Closing the Achievement Gap: Teaching Content
…you never have more than five instances of “inappropriate or off-task behavior” by students within a half-hour of class time.
…you respond to students’ correct answers by “probing for higher-level understanding” of the idea being discussed at least three times every half hour.
…you lose no more than three minutes of teaching time to poor organization or planning.
Who says so? Why, Michelle Rhee says so.
Insisting that states allow the use of standardized test data to evaluate teachers, the signature feature of the Race to the Top fund initiative, was personally approved by President Obama, according to EdWeek’s Michele McNeil.
When Education Department staff members finally settled on the data firewall rule, which would effectively knock out two states with giant student populations and powerful Congressional delegations, I’m told that education staffers took it up to those above their pay grades. To Obama Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel, and eventually, to the president himself. And Obama, apparently, didn’t need much convincing.
Meanwhile, in a detailed analysis of the guidelines, Stephen Sawchuck says the data firewall issue is not just about performance pay.
States receiving Race to the Top funds must commit to using their teacher-effectiveness data for everything from evaluating teachers to determining the type of professional development they get to making decisions about granting tenure and pursuing dismissals. And, they will also be expected to track graduates of their education schools into classrooms to help institutions figure out which pathways and courses produce the best teachers.
The issue is not the use of the data, but the value of the data. Is it possible to make good decisions with bad data? Perhaps it doesn’t matter. One possibility raised by Fordham’s Mike Petrilli is that states will “superficially swear allegiance to these reform ideas but implement them half-heartedly down the road.”
Near the end of World War I, President Woodrow Wilson sought to reassure Americans that what was known at the time as “The Great War” was a just cause. In a speech to Congress, he outlined America’s war aims in “Fourteen Points” that were as broad as insuring freedom of navigation on international waters and fair trade, and as specific as redrawing the borders of several European nations and restoring their pre-war populations. French Prime Minister Georges Clemenceau, in one of history’s finer bon mots, quipped, “Fourteen points? Why, God Almighty has only Ten!”
Secretary of Education Arne Duncan goes Wilson one better. Five, actually. He has Nineteen Points. God has fallen nine back, well off the pace.
According to detailed guidelines being released today in Washington, states that hope for a piece of the $4.35 billion Race to the Top Fund will have to abide by 19 detailed criteria on academic standards, data-tracking, teacher recruitment and retention, and turning around low-performing schools. “You can’t pick or choose here,” Duncan tells USA Today.
EdWeek’s Michele McNeil notes the guidelines “send a strong message that any state hoping to land a grant must allow student test scores to be used in decisions about teacher compensation and evaluation.” While opposition to that will be summarily dismissed as the product of accountability-averse teachers unions, Dan Willingham has cogently described why this particular reform is not ready for prime time. Still, states like New York and California, which currently forbid by law using test data to evalute teachers will not be eligible for Race to the Top funds, as McNeil points out:
Being able to link teacher and student data is “absolutely fundamental—it’s a building block,” U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan said in an interview. “We believe great teachers matter tremendously. When you’re reluctant or scared to make that link, you do a grave disservice to the teaching profession and to our nation’s children.”
To be sure, there is much to like about this Ed Reform Early Christmas, and the sense of urgency is welcome and laudable. But let’s be clear, No Child Left Behind, however well-intentioned, did little to advance the idea that children benefit from a robust, well-rounded curriculum. It did much to advance the idea that children must be taught whatever might appear on a year-end test. If time was limited, anything that did not contribute to this near-term payoff was jettisoned. Thus, aggressive accountability measures actively worked against the patient, steady development of background knowledge that creates both well-educated children and, ultimately, higher test-scores. It beggars credulity to think that using data to hold individual teachers directly responsible for student gains will result in a sudden outbreak of big picture thinking in classrooms across the country.
