This move was long overdue. Charters have been attracting more and more of the public school market share in D.C. every year, but they have been grasping for adequate space to accommodate their burgeoning enrollments. Arguably, the D.C. charter sector would be even larger today if the city hadn’t hoarded vacant properties, prompting even the best charters to scrounge for makeshift facilities and place students on waitlists due to lack of space.

These challenges are familiar to charter schools in most cities. Despite the surge in charter school enrollments and the support the sector receives from both political parties, the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools has documented that charters still commonly rent or own building space that is much smaller than that occupied by their traditional public school peers or that lack kitchens, gymnasiums, libraries, or science and computer labs.

The same could be said of even the best-performing charters in D.C. Until the high-flying Washington Latin Public Charter Schools got the chance to move into a former district school, it had been operating on three different campuses and forcing older students to walk three blocks to get from class to class. KIPP DC has been struggling to find new property for its high school to meet heightened demand.

Mayor Gray then perhaps recognized that the city can’t keep treating certain public school students as second-class citizens. He’ll now give twelve charter schools long-term leases and provide the others with short-term rentals. Eight of these buildings are district schools scheduled to close by next year.

Charter opponents in the district have decried the move as another, major step toward an all-charter school system. But this ignores the trend lines in D.C.: Charter enrollments have grown by around 7 percent each year during the past five years and are on track to make up 50 percent of the total public school population in the near future. To ask in-demand charters to keep turning students away because they lack the facilities is unacceptable.

Charters shouldn’t have to rely on the goodwill of city leaders and school districts just to get a suitable school building. They should have access to the same capital funds and bonding authority available to traditional school systems. But until they do, Gray’s move ought to be emulated in other cities.

5.   The P is for prudence

The most noticeable aspect of PARCC’s response was its the-dog-that-didn’t-bark-ness. I expected, but didn’t get, more discussion of big successes to date.

Maybe they have gobs to peacock about but chose not to, wanting later results to speak for themselves (more on that in #4). People I trust say they are on the way to getting content, alignment, and rigor right. Maybe my questions didn’t set them up to brag about that stuff?

Or maybe my reaction is just a matter of relativity. When compared to SB’s earnest, 3,000-word, front-of-the-classroom response, heck, almost anything would’ve paled.

But maybe my affection for PARCC’s board and team has softened me. A cynic might say PARCC’s limited discussion of wins is a red flag.

I don’t find anything worrisome in PARCC’s response, so I won’t speculate. So I’ll say this: PARCC’s modest response about past activities probably won’t change too many Insiders’ right-track/wrong-track vote in either direction.

4.   Confidence about the future

Reports of the consortia’s death have been greatly exaggerated! Or so they argue: Both come across as sanguine about the days ahead.

Are their tests going to be on time?

• PARCC: We are “on-track to deliver high quality computer-based summative assessments for mathematics and ELA/literacy in grades 3–11 in the 2014–15 school year.”
• SB: “We are on track to deliver each aspect of our assessment system on time and on budget in 2014–15.”

Are they worried about states abandoning the consortia?

• SB: “We have no reason to expect changes among our 21 governing states.”
• PARCC: “Our governing states tell us they are in it for the long haul.”

What about these large proportions of Education Insiders saying both consortia are on the wrong track?

• PARCC: “The ‘education insiders’ who matter most are our state chiefs, local educators and local school systems. They tell us they are pleased with our progress, and we will keep pushing forward as planned.”
• SB: (My paraphrase): We’re quietly doing tough, technical work; those folks aren’t assessment experts; they don’t know what we’ve been doing.

Doughty stuff, indeed. Take that, Smarick, Finn, and Education Insiders!

3.   Whither common assessments?

Secretary Duncan used to assail the “race to the bottom.” States had different standards and tests, and the tests differed in difficulty and cut scores. So a state could “improve” its comparative standing by merely easing its standards or tests.

The solution, he argued, was common standards and common assessments. Three Duncan quotes from 2010:

(Note two things about his vision: Commonality is key and state decision making on tests created huge problems—“insidious,” “no sense.”)

“The Common Core standards developed by the states, coupled with the new generation of assessments, will help put an end to the insidious practice of establishing 50 different goalposts for educational success.”

“The fact of, you know, 50 states doing this individually has made no sense whatever. You know, this is much more efficient, and both intellectually and from a financial standpoint is the right way to go.”

“For the first time, it will be possible for parents and schools leaders to assess and compare in detail how students in their state are doing compared to students in other states.”

Statements like these had me believing the Department was determined to have states participate in the consortia. In fact, one 2010 Duncan statement suggested that the consortia would be the only testing options:

“We hope these two groups will work together and learn from one another. States will have the ability to - you'll pick which one they think will be best for them.”

This is why I asked all three respondents how important the consortia were to Common Core and why I asked the Department if it would use its authority to hold states in the consortia.

The answers I got were unexpected and significant.

The consortia surprisingly demurred. SB replied, “The Common Core will succeed or fail in the classroom.”

But the Department’s response was clear: It is not going to hold states together on assessments.

While it thinks a diffuse system of tests with varying cut scores would be “unfortunate,” the Department implied things wouldn’t be so bad.

To paraphrase its response: The public reporting requirements of ESEA would continue to ensure transparency and the ability to identify areas of weakness in states. States would work with their institutions of higher education to create tests that measure college- and career-readiness. And NAEP would still provide comparable cross-state results.

Two things stand out. First, it feels like the Department has seriously pulled back on the importance of common assessments—three years ago, different state systems “made no sense” and was “insidious.”

Second, we had ESEA reporting requirements, state-based test decisions, and NAEP results back when Secretary Duncan bemoaned the “race to the bottom.” Those things evidently didn’t stop states from scurrying downward. Why would they now?

More on that below.

But my point here is I now have a much-reduced sense of the likely place of common assessments in the Common Core era.

2.   The return of the Tenth Amendment and the loss of commonality

There were times during my reading of the responses that I thought I had inadvertently picked up a copy of the Republican Party’s platform on federalism. We’re talking about near-obsequious touting of state authority.

PARCC and SB are collections of states, so I wasn’t surprised to read it from them. But the Department’s enormous deference to states speaks volumes about the current politics of Common Core and, more importantly for our purposes here, the future of Common Core–aligned tests.

The Department’s response included the following:

• “The states are the vital decision-makers here”
• “States must make the right decisions for their students and communities”
• “How states get (to great standards and assessments) is entirely up to them.”
• “Again, states need to individually make the best decision for them based on all the relevant facts.”

I have a difficult time squaring these comments with the 2010 language (quoted above) that demeaned a state-led system of standards and assessments.

It seems pretty clear that this is simply realpolitik from the Department. At present, much of the political right sees the push for common standards and assessments as federal overreach. In power in many states, leaders on the right are now doing something about it—e.g., Indiana’s and Pennsylvania’s Common Core repudiations.

I’m sure many advocates for common standards and assessments now feel wistful. Would this backlash have occurred had the Department used language more deferential to states than the 2010 language cited above?

Would there be less antagonism toward Common Core and common assessments had the Department allowed them to gain support organically instead of pushing them so forcefully?

(In Rick Hess’s direct language, the Department has its “thumbprints all over the Common Core. The administration has pushed it through Race to the Top, the NCLB waivers, and their ‘ESEA blueprint’; they've championed it in public remarks; and they've patted themselves on the back for all this in the Democratic National Platform.”)

I have to wonder: If four years of policy and communications had been more modest, would the Department now be in better position to hold the consortia together and prevent a splintering on assessments?

The Department now says it’s fine with states making their own testing decisions. But based on that 2010 language, the $330 million it spent on the consortia, and its weaving of common standards and assessments into other programs, I suspect it was the Department’s wish that all or nearly all states participated in the consortia.

That now is out of the Department’s hands. Broad commonality in testing may be lost.

But the Department has not surrendered; instead, it appears to have made a clever tactical retreat. It has drawn a line in the sand, and we now know where the final battle will be fought.

1.   Rigor, alignment, and technical review

With commonality likely a lost cause, the Department will fight for rigor and alignment.

Each state can choose whatever assessment system it wants—PARCC, SB, or something else—but that system will have to be aligned with high-quality standards and measure college- and career-readiness.

The Department gave several interesting clues about how this will play out. First, it mentioned that Common Core differs from other standards, for example, in its heavy focus on writing; therefore, “assessments that truly measure the Common Core will likely look different from current state tests.”

How I read this: Test makers and states, off-the-shelf won’t cut it.

Second, the Department said it is studying how to determine whether a test actually measures college- and career-readiness.

I interpret that to mean the Department will be very interested in state cut scores.

Third, the Department reminds us that current law requires a state’s tests to be aligned with its standards, and that the Department has a peer-review system for ensuring that. In a few months, the Department says it will re-launch the now-paused peer-review system and provide additional detail “about our process and our criteria.”

Then, the kicker:

Once complete, all assessment systems, including PARCC, Smarter Balanced, and all other state assessment systems, will be required to demonstrate how they meet the requirements for technical quality, alignment, and other assessment best practices.

(Don’t consider this an idle threat. Though it was in the previous administration, the Department has withheld funds from a state for not adhering to federal rules on testing.)

So in total: The Department will be hands-off about the test systems states choose; the consortia will sink or swim based on their ability to create products states want; states may chose to go in different directions, making comparing results difficult; but the Department will use its peer-review process to ensure state systems are aligned with standards and set the proficiency bar high.

Keep your eyes peeled for information from the Department on the peer-review process and criteria. That will be the pulling back of the curtain, the big reveal, for how Common Core will be assessed.

Many of the seeds planted in the "let a thousand flowers bloom" era of the early charter schools movement grew into skunk cabbage. What happened? Photo by Nicholas_T

Dear Deborah,

I want to say more about a topic that interests us both: How to create an accountability system that empowers excellent educators to create top-notch schools while ensuring a basic level of quality for everyone.

It's a real dilemma, because what might work in a hothouse setting (especially lots of professional autonomy) has tended to disappoint when taken to scale.

That's not easy for me to admit. My first education enthusiasm was the notion of autonomy and uber-local control, as epitomized in Chicago's "local school councils" of the early 1990s. I wrote my college thesis on the topic (with the help of the University of Michigan's great David Cohen), and came away convinced that educator autonomy, plus parental choice, would lead us to the Promised Land. (Professor Cohen knew better!)

