One of the most interesting developments of 21st century school reform has been a shift among members of both parties on Capitol Hill in the angles from which they approach the topic. In the past, virtually the only shared reference point (or at least the dominant one) that both Republicans and Democrats could agree with was the notion that education was critical for our nation from a national economic and competitive standpoint. It was this line of thinking that led to the National Defense Education Act in 1958 (after the kick-in-the-butt presented by the Russian launch of Sputnik the prior year), that was underscored with the landmark A Nation at Risk report in 1983, that sparked President Bush’s Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) Education Competitiveness Act, and that has been bandied about in debates at all points in between.

Recently, however, and owing largely to the No Child Left Behind Act, there has emerged a greater consensus among both parties that another shared angle from which to approach the school reform topic is the academic achievement gap angle. So while GOP presidential candidate Barry Goldwater was still saying back in 1964 that “The child has no right to an education; in most cases he will get along very well without it,” members of both parties today recognize the paramount importance of a federal role in ensuring educational opportunity for low-income and minority children.

This evolution, however, has not reduced the impact of the notion of international competition and the image of an educationally-lagging American population. Articles citing US students falling behind European and Asian counterparts in math and science, and our graduate schools being dramatically out-produced in engineering doctoral degrees still make great media copy and still elicit strong reactions among law-makers and ordinary citizens, both of whom are concerned about our international position.

Critics of this position (often pro-public education advocates who seek to throw water on the provocative image of widespread failure in our schools) commonly claim that these international comparisons are either off-base or completely irrelevant. The Center for Public Education recently released a study evaluating these claims, and it found a middle-ground conclusion: that our students are not “failing” in international comparisons, but neither are they thriving. It cites test data that finds US 4th graders actually doing well above average (though never first) in reading, math, and science tests against international counterparts as part of a case against a sky-is-falling scenario.

The problem with this data, of course, is that it is only a partial picture (and unfortunately, the least important part) of the true story. The truth is, where our 4th graders do quite well, our 8th graders do measurably worse in an international context than our 4th graders do, and our 15-year-olds are dramatically outscored (particularly in science) by a whole slew of countries. In other words, unless you know many technological advances or 21st century industries that rely on the abilities of nine-year-olds, our students and our schools need a lot of help if we want to keep up with—or better, lead—the rest of the world. I’m still waiting for a reporter or policy maker to make this point (can you imagine an NFL coach saying, “I think we did pretty well this year. Sure we only finished 4-12 this year but we were leading after the first quarter in nine of our games!”)… perhaps you’ve seen it before and can share a link?

Posted by Aaron Tang at 12:34 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Whenever I read stories like this one, about parents who stand up to defend their neighborhood schools from being shut down due to budget cuts, I am reminded of a common finding among studies and opinion polls on public education: America’s parents, by and large, believe that the schools their own children attend are good even as they believe that public schools as a whole are not. In 2004, for instance, 70% of parents graded their own neighborhood school an A or B, but only 22% of parents gave the same high marks to the nation’s public schools as a whole. Conversely, the same parents rated their child’s school a C, D, or F in only 28% of responses, but gave a C, D, or F mark to the public schools writ large in 63% of cases. These disparities have persisted over time, even as respondents have been selected from a diverse and representative sample.

In other words, public school parents are quick to agree with assessments about the need for dramatic improvement in public education across America, but they largely believe that their own schools are exceptions to the rule. Unfortunately, the parents can only be correct on one count. Either the first assessment is correct that our schools have something to do with our lagging performance internationally, staggering dropout rates, and inequality of educational opportunity, in which case a significant number of parents are simply overrating their own school for whatever reason, or the second assessment is correct and the vast majority of our schools are actually doing an exemplary job at preparing all children for successful lives in the 21st century.