The idea that reading comprehension is a function of background knowledge has not taken deep hold in America’s classrooms. And what teacher — especially the new, young and relatively inexperienced teachers who disproportionately fill struggling urban schools — will have the wherewithal to insist on the steady buildup of knowledge across the curriculum? Indeed, if we are to have 19 points, why not round up to 20 and insist that a Race to the Top cannot happen without attending to a well-rounded curriculum? Instead we are almost certain to have more — much more — of the deleterious effects of our data-driven, muscular accountability age: endless focus on reading strategies that have limited impact, mind-numbing test prep, and no attention to the essential long-range development of background knowledge that will make reading gains possible years down the road.
“Language comprehension is a slow-growing plant,” observes E.D. Hirsch. “Even with a coherent curriculum, the buildup of knowledge and vocabulary is a gradual, multiyear process that occurs at an almost imperceptible rate. The results show up later.”
This is clear, this is obvious, and this is certain. But there is simply no room for this kind of thinking in an accountability system that insists –for every good reason under the Sun–on results right now and encourages individual teachers to compete instead of cooperate.
Fast-forward. It is 2016. After a years of holding teachers accountable for short-term gains, and creating incentives that actively work against the buildup of knowledge, with disappointing results, we wake up and realize we are going about this the wrong way. A few look back and say we should have listened to our Cassandras. But other energetic, well-meaning reformers see it another way. Instead of realizing we have fatally neglected a robust curriculum, that we are reaping what we have sown, they will conclude that as a nation we simply have no good 8th grade reading teachers. Aggressive, immediate action is needed.
Because after all, the data doesn’t lie, does it?
Lots of coverage of the latest NAEP scores and what it means for efforts to close the achievement gap. Results show efforts to close the gap “may have a limited shelf life for kids,” notes USA Today’s Greg Toppo.
“Since the early 1990s, schools have helped minority elementary schoolers close the achievement gap in basic math and reading skills, with real progress showing up recently on a federally administered test given to thousands of kids around the time they’re in fourth grade. But by the time they get to middle school, it seems, their progress all but vanishes.”
“Some of the scores are higher than ever, some show no gains over time,” observes Diane Ravitch, a former member of the National Assessment Governing Board, which oversees and sets policy for NAEP. “A closer look reveals that the rate of progress is no greater than–and in some cases, less than–the pre-NCLB years.
In the New York Times, Sam Dillon fixates on evolving regional differences. “The nation’s most dramatic black-white gaps are no longer seen in Southern states like Alabama or Mississippi,” he notes, “but rather in Northern and Midwestern states like Wisconsin, Nebraska, Connecticut and Illinois.
Why does the achievement gap persist? “African-American students are less likely than their white counterparts to be taught by teachers who know their subject matter,” Ed Trust’s Kati Haycock tells the Associated Press. “They are less likely to be exposed to a rich and challenging curriculum,” she said. Meanwhile Richard Whitmire, citing Haycock, points out that states that focus on early literacy skills are making more progress.
In a non-NAEP post over at Flypaper, Mike Petrilli tosses off an interesting and provocative comment on what we mean — or what we should mean — when we say “achievement gap.” Mike’s eyebrows went up when he heard DC Schools Chancellor Michelle Rhee say that if present trends continue “within six years we will have completely eliminated the achievement gap between black and white students in the District.” Says Petrilli:
Now that’s quite a statement. To the man on the street, it surely sounds miraculous. You mean black students in the District of Columbia, most of whom live in abject poverty in places like Anacostia, are going to be learning at the same level as the handful of white students in the system, most of whom come from affluent, well-educated families clustered on Capitol Hill and the upscale neighborhood of Chevy Chase, where houses start in the $750,000 range? Wow! Except that’s not what she means at all. She’s referring to the proficiency gap—and by boosting the percentage of black students getting to “proficiency,” she is automatically closing said gap because almost all of the white students are already over that bar. But that doesn’t mean that the average black student will be achieving at the same level as the average white student, which is what “eliminating the achievement gap” sounds like.