A few years later, I landed at the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation, where we embraced the "let a thousand flowers bloom" mantra of the early charter schools movement. I helped plant a few of said flowers in our hometown of Dayton, Ohio—flowers that turned out to be, err, more like skunk cabbage.

It was a disaster. Well, not a total disaster. A few of those charter schools (in Ohio and elsewhere) turned out to be quite good. KIPP. Amistad Academy. The Met. High Tech High.

But many, many more turned out mediocre, or worse.

What was the problem? We'd cleared away the soul-sucking union contracts and much of the mindless bureaucracy. We'd empowered educators to do their thing and let the magic happen. Yet many flopped.

It wasn't just the test scores—though those were often pretty pitiful. Anyone who visited the schools could see with their own eyes that there wasn't much there there—the curriculum (if they had one) was disorganized or incoherent, the teaching was inconsistent (at best) and nonexistent (at worse), the culture was weak. The schools were often small, safe, and welcoming—virtues, all—but you couldn't say much more about them without wanting to cry.

Freedom for educators and for parents is necessary, but not sufficient, for the creation of excellent schools.

This period of the charter movement yielded difficult lessons—but which lessons is still debated. Did it just show that nothing works—that poverty is too much of a barrier for anyone to overcome? (Most of these early charters in most states were serving overwhelmingly poor students.) Were the charters simply underfunded—money matters after all!—and just needed more resources to succeed? Did it prove that "decentralization" and "professional autonomy" are misguided—and that what we need is more centralization and control, like some systems overseas?

My own take is that freedom—for educators to do their work and for parents to choose an environment that's right for their children—is necessary, but not sufficient, for the creation of excellent schools. That it's "necessary" is obvious by looking at what happens in highly controlled, regimented systems in the United States or around the world. These systems can bring a certain degree of quality control to the task and make sure that outright failures (educational, fiscal, or otherwise) don't happen. But it's hard to find an "excellent" school in a command-and-control system. That's because of a simple fact of human psychology: We hate being told what to do.

You can't just empower anyone—you have to empower a team of people who actually know what they are doing.

But removing all strings isn't sufficient to get you excellence, either. You can't just empower anyone—you have to empower a team of people who actually know what they are doing. And these people, collectively, must have the capacity to run a great school. They need to have a coherent pedagogical vision, know how to build a curriculum, know how to create a positive school culture, know how to build and follow a sensible budget, know how to put reasonable "internal controls" in place, know how to recruit a great staff, and on and on. These people, it turns out, are scarcer than I had realized at age 22.

And then you have to hold these schools accountable for getting strong results with kids. That brings us back to the question of measurements. I think the charter movement had it right from the get-go: Each school would have its own "charter" spelling out the results that it would be responsible for achieving, and these metrics could be customized to the school. More traditional schools might have been happy to use test scores, but more progressive ones might use something else—say, their graduates' success at the next level of schooling. (Deborah, how do you think about this for a school like Mission Hill, whose test scores are pretty mediocre? Is it how well their students do in high school?)

Then came the modern standards-testing-accountability movement with its emphasis on uniform achievement measures, culminating in No Child Left Behind. Here those of us in the charter movement made a mistake. We quickly agreed to be part of the "same accountability system" as other public schools, which meant that those customized "charters" mostly went out the window; the measures that mattered were the test scores and nothing but. We did this for understandable and strategic reasons—imagine the outcry from charter opponents if charters didn't have to sweat the tests!—but it was a step backward nonetheless. And it led, predictably, to less pedagogical diversity in the charter movement, which came to be increasingly dominated by "traditional" models of schools.

So now what? Let me make a modest proposal for how to design an accountability system going forward; I think you might actually like it!

1. First, as the default system, we keep something like we have today, but with better standards and tests. (Yes, common-core standards and tests.) Students are tested annually; schools are held accountable for making solid progress from September to June, with greater progress expected for students who are further behind. States and districts give these schools lots of assistance—with curriculum development, teacher training, and the like. Such a default system won't lead to widespread excellence, but it will continue to raise the floor so that the "typical" school in America becomes better than it is today. (NB: I'd scrap any state-prescribed "accountability" below the level of the school. In other words, no more rigid teacher evaluation systems; leave personnel issues to the principals.) And it would provide taxpayers an assurance that they are getting a "public good" from their investment in public education (namely, a reasonably educated citizenry).
2. Then we offer all public schools—district and charter—an opt-out alternative. They can propose to the state or its surrogate that they be held accountable to a different set of measures. My preferences would be those related to the long-term success of their graduates. School "inspections" could be part of the picture, too. These evaluation metrics would be rigorous, but designed to be supportive of, rather than oppositional to, the cause of excellent schools. And they might be particularly important to educators of a more progressive, anti-testing bent.

How about it, Deborah? The "default" system would keep schools from being bad, and might even help most schools be good. And the "alternative" system would unleash our best educators to go for great.

Deal?

Mike

I’ve pulled out a “Top Ten Takeaways” from the exchange. Today, we’re posting #10–#6 (they’re in rank order so #1 is most important). Tomorrow, we’ll post #5 - #1.

10.   Competition with the testing industry is GAME ON!

In ways subtle and not, the responses sought to differentiate the consortia’s efforts from the testing industry.

It seemed like the Department’s interest was in drawing a line between the old and the new. Why’d they spend $330 million on new tests? Because, USED says, governors and state chiefs asked them to do so.

Why did states make that ask? “Because the market was not meeting their needs.”

According to the feds, the consortia are building “next-generation” tests that “will offer significant improvements directly responsive to the wishes of teachers and other practitioners: they will offer better assessment of critical thinking, through writing and real-world problem solving, and offer more accurate and rapid scoring.”

“We expect the consortia to develop assessment systems that are markedly better than current assessments.”

The implication is that the testing industry had come up short.

SB said its new tests would offer a “quality benefit”; SB’s transparency is “antithetical to the competitive nature of commercial test publishing”; states will now have more control over tests; and tests will have more high-quality items.

PARCC argued that “through the consortium, states are able to ensure a higher-quality assessment than any individual state could by itself.” If states drop out, they “will likely use lower quality tests to assess the CCSS.”

PARCC was also clear that the consortia had the ability make the testing industry better: “The power of states working together is going to move and improve the entire testing industry” and “The consortia assessments are our best chance to move the testing industry towards innovation and quality.”

What does PARCC think about testing companies trying to steal away its members with big promises? “The state chiefs have been hearing this sales pitch for years, and they are wise to the ways of the traditional testing industry.”

Bam!

Have no doubt: This is true-blue competition.

I’m sure the consortia believe everything they’re saying, but have no doubt, they’re also talking down their competitors.

They’ve probably had an inkling that the testing companies were quietly looking to pick off states. But yesterday’s hugely revealing Ed Week piece on ACT removed all doubt as the company declared, “We are Plan B.”

Ka-pow!

The testing companies’ capturing states would be a coup: beating out two consortia of states that were buoyed by federal money and given several years of lead-time to get their offerings right. The consortia don’t want to lose members, and they certainly don’t want to have to explain why they got $330 million of taxpayer funds if the market was going to produce something states wanted and without government money.

It seems the consortia are working overtime to maintain their respective market shares. When asked about the possibility of Florida’s and other states’ exodus, PARCC summed things up extremely well.

Yes, we think they’ll stay with us, “[b]ut we know there are no guarantees. That is why we are working hard to produce the highest-quality assessment that reflects the needs of PARCC states…Our job is to make sure that PARCC remains ‘Plan A’ for Florida and every other member state.”

Game on.

9.   Technology as a major issue

Both consortia concede that while some states are ready to give online tests, some are not. Both are confident states will get there. (As a precaution, both are providing a paper-and-pencil option.)

To help the cause, SB announced that old operating systems and processors and limited memory will be sufficient to administer its assessments. With PARCC, it developed a “technology readiness tool” that allows schools and districts to track progress.

Making the infrastructure upgrades necessary and procuring the needed devices is a huge lift for states. Moreover, online tests come with their own challenges.

As states list the pros and cons of staying in the consortia, tech issues will be front and center.

8.   The complexity and consequences of coordination and consensus

Both PARCC and SB discussed the difficulty associated with so many cooks in the kitchen. Completing tasks requires so many different actors across so many different states, and so many stakeholders want to play a role. In PARCC’s words, “There are thousands of state leaders, local educators and postsecondary leaders, administrators and faculty who are engaged in developing the PARCC assessment system.”

SB wrote about the challenge of “responding to the intense—and legitimate—interest of so many diverse parties in this work.” Moreover, “Keeping this diverse array of interested parties informed about the complex and often highly technical work of building an assessment system has been more challenging than we originally imagined.”

This is noteworthy because these challenges have arisen prior to the high-stakes state-level decisions just ahead. As states approach crucial go/no-go calls (budgeting for the new tests, ending contracts for existing tests), the gaps between the consortia’s decisions and each state’s preferred paths will be magnified.

In other words, a number of states might opt out partially because they didn’t get their ways on some number of issues.

7.   Smarter Balanced has its act together

I follow the assessments transition closely, and even I didn’t realize how far SB had come. Perhaps they are just really good at telling their story, but I walked away from their submission convinced they are running a pretty tight ship.

They’ve hit their project milestones for delivering summative, interim, and formative assessments. The estimated cost for their full formative-interim-summative package is less than what most of their members currently pay.

This coming year, they’ll pilot 5,000 items and tasks with about a million students. This month, they plan to release a complete set of practice tests for each subject and grade level. They’ve done small trials already.

Finally, they believe all of their governing-board members are fully committed (that is, not flight risks). In a recent survey, all but one of their states indicated plans to use the full suite of tests; the other plans use only the summative assessment.

Not too shabby.

6. But what will be the quality of SB’s act?

In so many ways, Smarter Balanced gave the impression that their process has been (and therefore their final product may be) business-as-usual. Time and time again, I found myself saying, “Wow, this sounds traditional.”

