The Education Gadfly Weekly: The “no excuses” model is due for a renaissance
The Education Gadfly Weekly: The “no excuses” model is due for a renaissance
The “no excuses” model is due for a renaissance
Many of the conditions that led to the prominence of “no-excuses” charter schools a quarter-century ago have returned. For students, teachers, and parents who have never lost their appetite for safe and orderly schools, it can’t come soon enough.
The “no excuses” model is due for a renaissance
Four states that are leading the charge for conservative education
We know more about improving math outcomes than policy debates suggest
How global education systems can speed pandemic recovery
#911: The flaws in school funding formulas, with Rebecca Sibilia
Cheers and Jeers: March 14, 2024
What we're reading this week: March 14, 2024
Four states that are leading the charge for conservative education
We know more about improving math outcomes than policy debates suggest
How global education systems can speed pandemic recovery
#911: The flaws in school funding formulas, with Rebecca Sibilia
Cheers and Jeers: March 14, 2024
What we're reading this week: March 14, 2024
The “no excuses” model is due for a renaissance
In a dispatch over the weekend, the New York Times took note of the rise of “super strict schools in England,” marked by “strict routines and detentions,” silent corridors, and “zero-tolerance” policies for even minor student misbehavior. The focus of the piece is London’s legendary Michaela Community School, which has posted the highest rate of academic progress in the country. “Its approach is becoming increasingly popular,” notes Times reporter Emma Bubola, sounding vaguely surprised.
On the one hand, the Times piece is an unexpectedly respectful take. It notes that these schools are “borrowing from the techniques of American charter schools and educators who rose to prominence in the late 2000s.” On the other hand, it indulges in many of the same cliches and misunderstandings that drove those “no excuses” charter schools into disfavor. Bluntly, it’s idiotic to say, as the Times does, that such schools spring from the idea “that children from disadvantaged backgrounds need strict discipline, rote learning, and controlled environments to succeed.” No. The point is to give disadvantaged kids the opportunity to learn in the kinds of safe and orderly schools that well-off kids and their parents take for granted.
I had the pleasure of spending a very full day at Michaela last year during a trip to England. It was, without question, the most impressive and invigorating school observation I’ve taken in more than two decades in education. Doubly so because headmistress Katharine Birbalsingh, the self-proclaimed “strictest headmistress in Britain,” made no attempt to stage-manage my visit or steer me toward the strongest teachers’ classrooms. She simply handed me a class schedule and invited me to wander in and out of classrooms at will. Any and every class would be a good demonstration of “The Michaela Way.” I wrote about my visit for National Review and concluded with the hope that Birbalsingh might someday seize the opportunity afforded by the fast-growing universal ESA movement and open an American Michaela.
If such schools are “conservative,” as the Times puts it, they are (as Birbalsingh herself told me) “small c” conservative. Comparing such school cultures to a “dystopian science fiction movie” is a shining example of a luxury belief, the phrase coined by Rob Henderson to connote ideas and opinions held by the affluent or privileged that are impractical or even harmful to the less fortunate. At a recent school visit here in the U.S., for example, I spoke to a school board member who compared conditions at one school in the district to “a Victorian madhouse.” Learning doesn’t happen in that kind of environment. There is nothing “oppressive” about a well-run school; the oppressed are the kids who don’t want to go to school because their peers are out of control and no consequences follow.
Spend enough time in education and you begin to detect a rhythm: a reliable cycle of correction, over-correction, and reversal, usually driven by the unintended consequences of fad-driven programs or policies. Each new generation of would-be school reformers discovers, as if anew, some insight or idea that was once conventional wisdom. Thus, I will boldly predict that the Times’s report from Olde England may herald the inevitable reconsideration of “no excuses” schools here in America. Post-Covid, many of the conditions that led to the model’s rise in prominence a quarter-century ago have returned: declining test scores, a sharp rise in student behavior problems, and as Daniel Buck never tires of pointing out, an exodus of teachers owing to declines in classroom culture and school safety.
