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The California Context: CA Policymakers and Educators Shift from Test-and-Punish to Build-and-Support

Photo Credit: Lukasz Stefanski / Shutterstock.com

The California Context
California Policymakers and Educators Shift from Test-and-Punish to Build-and-Support

by Bill Honig

California, under the leadership of Governor Jerry Brown, State Superintendent of Public Instruction Tom Torlakson, Michael Kirst, president of the State Board of Education, and the legislature, and backed by almost the entire educational establishment and advocacy groups in the state, including the teacher unions, has embraced the long-range and comprehensive Build-and-Support strategy. California’s approach is based on valid, reliable school improvement research and patterned after the practices and policies of high-performing states such as Massachusetts. All California stakeholders agree that educational performance in the state must improve substantially and that it will take 10–15 years of concerted effort to successfully implement the more demanding instructional program envisioned by the Common Core State Standards (CCSS). The specifics of the California strategy follow.

Ensuring Adequate Funding Levels

Early in his term, Governor Brown sponsored Proposition 30, a tax increase initiative that temporarily raised income tax rates on top earners and provided for a ¼-cent sales tax increase. It passed. Those funds and the economic recovery in the state allowed the governor, working with the state legislature, to increase per-pupil funding for K–12 by about 40% during his first term. The hefty increase was designed to make up for the precipitous drop in support caused by the recession. The governor and the legislature also revamped the educational funding system under the Local Control Funding Program (LCFP). It now gives districts more flexibility in how to manage their funds and to provide additional resources for high-risk students.

Adopting a Rigorous, Standards-Based Liberal Arts Curriculum

After widespread discussions, the State Board of Education (SBE) in California approved the Common Core State Standards (CCSS), the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS), the English Language Arts (ELA) Standards, and the English Language Development (ELD) Standards. The later two were both later integrated into the ELA/ELD Framework. It also signed on to the CCSS-aligned Smarter Balanced Assessment Program (SBAC). California policymakers were careful to emphasize that the primary purpose of the assessments was to feed back information to improve instruction, not for high-stakes consequences. At the same time, they eliminated a cluster of existing state tests. The SBE, backed by the political establishment, postponed testing until the new SBAC tests were ready and refused to submit to federal pressure requiring that testing be tied to teacher evaluations. The state legislature also gave the SBE two years to devise a new accountability system.

Delivering High-Quality Instruction

Recognizing the need for additional support, the SBE authorized the development of frameworks to advise teachers and districts on how best to translate the standards into curriculum and instruction, deliver effective professional development, build collaborative teams, and adopt instructional materials consistent with the standards.

Useful California Content Frameworks and Support Documents

These frameworks have been widely supported in the state. The California Department of Education, county offices, districts, educational organizations, newly created networks of schools and districts, and especially the state teacher unions have been aggressively pursuing the implementation of the more active and deeper instruction envisioned by the CCSS. The California Teachers Association has been in the forefront of standards implementation efforts and has formed partnerships with Stanford and other educational entities to that end.

In 2012, State Superintendent Tom Torlakson formed a prestigious commission chaired by Linda Darling-Hammond and Chris Steinhauser. Darling-Hammond is one of the most respected school improvement researchers in the country, and Steinhauser is superintendent of the Long Beach Unified School District, which was designated one of the top school districts in the world. The commission produced Greatness by Design, a superb policy document that provides the blueprint for a Build-and-Support strategy in the state. In 2015, it followed up with A Blueprint for Great Schools: Version 2.0. These documents have had a major influence on practice in California, as has the expert advice of Michael Fullan.

In addition, the governor and the legislature invested almost $2 billion specifically for supporting the CCSS implementation and associated curricular and assessment changes and another $500 million for similar purposes in the 2015 budget. That latest allocation also included attracting, training, inducting, and supporting new teachers as one of the primary goals of the item, consistent with the recommendations of Greatness by Design, although there is still much to be done to revitalize the teaching profession.

Creating Useful and Fair Accountability Systems

In California, political and educational leaders proposed and the legislature enacted a plan to develop a new assessment and accountability system using multiple measures of student performance. The primary goal of the new system is to feed back information that will support local improvement efforts and not to punish schools and teachers. State leaders also created a new entity, the California Collaborative for Educational Excellence, to support and review the CCSS and LCFP implementation and organize site visits and support for struggling schools.

Most districts have been hard at work on the day-to-day business of implementing the Common Core State Standards. In addition, two effective networks of districts have been collaborating on the CCSS implementation. One network, CORE Districts, is composed of some of the largest districts in the state; the other is the California Collaborative on District Reform. CORE Districts obtained a federal waiver to develop its own broader assessment system (although it had to agree to test-based teacher evaluation, which each district will soon be able to ignore under the new Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA).

Engaging Stakeholders

A potent informal network funded by foundation support, the Consortium for the Implementation of the Common Core State Standards, was formed with representatives from major educational and government entities, districts, county education offices, teacher groups, the research community, higher education, and advocacy groups. It has helped on such key issues as implementation planning, coordinating the work of support providers, communication, technology, understanding the state mathematics and ELA/ELD frameworks, accountability, and new teacher policies. Its first publication, Leadership Planning Guide California, was intended to assist districts and schools in addressing the implementation of the CCSS. In 2015, the consortium produced user-friendly summaries of the math and ELA/ELD frameworks.

Resisting High-Stakes Testing

Moreover, almost every educational group has joined the political and educational leadership and the legislature to successfully resist federal demands for excessive high-stakes testing and accountability and not-ready-for-prime-time student and teacher evaluation schemes. The one exception has been the CORE Districts, which sought a waiver from severe No Child Left Behind (NCLB) penalties and were forced to accept test-driven teacher evaluation as the price for the waiver. Many of the districts are now struggling with implementing those evaluations, which have caused disharmony within the districts. In addition, although many in management continue to support such measures as test-driven teacher evaluation, their numbers are decreasing in the face of the Build-and-Support agenda being promoted by educational leaders across the state. Finally, the presidents and chancellors of the four higher education segments all signed a letter pledging support for the Common Core State Standards.

A brief summary of California’s approach is available in a slide presentation by Michael Kirst and an article in CALmatters, “A Stanford Professor’s High-Stakes Plan to Save California Schools.” See also Jeff Bryant’s 2015 interview of me in Salon and his follow-up article on California as a potential role model for the country. Lastly, see Charles Kerchner’s blog post, “Can the ‘California Way’ Turn Around Underperforming Schools?”

How California Avoided the Push-Back Against the Common Core

There is widespread backing for Common Core in the state thanks to these efforts, particularly the tempered rolling out of the CCSS, the postponing of testing and accountability to allow time for implementation, and the divorcing of accountability from evaluations. The resistance to the CCSS that has erupted in other states from abrupt implementation and tying the standards themselves to high-stakes accountability has not occurred in California. The study Leveraging the Common Core to Support College and Career Readiness in California reports finding widespread excitement among high school teachers for the promise of the more active instruction offered by the CCSS.

In 2015, a poll by Children Now found 67% support among the general public in California for the CCSS. Interestingly, if respondents were asked only about the ideas behind the standards, without mentioning the name Common Core, support rose to between 85% and 93%. The findings were similar for parents who had children in public schools, and for those employed in the education field, 82% expressed support for the standards.

Build-and-Support Is Working in California

In 2013, Secretary of Education Arne Duncan praised a few cherry-picked states that had followed the administration’s proposed reforms and improved their National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) results. Duncan failed to mention the larger number of states that had also implemented the policies but did not grow and experienced lackluster results overall. In a glaring case of omission, Duncan never acknowledged California’s reform efforts, which, although resisting many of the federal reform policies, topped the nation in growth in eighth-grade scores.

That trend has continued. From 2009 to 2015, California was first in growth, along with Washington, DC, in eighth-grade scaled reading score growth—up six points from 2009 compared to the national growth rate of one point. California was among the four-highest states in eighth-grade growth in mathematics—up five points from 2009 compared to a national decline of one point. California did not fare as well on NAEP fourth-grade scores. They have remained low with flat growth, mirroring the rest of the nation.

Added note: 2017 NAEP results have accelerated this trend, though there is still much work to do.

NAEP 8th and 4th Grade Reading and Math Average Scaled Score Growth for 2009-2017  California has the most second language students, the most diversity, and high levels of low income children compared to other states. Top growth scores nationally for 8th grade reading, 4th grade reading, 8th grade math. Weak growth for 4th grade math.  

Reading: 8th grade: First in the nation. California growth +10 and now within 2 points of the national average. National growth +3 https://www.nationsreportcard.gov/reading_2017/#states/scores?grade=8

4th grade: Tied for 2nd nationally California growth +6  and now within 6 points of the national average. National growth +1 https://www.nationsreportcard.gov/reading_2017/#states/scores?grade=4 

Math: 8th grade: Tied for 2nd nationally. California growth +6, Now within 5 points of the national average. National growth 0. https://www.nationsreportcard.gov/math_2017/#states/scores?grade=8

  4th grade: Tied for 15th in growth +1. 7 points behind nationally. National growth 0. https://www.nationsreportcard.gov/math_2017/#states/scores?grade=4 

Gaps have actually narrowed in the state. White student scores have not grown as fast as Hispanic and Black children.
Some subgroup info: 
 Hispanic growth scores for reading 2009-2017; 8th grade reading +10; 4th grade reading +8
  Black: 8th grade +7; 4th grade -1!!!.
   Hispanic growth scores for math: 8th grade +6; 4th grade +4
   Black: 8th grade +5; 4th grade +1 

Two California Urban Districts under the Federal Trial Urban District Assessment (TUDA) program showed top gains in NAEP. 

LA: 8th grade reading average score growth 2009-2017. +11.  1st in nation. https://www.nationsreportcard.gov/reading_2017/#/districts/scores?grade=8
       4th grade reading: +10;  1st in nation (Tied DC)

       8th grade math:  +8 (Tied for 3rd)
       4th grade math: +1 (Not good—tied for 7th)

San Diego

        8th grade reading: +10. (2nd nationally after LA) https://www.nationsreportcard.gov/math_2017/#districts/scores?grade=8
        4th grade reading: +9.  (tied for 2nd nationally)
        8th grade math:  +3 (tied for 7th)
        4th grade math +1 (tied for 7th)
 

Another set of data from the Urban Institute app which adjusts NAEP scores for language, poverty, race, and special ed. And whether the adjustments are accurate or not,  comparisons using the same standards are legit. http://apps.urban.org/features/naep/  
One caveat is that the intervals on the ranks are still being scaled which might change 
rank growth somewhat but the overall picture will remain very similar. 

I took off the age control but let the others stay. (If you look at the website be sure to refresh after looking at math to allow you to click from math to reading and when you do remember to put off the age control) These data are ranks based on average scores, and if you mouse over the state it shows the growth in rankings. It is apparent that California has made large jumps in rankings this year from the past few years. (Florida has not grown as much but is at the top or near the top nationally in all the rankings—whether from state policy or district independent efforts needs to be determined) 

In 8th grade reading we are now 14th in the country up from the low 40’s as recently as 2013. In 4th grade reading we are 19th in the country up from the high 30’s in 2015. 

In 8th grade math we are 22nd up from the low 40’s as recently as 2013.In 4th grade math (our weakest area where we need to undertake considerable work) we are 37th up from the low 40’s in 2011 and 2015.   

Some confirmation is provided by our most recent state testing, the SBAC. 11th grade reading scores. 60% now reach the “proficient” level—a level consistent with 4yr college work and the NAEP proficiency level which compares favorably to the other SBAC states that are much less diverse. To me, getting 60% of our diverse students to that level is impressive and a tribute to the hard work of our educational practitioners and policy direction. On the other hand, the state is much weaker in SBAC math performance at 11th grade (although improving) and math will be a major area of subsequent improvement efforts. 

In addition, from 2010 to 2015, the Golden State improved its high school graduation from 74.7 to 82.3, an increase of 7.6 points, which is significantly greater than the improvement in the national rate. Despite having one of the most diverse student bodies in the nation, the state graduation rate is now higher than the national average. California Latino and African-American students progressed even faster. The rate of Latinos has increased 15% since 2010 to 78.5%; African-American students increased 11% to 70.8. Finally, in 2015, 43.4% of graduates completed all the necessary coursework to meet the minimum admissions requirements for the University of California and the California State University systems, a substantial jump from the 36.3% meeting the requirements in 2010.

Even though California scores have been increasing on NAEP, at least at the eighth-grade level, student achievement must improve substantially in the next decade. The first Smarter Balanced assessments based on the Common Core State Standards were given in 2015 and formed the base year for determining growth rates and improvements.

Preliminarily, SBAC reported four levels—standard exceeded, standard met, standard nearly met, and standard not met. It is important to understand what “standard” means. It was established to be comparable to the NAEP proficiency standards, which predict success in a four-year college credit-bearing course. Massachusetts, whose students score among those in the top countries worldwide, is the only state in which just over 50% of its students score proficient on NAEP.

