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May 18, 2013

The Common Core and Disadvantaged Students

A group of Democratic state senators in Pennsylvania has now joined the revolt against the Common Core State Standards, saying "...we are opposed to common core state standards without adequate state financial resources for our schools so that all of our students have the opportunity to succeed under those standards, including those in financially distressed school districts."

Which leads me to ask the following question of these Democrats: How is it that countries that spend substantially less per student than the United States also produce student achievement way above ours?  Why do we need even more money to produce results like theirs?  How much is enough?

They will say that I am talking about averages while they are not talking about averages, but about poor districts.  And I will say, yes, I agree.  One of the things that the top-performers have done is redesign their school finance systems so that they provide more resources for hard-to-educate students than those who are easier to educate.  Which would cause me to ask the Pennsylvania Democrats why they are opposed to standards.  Why aren't they filing bills to start raising and spending all the money for their schools at the state level, with allocation formulas that would provide more money for the harder-to-educate than the easier-to-educate?  And they would say, why that's too hard.  I might lose my seat if I did that.  It is easier to oppose the implementation of the Common Core.

Do you know who that hurts most?  It hurts the poor most, the very people they say they are championing.  When Florida first proposed to raise its standards years ago, some people objected on the grounds that high standards would hurt the poor and minorities, who would not be able to meet them.  The standards were raised and the students whose scores improved the most were poor and minority students.  When Massachusetts set out to raise their standards, the liberals objected that the poor and minority students would be hurt, because they would not be able to meet the standards.  And--you guessed it--when the standards were raised anyway, the students who made the greatest gains were the poor and minority students.

Years ago, I was running a focus group in Rochester, New York.  I was asking parents how they felt about standards.  An African-American single mother living on welfare said, "My boy is in middle school in the city.  He is getting A's just for filling in the colors in a coloring book.  The kids in the suburbs have to work really hard for their A's.  When my child graduates, all he will be good for is working the checkout counter at the grocery store.  I want my child to have the same opportunities they have.  I want him to have to do as well in school as they have to do to earn an A."

She understood what standards are all about a lot better than the Pennsylvania Senators do.  She understood that the world is unforgiving.  Employers have standards.  Schools providing graduate education in the professions have standards.  If you cannot meet them, you do not get the job and you do not get a professional education.  The Common Core State Standards simply reflect reality.  They reflect what the world now demands.

I do not mean to imply that it will be easy to meet the new standards.  It will be hard, very hard, and it will be especially hard for schools serving poor and minority students to meet the standards.  But we will not be able to meet them simply by spending more money.  We already spend more money on average than every industrialized country except Luxembourg and Norway.  We will have to do what the top-performers everywhere have done: radically change our school finance systems, academic standards, curriculum, instructional practices and tests and exams.  Not least important, we will have to make big changes in teacher compensation, the way we structure teachers' careers, the standards for getting into teachers colleges, the curriculum in our teachers colleges, our teacher licensure standards and the way we support new teachers.

But the welfare mom in Rochester was dead right.  The Pennsylvania senators do not have the option of rejecting the standards.  The standards are there, in the behavior of employers and selective colleges who reject poor and minority kids whose education does not cut it every day.  The only option they have is to figure out how to embrace the standards and figure out how to use the money they are already appropriating to fix our bloated, ineffective system by taking cues from the countries that are beating the pants off of us.

Posted by Marc Tucker at 11:21 AM | | Leave a comment | Recommend

May 10, 2013

What Does it Really Mean to be College and Work Ready?

Earlier this week, the National Center on Education and the Economy released a study we have been working on for almost three years.  There has been a lot of talk in recent years about getting high school students ready for college and work.  But what does that really mean?  We decided to find out, to see what skills in mathematics, reading and writing were actually required to be successful in the first year of community colleges.  Why community colleges?  Because about half of the high school graduates who go to college go to these institutions and because, of those who do, close to half go into programs designed to prepare them for careers and the other half goes into a program designed to enable them to transfer to four year colleges after two years.  A College Board study shows that students who successfully complete the first year of community college are likely to complete a community college program with a two-year degree or certificate.  So we can reasonably say that, if you have the skills needed to succeed in the first year of a community college program, you have left high school ready for college and career.

We selected seven states reasonably representative of the United States as a whole, and then selected, at random, a community college in each of those states.  Then we selected eight of the most popular vocational programs in those colleges to study.  We also studied the program designed to prepare students to transfer to four-year colleges.  We collected the most popular textbooks in those programs and analyzed them for reading challenge and for mathematics content.  We collected graded writing assignments as well as tests given at the end of courses and the grades given on those tests.  From this information, we were able construct a detailed picture, program by program, of the content and challenge level of the reading, writing and mathematics required of the students.