The first step is rescuing “no excuses” from its critics and recapturing what the phrase meant in its original coinage. David Whitman captured the mindset well in his 2008 Fordham Institute book Sweating the Small Stuff: a belief that “disorder, not violence or poverty per se, is the fatal undoing of urban schools in poor neighborhoods.” Minimizing disorder also explains why such schools “are long on rituals, including school-affirming chants at assemblies, hallways of academic fame with photos of student honorees plastered on the wall, public recognition and awards for students who have done well scholastically, and activities that build a sense of teamwork and spirit de corps.”
Note to the New York Times: This is what your correspondent witnessed at Michaela but misinterpreted as “formulaic routines,” including students having “yelled a poem,” Ozymandias, in unison as they entered the cafeteria. The day I visited it was Invictus. And it was awesome.
I’d still like to see an American Michaela, but conditions are ripe for a broader “no excuses” renaissance. For students, teachers, and parents who have never lost their appetite for safe and orderly schools, it can’t come soon enough.
Four states that are leading the charge for conservative education
It’s looking like this year’s election will feature a Trump-Biden rematch—a pairing that’s especially frustrating for education, where the nation is wrestling with a raft of real problems: dismal student achievement, chronic absenteeism, chaotic classrooms, plunging confidence in higher education, and more.
The Biden administration makes clear that a party beholden to the teacher unions can’t do much more than subsidize the status quo. Meanwhile, free of ties to the education blob, conservatives are free to lead—if they’re up to the challenge. While Donald Trump has shown he lacks the discipline or seriousness to engage in substantive policy, a quartet of conservative state leaders are pointing the way forward when it comes to early childhood education and K–12 schooling.
1. In early childhood education, where conservatives have tended to come up empty, Virginia’s Glenn Youngkin has put forward a robust vision that offers a clear alternative to supersizing traditional school districts. It features state-created digital wallets that can accommodate both public and private funds for preschool while dedicating an additional $200 million to support choice-based offerings for working families.
But the agenda encompasses much more, including a “navigator” to provide searchable information on early childhood options; attention to the red tape that’s stymied the supply of good options; and a program to redeploy underutilized space in public colleges to expand early education. Youngkin has sketched a principled vision of how we can tackle early childhood in a way that’s responsive, family-friendly and not reliant on packing little children into impersonal school buildings.
2. Arkansas Governor Sarah Huckabee Sanders’s signature LEARNS Act offers a similarly robust agenda for K–12. LEARNS includes a universal Education Savings Account program that will ultimately deposit $7,500 a year in flexible-use spending accounts that allow families to access a host of private providers if they wish. The act was about much more than expanding educational choice, though; it also invested heavily in rebooting the teaching profession by boosting the minimum salary for teachers to $50,000, raising salaries for most of Arkansas teachers (disproportionately those in high-poverty school districts), granting twelve weeks of paid maternity leave to teachers, and earmarking funds for literacy coaches.
3. In Louisiana, meanwhile, state superintendent Cade Brumley shepherded through his bipartisan state board an impressive overhaul of the state’s social studies standards. He did this by being radically transparent, fielding more than 1,800 public comments and taking extensive feedback from both supporters and critics. The final standards are unabashedly pro-American while leaning forthrightly into difficult and controversial topics. They address weighty themes while requiring more factual knowledge and specificity than previous standards, something that those on all sides of our history wars can applaud.
4. There has been perhaps no more heartening development in public education than the surge of support for schools to embrace the “science of reading.” Rooted in a commitment to the building blocks of literacy, scientifically informed reading offers a systematic, effective way to help young children develop into fluent readers. The pioneer on this count may well be red Mississippi, where the legislature passed and Governor Phil Bryant signed the Literacy-Based Promotion Act in 2013.
The law focused on reading preparation in grades K–3, investing in reading coaches and high-quality materials for those coaches to utilize. It also required third grade students to demonstrate reading proficiency by holding back those who did not reach that level and ensuring they received additional support. In 2013, just 21 percent of Mississippi fourth graders were “proficient” in reading on the National Assessment for Educational Progress. By 2019, rapid progress meant that the gap between Mississippi’s students and their peers in other states had shrunk to just 2 percentage points.