Talk of closing the achievement gap is “sloppy and misleading,” Petrilli notes. “Let’s stop talking about the achievement gap entirely, and instead focus on raising achievement across the board,” he concludes. ”It’s more honest, and, in my view, more equitable, too.”
Guest blogging at Eduwonk, Curt Johnson is the latest to wonder aloud about how carelessly we throw around the word “innovation” at present. (See also the redoubtable Claus Von Zastrow on the unfortunate tendency to value ”novelty over quality.”). “For Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, innovation seems to mean grabbing the lessons from schools with records of high performance and grafting them on to problem schools,” Johnson notes. That’s not innovation, but replication.
Replication is a worthy effort. But ‘new, here’ is not the same as ‘new, anywhere’. There needs to be room for real innovation. Which means: Letting schools and teachers try things. Which means, in turn, that we will all have to get comfortable with not-knowing, ahead, what the innovators will come up with.
More to the point, we have to get comfortable with failure, which comes with the territory when you innovate. But in an era where accountability is the coin of the realm, risk-taking is not a career move for the feint of heart. “Do something,” Franklin Delano Roosevelt famously commented. “If it works, do more of it. If it doesn’t, do something else.” Alas, we seem to be headed down a different path: “Do something. If it doesn’t work, we’ll fire you and find someone new to do something else.”
Innovators, line up to the right….Hello?? Hey, where’s everybody going?
pre-dom-i-nant (adj.) having ascendancy, power, authority, or influence over others; preeminent.
Gotham Schools quotes the Obama administration in charge of the $4+ billion education innovation fund saying that unless New York’s legislature allows teachers to be evaluated based on test data, the state won’t be getting a slice of cake.
“Joanne Weiss said the Obama administration aims to reward states that use student achievement as a ‘predominant’ part of teacher evaluations with the extra stimulus funds — and pass over those that don’t. New York state law currently bans using student data as a factor in tenure decisions. Test scores aren’t everything, Weiss said. “But it seems illogical and indefensible to assume that those aren’t part of the solution at all,” she said, echoing nearly word-for-word Education Secretary Arne Duncan’s remarks last week to the National Education Association.”
So tests scores aren’t everything. Just the most powerful, authoritative and influential thing. Sounds like Dan Willingham’s memo failed to find its way to the White House.
The Broader, Bolder Approach to Education is out today with its recommendations on school accountability. As I write this, the report is not yet on BBA’s website, but many of the recommendations will be familiar to readers of Richard Rothstein’s Grading Education: Getting Accountability Right.
I suspect the recommendation that will be subject to the most discussion is the call for states to “provide for the inspection of districts and schools to ensure their contributions to satisfactory student performance in academic subject areas, as well as in the arts, citizenship, physical fitness and mental and physical health, work and other behavioral skills that will enable them to achieve success in a pluralistic society and complex global economy.” The report points that “school inspections as the core of state accountability systems” have precedent in places like England.
There is a lot to agree with in BBA’s insistence that a narrow focus on testing has had a deleterious impact on schools. But personally, I wonder if a schools inspectorate will make matters better or worse. Spend time in a struggling school in the weeks before a “quality review” and you’ll see an extraordinary amount of teaching and learning time going to cleaning classrooms, updating portfolios, making sure bulletin boards have up-to-date student work, etc. Having lived through a few such inspections, its tempting to suggest judging a school from a formal walk-around is like judging a household from a Thanksgiving dinner. Remember the grief your mom used to give you to clean up and mind your manners before company came? Now imagine mom’s livelihood depends on it. That’s a school in the weeks before quality review. It’s hard not to be skeptical that a visit from the inspectorate would be any less subject to gaming and distractions that a relentless focus on test prep.
Update: The report is here. Patrick “Eduflack” Riccards has a detailed summary here.