Very little writing at all is required in most programs.  The writing that is required is of a very simply sort.  Students, for example, are rarely required to argue a position logically and marshal data on behalf of that argument.  The typical first year community college text is written at an 11th or 12th level (which one would think would be a year or two below the level of community college), but it turns out that most high school graduates cannot read with comprehension at that level, because the typical high school text is written at the 8th or 9th grade level.  So our community college instructors prepare Power Point presentations to make sure that the students get the main points in the text.  When it comes time to test the students at the end of the course, they are not tested on much of the material that was in the text, and what they are tested on is mostly recall of facts, which means that much of what the textbook author thought was important for a student to know to be competent in the career for which he or she is preparing is not taught or tested.

It turns out that College Math, which contains the most demanding mathematics that most community college students will face in their first year, is actually Algebra one-and-a-quarter.  That is, it contains the topics usually associated with Algebra I and a few topics in statistics and probability.  One does not need Algebra II to study Algebra I.  Indeed, it seems that what is normally taught in high school mathematics is not needed in community college.  What is needed is middle school mathematics, but it turns out that high school graduates have a very poor command of middle school mathematics.  And, we discovered that there are a number of very important topics in mathematics--like mathematics modeling, and the ability to read and interpret schematic diagrams and logic diagrams of the sort required for computer programming--that are needed in community college programs but are not taught at all in school. The typical textbook for the programs we looked at does require mathematics, but it seems that that mathematics is neither taught nor tested, presumably because the instructors do not think the students can do it.

Most of us take it more or less for granted that as a student progresses through the grades, that student does 8th grade work in 8th grade, 9th grade work in the 9th grade, and so on until, in the first year of community college, that student is doing 13th grade work.  But it seems that that is not the case at all.  A very large fraction of 12th graders leave the 12th grade to do 8th or 9th grade work in community college.  And that is not the end of it, because about a third of our high school graduates show up at the community college unable to do work at the 8th or 9th grade level.  Many of the rest, apparently, those who are admitted to credit-bearing courses at their community college, have only the shakiest command of 8th and 9th grade mathematics, reading and writing.

So whom should we hold accountable for this?  Community college standards are clearly in the basement.  They should be much higher.  But, if we were to talk to the community college instructors about this, they would undoubtedly say that they are doing the best they can, that we should go and talk to the high school people, who are responsible for sending them students who have been very badly educated.  But the high school faculty would, with reason, say that they are doing the best they can with what they get from the middle school.  And, you guessed it, the middle school faculty would point to the elementary school, saying they, too, are doing the best they can with what they get.  

All of the school managers, if pressed, would probably acknowledge that part of the problem is that they are getting teachers whose own command of mathematics is a bit shaky, and maybe their reading and writing skills are not what they should, be, not to mention their ability to teach these subjects.  So they would point to the schools of education that are responsible for sending them teachers whose command of the subjects they are supposed to teach is not what it ought to be.  But the school of education would be quick to point out that they are not responsible for teaching the subject matter.  That is the responsibility of the arts and sciences faculty.  But the arts and sciences faculty would say that we, too, are doing the best we can with what we get.  Just look at the poor skills and lack of knowledge of the young people we are getting from the high schools!  But that, of course, is where we began.  Everyone is doing the best they can with what they get and the result is appalling.

In my next few blogs, I will have something to say about how we might break this cycle.  If you suspect that I will say that each and every actor in this sad cycle is responsible for breaking it, you would be dead right.

Posted by Marc Tucker at 11:23 AM | | Leave a comment | Recommend

May 03, 2013

China on the Charles

I had a chance last month to sit-in on a fascinating meeting, a spirited exchange between the top officials of the Chinese education system and the American education system.  Representatives of the U.S. Department of Education and the Chinese Ministry of Education, the chief state school officers of a number of American states and the top officials of many of the provincial education systems had a chance to ask each other questions about how the other country approached the issue of teacher quality.  The event was sponsored by the Chinese Ministry of Education, the U.S. Department of Education, the Asia Society, the Council of Chief State School Officers and the Harvard Graduate School of Education.

We in the United States are most concerned about the quality of teachers available to the poor and minority students in our inner cities.  But the Chinese are really focused on the quality of the teachers in what they call their "rural" schools but what are in fact the schools in where poverty has concentrated their most challenged students, many of which are in their metropolitan areas as well as in the country. In a sense, time is on their side, as rural incomes are rising (making it easier to attract teachers), metropolitan areas are taking more responsibility for educating the children of immigrants from rural areas and class sizes in rural schools have been declining with the migration to the cities, but the problems with teacher quality in these areas are still very daunting.

