Deregulating Education

by Robert Pondiscio
December 21st, 2011

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Posted in Education News, Education Practice | 20 Comments »

“From space travel to health care to clean energy, the federal government has a successful track record of partnering with the private sector,” writes John Bailey at The Atlantic, so why not education?  Bailey, the director of Whiteboard Advisors, points out the most federal agencies “in some way engage the private sector in addressing their priorities.”

“When it comes to education, however, Uncle Sam’s handshake with entrepreneurs clenches into a fist. Instead of involving the private sector, education policymakers have actually created policy and funding barriers that skew support to nonprofits and prevent for-profits from fully participating in programs aimed at improving teaching or learning. These barriers exist at nearly every level of government — local, state, and federal — further isolating education from potential innovations that could help children and discouraging entrepreneurship.”

It’s an interesting argument.  Privatization and profiteering, however, are among the most loaded terms in education debate.  Charter school operators, test-makers and technology companies are routinely charged with prioritizing profits over the best interests of children. Indeed, there is something viscerally distasteful about looking at children and seeing dollar signs, which alone quickly derails conversations and briskly muscles quality arguments to the sidelines.

Perhaps the more interesting frame is one that Bailey doesn’t make.  The question is not whether to introduce the profit motive, but whether to deregulate education.  Unthinkable?  Like education, broadcasting was once considered so vital to the public interest that it was tightly controlled by the government. While Bailey notes a host of industries–from airlines to the Internet–that have benefited from private sector innovation, curiously broadcasting is not one of them.

Until 30 years ago, our radio and TV airwaves were universally viewed as public property; broadcasters had an obligation by law to operate “in the public interest.” If you are over 40, you probably remember a TV and radio landscape, pre-cable, featuring much more local news and public interest programming, especially at odd hours and Sunday mornings.  Rules requiring certain amounts of public affairs content were wiped away under deregulation, along with rules limiting the number of TV and radio stations a company could own. The Fairness Doctrine, which demanded an equitable, fair and balanced presentation of controversial issues was scrapped in 1987.

Things are quite different today.  Clear Channel Communications, the nation’s largest radio broadcaster, owns roughly one in five of all radio stations in America.  That literally could not have happened 30 years ago.  The large thrust of deregulation, for good or for ill, has been to spur enormous growth in the broadcasting industry.  Technological advances–the Internet, satellite broadcasting, cable television–have also boosted the number of options available.  But without a doubt, deregulation has allowed public property to be used to build private fortunes.

Whether we as a nation are better or worse for this is an open question. There are compelling arguments to be made for and against.   Flowering choice has not always led to higher quality, as even a few minutes of prime-time TV viewing will attest. On the other hand, having spent the early years of my career in local radio, I’m hard-pressed to argue that local communities were universally well-served by mom and pop broadcasters.  I can’t pretend not to think we were better served by more local news and public affairs programming.  But having spent years producing that programming, neither can I pretend anyone was listening.

Let me anticipate that the comparison of broadcasting to education will be dismissed as trivial.  I’m not sure I agree.  I could even make a case that our consumption of media in its various forms does as much or more to shape our national character and discourse than the education system, since it takes up far more of our time and at a higher level of engagement over the course of a lifetime.

What if education was essentially deregulated, and its quality was assured not by the Department of Education, but the Federal Trade Commission?  Would KIPP or Achievement First emerge as the Clear Channel of education, becoming the dominant provider?  Someone else?  Those who favor deregulation tend also to favor free markets and local control. Yet deregulation has also brought complaints that local, religious, women, and minority broadcasters have been either marginalized or forced out of business altogether.

Spoken or unspoken, deregulation is already the thrust of many proposed reforms.  At a Manhattan Institute event in New York City last week, a panel discussion of Marcus Winters’ new book, Teachers Matter, broadly agreed that barriers to entering the teaching profession should be eliminated, since there is no correlation between certification and a teacher’s efficacy.  What is that if not an argument for deregulation of the teaching profession, if not education itself?