The number of students in California meeting or exceeding the standard on the SBAC test at 11th grade is one indication of how many students are being adequately prepared for both four-year colleges and community colleges where students transfer to four-year colleges after two years or to one of the more demanding career tech pathways.

The 2015 scores in the 11th grade were decent in English language arts—58% of students reached the four-year college-bound level. The scores were low in mathematics—only 28% reached or exceeded the college-bound standard. This may be due to the shift in instruction called for by the CCSS or the greater language demands of the math test, or the test may have been too dependent on Intermediate algebra, which is not appropriate for many career paths. Researchers are currently examining the discrepancy between student performance in math and reading.

At elementary and middle grades, the percentage of students meeting the on-track to a four-year college standard was generally in the mid-30% in math and mid-40% in reading. The achievement gaps between low-income children or children of color and their higher-income or Caucasian peers increased from previous tests. This is most likely due to the fact that the new SBAC assesses deeper learning and provides a more accurate picture of actual performance.

Meeting the Challenges of Diversity and Underfunding

California has one of the most diverse groups of K–12 students in the nation: 54% Hispanic/Latino; 25% white; 12% Asian, Pacific Islander, or Filipino; 6% African-American; 3% mixed race; and 0.6% Native American. Its English-language learner (ELL) population is 25%, the largest in the nation. The states with the next largest ELL populations are Texas with 15%, Florida with 10%, and New York with 9%. Our state also ranks high in poverty levels.

Importantly, California spends significantly less per pupil than other states. In 2014–2015, it ranked 42nd after adjusting for cost of living, and it is significantly behind other states in additional support measures that affect school quality as well.

Yet, compared to the 12 other states that took the SBAC, California ranked in the middle of 11th-grade scores for both reading and math. None of the other states are as diverse. In the lower grades, however, California was either at the bottom or near the bottom. Unquestionably, much work is to be done in the state, but the Build-and-Support policy framework being pursued offers the best chance of substantial improvement during the next decade.

Career Tech Pathways

Many of us in California have one major problem with the Common Core State Standards, which is how the SBAC standards were set and how the CCSS in general are portrayed in the media. Although the literature maintains that the goal is “career and college readiness,” as I explained above, the high school standards are actually primarily aimed at preparing students for four-year colleges or alternative career paths that demand the highest educational levels. This is particularly true of third-year high school courses in mathematics.

Many have questioned whether intermediate algebra (made more demanding by Common Core Standards) is an appropriate course for those preparing to be dental hygienists or to be trained in precision manufacturing. For those tech/prep students, rigorous substitutes such as statistics and quantitative reasoning or embedding these subjects in career tech application courses seems to be a better alternative. In fact, many states have pursued this direction. For example, Texas just recently changed its requirements.

The Charles A. Dana Center in Texas recently examined 34 career paths—from accounting to visual communication—to determine which math skills were needed. Most careers only demanded the use of the math learned through eighth grade that can be applied in complex and unique situations. See also “Programs of Study & Mathematics Alignment” on the Dana Center’s website. It presents an analysis of the mathematical demands for nursing, communications, criminal justice, and social work.

Currently, about 40% of students nationally reach the levels needed for succeeding in a credit-bearing four-year college course. We should definitely be trying to increase that number, and the Common Core State Standards are valuable for that goal. Yet even for the college bound some flexibility is warranted. The University of California’s Board of Admissions and Relations with Schools (BOARS) establishes the courses that count for college admission, and the state university and community college systems follow its lead. Recently the BOARS committee approved some substitutions for intermediate algebra http://senate.universityofcalifornia.edu/_files/committees/boars/documents/BOARSStatementonStatway.pdf and the community colleges are considering changes along these lines.

But that still leaves a large number of students who could profit from rigorous tech-prep pathways yet are usually neglected in a system that is primarily geared for the four-year college bound. California has lagged behind some other states showing leadership in developing these pathways such as Illinois, but it is now devoting resources and attention to this problem.

Robert Schwartz, of Harvard University’s Graduate School of Education, has been one of the major national proponents of improving the pathways for the non–four-year college bound. See his Pathways to Prosperity: Meeting the Challenge of Preparing Young Americans for the 21st Century and Career Pathways: A Route to Upward Mobility, a paper he coauthored with Nancy Hoffman. The Thomas B. Fordham Institute also has been promoting alternative pathways. See the papers and video presentations from its Education for Upward Mobility Conference that are devoted to the issue. David Conley and Linda Darling-Hammond have also been champions of this approach. See the handouts on the California Department of Education web page that summarize their work. For a California perspective, see Career Technical Education Pathways Initiative, and for a national perspective, see The State of Career Technical Education. See also the fall 2014 online issue of American Educator, which is devoted to this topic.

Pamela Burdman has authored three excellent reports on mathematics college placement issues in California sponsored by the Policy Analysis for California Education (PACE) as well as a short article on the inaccuracies of college placement exams. A compendium of research from a conference on this subject can be found at a LearningWorks conference on the future of college math placement. The conference focused on three main issues:

  1. Are there alternative paths to college other than the usual mathematics sequence that ends in intermediate algebra such as statistics or quantitative reasoning?
  2. Is relying on a placement test an accurate and fair way to force students into remedial classes based on Algebra 2, which many will not pass. Are there better alternatives? Placement tests provide only a tiny percentage improvement on the predictions generated by merely relying on transcripts but do result in high levels of misplacement.
  3. Are there more successful ways to teach the remedial classes?

In 2016, a major report by the Center for Community College Student Engagement made similar points about the deficiencies in our system of remediation, and a summary of the research demonstrates the defects of community college placement exams that 87% of community college students are forced to take.

Some extremely effective groups have been formed to support alternatives for the college bound and programs that offer rigorous preparation for the tech/prep bound. Among them are Linked Learning and ConnectEd. See also the High Tech High charter organization, which is devoted to school/career integration with an emphasis on project-based learning, and the many career academies that over the past two decades have been providing successful career preparation in important fields such as health, business, and manufacturing.

California has invested one-and-a-half-billion dollars in collaborative tech/prep grants aimed at two-year community college pathways to careers or four-year colleges or apprenticeships. This has been accomplished under the leadership of Governor Brown and the state legislature, with the full support of State Superintendent of Public Education Tom Torlakson. The investments have been made over the past few years and are slated to continue for the next few years.

Although some civil rights advocates are reluctant to support the premise that it is an unattainable goal for all students to become prepared for four-year institutions of higher learning, we are doing a disservice to many youngsters by only concentrating on that pathway. Many students who could succeed in a rigorous alternative route will falter under a four-year college prep sequence. These substitute pathways are a far cry from the old vocational education, which often became a dumping ground for low-performing students and devolved into tracking for minority and low-income students. One policy goal should be to maximize the number of students who qualify, attend, and graduate from four-year colleges, but we should also attend to the needs of those students who could profit from a rigorous tech/prep pathway.

The jury is still out on whether our large, diverse state will successfully implement the ambitious instructional program envisioned by the Common Core Standards over the next decade by following a Build-and-Support approach. So far, so good.

Recent Developments

7/30/2016. Michael Petrilli has edited a just-released book Education for Upward Mobility (2016). This work contains essays under three headings. First, Transcending Poverty through Education, Work, and Personal Responsibility which includes chapters on the “Success Sequence” (graduate high-school, obtain a full-time job, and wait to have children until 21), tech-prep pathways, certification, and apprenticeship. Second, Multiple Pathways in High School: Tracking Revisited? which includes chapters on small schools of choice, college-prep high schools for the poor,  and high-quality career and technical education. Finally, there is a section, The Early Years with chapters on the importance of the first five years, the centrality of knowledge acquisition in the elementary years, and issues of tracking in middle schools. Many of these authors support the main points in the article above.

7/30/2016 Two reports from the Education Commission of the States on what states require for early reading. California doesn’t do as much as many other states. Although our ELA/ELD framework is solid, we are missing some of the other infrastructure. http://www.ecs.org/50-state-comparison-k-3-quality/; http://www.ecs.org/companion-report-50-state-comparison-k-3-quality/

 

Reference Notes

Adopting a Rigorous, Standards-Based Liberal Arts Curriculum
Fensterwald, J. (2015, Jun 22). State Board Gets Extra Year to Create Measures of School Progress. http://edsource.org/2015/state-board-gets-extra-year-to-create-measures-of-school-progress/818666

Delivering High-Quality Instruction
Fensterwald, J. (2014, Dec 1). CTA Launches Large-Scale Teacher Training. http://edsource.org/2014/cta-launches-large-scale-teacher-training/70687#.VLg-31fF9D9

Tom Torlakson’s Task Force on Educator Excellence. (2012, Sep 17). Greatness by Design: Supporting Outstanding Teaching to Sustain a Golden State. California Department of Education. http://www.cde.ca.gov/eo/in/ee.asp

Blueprint 2.0 Planning Team. (2015, Jul 27). A Blueprint for Great Schools: Version 2.0. State Superintendent of Public Instruction. California Department of Education. http://www.cde.ca.gov/eo/in/bp/bp2contents.asp

Fullan, M. (2015, Jan). A Golden Opportunity: The California Collaborative for Educational Excellence as a Force for Positive Change. http://www.michaelfullan.ca/california-release-a-golden-opportunity/

Mead, S., Aldeman, C., Chuong, C., & Obbard, J. (2015, Jul 28). Rethinking Teacher Preparation: Empowering Local Schools to Solve California’s Teacher Shortage and Better Develop Teachers. http://bellwethereducation.org/publication/Rethinking_Teacher_Prep_California See also Ellison, K., & Fensterwald, J. (2015, Jul 14). California’s Dwindling Teacher Supply Rattling Districts’ Nerves. http://edsource.org/2015/californias-dwindling-teacher-supply-rattling-districts-nerves/82805

Creating Useful and Fair Accountability Systems
CORE Districts. http://coredistricts.org/

California Collaborative on District Reform. http://cacollaborative.org/topics/district-collaboration

Engaging Stakeholders
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://ccsesa.org/ccsesa-common-core-leadership-planning-guide-now-available/

Yakes, C., & Sprague, M. (2015). Executive Summary: Mathematics Framework for California Public Schools: K–12. California Department of Education. http://www.scoe.net/castandards/

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/Pages/default.aspx

Gewertz, C. (2014, Sep 4). California Higher Education Systems Pledge Common-Core Support. http://blogs.edweek.org/edweek/curriculum/2014/09/california_higher_education_sy.html

Resisting High-Stakes Testing
Kirst, M. W. (2015, Jul). California Education Policy Overview 2015. Education Policy Fellowship Program. http://c.ymcdn.com/sites/epfp.iel.org/resource/resmgr/AERA_IEL/Final_MK_IEL-AERA_July_2015_.pdf

Lin, J. (2016, Jun 4). A Stanford Professor’s High-Stakes Plan to Save California Schools. https://calmatters.org/articles/a-stanford-professor-disrupts-california-schools/

Bryant, J. (2015, Apr 14). Common Core Consequences: What Currently Passes for “Reform” Has Caused Considerable Collateral damage to Schools and Teachers. http://www.salon.com/2015/04/14/common_core_consequences_what_currently_passes_for_reform_has_caused_considerable_collateral_damage_to_schools_and_teachers/

Bryant, J. (2015, Apr 23). An Alternative to Failed Education “Reform,” If We Want One. http://educationopportunitynetwork.org/an-alternative-to-failed-education-reform-if-we-want-one/

Kerchner, C.T. (2016, Jun 6). Can the “California Way” Turn Around Underperforming Schools? http://blogs.edweek.org/edweek/on_california/2016/06/can_the_california_way_turn_around_underperforming_schools.html

How California Avoided the Push-Back Against the Common Core
Freedberg, L. (2016, Jan 10). Common Core: New York Stumbles, California Advances on Common Core Implementation. http://edsource.org/2016/new-york-stumbles-california-advances-on-common-core-implementation/92986

Venezia, A., & Lewis, J. (2015, Aug). Leveraging the Common Core to Support College and Career Readiness in California. Education Insights Center. California State University, Sacramento. http://edinsightscenter.org/Publications/ctl/ArticleView/mid/421/articleId/1007/Leveraging-the-Common-Core-for-College-and-Career-Readiness-in-California

Children Now. (2015, Apr 20). New California Poll Shows Strong Support for Common Core and Its Approach. http://www.childrennow.org/about-us/press-releases/new-california-poll-shows-strong-support-common-core-and-its-approach/

Build-and-Support Is Working in California
National Center for Education Statistics. (2015). NAEP State Profiles. U.S. Department of Education. Institute of Education Sciences. http://nces.ed.gov/nationsreportcard/states/?utm_source=Michael%27s+daily+email%2C+Oct.+28%2C+2015&utm_campaign=Daily_4-24-15&utm_medium=email

Leal, F. (2016, May 17). California’s Graduation, Dropout Rates Improve for the Sixth Straight Year. http://edsource.org/2016/californias-graduation-dropout-rates-improve-for-the-sixth-straight-year/564357?utm_source=May+18+digest+Jane&utm_campaign=Daily+email&utm_medium=email

Blume, H. (2015, Sep 11). Achievement Gaps Widen for California’s Black and Latino students. Los Angeles Times. http://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-ln-achievement-gaps-widen-20150911-story.html

Meeting the Challenges of Diversity and Underfunding
Lucile Packard Foundation for Children’s Health. Public School Enrollment by Race/Ethnicity. http://www.kidsdata.org/topic/36/publicschoolenrollment-race/table – fmt=451&loc=2,127,347,1763,331,348,336,1&tf=84&ch=7,11,621,85,10,72,9,73&sortColumnId=0&sortType=asc

Federal Education Budget Project. (2012, Mar 28). Student Poverty Rate. http://febp.newamerica.net/k12/rankings/cenpov

Kerchener, C. T. (2015, Nov 23). Tax Proposals Would Lift California’s Low School Funding. http://blogs.edweek.org/edweek/on_california/2015/11/tax_proposals_would_lift_californias_low_school_funding.html

Kaplan, J. (2015, Nov). California’s Support for K-12 Education Ranks Low by Almost Any Measure. http://calbudgetcenter.org/?s=fact+K-12

Smarter Balance Results by State: 2014–2015.http://edsource.org/smarter-balanced-results/state.html and McCrea, D. (2015, Nov. 20). Personal letter to author.

