Florida Governor Charlie Crist signed this week a bill that lessens the emphasis of the state’s high-stakes test, the FCAT. The House minority leader, Dan Gelber, a Democrat, and Patricia Levesque, who directs former Governor Jeb Bush’s Foundation for Florida’s Future, both supported the bill—a rather odd pairing, to be sure. Here’s more about the changes.

New York City’s experiences in the last couple weeks reinforce my belief that the notion that we can “hold public schools accountable for results” is questionable.

No one bought the district’s announcement that test scores have dramatically improved. And why should they have? The doubters seem to understand that politicians who pledge to raise student achievement are heavily motivated to make it appear that they’ve raised student achievement—even if they really haven’t.

What puzzles, though, is that this sage observation seems to have died at the doorsteps of Michael Bloomberg and Joel Klein. The skeptics blame these particular politicians as if the perverse incentive to varnish test scores afflicted only certain snaky individuals rather than all holders of public office. Why is that? Why when public servants invariably fall prey to the sinister tug of politics do we blame the individuals and never politics?

A group of charter school organizations including the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools and the National Association of Charter School Authorizers, issued a report this week that presents findings from a panel charged with developing a framework for judging the academic quality of charter schools. The report lays out four essential indicators of academic quality: student achievement, student progress over time, post-secondary readiness and success, and student engagement. Each indicator is accompanied by multiple measures, metrics, and benchmarks that define how each is to be operationalized. For example, student achievement measures include proficiency levels on state assessments, college entrance exam scores, and high school exit exams (as applicable). For the most part, the indicators and their corresponding data points are ones commonly used to measure quality (e.g., graduation rates, percentage of students passing high school exit exams).  The report has, in a sense, packaged prior disparate indicators all together in one piece.

The report also appears to be a response to those who

believe that the vast diversity in charter school missions, educational models, and student populations—as well as differences in state accountability requirements and individual authorizer expectations—makes it impossible to establish common standards and measures of quality that are applicable and meaningful to all kinds of charter schools.

Advocates hold that a more comprehensive framework like this one will deter “reliance on snapshot data” that “lead to ill-informed judgments about charter schools.”

In short, the report issues a resounding charge for charter school operators and authorizers to up the ante in terms of policing themselves and using standard data to foster accountability. Kudos to them. The charge is needed and noble.

The list, however, is fairly meaty—then there’s the caveat that all of this is just a starting point. The main problem in my opinion, in fact, is the authors’ admonishment that the framework (comprising 13 measures and 30 metrics total) must be used in its entirety, that choosing several indicators would “not be appropriate.” No doubt if the charter community was to measure quality by reporting on all 13 measures (with their 30 metrics), we’d have plenty of very useful comparative data for these schools. I don’t agree, however, that charter schools must report on the whole list, lest the framework be rendered null and void. I understand the concern with cherry picking data, but requiring charters to report on all of these data points may be more burdensome than necessary (a couple of the post-secondary readiness measures appear particularly hard to gather). I worry, like others, about the balance between flexibility, burden, and accountability in charter schools. And let us not forget that defining quality is a problem for all schools, not just charters—so the conversation about accountability and reporting norms, assuming they are to be strengthened, needs to be occurring in our non-charter schools as well.

About the short review that Coby kindly mentions: I wrote it for a lay audience, one not tuned in to every shift in k-12 minutiae, and so I didn’t dive into the issues as much as perhaps I could have. I also didn’t write about the positive things going on at Douglass High circa 2004 (the debate program, the choir); alas, word count restrictions made it so, and it was more important to note how the positives were undermined by the negatives. The documentary shows a staff that seems to care about its students and is generally well-intentioned. It doesn’t seem so very different, in fact, from staffs one might encounter at suburban public high schools. But whereas suburban schools may be able to get away with employing people who are kind but in many ways incapable, urban schools such as Douglass cannot. After watching Hard Times at Douglass High, one would be hard-pressed to argue against more mechanisms—results-based mechanisms—for holding teachers and administrators accountable.

Update: Here’s the New York Times review.

Education poobahs from everywhere will go this week to Orlando for a k-12 summit hosted by former Florida Governor Jeb Bush and friends. In yesterday’s Orlando Sentinel, I wrote about the need for summit participants (and legislators and bureaucrats generally) to forget the hype and avoid focusing overmuch on dropout rates—that is, on the numbers themselves, which are essentially meaningless because states can render receipt of a diploma as difficult or facile as they wish. Lots of states have already succumbed to “lower the dropout rate” pressure by defanging their exit exams.

