills in the California framework are summarized in an extremely well written resource guide by Hallie Yopp, one of the authors of the framework.

The second theme, language, deals with the crucial topic of vocabulary, text structure and syntax, and academic language—all critical to understanding text. Academic texts in English contain a large number of words that appear infrequently but are essential to understanding. To successfully complete high school, students need to understand approximately 65,000 words, although some words are members of the same word family. Consequently, from the outset, there must be a rich vocabulary development strand coupled with an extensive independent reading program. This is particularly crucial for the large numbers of low-income or ELL students who start school knowing far fewer words than their middle-class and English-speaking peers. For a valuable resource, see the Vocabulary Handbook and CORE’s Word Intelligence, which is a vocabulary program for middle-grade students. In addition, as material and sentence structure become more complex and demanding in upper elementary, students must learn to handle challenging elements such as complex sentences with multiple dependent clauses. Finally, different disciplines such as history and science organize information in different ways and students need help in navigating these varied text structures.

The third theme enhances comprehension by concentrating on a student’s ability to express ideas in writing and speaking. This strand also includes spelling and writing conventions such as grammar. Often, until you have tried to explain something, you really don’t know it.

The fourth theme deals with the vital role content knowledge plays in comprehension and the importance of a systematic buildup of disciplinary and cultural knowledge through organized class work and independent reading. See the vast work on this subject at Core Knowledge and “For Reading, Knowledge Matters More Than Strategies, Some Experts Say.” See also “Why Reading to Learn Is Seldom Taught.” And, finally, meaning making addresses the meta-cognitive skills of self-monitoring, drawing inferences, and thinking about what is being read.

For ELD students, the frameworks recommend that these strands be integrated into the regular instruction program (integrated instruction) and that schools provide a designated time for supportive instruction tailored to the language needs of the students (designated instruction).

Similar to math, English language arts shifts to a more active instructional program including book discussions, projects, research, and making arguments and taking positions in both writing and speaking.

I believe we have reached a broad-based consensus in California on the elements of good reading instruction and how best to deal with our large numbers of second-language learners. The frameworks are widely supported by educators and policymakers, although there are still too many schools and classrooms that have not yet incorporated the breadth of what these well-researched documents are recommending.

Reference Notes

Phillips, M. M. (2016, Jan 7). Military Doctors Fault Pentagon on Battlefield Casualty Care. The Wall Street Journal. http://www.wsj.com/articles/military-doctors-fault-pentagon-over-battlefield-casualty-care-1452194963

The Rise of Whole Language
Chall, J. S. (1983). Stages of Reading Development. New York: McGraw-Hill.

Persuasive Reading Research
Adams, M. J. (1996). Beginning to Read: Thinking and Learning about Print. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

The Role of Foundational Reading Skills
Gutlohn, L., & Bessellieu, F. (2014). Word ID: Assessment Across the Content Areas. Novato, CA: Arena Press. http://www.wordidassessment.com

Three Important Decisions
Consortium on Reaching Excellence (CORE). http://www.corelearn.com/

Honig, B. (1996). Teaching Our Children to Read: The Role of Skills in a Comprehensive Reading Program. Thousand Oaks, CA: Corwin. https://us.corwin.com/en-us/nam/teaching-our-children-to-read/book7412

Lemann, N. (1997, Nov). The Reading Wars. The Atlantic. http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1997/11/the-reading-wars/376990/

National Reading Panel, & National Institute of Child Health and Human Development. (2000). Report of the National Reading Panel: Teaching Children to Read: An Evidence-Based Assessment of the Scientific Research Literature on Reading and Its Implications for Reading Instruction: Reports of the subgroups. Washington, D.C.: National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, National Institutes of Health. https://www.nichd.nih.gov/publications/pubs/nrp/pages/smallbook.aspx

Yoncheva, Y. N., Wise, J., & McCandliss, B. (2015). Hemispheric Specialization for Visual Words Is Shaped by Attention to Sublexical Units During Initial Learning. Brain and Language. http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0093934X15000772

Ehri, L. C. (2014). Orthographic Mapping in the Acquisition of Sight Word Reading, Spelling Memory, and Vocabulary Learning. Scientific Studies of Reading. http://eric.ed.gov/?q=%22%22&ff1=subVocabulary+Development&id=EJ1027413

Spear-Swerling, L. (2015). The Power of RTI and Reading Profiles: A Blueprint for Solving Reading Problems. Baltimore, MD: Paul H. Brookes.

Kilpatrick, D. (2015). Essentials of Assessing, Preventing, and Overcoming Reading Difficulties (Essentials of Psychological Assessment). Hoboken, NJ: Wiley.

Heitin, L. (2015, Jun 12). Can Most Kindergartners Really Tackle ‘Emergent-Reader Texts?’ 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

Honig, B., Diamond, L., & Gutlohn, L. (2013). Teaching Reading Sourcebook, Updated Second Edition. Novato, CA: Arena Press. http://www.corelearn.com/Products/Publications/ – Teaching-Reading-Sourcebook-Updated-2nd-Edition

Diamond, L., & Thorsnes, B. J. (Eds.). Assessing Reading: Multiple Measures. 2nd Edition. Novato, CA: Arena Press. http://www.corelearn.com/Products/Publications/ – Assessing-Reading-Multiple-Measures-2nd-Edition

National Council on Teacher Quality. (2014). Standard 2: Early Reading: What Consumers Need to Know About Teacher Preparation. http://www.nctq.org/dmsView/Teacher_Prep_Review_2014_Std2