Career Tech Pathways
Schulzke, E. (2015, Dec 12). How Much Math Do College-Bound Students Really Need? http://www.deseretnews.com/article/865643586/As-math-standards-nudge-upward-is-it-time-for-a-national-dialogue-on-how-much-math-high-schoolers.html

Fechter, J. (2014, Jan 31). State Nixes Algebra 2 for Most Students, Offers Other Math Options. http://www.mysanantonio.com/news/education/article/State-nixes-Algebra-2-for-most-students-offers-5194326.php

The Charles A. Dana Center. (2013, Jul). What Students Need to Know: Mathematics Concept Inventories for Community College Workforce Education Programs. The University of Texas at Austin. http://www.utdanacenter.org/higher-education/higher-education-resources/policy-resources/programs-of-study-mathematics-alignment/

The Charles A. Dana Center. Programs of Study & Mathematics Alignment. The University of Texas at Austin. http://www.utdanacenter.org/higher-education/higher-education-resources/policy-resources/programs-of-study-mathematics-alignment/

UC Board of Admissions and Relations with Schools. (2015, Jan 16). Statement on Approval of Statway. University of California. http://senate.universityofcalifornia.edu/committees/boars/documents/BOARSStatementonStatway.pdf See also UC Board of Admissions and Relations with Schools. (2013, Jul). Statement on Basic Math for All Admitted UC Students. http://senate.universityofcalifornia.edu/committees/boars/BOARSStatementonMathforAllStudentsJuly2013.pdf

Walton, I. (2013, Jun). Alternatives to Traditional Intermediate Algebra. Academic Senate for California Community Colleges. http://www.asccc.org/content/alternatives-traditional-intermediate-algebra

Symonds, W. C., Schwartz, R., & Ferguson, R. F. (2011). Pathways to Prosperity: Meeting the Challenge of Preparing Young Americans for the 21st Century. Cambridge, MA: Pathways to Prosperity Project, Harvard University Graduate School of Education. https://dash.harvard.edu/handle/1/4740480

Schwartz, R., & Hoffman, N. (2014, Dec 2). Career Pathways: A Route to Upward Mobility. edex.s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/Schwartz-Hoffman%20Paper-KLM%20(1).pdf

Thomas B. Fordham Institute. (2014, Dec 2). Education for Upward Mobility. http://edexcellence.net/publications/education-for-upward-mobility The papers from this conference have been published in a 2015 book edited by Michael Petrilli, Education for Upward Mobility, and a second video conference on the book was held in 2016. http://edexcellence.us6.list-manage.com/track/click?u=628bd73f1e90c900ee5ef4166&id=7894a573bc&e=ebbe04a807

California Department of Education. PSAA Meeting Webcast Archive 2014. Meeting Handouts. http://www.cde.ca.gov/ta/ac/pa/psaawebcastarchive14.asp#dec2014handouts

California Community Colleges Chancellor’s Office. (2013, Aug). Career Technical Education Pathways Initiative. http://californiacommunitycolleges.cccco.edu/Portals/0/reportsTB/REPORT_CTEPathwaysInitiative_082613_FINAL.pdf

Advance CTE. The State of Career Technical Education. http://www.careertech.org/state-CTE

American Federation of Teachers. (2014, Fall). American Educator. http://www.aft.org/ae/fall2014

Burdman, P. (2015). Publications. Policy Analysis for California Education (PACE). http://edpolicyinca.org/authors/pamela-burdman

Burdman, P. (2015, Nov 5). Math Placement Tests Deserve More Scrutiny. http://edsource.org/2015/math-placement-tests-deserve-more-scrutiny/90132?utm_source=Nov.+6+newsletter+John&utm_campaign=Daily+email&utm_medium=email

Learning Works. (2015, Nov 10). Testing and Beyond: A Summit on the Future of College Math Placement. http://www.learningworksca.org/testing-and-beyond-conference-nov-10th-2015-oakland-california/

Center for Community College Student Engagement. (2016). Expectations Meet Reality: The Underprepared Student and Community Colleges. The University of Texas at Austin, College of Education, Department of Educational Administration, Program in Higher Education Leadership. http://www.ccsse.org/nr2016/

Belfield, C., & Crosta, P. M. (2012, Feb). Predicting Success in College: The Importance of Placement Tests and High School Transcripts. Columbia University Teachers College Community College Research Center. http://ccrc.tc.columbia.edu/publications/predicting-success-placement-tests-transcripts.html

Linked Learning Alliance. http://www.linkedlearning.org/

The California Center for College and Career (ConnectEd). www.connectedcalifornia.org

High Tech High. www.hightechhigh.org

Leal, F. (2016, Jan 26). $1.5 Billion Helping Career Pathways Take Off in California’s High Schools. http://edsource.org/2016/1-5-billion-helping-career-pathways-take-off-in-californias-high-schools/93950

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

How Top Performers Build-and-Support: Provide an Engaging Broad-Based Liberal Arts Curriculum

How Top Performers Build-and-Support
Provide an Engaging Broad-Based Liberal Arts Curriculum

by Bill Honig

A major component of every successful educational improvement effort is addressing the issue of what will be taught. Specifically, world-class educational performers provide all students with a challenging and engaging broad liberal arts curriculum—precisely the type of curriculum envisioned by the Common Core State Standards (CCSS), which have been adopted by more than 40 states. Many conventional reformers have supported the CCSS, seeing them as a mechanism for their high-stakes accountability agenda. Their position has been to establish national standards, assess performance against those standards, and attach consequences to low performance—the Test-and-Punish approach. I stand with a vast number of educators who, while rejecting an emphasis on test-based accountability, support the CCSS and the promise they hold for improving curriculum and instruction. The standards are consistent with what our most knowledgeable teachers and researchers have been advocating for years.

Why the Common Core State Standards Are So Important

The California Common Core State Standards (CCSS) for English Language Arts & Literacy (which almost identical to the national Common Core Standards) and the state’s framework explicating them (listed below) are based on the deeper learning that is taking place in our best schools and classrooms—reading, writing, and discussing literature and complex text and ideas; synthesizing those texts and ideas to construct arguments; reading widely; and mastering core academic content in history, science, civics, and humanities to enhance comprehension and better understand the world.

Deeper learning entails mastering more complex thinking and applying twenty-first-century skills. Deeper learning also produces higher learning. For a scholarly treatment of the concept of deeper learning, see the work of Maggie Lampert, the Learning Deeply blog, and Jal Mehta and Sarah Fine.

Mehta and Fine define the term this way:

There is no consensus on exactly how to define deeper learning. For example, it has often been described as the integration of academic, inter-, and intrapersonal skills and knowledge. Recent research findings strongly suggest that in order to succeed in college, careers, and all aspects of adult life, young people require more than just a command of academic content. They also need to be able to solve complex real world problems, collaborate, communicate effectively, monitor and direct their own learning, and develop an academic mindset.

Among many cognitive psychologists, however, deep learning—or what they might call learning for understanding—refers to the ability to transfer knowledge. The idea is that knowledge becomes deeper when one can use it not only to address a problem in the context in which it has been taught, but also to understand or explain something in a different but related context. Rather than seeing isolated facts, deep learners see patterns and connections because they understand the underlying structures of what they’re exploring.

The authors of this paper suggest that deeper learning requires the ability to transfer knowledge, and more. It often emerges at the intersection of mastery (knowledge of substantive content, including the ability to transfer), identity (driven by relevance to the learner), and creativity (the ability to act or make something from the knowledge).

However one defines it, though, deeper learning poses a multipronged challenge to current classroom practice and educational systems. It will require a major increase in the cognitive demand of the tasks that most students, particularly in high-poverty schools, are asked to complete.

The Common Core State Standards and the frameworks explicating them envision a substantial instructional shift to this type of enriched learning. (These frameworks are discussed in greater depth later in this article.)

I caught a glimpse of the future back in 1985, when I was California superintendent of public instruction and visited a seventh-grade classroom in Santa Barbara. The students were presenting research papers on college-level questions such as “What effect did the Galileo trial have on scientific investigation in southern and northern Europe?” I was amazed as teams of students presented their papers and then engaged in a sophisticated discussion with the rest of the class. Almost every student contributed. Discussants were serious, used sophisticated language, asked perceptive questions, and responded appropriately to what was being said. Afterward, when I met with their superb teacher, Naomi Johnson, it became apparent how much work had gone into creating the conditions that allowed the students to successfully participate in such an erudite academic discussion. She assured me that these advanced behaviors and abilities were also the result of several years of sustained learning in previous grades and tremendous efforts by the entire faculty at the middle school to assure that each class reinforced the skills students need to conduct research and actively contribute to academic discussions.

The Common Core State Standards for Mathematics are also internationally benchmarked—reflecting what math educators have been recommending: go deeper into fewer topics, incorporate practices such as modeling, discussion both in class and with peers, problem solving, and a greater emphasis on procedural skills, conceptual understanding, and application to increasingly complex situations. Both sets of standards, English language arts (ELA) and mathematics, build on existing best practices but demand significant changes in instruction. In addition, California combined the ELA Common Core Standards with state-adopted English Language Development (ELD) standards to create a framework that integrates both sets of standards, the ELA/ELD Framework.

The recently developed Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS) offer similar pedagogical approaches in science, combining content and practices. These science standards have also been adopted by numerous states.

Similar documents have been developed to create national standards for history-social science such as the College, Career, and Civic Life (C3) Framework for Social Studies State Standards. In addition, many states have drafted and implemented their own standards for history-social science. The importance of science and history-social science content is also emphasized in Common Core’s ELA and mathematics standards.

Why Support the Common Core State Standards?

Most teachers in California are excited by the educational promise of providing an active, engaging curriculum, as called for in the new standards. They have long believed in and have expressed a strong interest in bringing the ideas to fruition. One of the most exciting aspects of the CCSS is that they incorporate the complex instructional expertise and practices that make up effective teaching. This means that implementing the CCSS can become the catalyst for every school to address each of the crucial components of effective instruction. It has been shown that failure in any one component affects successful practice and outcomes. Moreover, the shift to the more complex and active instruction envisioned by the CCSS requires schools to build collaborative teams and provide the support needed for continuous improvement in individual teacher and school performance. Each school can decide how to tailor its implementation strategy based on the needs of its staff. Depending on the teacher or school program, some proficiencies will become second nature while others may need constant attention. For more on the topic of effective teaching, see the companion article Provide High-Quality Instruction. For more about team building, see the companion article Build Teams and Focus on Continuous Improvement.

I know that the CCSS are controversial and that many people strongly object to various aspects of the standards. Some concerns do not relate to the standards themselves but to unwarranted classroom practices and misguided implementation policies. Examples include over-scripted instruction, assigning inappropriate activities to kindergarteners, or abuses at the state level such as New York State’s decision to arbitrarily set cut levels so high that huge numbers of students failed the tests. Criticisms of the standards are often based on a misinterpretation or misreading of what they actually say. For example, many people decry the devaluation of literature, basing their objections on the standards’ recommendation that 70% of high school reading materials should be informational text. However, a closer reading of the language in the standards reveals that the 70% refers to all high school reading, which means there would still be plenty of time in English classrooms for a full literature program. At the same time, incorporating some powerful essays, biographies, and nonfiction books such as The Double Helix into the English curriculum promotes the deeper learning educators seek.