Consider SB’s verbatim language:

• “The process Smarter Balanced is using is very similar to the processes that states have been using for over a decade to create assessments for NCLB accountability”
• “To date, our work has been supported through contracts with every one of the country’s large testing companies”
• “The test-development process Smarter Balanced is using follows a sequence of steps that is familiar to all experienced assessment professionals.”

More than just using familiar processes, SB seems to have done everything possible to generate consensus among its countless stakeholders—such language is throughout their response. Of course, there’s nothing wrong with this in principle—in fact, it’s laudable—but it does raise the specter of lowest-common-denominator-itis.

Take for example, SB’s “innovative approach” to setting cut scores. Concerned that member states might not feel “adequately represented” by just participating in workshops, SB has created a crowd-sourcing mechanism so just about everyone can weigh in on what proficiency means. Will that lead to tough cut scores or widely accepted cut scores (BIG difference)?

Perhaps SB’s most revealing response along these lines is the following: “While the process that is being used to develop the Smarter Balanced assessment system would be familiar to anyone who has ever built a test, what is unique about Smarter Balanced is the bringing together of a large and diverse array of talent committed to making each element of the system ’best in breed.’”

That sounds to me like things aren’t going to be different so much as consensus based and better (though my colleague Kathleen Porter-Magee might question the “better” part).

Maybe this is the right course of action. It’ll keep people together and keep everything on pace. The product will probably be evolutionary, not revolutionary.

I guess my overall take is this: I’m certainly more confident than before that SB will successfully deliver something reputable and on-time. For that, they deserve a tip of the hat.

However, I just find it hard to make the case, based on what I read from them, that it will be “next generation.”

But I may be wrong. Time will tell.

Jeff and his wife have been reaching into their “middle-income pockets” to send their daughters to a “middle-of-the-road” private school because their public school options have been substandard. Until recently. An impressive STEM high school planned to expand to middle grades, and it was just what the Murray family wanted.

So it was for hundreds of others. And so a lottery would pick the lucky few from the many who longed for what Jeff called the Holy Grail, the best possible educational foundation for their kids. “We know we’d found it,” he writes. “And we can’t get in.”

Jeff has left us a lot to ponder, and not just because he has left us a powerful, personal reflection. What happens, he asks, when you don’t have the means or the knowledge of the system? What happens when all your choices are bad?

What happens, indeed?

My name is Kathleen Porter-Magee; I’m a senior director and Bernard Lee Schwartz policy fellow at the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, a right-leaning education-policy think tank in Washington, D.C., that also leads ground-level work in the great state of Ohio. We support a variety of education reforms, with a particular focus on school choice and standards- and accountability-driven reform. In addition to my own policy work, I’ve spent several years working to implement rigorous standards in urban Catholic and public charter school classrooms. Fordham’s president, Chester Finn, served in the Reagan Administration, and its executive vice president, Mike Petrilli, served under George W. Bush. Both are also affiliated with the Hoover Institution in California.

I’m honored to be with you here today, and I’m grateful for the opportunity to talk to you about what I believe is one of the most important education initiatives of the past decade: the development and adoption of the Common Core State Standards.

I hope to help explain why the Common Core holds such promise, to demystify what the standards are all about, and to debunk some of the most common myths and misconceptions.

For nearly two decades, state standards have been a cornerstone of our modern education system. State governments have long set minimum expectations for each grade level or grade band across all grades, K through 12. These are meant to ensure that all students, regardless of race or socioeconomic status are held to the same rigorous standards. And there is ample evidence that, without clear objectives, teachers will—often unconsciously—raise or lower their own expectations based on the abilities and background of the students in front of them, rather than based on what will help ensure students are on path towards college or the workforce.

Yet, we have known for a long time that, in far too many states, including Wisconsin, the existing state standards set the bar far too low, leaving a content and expectations gap between schools and classrooms.

But are the Common Core the right solution to this problem? In order to answer that question, it’s important to understand five facts:

1.   The Common Core effort is and has always been a state-led effort to improve the quality and rigor of K–12 academic standards, of which Wisconsin leaders have been full participants.
2.   The Common Core State Standards are significantly stronger than the Wisconsin standards they replaced.
3.   Common Core English language arts standards emphasize the importance of reading rigorous, high-quality literature in English class, plus nonfiction in history, science, and other courses.
4.   The Common Core math standards prioritize the most important math content at each grade level, including a heavy dose of “math facts” and arithmetic in the early grades.
5.   By adopting the Common Core, Wisconsin benefits from much stronger standards while retaining full control over curriculum, instruction, and pedagogy where it belongs—at the local level.

Let’s dive deeper into rigor of the standards. If I leave you with nothing else, I hope I will be successful in underlining this critical point: The Common Core are significantly clearer and more rigorous than the Wisconsin English language arts and math standards they replaced. In fact, the gains made by replacing the Wisconsin standards with the Common Core are some of the largest in the nation.

We at the Fordham Institute have been evaluating state standards for more than fifteen years. In 2010, we released a comprehensive review of the clarity, specificity, content, and rigor of every state’s existing ELA and math standards, along with our evaluation of the final draft of the Common Core. In that analysis, the Common Core earned a B-plus from our ELA experts and an A-minus from our math experts. In the same evaluation, Wisconsin’s English language arts and math standards earned a D and an F, respectively. By choosing to adopt the Common Core, Wisconsin has dramatically boosted the quality, clarity, and rigor of its expectations in these two critical areas.

When judged against international standards for ELA and math, the Common Core fares equally well. Between 2009 and 2010, we reviewed the quality of the standards that provide the foundation for several national and international assessments: the NAEP, the PISA, TIMSS (for math), and PIRLS (for ELA). In math, the Common Core scored as well as the TIMSS, and better than both the PISA and the NAEP. In ELA, the Common Core outperformed all three: the NAEP, PISA, and PIRLS.

What’s more, research by William Schmidt, a leading expert on international mathematics performance and a previous director of the U.S. TIMSS study, has compared the Common Core to high-performing countries in grades K–8. The agreement was very high between the Common Core math standards and the math standards in place in the highest performing nations. In fact, Schmidt and his colleague found that no state's previous math standards were as close a match to those of high performing countries as the Common Core (not California’s, not Indiana’s, not Massachusetts’s).

Perhaps even more critically, Schmidt’s research found that “states whose previous standards were most similar to the Common Core performed better on a national math test in 2009.”[1]  That means that, across the nation and the world, students whose learning was driven by standards that closely resembled the Common Core fared better than students who lived in states whose standards looked very different.

In spite of the evidence of rigor of the Common Core, a small but vocal set of critics have spent the past year in Wisconsin and around the country spreading countless myths about what the standards ask, who is behind them, and what they mean for our teachers and students.

For the purposes of today’s conversation, let me address four of the most prominent critiques to demonstrate how these attacks don’t hold up under scrutiny.

First, many critics mistakenly believe that the Common Core inappropriately prioritize nonfiction over literature in language arts classrooms.

This is based on a misreading—or deliberate manipulation—of a two-paragraph section found on page 5 of the introduction to the CCSS that mentions the NAEP assessment framework, and suggests that teachers across content areas should “follow NAEP’s lead in balancing the reading of literature with the reading of informational texts, including texts in history/social studies, science, and technical subjects.” Following NAEP’s lead would mean that fourth, eighth, and twelfth graders would spend 50, 55, and 70 percent of their time (respectively) reading informational text.

Some critics have led people to believe that these percentages are meant to direct learning exclusively in literature classrooms. They are not. In fact, the Common Core immediately clarifies that “the percentages…reflect the sum of student reading, not just reading in ELA settings. Teachers of senior English classes, for example, are not required to devote 70 percent of reading to informational texts.”

What’s more, the Common Core devote a disproportionately large amount of attention on demonstrating the quality, complexity, and rigor of the texts students should be reading each year. Appendix A includes a list of “exemplar” texts, the vast majority of which are works written by literary giants like Throeau, Chaucer, Shakespeare, Harper Lee, and Nathaniel Hawthorne. The small number of technical documents included in these lists are dwarfed by the volume of great authors and works of literature and literary nonfiction that the Common Core holds up as exemplary.

Second, many critics complain that the Common Core standards promote low-level mathematical skills, or that they prioritize mathematical “practices” or “fuzzy math” over critical content. Again, a close reading of the standards reveals the opposite is true.

The Common Core math standards prioritize essential content—and allow the time and space needed for deep mastery of that content. In the early grades, this means that arithmetic is heavily weighted, that students are asked to learn to automaticity their basic math facts, and that they are asked to master the standard algorithms. This is content they need to know—cold—in order to be prepared for the upper level math work they will do in high school and beyond. If there is one thing we know with certainty, it’s that math is cumulative. You can only move on to more advanced content when you have fully mastered essential prerequisite knowledge and skills.

Some critics complain that the Common Core don’t require Algebra in the eighth grade, something that many think is essential to prepare students for advanced math in high school. The reality, however, is that the Kindergarten through seventh grade Common Core standards include all of the prerequisite content students will need to have learned to be prepared for Algebra I in the eighth grade. And that means that it’s the states, districts, and/or schools who decide for themselves course and graduation requirements.

Third, despite some heated rhetoric to the contrary, the Common Core was at its founding and remains today a state-led effort. The Obama administration has certainly tried to claim credit, but the truth is the work on Common Core started before Barack Obama was sworn in as president. And while his administration did try to incentivize adoption of more rigorous state standards like Common Core through the Race to the Top competition, no other federal money is tied to Common Core adoption. The states who have opted not to adopt the Common Core—Texas, Virginia, Alaska, and Nebraska—receive exactly the amount of federal aid they would have received had they adopted the Common Core. Even more critically: any state that opts out of the Common Core today or in the future will not lose any future federal education funding.

Some claim that the Obama administration tied Common Core adoption to its ESEA waiver process. Yet, Virginia won a waiver without ever adopting the Common Core, proving that the two were not inextricably linked.

Similarly, there is no single national assessment being forced on states. There are two federally funded assessment consortia, but states have no obligation to join either, as was evident when Alabama and Utah backed out of both. In fact, private assessment developers continue to compete for state assessment contracts. Pearson has developed an assessment in New York that the state may choose to stick with even when the consortia assessments are ready. The ACT is in the process of developing its own version as well. Others will no doubt join them, and the federally funded consortia will be a helpful comparison—much like the NAEP is now—but will not lead to a sole “national” test for all American schoolchildren.