When it comes to education, it’s not enough for conservatives to simply stand athwart history, shouting “Stop!” When taxpayers are spending hundreds of billions of dollars per year on early childhood and K–12 and when public officials make the rules on everything from textbook adoption to preschool teacher licensure, a failure to lead is really a decision to concede.
There are state leaders right now showing how the right can do just this. Their example deserves to be emulated, in Washington and across the land.
Editor’s note: This was first published by The Hill.
We know more about improving math outcomes than policy debates suggest
I recently watched a seventh-grade math lesson that did a better job than I ever did as a teacher asking kids relatable theoretical probability questions. How would you represent the probability of a six-foot-tall seventh grader? How would you represent the probability of getting a test in school in any given week? Making sense of where students were coming from was a fascinating puzzle. Why did one student think the probability of there being a six-foot-tall seventh grader was absolutely certain (6/6) while another student thought it was unlikely and round to 0/6? Why did everyone represent all of their probability fractions using a denominator of 6? (The experimental probability lesson the day before involved dice, of course.) Watching a lesson with great content and instruction reminds me, without question, that every student can be a math person.
Unfortunately, math learning results far from match that clear potential. Looking at math learning outcomes closely is the most heartbreaking thing a lover of mathematics can do. The overall outcomes are gutting; certain student subgroups have starkly disparate outcomes—with single digit proficiency quite common—and the Covid drops were stark.
These outcomes—and the sense that “we did a lot around reading so we need to pay equal attention to math”—is leading math to get worthy attention by state leaders, policymakers, and education reporters right now. The approach to both reading and math policy conversations misses the mark in ways that will limit their long-term impact.
When policymakers ask, “what should we do to improve reading outcomes?” there are a few clear and obvious things that most experts agree would make a positive difference. In foundational skills in reading, there are teacher training, curriculum, and assessment moves based on well-established research that seem like they will help. As I have written about before, I worry that the reading policy reforms project too much confidence that a narrow set of (important) strategies will strengthen outcomes in a subject that is highly interconnected and notoriously hard to move. I worry they focus too much on foundational skills (decoding) alone and lack attention to implementation—especially around school leadership team capacity building—that will make or break success. I worry the reading reforms are set up for disappointment and even backlash when those plays don’t lead to immediate positive growth.
In contrast, when policymakers ask, “what should we do to improve math outcomes?” answers feel murkier. Many have pointed out that we don’t have a “science of math” the way we have a “science of reading”—meaning there have been relatively few neuroscientific studies dedicated to understanding how kids learn math compared to how kids learn to read. Others feel there are things that are well understood about how kids learn math, but those findings are not yet instantiated well in curriculum or practice (commentary on this here, here, and here). Relative to reading, there are fewer assessments and interventions that have been highly tested and scaled in math. It is harder to find math teachers, and many teachers have steep learning curves in both content knowledge and understanding of how to teach the subject. It feels tougher to pull together a package of reforms in math than in reading.
I worry that interest in “doing something that feels similar to what we did in reading” will lead policymakers to require schools to do things that don’t make sense. I worry generally about the burden that every requirement adds to schools. And I worry especially about additional required assessments.
But more significantly, I worry that the policy debates I am watching seem to have forgotten that we know a lot about what to do to improve math outcomes. Between 1992 and 2019, eight-grade math results grew 20 scale score points (compared to 3 points in reading) with outsized progress for Black students, AAPI students, and multilingual learners. It is far from enough progress, but there are things we can learn from this growth at scale. Furthermore, at the unit of a school, every state can find schools that have seen dramatic improvements in math across student groups. There are local examples to lift up and learn from.
At Instruction Partners, especially during the last few years, our partners have seen higher growth than the state in math overall and for students experiencing poverty, multilingual learners, students with disabilities, and almost every group of students of color. Both partners that work with us directly and partners that work with regional service centers that we have coached have seen these outsized impacts.
Many factors may be shaping these outcomes, but here are some things that seem to be driving stronger instruction:
- The school team (teachers and leaders together) benefits from a shared vision of what good math instruction looks like in action that moves beyond either-or thinking about procedural fluency and concepts and embraces the need for both.