I should mention that not all of my fellow Build-and-Support advocates believe in the value of the CCSS, as I do. In addition to opposing the Test-and-Punish approach, “market-based reform efforts,” privatization of schools, and corporate overreach, Anthony Cody, Diane Ravitch, and a few other respected thought leaders reject the Common Core State Standards themselves. They think the standards are so entwined with high-stakes accountability that they are unsalvageable and not educationally warranted or legitimate. I disagree on both counts. Diane graciously allowed me to plead my case on her blog. I began my post with “Common Core Standards, YES. High-stakes Testing, Rewards and Punishments, and Market-based Reforms, NO. The California Story.” My comments engendered quite the discussion.

For an intelligent critique of the Common Core State Standards, see also Thomas Newkirk’s Postscript: Speaking Back to the Common Core. California made a concerted effort to address many of his criticisms in its adoption of the Common Core Standards, in the frameworks based on them, and in its implementation strategies, which divorced the Common Core rollout from test-driven high-stakes accountability. For more on this topic, see the companion articles in The California Context.

The Crucial Role of Content Frameworks

In California and other states, content frameworks translate the CCSS into guides for curriculum, instruction, professional development, and adoption of materials. They are critical in turning the standards into a workable curriculum. Ideally, the effort of schools across this country to implement a curriculum that reflects the content frameworks aligned with the CCSS or other comparably ambitious standards can be the centerpiece of an alternative Build-and-Support reform movement. The key is to detach implementation of the Common Core Standards from the high-stakes, test-based punitive measures too often linked with them. This is what California and a few other states have done.

Useful California Content Frameworks and Support Documents

The Common Core State Standards Are Not a Curriculum

Before I discuss the California mathematics and ELA/ELD standards as examples of the complexity of curriculum and the discipline-based instruction proposed, one clarification is needed. The most successful districts spend time, effort, and thought in translating standards into a coherent and sequenced curriculum and thus avoid the trap of thinking that standards alone will improve educational performance.

The CCSS delineate what students should master, but they are not a curriculum. Jumping from the standards to create lesson plans misses the crucial middle step of developing a sequenced, coherent curriculum. Creating a local curricular framework for the district or utilizing one from the state informs the sequence and breadth of instruction. Developing this “scope & sequence” is complex. And without it, implementation of the CCSS is destined to fail.

For example, one of the seventh-grade math standards is to use proportional thinking and percentage to solve problems such as “If $50 is 20% of your total funds, how much do you have?” The standard does not say how much instructional time should be invested in helping students master the requisite skills (actually quite a lot) nor does it list which strategies will be effective, recommend a progression of learning, or explain how instruction should correlate with previous units.

The same is true of Common Core’s ELA & Literacy Standards. They stress the need for a coherent curriculum and a systematic buildup of knowledge through broadly defined literature and the disciplines. But the standards do not specify the actual content that should be used to reach those goals.

Unfortunately, many districts have not undertaken this crucial work. The Common Core State Standards Implementation Survey surveyed 818 districts in California, which represent 83% of state public school enrollment. In late 2013, only about one-third of the districts had created a scope and sequence for the CCSS in either English-language arts or mathematics for at least some grades. More than one-third of the districts reported that this work is planned “for the future,” and about one-quarter reported that they are not planning to engage in this work at all. At the same time, only about half the districts were creating units or lessons, or aligning existing units or lessons with the new standards. The situation has improved since 2013, but many districts still have not adopted a coherent standards-based curriculum including essential materials.

Resources for Developing a Coherent Scope & Sequence

First, existing framework documents such as the one developed by California provide essential advice on how to structure the curriculum, including the order in which standards should be taught; how much time should be spent on each standard; how a standard fits in the larger context of the grade-to-grade buildup of knowledge; strategies for instruction, intervention, and assessment; links to resources; and illuminating vignettes. Teachers need this broader context to maximize the effect of adopted or available materials.

Second, many proprietary core reading and math programs offer a well-constructed scope & sequence. Among them are those adopted in California in mathematics and in ELA/ELD. Some open-source education materials also have sound scope and sequences. All materials have undergone extensive reviews and have translated the CCSS and state frameworks into a serviceable curriculum for teachers. The programs also allow flexibility so that our best teachers and districts can enhance their materials with a variety of open-source educational materials such as those listed by ISKME—a mix-and-match strategy. Also see a network of states devoted to sharing open-source material.

Third, many of the nation’s best districts have developed their own scope and sequences, although many still incorporate basal texts in many disciplines based on their criteria. For example, Long Beach’s scope and sequence documents provide a comprehensive “blueprint” for strategically sequencing and operationalizing the grade level/course standards in ELA and mathematics. The critical attributes of each document are units laid out in sequence by theme/title; an indication of how much time to spend on each unit; a narrative description of each unit explaining its focus and purpose; a description of the standards to be assessed for each unit; an assessment narrative detailing the formative assessment strategies and practices included in each unit so teachers can monitor how well the students are learning; a notation of formative assessment lessons to be included in each unit during the second half of the unit with time allowed for reteach/review; an explanation of the structure and purpose of the interim or end-of-unit assessment; a list of item types that may be included, along with the rationale; and finally the reading-level range of the texts used in each ELA unit. Long Beach provides very detailed advice. Other districts may wish to offer more general guidelines.

Fourth, many websites offer progressions and scope and sequences for instruction such as Achieve the Core and Illustrative Mathematics. A November 2013 report by Hanover Research contained an exhaustive list of Common Core curricular resources and planning tools that are used by various states. Another list of resources is available at the California Department of Education (CDE) website, and a national open resources list aligned to the Common Core can be found at OER Commons. Finally, an online Internet tool for California educator collaboration and resource sharing, My Digital Chalkboard, contains supporting links and resources. Many states have also produced curricular planning guides. For example, the Colorado Department of Education has posted its own guide (Colorado’s District Sample Curriculum Project), as has New York. Many district scope and sequence efforts and units of instruction for standards implementation are available at the CDE, California County Superintendents Educational Services Association (CCSESA), and county office of education websites. Most districts are willing to share their work.

The Role of Core Basal Programs

One question that is troubling educators is how much they should rely on traditional prepackaged, comprehensive basal programs. With the availability of online and open-source materials, some people are predicting the demise of these programs. We are not quite there yet. Textbooks can be very useful in certain instructional areas, if they are part of a broader curricular approach and supplemented by digital or niche resources. For example, in addition to oral language development and reading books aloud, teaching beginning reading in English requires an organized, systematic presentation of letter/sound correspondences, progressing from the easier to the more difficult. Children need practice reading “decodable text,” or material that follows the letter/sound correspondences they have been taught. Designing such materials is complex, time consuming, and usually better left to knowledgeable sources.

Many textbooks have become too hefty—emphasizing coverage of content over depth. The new CCSS and corresponding frameworks propose deep learning, in which students learn how to read, evaluate, and create a range of multimedia. This requires differently designed materials. For example, Asian math textbooks are thinner and organized around challenging questions. In the US, publishers are creating hybrid programs that use both print and digital supporting materials. The recently adopted ELA/ELD materials in California are of high quality and reflect the values of the Common Core State Standards and California’s 2014 English Language Arts/English Language Development Framework.

While relying only on traditional basal programs would be a mistake and deprive teachers of engaging, effective options, refusing to take advantage of some organized materials would limit and diminish instruction for most teachers. The vast majority of teachers resist demands that they develop a full curriculum on their own—they have neither the time, expertise, nor inclination. Striking the proper balance with a mix-and-match strategy offers the best approach.

Unfortunately, reformers have neglected the crucial role of curriculum and instructional materials in improving educational performance. Linda Diamond, one of finest reading educators in the country, uses the metaphor of a three-legged stool. Teacher’s content and pedagogical knowledge of a strong, liberal arts curriculum is the first leg. Excellent instructional materials are the second leg. Doctors need the best tools, and so do teachers. Effective teams, support structures, and leadership are the third leg.

Improved Mathematics Instruction

As an example of the Common Core’s consistency with powerful research, the mathematics standards aim for deep content understanding—both procedural and conceptual—and the ability to apply such knowledge in increasingly complex situations. Instruction envisions a more interactive classroom that marries content with practice standards such as asking yourself if the answer makes sense, modeling, questioning, and explaining.

While delving into each discipline in detail is not the purview of this article, I will attempt to provide the flavor of the changes in each discipline. As an example of an instructional shift in mathematics, Jo Boaler proposes that students work on provocative questions. In What’s Math Got to Do With It?, she provides this example for third graders: “How would you solve 15 times 6 without pencil and paper?” This type of question stimulates a deeper understanding of the number system before students learn the algorithm and become procedurally fluent. Students can work in groups or individually to develop multiple ways of solving the problem and report back to the class for discussion of the pros and cons of each approach, all of which advance number sense.

Students might come up with these ideas: 6 times 10 and then add 6 times 5; 2 x 15, 3 times; 6 times 30 and divide by 2; 5 times 6, 3 times, and so on. Boaler challenges sixth graders with this math problem: A man on a diet can only eat ¼ of a pound of turkey a day. The market only sells packages of three slices, which is ⅓ of a pound. What fraction of the three slices can he eat? This question takes some thought, and there are several ways to solve it. (Spoiler hint: How many slices in a pound?) Or, a large cube that is painted on the outside that comprises smaller cubes of equal size, 10 by 10 by 10. How many cubes have one side painted, two sides, and three? Professor Boaler has collected scores of these engaging questions on her website. A steady diet of working on such problems produces deeper understanding and problem-solving abilities. For more on this topic, see “Not a Math Person: How to Remove Obstacles to Learning Math.”

I would add another example. Most adults have difficulty with proportional thinking, especially percentage. Many try to solve problems by rote application of the cross-multiplication rule, which is complex, prone to error, and precludes thinking about the underlying relationships. If you give students a problem such as “2 is to 3 as what is to 9?” (in the form of a 2-inch-high stick casting a 3-inch shadow, and a tree casting a 9-foot shadow—what is the height of the tree?) and ask them to figure out as many ways to solve it as they can, they will develop a deeper understanding of proportional relationships. Students could approach the problem as:

  • 2 is ⅔ of 3, so what number is ⅔ of 9?, or conversely
  • 3 is 1½ times 2, so 9 is 1½ times what number?, or
  • 9 is 3 times 3, so what number is 3 times 2?, or
  • the standard cross-multiplication procedure 2:3=x:9, so set up the equation 2/3=x/9, solve by cross-multiplying: 3x = 2 x 9 or 3x=18, 18 ÷ 3 = x, which leaves x alone and the answer is 6.

All of these methods work; each develops an understanding of proportional relationships. Outside the classroom no one proficient in mathematics would use the more complicated formulae in this situation. Instead, they would think about what is being asked and use one of the simpler relationships to determine the answer. Vignettes demonstrating examples of active classroom instruction are included in the California mathematics framework, and videos and grade-level content are available from numerous sites.

I know some people will question this approach, asking “Why waste all this time: Why not just teach students the most efficient procedure first?” Eventually, they need to learn to be automatic with a procedure so they can think about new material, but initially the opportunity to struggle with a question, to think about the relationships and concepts, and to communicate and listen to ideas is too beneficial to miss. Ask the Japanese who have perfected this method and lead the world in math performance. Often, learning to rely exclusively on applying a rule or procedure precludes deeper thinking about the problem: Which procedure makes the most sense?; which data is important or superfluous?; and does the solution comply with a reasonable estimate? Of course, some procedures just need to be eventually memorized such as multiplication facts. This is what the California Mathematics Framework advocates, although even in this case, there are proven strategies and patterns to facilitate the effort.

Jo Boaler argues that the way math has been taught in the US as a set of rules to apply—show a procedure, work a problem in front of the class, have students practice and do homework, and then test—is ineffective for many students. They forget the steps, plug in the wrong numbers to the formula, and don’t know which procedures to use when they encounter a more complex problem, which is key to being able to use numbers. Classroom instruction usually masks this point by making it obvious which procedure to apply (a student will know that all of the day’s problems are about multiplying fractions). For many students, when they encounter a problem without the clue they are stumped. Instead the CCSS standards of content and practice emphasize conceptual understanding in addition to procedural knowledge and application. Finally, a steady diet of a rigid instructional routine—get the answer by following the rules—alienates many students.

Facility with percentage provides a perfect illustration of the problem. Percentage is probably one of the most useful mathematical tools in everyday life. Yet only about 45% of the US population can use percentage effectively. Sal Khan has commented that Khan Academy collects data from millions of people around the world. They have discovered that percentage problems rank among the most difficult for large numbers of adults. This finding was explained years ago by Parker and Leinhardt in a 90-page article entitledPercentage: A Privileged Proportion.