The NY Times plays up Secretary Duncan’s coming warning to charter school operators that “low-quality institutions are giving their movement a black eye.” Writes the Times’ Sam Dillon:
The charter movement is putting itself at risk by allowing too many second-rate and third-rate schools to exist,” Mr. Duncan says in prepared remarks that he is scheduled to deliver in Washington at the annual gathering of the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools. In an interview, Mr. Duncan said he would use the address to praise innovations made by high-quality charter schools, urge charter leaders to become more active in weeding out bad apples in their movement and invite the leaders to help out in the administration’s broad effort to remake several thousand of the nation’s worst public schools.
The Times makes much of last week’s Stanford study indicating that nearly half of all charter schools nationwide “have results that are no different from the local public school options, and over a third, 37 percent, deliver learning results that are significantly worse than their students would have realized had they remained in traditional public schools.”
It will be interesting to see how charter advocates react to Duncan’s call. At worst, it seems like a reminder of the accountability principles undergirding the movement. Indeed, if the movement practices what it preaches, closing bad charter schools should be considered a victory– for the charter movement.
A study by the Center on Education Policy casts doubt on the conventional wisdom that No Child Left Behind causes teachers to shortchange high and low-performers, given the law’s incentives to get students to the proficient level.
“If accountability policies were indeed shortchanging high- and low-achieving students, we would expect to see stagnation or decline at the basic and advanced levels,” says Jack Jennings, CEP’s President. “Instead, the percentages of students scoring at the basic-and-above and advanced levels have increased much more often than they have decreased, especially in the lower grades.”
Hear, hear for higher test scores at all chievement levels. But how does that show high achieving students aren’t suffering under NCLB? Testing is a measure of where students are, not where they could or even should be. If there’s anything I learned teaching at a struggling school, it’s that the stronger students are largely assumed to be doing fine despite being neglected–a point nailed precisely in the Jack Kent Cooke Foundation’s “Achievement Trap” report a few years back.
Such children are dandelions. They will find a way to grow even in the harshest conditions. I can walk out onto the sidewalk and gather a bouquet of dandelions growing up through the pavement cracks. That doesn’t prove I’m a good gardener.
Texas, South Carolina, Alaska and Missouri are the only states not on board with the effort to create voluntary national education standards. The National Governors Association Center for Best Practices (NGA) and the Council of Chief State School Officers (CCSSO) officially announced the effort this morning. From the news release:
By signing on to the Common Core State Standards Initiative, governors and state commissioners of education across the country are committing to joining a state-led process to develop a common core of state standards in English-language arts and mathematics for grades K-12. These standards will be research and evidence-based, internationally benchmarked, aligned with college and work expectations and include rigorous content and skills.
The Washington Post’s Maria Glod turns in a curtain-raiser on the effort, making it sound as if we should expect a whole lot of process and not a lot of content. “By July, groups of experts already at work are expected to unveil ‘readiness standards’ for high school graduates in reading and math,” she writes. “ Then, with each grade considered a steppingstone toward that goal, they will set out the skills students must master each year to stay on track.”
Skills, readiness, staying on track. You get the picture. Edweek’s Michele McNeil has more on the tick-tock of the adoption process:
Both the NGA and the CCSSO plan to create a ‘validation’ committee made up of independent national and international experts in content standards to review and comment on the drafts. The experts will be nominated by states and organizations, but ultimately chosen by those two organizations. Once the standards are agreed to, it will be up to the states to get them adopted. The signed memo stipulates that the common core must represent at least 85 percent of a state’s standards, and that the common core needs to be adopted within three years.
Until we see what they come up with, there’s every reason to be skeptical that we’re going to get meaningful content standards. ”There will be no prescription for how teachers get there, avoiding nettlesome discussions about whether phonics or whole language is a better method of teaching reading; whether students should be drilled in math facts; or whether eighth-graders should read “The Great Gatsby” or “To Kill a Mockingbird,” Glod writes. It’s entirely likely the entire exercise will amount to nothing more that replacing 46 sets of squishy, non-specific standards with one set of squishy, non-specific standards. But if we end up with a single yardstick — one set of national assessments — the transparency in state-to-state comparisons will be worthwhile. Alas, that may end up as the only reason to be excited about national standards.
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