California Department of Education. (2015, Jul). English Language Arts/English Language Development Framework for California Public Schools: K–12. http://www.cde.ca.gov/ci/rl/cf/elaeldfrmwrksbeadopted.asp

Slowik, H. Y., & Brynelson, N. (2015). Executive Summary: English Language Arts/English Language Development Framework for California Public Schools: K–12. California Department of Education. http://www.scoe.net/castandards/

Isken, J. A., Honig, B., & Jago, C. (2015, Oct 15). California’s Recently Adopted English Language Arts/English Language Development Framework: Translating the Common Core State Standards to a Coherent and Sequenced Curriculum for All Students. California Department of Education. http://www.cde.ca.gov/ci/rl/cf/documents/elaeldfwsummaryoct15.pdf

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%3Agpfwm5rhxiw&output=xml_no_dtd&filter=1&num=20&start=0&q=Resource+Guide+to+the+Foundational+Skills+of+the+California+Common+Core+State+Standards+for+English+

Diamond, L., & Gutlohn, L. (2006). Vocabulary Handbook. Baltimore, MD: Paul H. Brookes. http://www.corelearn.com/Products/Publications/ – Vocabulary-Handbook

Word Intelligence. http://www.wordintelligence.net/

Core Knowledge. www.coreknowledge.org

Heitin, L. (2015, Oct 29). For Reading, Knowledge Matters More Than Strategies, Some Experts Say. http://blogs.edweek.org/edweek/curriculum/2015/10/for_reading_knowledge_matters_more_than_strategies.html?utm_source=feedblitz&utm_medium=FeedBlitzRss&utm_campaign=curriculummatters

Cobb, V. (2015, Jul 21). Why Reading to Learn Is Seldom Taught. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/vicki-cobb/why-reading-to-learn-is-s_b_7841040.html

How Top Performers Build-and-Support: Exemplary Models

How Top Performers Build-and-Support
Exemplary Models

by Bill Honig

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

School Districts

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Nations and States

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Reference Notes

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

How Top Performers Build-and-Support: Lessons Learned from Successful Districts

How Top Performers Build-and-Support
Lessons Learned from Successful Districts

by Bill Honig

When we examine assessments of educational outcomes, it is important to be aware of a potential trap articulated by social science statistical research. The fact that there are common measures in successful districts does not necessarily mean that a low-performing district will experience similar improvements if it adopts those measures. Each district, city, state, and nation has some special circumstances, and there may be prerequisites or unique tweaks required before the approaches will work in a new context. Moreover, the process of implementing new policy initiatives and maintaining a comprehensive, strategic view that interweaves various improvement proposals may be more important than the individual measures themselves. Yet there are some essential initiatives that every successful district has employed.

Components of Successful Strategies

Virtually every world-class district has adopted policies that actively engage teachers and administrators, build social capital, and develop collaboration and teamwork. These districts also put systems in place to ensure continuous improvement centered on building craft knowledge and becoming more proficient at delivering a demanding, broad-based liberal arts curriculum. They have a robust human resources development program with two aspects. First, the districts find and keep the best teachers by developing effective systems of recruiting, proper placement, inducting, granting tenure, and compensation. Second, they build the capacity of current staff through comprehensive professional development, create effective school site teams, and offer career advancement pathways that allow our best teachers a hybrid teaching and leadership role and the possibility of higher earnings. Successful districts also have implemented a pre-K or early education program and extensive extracurricular involvement of students. Researchers in both education and business recommend these methods as essential to success. In addition, while successful jurisdictions have carefully avoided the punitive approaches advocated by conventional reformers, most low-performing districts have succumbed to that agenda and thereby neglected the more effective, positive Build-and-Support approach.

A second major point is that just as teachers must become proficient in the many dimensions of teaching (as delineated in the companion article Provide High-Quality Instruction), districts must become adept in many aspects of leadership and support. Crucially, districts have to integrate improving teaching and learning a demanding curriculum into all their initiatives so that each effort pulls in a common direction. As important, they must shift from a superficial checklist-compliance approach to an approach that provides real support for schools and teachers.

Transforming the Central Office

University of Washington professor Meredith Honig (no relation) and her team at the Center for the Study of Teaching and Policy published a significant report on how districts can reorient their administration to a school support approach. Their recommendations are based on the most valid and reliable research and the experience of our top-performing districts. The document delineated five components of successful district improvement efforts:

The Five Dimensions of Central Office Transformation

Dimension 1: Learning-focused partnerships with school principals to deepen principals’ instructional leadership practice.

Dimension 2: Assistance to the central office–principal partnerships.

Dimension 3: Reorganizing and re-culturing of each central office unit, to support the central office–principal partnerships and teaching and learning improvement.

Dimension 4: Stewardship of the overall central office transformation process.

Dimension 5: Use of evidence throughout the central office to support continual improvement of work practices and relationships with schools.

Michael Fullan, professor emeritus of the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education at the University of Toronto, advises districts to address the entire school system using a small but powerful set of integrated initiatives. He cautions against an overly complex, by-the-book compliance orientation. Another helpful document on district effectiveness is the Common Core Leadership Planning Guide. It was developed in conjunction with some key policymakers, researchers, and educational and community leaders in California. The guide lists 10 areas that school districts should examine:

  • curriculum and instruction
  • instructional materials and resources (both print and electronic)
  • professional development
  • capacity building and leadership
  • student learning feedback and assessment
  • alignment of fiscal and human resources—the recruiting, induction, assisting, and providing career advancement for teachers and other staff
  • support programs that bolster implementation
  • communication with stakeholders (including parents and community)
  • transition to higher education and careers
  • technology support for instruction, data, and assessment

A very comprehensive inventory, indeed.