According to these and later researchers such as Susan Lamon, fourth graders are better at solving percentage problems than sixth graders. Since they have not been taught the algorithm, they think creatively using benchmarks. For example, when asked “What is 60% of 40?,” fourth graders think: “I know 50% of 40 is 20, and 10% is 4, so it must be 24.” Many students in later grades stop thinking and just attempt to apply a rule. (Witness the difficulty people have with tipping 15%.)

What is hard about percentage is that the tool is actually shorthand for conceptually complex relationships and meanings tied to a 100th scale, which was historically developed over thousands of years. The key issue is determining the base for comparison and the ability to flexibly shift bases. For example, imagine that your boss tells you that owing to financial difficulties, she has to cut your monthly salary of $1,000 by 10% for one month, but she will raise it 10% after the month is over. You won’t be back to your previous level because the first base for the cut is $1,000, while the second base for the increase is $900. Or, a more common situation: The graduation rate in your school is 50% and increases to 60%. Is that a 10% increase or 20%? It is both, depending on what you are attempting to communicate. Ten percent more than 50% is a 10% increase compared to 100% (entire student body)—a standard way of evaluating schools, but the pool of graduates (represented by 50%) rose 20% (10/50). Tricky.

In middle grades, solving percentage problems is usually taught procedurally in a few lessons using the cross-multiplication rule. This results in massive failure rates. On assessments, significant numbers of eighth graders could not answer the question “What is 100% of 8?” If five to six weeks of class time are invested with heavy language mediation and numerous examples of comparing this to that and that to this, about 95% of students will become proficient in using percentage. This is an example of the CCSS approach—fewer topics taught more in depth.

Many students want to know why a procedure works and desire to tackle more complex problems using the practices delineated in the new standards. Direct instruction definitely has its place, and many successful teachers use it predominately and still manage to encourage deeper student thinking. But for most practitioners, posing complex questions and providing open-ended tasks should be added to their teaching routines. The California mathematics framework calls for teachers to determine a proper balance between direct instruction and more engaging activities.

What is mathematically most useful for the vast majority of people is the ability to figure out how to set up a problem and decide which data are relevant and which procedures to use—a skill that is developed through practice by encountering large numbers of problems and completing activities that require thinking. This idea was brought home to me when I was participating in a review of potential test questions for the CCSS-aligned Smarter Balanced assessments. At my table was Mike Kirst, president of the California State Board of Education and a professor from Stanford. Also present was the then chair of the University of California’s Board of Admissions and Relations with Schools (BOARS) committee who was an engineering professor at one of the UC campuses. We were given several questions to rank for difficulty. The one we all agreed was the hardest required only adding, subtracting, multiplying, and dividing but was challenging to think through, set up, and decide which procedures and practices to use and when.

The math used by most adults except for science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) occupations is the application of math learned through eighth grade such as fractions, rates, proportions, and percentage applied to complex or unique situations. Also important is the ability to reason quantitatively such as reading charts and extrapolating data. Andrew Hacker maintains that that ability is missing from most secondary math courses.

A 2016 study from OECD sheds some interesting light on strategies that help low-performing math students. The authors found that students don’t necessarily hate math but have high levels of anxiety. Extracurricular activities, which don’t need to be math based, help. A major finding is that the right amount of homework is crucial. Six hours of math homework a week reduces the odds of becoming a low performer—a whopping 70% compared to those doing little or no homework. Beyond six hours, homework becomes stressful and further results stall. Finally, in a controversial finding, in the US and a few other countries, ability grouping actually increased performance of struggling students.

For an in-depth analysis of implementation issues, see the reports produced by the Math in Common (MIC) network, which is devoted to the successful execution of the California Common Core State Standards in Mathematics. Owing to the complexity of this more demanding math instruction, many districts are shifting to have upper-elementary math taught by math specialists.

More Comprehensive and Engaging Language Arts

Reading, writing, discussing, and analyzing text in a more active manner are hallmarks of the English Language Arts (ELA) Standards. The California ELA/ELD Framework integrates two sets of standards: state Common Core English Language Arts (ELA) Standards and state English Language Development (ELD) Standards.

Following is a short excerpt from a 2014 summary of the ELA/ELD Framework authored by JoAnn Isken, Carol Jago, and me, which explains the ideas behind the framework:

The outer ring of the graphic 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 (ELLs) in mastering the CCSS, 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 roots), and fluency instruction (the rationale and more details are covered in the companion articles The California Context). The foundational skills in the California framework are summarized in an extremely well-written white paper by Hallie Yopp, one of the authors of the framework.

For a useful compendium on research-based reading instruction and strategies, see Honig, Diamond, and Gutlohn’s Teaching Reading Sourcebook, Updated 2nd Edition and its companion book Assessing Reading: Multiple Measures, 2nd Edition. Both books were produced by the Consortium on Reaching Excellence (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.

In 2015, Louise Spear-Swerling wrote The Power of RTI and Reading Profiles and David Kilpatrick wrote Essentials of Assessing, Preventing, and Overcoming Reading Difficulties. Along with the Sourcebook, these two books are among the best research-based books on how to teach children to read. They also explain some current misguided reading approaches that are still in widespread use. The companion article How the California Reading Wars Got Resolved: A Personal Story goes into further detail on the issue of the importance of foundational skills.

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 CORE’s Vocabulary Handbook and 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 Liana Heitin’s blog “For Reading, Knowledge Matters More Than Strategies, Some Experts Say.” See also Vicki Cobb’s article “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.

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

History, Civics, Economics, Geography, Humanities, and the Fine Arts

Changes in history/social science instruction follow a similar pattern as math and English language arts. The new California History-Social Science Framework and the College, Career, and Civic Life (C3) Framework for Social Studies State Standards encourage a more active curriculum. For example, in sixth grade, instead of marching through the growth of empires in Egypt, the Fertile Crescent, India, China, Africa, and Mesoamerica, teams of students may be assigned a particular area. Groups then investigate the history of their area, report to the class, and discuss the similarities and differences. Or, a teacher may pose the question: “Why did the Industrial Revolution start in England?” As in the other subject areas, understanding a combination of factual, conceptual, and historical processes seems the best mix, supported by powerful motivational content such as stories, narratives, historical fiction, biographies, projects, and performances.

Science

Similar to the other disciplines, the new Next Generation Science Standards and the new California Science Framework elucidating them stress the marriage of content in physics, chemistry, life, and earth sciences, including health; evolution and human origins; practices such as modeling, explaining, and observing; active investigations and hypotheses generation; understanding historical science; the incorporation of larger cross-cutting themes such as energy; and motivational efforts such as biographies of leading scientists and stories of the fight to conquer various diseases. For a wonderful compilation of engaging and motivating stories of scientists, see Joy Hakim’s Science Stories: Proof That Informative Can Be Engaging.

Other Crucial Student Learning

Similarly, teachers need to know the latest research and best practice related to how students learn and retain knowledge. Many of the works cited above will help. In addition, I recommend:

  • Building Blocks for Learning: A Framework for Comprehensive Student Development
  • How Children Succeed: Grit, Curiosity, and the Hidden Power of Character, which discusses the importance of personal and relational skills
  • Make It Stick: The Science of Successful Learning, which covers the importance of self-monitoring and self-testing strategies
  • Mindset, which explains the importance of students believing that effort will lead to their success
  • Teacher and Student Evaluation: Moving Beyond the Failure of School Reform
  • Visible Learning for Teachers: Maximizing Impact on Learning, which reviews the research on which strategies produce the largest effect size such as just-in-time intervention and actively involving students in the educational process

Practitioners should know where to go to obtain answers to key questions that arise from their efforts to improve instruction. High on the educational agenda should be making pedagogical wisdom available in a usable format to the professional learning teams at each site. School teams could then adapt those ideas to their individual students.

This article has dealt with the what of teaching and learning—the curriculum. See also the companion article, Provide High-Quality Instruction, which explores how teachers can best deliver that curriculum in the classroom.

BBS Companion Articles

How Top Performers Build-and-Support
Ground Efforts on Unassailable Research
Provide High-Quality Instruction
Build Teams and Focus on Continuous Improvement
The California Context
California Policymakers and Educators Shift from Test-and-Punish to Build-and-Support
How the California Reading Wars Got Resolved: A Personal Story

Reference Notes

Why the Common Core State Standards Are So Important
Bitter, C., & Loney, E. (2015, Aug). Deeper Learning: Improving Student Outcomes for College, Career, and Civic Life. http://educationpolicy.air.org/publications/deeper-learning-improving-student-outcomes-college-career-and-civic-life

Lampert, M. (2015). Deeper Teaching. Students at the Center: Deeper Learning Research Series. Boston, MA: Jobs for the Future. http://www.studentsatthecenter.org/topics/deeper-teaching

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

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

NGSS Lead States. (2013). Next Generation Science Standards: For States, By States. http://www.nextgenscience.org/

Heitin, L. (2016, Feb 23). Curriculum Matters: Eight Things to Know About the Next Generation Science Standards. http://blogs.edweek.org/edweek/curriculum/2016/02/next_generation_science_standards_8_things_to_know.html?utm_source=feedblitz&utm_medium=FeedBlitzRss&utm_campaign=curriculummatters

California Department of Education (CDE). (2013). Next Generation Science Standards for California Public Schools: K–12. http://www.cde.ca.gov/pd/ca/sc/ngssstandards.asp

National Council for the Social Studies (NCSS). (2013). College, Career, and Civic Life (C3) Framework for Social Studies State Standards: Guidance for Enhancing the Rigor of K–12 Civics, Economics, Geography, and History. Silver Spring, MD: NCSS. http://www.socialstudies.org/c3

California State Board of Education. Content Standards. http://www.cde.ca.gov/be/st/ss/

Why Support the Common Core State Standards?
Ravitch, D. (2014, Jan 7). Bill Honig: Why California Likes the Common Core. http://dianeravitch.net/2014/01/07/bill-honig-why-california-likes-the-common-core-standards/

Newkirk, T. (2013). Postscript: Speaking Back to the Common Core. https://www.heinemann.com/shared/onlineresources/E02123/Newkirk_Speaking_Back_to_the_Common_Core.pdf

The Common Core State Standards Are Not a Curriculum
Honig, B. (2014, Jan 29). Coherent and Sequenced Curriculum Key to Implementing Common Core Standards. http://edsource.org/2014/coherent-and-sequenced-curriculum-key-to-implementing-common-core-standards/56704 See also Tucker, M. (2016, Feb 11). Building a Powerful State Instructional System for All Students. http://blogs.edweek.org/edweek/top_performers/2016/02/building_a_powerful_state_instructional_system_for_all_students.html

California County Superintendents Educational Services Association (CCSEA). (2013). Common Core State Standards Implementation Survey: Statewide Summary of Results. http://ccsesa.org/common-core-implementation-california-status-report/

Resources for Developing a Coherent Scope & Sequence
California Department of Education. (2014, Jan 15). 2014 Mathematics Adoption. http://www.cde.ca.gov/ci/ma/im/sbeadopted2014mathprgms.asp

California Department of Education. (2015, Nov 4). 2015 ELA/ELD Adoption. http://www.cde.ca.gov/ci/rl/im/sbeadoptedelaeldprogs.asp

OER Services. http://www.iskme.org/services/oer-support

Zubrzycki, J. (2026, Feb 26). 13 States Join Federal Open Resource Initiative. http://blogs.edweek.org/edweek/curriculum/2016/02/open_educational_resources.html?utm_source=feedblitz&utm_medium=FeedBlitzRss&utm_campaign=curriculummatters

Long Beach Unified School District. Scope and Sequence Documents. http://www.lbusd.k12.ca.us/Departments/Curriculum/ELA/curriculum_docs.cfm

Achieve the Core. www.achievethecore.org

Illustrative Mathematics. https://www.illustrativemathematics.org/

Hanover Research. (2013, Nov). Final Report–Common Core Implementation Tools. Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/1009965-commoncore-implementationtools-gates1113.html

California Department of Education. All Curriculum Frameworks. http://www.cde.ca.gov/ci/cr/cf/allfwks.asp

OER Commons. https://www.oercommons.org/

My Digital Chalkboard. https://www.mydigitalchalkboard.org

Colorado Department of Education. Colorado’s District Sample Curriculum Project: Introduction. https://www.cde.state.co.us/standardsandinstruction/samplecurriculumproject

New York State Education Department. New York State Learning Standards and Core Curriculum. http://www.p12.nysed.gov/ciai/cores.html

California Department of Education. http://www.cde.ca.gov/

California County Superintendents Educational Services Association. http://ccsesa.org/

The Role of Core Basal Programs
Dobo, N. (2015, Nov 4). The Federal Government Urges K–12 Schools to Try Open Educational Resources. http://hechingerreport.org/the-federal-government-urges-k-12-schools-to-try-open-educational-resources/

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

Boser, U. (2015, Oct 14). The Hidden Value of Curriculum Reform: Do States and Districts Receive the Most Bang for Their Curriculum Buck? https://www.americanprogress.org/issues/education/report/2015/10/14/122810/the-hidden-value-of-curriculum-reform/

Consortium on Reaching Excellence (CORE). The CORE Approach to Building and Sustaining Lasting Academic Excellence. https://www.corelearn.com/About-Us/Our-Approach.html

Improved Mathematics Instruction
Boaler, J. (2015). What’s Math Got to Do With It? How Teachers and Parents Can Transform Mathematics Learning and Inspire Success. New York: Penguin Books.