If, as I am led to believe, the former is the case, what ought to be investigated further is why parents consistently overrate the quality of their own schools and, more importantly, what the implications of this tendency are for school improvement efforts. In asking these questions, my point is not to argue against parental involvement in community and state decisions about education (after all, parents frequently do have critical things to say, such as the complaints being made about high performing schools on the Detroit school-shuttering list), but simply to highlight a tricky tension that is unfolding in today’s standards based reform era when parents react to the bad news implicit in enforcing these standards. For in order for standards to hold any meaning, the lowest-performing of our schools must undertake at least some kind of serious corrective measure if they continue to fail children.

In light of this, many hard-nosed school reformers from both sides of the isle have argued for some time now that what is needed today is strong leadership that shuts down (or reconstitutes) continuously under-performing schools, rewards strong schools, and tries to foster and support all other schools to meet the same high standards as our best schools. The use of NCLB’s AYP measures and a growing number of value-added approaches ensures that what qualifies as a “strong school” cannot just be a comparatively wealthy district cherry-picking its already successful kids; indeed, our strongest schools will actually be those serving low-income rural and urban schools that raise the collective bar, against fierce headwinds, to proficiency .

But what if all of this just flies in the face of what parents want for their kids—which turns out often to be a desire for the status quo, to send their children to their neighborhood school even if it is worse than a viable alternative? What are policy makers to do—abide by the discretion of parents even if it’s not in the best academic interests of students, or do what they believe to be better for America’s democracy and economic future and shut down struggling schools that parents want to leave standing? What would you do?

Posted by Aaron Tang at 08:23 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

“Pay for performance” and “merit pay” are among the most loaded phrases in the education reform arena, right up there with “teaching to the test”, “unfunded mandate”, and “school choice”. The two phrases are synonymous, and refer to the notion that teachers ought to be paid in accordance with some measure of their effectiveness, as opposed to following strict salary schedules negotiated in contracts by teachers unions that are based on seniority and advanced degrees.

The concept of merit pay has long drawn the ire of rank-and-file teachers and staunch union supporters who argue that teacher performance is impossible to judge in any objective, unbiased way. Recent advances in value added measurement (i.e. the use of standardized tests to discern year-to-year gains in student achievement that can be attributed to how well a particular teacher has taught) have softened the playing field such that a number of districts and even a couple of states (with varying degrees of support from the unions) have instituted pilot projects to determine whether pay for performance incentives actually improve student learning.

My conversations with students, parents, and school reform experts leads me to believe that merit pay for teachers is controversial because of the intensity with which unions have historically opposed it. These other stakeholders are far less likely to object to the idea that teachers should be rewarded, praised, and paid more when they do a good job and should be recommended for further training or let go if they do a poor job, similar to how other professions evaluate human resource decisions. But if the concept of pay for performance for teachers is controversial because the teachers object, the notion of pay for performance for students is a controversial among virtually every stakeholder.

Yet this is exactly what a pilot project in Coshocton, Ohio has done for the past two and a half years as a part of a three-year study to determine whether paying students who do well on their standardized tests—as much as $100 for youth in grades 3-6 who earn advances scores on all five state tests—actually improves the performance of these students.

Objections to this research project, which is run by a Case Western Reserve University economics professor, cite long-standing research in developmental psychology about the harms that external rewards can have on students when associated with learning since such rewards have been found to undermine a student’s tendency to develop a natural love of learning for its own sake.

But the early results from the Coshocton study seem to run contrary to the conventional wisdom. Students selected to participate in the pilot project have demonstrated increase attendance, and the school district itself has even shed its “academic emergency” label since adopting the initiative even as the district has had to cut teachers and other support staff due to budget shortfalls—though it’s not clear that these are the direct result of the student payment system. One thing, however, is certain: the students love the idea, not just because they get their external rewards in cash (which have a more compelling ring than a homeroom pizza party, it would seem) but also because local merchants who are eligible to cash the rewards (which are given out as vouchers to these stores instead of in actual cash form) have complimented the students who use the vouchers on their hard work in school.