Improving System Performance

The documents I’ve cited reflect the strategies pursued by the most successful districts in this country and around the globe—districts that avoided the more negative Test-and-Punish methods in favor of a Build-and-Support strategy. These districts respect and encourage their teachers and pay them decently. They placed instruction and teaching at the center of their improvement efforts and turned schools into learning institutions. These districts have a long-term strategic plan for building the knowledge and capacity of the staff and continuous improvement. They create positive working conditions that allow on-site collaborative teams to thrive. These districts use the most effective instructional materials. They have reoriented management (especially principals and teacher leaders) and provided time, knowledge, and resources to assist these efforts.

Improvement initiatives in the US come none too soon. According to the article “Want to Close the Achievement Gap? Close the Teaching Gap,” on the whole, our teachers spend more time in the classroom than their counterparts in top-performing countries, significantly less time collaborating with other teachers on how best to improve instruction, and work in a much less supportive school atmosphere. See also Dana Goldstein’s recent book, The Teacher Wars: A History of America’s Embattled Profession, and the National Center for Education and the Economy’s 2016 publication Beyond PD: Teacher Professional Learning in High-Performing Systems. Conversely, staffs in the most successful countries and districts in Asia, Europe, and North America spend less time teaching and invest the difference in working with one another to improve instruction. Consequently, they get better results.

Revitalizing the Teaching Force

These top performers have also substantially upgraded the quality of and respect for the teaching force by attracting new teachers from the top tier of college students, training and paying them well, supporting them in their school careers, and offering career advancement for the best practitioners who remain in the classroom and help other teachers as mentors. As an example see Joel Knudson’s You’ll Never Be Better Than Your Teachers: The Garden Grove Approach to Human Capital Development. Mentoring improves the performance of both the mentor and the teacher being helped.

Building a cooperative and supportive atmosphere was found to be essential for attracting and retaining these high-quality professionals. Two major national efforts along these lines have been initiated: Deans for Impact and the Collaboration for Effective Educator Development, Accountability and Reform (CEEDAR). See also a report on the importance of a long-term strategy for revitalizing the teaching profession.

Another key objective for districts is determining the best way to select, train, and support principals to lead continuous improvement efforts at their schools. On-site leadership is critical in building the systems that connect teaching, curriculum, and instruction, continuously improving all three, and increasing the degree of engagement of teachers, students, parents, and the wider community—all of whom shape the school climate. For a perceptive two-part series on how best to train principals to lead such a capacity-building effort currently under way in four states, see Marc Tucker’s “Organizations in Which Teachers Can Do Their Best Work.” For a comprehensive report on principal training, see The School Principal as Leader: Guiding Schools to Better Teaching and Learning and 2015 standards for educational leaders.

BBS Companion Articles

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

Reference Notes

Mehta, J. (2016, Jan 8). Why “Queen Bees” and “Wannabees” Is Not the Right Way to Think About Global Education. http://blogs.edweek.org/edweek/learning_deeply/2016/01/why_queen_bees_and_wannabes_is_not_the_right_way_to_think_about_global_education.html?utm_source=feedblitz&utm_medium=FeedBlitzRss&utm_campaign=learningdeeply

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

Kirp D. L. (2016, Feb 13). How New York Made Pre-K a Success. The New York Times. http://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/14/opinion/sunday/how-new-york-made-pre-k-a-success.html See also Farran, D. C. (2016, Feb 25). We Need More Evidence in Order to Create Effective Pre-K Programs. http://www.brookings.edu/research/reports/2016/02/25-need-more-evidence-create-effective-prek-programs-farran Some experts have raised questions about the research base supporting early education and whether there should be massive expansion of the program. For example, see Kirp D. L. (2015, Oct 3). Does Pre-K Make Any Difference? The New York Times. http://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/04/opinion/sunday/does-pre-k-make-any-difference.html and Frey, S. (2016, Feb 28). Groups Want Early Ed Block Grant Pulled From This Year’s State Budget. http://edsource.org/2016/groups-want-early-ed-block-grant-pulled-from-this-years-state-budget/95285?utm_source=Feb.+29+daily+digest+-+Erin&utm_campaign=Daily+email&utm_medium=email

Early Learning. http://www2.ed.gov/about/inits/ed/earlylearning/index.html

Kronholz, J. (2012, Winter). Academic Value of Non-Academics. http://educationnext.org/academic-value-of-non-academics/

Transforming the Central Office
Honig, M. I., Copland, M. A., Rainey, L., Lorton, J. A., & Newton, M. (2010, Apr). Central Office Transformation for District-wide Teaching and Learning Improvement: Executive Summary. Center for the Study of Teaching and Policy. University of Washington. http://www.wallacefoundation.org/knowledge-center/school-leadership/district-policy-and-practice/pages/central-office-transformation-district-wide-teaching-and-learning.aspx

Fullan, M. (2015, Jul). California’s Golden Opportunity. LCAP’s Theory of Action: Problems and Corrections. The Stuart Foundation. http://www.michaelfullan.ca/california-release-a-golden-opportunity/

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. http://www.scoe.net/castandards/Pages/default.aspx

Improving System Performance
Darling-Hammond, L. (2014-2015, Winter). Want to Close the Achievement Gap? Close the Teaching Gap. American Educator. http://www.aft.org/ae/winter2014-2015/darling-hammond.