To be clear, I’m not advocating deregulation. This is purely a thought exercise.  Rick Hess, commenting on Bailey’s piece, wrote that he is “frequently frustrated by our inability to talk sensibly about the role of for-profits in schooling.”  Very well, let’s talk about it.  But let’s not mince words.  What we’re really talking about is not about the role of for-profits in education . Lots of companies, from textbook publishers to computer makers already profit handsomely from education.

What we’re really talking about is deregulating it.

Achievement Gap Mania Fails the “Tiffany Test”

by Robert Pondiscio
September 27th, 2011

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Posted in Education Practice, Educational Policy, Students | 24 Comments »

The person who has had the greatest influence on my career in education was not a professor, policymaker or a fellow educator. It was an eleven-year-old girl named Tiffany Lopez, a fifth grader in my class during my second year of teaching in the South Bronx.

Walk into any classroom in any struggling urban school and you will spot someone like Tiffany almost immediately. Her eyes are always on the teacher, paying careful attention and following directions. She is bright and pleasant, happy to help and eager to please. Her desk is clean and well-organized; homework always complete. She grew up hearing every day how important education is. She believes it, and her behavior in class shows it. She does well in school. She gets praise and she gets good grades.

She also gets screwed.

Since she goes to a school where the majority of her classmates read and do math well below grade level, Tiffany is “not your problem,” as one of my administrators pointedly told me early in my teaching career. The message to a new teacher could not have been clearer: focus your efforts on the low achievers. Get them in the game. Tiffany will be fine.

Will she?

I thought of Tiffany Lopez, as I often do, while reading Rick Hess’s essay last week in National Affairs on “Achievement Gap Mania.” Nearly alone among edupundits, Hess has the standing—and frankly, the balls—to call into question the gap-closing orthodoxy, the de facto policy engine driving American education in the era of No Child Left Behind. Our focus on gap closing, Hess writes, “has hardly been an unmitigated blessing.”

“The truth is that achievement-gap mania has led to education policy that has shortchanged many children. It has narrowed the scope of schooling. It has hollowed out public support for school reform. It has stifled educational innovation. It has distorted the way we approach educational choice, accountability, and reform.”

Hess couldn’t be more correct or on target. To this day, I worry about whether I was the teacher Tiffany Lopez needed me to be. In my post-classroom work I apply the “Tiffany Test” to any new reform, policy initiative or teaching idea that comes down the pike: will this make it more likely or less likely that kids like Tiffany will get what they need to reach their full academic and life potential? The answer rarely comes back in the affirmative. Indeed, the primary casualty of our achievement gap mania is what Hess describes as “the credo that every child deserves an opportunity to fulfill his potential.”

Blame the teachers? Not this time. Hess cites a 2008 poll, which asked if it’s more important to focus equally on all students or disadvantaged students who are struggling academically. Eighty-six percent of teachers said all students and just 11% said disadvantaged students. “Yet education reformers are doing their very best to counter this healthy democratic impulse — and they have largely succeeded,” Hess observes.

“All of this has eroded traditional notions of what constitutes a complete education. Because of the way “achievement gaps” are measured — using scores on standardized reading and math tests — any effort to “close the achievement gap” must necessarily focus on instruction in reading and math. Hence many schools, particularly those at risk of getting failing grades under NCLB, have fixated on reading and math exclusively; other subjects — art and music, foreign language, history, even science — have been set aside to make more time and resources available for remedial instruction.”

Frank C. Worrell of the University of California, Berkeley points out that the focus on bringing up the bottom means “we are not sparking the creativity of those who have the most potential to make outstanding contributions.” Hess is particularly strong on how a gap closing focus coupled with the orthodoxy of differentiated instruction is a double whammy for high-achieving (or potentially high achieving) students. Students like Tiffany Lopez.

“Children who are ready for new intellectual challenges pay a price when they sit in classrooms focused on their less proficient peers. In 2008, Brookings Institution scholar Tom Loveless reported that, while the nation’s lowest-achieving students made significant gains in fourth-grade reading and math scores from 2000 to 2007, top students made anemic gains. Loveless found that students who comprised the bottom 10% of achievers saw visible progress in fourth-grade reading and math and eighth-grade math after 2000, but that the performance of students in the top decile barely moved. He concluded, “It would be a mistake to allow the narrowing of test score gaps, although an important accomplishment, to overshadow the languid performance trends of high-achieving students . . . .Gaps are narrowing because the gains of low-achieving students are outstripping those of high achievers by a factor of two or three to one.”