Policies and practices vary from province to province in China and within provinces, too.  But it is still possible to construct a composite picture of the policies the Chinese have evolved to deal with the issue of teacher quality in the Chinese hinterland.  Some of the pieces of this system are the result of funded national programs, others of national policy in the form of unfunded mandates that provinces and localities are expected to fund out of their own budgets and others have simply evolved as officials at many levels have come to grips with the problems they have been facing

Promising high school graduates are offered a free ride at China's teacher's colleges if they agree to serve in designated rural areas for five years.  But they do not get the money up front.  Instead they pay their own tuition and expenses for college and, then, after they show up for their jobs as teachers, they are reimbursed.  But the incentives do not end there.  Most teachers in China are paid by their local government by the month.  In some provinces, however, these highly qualified teachers are employed by the province and are paid by the year, so their compensation is much more secure than for the average teacher.  These teachers are often also offered free or subsidized housing and transportation to serve in rural schools.  Finally, the authorities have let it be known that, for highly qualified teachers, service in rural schools will provide an inside track to promotion up the career ladder later, which means more responsibility and authority and higher pay.

There are other reasons that teaching, especially in rural areas, is attractive right now in China.  The offer of job security as a teacher up front to young people making career decisions is particularly attractive right now in light of the glut of college graduates — China is now producing college grads faster than its economy can absorb them.  The widespread use of distance learning in rural schools means that rural teachers can spend time — up to six months at a time — away from their school taking courses.  The housing that these teachers get is not just subsidized but built to a higher standard than typical rural housing.  And, in some cases, young people who opt for teacher education programs in college get priority in college admissions.

No surprise, the Chinese reported that this powerful package of incentives and related measures is working.  The system is not perfect.  Because much of the funding for these measures is provided at the provincial and lower levels, implementation is uneven.  But I had the impression that the Americans present were very impressed with way the Chinese are dealing with the issues at the nexus of teacher quality and school quality.

Posted by Marc Tucker at 3:21 PM | | Leave a comment | Recommend

April 26, 2013

Testing, the Common Core, and Consumer Resistance

Some consumers, evidently, have had enough. Parents in some schools are refusing to send their children to mandated testing sessions, and we have reports of teachers refusing to proctor them. What are we to make of this?

I can think of no high-performing country we have studied in which we have seen this kind of resistance to the development of tests that we are now seeing in the United States.  Why here, and now and what does it mean?

The answer lies in the history of testing in the United States, and, especially recently, how we have used our tests.

Though almost all the top-performing countries have tests that match their standards (Finland being the exception), they are unlike the typical American tests in important ways.  First, they are designed to match the curriculum, to find out whether and to what degree students have mastered the curriculum the teacher has been teaching.  American tests, for many years, have been designed to be curriculum neutral, meaning unrelated to the curriculum.  So American teachers have seen the basic skills tests they are familiar with as their enemy, testing things that they did not necessarily teach, and often don't believe should be taught.  The Common Core State Standards were developed, in part, to fix this alignment problem, but the standards are not yet implemented and there is no official curriculum available to teachers that is based on the standards and on which the tests themselves are based, as there are in the top-performing countries.  So it will not be easy to overcome an image of testing among teachers that is based on a professional lifetime of experience.

Second, American tests have been designed to be, first and foremost, cheap.  A testing director for one of America's biggest cities once told me, with great pride, that his city had never spent more then $1 per test per student per year and never would.  They cost as little as they do because of the multiple-choice, computer scored method of test construction that is so prevalent.  American teachers figured out a long time ago that these tests are great at testing the rudiments of the basic skills and not very good at testing complex skills, deep understanding, critical thinking or creativity, the things teachers want most to teach, another reason for them to detest the typical test.  In the top-performing countries, there is very little use of multiple-choice, computer-based testing.  Most tests are essay-based.  They are scored by teachers trained to score them and teachers generally feel that these examinations are testing the things they think really matter.

Third, the frequency of testing is very different in the United States from our top competitors.  They typically do major statewide or nationwide testing only two or three times in a student's whole school career, usually just at the end of lower secondary school (tenth grade) and again at the end of high school.  Most of the other testing they do at the statewide or national levels is done to monitor the performance of the system and is done by sampling a few students in a few schools.  The testing program mandated by No Child Left Behind—calling for six grades of testing, including five consecutive grades in elementary and middle school, an enormous testing burden—has no counterpart in the top-performing countries.

Not one of the top-performing countries has an accountability system remotely like that of No Child Left Behind.  No one in those countries is insisting, as the U.S. Department of Education does in its Race to the Top Program, that student scores on mandated tests be used as a major—perhaps the single most important—input into personnel decisions made about teachers.

So American teachers' experience of testing is very different from that of their counterparts in the top-performing countries.  They see cheap tests, unrelated to what they teach and incapable of measuring the things they really care about, being used to determine their fate and that of their students.  What is ironic about this is that, because these other countries do much less accountability testing than we do, they can afford to spend much more on the tests they do use, and so are getting much better tests at costs that are probably no greater than what we are spending for our cheap tests.