Goldstein, D. (2015). The Teacher Wars: A History of America’s Embattled Profession. New York: Anchor. See also Goldstein, D. (2015, Spring). Quieting the Teacher Wars. What History Reveals About an Embattled Profession. American Educator. http://www.aft.org/ae/spring2015/goldstein

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

Revitalizing the Teaching Force
Knudson, J. (2013, Sep). You’ll Never Be Better Than Your Teachers; The Garden Grove Approach to Human Capital Development. California Collaborative on District Reform. http://www.cacollaborative.org/publications

Kirby, A. (2016, Mar 7). Teacher Mentorship Improves Performance on Both Sides. https://www.cabinetreport.com/human-resources/teacher-mentorship-improves-performance-on-both-sides

Deans for Impact. http://deansforimpact.org/ See also Deans for Impact. From Chaos to Coherence: A Policy Agenda for Accessing and Using Outcomes Data in Educator Preparation. http://www.deansforimpact.org/policy_brief.html

Collaboration for Effective Educator Development, Accountability and Reform (CEEDAR). http://www.ceedar.org/

Richardson, J. (2015, Nov 9). Looking Abroad for Answers at Home. http://www.learningfirst.org/looking-abroad-answers-home

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

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 See also 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). 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

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

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

by Bill Honig

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

Damaging Cuts in Public Education

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

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

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

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

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

Antigovernment and Antiunion Forces at Work

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

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

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

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

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

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

A Toxic Narrative

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

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

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

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

Impossible Goals and Severe Consequences

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

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

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

Lessons from New Orleans

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

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

Failing Grades

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

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

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

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

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

Limited Gains and Unnecessary Damage

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

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

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

Other Failed Examples: State Takeovers

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

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

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

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

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

Privatization Failures

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Seeking Common Ground

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Here is the way Mike Petrilli describes the Coherence Camp:

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

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

Recent Developments

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

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

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

BBS Companion Articles

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

Reference Notes

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

TeachStrong. http://teachstrong.org/

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

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

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

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

by Bill Honig

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Teacher Quality: Putting the Issue in Perspective

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tests Are Not Reliable Measures of Teacher Performance

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

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

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

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

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

Evaluations Based on Test Scores Misidentify Teachers

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

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

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

Examples of Test-Based Evaluations That Fail Exemplary Teachers

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

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

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

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

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

Other Flaws in Test-Based Evaluation Systems

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A More Effective Approach to Teacher Evaluation

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Does Dismissing Incompetent Teachers Improve Student Outcomes?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A Narrow Focus on Dismissing Teachers Detracts from Effective Improvement Measures

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Recent Developments

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

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

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

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

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

Promote stakeholder engagement.

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

Embed evaluation and evidence-based building activities in school implementation

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

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

BBS Companion Articles

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

Reference Notes

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A Broader, Bolder Approach to Education. http://www.boldapproach.org/

Sawhill, I. V., & Rodrigue, E. (2015, Nov 18). An Agenda for Reducing Poverty and Improving Opportunity. Brookings. http://www.brookings.edu/research/papers/2015/11/campaign-2016-presidential-candidates-poverty-and-opportunity

Kerwin McCrimmon, K. (2015, Aug 27). Private Money Saves Colorado IUD Program as Fight Continues for Public Funding. Kaiser Health News. http://khn.org/news/private-money-saves-colorado-iud-program-as-fight-continues-for-public-funding/ See also Tavernise, S. (2015, Jul 5). Colorado’s Effort Against Teenage Pregnancies Is a Startling Success. The New York Times. http://www.nytimes.com/2015/07/06/science/colorados-push-against-teenage-pregnancies-is-a-startling-success.html

Tests Are Not Reliable Measures of Teacher Performance
American Education Research Association and National Academy of Education. Getting Teacher Evaluation Right: A Brief for Policymakers. https://edpolicy.stanford.edu/publications/pubs/421

American Statistical Association. (2014, Apr 8). ASA Statement on Using Value-Added Models for Educational Assessment. OpEd News. http://www.opednews.com/Quicklink/ASA-Statement-on-Using-Val-in-Best_Web_OpEds-Administration_Caution_Mandates_Teacher-140412-203.html

American Education Research Association. (2015, Nov). AERA Statement of Use of Value-Added Models (VAM) for the Evaluation of Educators and Educator Preparation Programs. Educational Researcher. http://online.sagepub.com/search/results?submit=yes&src=hw&andorexactfulltext=and&fulltext=AERA+Statement+of+Use+of+Value-Added+Models+%28VAM%29+for+the+Evaluation+of+Educators+and+Educator+Preparation+Programs&x=0&y=0

Darling-Hammond, L., Amrein-Beardsley, A., Haertel, E., & Rothstein, J. (2012, Mar 15). Evaluating Teacher Evaluation: We Know About Value-Added Models and Other Methods. Phi Delta Kappan. http://www.edweek.org/ew/articles/2012/03/01/kappan_hammond.html

Lavigne, A. L., & Good, T. L. (2013). Teacher and Student Evaluation: Moving Beyond the Failure of School Reform. New York: Routledge.

Stigins, R. J. (2014). Defensible Teacher Evaluation: Student Growth Through Classroom Assessment. Thousand Oaks, CA: Corwin Press.