Finally, some argue that adoption of the Common Core—or any K–12 academic standards—will usurp local control over curriculum and instruction. On the contrary, by setting standards, rather than adopting statewide curricula, state education leaders are ensuring that local district, school, and teacher leaders remain in control of the decisions that most directly impact the students they serve. On the ELA side, this means that local leaders and teachers can and will choose the texts students will read. On the math side, it means that schools can decide whether to fast-track students to Algebra I, and so on. Standards set a minimum bar—a floor, not a ceiling. They are designed only to help define student outcomes to help ensure that all students have the opportunity to learn the content they need to succeed. But educators still drive curriculum and instruction. Leaders still make critical, school-level decisions. In short, by setting standards, states can help preserve local autonomy, rather than taking it away.

The decision to adopt the Common Core in Wisconsin has set this great state on the right path. Whether this decision leads to improved outcomes depends entirely on your commitment to getting this right for Wisconsin’s schoolchildren.

[1]  For a fuller description of the findings, see here: http://edwp.educ.msu.edu/news/2012/study-supports-move-toward-common-math-standards/#sthash.qqbNrGdb.dpuf.

Our first guest on By the Company It Keeps is Tim Daly, President of TNTP. I’m a huge fan of Tim and his organization. In addition to being a highly talented and endlessly affable guy, he’s helped lead TNTP into rarified air. It is as influential on policy and practice as any education-reform organization around.

Tim was a guiding force behind the seminal publication The Widget Effect and played a major role in the production of other top-flight TNTP reports like The Irreplaceables and Leap Year.

Earlier in his career he was a TFA corps member (having taught in Baltimore) and helped establish and expand the New York City Teaching Fellows program. With TNTP CEO Ariela Rozman (another total star), he received the 2012 Harold W. McGraw, Jr. Prize in Education.

If future interviews turn out half as well as Tim’s, I’ll be thrilled. We learn a great deal, and the subject’s smarts, curiosity, and humility shine through. He even enlightens us about Garry Wills and Stan Musial.

As a matter of fact, the totality is so good that I’m willing to look past his grievous error about Sandy Koufax (he only had 165 career wins!).

Ladies and gentlemen, Tim Daly.

1.   How would you summarize the key findings of Leap Year, TNTP’s latest report?

It’s sort of a combination of a study and a tell-all. The basic finding is that the first year is not a warm up lap—it’s a very strong signal of how a teacher will perform in the future. If we use multiple tools to follow a teacher’s early progress, we have a good idea of whether that person should continue in the profession. Other studies have shown this by looking at large populations of teachers, but we demonstrated it in the real world by launching programmatic shifts in more than a dozen cities.

It’s also the story of our quest to do a better job of bringing excellent teachers to schools that desperately need them. We have a mission. If we aren’t doing the things that will achieve it, we need to change. But how? We thought we’d share our approach.

2.   One interesting lesson is that we should probably invest in more observers, not more observations. Can you say more about that?

This is a finding that echoes the Gates MET research. When you send the same person each time to see a teacher, you don’t maximize reliability because whatever tendencies the observer has are consistently projected onto the teacher. In some ways you are learning more and more about the observer, not the teacher. We also see in many cases that the same observer rates the teacher higher and higher with each visit, while you don’t see that with varied observers. The most useful observational portrait is a combination of multiple visits AND multiple visitors.

3.   In recent years, thanks to the MET Project, TNTP’s The Widget Effect, and other research, we’ve learned a great deal about educator effectiveness. Thanks to Leap Year, we’re wiser about the first year of teaching. Taking all of this into account, what does the ideal state teacher-certification system look like?

This is a policy issue where our instincts and the evidence can point in opposite directions. We all want to hold a high bar for entry into teaching. It’s a reasonable assumption that asking candidates to jump through all sorts of hoops before becoming teachers is going to improve quality. But the evidence just doesn’t support it. A lot of the candidates who jump through the hoops don’t become good teachers and some of the candidates who come through streamlined avenues do very well. It leads us to conclude that up-front certification should be lightweight and simple—designed to exclude only those who don’t even deserve a tryout in teaching. On the other hand, ongoing re-certification should be much more rigorous, as we should expect that many teachers will fail to meet our standards on the job and should not become career educators.

4.   Why do you think some of the nation’s “new-and-improved” teacher-evaluation systems continue to rate the vast majority of teachers as effective or better? Given all of the time, money, and energy spent on evaluation reform, should we be concerned that meaningful differentiation is still elusive?

Yes, we should be concerned, but not surprised. We argued in The Widget Effect that the problem wasn’t just the evaluation systems, it was a culture that refused to see the differences in instructional skill that were right before our eyes. The new systems provide a better support structure to assess and develop instruction, and they usually remove prohibitions against consideration of student learning. But they do not by themselves change culture. All of us, as educators, are responsible for that culture. We must take ownership of the systems and use them as they were intended to be used.

5.   What current TNTP projects are you most excited about? Are there any particular state or district engagements that seem especially promising?

As a follow up to The Irreplaceables, we’ve done a survey of elite teachers nationally – mostly folks who’ve won prestigious awards—to learn more about their experiences and perspectives on policy issues. We’ll publish the results later this year, but one thing that stands out clearly is that when we talk about what “teachers” think, we’re probably oversimplifying because they have such diverse views about so many issues. I’ve lost track of how many findings surprised me.

Also, we’re about to name the second group of Fishman Prize winners. This is one of my absolute favorite things we do at TNTP. It’s a $25,000 prize for teachers in Title I public schools that’s named for Shira Fishman, a high school math teacher in DC. The winners spend the summer working with us and writing about their classroom practice.

6.   My sources tell me that you are an inveterate number cruncher—that, all things being equal, you’d prefer to be analyzing data. Have those hours taught you any overarching lessons about research, advocacy, or policy? Any particularly memorable “a-ha!” from one of these long, solitary journeys through a spreadsheet?

I plead guilty. I like to review evidence myself because I can ask all the questions I want without bothering someone else…and I usually have an annoying number of questions. I would say the number one thing I’ve learned is not to believe things you hear—not without checking. People repeat things at conferences that they believe to be true, but often they misheard someone else say it or they are slightly (and often unintentionally) exaggerating it. Or they are presenting anecdotes as data. When you dig, you find that far fewer things are “true,” meaning they hold up to scrutiny, but they are more interesting and challenging than things tossed around as conventional wisdom.

A good example is the idea that new teachers struggle, but with time they get better. That seems entirely reasonable because it’s consistent with what we observe in our own experiences and with research, which says second year teachers are better than first year teachers. But when you look at the data in detail, it’s more complex than that. This was one of my “A-ha!” moments, as you call them.

I was looking at trend data on a group of new teachers and I realized that some of them stagnated very early in their careers or even declined temporarily. Because they didn’t master basic skills, they adopted bad habits to get by that caused them to fall so far behind their peers that they couldn’t catch up, even a year or two later. So yes, new teachers get better, but you can’t just assume it will happen, or that they will all get better. I still remember staring at my computer screen, trying to make sense of what I was seeing.

7.   More under-rated hitter: Jimmie Foxx or Stan Musial? Better left-handed pitcher: Warren Spahn or Sandy Koufax?

Stan Musial. I am fatally biased because I’m a Cardinals fan but Musial is one of the most accomplished, consistent, and balanced hitters in baseball history. Just for a start, he had over 3,600 hits—that’s a staggering number, Tony Gwynn didn’t even have 3,200—and he had the same number at home and on the road. But he also hit almost 500 home runs. Pete Rose may have had more hits but he had only 160 home runs.

For pitchers, I’m going to say Koufax but it’s apples and oranges. Spahn is so much more accomplished over his career but Koufax was as untouchable for a period of time as anyone has ever been. That stretch of domination is fascinating to me—especially since he was magical right to the day of his retirement.

8.   In my experience most number crunchers are simply very curious people. If you look back on your intellectual development, what big ideas, books, or thinkers (whether education reform–related or not) influenced you the most?

I took a couple of classes with Garry Wills, a historian, when I was an undergraduate and he had a huge influence on me. He has such a knack for laying out deep arguments simply and supporting them with evidence that is more far reaching and comprehensive than anyone else. He’s written authoritatively on everything from performances of Macbeth to the Gettysburg Address to the Catholic Church. His background was as a classicist. In his books he often goes back to original Greek or Latin sources and translates them for himself when he is writing about them. I’ve never forgotten that commitment to inspecting each fragment. And on top of that, he taught me to appreciate Martin Scorsese films.

9.   If I had TNTP’s senior staff and board in a room, I’d try to convince you that no matter how smart or effective your team, you’ll never be able to make the urban district succeed. I’d tell you to reallocate your resources to expanding great schools and helping create great new schools in the charter sector and developing policies and support organizations for this new system of schools. After you had me escorted from the building, what would you say to your colleagues?

This is a worthy debate to have. After decades of trying, how many large urban districts can say they systematically expand opportunities for the families they serve? The alternative is to focus on expanding the number of seats in good schools. Except I don’t think these things are mutually exclusive. On our good days, we help districts see that they can think just as aggressively about creating conditions to grow excellent schools as the charter sector. They can empower leaders to assemble cohesive teams and establish college as a core expectation for students. There are districts out there trying to think boldly, and if they succeed, they can create conditions for a lot of good schools to thrive at once. My view is that just as charters are competing with and reacting to districts, districts can compete with and react to the charter sector. They have a role to play.

10.   Your brother is an assistant coach with the NFL’s Minnesota Vikings, meaning he gets to have football conversations with future Hall-of-Famers Adrian Peterson and Jared Allen. You, on the other hand, are forced to have conversations about spreadsheets with me. Ever feel like the universe is really, really unfair?

He’s my older brother and I look up to him in a million ways…but never more so than on a Sunday afternoon when he has a ground-level view of Adrian Peterson breaking away on a long run. However, each of us has a place in the universe, and apparently mine is among the spreadsheets.

Explaining why boys are struggling now more than in past decades is, of course, extremely complex. One line of inquiry might consider the changing schooling experiences of boys and girls: Could it be that boys are becoming increasingly harder to educate? Might schools tailor education in ways unsuitable for boys’ needs? Or is it a mix of both?