We will have to wait and see what kind of tests will be produced by the two state testing consortia.  It is rumored that they have been struggling to produce high quality tests, because they, too, are working in an environment in which schools and legislatures are not used to paying very much for good tests.  We have to hope that the developers of these new tests will not fall short of the ambitions their designers had for them.  If they end up looking more like the tests teachers are familiar with than the examinations the top-performing countries use, then millions of American teachers may rebel.  The Congress could, of course, abandon the nation's unwise commitment to grade-by-grade testing, which would enable this country to produce and administer tests and examinations as good as any in the world, and, at the same time, greatly reduce the testing burden on our schools.  But that would mean that it would also have to abandon the current approach to school and teacher accountability in favor perhaps of accountability systems of the sort used by the top performers, but I have not yet detected any interest in doing so.

The fate of the Common Core State Standards may well depend on what this country does about testing and accountability.  Maybe we should be listening to the sounds of nascent rebellion a little more closely.   

Posted by Marc Tucker at 10:10 AM | | Leave a comment | Recommend

April 18, 2013

MOOCs: More Social Mobility or Less?

In my last blog I pointed out that the opportunities that any given student has for climbing up the greasy pole of social status and income when that student enters the workforce may be affected at least as much by who that student went to school with as by the things we educators focus on: curriculum, teaching, accountability systems and so on.  The reasons for this range from the expectations that faculty have for the students in a school to the power of a college's faculty and the graduates to help the members of that network get the best jobs as they rise up together.  Now, let's take a look at how this phenomenon might relate to a new and interesting phenomenon: the rise of MOOCs in our higher education institutions.
 
What seems to be emerging is a four-class MOOC universe.  At the top are the elite universities that produce the courses.  They will provide a grade but not credit for the courses they offer.  Then come the second tier universities, which will provide credit to students who take the MOOC courses from the higher prestige institutions, provided that those students come to their campus and sign up as regular students at the regular price.  What they have to offer is the credit, the prestige that comes with their brand, and support services to the students.  And next down the pecking order are the institutions that will take the students' money in exchange for the credit and the degree, with no requirement that the student attend the institution and no serious offer of support services.
 
MOOCs have—quite reasonably—been promoted as a boon for social mobility.  After all, many students at the bottom of the social totem pole will get access to first rate professors, often bundled into courses with very high production values--students who might never have had access to high quality instruction before.
 
But there is another—darker—way to look at the rise of MOOCs from the perspective of social mobility.  The big benefit from MOOC courses will go to those students who are the most motivated, most disciplined and best prepared, all of which is more likely to be found among students from well-off families than students who come from less educated, poorer families.  But legislatures are now falling all over themselves to write legislation requiring higher education institutions to offer credit and degrees to students who will take MOOCs to get those degrees, and, sometimes, only MOOCs.  Legislatures have been massively defunding their higher education systems, driving the cost to the student up and the quality down.  Now they see MOOCs as a magical way to have their cake (provide higher education to their constituents) and eat it too (at very low cost).
 
But MOOCs are not a magical solution.  Many of the students who are most dependent on the public university system are those whom the MOOCS will benefit the least in educational terms, because they lack the motivation, the self-assurance, the preparation, the literacy skills, the prior knowledge, the vocabulary and the study skills needed to get what they need from a remote lecturer, without the kind of support they would get in a traditional university that might compensate for at least some of these challenges.  But the elephant in the room is the lack of access to the networks that resident college students get in their universities—networks of peers and professors—who can provide them with the connections to the people who can offer them the job opportunities and mentoring they need to really make it.  These two challenges, taken together, will constitute a mighty barrier to success.  And so the move to MOOCs, as I see it, may aggravate, not alleviate, the steadily widening disparity in incomes between our wealthiest and our poorest and, at the same time, make it ever more likely that the sons and daughters of the masters and mistresses of the universe will themselves become the next generation of masters and mistresses.  That would be a shame.

Follow NCEE @CtrEdEcon.

Posted by Marc Tucker at 5:44 PM | | Leave a comment | Recommend

April 12, 2013

The Myth of Education as the 'Great Equalizer'

We Americans have long liked to think of ourselves as born into a classless society, a place in which the best jobs, the highest incomes and the upper reaches of social status are reached not by being born into the right family, but by merit.  We believe that our schools make it possible for low status, poor and minority people with smarts, drive and ambition to ascend to the top.  But what if this is increasingly a myth?  What if our education system now serves mainly those already at the top, enabling their children to get the greatest possible advantages in the race at the expense of everyone else?