YouCubed. https://www.youcubed.org/

Schwartz, K. (2015, Nov 30). “Not a Math Person”: How to Remove Obstacles to Learning Math. http://ww2.kqed.org/mindshift/2015/11/30/not-a-math-person-how-to-remove-obstacles-to-learning-math/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+kqed%2FnHAK+%28MindShift%29

Heitin, L. (2015, Aug 13). Common Core’s Focus on Concepts Is Key to Improving Math Education, Report Says. http://blogs.edweek.org/edweek/curriculum/2015/08/common_cores_focus_on_concepts_key_to_improving_math_education.html?utm_source=feedblitz&utm_medium=FeedBlitzRss&utm_campaign=curriculummatters

Parker, M., & Leinhardt, G. (1995). Percent: A Privileged Proportion. Review of Educational Research Winter 65. http://rer.sagepub.com/content/65/4/421.abstract

Hacker, A. (2016, Feb 27). The Wrong Way to Teach Math. The New York Times. http://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/28/opinion/sunday/the-wrong-way-to-teach-math.html?ref=opinion&_r=0

Cuban, L. (2016, Mar 10). The Wrong Way to Teach Math (Andrew Hacker). https://larrycuban.wordpress.com/2016/03/10/the-wrong-way-to-teach-math-andrew-hacker/

Heitin, L. (2016, Feb 11). What We Know About Struggling Math Students According to PISA Results. http://blogs.edweek.org/edweek/curriculum/2016/02/what_we_know_about_students_who_struggle_international_math_test.html?r=1820170230&utm_source=feedblitz&utm_medium=FeedBlitzRss&utm_campaign=curriculummatters See also OECD. (2016, Feb 10). Low-Performing Students: Why They Fall Behind and How to Help Them Succeed. http://www.oecd.org/edu/low-performing-students-9789264250246-en.htm

WestEd. Math in Common Evaluation. https://www.wested.org/project/math-in-common-evaluation/ See also Fong, T., Perry, R., Reade, F., Klarin, B., & Jaquet, K. (2016, Jan). Many Pathways to Student Success in Mathematics: Middle and High School Math Course Sequences and Placement Decisions in Math in Common Districts. https://www.wested.org/resources/many-pathways-to-student-success-in-mathematics/ and Perry, R, Finkelstein, N., Seago N., Heredia, A., Sobolew-Shubin, S., & Carroll, C. (2016, Jul). Taking Stock of Common Core Math Implementation: Supporting Teachers to Shift Instruction Insights from the Math in Common 2015 Baseline Survey of Teachers and Administrators. https://www.wested.org/resources/taking-stock-common-core-math-implementation/ and Flaherty Jr., J., Sobolew-Shubin, A., Heredia, A., Chen-Gaddini, M., Klarin, B., & Finkelstein, N. (2016, Sep 26). Under Construction: Benchmark Assessments and Common Core Math Implementation in Grades K–8. https://www.wested.org/resources/under-construction-benchmark-assessments-and-common-core-math-implementation-in-grades-k-8/ and Perry, R. R., Seago, N., Burr, E., Broek, M., Finkelstein, N. (2015, Jan 26). Classroom Observations: Documenting Shifts in Instruction for Districtwide Improvement. https://www.wested.org/resources/documenting-shifts-in-instruction/

Disare M. (2016, Feb 16). 75 Schools Will Overhaul Math Teaching, a Move Fariña Says Will Reduce Inequity. http://ny.chalkbeat.org/2016/02/16/75-schools-will-overhaul-math-teaching-a-move-farina-says-will-reduce-inequity/#.VsYgQ4-cE2w

More Comprehensive and Engaging Language Arts
Isken, J. A., Honig, B., & Jago, C. (2014, Nov 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/resourceselaeld2016.asp

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/ci/rl/cf/documents/foundskillswhitepaper.pdf – search=Yopp 2015 Resource guide&view=FitH&pagemode=none

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

Diamond, L., & Thorsnes, B. J. (Eds.). (2008). Assessing Reading: Multiple Measures. 2nd Edition. Novato, CA: Arena Press. http://www.corelearn.com/Products/Publications/

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

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

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. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley.

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

CORE. Word Intelligence. http://www.corelearn.com/word-intelligence.html

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

History, Civics, Economics, Geography, Humanities, and the Fine Arts
National Council for the Social Studies (NCSS). (2013). College, Career, and Civic Life (C3) Framework for Social Studies State Standards. http://www.socialstudies.org/c3

Science
NGSS Lead States. (2013). Next Generation Science Standards: For States, By States. http://www.nextgenscience.org/

Hansel, L. (2015, Aug 27). Joy Hakim’s Science Stories: Proof that Informative Can Be Engaging. http://blog.coreknowledge.org/2015/08/27/joy-hakims-science-stories-proof-that-informative-can-be-engaging/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+TheCoreKnowledgeBlog+%28The+Core+Knowledge+Blog%29

Other Crucial Student Learning
Stafford-Brizard, K. (2016). Building Blocks for Learning: A Framework for Comprehensive Student Development. Turnaround for Children. http://www.turnaroundusa.org/what-we-do/tools/

Tough, P. (2013). How Children Succeed: Grit, Curiosity, and the Hidden Power of Character. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.

Brown, P. C., Roediger, H. L., III, & McDaniel, M. A. (2014). Make It Stick: The Science of Successful Learning. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Dweck, C. (2006). Mindset: The New Psychology of Success. New York: Random House.

Lavigne, A. L., & Good, T. L. (2014). Teacher and Student Evaluation: Moving Beyond the Failure of School Reform. New York: Routledge.

Hattie, J. (2012). Visible Learning for Teachers: Maximizing Impact on Learning. New York and London: Routledge.

How Top Performers Build-and-Support: Ground Efforts in Unassailable Research

How Top Performers Build-and-Support
Ground Efforts in Unassailable Research

by Bill Honig

The failure of the reform movement could have been easily predicted. Reformers’ solutions are inconsistent with research findings on the best ways to build high-performing schools, and fly in the face of modern management theory. Unfortunately, policymakers continue to ignore what the most successful schools, districts, states, and nations have actually done. In becoming world-class institutions, none of the top performers used a fire-the-worst-teachers-and-reward-the-best strategy. Nor did they rely on the pressure of test-driven, high-stakes accountability, competition, privatization, and choice as the centerpiece of their improvement initiatives.

A Blueprint for Success

Over the past 30 years, a widespread consensus has emerged in the educational community on the best ways to improve school quality and student performance. These educators do not deny that large numbers of schools and classrooms need to greatly upgrade learning, but they believe that with the proper leadership, social and educational resources, and organizational support, most failing schools have the potential to succeed. The advocates of this Build-and-Support approach base their efforts on an overwhelming body of impeccable scholarship, indisputable evidence, and compelling experience.

This powerful consensus supports placing instruction at the center of improvement efforts, with a rigorous and active liberal arts curriculum. It recognizes the need to build teachers’ content and pedagogical knowledge and to provide effective instructional materials and tools. It emphasizes strategic long-term efforts aimed at building capacity and continuous improvement systems to support enriching instruction and focuses on the interaction of all these elements.

These measures also aim to improve working conditions by developing school, district, parent, and community social capital and teamwork. They base accountability on respect for the professionals at the school, and they connect school and district improvement efforts to usable information about best practice. This Build-and-Support approach recognizes the need for districts and states to reorient from a top-down command-and-control compliance mentality to a field-facing support approach based on dialogue and discussion of needed improvements.

Prominent Experts and Authors

An enormous and powerful cadre of respected researchers, educators, and practitioners has forcefully advocated and implemented the positive Build-and-Support strategy. The following pages present a few of those whose work has deeply influenced the positions and policies promoted on this Building Better Schools site. We will begin with Michael Fullan and Linda Darling-Hammond.

Michael Fullan is professor emeritus of the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education at the University of Toronto. He is one of the prominent researchers and policy experts who promote building continuous improvement capacities around powerful instruction. He has been the intellectual godfather of Ontario, Canada’s successful rise from mediocre to world-class education. Fullan is currently advising many districts and states, including California, as well as other countries. For an example of his thinking, see Choosing the Wrong Drivers for Whole System Reform. He recently coauthored Coherence: The Right Drivers in Action for Schools, Districts, and Systems (2015) with Joanne Quinn.

A seminal thinker of the Build-and-Support approach, Fullan examines policy and strategy levers that drive reform. He has found that the four “drivers” now in favor in the US are inadequate and often counterproductive. He offers an alternative four that have proved to be more effective at improving student performance and closing the gap for lower-performing groups relative to higher-order skills and competencies. Fullan says these successful drivers foster intrinsic motivation of teachers and students, engage educators and students in continuous improvement of instruction and learning, inspire collective or team work, and affect all teachers and students 100%.

In Fullan’s view, the key to systemwide success is to appeal to the energy and dedication of educators and students, aligning the goals of reform with the intrinsic motivation of participants. Though superficially compelling, the prevailing drivers do not work. According to Fullan, these are the four “wrong” drivers:

  • accountability—using test results and teacher appraisal to reward or punish teachers and schools (vs. capacity building and continuous improvement)
  • individual teacher and leadership quality—promoting individuals (vs. collaboration and group solutions)
  • technology—investing in computer systems and digital media assuming they will be a quick fix to low performance (vs. using the best of a blended learning approach with a variety of educational media)
  • piecemeal reform measures (vs. integrated or systemic strategies)

Although each of these “wrong” components may be useful at times, they can never be successful drivers. In fact, Fullan notes that none of the top-performing countries in the world led their reforms with the four drivers that are the current favorites in the US.

Another way to describe Fullan’s more positive effort is “building a teaching profession around effective instruction.” A 2010 McKinsey report, How the World’s Most Improved School Systems Keep Getting Better, supports his position. The report concludes that improving system performance “ultimately comes down to improving the learning experience of students in their classroom” and that systems achieve the best results when they “change their processes by modifying curriculum and improving the way that teachers instruct and principals lead.”

Linda Darling-Hammond is faculty director of Stanford University’s Center for Opportunity Policy in Education (SCORE). She is one of the most respected school improvement researchers in the country and a true national treasure. Darling-Hammond has been a tireless advocate of the Build-and-Support approach and an outspoken critic of the dangers of Test-and-Punish strategies. She has published hundreds of books and articles on these issues. Her book The Flat World and Education: How America’s Commitment to Equity Will Determine Our Future received the coveted Grawemeyer Award in 2012. Among her most recent books are Getting Teacher Evaluation Right: What Really Matters for Effectiveness and Improvement and Beyond the Bubble Test: How Performance Assessments Support 21st Century Learning. She also wrote an article that appeared in American Educator (2010, Winter) about what it takes to build an effective teaching profession, citing examples from this country and abroad.

In 2012, California superintendent of public instruction Tom Torlakson created a prestigious commission chaired by Darling-Hammond and Chris Steinhauser, superintendent of Long Beach, which was designated one of the top districts in the world. The commission produced Greatness by Design: Supporting Outstanding Teaching to Sustain a Golden State, a superb road map for the Build-and-Support strategy, as it applies to supporting and improving teachers. California has used it to guide statewide improvement efforts. This document should greatly assist other states as they shape educational policy under the new powers given them in the recently passed Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA).

Greatness by Design delineates many of the key components of the Build-and-Support strategy:

  • a strong liberal arts curriculum and active instruction envisioned by the Common Core standards as the driver of improvement efforts
  • a focus on team building and capacity for continuous improvement with the structures to support those efforts
  • attracting, training, induction, effective individual and team professional development, evaluation geared to program improvement, and career opportunities for our best teachers to remain in the classroom but also to become master teachers with additional responsibilities as peer mentors

Professor Darling-Hammond also coauthored an excellent guide pertaining to professional learning, the Learning Policy Institute’s publication Maximizing the Use of New State Professional Learning Investments to Support Student, Educator, and School System Growth. This topic will be further explored in the companion article Build Teams and Focus on Continuous Improvement.