Fair questions—and using Ohio’s special education data, I look at whether there’s any evidence that (a) boys might be harder to educate than girls and (b) whether schools might respond to difficult-to-educate boys by referring them into special education.

The Ohio data is nothing short of remarkable: There are considerably more boys identified as disabled than girls. (The referral and identification process is a joint effort between the parent and the school.) Statewide, 166,690 boys (65 percent) and 88,539 girls (35 percent) were identified as disabled in 2011-12. This compares to a 51 percent male to 49 percent female ratio for all K-12 students—disabled and non-disabled together.

A similarly disproportionate number of boys populate the specific disabled categories. In fact, every single category except one (deaf-blindness) has more boys than girls.[1] The bullets below, and as displayed in chart 1, present the male-female percentages for the state’s top five special education categories, by student enrollment in 2011-12:

• Specific learning disabilities: 64,130 boys (61 percent of this group) and 41,133 girls (39 percent);
• Other health impaired – minor: 23,923 boys (70 percent) and 10,152 girls (30 percent);
• Speech and language impairments: 21,361 boys (67 percent) and 10,340 girls (33 percent);
• Cognitive Disabilities (mental retardation): 14,887 boys (58 percent) and 10,852 girls (42 percent);
• Autism: 13,816 boys (85 percent) and 2,485 girls (15 percent).

Chart 1: Proportionally more boys than girls identified as disabled - by largest special education categories, 2011-12

SOURCE: Ohio Department of Education, Data Warehouse Reports

That there are more boys than girls who are identified as disabled is not a one-year phenomenon as chart 2 indicates. We see that the percentage of male special education students has remained steady, slightly above 65 percent since 2003. Interestingly, however, the percentage of males in the specific learning disability (SLD) category has declined from 69 percent in 2002-03 to 61 percent in 2011-12. Meanwhile, the proportion of males has risen incrementally in the other two disabled categories displayed. (Only the three largest categories by 2011-12 student enrollment are displayed.)

Chart 2: More boys than girls identified as disabled – overall disabled and select categories, 2002-03 to 2011-12

SOURCE: Ohio Department of Education, Data Warehouse Reports

Whether it’s the “boy or the school” that accounts for the disproportionate identification of boys as disabled can’t, of course, be answered definitively with these data. It could be that schools are quick to relocate hyperactive or slow-learning boys into special education. (Naturally, categories such as deaf-blindness or autism wouldn’t be valid under this explanation. But the Other Health Impairments-Minor, somewhat of a catchall category for unruly kids, could be.) Yet, it could also be that learning-disabled boys are wired in such a way that special education is an entirely justifiable action taken by a school and parent.

In the end, the dismal findings about boys in Wayward Sons, together with special education data that indicate that too many boys have difficulty in today’s classrooms—and that disabled identification is an oft-used solution—should prompt rethinking about how schools educate boys. Is special education the only—and best—solution for behaviorally- or learning-challenged boys? Could schools better meet boys’ needs through single-gender schools or classrooms? Could schools ratchet up efforts to recruit and retain male teachers? (Ohio’s teacher force is 75 percent female.) Should schools carve out more recess or physical education time for boys? What about establishing more vocationally focused high schools? Any or all of these practices might just put boys on a better educational and vocational trajectory than our current system has.

It didn’t seem to make sense, despite the arguments of the governor’s staff that Ohio’s demographics had changed considerably over the last decade (consider Cleveland had lost 30,000 students), and poverty was far more widely dispersed than most people thought. In response to the cries that the governor’s plan was unfair to rural and urban districts while a money grab for suburban districts the House rewrote the Kasich school funding plan to fund both rural and urban schools at higher amounts. This, it was argued, would be a fairer funding formula than what the Governor proposed and spreadsheets of the House plan did indeed show more rural and urban district benefiting from their plan than the governor's.

It is yet to be seen what the Senate is going to do per school funding, but one hopes that Senators are reading the new book from the Brookings Institution that reports “the suburban poverty rate in America has climbed by 64 percent over the past decade, more than twice as fast as the poverty rate in urban areas.”

The Brookings report confirms what supporters of Governor Kasich’s plan have been arguing since its release in February. Ohio’s demographics are changing and Ohio’s school funding formula needs to evolve to meet these new realities. Kasich’s plan tries to attach school funding to the actual needs of students, as opposed to attaching money to traditional perceptions about school districts and their poverty. Ohio should follow Governor Kasich’s lead and finally break away from thinking of school funding through the lenses of district “equity” and “adequacy;” between “rich” and “poor” districts. Poverty and needy students increasingly live in the suburbs and money for their education should follow them to their schools.  

We feel the survey and its findings provide an important window into how the reforms we champion play out on the ground in districts across Ohio. The insights of our panelists and audience members are interesting and enlightening. Watch the video and tell us what you think.

Yesterday, I spent all day hitting the Refresh button on my email account. Probably 653 times. Why? Because the one school that we wanted for our children for next year was to announce its lottery results to those lucky few who would be chosen. 12 or 13 slots for sixth grade, out of an application pool of several hundred (wish I knew exactly how many).

On click number 653 we got the news at last: Our numbers didn’t hit.

***

My parents practiced school choice the old-fashioned way in the late 1970’s – they moved from the east side of Columbus to the boonies. This was their only option. With a one-income family and four children, private school was not in the cards. My father drove 30 miles one way to work (even farther later in his career) with no complaints.

Why not stay in Columbus City Schools? Desegregation. I’m not proud of this fact and the mindset that it evokes, but they were not the only ones in our neighborhood – let alone the city – who did not want their children bussed across town for a school they felt inferior to the one they had. In fact, we had five other family/friends move from our street alone into the same tiny burg in the country the same summer. Did we miss out on some opportunities moving from a big city district to the country? You bet. But all of us did OK in our new environment and our lives and careers are still on track nearly 40 years later.

Fast forward to 2013: my family and I live in the city of Columbus in an old house on a quiet street near everything we love – libraries, parks (river, bikepath, etc.), stores, activities, and even the road out of town for when wandering sounds good. Our commute to work is 15 minutes on a bad day.

This neighborhood has been the same for a very long time, but much has changed around it and much within the mindset of its residents, especially in terms of education that is on the minds of the many young families who choose to live here. And it is a choice that they make for the most part. Incomes here are all over the board and can usually be determined by where you live in relation to the major crossroads. To say you live in this part of town conveys nothing but a relative geography until folks probe deeper and then they figure out more about you by whether you live northwest or southeast of High and Broadway. And so you can choose to be in the same area whether you have a middling amount of money or a large amount of money. House, apartment, duplex, condo – we have it. This is a place you go when you have some means (either a little or a lot).

What we don’t have is a district school that I want to send my daughters to. This is no different than my parents felt – for a very different reason – but the landscape of choice has changed. In fact, that landscape includes an opt-in to the Columbus district, which many vocal parents are choosing and advocating for among their friends and acquaintances. They reason that if more motivated parents choose to be here, the neighborhood school and all its students will benefit. And, honestly, if there is a good Columbus elementary school to be had (i.e. – rigorous, focused on student success, geared toward the future, and not sparing with high-value homework) it’s probably here. In fact, our area is one of the few with no voucher-eligible schools in Columbus. But we investigated and found it academically wanting and so it was out. NOTE: I am not the first Fordham father to talk about this. Check out Mike Petrilli’s excellent book for his much more detailed story.

So was the district lottery, despite the fact that many families we knew sent their children (often multiple children) to the alternative school several blocks away. If you can get in. But it too seemed to be less than an ideal fit for our girls and the lottery process was reported to be Byzantine and often fruitless, although it still lurks in the back of our minds.

No charter schools in our neighborhood, so we would be forced to bus them or drive them a long way to reach one of the few good charter elementaries. So that was not practical either.

And as we have always done, we were looking at the big picture – middle school, high school, college readiness. Even if we had been tireless advocates for our children in the neighborhood public elementary (pushing for more rigor, nagging for more attention from teachers, and supplementing the classroom work with outside opportunities), there was nothing available to us in the district even remotely worthwhile to us after fifth grade.

And since neither of us have the skill to homeschool, we have gone the private school route. That has been our reality since the girls were three years old – private daycare, private preschool, private Montessori school, and now a private K-8 school, with summer camps each year from various private sources. Out of our own middle-income pockets. Not the elite Academies or all-girls schools you might have heard of, but a white-bread (in all senses of the term, unfortunately) middle-of-the-road institution that really would rather be doing Mass than math. But they soldier on with academics, pleased to adopt and align to the Common Core early but lax on homework, indifferent to long-term project-based learning, and weak in areas where there's no such thing as a common core standard.

The girls have done great – worked hard, learned the value of a good education, and produced at or above our expectations regularly. And they even know how to have fun when the work is finished. They are fantastic and on the right path, sometimes despite the teachers in the schools they’ve attended.

So, what was yesterday about? Those 653 clicks?

The holy grail.

***

We have had our eye on the local STEM school for high school (talk about the long game) for the last couple of years, only to have them announce that they are expanding to middle school just in time for our kids to start sixth grade. Wow. But maybe it’s not as good as we thought it was.

Open house. Amazing. Even better than we imagined.

Application. Easy and interesting. I didn’t realize my eleven-year-olds had already figured out their five-year visions.

The waiting. Hard, but not too long.

Word on the street: everyone we know is applying. Probably lots of folks we don’t know.

Uh oh.

Yesterday? Depression.

***

Our only Plan B is to return to our middle-of-the-road private school, downtrodden and with even lower expectations than before. (You know how it is: as soon as you decide that you want to trade in your old car, you suddenly see its flaws even more starkly.) We can apply to the STEM school – the only one of its kind for 20 miles – again next year for seventh grade. And again the following year for eighth grade. And again the following year for ninth grade, as we had originally planned.

We figured we had the school choice thing in Columbus locked up: we lived where we wanted, paid for the best school we could afford, and then supplemented to the best of our ability. We didn’t even begrudge our property taxes continuing to go to Columbus City Schools. The American way, right?