Ballou, D., & Springer, M. G. (2015). Using Student Test Scores to Measure Teacher Performance: Some Problems in the Design and Implementation of Evaluation Systems. Educational Researcher. http://edr.sagepub.com/content/44/2/77.full.pdf+html?ijkey=WSTBFIHcTyO9I&keytype=ref&siteid=spedr

Amrein-Beardsley, A. (n.d.). Top 15 Research Articles About VAMS. http://vamboozled.com/research-articles-on-vams/

Amrein-Beardsley, A. (n.d.). All Recommended Articles About VAMS. http://vamboozled.com/recommended-reading/value-added-models/

Shavelson, R. J., Linn, R. L., Baker, E. L., et al. (2010, Aug 27). Problems with the Use of Student Test Scores to Evaluate Teachers. Economic Policy Institute. http://www.epi.org/publication/bp278/

Yettick, H. (2014, May 13). Studies Highlight Complexities of Using Value-Added Measures. Education Week. http://www.edweek.org/ew/articles/2014/05/13/32value-add.h33.html

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

Casey, L. M. (2013). The Will to Quantify: The “Bottom Line” in the Market Model of Education Reform. Teachers College Record. http://www.tcrecord.org/Content.asp?ContentId=17107

Amrein-Beardsley A., Collins, C., Holloway-Libell, J., & Paufler, N. (2016, Jan 5). Everything is Bigger (and Badder) in Texas: Houston’s Teacher Value-Added System. Teacher’s College Record. http://www.tcrecord.org/Content.asp?ContentId=18983

Lash, A., Makkonen, R., Tran, L., & Huang, M. (2016, Jan). Analysis of the Stability of Teacher-Level Growth Scores from The Student Growth Percentile Model. WestEd. https://relwest.wested.org/resources/210?utm_source=REL+West+Mailing+List&utm_campaign=05c37febff-ee-4-1&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_316bfe94f7-05c37febff-92259833

Yeh, S. (2013). A Reanalysis of the Effects of Teacher Replacement Using Value-Added Modeling. Teachers College Record. http://www.tcrecord.org/Content.asp?ContentID=16934

Amrein-Beardsley, A. (2015, Apr 30). The (Relentless) Will to Quantify. http://vamboozled.com/the-relentless-will-to-quantify/

Anrig, G. (2015, Mar 25). Value Subtracted: Gov. Cuomo’s Plot to Tie Teacher Evaluations to Test Scores Won’t Help Our Public Schools. Slate. http://www.slate.com/articles/life/education/2015/03/gov_andrew_cuomo_and_teacher_evaluations_standardized_test_scores_are_the.html

Berliner, D. C. (2015, Aug 11). Teacher Evaluation and Standardized Tests: A Policy Fiasco. Melbourne Graduate School of Education. http://education.unimelb.edu.au/news_and_activities/events/upcoming_events/dean_lecture_series/dls-past-2015/teacher-evaluation-and-standardised-tests-a-policy-fiasco

Evaluations Based on Test Scores Misidentify Teachers
Schochet, P. Z., &. Chiang, H. S. (2010, Jul). Technical Methods Report: Error Rates in Measuring Teacher and School Performance Based on Student Test Score Gains. National Center for Education Evaluation and Regional Assistance. https://ies.ed.gov/ncee/pubs/20104004/

Bitler, M. P., Corcoran, S. P., Domina, T., & Penner, E. K. (2014, Spring). Teacher Effects on Student Achievement and Height: A Cautionary Tale. The Society for Research on Educational Effectiveness. https://archive.org/stream/ERIC_ED562824/ERIC_ED562824_djvu.txt

Examples of Test-Based Evaluations That Fail Exemplary Teachers
Hirsch, M. (2012, Mar 1). The True Story of Pascale Mauclair. New Politics. http://newpol.org/content/true-story-pascale-mauclair

Darling-Hammond, L., Amrein-Beardsley, A., Haertel, E., & Rothstein, J. (2012, Mar 15). Evaluating Teacher Evaluation. Phi Delta Kappan. http://www.edweek.org/ew/articles/2012/03/01/kappan_hammond.html

Ravitch, D. (2015, Aug 7). Bruce Lederman Explains the Challenge to New York State Teacher Evaluation System. http://dianeravitch.net/2015/08/07/bruce-lederman-explains-the-challenge-to-new-york-state-teacher-evaluation-system/

Harris, E.A. (2016, May 10). Court Vacates Long Island Teacher’s Evaluation Tied to Student Test Scores. The New York Times. http://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/11/nyregion/court-vacates-long-island-teachers-evaluation-tied-to-student-test-scores.html

Pallas, A. (2012, May 16). Meet the “Worst” 8th Grade Math Teacher in NYC. The Washington Post. http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/answer-sheet/post/meet-the-worst-8th-grade-math-teacher-in-nyc/2012/05/15/gIQArmlbSU_blog.html

Other Flaws in Test-Based Evaluation Systems
Whitehurst, G. J., Chingos, M. M., & Lindquist, K. M. (Winter 2015). Getting Classroom Observations Right. EducationNext. http://educationnext.org/getting-classroom-observations-right/ See also Kirby A. (2016, Jan 21). Study Finds Flaws in Teacher Performance Observations. https://www.cabinetreport.com/human-resources/study-finds-flaws-in-teacher-performance-observations

Amrein-Beardsley, A. (2015, Oct 8). Teacher Evaluation Systems “At Issue” Across U. S. Courts. http://vamboozled.com/teacher-evaluation-systems-at-issue-across-u-s-courts/

Paufler, N. A., & Amrein-Beardsley, A. A. (2013, Jul 25). The Random Assignment of Students into Elementary Classrooms: Implications for Value-Added Analyses and Interpretations. American Educational Research Journal. http://aer.sagepub.com/content/51/2/328.