Two readers thought my piece worth commenting on on the Sentinel’s online site, and both had the same gripe: that my article didn’t even mention student accountability. This is a complaint that I frequently stumble upon, especially in comments sections where readers post opinions about the op-eds they’ve just ingested. In this particular ed-related observation (anong sundry others), the thinking public is far ahead of 1) the education thinktankerati and 2) government officials. One surmises that not a few thoughtful individuals have surmised that not a few high school students are screw-ups who don’t want to be in school, don’t want to learn, and don’t want to behave. Many of them will probably drop out, and many people seem to think that’s generally okay because at some point in time a 17-year-old has to take some responsibility for his own education and life. (Al Shanker, longtime AFT president, believed in student accountability, too.)

To utter such thoughts today is generally not acceptable in polite, ed-policy company, the membership of which concocts dreamy goals such as 100 percent proficiency by 2014. (Soon enough, we’ll have national 100 percent high school graduation targets.) Such student accountability observations are termed “unhelpful” and “unprodcutive.” Of course, they’re also true. But frankness is frowned upon, and so we watch chutzpah-less state legislators backtracking on exit exams and standards because they can’t bear to see anyone fail. Chapel Hill considers making 61 percent the lowest grade a pupil can garner—i.e., “You refuse to do your homework, Johnny? Okay, then. I’m afraid I’ll have to give you a 61 percent.”

Certainly, it’s important to offer second chances to kids who have screwed up but genuinely wish to work hard and compensate for their previous mistakes. Some students, however, simply have no such wish. It’s worth realizing that.

Apparently tired of being called defeatist defenders of the status quo, the Economic Policy Institute (home of Lawrence Mishel and Richard Rothstein) just released a policy statement calling for a “broader, BOLDER approach” to education. It’s a smart and savvy strategy: they go out of their way to say that school improvement matters, but they also want a focus on other social issues:

Education policy in this nation has typically been crafted around the expectation that schools alone can offset the full impact of low socioeconomic status on learning. Schools can—and have—ameliorated some of the impact of social and economic disadvantage on achievement. Improving our schools, therefore, continues to be a vitally important strategy for promoting upward mobility and for working toward equal opportunity and overall educational excellence.

Evidence demonstrates, however, that achievement gaps based on socioeconomic status are present before children even begin formal schooling. Despite the impressive academic gains registered by some schools serving disadvantaged students, there is no evidence that school improvement strategies by themselves can close these gaps in a substantial, consistent, and sustainable manner.

Nevertheless, there is solid evidence that policies aimed directly at education-related social and economic disadvantages can improve school performance and student achievement. The persistent failure of policy makers to act on that evidence—in tandem with a school-improvement agenda—is a major reason why the association between social and economic disadvantage and low student achievement remains so strong.

This reasonable argument attracted the support of many co-signers, including Fordham trustee Diane Ravitch. But I see three big problems with the statement.

First, while admitting the importance of school improvement, it’s REALLY squishy on school accountability:

The public has a right to hold schools accountable for raising student achievement. However, test scores alone cannot describe a school’s contribution to the full range of student outcomes. New accountability systems should combine appropriate qualitative and quantitative methods, and they will be considerably more expensive than the flawed accountability systems currently in use by the federal and state governments.

You could be kind and read that as “mend it don’t end it” on accountability, but I read it as “we don’t really want accountability but we can’t quite admit it.”

Second, the group’s big idea—that poor kids need high-quality preschool—is riddled with the same challenge as the big idea the group is challenging—that schools alone can narrow the achievement gap. Namely: we don’t have any experience bringing high-quality preschool to scale, just like we don’t have any experience bringing “no excuses” schools to scale. To my knowledge, the number of high-quality pre-K programs with strong evidence of effectiveness can be counted on one hand. (Sara Mead, am I missing something? Update: Sara says I am.) So why should we feel any better about putting our eggs in the preschool basket?

And finally, while it’s fair to say that “schools alone” can’t solve all these social problems, we shouldn’t pretend that most schools are coming anywhere close to doing all they could be doing to narrow achievement gaps. As long as the vast majority of inner-city schools, in particular, use watered-down curricula, hire inadequate teachers, and refuse to create a culture of high expectations, then we won’t know just how much “schools alone” could do.

Is this a broader approach? Sure. A bolder approach? Hardly.

Several New York City high school principals are receiving performance bonuses under the terms of an old program even though their schools fared poorly under the district’s new grading system. The old program uses the same tests as the new one but apparently sets lower achievement benchmarks.

The UFT is upset about this:

“It’s a cockeyed situation,” said teachers union president Randi Weingarten. “One set of metrics can generate a bonus and yet a separate set of metrics for the same exact school can generate an F. It just shows that using one set of data as the be-all and end-all just doesn’t make [sense].”