Our kids are our priority and we know where we want them to go: to college and beyond. They can be anything they want with the right foundation, and it’s our job to give them the best foundation possible. That’s why yesterday’s lottery loss stings so much. We know we’d found it. And we can’t get in.

What happens when you don’t have means, when you don’t have knowledge of the system, when you have other priorities weighing on your family, when all of your “choices” are bad?

Consider today's realities. Private K–12 enrollments are shrinking—by almost 13 percent from 2000 to 2010. Catholic schools are closing right and left. The Archdiocese of Philadelphia, for example, announced in January that forty-four of its 156 elementary schools will cease operations next month. (A few later won reprieves.) In addition, many independent schools (day schools and especially boarding schools) are having trouble filling their seats—at least, filling them with their customary clientele of tuition-paying American students. Traditional nonprofit private colleges are also challenged to fill their classroom seats and dorms, a situation to which they're responding by heavily discounting their tuitions and fees for more and more students.

Meanwhile, charter school enrollments are booming across the land. The charter share of the primary-secondary population is 5 percent nationally and north of 25 percent in two dozen major cities. "Massive open online courses" (MOOCs) are booming, too, and online degree and certificate options proliferating. Public-sector college and university enrollments remain strong and now educate three students out of four. The "proprietary" (i.e., for-profit) sector of postsecondary education is doing okay, despite its tortured relationship with federal financial aid.

What's really happening here are big structural changes across the industry as the traditional model of private education—at both levels—becomes unaffordable, unnecessary, or both, and as more viable options for students and families present themselves. While unemployment remains high, the marginal advantage of investing thirty or fifty thousand dollars a year in private schooling is diminishing, particularly when those dollars are invested in low-selectivity, lower-status institutions. Recent analyses by AIR's Mark Schneider and Brookings's Stephanie Owen and Isabel Sawhill make it explicit:

People who attended the most selective private schools [colleges/universities] have a lifetime earnings premium of over $620,000....For those who attended a minimally selective or open-admission private school, the premium is only a third of that....[P]ublic schools tend to have higher ROIs than private schools, and more selective schools offer higher returns than less selective ones.

Alterations in the housing market may also play a role where K–12 private schools are concerned. Not long ago, one could live in a nice house in the city for a lot less than a nice house in the suburbs—and spend the money saved on private schooling for one's kids. In gentrifying cities, however, that's no longer so. Now one must pay more for a house in the city plus private school for the children. Thus, more parents are saying, "Forget it, I'll go public—provided the public sector can be made to supply me with a good charter or magnet school, or a virtual-education supplement to a decent neighborhood school."

Three factors keep all these changes from being more visible and talked about.

First, of course, they're gradual, and thus (proverbially) difficult to perceive. Second, it's not in the interest of private schools or colleges to acknowledge that they have a problem—lest it create the educational equivalent of a run on the bank, with clients fleeing for fear of being abandoned after a sudden collapse. Much of the allure of private schools, after all, is based on their reputations, which they work hard to sustain. Hence they maintain a brave front while quietly shrinking, discounting—and recruiting full-pay students from wealthy families in other lands, particularly in Asia.

Most other modern countries have essentially melded their private education sectors into their systems of public financing

Third, elite private institutions are doing just fine, many besieged by more applicants than ever before. The wealthiest Americans can easily afford them and are ever more determined to secure for their children the advantages that come with attending them. And at the K–12 level, a disproportionate fraction of those wealthy people live in major cities where the public school options are unappealing. So we're not going to see an enrollment crisis anytime soon at Brown, Amherst, or Duke, nor at Andover, Sidwell Friends, or Trinity. Indeed, New York's new Avenues School, serving preschoolers through twelfth graders, is able to fill its classes with families willing and able to pay its staggering $43,000 per annum.

Because these elite schools and colleges are also highly visible—and where the "chattering classes" want (and can afford) to enroll their own daughters and sons—they create a façade of private-sector vitality. Behind it, however, like the Wizard of Oz's curtain and Potemkin's building façades, there is much weakness, a weakness that probably afflicts the vast majority of today's private schools and colleges.

Is this situation reversible? And should it be a matter of concern for education reformers and policymakers?

Most other modern countries have essentially melded their private education sectors into their systems of public financing—and have accepted the tradeoffs that accompany such financing, namely government regulation of curriculum, teacher credentialing, student admissions, and more. We can see early examples of this in the U.S., too, as vouchers gradually spread and private schools accommodate themselves to the state testing regimes and other rules that come with such financing.

This is apt to be a limited remedy, however, due to American church-state entanglement anxieties that other countries don't share; prohibitions in many state constitutions that make such public financing difficult or impossible; and our conviction that what's valuable about private education is its freedom to be different. The policy dilemma is whether different-ness is precious enough, if with it comes gradual erosion of the "different" sector itself.

Can run-of-the-mill private schools and colleges reboot? I wouldn't bet a year's tuition on it.

One can also fairly ask whether U.S. private schools and colleges are really all that different from their public-sector counterparts. In practice, their education-delivery model is practically indistinguishable, save for the accoutrements that the wealthiest of them can buy (trips to faraway lands, nifty technology, tiny classes, etc.). There is, however, a difference where religion is concerned: Just 22.8 percent of K–12 private school students are in secular schools, while about 32 percent of all private college students are enrolled in religiously affiliated institutions. In less prosperous schools and colleges, religion may, at day's end, be the only real difference between public and private—and the return on that investment, while perhaps significant, cannot be easily measured.

Changing the delivery system might serve to make private education both more affordable and more different, and signs of such change are already evident, but rarely in the traditional nonprofit portions of the private sector. Instead, the boldest innovations are coming from entrepreneurs, most of them profit-seeking and most of them delivering instruction (and more) via technology rather than face-to-face in brick buildings that are open just six or eight hours a day for 180 or so days a year.

Elite universities—the ones that are still thriving and would continue to thrive even without these changes—are also, themselves, innovating—but mostly for students other than their own. The MITs and Stanfords are teaming up with the Courseras and Udacitys—educational-technology companies specializing in online education—to offer online courses to thousands. Udacity has dipped a toe into the K–12 waters, both by partnering with local school systems and by inviting students to enroll directly in its college-level courses. Nor is it likely to stop there. Indeed, I expect "St. Paul's math" and "Dalton's literature" in time to echo across the land, too. If current trends continue, we're going to see a bi-modal system develop, with public schools (including charter schools) and ultra-elite private schools monopolizing the education space as the plethora of smaller private and parochial schools that once fell between them gradually fade away.

Can run-of-the-mill private schools and colleges reboot? Can they change themselves—including both their delivery systems and their cost structures—enough to brighten their own futures? I wouldn't bet a year's tuition on it.

This article originally appeared in the Atlantic.

Confusion never stops 
Closing walls and ticking clocks 
Gonna come back and take you home 
I could not stop that you now know

Come out upon my seas 
Cursed missed opportunities 
Am I a part of the cure? 
Or am I part of the disease?
-Coldplay, "Clocks," A Rush of Blood to the Head, 2002

Dear Deborah,

I am haunted by the title of your last post: “The Testing Obsession Widens the Gap.”

Could this possibly be true? Is test-based school reform reducing opportunity for America's neediest children? Is everything for which we school reformers fight actually making things worse? Am I a part of the cure, or am I part of the disease?

"It's OK to ask: 'What if I'm wrong?'" you wrote last week. So let me ask it. It wouldn't be the first time. A year ago, for example, I explored the "test-score hypothesis"—a line of reasoning, undergirding much of the reform movement, that says that if we can significantly improve low-income students' math and reading skills, as measured by standardized tests, we can significantly increase their chances of escaping poverty.

Let's unpack this hypothesis a bit.

As it stands now, children born into poverty come into kindergarten with massive deficits—in terms of vocabulary, content knowledge, and non-cognitive skills. And if they make it to high school graduation thirteen years later (and many will not), they will leave, on average, reading and doing math at an eighth-grade level. Of the low-income teens that give higher education a shot, the vast majority will end up in remedial education and then wash out. More than half of poor children will become poor adults, with poor children of their own. The cycle will repeat. Our hope is that by improving our schools (and, yes, other things too), we can change this narrative.

Let's imagine that our schools can help the average child born into poverty do somewhat better. Let's say that with a combination of talented and well-trained teachers, a rich and rigorous curriculum, lots of supports, and strong leadership, we're able to get poor students, on average, to a tenth-grade level by the time they graduate high school. Suddenly they can attend a community college, or even a four-year university, without starting in remedial education. They are much more likely to graduate, at least with an associate's degree or a technical credential. Rather than making minimum wage, they will make a living wage.

They are less likely to get pregnant as teens, or end up in prison, or drop out of the workforce. Their children wouldn't be born poor—they would be born middle class. This would be transformative.

Notice the key assumption built into this "theory of action": reading and math matter a lot. Getting to the tenth-grade level instead of the eighth-grade level (even as measured by rinky-dinky standardized tests) would make a meaningful difference in real lives. With that assumption in place, it's not crazy—in fact, it's perfectly rational—to hold schools accountable for helping their students make progress every year with their reading and math skills. It's smart to put in place clear, high standards—let's call them common-core standards—that will delineate the path from poverty to prosperity, that will help schools and teachers focus on the knowledge and skills that matter most, and will get students to true readiness for college and career by the age of eighteen.

So Deborah, are you ready for the big question, the kicker, the heart of the matter?

How sure are we that it's literacy and numeracy, and related academic knowledge and skills, that are the most important precursors to success in college, career, and life? What if something else is just as important, or even more important, like "non-cognitive skills" or personal relationships? (Or perhaps the habit of "serious intellectual inquiry," as you put it?)

And what if our "testing obsession" is crowding these other things out?

These are critical questions, but here's what gives me solace.

First, the evidence is quite strong that reading and math achievement are critical tickets to the middle class. Look, for example, at the blockbuster study from Raj Chetty, John Friedman, and Jonah Rockoff that examined the impact of teachers on students' long-term outcomes. As Kevin Carey explained at the time,

If you believe standardized tests are worthless or highly flawed or deeply inadequate or even troublingly limited in accuracy and scope-and many reasonable people believe these things-then you could dismiss or downplay value-added measures of teacher effectiveness, by definition....But now the CFR study says that teachers who are unusually good at helping students score high on standardized tests today aren't just unusually good at helping students score high on standardized tests tomorrow. They also have an unusual effect on the likelihood of students going to college, going to a good college, earning a good living, living in a nice place, and saving for retirement. In other words, whatever the limitations of standardized tests may be, test-based value-added scores do, in fact, provide valuable information about the things most people care most about.