Condie, S., Lefgren, L., & Sims, D. (2014, Jun). Teacher Heterogeneity, Value-Added and Education Policy. Economics of Education Review. http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0272775713001647

Test-Based Evaluations Do Not Measure Good Teaching and Harm the Profession
Polikoff, M. S., & Porter, A. C. (2014, May). Instructional Alignment as a Measure of Teaching Quality. Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis. http://www.aera.net/Newsroom/RecentAERAResearch/InstructionalAlignmentasaMeasureofTeachingQuality/tabid/15510/Default.aspx See also Barshay, J. (2014, May 13). Researchers Give Failing Marks to National Effort to Measure Good Teaching. http://educationbythenumbers.org/content/researchers-say-pennsylvanias-measurement-teacher-effectiveness-doesnt-measure-good-teaching_1238/ and Ravitch, D. (2016, Mar 16). John Thompson: The Utter Failure of Standardized Teacher Evaluation. http://dianeravitch.net/2016/03/16/johnthompson-the-utter-failure/

Johnson, S. M. (2015, Jul 29). Four Unintended Consequences of Using Student Test Scores to Evaluate Teachers. The Washington Post. http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/answer-sheet/wp/2015/07/29/four-unintended-consequences-of-using-student-test-scores-to-evaluate-teachers/

Kirby, A. (2015, Aug 27). High-Stakes Teacher Evaluations May Not Help. https://www.cabinetreport.com/human-resources/high-stakes-teacher-evaluations-may-not-help See also Bryant, Jeff (2016, April) We Won’t Improve Education by Making Teachers Hate Their Jobs. http://educationopportunitynetwork.org/we-wont-improve-education-by-making-teachers-hate-their-jobs/

Kwalwasser, H. (2015, Sep 15). Standardized Tests Don’t Help Us Evaluate Teachers. Los Angeles Times. http://www.latimes.com/opinion/op-ed/la-oe-0910-kwalwasser-standardized-testing-problems-20150910-story.html

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

Amrein-Beardsley, A. (2015. Dec 29). VAMboozled!: Why Standardized Tests Should Not Be Used to Evaluate Teachers (and Teacher Education Programs). http://nepc.colorado.edu/blog/why-standardized-tests

Toch, T. (2016, May). Grading the Graders: A Report on Teacher Evaluation Reform in Public Education. Center on the Future of American Education. https://georgetown.app.box.com/s/f47qnfh63wfxhxqu88pu5r0y0tkbo6bk

Feintzeig, R. (2015, Apr 21). The Trouble with Grading Employees. The Wall Street Journal. http://www.wsj.com/articles/the-trouble-with-grading-employees-1429624897 See also Korkki, P. (2015, Jul 11). Why Employee Ranking Can Backfire. The New York Times. http://mobile.nytimes.com/2015/07/12/business/why-employee-ranking-can-backfire.html?_r=1&referrer

Ravitch, J. (2015, Oct 21). John Thompson: The Gates Plan Failed in Tulsa, Now What? http://dianeravitch.net/2015/10/21/john-thompson-the-gates-plan-failed-in-tulsa-now-what/

Kirby, A. (2015, Nov 9). Michigan Bill Rolls Back Test Scores in Teacher Evaluations. https://cabinetreport.com/politics-education/michigan-bill-rolls-back-test-scores-in-teacher-evaluations

Amrein-Beardsley, A. (2015, Nov 9). Houston Board Candidates Respond to Their Teacher Evaluation System. http://vamboozled.com/?s=Houston+board+candidates&submit=Search&__bcf_gupi=1DCE61EDFC3F0001C87B1A304D9B1E821DCE61EDFC4000013A7E99739110F630

Gandha, T. (2016, Feb). State Actions to Advance Teacher Evaluation. Southern Regional Education Board. http://www.sreb.org/publication/state-actions-advance-teacher-evaluation

Tom Torlakson’s Task Force. (2012, Sep). Greatness by Design; Supporting Outstanding Teaching to Sustain a Golden State. http://www.cde.ca.gov/eo/in/ee.asp

Danielson, C. (2016, Apr 18). Charlotte Danielson on Rethinking Teacher Evaluation. Education Week. http://www.edweek.org/ew/articles/2016/04/20/charlotte-danielson-on-rethinking-teacher-evaluation.html?cmp=eml-enl-eu-news2-RM

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

Disare, M. (2015, Dec 14). In Big Shift, Regents Vote to Exclude State Tests from Teacher Evals Until 2019. http://ny.chalkbeat.org/2015/12/14/breaking-in-big-shift-regents-vote-to-exclude-state-tests-from-teacher-evals-until-2019/?utm_source=Master+Mailing+List&utm_campaign=f54d1b9f78-Rise_Shine_201912_15_2015&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_23e3b96952-f54d1b9f78-75668293#.VnA8EI-cE2y

Tyrrell, J. (2015, Nov 21). Nassau Superintendents: End Teacher Evals Tied to Test Scores. Newsday. http://www.newsday.com/long-island/nassau/nassau-superintendents-end-teacher-evals-tied-to-test-scores-1.11150791

Layton, L. (2015, Nov 16). Clinton Says “No Evidence” That Teachers Can Be Judged by Student Test Scores. The Washington Post. https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/education/clinton-says-no-evidence-that-teachers-can-be-judged-by-student-test-scores/2015/11/16/303ee068-8c98-11e5-baf4-bdf37355da0c_story.html

Ravitch, D. (2015, Dec 17). John Thompson: The Beginning of the End of VAM? http://dianeravitch.net/2015/12/17/john-thompson-the-beginning-of-the-end-of-vam/