Personally, I have never been a huge proponent of the liberal pedagogy camp that holds extrinsic rewards to run counter to the purposes of schooling. In my opinion, the most important thing that our schools can do in this day and age is prepare all of its children to become successful citizens in our society in democratic, social, and economic terms. I would rather have a student go to college because they know it will lead to a better financial and civic future than risk losing students who would otherwise succeed because we want them to go to college if and only if a “love of learning” is their sole motivation.

So I, for one, will be watching closely when the final results from the Coshocton study are released this summer, not because the idea necessarily holds the key to all our woes in school reform, but because an unspoken, critical piece of the reform puzzle is that achievement will only rise to the degree to which we can motivate students to succeed. And who knows? Can you imagine a day where a fair, progressive merit-pay system were implemented that paid students who increased their achievement by more than one grade level each year using value-added systems just like new teacher merit pay models, but with a variable for need? What would have a greater impact: throwing an additional $500 in per-pupil expenditures into the bureaucratic giant of a large city school system, or offering that $500 as a cash reward to disadvantaged students who, year-after-year, work their tails off in school?

Posted by Aaron Tang at 09:43 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

One of the consequences of media coverage on and direct exposure to the severity of problems in our education system is that it leads people to think about the challenges we face in all-or-nothing terms. Policy makers, education experts, and ordinary citizens—myself included—are guilty of this thought process; when faced with statistics about staggering drop out rates and achievement gaps, we tend to minimize partial solutions that may lead to only incremental gains in the quest for silver-bullet answers that can bring about dramatic progress, fast.

The same thing happens with other issues too, of course. We see it, for example, when foreign policy experts fail to implement policies that could greatly benefit our position in Iraq because many of these ideas (such as changes in the way we train Iraqi security forces or provide security for key infrastructure points in the country’s electricity grid) lack the headline-grabbing potential of a troop surge or a hard withdrawal deadline.

The problem with this way of thinking is that big ideas often times do as much harm as good, because social problems are usually nuanced in a way that the most critical leverage points are found in the subtext, not the headlines. Mike Petrilli, a first-term Bush Administration Education official who now works at the conservative Fordham Foundation—and one of the staunchest NCLB cheerleaders in the land—recognized as much in a letter he wrote on January 8th commemorating the 5th anniversary of NCLB, admitting, “I can't pretend any longer that the law is ‘working,’ or that a tweak and a tuck would make it ‘work.’”

In times like these, I find it helpful to highlight programs that are making a difference in the lives of children, even if they aren’t silver-bullet answers. One such program, which I’ll admit a particular affinity to, is the Summer Bridge model that at-risk brings middle school youth to an academically-focused, tuition-free summer program where talented college students are hired to teach them (and in so doing, learn about the rewards and challenges of the teaching profession). Many of the students who attend these programs benefit enormously from the extra attention they get from young educators who believe in them and want passionately for them to succeed.

In the summers of my sophomore and junior years of college, I benefited from this experience personally, as I taught at Aspire, a summer program for disadvantaged middle school students in Cleveland, Ohio. Whenever I see the calculus of politics supersede the best interests of children in state houses and school board rooms across the nation, and I lose hope that lasting change can be wrought for our nation’s unluckiest children, I think about my time at Aspire, where a remarkable culture of achievement, self-confidence, and leadership was built among the more than 100 middle school students and staff members, all of whom were made the better for it.

Indeed, whenever the high school and college students I work with on a daily basis with Our Education ask me for personal advice about how they can make a difference in education, I tell them that a great place to start would be to work with a program like Aspire for a summer. Because even if a middle school summer program isn’t able to fix the whole system, at least this much is certain: it will make a meaningful difference for those who take part in it. To paraphrase the old joke about small chunks of billions of dollars in the federal budget sooner or later adding up to be “real money”, a little bit of change here and a little bit of caring there and sooner or later if you get enough programs like Aspire intervening in the system you’re talking about a real difference in the lives of a lot of young people.

Click here to learn more about Aspire and how you can apply to teach for a life-changing summer!