Or look at the evidence that E.D. Hirsch cites about the impact of teenagers' vocabularies on their long-term prospects, such as a 1999 study that shows that "a gain of one standard deviation on the Armed Forces Qualification Test raises one's annual income by nearly $10,000 (in 2012 dollars)."

Or a brand-new study from the United Kingdom (flagged by Joanne Jacobs) that finds that "math skills at 7 predict earnings at 42."

Surely reading and math aren't all that matters. Paul Tough makes a good case for non-cognitive skills. Others, yourself included, point to the importance of strong personal relationships with mentors. We could name more. But reading and math skills are at least necessary, if not sufficient.

On the other hand, there's little evidence that the "testing obsession" is systematically getting in the way of good teaching and learning in high-poverty schools. That's not because an obsession with testing isn't a problem. It surely is, with its temptations of cheating, narrowing of the curriculum, and the culture of fear that it often perpetuates.

But here's the rub, Deborah: Studies of high-poverty schools in America have demonstrated for decades that great teaching and learning have always been the exception, not the norm. To believe that testing is making these schools worse, you have to believe that they were once pretty good, or at least better than they are now. I just don't see it. Do you? Where's the evidence of that?

Furthermore, think back to Kevin Carey's comments on the Chetty study. If an obsession with reading and math was crowding out more important tasks, why would students with stronger reading and math gains do better long-term than their peers?

Here's what your readers need to remember: The choice today is not between 100,000 Central Park Easts or Mission Hills and 100,000 test-prep factories. If it were, I'd pick the Deborah Meier schools in a heartbeat. But let's face it: There aren't more than a handful of Deborah Meier schools out there. (The same goes with Don Hirsch schools or Mike Feinberg/Dave Levin schools, or any other brand you want to name.)

The typical high-poverty school is, and has always been, pretty mediocre. That's not an indictment of the people who work in these schools; the problem is the system. And it's not unique to education. Any big, bureaucratic government agency is going to struggle to achieve effectiveness, much less excellence. (Think the DMV.) Heck, even most large, private-sector companies are pretty lame, especially ones that don't face much competition. (Think the electric company.) Layer on top of that all of the distracting demands placed upon schools, the fragmented nature of education governance, and, in some places at least, too few resources, and it would be a miracle if the typical high-poverty public school were good, much less great.

So do I think testing and accountability make matters worse? No. In fact, based on the studies cited above, I think they will make matters marginally better. I also think stronger standards and tests (a la Common Core) will make things better still.

What about you, Deborah? Are you willing to ask "What if I'm wrong?" What if it's true that reading and math skills are hugely related to opportunities in life, and indeed are malleable? What if "direct instruction," which you say isn't needed, really is the most effective method for helping children in poverty develop those skills? What if it's patently untrue that children learn "vocabulary, grammar, syntax, and spelling ... the same way we learn everything else that matters," as you stated last week, but instead have to be taught systematically? What if the perfect for which you have spent decades championing really is the enemy of the good—and the greater good, for millions of boys and girls throughout America?

Deborah, with all due respect, I ask you to ask yourself: Am I a part of the cure, or am I part of the disease?

Mike

Steve Farkas of the FDR Group led off the event with a presentation of the findings the survey of 344 of the state's 614 superintendents. The survey found varied opinion from school leaders for the Buckeye State’s recent reforms. Among the seven reforms we inquired about, superintendents strongly support the Common Core and individualized learning. District superintendents, however, are far less enamored with the Third Grade Reading Guarantee and school choice options (vouchers and charter schools).

A panel discussion followed with Fordham’s Terry Ryan moderating and Senator Peggy Lehner, Kirk Hamilton, and Steve Dackin participating on the panel. Senator Lehner is the chair of the Senate Education Committee, Kirk Hamilton is the executive director of the Buckeye Association of School Administrators (BASA), and Dackin is the superintendent of Reynoldsburg City Schools near Columbus.

Panelists (from left to right): State superintendent Dick Ross, Steve Farkas of the FDR Group, Kirk Hamilton of the Buckeye Association of School Administrators, Steve Dackin of Reynoldsburg City Schools

The first topic of discussion was the Common Core. The panelists agreed that the Common Core has considerable potential to improve education for Ohio’s youngsters. Lehner remarked that educator support for the Common Core has helped Ohio’s lawmakers “weather the storm” of recent anti-Common Core agitation. Also agreed upon was that K-12 education must push ahead by integrating technology into classrooms and individualizing learning. Both, the panelists thought, can better inspire and engage children in their education.

Less common ground was found when it came to the Third Grade Reading Guarantee—Ohio’s recent law requiring third graders to demonstrate proficiency in reading before entering fourth grade. Dackin reported that, for the most part, his district has been pushing hard in primary education even before the law. Meanwhile, Lehner maintained that the policy is the right policy—Ohio has far too many kids who can’t read—and a state law, on the books, will push districts harder to prioritize the basics of early education.

Finally, the panelists found the least consensus when it came to school governance: Specifically, what role should local communities have (which as Hamilton pointed out, vary widely in culture and values) and what role should the state of Ohio play in students’ education? A brief exchange between Lehner and Hamilton sums up the complexity of governance—public education is akin to a marriage: It takes hard work to get it right—and sometimes there are arguments and sometimes there’s dysfunction.

Implementing education policy remains complex, the panelists seemed to agree. And, all this brings us full-circle to Dick Ross’ statement.  Implementing serious—and often complex—education reform for the betterment of Ohio’s 1.8 million school-aged children is “all about leadership.” Are superintendents willing and able to faithfully lead the implementation of these changes?  Time will tell, and here’s hoping.

To read the full findings of Fordham’s survey of Ohio superintendents, please click here. For more reaction to the report, please visit the Columbus Dispatch and StateImpact Ohio.

As the reform load has grown weightier, however, we at Fordham have come to understand more clearly that while lawmakers can help set the conditions for improvement (or get in the way of needed changes!), any real and sustainable gains to school and student performance depend mainly on hard work by district leaders, school principals, and teachers. Along with students and families, they fuel the engines of improvement, even as state officials may turn the key. 

In the commercial world, Ohio has long been known as the country’s “test market” because if something sells in the Buckeye State, it is apt to sell nationwide. (Ben Wattenberg and the late Richard Scammon once wrote that the most typical American was a forty-seven-year-old suburban housewife in Dayton.) What we learn in Ohio is surely applicable in other places.

And we’ve just learned a few new and important things about education reform as refracted through the lenses of local superintendents—including both some heartening information and some that we wish were otherwise. In a new survey, we asked the state’s 613 district superintendents how they view seven big reforms: 1) Common Core academic standards; 2) teacher evaluations; 3) Ohio’s new third-grade reading guarantee; 4) the state’s new A–F school rating system; 5) open enrollment; 6) blended-learning opportunities; and 7) school choice (both in charter and voucher form).

More than half of them responded (a remarkable rate), and our able colleagues at the FDR Group did a fine job of analyzing the data they supplied.

What we learned is that district leaders tend to support reforms that they can control, including implementation of new Common Core standards, but have serious misgivings about those that they see as sapping their authority and/or budgets (e.g., vouchers, charter schools, and external rating systems). Okay, you’re not too surprised, at least by the latter point. But it’s important information nonetheless.

Specifically, we learned that the following feelings are prevalent among district leaders in Ohio:

1)    Strong support for the Common Core

• 68 percent consider implementation of these new standards to be an initiative that will lead to “fundamental improvement” to Ohio’s education system
• 81 percent believe that, five years hence, the Common Core State Standards “will be widely and routinely” in use in Ohio
• Almost two in three (64 percent) indicate that virtually all of their teachers have participated in professional development and are now prepared to teach to the Common Core

2)    Moderate support for teacher evaluations, open enrollment and blended learning opportunities

• 42 percent say “teacher evaluations that integrate value-added assessments” are an initiative that will lead to fundamental improvement in Ohio education
• 65 percent view open enrollment (i.e., free student transfers between districts) a serious option worth pursuing rather than something to be avoided
• 59 percent think blended learning will fundamentally improve K–12 education

3)    Disdain for the third-grade reading guarantee, letter-grade ratings for schools, and school choice

• Only 20 percent of superintendents believe that Ohio’s new Third Grade Reading Guarantee is an initiative that will bring fundamental improvement to K–12 education in the state
• Just 8 percent think A-to-F grades for schools will fundamentally improve education
• More than half (53 percent) think charter schools have hurt traditional school districts and worsened education for students
• Just two percent think vouchers will fundamentally improve education

It’s a classic case of a big glass that’s either half empty or half full, depending on one’s school-reform disposition. We also uncovered some paradoxical findings. For example, about 70 percent of Ohio superintendents think the state’s public schools as a whole are “keeping up with a changing world” and giving most kids a good education. Yet 44 percent of them said that all districts could be doing “a lot better” than they are.

The best news in these data is the strong support for Common Core standards from district leaders, especially at a time when so many attacks on those standards are coming from both the left and the right. Yes, they have misgivings—and rightfully so—about various implementation challenges, but they don’t want it to go away. They think it can and will make a large and positive difference. Hurray for them and pooh on the doubters, critics, and political advantage-takers who are trying to weaken or kill it. On this front, the superintendents have it right.

It’s also a fact, however, that education reformers with more than one arrow in their quiver will be frustrated to see, once again, that many front-line education leaders are negative about changes to empower parents with more education choices for their children. That’s a pity because Ohio, like other states, needs both: systemic reforms that districts can make and those that give parents more ways to ensure that their kids get a solid education.

The trouble started two years ago, when the American Civil Liberties Union and Disability Rights Wisconsin complained to the Justice Department that private schools in the Milwaukee Parental Choice Program were violating the ADA. They argued that the schools were failing to accommodate disabled students, discouraging some from attending and improperly expelling others. (NB: These groups did not make these claims under the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (i.e., special education); private schools are clearly exempt from its requirements.)