- Teachers can learn a lot about the content and how to teach it by studying good curriculum in well-supported collaborative planning structures. It is easier to chunk and build this math content knowledge throughout the year while preparing for the next unit than to overview it all in one big dose over the summer.
- Coaches and leaders (even those who don’t feel like they are math people) can also learn to give math teachers useful feedback when they use the curriculum as a guide. Leaders modeling a learning stance about math gives teachers, and students, permission to do the same.
- School and district leadership teams benefit from short cycles of improvement focused on the question: “Are the moves we are making working?” Short cycles support focus, follow-through, and problem-solving. Improvement happens over time.
These are the kind of practical and disciplined leadership moves that I sense will be a big part of any reform at scale—and that I fear current policy debates are missing.
The theoretical probability that kids can learn math is a 6/6. I sense we will help them reach that potential faster if policy debates stay very close to instruction and build on what we already know can power growth.
Editor’s note: This was first published in an email newsletter from Emily Freitag in her role as CEO of Instruction Partners.
How global education systems can speed pandemic recovery
Students experienced significant learning loss during the pandemic, accelerating pre-existing trends and widening achievement gaps. The World Bank estimates that seven in ten students in low- and middle-income countries are living in “learning poverty” today, unable to read a simple sentence by the time they finish elementary school. Furthermore, if existing trends continue, it will take until 2040 just to get back to where we were in 2019 in terms of global student learning outcomes and more than 725 million children worldwide would still be in “learning poverty” status by 2050. Looking for some signs of hope, analysts from McKinsey and Company’s Global Education Practice scoured the globe for education systems bucking the trends. Their new report suggests that there is a roadmap available to speed up improvement for those willing to follow it.
The enormous research effort was multi-faceted and involved data from hundreds of educational systems—national, regional, state/province, and even city-level systems—across the world. It included a literature review of over 400 publications covering twenty years, encompassing a broad range of international testing data (PISA, TIMSS, PIRLS, and more); over 10,000 education policy changes in 190 countries via Stanford University’s World Education Reform Database; and conversations with more than 200 system leaders, experts, donors, philanthropists, and researchers. The final step was a global education survey conducted between September and December of 2023, gathering 422 responses from twenty-seven countries across Africa, Asia and the Pacific, Europe, Latin America, the Middle East, and North America. Survey respondents included senior leaders (from national education ministers to school superintendents) and senior members of executive teams (like chief academic officers and chief operating officers of education systems). Analysts then built detailed case studies of fourteen systems that had made and sustained educational improvements over the course of a decade or more prior to the pandemic, documenting their reform efforts in an effort to find replicable commonalities.
The topline finding is that, based on student performance on those various international tests, many systems were “beating the odds” and showing strong improvement between 2005 and 2019. The biggest improvers ran the gamut of national and subnational (state/province/local) structures and experienced both high- and low-poverty. Interestingly, educational spending was only impactful up to a point—somewhere around $6,000 to $8,000 U.S. dollars per student—above which additional spending was not clearly correlated with continued academic improvement.
Looking to see what worked in various contexts (size, structure, socioeconomic status, education spending), analysts dug deeply into those systems chosen for case studies. Nationally, they are Kenya, Poland, Singapore, Morocco, Norway, South Africa, Peru, Estonia, and Malawi. The regions of Ceará in Brazil and Punjab in India were also studied. So was the state of Mississippi, which has been lauded elsewhere for its success in scaling reforms statewide. London, England, and Washington, D.C., represented city-wide efforts. The latter was specifically cited for coalition-building across various levels of stakeholders under Michelle Rhee and Kaya Henderson. The report covers all of the particulars, but the bottom line is that if—starting today—all education systems could improve at the same rate these exemplars exhibited in 2019, anticipated global pandemic recovery time would be drastically shortened and improvement would restart at such a pace that an additional 350 million children could be lifted from learning poverty by 2050.
That’s great news, but is it realistic to expect improvement on that kind of scale? The answer to that question takes up the majority of the report, and is perhaps even more relevant to the authors than documenting the existence of improvement.