Tiffany Lopez had more “grit” at age 11 than the entire graduating class of any KIPP school. There was never a doubt in my mind that she would stay in school and go to college. This month, she began her freshman year at a four-year, in-state, public university in Pennsylvania, where she moved a few years after leaving my classroom. I’ve been waiting for this moment for seven years. I have long feared that at college she will find herself surrounded by students of lesser gifts who, though they lack her aptitude and character, will be better academically prepared. I hope I’m wrong. But if she succeeds, it will not be because of what I and other teachers did for her over the course of her public school education.

It will be in spite of it.

When you have a Tiffany in your class in the age of gap-closing you understand that despite her good grades and rock steady performance on state tests, she is subsisting on starvation rations in history, geography, science, art and music. You understand that her finish line—read on grade level; graduate on time—is the starting line for more fortunate children. Tiffany and the numberless, faceless multitude of children like her, represents the low-hanging fruit the typical inner city school leaves drying on the vine. She is–maddeningly, damnably, undemocratically–”not your problem.”

There is a question that has gnawed at me ever since I was Tiffany Lopez’s 5th grade teacher in the South Bronx. If you are committed to equity and social justice, which is the more effective engine of change: giving every child a mediocre, minimum-competency education? Or giving the richest, most robust possible education to the most receptive and motivated? A focused, low-income kid with a superior education is on the time-honored path to upward mobility, virtually guaranteeing her children will not grow up in poverty. The same kid with a bland, good-enough education is prepared merely to march in place.

A false dichotomy. We should do both, of course. But as Hess has amply demonstrated, it’s not working out that way.

Data-Driven…Off a Cliff

by Robert Pondiscio
October 20th, 2010

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Posted in accountability, Assessment and Testing, Curriculum, Teaching | 30 Comments »

Miami English teacher Roxanna Elden makes a compelling case for how “data-driven instruction” can be misleading and self-defeating.  Writing at Education Next, Elden describes a nonfiction passage about owls on a practice test for the state’s FCAT test: Which of the owls’ names is the most misleading? Is it the screech owl “because its call rarely approximates a screech?” Or is it the long-eared owl, “because its real ears are behind its eyes and covered by feathers?”

Each question on the practice test supposedly corresponds to a specific reading skill or benchmark. “Teachers are supposed to discuss test results in afterschool ‘data chats’ and then review weak skills in class,” Elden writes.  Like so:

First Teacher: Well, it looks like my students need some extra work on benchmark LA.910.6.2.2: The student will organize, synthesize, analyze, and evaluate the validity and reliability of information from multiple sources (including primary and secondary sources) to draw conclusions using a variety of techniques, and correctly use standardized citations.

Second Teacher: Mine, too! Now let’s work as a team to help students better understand this benchmark in time for next month’s assessment.

Third Teacher: I am glad we are having this “chat.”

Forget for a moment that people only speak like this after they fall asleep next to a pod.   Here’s how Elden’s actual “data chat” went:

First Teacher: My students’ lowest area was supposedly synthesizing information, but that benchmark was only tested by two questions. One was the last question on the test, and a lot of my students didn’t have time to finish. The other question was that one about the screech owl having the misleading name, and I thought it was kind of confusing.

Second Teacher: We read that question in class and most of my students didn’t know what approximates meant, so it really became more of a vocabulary question.

Third Teacher: Wait … I thought the long-eared owl was the one with the misleading name.

Language arts teachers, Elden points out, “know that answering comprehension questions correctly does not rest on just one benchmark.”  That may work for math, but, she correctly observes, “reading is different.”

“After students have mastered basics like decoding, reading cannot be taught through repeated practice of isolated skills. Students must understand enough of a passage to utilize all the intricately linked skills that together comprise comprehension. The owl question, for example, tests skills not learned from isolated reading practice but from processing information on the varying characteristics of animal species. (The correct answer, by the way, is the screech owl.)”