Posted by Aaron Tang at 04:50 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

On this, the 5th birthday of NCLB, the Fordham Foundation asked twenty "Washington education insiders" to predict what the future holds for the contentious law. Their prognostications have been compiled and released in a short research brief. Though the survey results contain no big surprises--the insiders agree that the law is here to stay and that a major overhaul is not likely, nor is reauthorization before the next presidential election--it is well worth checking out.

Posted by Ethan at 03:33 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

It’s no secret that the most disadvantaged children in the United States grow up in a world with the deck stacked steeply against them. With the exception of perhaps health care, nowhere is this more true and more painful for low-income and minority children than in our schools, and a recently released Education Trust report highlights the ways in which policy makers at every single level of government--district, state, and federal--facilitate educational inequality by failing to provide equal* school resources to these children.

Put another way, the study finds that the funding formulas and systems currently used in the vast majority of school districts and states and at the federal level do more than fail to ensure all children with equal educational opportunities, they actually exacerbate the existing inequalities by channeling disproportionate resources to schools serving wealthy student populations.

Here’s how. At the federal level, Title I expenditures, the main federal source of support for low-income students, are given to states based on a matching formula that gives more funding to states that spend greater amounts on low-income students. While the intent of the law is sound--the feds want to reward states who commit more resources to education as opposed to less--the effect is that the low-income students who happen to live in the highest-poverty states get the shortest end of the stick. For example, UC Berkeley Professor of Law Goodwin Liu notes that Maryland has fewer poor children than Arkansas yet it receives 51% more aid from Title I per poor child than Arkansas… even though Arkansas devotes a higher percentage of its resources to education than Maryland! The reason for this is that Title I only matches absolute spending levels made by states, not proportional ones, so that wealthy states like Connecticut and Massachusetts automatically get a leg up even though there are higher concentrations of children in poverty in other states.

The federal inequities are worsened at the state level, where despite the torch-bearing examples of Kentucky and Massachusetts, which utilize formulas that provide more money to low-income school districts, the majority of states provide fewer resources to high-poverty and high-minority districts than they provide to low poverty and low minority districts. Ross Wiener and Eli Pristoop of the Ed Trust show that, on average, school districts with the highest minority and poverty concentrations get between $800 and $900 less per student than their more advantaged counterparts. Over a child’s educational career, that’s $10,000 worth of resources that poor children do not receive access to… and in a school of twelve hundred kids that’s over a million dollars a year less that the school gets to use on teacher salaries, instructional materials, and facilities.

Finally, as if the double whammy of state and federal inequality building were not enough, multi-school school districts often channel disproportionate resources to schools with the least minorities and low-income children. The principle cause for this disparity is in teacher salaries, since districts assign individual schools a certain number of teaching positions instead of a fair, sum total that each school is allowed to spend on salaries based on the number and type of students who attend it. Because more experienced teachers frequently seek out positions in the higher achieving (and often more advantaged) schools, the net result is that low-income children usually have access to the least qualified and least proven teachers… a sacrifice that they are asked to make so that their wealthier neighbors can pay their teachers disproportionately higher salaries.

* It’s bad enough that funding gaps exist that have poor and minority children receiving fewer school resources than the average children; but this frame of analysis doesn’t do justice to the problem: the truth of the matter is, we need to be providing children born into disadvantaged circumstances with greater-than-average resources if we want to ensure that they have a fair opportunity to realize the American dream through hard work and determination. In other words, proposals like the Weighted Student Funding model which has drawn much attention in the past year are what we need to be talking about—and I’ll provide an overview of this controversial, yet critical proposal in a future entry. But the point of this particular entry is simple. Even though reformers who throw around the “money doesn’t matter argument” have legitimate reasons for concluding so, they have no defense against a more pressing point about our nation’s values and whether we actually care about all of our children. The point is articulated best, perhaps, in Scripture, Matthew 6:21, “For where your treasure is, there will your heart be also.” The Ed Trust report is still more evidence that our heart is anywhere but with the poor boys and girls struggling to learn in their schools, who will be asked to lead us in the 21st century.

Posted by Aaron Tang at 12:57 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)