Lee Shulman, also of Stanford University, is president emeritus of the respected Carnegie Endowment for the Advancement of Teaching, an organization that champions the Build-and-Support strategy. Throughout his career, he has championed the importance of craft knowledge and pedagogical practice in improving schools.

Michael Kirst, whose authorship has bolstered the Build-and-Support position, is president of the California State Board of Education and has led the charge for a more supportive strategy in California. Kirst was coauthor of an EdSource report that examined middle school math programs. It found that what distinguished high-performers from laggards was the extent to which the schools organized and collaborated around how best to teach a strong instructional program with district support.

Edward Haertel is professor emeritus of education at Stanford University and one of the top psychometricians in the country. He has persistently warned of the dangers of misusing tests for evaluation schemes.

Richard F. Elmore has also written extensively on the Build-and-Support approach. For example, he authored the chapter “Leadership as the Practice of Improvement” in Improving School Leadership, Volume 2.

Jal Mehta, a strong advocate for instruction-driven reform and capacity building, edited The Futures of School Reform. Mehta coauthors Learning Deeply, an influential blog, with Richard Rothman, a perceptive opinion leader.

Andy Hargreaves, of Boston College, is a policy expert who has supported and consulted on the positive Build-and-Support approach. Like Mehta and Rothman, he has written extensively about the importance of building social and professional capital and teacher engagement aimed at deeper learning for students. He coauthored Professional Capital: Transforming Teaching in Every School with Michael Fullan.

David Cohen is an important researcher who with coauthor Susan L. Moffitt wrote about the missing ingredient in federal policy—building capacity—in The Ordeal of Equality: Did Federal Regulation Fix the Schools?

Marshall Smith is the former dean of the Stanford School of Education and was undersecretary at the federal Department of Education during the Clinton years and program officer at the Hewlett Foundation. He has ceaselessly lobbied for a course correction of federal policy along the lines I have discussed. Smith was one of the first policy experts to encourage the feds to look at Massachusetts as a model rather than to pursue the Test-and-Punish approach.

Anthony Bryk is the president of the prestigious Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching. In 2010, it published a study examining the reform efforts that actually worked in the Chicago schools, which were in stark contrast to those undertaken by Arne Duncan when he was Chicago’s superintendent. Organizing Schools for Improvement: Lessons from Chicago stresses school collaboration, along with strong curricular and instructional focus, principal leadership, community involvement, and student service support as the critical elements that characterized successful schools. Bryk’s team recently authored the superb book Learning to Improve: How America’s Schools Can Get Better at Getting Better.

Marc Tucker is president of the National Center for Education and the Economy. He authored Standing on the Shoulders of Giants: An American Agenda for Education Reform and an EdWeek article, “Creating Education Success at Home.” In 2011, Tucker published Surpassing Shanghai: An Agenda for American Education Built on the World’s Leading Systems, which advocated the Build-and-Support approach. Tucker’s extremely informative blog Top Performers is an excellent source of information about positive strategies being used worldwide.

In one of his blog posts, Tucker pointed readers to Is School Reform Working?, a must-read document bolstering the more constructive and effective measures. The author is Geoff Masters, chief executive officer of the Australian Council for Educational Research and one of the brightest educational theorists. Masters was awarded the Medal of the Order of Australia, the highest honor the Australian government can bestow on its citizens. No slouch.

In his paper, Masters contrasts two improvement strategies. The first is incentive driven, using rewards, punishments, and competition—the familiar Test-and-Punish strategy. The second strategy focuses on building the capacity of teachers and educators to deliver high-quality instruction for all students and to continuously improve—the Build-and-Support approach. He found that the countries with falling scores on international assessments such as the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) are those that adopted the Test-and-Punish approach, including Australia, New Zealand, England, and the United States. The countries that experienced improved results are those that followed the Build-and-Support strategy.

Master’s paper also provides one of the best descriptions of what successful nations do to support school improvement, specifically:

  • attracting and retaining high-quality teachers
  • ensuring that teachers know subject matter content and pedagogy
  • developing and supporting the capacity of teachers and leaders to work together toward improving teaching and instruction; and
  • guaranteeing that talent is widely distributed

Is School Reform Working? has a detailed description of the measures that school leaders should follow if they want results—measures that are completely aligned with the Build-and-Support approach proposed on this website.

Diane Ravitch has written extensively about the failures of the reform strategies, the widespread collateral damage to public schools, and the threat to the existence of public education by the “privatization” movement. Diane is the author of two recent books sounding the alarm about the punitive and privatization approaches being foisted on schools: Reign of Terror: The Hoax of the Privatization Movement and the Danger to America’s Public Schools and The Death and Life of the Great American School System: How Testing and Choice Are Undermining Education. She also edits one of the most influential blogs in the country, mentioned below.

Greg Anrig Jr. from the Century Foundation wrote Beyond the Education Wars, an important book about the importance of building social capital.

E. D. Hirsch, the founder of Core Knowledge, has advocated tirelessly for building students’ content knowledge and content’s role in comprehension. Core Knowledge promotes the steady buildup of knowledge. Schools using Core Knowledge materials have done spectacularly well.

Lisa Hansel is a perceptive commentator on the Core Knowledge blog.

David C. Berliner and Gene V. Glass cowrote 50 Myths and Lies That Threaten America’s Public Schools: The Real Crisis in Education.

Pedro Noguera is the author of excellent books and articles. He contributes to the Bridging Differences blog, focusing on the dangers of the “reform agenda” and the importance of funding student support efforts and involving communities.

Two experts from management science have also made important contributions to our understanding of schools as complex, dynamic institutions:

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

Professor Leana emphasizes that this approach requires the following:

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

Writing for the Albert Shanker Institute blog, Esther Quintero has published a series of articles on the crucial importance of building social capital.

Content and Pedagogy Advocates

To build teacher’s content knowledge and pedagogy in mathematics, we can turn to several expert content specialists:

Deborah Ball from the University of Michigan is one of the foremost authorities on teacher knowledge necessary to teach mathematics and ascertain what students actually know. There are also Phil Daro, Jason Zimba from Student Achievement Partners, and Bill McCallum, who has developed the progressions tools and the fantastically helpful, illustrative math blog, Tools for the Common Core Standards. Daro, Zimba, and McCallum were primary authors of the Common Core Mathematics Standards that call for a more active classroom combining procedural, conceptual, and application instructional practices. Each is extremely active in Common Core implementation.

Other content experts include Karen Fuson from Northwestern University, one of the top researchers and experts on elementary mathematics, and Jo Boaler from Stanford, author of What’s Math Got to Do With It?, a book every teacher of math should read. Boaler is a strong advocate for the shift to more active and engaging instruction and a leading proponent of problem-driven and project-based instruction. She taught a widely popular MOOC course on the subject, and thousands of followers visit her website, Youcubed.

Also of note is Alan Schoenfeld from the University of California, Berkeley, whose writings on conceptual understanding, problem solving, and performance assessments have been very influential.

Professor Boaler has been an effective disciple of Carol Dweck, who wrote Mindset: The New Psychology of Success. The breakthrough book demonstrated the power of teacher attitude and active instruction in persuading all students that they can be proficient at math if they work at it. This is very different from the prevailing view of most teachers, students, and US citizens that math ability is fixed—you’re either good at it or not. Finally, there are the contributors to the Second Handbook of Research on Mathematics Teaching and Learning whose writings address necessary teacher knowledge in math. Ensuring that their ideas, which are incorporated in the Common Core Standards, become standard practice should drive improvement efforts.

To build teacher’s content knowledge and pedagogy in language arts, we can turn to the work of these authorities:

Timothy Shanahan, distinguished professor emeritus at the University of Illinois; Linnea Ehri of the City University of New York (CUNY), one of the most respected theoreticians of beginning reading; Louisa Moats, contributing writer of the Common Core State Standards, Foundational Reading Skills; Louise Spear-Swerling, whose 2015 book The Power of RTI and Reading Profiles: A Blueprint for Solving Reading Problems is one of the best summaries of how best to teach children to read; Kenji Hakuta of Stanford University and one of the architects of the English Language Development Standards adopted in California that are now incorporated in a powerful ELA/ELD Framework; the writers of the California ELA/ELD Framework, Hallie Yopp Slowik, Nancy Brynelson, and Pam Spycher; Susan Pimentel and David and Meredith Liben from Student Achievement Partners; and Linda Diamond from the Consortium for Reaching Excellence in language arts.

In other disciplines, outstanding educational leaders include the following:

In science—Helen Quinn, a world-famous physicist from Stanford, wrote the national science framework on which the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS) was based and co-chaired the California Science Curriculum Framework Committee.

In history/social sciences—Michelle Herzog is president of the National Council for the Social Studies, which produced the C3 Framework for Social Studies, and Nancy McTygue, from the University of California, Davis, directed the writing of the History-Social Science Framework for California Public Schools.

In music, the arts and humanities, and physical education—Kristine Alexander is from the California Arts Project, and Diane Wilson-Graham is from the Physical Education-Health Project. Lynne Munson leads Great Minds, which brings schoolteachers together in collaboration with scholars to craft exemplary instructional materials and share them with the field.

Finally, under the leadership of Michael Cohen, the Achieve organization has been a major force for implementing the deeper learning envisioned by the CCSS.

Website Contributors and Bloggers

A number of influential bloggers and authors promote the Build-and-Support approach and caution against relying on more punitive measures:

Diane Ravitch, mentioned above, is one of the country’s most prominent educational historians. Her blog has a huge number of followers. A great deal of the content of Building Better Schools has relied on the extensive articles and authors she has published.

In addition to Marc Tucker, also mentioned above, there is Matthew Di Carlo a capable and fair researcher who writes on Albert Shanker Institute’s blog. He has written many pieces on the issues raised in this article. He also authored and sponsored a series on the importance of social capital, featuring Esther Quintero whom I have also mentioned previously.

Carrie Leana and Frits Pit contribute to the excellent Albert Shanker Institute blog. See, for example, “A New Focus on Social Capital in School Reform Efforts.”

For another preeminent authority, see Stephanie Hirsh’s website Learning Forward. It is one of the best sources of advice and protocols for building collaborative efforts at school sites.

Since 2012, Jennifer Berkshire has relentlessly and with great humor unmasked deceptive reform claims and practices on her blog, EduShyster.

Jeff Bryant writes for Salon and the Education Opportunity Network about the benefits of the more supportive option.

On his blog, Living in Dialogue, Anthony Cody writes about punitive reform measures and corporate overreach in schools.

Audrey Amrein-Beardsley critiques VAMs on her blog VAMboozled.

Lisa Hansel writes for the Core Knowledge blog. Her post “Seeking Confirmation” explains the complex nature of school improvement and investigative pitfalls.

On his blog, Dan Willingham gives commonsense advice and published a powerful series of articles on instruction.

David Kirp, of the University of California, Berkeley, wrote the recent book Improbable Scholars. It chronicles how Union City, New Jersey, and two other districts rose to excellence by following a supportive approach to reform.

Charles Kerchner writes an Education Week blog about California’s exceptional path.

Robert Pondiscio writes for Flypaper at the Thomas B. Fordham Institute’s Educational Excellence Network.

Julian Vasquez Heilig is a professor of educational leadership and policy studies at California State University, Sacramento. His Cloaking Inequity blog examines the inequities of the reform agenda.

Mercedes Schneider is a Louisiana-based researcher who brilliantly refutes many of the reformers’ excessive claims on her blog, deutsch29.

Bruce Baker is professor of education finance and policy at Rutgers University. His website, School Finance 101, debunks many of the “reformers” arguments.

John Thompson is a historian who became an award-winning inner-city teacher. Writing for the Huffington Post, he deflates reform rhetoric.

The blogger Jersey Jazzman (Mark Weber) provides in-depth analysis of reform nostrums and the value of the alternative Build-and-Support approach.

KQED, a public TV station in the San Francisco Bay Area, has an excellent blog, MindShift, which is a fount of valuable educational ideas.

One of the best places to find theoretical support and practical advice related to the Build-and-Support philosophy is American Educator, the American Federation of Teachers magazine available online. Issued quarterly, it has been a consistent vehicle for top-notch scholarship in this area.

State and Local Leaders

As commissioner of education in the 2000s, David P. Driscoll helped lead Massachusetts to greatness. Tom Torlakson, California’s current superintendent of public instruction, has been a strong voice for the more collaborative approach centered on improving instruction.

