A Turn in the Road? Rerouting Federal School Reform

Since July 1, three developments suggest that the first-year victories of the Obama-Duncan “transformational reform” effort may be in jeopardy. First, the House of Representatives adopted a supplemental appropriations bill that includes an emergency infusion of $10 billion for saving teachers’ jobs, $800 million of which is financed by modest reductions in Race to the Top, the Teacher Incentive Fund, and one other embryonic administration program. The White House threatens a veto.

The second and third developments were non-events: the annual conventions of both the National Education Association and the American Federation of Teachers excluded any speaker from the administration. Given the longstanding and symbiotic relationship of teacher unions and the Democratic Party, the double cold shoulder is an unmistakable warning about the health of the alliance.

The administration bet heavily on a clever tactic to leverage scarce dollars to entice states to change their rules about charter schools, teacher evaluation, and data-gathering. Many states enacted laws to qualify for Race to the Top grants in the competition for $4.3 billion, the largest discretionary fund ever administered by an education secretary. The administration hopes to extend its vision for reform by using competitive grants—as opposed to funds distributed by congressionally approved formulae—to encourage further policy compliance.

The problem is not the tactics. The problem is the strategy. Consider the nature of the administration’s policy aims, and why they miss the mark.

Blame Teachers

 “Merit pay” and “teacher accountability” are two ideas that sound sensible and are popular. The problem is that, absent workable models, attempts to institute these ideas are premature.

The Teacher Incentive Fund is the federal program driving merit pay. It encourages experiments via locally designed collaborations with teachers to find better ways to incorporate student performance in the compensation of classroom teachers. No current model fairly and reliably can calibrate the contribution of individual teachers, particularly in schools with concentrations of students from poor families (in part because student turnover rates tend to be so high and so many students come from non-English literate families). Merit pay is a potentially useful idea in search of a workable, tested model.

Reasonable persons agree that teachers should be accountable. Secretary Duncan has asserted that the key to improving accountability is to tie teacher compensation to the performance of their students on standardized tests. For the same reasons merit pay is difficult to put in practice, so too is Secretary Duncan’s drive to connect test results with individual teachers. Encouraging more experimentation is welcome. However, insisting that every state be capable of tying test results to individual teachers should not be one of the four absolute preconditions for applying for a Race to the Top grant. By elevating this requirement, the administration suggests that classroom teachers are the major suspects in the poor academic performance of American students.

In recent months, Secretary Duncan has moderated his tone and publicly accepted that there are many other factors that need to be weighed in an improved teacher evaluation system. But by placing teacher accountability at the top of the list of “reforms,” he has implied that teachers know what to do when facing very challenging instructional problems, but hold back because of a faulty compensation and evaluation system.

Open More Charter Schools

After twenty years or so, charter schools educate about 2 percent of the nation’s public school students. The shared characteristics of effective charters is that they set very high standards for students and teachers and spend up to 50 percent more time on instruction than do their district counterparts. The strong emphasis given to the charter school movement by both President Obama and Secretary Duncan overlooks three major problems:

1. The best evidence to date suggests that less than one-fifth of charter school students perform academically better than similar students in district schools, but more than a third of them perform worse. More importantly, charter schools typically do not enroll as many special education students as do their district counterparts, and practically no non-English-speaking ones. And, of course, they only enroll students from families that have sought alternatives to their district schools, a “selection bias” that cannot be easily measured.
2. The most important lesson from the high-performing charters—that more teaching time produces more learning—is not one easily adopted by school districts during the Great Recession. With teacher and staff layoffs cascading this year, there is no money to begin the transition from the standard six-hour day, 180-day school year to the eight-hour, 210-day school year found at KIPP and other highly effective charter schools.
3. Secretary Duncan’s notion that charter school management organizations that open only clean-slate schools with students from enterprising families and that have no labor contracts or bureaucracy to contend with are candidates to take over and transform failed schools in the nation’s poorest neighborhoods is a worthy experiment. Perhaps. However, to load such a difficult mission on relatively young and unproven organizations is risky business.

here Are Only Four Ways to Fix a Broken School

Secretary Duncan repeatedly asserts that one of three organizing principles to guide reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act is to increase local control and flexibility. “We believe that states do not need a prescription for success,” is how he put it when giving testimony to the House Appropriations Committee.

Except, that is, when it comes to the most intractable problem of the past half-century: educating poor children in the poorest schools. Here, the U.S. Department of Education asserts certainty about the means to “turn-around” the bottom 5 percent of American schools, almost all of which are found in neighborhoods of deep and persistent poverty. The answer? Districts are “free” to choose from a menu of four options: “transform” the school (but not more than 50 percent of them in any district), “re-start” the school (by firing half the teachers), hand over the school to a for-profit education management organization or a charter management organization, or shut the school down (with no answer about what happens to its students).

There is no evidence whatsoever that adopting one of these approaches will elevate significantly the academic performance of most students in most schools. Instead, there is a clash of evidence colored by local circumstances, the role of the district, availability of teacher support, the inherited academic preparation of students, and so on. Moreover, the federal policy cuts out the district from taking leadership to improve all low-performing schools. The lesson from Montgomery County, Maryland, Union City, and several other New Jersey districts is that a coherent, relentless, district-led effort, based on evidence of student need and performance and high expectations and standards, can work.

There is one additional lesson from school districts that perform well across-the-board: they start early and intensively to prepare students from poor families to be strong readers and writers of English, including at least one year of high-quality preschool and full-day kindergarten. Yet this approach appears to be ineligible for School Improvement Grants precisely at the time that state and local resources for preschool and full-day kindergarten are diminishing. Instead of focusing on a stronger, earlier start for poor children, the federal policy concentrates disproportionate funds on high schools, the level least likely to respond to even well-financed intervention.

There is a reason why so many Obama supporters are bailing on their support for his educational initiatives—they focus on the wrong problems and ignore the less dramatic but most effective alternatives. There may still be time to return to the approach put forward by candidate Obama, with his consistent invocation of high-quality preschool as a cost-effective investment. Just as the president changed his tone and emphasis when addressing issues such as health care and the BP gusher, so can he redirect the conversation and policies on urban education.

See Gordon MacInnes, “Eight Reasons Not to Tie Teacher Compensation to Standardized Test Results,” The Century Foundation, October 27, 2009, http://www.tcf.org/publications/education/gordon%20brief.pdf.

See, for example, Multiple Choice: Charter School Performance in 16 States, Center for Research on Education Outcomes (CREDO), Stanford University, June 2009, http://credo.stanford.edu/reports/MULTIPLE_CHOICE_CREDO.pdf.