Sawchuk, S. (2013, Apr 4). Bill Gates: Don’t Overuse Tests in Teachers’ Evaluations. http://blogs.edweek.org/edweek/teacherbeat/2013/04/bill_gates_dont_overuse_tests_in_teachers_evaluations.html See also Layton, L. (2015, Oct 7). Improving U.S. schools Tougher than Global Health, Gates Says. The Washington Post. https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/education/improving-us-schools-tougher-than-global-health-gates-says/2015/10/07/56da9972-6d05-11e5-b31c-d80d62b53e28_story.html

A More Effective Approach to Teacher Evaluation
Quintero, E (2016, Feb 23). Beyond Teacher Quality. http://www.shankerinstitute.org/blog/beyond-teacher-quality

Johnson, S. M. (2015, Jun 25). Will Value-Added Reinforce the Walls of the Egg-Crate School? http://www.shankerinstitute.org/blog/will-value-added-reinforce-walls-egg-crate-school

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

Public Impact. (2015). Evaluation, Accountability, and Professional Development in an Opportunity Culture. Opportunity Culture. http://opportunityculture.org/evaluation-policy-brief/

Lavigne, A. L., & Good, T. L. (2015). Improving Teachers Through Observation and Feedback: Beyond State and Federal Mandates. New York: Routledge.

Network for Public Education. (2016). Teachers Talk Back: Educators on the Impact of Teacher Evaluation. http://networkforpubliceducation.org/2016/04/6468/

Does Dismissing Incompetent Teachers Improve Student Outcomes?
Kraft, M.A., & Gilmour, A.F. (2016, Feb). Revisiting the Widget Effect: Teacher Evaluation Reforms and the Distribution of Teacher Effectiveness. Brown University. http://scholar.harvard.edu/mkraft/publications/revisiting-widget-effect-teacher-evaluation-reforms-and-distribution-teacher

Hess, R. (2016, Mar 8). When Fancy New Teacher-Evaluation Systems Don’t Make a Difference. http://mobile.edweek.org/c.jsp?cid=25920011&item=http%3A%2F%2Fapi.edweek.org%2Fv1%2Fblog%2F76%2F%3Fuuid%3D57146

Lowrey, A. (2012, Jan 6). Big Study Links Good Teachers to Lasting Gain. The New York Times. http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/06/education/big-study-links-good-teachers-to-lasting-gain.html?_r=0

Ravitch, D. (2014, Aug 11). The Holes in the Chetty et al VAM Study as Seen by the American Statistical Association. http://dianeravitch.net/2014/08/11/the-holes-in-the-chetty-et-al-vam-study-as-seen-by-the-american-statistical-association/

Rothstein, J., & Mathis, W. J. (2013, Jan 31). Review of Two Culminating Reports from the MET Project. National Education Policy Center. http://nepc.colorado.edu/thinktank/review-MET-final-2013

DeWitt, P. (2015, May 11). 3 Reasons Why Your Observations May Be a Waste of Time. http://blogs.edweek.org/edweek/finding_common_ground/2015/05/3_reasons_why_your_observations_may_be_a_waste_of_time.html

WestEd. (2015, Sep). Video: Making Meaningful Use of Teacher Effectiveness Data. https://relwest.wested.org/resources/198

Can Evaluations by Principals Fix the Problems of Test-Based Accountability
Kirby, A. (2016, Jan 21). Study Finds Flaws in Teacher Performance Observations. https://www.cabinetreport.com/human-resources/study-finds-flaws-in-teacher-performance-observations

Hallinger, P., Heck, R. H., & Murphy, J. (2013, Jul 30). Leading via Teacher Evaluation: The Case of the Missing Clothes? Educational Researcher. http://ecs.force.com/studies/rstudypg?id=a0r70000003ql6SAAQ

American Educational Research Association. (2016, Mar). Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis. http://eepa.aera.net See also Di Carlo. M. (2015, Feb 25). Student Sorting and Teacher Classroom Observations. http://www.shankerinstitute.org/blog/student-sorting-and-teacher-classroom-observations and Garret, R., & Steinberg, M. P. (2015, May 21). Examining Teacher Effectiveness Using Classroom Observation Scores. http://epa.sagepub.com/content/early/2014/06/13/0162373714537551

Lavigne, A. L., & Good, T. L. (2015). Improving Teaching Through Observation and Feedback: Beyond State and Federal Mandates. New York: Routledge.

Devaney, L. (2016, Jan 19). Classroom Observations May Hurt Teachers More Than They Help, Study Says. eSchool News. http://www.eschoolnews.com/2016/01/19/classroom-observations-may-hurt-teachers-more-than-they-help-study-says/

DiCarlo, M. (2015, Dec 4). Evidence from a Teacher Evaluation Pilot Program in Chicago. http://www.shankerinstitute.org/blog/evidence-teacher-evaluation-pilot-program-chicago

DeWitt, P. (2016, Apr 19). The Myth of Walkthroughs: 8 Unobserved Practices in Classrooms. http://blogs.edweek.org/edweek/finding_common_ground/2016/04/the_myth_of_walkthroughs_8_unobserved_practices_in_classrooms.html

A Narrow Focus on Dismissing Teachers Detracts from Effective Improvement Measures
American Education Research Association and National Academy of Education. Getting Teacher Evaluation Right: A Brief for Policymakers. https://edpolicy.stanford.edu/publications/pubs/421