Local leaders of exemplary California school districts successfully translated these supportive ideas into practice. Among them are Chris Steinhauser and Carl Cohn from Long Beach, Ronald Johnson from Sanger, Gabriela Mafi and Laura Shwalm from Garden Grove, Sandra Thorstenson from the Whittier High School District, Michael Hanson from Fresno whose attention to the potentially college bound has almost doubled the number of students who actually enroll in college, Dave Gordon and Sue Stickel from the Sacramento County Office of Education, Tom Adams from the California Department of Education, Joshua Starr and Jerry Weast from Montgomery County in Maryland, and Donald Shalvey, who previously ran the Aspire Public Schools, a charter school network. I must also acknowledge the many extremely capable administrators and teachers who work for and with these educational leaders. (Be sure to look at Turning Around a High-Poverty District: Learning from Sanger by Joan Talbert from Stanford and Jane David, a fascinating description of Sanger’s success story published by S. H. Cowell Foundation.

Successful districts have enjoyed the support of networks such as Jennifer O’Day’s California Collaborative on District Reform, which has sponsored scores of meetings between large districts and researchers in California to advance a Build-and-Support strategy and provides reports on major issues discussed. Rick Miller from the California Office to Reform Education (CORE), which comprises some of the largest districts in the state, is examining broader assessment alternatives, and the New York City Collaborative on Performance-Based Assessment is offering replacements for fill-in-the-bubble tests. Also see the list of networks compiled by the Carnegie Foundation.

In addition, David Plank from Policy Analysis for California Education has provided very helpful reports on implementation of Common Core issues. Three advocacy group leaders—Ted Lempert from Children Now, Ryan Smith from Education Trust West, and Arun Ramanathan from Pivot Learning—have supported Common Core because of the potential of those standards to improve the performance of low-income students and students of color.

The expert advocates I have named in these pages make up an impressive list of Build-and-Support proponents. I offer my apologies to the countless others who have also contributed to redirecting reform on a positive path but are not included here. The list could go on, but the main point is that there is extensive and unassailable backing for a supportive approach and validation of the dangers of the punitive strategies that are being promoted and implemented throughout our country.

In summary, the experts cited have found that all successful schools, districts, states, and nations have framed their initiatives around respect and trust. They eschewed short-term “silver bullet” approaches. Instead, they focused on long-term, comprehensive measures and adequate resources to encourage engagement, cooperative effort, relational trust, and continuous improvement. All efforts were aimed at improving the quality of instruction of individual teachers centered on a broad, liberal arts curriculum as well as developing the capacities of the whole school staff—the building of social capital. These strategies are emphasized in business and management schools, are widely used in industry, and are especially appropriate for high-performing professional enterprises. Such organizations are staffed by professionals who deal with complicated and difficult problems on a daily basis and require skilled practitioners to repeatedly adapt craft knowledge to complex situations.

Highly productive schools and districts understand that the secret to top performance is participation and teamwork. Only by unleashing their power can institutions improve and enhance the performance of each individual. To that end, they devote significant efforts to helping teachers trapped in isolated classrooms learn how to work together in becoming better at what they do. These exemplary districts understand that punitive, high-stakes schemes often undermine engagement and cooperative effort.

BBS Companion Articles

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

Reference Notes

A Blueprint for Success
Tucker, M. (2016, Mar 3). Why the Common Core Will Be Declared a Failure. http://blogs.edweek.org/edweek/top_performers/2016/03/why_the_common_core_will_be_declared_a_failure_and_why_that_will_be_dead_wrong.html?utm_source=feedblitz&utm_medium=FeedBlitzRss&utm_campaign=top_performers

Prominent Experts and Authors
Fullan, M. (2011, May). Choosing the Wrong Drivers for Whole System Reform. Centre for Strategic Education. www.janhylen.se/wp-content/uploads/…/Fullan-Wrong-Drivers-Paper.pdf

Fullan, M., & Quinn, J. (2016). Coherence: The Right Drivers in Action for Schools, Districts, and Systems. Thousand Oaks, CA: Corwin.

Mourshed, M., Chijioke, C., & Barber, M. (2010, Nov). How the World’s Most Improved School Systems Keep Getting Better. http://mckinseyonsociety.com/how-the-worlds-most-improved-school-systems-keep-getting-better/ See also Paine, S. L., & Schleicher, A. (2011, Mar). What the U.S. Can Learn from the World’s Most Successful Education Reform Efforts. McGraw-Hill Research Foundation. http://hub.mspnet.org/index.cfm/22436

Stanford Center for Opportunity Policy in Education. Linda Darling-Hammond. https://edpolicy.stanford.edu/node/46

Darling-Hammond, L. (2010). The Flat World and Education: How America’s Commitment to Equity Will Determine Our Future. New York: Teachers College Press.

Darling-Hammond, L. (2013). Getting Teacher Evaluation Right: What Really Matters for Effectiveness and Improvement. New York: Teachers College Press.

Darling-Hammond, L., & Adamson, F. (2014). Beyond the Bubble Test: How Performance Assessments Support 21st Century Learning. Hoboken, NJ: Jossey-Bass.

Tom Torlakson’s Task Force on Educator Excellence. (2012, Sep 17). Greatness by Design: Supporting Outstanding Teaching to Sustain a Golden State. California Department of Education. http://www.cde.ca.gov/eo/in/ee.asp

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

Williams, T., Haertel, E., Kirst, M. W., Rosin, M., & Perry, M. (2011, Feb). Preparation, Placement, Proficiency: Improving Middle Grades Math Performance. EdSource. http://eric.ed.gov/?id=ED516660

Haertel, E. (2013, Oct 21). The Flaws of Using Value-Added Models for Teacher Assessment. https://edpolicy.stanford.edu/multimedia/video/1033

Elmore, R. F. (2008, Jul 31). Leadership as the Practice of Improvement. OECD. http://www.oecd-ilibrary.org/education/improving-school-leadership/leadership-as-the-practice-of-improvement_9789264039551-4-en

Learning Deeply. http://blogs.edweek.org/edweek/learning_deeply

Hargreaves, A., & Fullan, M. (2012). Professional Capital: Transforming Teaching in Every School. New York: Teachers College Press.

Cohen, D. K., & Moffitt, S. L. (2009). The Ordeal of Equality: Did Federal Regulation Fix the Schools? Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Bryk, A. S., Sebring, P. B., Allensworth, E., Luppescu, S., & Easton, J. Q. (2010). Organizing Schools for Improvement: Lessons from Chicago. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.

Bryk, A. S., Gomez, L. M., Grunow, A., & LeMahieu, P. G. (2015). Learning to Improve: How America’s Schools Can Get Better at Getting Better. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Education Press.

Tucker, M. S. (2011, May 24). Standing on the Shoulders of Giants: An American Agenda for Education Reform. National Center for Education and the Economy. http://eric.ed.gov/?id=ED522108

Tucker, M. (2011, Oct 17). Creating Education Success at Home. Education Week. http://www.edweek.org/ew/articles/2011/10/19/08tucker_ep.h31.html

Tucker, M. Top Performers. http://blogs.edweek.org/edweek/top_performers/

Tucker, M. (2015, Mar 19). Why Is Achievement Rising in Some Countries, Going Down in Others? http://blogs.edweek.org/edweek/top_performers/2015/03/why_is_achievement_rising_in_some_countries_going_down_in_others.html

Masters, G. N. (2014, Dec). Is School Reform Working? Policy Insights, Issue 1. ACER. http://research.acer.edu.au/policyinsights/1/

Ravitch, D. (2014). Reign of Terror: The Hoax of the Privatization Movement and the Danger to America’s Public Schools. New York: Vintage Books.

Ravitch, D. (2011). The Death and Life of the Great American School System: How Testing and Choice Are Undermining Education. New York: Basic Books.

Diane Ravitch’s Blog. https://dianeravitch.net/

Anrig, G. (2013). Beyond the Education Wars: Evidence That Collaboration Builds Effective Schools. New York: The Century Foundation Press.

Core Knowledge. http://www.coreknowledge.org

Berliner D. C., Glass, G. V., & Associates. (2014). 50 Myths and Lies That Threaten America’s Public Schools: The Real Crisis in Education. New York: Teachers College Press.

Noguera, P. (2012, Sep 25). The Origins of My Views on Education. http://blogs.edweek.org/edweek/Bridging-Differences/2012/09/i_have_been_in_the.html

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

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

Content and Pedagogy Advocates
Tools for the Common Core Standards. http://commoncoretools.me/author/wgmccallum/

Boaler, J. (2015). What’s Math Got to Do with It? New York: Penguin Books.

Youcubed. https://www.youcubed.org/

Dweck, C. (2007). Mindset: The New Psychology of Success. New York: Random House.

Lester, F. K., Jr., (Ed.). (2007). Second Handbook of Research on Mathematics Teaching and Learning. National Council of Teachers of Mathematics. Charlotte, NC: Information Age Publishing.

Shanahan on Literacy. http://www.shanahanonliteracy.com/

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

California Department of Education. (2014, Jul 9). English Language Arts/English Language Development Framework for California Public Schools: K–12. http://www.cde.ca.gov/ci/rl/cf/elaeldfrmwrksbeadopted.asp

Consortium for Reaching Excellence. www.corelearn.com

Great Minds. (2015). Lynne Munson. http://greatminds.net/board-of-trustees/lynne-munson

Achieve. http://www.achieve.org/

Website Contributors and Bloggers
Diane Ravitch’s Blog. www.dianeravitch.net

Albert Shanker Institute. Matthew Di Carlo. http://www.shankerinstitute.org/author/matthew-di-carlo

Quintero, E. (2015, May 21). Trust: The Foundation of Student Achievement. http://www.shankerinstitute.org/blog/trust-foundation-student-achievement See also Quintero, E. (2014, Jul 17). Do Students Learn More When Their Teachers Work Together? http://www.shankerinstitute.org/blog/do-students-learn-more-when-their-teachers-work-together

Leana, C. R. & Pil, F. K. (2014, Oct 14). A New Focus on Social Capital in School Reform Efforts. http://www.shankerinstitute.org/blog/new-focus-social-capital-school-reform-efforts

Learning Forward. www.learningforward.org

EduShyster. www.edushyster.com

Education Opportunity Network. http://educationopportunitynetwork.org

Living in Dialogue. http://www.livingindialogue.com/

VAMboozled. http://vamboozled.com/

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

Daniel Willingham. http://www.danielwillingham.com/articles.html

Kirp, D. L. (2013). Improbable Scholars. New York: Oxford University Press.

Kerchner, C.T. (2016, May 24). On California: Analyzing K-12 Politics and Policies in the Golden State. http://blogs.edweek.org/edweek/on_california/

Thomas Fordham Institute. Robert Pondiscio. http://edexcellence.net/about-us/fordham-staff/robert-pondiscio

Cloaking Inequity. http://cloakinginequity.com/

deutsch29. https://deutsch29.wordpress.com/

School Finance 101. https://schoolfinance101.wordpress.com/

The Huffington Post. John Thompson. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/john-thompson/

Jersey Jazzman. http://jerseyjazzman.blogspot.com/

MindShift. http://ww2.kqed.org/mindshift/

American Educator. http://www.aft.org/our-news/periodicals/american-educator

State and Local Leaders
David, J. L., & Talbert, J. E. (2012). Turning Around a High-Poverty District: Learning from Sanger. S.H. Cowell Foundation. http://www.smcoe.org/assets/files/about-smcoe/superintendents-office/Sanger%20Turnaround%20.pdf

California Collaborative on District Reform. www.cacollaborative.org

California Office to Reform Education. www.coredistricts.org

New York City Collaborative on Performance Based Assessment. http://performanceassessment.org/

Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching. (2016, Feb 4). Organizing a Network for Collective Action. http://www.carnegiefoundation.org/blog/organizing-a-network-for-collective-action/

Policy Analysis for California Education. www.edpolicyinca.org

Children Now. www.childrennow.org

The Education Trust West. https://west.edtrust.org/

Pivot Learning. http://www.pivotlearning.org/

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

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

by Bill Honig

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

Major Problems with Teach for America (TFA)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

How About Merit Pay?

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

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

Is Test-Based Retention Effective?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Is Technology Innovation Key to School Improvement?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Summing Up: The Failure of Conventional Reform

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

As Diane Ravitch explains:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Recent Developments

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

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

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

BBS Companion Articles

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

Reference Notes

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

by Bill Honig

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

Charters Do Not Perform Better Than Their Public School Counterparts

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Charter School Stats

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

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

Dishonest Success Stories: The Refusal to Backfill

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

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

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

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

The Problematic “No Excuses” Approach

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Debunking the Theory: Public Schools Are Not Inherently Unproductive

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Minimal Accountability for Fraud, Mismanagement, or Low Performance

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Charters Drain Funds from Non-Charter Public Schools

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Charters and Crony Capitalism Create Sweetheart Deals

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Charter Schools Should Be Nonprofit, Accountable, and Fully Transparent

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

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

Is Replacing Neighborhood Schools with Charters Worth the Risk?

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

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

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

An Unsustainable Business Model

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

Summing Up the Many Problems with Charter Schools

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

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

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

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

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

Recent Developments

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

BBS Companion Articles

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

Reference Notes

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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