The unheralded virtues of grown-up policymaking, New Jersey-style

yes Andy Smarick / February 11, 2013

While working at the New Jersey Department of Education, I found our work on improving educator evaluations to be our most technically and politically challenging initiative. It required close work with schools, districts, labor organizations, the state board, and various internal offices and deep knowledge of state law and regulation and the growing national research base.

That’s why I was so impressed with (and proud of) the recent memo sent out by my former colleagues.

I’ve said many times before that educator evaluation policy got far ahead of the practice. This memo shows that the NJDOE has been assiduous in trying to bridge that gap.

Do your job thoughtfully and well, and take pride in that—but know that the aspects likeliest to be covered will be those that generate the most heat, not the most light.

The graphic on page 3 shows how they’ve used multiple sources to continuously inform their work. The timeline on the final page shows how they’ve choreographed the various activities over a long stretch of time to ensure that the work progresses—but prudently.

The heart of the memo is a summary of what they’ve learned from these various sources to date and how the department is responding to the lessons.

I may be biased, but this is—in my opinion—top-notch, grown-up policymaking by a state department of education: Take a broad policy directive, start a pilot, develop multiple external assessors, integrate this work with mid-stream RTTT-3 funds and a new

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The unheralded virtues of grown-up policymaking, New Jersey-style

Do demographic shifts explain cities’ test-score changes?

yes Aaron Churchill , yes Michael J. Petrilli / February 11, 2013

One reason we wonks love state-level—and now city-level—data from the National Assessment of Educational Progress is that it helps us identify jurisdictions that are making strong progress compared to their peers. We assume those places are leading the pack because something they are doing is working. (Plus, it makes us feel better about our chosen profession. Policy matters!)

But does it? Matthew DiCarlo of the Shanker Institute, among others, has wondered whether the ups and downs of test score trends are necessarily related to what’s happening in the classroom, much less what’s happening in the statehouse or the school board. NAEP results, DiCarlo wrote, “can’t be used to draw even moderately strong inferences about what works and what doesn’t.”

He may be onto something. Take a look at the two graphs below, which show the relationship between changes in eleven cities’ NAEP results and changes in their median incomes:

Cities furthest to the left (San Diego, Chicago, Charlotte, and Cleveland) have seen their median incomes decline most dramatically from 2005 to 2011. Cities toward the right have seen their incomes increase (Boston and Houston) or increase dramatically (Washington, D.C.). These trends could reflect shifts in the population of these cities, with richer or poorer people moving in or out, or simply the impact of the Great Recession on a stable population; we suspect it’s some of both.

Meanwhile, on the y-axis, we show changes in

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Do demographic shifts explain cities’ test-score changes?

A few good reads

yes Andy Smarick / February 6, 2013

Bill Gates just released his foundation’s annual letter, and he summarizes the edu-important parts here. He focuses on the findings of the gigantic MET study. While I’m happy that he is personally publicizing what they learned about teacher effectiveness, this short piece only underscores the concerns I raised here. Implementing the study’s findings is the tough part, but his only reference to that is a glancing blow about budgeting. I really hope they have a detailed, coordinated plan in place.

Check out a smart piece by Checker on the very important issue of cut scores for common assessments. This is one of the issues that, if mishandled, may contribute to the centrifugal force pulling the testing consortia—and Common Core—apart. (Cost may prove to be another.) If you think I’m mother hen-ing this thing, consider Alabama’s recent decision to drop out…

According to Politics K–12, a number of House GOP leaders are charging that the Administration is standing in the way of students hoping to participate in the D.C. scholarship program. This program, which allows a small number of D.C. kids to choose nonpublic schools, seems to always be on its last legs. Kudos to Speaker Boehner et GOP al. for continuously patching it up and fighting for the kids it might serve. As my book, The Urban School System of the Future,

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A few good reads

On closing schools

yes Chester E. Finn, Jr. / January 31, 2013

School closures are traumatic. Photo by Thomas Hawk

Secretary Duncan and his team were mobbed the other day by agitated parents and kids protesting the closing of public schools around the land. Though Uncle Sam has no real control over this, it's true that Duncan came to Washington promising to close (or overhaul) a thousand schools a year and, more recently, has been pressing for radical action in the lowest-performing 5 percent—i.e., about 5000 schools. Actual data in this realm are scarce, but NCES reports roughly a thousand closings a year among “regular” public schools (meaning that, in one sense, Duncan's promise is being kept, though not by him), as well as who knows how many charter and private schools that bite the dust. But even if the total is closer to 2000, in a country with 100,000 schools that's just 2 percent a year. Moreover, schools keep opening, too, hundreds of them every year in every sector.

Nobody likes to close schools. Secretary Duncan remarked to the crowd, “I don't know any educator who wakes up in the morning and says, ‘I want to close schools.’” And it’s self-evident that nobody likes to have his or her own school closed. It's traumatic for families, teachers, students, neighborhoods, communities, even entire villages and towns.

But there are three big reasons why schools close and will continue to close—while

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On closing schools