It’s cockeyed, for sure, but the real problem isn’t that they’re using one set of data. The problem is that the district keeps casting its accountability systems in concrete rather than soft, malleable Play-Doh. High-performing organizations are flexible enough to adapt to changing external circumstances and agile enough to carry out internal adjustments on the fly.

Public school districts will never do either of these things truly well since they’re largely chained to the inertia of the political process, but some government agencies have proved that they can slim down and smarten up when finally impelled to do so by the competition. Maybe someday this will happen in the schools sector.

Mississippi has passed legislation, and the governor has signed it, that would fire superintendents whose districts are labeled “underperforming” for two years straight. (Before it’s active, the law needs to be approved by the feds, for Civil Rights-related reasons that Education Week explains.) The Gadfly likes the law. I don’t.

Officials note that the Magnolia State is one of just three (in the company of Alabama and Florida) where some superintendents are elected. The thinking is this: Local elections for superintendent are easily corrupted because of their small turnouts; elected superintendents are more likely to make decisions based on politics, not on the interests of students; and elected superintendents, especially those supported by teachers’ unions, may fill the superintendent role for years without appreciably improving the classroom instruction of which they’re ostensibly in charge. (These concerns relate to few. Most superintendents in Mississippi are appointed.) Furthermore, advocates for the new law say, if the state holds teachers accountable, it should treat superintendents similarly.

Fair points, but points outweighed by the pitfalls of Mississippi’s new law. Pitfalls such as: There is no solid definition of “underperforming”; qualified candidates for superintendent positions will be dissuaded from taking open jobs in Mississippi; two years is not enough time to appreciably improve a failing school district; the law’s process for actually firing underperforming superintendents is complicated (see the Ed Week article); and voters are having their democratic voice overturned by the legislature.

To compare Mississippi’s new superintendent accountability with teacher accountability is to compare apples and rodents. Teachers in Mississippi who fail to drastically improve the test scores of their classrooms are not fired after two years—and neither should they be.

Prediction: The feds approve this law and after two or three years everyone in Mississippi hates it and the legislature tosses it out and why did we bother with this crude, top-down, hasty accountability system in the first place?

Photo by Flickr user nmcil.

Yesterday, we noted that Kevin Donnelly, authority on all things related to Aussie-ed, was displeased that Victoria was offering its teachers a massive, across-the-board pay raise decoupled from accountability. With principals, though, it’s another story.

In the latest episode of Fordham Factor, Mike hypothesizes that the addition of a writing component to the SAT exam may be partly responsible for the recent rise in twelfth-grade NAEP writing scores.

Is it possible that a privately-run, consumer-driven testing company could do as much if not more to improve student achievement than NCLB, which costs taxpayers billions of dollars?

This Associated Press story reports that the kinder-and-gentler Massachusetts Board of Education is “searching for gentler euphemisms to describe the state’s failing schools after educators complained current labels damage teacher morale and student self-esteem.” So instead of getting called “underperforming” they might be labeled a “Commonwealth priority.”Are they joking? Is this an April Fool’s Day joke? One of the primary theories behind standards-and-accountability is to shame schools (and their districts) into taking the tough actions to turn themselves around. Clear labels also alert parents to a problem so they can get involved-or get busy finding another option. It’s hard to think of a better way to keep parents in the dark than to call their schools a “priority.”

For their next act, maybe the board will suggest that Bear Stearns be labeled a “priority” investment firm. We can remember when the Massachusetts board was a model of toughness and foresight; where are their “priorities” now?

Mike, I agree that holding superintendents accountable for the performance of their schools is entirely appropriate, but as with any new law, the devil will prove to be in the details. The Commercial Dispatch reports that school performance will be based on the state’s accountability system; that’s not terribly encouraging in a state that earned a D+ from Fordham for its state standards. And what about a superintendent whose district shows great improvement for two straight years, yet still rates “underperforming”? The proposed law appears to be a blunt instrument applied to a complicated problem, especially considering that two years is barely time to implement changes, much less see the results show up in testing. Finally, we can’t forget that superintendent turnover is already a problem, with the average tenure lasting just a handful of years, and that should give us education reformers pause: change is hard to sustain without consistent leadership. Let’s hope this law works as intended, weeding out those superintendents who do little to help kids, and that it doesn’t exacerbate the leadership shortage found in too many school systems today.

The Mississippi Board of Education wants superintendents to be held accountable for student learning, the Clarion-Ledger reports. Supes in underperforming districts would be removed after two years, even if they were elected by the public. (Yes, some southern states still elect local superintendents.) Unfortunately voters don’t appear to put student achievement high on their priority lists when voting for education officials—at least in the case of school boards—so this tonic is more than appropriate. Fair is fair: if educators are to be held accountable, their bosses should be too.