Data-driven instruction says teach the skill?  Well, data-driven instruction is wrong.  Reading is not a transferable skill with components that can be separated like an egg yolk from the egg white. Comprehension is a function of interwoven skill, prior knowledge and vocabulary.   Expecting teachers to tease out a specific skill from the question Elden cites is like asking them to separate the yolk from a scrambled egg.

“Unfortunately, strict adherence to data-driven instruction can lead schools to push aside science and social studies to drill students on isolated reading benchmarks. Compare and contrast, for example, is covered year after year in creative lessons using Venn diagrams. The rersult is students who can produce Venn diagrams comparing cans of soda, and act out Venn diagrams with Hula–hoops, but are still lost a few paragraphs into a passage about owls. When they do poorly on reading assessments, we pull them again from subjects that give them content knowledge for more review of Venn diagrams. Many students learn to associate reading with failure and boredom.”

The expectation that teachers should use data in a way that belies what we know about reading is a prime example of what Rick Hess called The New Stupid – “a reflexive and unsophisticated reliance on a few simple metrics.”

“It’s impossible to teach kids to read well while denying them the knowledge they need to make sense of complex material,” Elden concludes “Following the data often forces teachers to do just that.”

A “Social Agenda Trojan Horse?”

by Robert Pondiscio
February 19th, 2010

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Posted in Education News, Educational Policy | 8 Comments »

An Obama Administration education official wants school safety measurements – ”a data system so parents know what kind of environment a kid will encounter in a school” — included in the Common Core State Standards.  And that has one prominent ed watcher asking if there’s a social agenda bait-and-switch in the works.

In an interview in Phi Delta Kappan magazine, Kevin Jennings, Assistant Deputy Secretary for Safe and Drug-Free Schools, says, “just as we have standards around academic goals, we need standards around school climate because what gets measured is what gets done.”  The interviewer for the Kappan asks Jennings if he wants school climate standards included in the Common Core Standards, and Jennings says yes.

If we don’t get this one right, the other ones don’t matter. Right now, they’re really focused on the academic standards. This one is much newer…We’re still fighting over the definition of school climate. But I can promise you it does not include air conditioning. Once we have standards and a scientific way of measuring school climate, state and local authorities will be able to pinpoint which schools need improvement and implement policies and programs to drive that process.

At his new blog, the American Enterprise Institute’s Rick Hess reads Jennings remarks and says, “Seriously? A high-ranking administration official is telling us that the common standards being financed by $350 million in Race to the Top funds “start” with academics but will eventually encompass “school climate” standards too?”  To Hess, Jennings desire to codify and measure whether kids feeling  emotionally safe “sounds like a summons to social agendas, culture clashes, and political fisticuffs. In other words, the stuff that sinks standards.”  Hess writes:

Mr. Jennings’ remarks raise concerns about the old bait-and-switch. If he is speaking for Secretary Duncan and the President, they seem to have been less than truthful so far when discussing their vision for common standards. If not, a President seeking bipartisan comity might want to encourage Mr. Jennings not to suggest that the Department is covertly planning to drive a massive 48-state effort into a familiar ditch…or to turn it into a Trojan Horse.

I agree that school climate is enormously important, but schemes that try to codify such conditions are fraught with problems.  For a time, New York City principals were judged in part on school discipline–the fewer suspensions, the tighter your ship was perceived to be.  Thus principals had every incentive not to suspend students, regardless of the infraction.  No consequences meant no discipline, and some of the worst climates were the schools with the best numbers on paper. 

Jennings was something of a lightning rod to political conservatives even before this interview.  Now that Hess has asked if the Common Core standards are a social agenda Trojan Horse, I suspect we’ll be seeing a lot more chatter about Jennings’ remarks, a clarification from DOE, or both.

Update: At Eduwonk, Sara Mead thinks Hess has strayed into “tinfoil hat” territory.  But two paragraphs later she worries that school climate surveys accountability “could water down accountability for academic outcomes.”