In the mid-60s, James Coleman, in an iconic U.S. Government report, Equality of Educational Opportunity, said that the biggest influence on student achievement was not anything having to do with the schools they attended, but rather the socio-economic status of their parents.  No doubt this is partly because wealthy communities can easily raise enough money for their public schools to buy the best teachers, facilities, materials and school administrators.

But that may leave out the most important variable, the socio-economic status of the other students in the school.  Take for example, the conditions in a typical low-income, mostly minority community: expectations for all students are low, students get As for doing mediocre work, the curriculum is not challenging, classrooms are constantly disrupted, teachers have a hard time maintaining order, students who strive for academic excellence are ostracized by their peers and few go to college.  In a wealthy school district serving mostly students from well-to-do families, all is reversed: expectations are high, classroom discipline is not a problem, students are paying attention in class; they have to work for their As and are not ostracized by their peers for doing well in their classes.  The curriculum is challenging and designed to put all students on a track that will get a great majority of them into selective colleges. 

In a process brilliantly described by Richard Florida, the "creatives" the professionals most in demand in the new economy, are concentrating in a relatively small number of cities where they are most likely to get the environment they are seeking, while the people who used to work at the factories whose owners moved the business offshore are increasing concentrated, losing their homes and working, if they can get any work at all, at the local convenience store.  An article in last week's New York Times tells us that these trends feed on themselves, as rising real estate values in the favored communities are matched by falling real estate values in the others, driving the fortunes of these two types of communities steadily farther apart.

All over the United States, the professionals and managers in our society who can afford to do so are seeking every possible advantage for their children and, as income disparities increase, they are succeeding to an ever-increasing degree.  Their aim is to get their children into the most selective colleges in the nation, because they see those institutions as the keyhole their children must go through to get the best jobs and the highest status that society has to offer.

What is it about this vanishingly small number of elite institutions that makes them the gateway to success for the children of the new elite?  Is it the quality of education they will get there?  Not so much.  The answer lies just where it lay in the schools.  It is mainly the community to which they gain access, their classmates.

In another very insightful article in the New York Times, Ross Douthat points out that, whereas elite families used to send their daughters to the Ivy league colleges to get married to the future masters of the universe, now the top professionals and managers are sending both their sons and daughters to those institutions so they can meet and marry the future masters and mistresses of the universe and build social networks with their classmates and their professors that will give them privileged access to the best jobs and highest status the society has to offer.  Those social networks will pay off for the rest of their lives.  From the time they are born until they enter the job market, the sons and daughters of our top professionals and managers have incomparably better access to the resources they will need to reach the pinnacles of success.  With each successive year the chances that our professional and managerial elite will be able to pass their status along to their progeny improves and the likelihood that the sons and daughters of the less fortunate will inherit the status of their parents also improves.  Education policy, as I see it, does not offset this trend.  It actually aids and abets it.  In my next blog, I will explain how the growth of massive open online courses could exacerbate this trend.   

Follow NCEE @CtrEdEcon.

Posted by Marc Tucker at 10:15 AM | | Leave a comment | Recommend

April 04, 2013

David Kirp on Education Reform

For more than forty years, David Kirp has been one of our most incisive, original and refreshingly literate scholars writing about American education.  Improbable Scholars: The Rebirth of a Great American School System and a Strategy for America's Schools, Kirp's newest book, shows that he has lost none of his magic.

At one level, the book tells the story of the Union City school district in New Jersey.  Union City, right across the Hudson from Manhattan, is a gritty low-income community whose schools enroll mostly Hispanic kids.  But, after years of patient effort by the leaders of the city and the district, those low-income, minority students are now achieving at the same levels as their much more fortunate suburban counterparts statewide, a stunning achievement.  Ninety percent graduate and 60 percent go on to college.  In the last chapter of the book, Kirp described two other school districts, very different from Union City, in which poor and minority students are also performing at comparable levels.

The question, of course, is how they did it.  Those of you who have read Surpassing Shanghai will recall that, at the end of that book, I listed the principles that typically underlie the policies and practices of the countries with the most successful education systems.  Among those principles are the following: putting more financial resources behind students who are harder to educate than students from more fortunate backgrounds, creating a strong system of early childhood education that assures that students begin formal schooling ready for the program offered in the first grade, doing whatever is necessary to raise expectations for student achievement to high levels, developing instructional systems that include curriculum frameworks that prescribe what topics will be studied in all the core subjects in the curriculum--grade by grade--from kindergarten through high school, making sure that school faculty have the training and support they need to provide the instruction needed by the students to progress at the rate called for by curriculum framework., creating an environment in which teachers are treated like professionals and are expected to collaborate with one another to continually improve the outcomes for students, and, finally, working over time to weld all the elements of the system into a coherent whole.  

You guessed it. I just took this seemingly unrelated detour from my account of Kirp's book because, as Kirp looks across the three American districts whose students are doing so well, the strategies he identifies as the key to their success turn out to map in detail to the policies and practices that explain the success of the countries with the highest achievement and the greatest equity in the world.