Thompson, J. (2015, Sep 10). The Rhino in the Room: Time to End Disruptive Reform. http://www.livingindialogue.com/the-rhino-in-the-room-time-to-end-disruptive-reform/

The New Teacher Project. (2013, Jul 30). The Irreplaceables: Understanding the Real Retention Crisis in America’s Urban Schools. http://tntp.org/publications/view/retention-and-school-culture/the-irreplaceables-understanding-the-real-retention-crisis

Knudson, J. (2013, Sep). You’ll Never Be Better Than Your Teachers: The Garden Grove Approach to Human Capital Development. http://eric.ed.gov/?q=source%3a%22California+Collaborative+on+District+Reform%22&id=ED557950 See also Tucker, M. (2016, Apr). How to Get a First-Rate Teacher in Front of Every Student. http://blogs.edweek.org/edweek/top_performers/2016/04/how_to_get_a_first-rate_teacher_in_front_of_every_student.html?utm_source=feedblitz&utm_medium=FeedBlitzRss&utm_campaign=top_performers

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

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

Baker, B. (2012). Revisiting That Age Old Question: Does Money Matter in Education? http://eric.ed.gov/?q=Does+Money+Matter+in+Education&id=ED528632 See also Baker, B. (2016). Does Money Matter in Education? Second Edition. http://www.shankerinstitute.org/resource/does-money-matter and Spielberg, B. (2015, Oct 20). The Truth About School Funding. http://34justice.com/2015/10/20/the-truth-about-school-funding/

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

Kane, T. J., Owens, A. M., Marinell, W. H., Thal, D. R. C., & Staiger, D. O. (2016, Feb). Teaching Higher: Educators’ Perspectives on Common Core Implementation. http://cepr.harvard.edu/teaching-higher See also Hull, S. J. (2015, Oct 14). Principals Matter—And They Need the Right Start. http://www.learningfirst.org/principals-matter-and-they-need-right-start?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+LFA+%28Public+School+Insights%3A+What+is+WORKING+in+our+Public+Schools%29 and Center for Education Policy Research. (2014–16). Teaching Higher: Educator’s Perspectives on Common Core Implementation. http://cepr.harvard.edu/teaching-higher

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

Tucker, M. (2015, Aug 20). Organizations in Which Teachers Can Do Their Best Work: Part II. http://blogs.edweek.org/edweek/top_performers/2015/08/organizations_in_which_teachers_can_do_their_best_work_part_ii.html

The Wallace Foundation. (2013, Jan). The School Principal as Leader: Guiding Schools to Better Teaching and Learning. http://www.wallacefoundation.org/knowledge-center/Pages/The-School-Principal-as-Leader-Guiding-Schools-to-Better-Teaching-and-Learning.aspx

Superville, D. R. (2015, Oct 23). New Professional Standards for School Leaders Are Approved. http://blogs.edweek.org/edweek/District_Dossier/2015/10/new_professional_standards_for.html?r=608789257

Targeting the Lowest-Performing Schools with Closure and Other Drastic Measures Is Usually Ineffective
Miller, T. D., & Brown, C. (2015, Mar 31). Dramatic Action, Dramatic Improvement. Center for American Progress. http://nepc.colorado.edu/thinktank/review-school-turnaround See also Burris, C. (2015, Sep 4). School Closures: A National Look at a Failed Strategy. http://www.networkforpubliceducation.org/2015/09/school-closures-a-national-look-at-a-failed-strategy-2/?can_id=012f354d90b87664b362dda6a4b2980d&source=email-school-closures-a-national-look-at-a-failed-strategy&email_referrer=school-closures-a-national-look-at-a-failed-strategy and American Institutes for Research and Mathematica Policy Research. (May 2015). Evaluation Brief: State Capacity to Support School Turnaround. National Center for Education Evaluation and Regional Assistance. https://ies.ed.gov/ncee/pubs/20154012/

Trujillo, T., & Renée, M. (2012, Oct 1). Democratic School Turnarounds: Pursuing Equity and Learning from Evidence. National Education Policy Center. http://nepc.colorado.edu/publication/democratic-school-turnarounds

Aragon, S., & Workman, E. (2015, Oct). Emerging State Turnaround Strategies. Education Commission of the States. http://www.ecs.org/press-release-emerging-state-turnaround-strategies/ See also Felton, E. (2015, Oct 19). Are Turnaround Districts the Answer for America’s Worst Schools? http://hechingerreport.org/are-turnaround-districts-the-answer-for-americas-worst-schools/

Ehrenhalt, A. (2013, Oct). School Scandals Reveal the Problem with Grading Schools. Governing. http://www.governing.com/columns/col-school-scandals-reveal-testing-ignorance.html

Di Carlo, M. (2015, Jun). The Evidence on the “Florida Formula” for Education Reform. Albert Shanker Institute. http://www.shankerinstitute.org/resource/evidence-florida-formula-education-reform

Sparks, S. D. (2015, Oct 6). Studies Probe How Schools Widen Achievement Gaps. Education Week. http://www.edweek.org/ew/articles/2015/10/07/schools-help-widen-academic-gaps-studies-find.html?r=258221469&cmp=eml-enl-eu-news1-RM

Klein, A. (2014, Sep 15). New Turnaround Options Detailed in Draft SIG Guidance. Education Week. http://www.edweek.org/ew/articles/2014/09/17/04sig.h34.html

Fullan, M. (2011, Nov 17). Choosing the Wrong Drivers for Whole System Reform. http://education.qld.gov.au/projects/educationviews/news-views/2011/nov/talking-point-fullan-101117.html

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

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