Update II: “We do not believe in national standards for school climate,” DOE’s Justin Hamilton tells me in a phone call.  “Kevin Jennings was taken out of context.”

The Hessians Are Coming

by Robert Pondiscio
February 17th, 2010

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Posted in Education News | No Comments »

Hard to believe he doesn’t already have one, but the prolific Rick Hess has launched a blog for Edweek.  In his debut post, Hess promises a look at education through the “dyspeptic, skeptical, and occasionally cynical lens through which I tend to view the world.”

It’s my impression that, in most walks of life, impassioned do-gooders are a crucial corrective to cynicism and self-interest. I’ve long worried that in schooling, however, we’ve a curious malady–a surfeit of passion, good intentions, and big plans. For what it’s worth, I find K-12 schooling to be one of the few places in life where we suffer a shortage of cynics and skeptics. The cost is a dearth of observers willing to deliver some bitter medicine to a sector gorged on saccharine sentiment.

It’ll be interesting to see how Hess develops this meme, but on the evidence of his first post, which fires shots across the bow of cheerleaders for differentiated instruction, school choice, teacher quality, ed tech, mayoral contol, and Race to the Top, he seems to have set phasers on stun.

Welcome to the jungle, Rick.   Speaking of Edweek, some sad news: veteran reporter Kathleen Kennedy Manzo, who has long covered curriculum, is leaving education’s paper of record after a 13-year run.

Red Ink Blues

by Robert Pondiscio
January 8th, 2009

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Posted in Educational Policy | 6 Comments »

California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger wants to shorten the school year by 5 days to save money.  Georgia is proposing larger class sizes for next year.  One Detroit elementary school is even asking for donations of toilet paper and light bulbs to continue operating.

Things are tough all over, but with drumbeats for a bailout of state budgets growing louder, Mike Petrilli, Checker Finn and Rick Hess argue at National Review that a stimulus package may retard education reform.  “There’s scant evidence that an extra dollar invested in today’s schools delivers an extra dollar in value,” the trio note.  “And ample evidence that this kind of bail-out will spare school administrators from making hard-but-overdue choices about how to make their enterprise more efficient and effective.”

Over at Flypaper, Petrilli writes with eyes wide open, “Yes, we’re ready for the hate mail.”

The New Stupid

by Robert Pondiscio
December 17th, 2008

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Posted in Education Leadership, Research and Reports | 10 Comments »

Gone are the days when educators dismissed data as having only a limited utility for improving schools and school systems.  What’s taken its place, argues Rick Hess, is “The New Stupid” — where data-based decision making and research-based practice “stand in for careful thought, serve as dressed-up rationales for the same old fads, or [are] used to justify incoherent proposals.”

In an article in Education Leadership, Hess describes first encountering the tendency to “energetically misuse data” during a presentation to a group of aspiring superintendents.

The group had recently read a research brief high-lighting the effect of teachers on student achievement as well as the inequitable distribution of teachers within districts, with higher-income, higher-performing schools getting the pick of the litter. The aspirants were fired up and ready to put this knowledge to use. To a roomful of nods, one declared, “Day one, we’re going to start identifying those high value-added teachers and moving them to the schools that aren’t making AYP.”

Now, although I was generally sympathetic to the premise, the certainty of the stance provoked me to ask a series of questions: Can we be confident that teachers who are effective in their current classrooms would be equally effective elsewhere? What effect would shifting teachers to different schools have on the likelihood that teachers would remain in the district? Are the measures in question good proxies for teacher quality? What steps might either encourage teachers to accept reassignment or improve recruiting for underserved schools?

My concern was not that the would-be superintendents lacked firm answers to these questions,” Hess recalls.  “It was that they seemingly regarded such questions as distractions.”

The key is not to retreat from data, Hess counsels, ”but to truly embrace the data by asking hard questions, considering organizational realities, and contemplating unintended consequences. Absent sensible restraint, it is not difficult to envision a raft of poor judgments governing staffing, operations, and instruction—all in the name of ‘data-driven decision making.’”

This is smart, even heroic stuff.