Here is something to think about, though. Closing the gap between the bottom students and average students in the United States is a remarkable achievement.  But it is important to remember that America's average students are performing well below the average students in a growing number of countries.

To find out why, we need to go to some of the policies and practices that are common in the top-performing countries but are not among those used by the three districts Kirp studied.

They are not on Kirp's list because they have to do with things that school districts have no control over.  Most important among them is teacher quality: the standards for getting into teachers' colleges, for licensing teachers, for the programs of study in teachers colleges and so on.  Districts must recruit from the pool that results from state policy and university practice, and districts whose student body consists largely of poor and minority students usually get the least capable teachers from this not very capable pool.  Kirp points out that coherent policies are very important to success, but, school districts control only their own policies, not those of the state or federal governments, putting them at a great disadvantage relative to systems in other countries in which the design of the system is controlled by a ministry of education which sees its role as producing highly coherent systems.  

Apart from policies that affect teacher quality, this point can be illustrated in countless ways, but among the most important are those that Kirp himself points to at the end of his book.  As he says, American education policy almost everywhere is at war with itself, a constant tug of war between those who, as he puts it, would "lead by intimidation" and "exalt choice" and markets and those who take the path these districts and the top-performing countries have taken.  It is not possible to collaborate with your teachers unions and bring them into the decision-making process, as Montgomery County has done with great success, and at the same time, do everything you can to weaken or destroy the unions, as a number of governors and chief state school officers have tried to do.  It is not possible to professionalize teaching while at the same time supporting alternative routes for the preparation of teachers that are founded on the premise that anyone can become a great teacher if they know their subject.  It is very unlikely that our best young people will go into teaching if school districts or the federal government believes that firing teachers is the shortest route to improving student performance.  

The districts Kirp studied have been doing their level best to develop and then implement coherent approaches to improving school performance, but they live within larger systems at the state and federal levels that have embraced theories of school improvement often antithetical to their own.  It is hardly surprising that they have not been able to match the performance of the world best school systems.  Kirp has shown that American school districts can close the gap that has separated the performance of our poor and minority students from our average middle class and white students, a very important achievement.  What remains is to close the gap between average American performance and average performance in the top-performing countries.  Kirp's work also shows that the lessons that have been learned by the top-performing countries are the very lessons we have to learn to close the gap these three districts have closed.  But we still won't close the gap between the United States and top performers until we have much better alignment among our policies at the national, state and local levels.

Follow NCEE @CtrEdEcon.

Posted by Marc Tucker at 9:25 AM | | Leave a comment | Recommend

March 28, 2013

Ravitch and Krashen: Last Round in Common-Core Debate

This will be, I promise, the last round in a series of exchanges with Diane Ravitch focused on the Common Core State Standards.  Her response to my last post was to post on her site some comments posted on my blog from Stephen Krashen, Professor Emeritus at the University of California. Krashen is a literacy expert.  For the views of another highly regarded expert in this field, I suggest you look at a piece by David Pearson.  Pearson, a member of the Validation Committee for the standards, provides what seems to me a very balanced and thoughtful defense of the Common Core.

But Krashen does not actually attack the Common Core standards per se.  The "content of the standards is not the real issue", he says.  "The real issue is whether we should have standards and tests based on standards." He describes the construction of the standards, the development of the new tests and the purchase of equipment to install this new system as one of the "greatest boondoggles of all time."  The real problem, he says, is "our high level of poverty."  He wants all the money invested in this new system invested instead in food programs, school nurses and school libraries.

"Tucker's position," he says, "is that tough standards, [and] tough-minded accountability will finally get educators moving, and force them to teach effectively." [That is not true, but we will let that pass] But he says, "When we control for poverty, our students do very well.  Middle class students in well-funded schools score at or near the top of the world....The problem is not teacher quality (or schools of education, or unions)....there is no crisis.  The problem is poverty."

I've quoted Krashen at length because I believe that he really does speak on this point for Diane Ravitch and for a great many professional educators in the United States.

Diane Ravitch did this country a signal service with the publication of her book, The Death and Life of the Great American School System: How Testing and Choice are Undermining Education.  Ravitch's attack on those who have embraced education reform agendas based on tough accountability and market theory was a real breath of fresh air.  If that was all that Diane Ravitch had ever done for American education—and it is not—she would deserve an honored place in the history of education in this country.

But—and it is a big but—Ravitch has done a lot to leave the country with the impression that, if those who are pressing this agenda of tough accountability and market strategies of reform would just go away, and we fixed our poverty problem, all would be well. 