On the upside, it seems that the high level “to do” list is fairly short. Successful school systems, analysts say, emphasize changes in the classroom, focusing first and foremost on teachers and the content they deliver. These systems choose evidence-backed strategies relevant to their starting place, require a solid baseline of data, acknowledge that student outcomes can only improve incrementally (from poor to fair to good to great), prioritize outcomes at the instructional core, and use available technology as a tool to enhance learning. Timelines for improvement must be realistic and include short-, medium-, and long-term benchmarks. Measuring student outcomes—and making those data transparent to all stakeholders—is key to knowing when to stay the course and when to make changes. There is a wealth of detail from exemplar systems about lower-level “to dos” that could help kickstart this kind of success in other locales.
If this sounds like an all-hands-on-deck approach to you, then you’re reading it right. Everyone from government oversight agencies and school bureaucracies to teachers and families must be brought on board for meaningful change to occur and, most importantly, sustain. The exemplar systems examined in this report accomplished this by setting fewer priorities so they could reach higher goals, cultivating multiple likeminded leaders at each stakeholder level, and engaging educators and families “authentically,” with transparent two-way communication.
The McKinsey authors are not Pollyanna-ish. To wit: “One should never underestimate stakeholders’ perception that a reform is a threat to them and their values, even if all they want is to retain what is familiar, stable, and predictable in their work and life.” The status quo, they add, “has many protectors.” But their conclusion—in response to all of the data, good and bad—is two-fold. First, a number of education systems of various sizes and resource levels have clearly shown that reform and improvement are possible, scalable, and sustainable. Second, their successes occurred in spite of the many “protectors” that were surely present at the start of their journeys. The distillation of these systems’ success into basic guidelines for other leaders to replicate—including how to address inevitable opposition—is meant to spark the belief that if another system can do it, so can we.
SOURCE: McKinsey and Company, “Spark & Sustain: How all of the world’s school systems can improve learning at scale” (February 2024).
#911: The flaws in school funding formulas, with Rebecca Sibilia
On this week’s Education Gadfly Show podcast, Rebecca Sibilia, the executive director of EdFund, joins Mike and David to debate whether we’ve fixed school funding in America. Then, on the Research Minute, Amber reports on a new study examining the effects of school shootings on survivors’ test scores, attendance, and long-term health.
Recommended content:
- "School finance data 'sucks.' Rebecca Sibilia's new org is offering $ to fix it" —Greg Toppo, The 74
- “Think Again: Is education funding in America still unequal?” —Adam Tyner, Fordham Institute
- “The policies promoting school shootings” —Max Eden, Fordham Institute
- EdFund Website
- Phillip Levine and Robin McKnight, “The consequences of high-fatality shootings for surviving students,” Journal of Policy Analysis and Management (February, 2024).
Feedback Welcome: Have ideas for improving our podcast? Send them to Daniel Buck at [email protected].
Cheers and Jeers: March 14, 2024
Cheers
- San Francisco residents voted by a large margin to return Algebra to middle school, after the district had staved it off until high school for a decade. —The 74
- More universities are re-adopting the ACT and SAT for admissions, which will improve educational equity. —David Deming, The Atlantic
- Don Shalvey helped to open the second charter school in the nation and to pioneer the concept of charter school systems. —Louis Freedberg, The 74
Jeers
- Helicopter parents, not students, pose the largest potential impediment to restrictive cellphone policies in schools. —Liz Shulman, Slate
- “Only pennies of new public-school dollars make it to teacher salaries.” —Christian Barnard, Education Next
- Complications with a streamlined FAFSA portal are making college admissions a confusing, chaotic mess this year. —Wall Street Journal
What we're reading this week: March 14, 2024
- Outdated research created a false promise that tutoring could achieve two-standard deviations of academic gains in students. —Paul T. von Hippel, Education Next
- Joe Biden could court more votes for his struggling campaign by endorsing charter schooling. —Tressa Pankovits, Wall Street Journal
- The culture war distracts both parties from the practical, even mundane policies that could truly improve American education. —Nicholas Kristof, New York Times
- The classical education movement has taken a conservative political turn. —Emma Green, The New Yorker
- Seven school districts in Texas face lawsuits after principals and superintendents urged employees to vote for anti-school choice politicians. —Education Week