Distribution-of-2009-PISA-reading-scores.jpg

And that is simply not true.  When OECD-PISA analyzes national education performance, they show how each country's student population is distributed among six performance levels.  It turns out that a smaller proportion of American students is found in the top levels of PISA and a larger proportion in the bottom levels than is the case for students in the top performing countries. Another part of the OECD-PISA analysis shows that a student's socio-economic status is a much better predictor of that student's educational achievement in the United States than in the top performing countries.  We are less successful at educating students in poverty than these other countries are.

Variation-by-school-PISA-2009-Reading-Chart.jpg
But this need not be an argument based simply on statistics.  Other nations are recruiting their teachers from much higher segments of their high school graduating classes.  They are insisting that not only their secondary teachers but also their elementary school teachers really know the subjects they are teaching.  Because they believe that teachers need to know their craft, they insist that they spend at least a year learning that craft before they can begin teaching, with no "alternative routes" into teaching to circumvent that requirement.  Because they believe that great teachers are the secret sauce for great education systems, they are offering them compensation comparable to the compensation offered to people going into high status occupations.  Because they really mean it when they say they want all students to achieve at internationally benchmarked levels, they put more money behind their hardest-to-educate students than their easiest-to-educate students.  We don't do any of these things.

In saying that our students would perform at levels rivaling the best in the world, if only we fixed our student poverty problem, Ravitch and Krashen would have you believe that we can get results just as good as the top-performers are getting without instituting a fairer financing system, without recruiting our teachers from among the best of our high school graduates, without insisting that all our teachers master the subjects they teach, without compensating our teachers at a level comparable to the levels at which high-status professional are compensated—without, in short, doing any of the things the top-performing countries have been doing to improve the quality of their education systems.

If you believe that the only difference between the United States and the top-performing countries is the level of poverty among our children, think again.  The level of poverty among our children is a disgrace and we must do everything we can to greatly reduce it.  But, make no mistake, if we succeeded in that quest, we would still be far behind, and will remain so until we get serious about making the kinds of changes I have just described. 

Follow NCEE @CtrEdEcon.

Posted by Marc Tucker at 12:45 PM | | Leave a comment | Recommend

March 20, 2013

Further Response to Diane Ravitch on Common Core

In my last blog, I told you why I thought Diane Ravitch is wrong on the Common Core State Standards.  She responded by wondering why I am not worried, as she is, that the standards are developmentally inappropriate for the early grades.

I assume that Ravitch's question was prompted by the well-publicized disagreement within the English literacy community on this point, articulated most prominently by Elfrieda Hiebert then a professor at the University of California, Santa Cruz.  Hiebert agrees—rather forcefully—with the contention of the authors of the Common Core State Standards for English literacy that the text difficulty of middle school and high school texts has slipped badly over the past 50 years and need to be raised.  Her challenge to the standards is only to the CCSS panel's decision to propose a fairly steep gradient for vocabulary acquisition and text complexity in the elementary school years.  She suggests that standards for literacy have already been rising in the elementary schools and should not be made more stringent.

But Hiebert does not speak for all experts in the field.  I asked Catherine Snow, Henry Lee Shattuck Professor of Education at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, one of the world's leading literacy scholars and a member of the Validation Committee for the Common Core State Standards (which also included, among others, David Pearson, Andreas Schleicher, Arthur Applebee, David Conley, Linda Darling-Hammond and Lauren Resnick) for her response to Ravitch's claim, voiced also by Hiebert, that the standards' writers had gotten the elementary standards wrong and new research was needed to get them right.  While acknowledging that Hiebert and others had challenged the elementary school standards, Snow pointed out that the standards "were discussed, adapted, modified, commented on and ultimately approved by a large and varied group that included experts in literacy and language development."  So there is a difference of opinion with respect to the appropriateness of the steepness of the challenge levels of the elementary school literacy standards as they proceed from grade to grade with respect to vocabulary and text complexity among the experts.

The education world is rife with such disagreements.  They are rarely definitively settled by individual research studies.  Ravitch did not suggest that all of the Common Core Standards save for the elementary literacy standards should be approved; she implied that she thinks all of the standards should be put on hold pending the results of validation research studies that could easily take years and would almost certainly result in findings that the experts would continue to debate.  First, it makes no sense to me to delay implementation of all the standards if only one part of them is in serious dispute, and second, I do not think it makes sense to delay implementation of that part of the standards that is in dispute, given the strong support they have received from an international panel of leading experts in the relevant fields.  Other countries view their standards as appropriately in a continual state of development and revision, as more information is gained about changing demands on students and on the way both teachers and students respond to them over time.  It is important, as I said in my last blog, to remember that standards are a judgment call, not a research finding, and we should not allow ourselves to get tied up in knots when people deeply invested in the field differ on their judgments.

Ravitch is also concerned that the rigor that is demanded by the standards "might widen the achievement gap and discourage struggling students."  Both Snow and I are in strong agreement with Ravitch that the standards, across the board, demand a good deal more of students than they are currently achieving.  And we agree that that is especially true of our most vulnerable students, who are achieving the least.  And this is cause for concern.  But, if the authors of the standards are correct in saying that students need to achieve these standards in order to stand a good chance of being successful in college and work, then we would do our most vulnerable students no favors by setting the standards aside or by delaying their implementation indefinitely.  When I shared Ravitch's concerns with Mitch Chester, Commissioner of Education in Massachusetts, home to what may be the most admired state standards in the United States, Chester reminded me that, "when Massachusetts initially adopted its content standards, the state did not conduct a field test of the standards prior to adoption."  There was great concern in some quarters that the standards would prove too demanding for poor and minority students.  In the event, however, the effect of adoption of the standards by the state was to greatly improve the education of poor and minority students.

Finally, Ravitch is worried that "reactionary groups and entrepreneurs are excited about the prospect that the Common Core will cause test scores to plummet in every state."  One has to read between the lines here, but I take it that Ravitch thinks that some groups on the political right are for the standards because they think the public will rise up in arms when the dominant education system fails to educate students to the new standards and that will create a big opening for vouchers and for education delivered by businesses in a newly energized education market economy.  One has to have a well-developed penchant for conspiracy theories to be kept awake at night by this vision, and I do not have such an imaginative flair.  The people who wrote the Common Core State Standards tell us they were paying attention to the standards in the top-performing countries when they wrote these standards.  They did not tell us that they set out to top the countries with the most demanding standards.  If other countries can redesign their education systems so that the vast majority of their students can achieve standards comparable to the Common Core State Standards, then our professional educators ought to be able to do so, too.  If they can't, then they should step aside, but I do not for one minute believe that that will prove necessary.

Posted by Marc Tucker at 3:50 PM | | Leave a comment | Recommend

March 14, 2013

Diane Ravitch: Wrong on the Common Core

A couple of weeks ago, Diane Ravitch came out against the Common Core State Standards, saying that they "...have been adopted in 46 states and the District of Columbia without any field test. They are being imposed on the children of this nation despite the fact that no one has any idea how they will affect students, teachers, or schools. We are a nation of guinea pigs, almost all trying an unknown new program at the same time."

But the Common Core State Standards are not a program, like a new drug, to be field-tested.  They are a statement of what we want our children to know and be able to do when they graduate from high school and what they ought to know and be able to do at key points along the way to graduation.  Our parents and students and teachers need to know what is expected.  I can understand why we would want to know how well a strategy for helping students reach our aspirations worked before we asked all our teachers to use it, but don't understand why we would field test our aspirations.

It is actually not possible to field test the standards.  What we can field test is the way the standards are implemented.  But how do we judge whether the implementation is successful?  Presumably by asking whether the students achieved the standards.  Suppose they don't.  Did the standards fail?  Or was their implementation faulty?  Hard to know, because the standard by which we are measuring success or failure is the standard being tested.  That makes no sense to me.

Diane Ravitch has played a very important role in recent years as an apostate from the camp that has devoted itself to market-driven education reform and the use of tough-minded accountability systems inimical to teacher professionalism.  But her reference in her blog on this subject to her opponents makes me wonder whether she is opposed to the Common Core State Standards because her opponents are for them.

One last point.  Among her reasons for opposing the standards is what Ravitch refers to as their "disparate impact" on poor and minority students. "Disparate impact" is a technical term in civil rights law referring to situations in which policies negatively affect minority and poor students relative to majority students.  The courts can throw out such policies on findings of disparate impact.  As I read that phrase in Ravitch's piece, a chill went down my back.  It came across as a threat.  

Let's be clear here.  Poor and minority students in the United States will score lower on assessments based on any internationally benchmarked standards than majority students, because we do not educate poor and minority students to the same standards as majority students in this country.  So this blast from Ravitch is not a criticism of the Common Core standards.  It is a blast against any serious standards.  And that is very disappointing, coming from a former Assistant Secretary of Education responsible for starting the development of academic standards for the schools in the United States.  We will not improve the performance of poor and minority students by suppressing standards.  It will only improve when we make the implicit standards explicit, which will then ratchet up the pressure to do something about the "disparate impact" of the kind of education those students now get.

The United States has been far behind the other industrialized countries in developing serious standards for student achievement.  The attempt to develop state-by-state standards failed ignominiously.  What we most need now is not cold feet, but high quality examinations, first-rate curriculum and instructional resources and high quality training for our teachers in the use of those standards, instructional resources and assessment systems.  It will take years of determined effort to develop all that infrastructure and years more to implement it effectively.  And there is no time to waste. 

Posted by Marc Tucker at 2:45 PM | | Leave a comment | Recommend

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