The Justice Department didn’t determine whether Milwaukee’s private schools had violated the ADA, but its civil-rights attorneys did tell the Wisconsin schools superintendent, Tony Evers, that he “must do more to enforce the federal statutory and regulatory requirements that govern the treatment of students with disabilities who participate in the school choice program.” Evers, according to the letter, must also count all of the disabled students enrolled at voucher schools and determine how many of them end up suspended or expelled. And he must advise these schools about all of their ADA obligations (such as making their facilities wheelchair accessible) while developing a procedure whereby disabled students attending voucher schools can complain of discrimination.

Here’s the rub: While non-sectarian private schools have fallen under the requirements of the ADA since it was enacted in 1990, churches and religiously affiliated schools have been exempt from most of its provisions. That’s important in this case, because about 86 percent of the 123 private schools in the Milwaukee and Racine voucher programs are religious.

When Congress first debated the ADA, the Association of Christian Schools International successfully led the charge to exempt religious groups from provisions that required private entities to remove any barriers that hindered access for the disabled (otherwise known as Title III). The association argued that ADA compliance would be too costly for religious schools, many of which were in older buildings that couldn’t be renovated or retrofitted without great expense. Moreover, its leaders argued, enforcement of the law would improperly entangle government with religion.

The Justice letter, however, effectively nullifies that exemption and concludes that it doesn’t matter whether a school in the Milwaukee or Racine voucher program is religious. Instead, it declares, “The state cannot, by delegating the education function to private voucher schools, place [voucher] students beyond the reach of the federal laws that require Wisconsin to eliminate disability discrimination in its administration of public programs.” Hence, institutions taking part in the state-funded voucher program must comply with Title II of the ADA, which applies to state and local governments.

The problem with this reasoning is that neither the state nor local school districts are contracting with private and sectarian schools to provide a public education. The Wisconsin Supreme Court determined as much in a 1998 decision that upheld the constitutionality of the Milwaukee voucher program. The justices wrote that “the program does not involve the State in any way with the schools’ governance, curriculum, or day-to-day affairs.” Rather, the program “vests power in the hands of parents to choose where to direct the funds allocated for their children’s benefit.”

The same can be said of any direct voucher program. Indeed, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in 2002 (in the well-known Zelman decision) that a Cleveland voucher program gave parents “genuine choice” in where to attend school—a private decision over which the state had no control.

But if the Justice Department can interpret things differently in Wisconsin, then its conclusions may apply in all of the nine states and the District of Columbia that also fund voucher programs. (Tax-credit-scholarship programs would almost certainly still be safe, as they aren’t funded with public dollars.)

One can surely make the case that schools that take public funds should adhere to certain public regulations. (That’s the case, in our view, when it comes to testing and transparency requirements.) Perhaps private schools, including religious schools, should also be required to be wheelchair accessible and such as a condition of receiving taxpayer dollars. But that’s a decision for Congress to make, not three attorneys from the Justice Department.

Outside of these three principles, I hold few ironclad beliefs on education. Yet in conversation, I find that others attribute principles to Relinquishment that I don’t hold. This probably stems from a lack of clear communication on my part, so let me provide additional clarity:

Relinquishment is not anti-union

Relinquishment is a reaction against management, not labor. Admittedly, I disagree with certain policies put forth by unions and their members, but individuals should possess the right to collectively bargain with their employers. Relinquishment only posits that the government should not be a party to the bargain; rather, the bargaining parties should be union and school operator. From here, results will dictate the future of unions. If unionized schools thrive, unions themselves will also thrive. I do understand that, from an organizing standpoint, unionizing decentralized charter schools will be more difficult than signing a singular collective bargaining contract with the district—but I do not believe this issue should trump the more salient issue of academic performance.

Relinquishment assumes equity in access is not the natural state of school systems

People concerned about ensuring that all public school students have equitable access to great schools often suggest that the best solution is to (1) force all kids into one system and (2) have that one operator allocate students to maximize equity. This rarely works. Due to attendance zones, many traditional school districts have highly inequitable enrollment patterns. Yet, I’m also sympathetic to the idea that when charters serve 10–20 percent of a system, these schools may attract more motivated families. In New Orleans, where I work, I’ve witnessed charters serving an increasingly at-risk student population as the traditional system has winnowed. Neither traditional nor charter systems will—on their own—deliver equity.

There is a fix to this: Cities should develop government-managed enrollment systems that regulate non-government school operators. The solution to inequitable enrollment is not to restrict choice. The solution is to create a process that ensures transparency and equity in enrollment, transfers, and expulsions. New Orleans has developed such a system (though it remains a work in progress). Others should follow suit. Government should achieve equity via school regulation, not school operation—in this sense, I believe that equity demands we put some guardrails around choice.

Relinquishment is hesitant to cast its position in historical civil-rights language

Education leaders often state that education reform is the civil-rights issue of our time. Whenever I hear this, I wonder: Who is the oppressor?

Is this a racial conflict? Well, both sides of the reform debate are diverse. And no side has a monopoly on African American support: NAACP, BAEO, Stand for Children—all are African American–led and all hold very different opinions on reform.

Are the wealthy the oppressors? This is unlikely. Most wealthy people in urban areas send their children to private schools but still pay taxes to fund public schools at fairly generous rates that compare well to international averages. The wealthy have not shrugged off their responsibility to fund public schools, and many are giving their own funds to support reform; whether or not one agrees with their strategies, Bill Gates, Eli Broad, and others hardly seem malevolent.

In short, the current education-reform movement, while having significant civil rights implications, is different than previous civil-rights battles. The current battle is one of strategy, not desired outcomes. Everyone wants poor children to succeed. Different groups simply have different ideas on how to achieve this outcome. Perhaps the most telling sign that we’re in a different civil-rights paradigm is the fact that both sides sincerely claim Martin Luther King Jr. as a role model. And, to an extent, both can do so with some legitimacy.

Relinquishment has realistic (but ambitious) aims

Students attending our best charter schools achieve impressive results. The top-tier charter schools in the country often produce SAT scores in the 1400 range and ACT scores in the 19 to 20 range. Students who may have otherwise dropped out of high school are now attending two- and four-year colleges. But, on average, these students are not prepared to excel at more rigorous four-year universities. Additionally, in looking at more rigorous statistical measures of successful charter sectors (experimental and quasi-experimental results in cities such as New Orleans, Boston, Memphis, Indianapolis, Detroit, Newark, Nashville, etc.), we often see the same trends: real positive effects but not academic miracles.

Let me add two caveats.

First, what some claim to be able to do in one generation we may be able to do in two generations. Students who grow up in severe poverty and achieve middle-class (or even lower-middle-class) status will then better prepare their own children for additional educational advancement. Perhaps these children will achieve at the levels some now promise. Second, the above is only based on our current abilities to educate children. My hope is that Relinquishment will greatly accelerate innovation, which will then increase our ability to drive academic gains. I’m not sure how we get from here to there. I just think a Relinquishment-based system will increase the probability that we get there.

Relinquishment as moderate extremism

Relinquishment is extreme in that what it calls for (non-governmental operation of schools, parental choice, and limited but effective regulation) currently only exists in one major city in our country.

But in other respects, Relinquishment is moderate. Relinquishment does not call for an end to unions. It does not aim to abolish government’s involvement in public schooling. It does not predict unearthly results.

All Relinquishment assumes is that empowered educators and families will achieve increased outcomes.

Neerav Kingsland is the CEO of New Schools for New Orleans.

“The Department,” like any hulking, beltway-bound federal agency, can seem like a cold, faceless leviathan—this imposing force, issuing impenetrable regulations from a utilitarian, vaguely Soviet, city block–sized building in the shadow of the Capitol.

But those who interact with it regularly, especially those of us fortunate enough to have worked there, know that it is made up of hundreds and hundreds of very fine people.

During my tenure there, I found both the career staff and the political appointees to be knowledgeable public servants and excellent colleagues. While working for a state department of education, I found the Department’s team to be thoughtful, accessible, and accommodating. And in my loyal-opposition think-tank stints, during which I sometimes find myself poking and prodding the Department, they’ve been patient, respectful, but understandably steely adversaries.

I’m appreciative that they took the time to answer these questions so thoroughly, and I’m flabbergasted that they did so at—in terms of agency timelines—Guinness-Book speed.

What would the U.S. Department of Education (ED) like people to know about the testing consortia?

The consortia are designing the next generation of assessment systems, which include diagnostic or formative assessments, not just end-of-the-year summative assessments. Their systems will assess student achievement of standards, student growth, and whether students are on-track to being college and career ready. These new systems will offer significant improvements directly responsive to the wishes of teachers and other practitioners: they will offer better assessment of critical thinking, through writing and real-world problem solving, and offer more accurate and rapid scoring. The Smarter Balanced consortium’s assessment will also be “computer-adaptive,” meaning that the difficulty of questions will adjust to students’ ability levels as they proceed through the test.

The two consortia are making significant progress developing their assessment systems and are making an effort to be as transparent as possible, going well beyond what is typical in an assessment-development process. They have released a wide variety of information on how they will create the assessments and have invited comment from educators, district practitioners, additional national experts and the public. In addition, both PARCC and Smarter Balanced have released sample items to offer educators and the public an early look and will release additional questions this summer.

When the two consortia roll out their new assessments in the 2014-15 school year, they will be works in progress. We fully expect some schedule adjustments and technical glitches. Assessment 2.0 will need lots of work to get to version 2.1 and 2.2. States and districts will improve implementation as they learn from pilots and field tests. And teachers will play an absolutely critical role in providing the consortia feedback about what works and what doesn’t work.

How important are PARCC and Smarter Balanced to Common Core? Is the fate of the standards tied to the fate of the consortia?

This new generation of assessments—combined with the adoption of internationally benchmarked, college and career-ready standards—is an absolute game-changer for American education. PARCC and Smarter Balanced are tremendously important as a step forward to getting better, more accurate, and more actionable data about what students know and can do. As important as better assessments are, they must work in tandem with high-quality curriculum; meaningful, job-embedded professional development; and all the other pieces that will support educators preparing to teach to these new standards.

Most education observers know the consortia received federal funding several years ago. But the field probably knows less about ED’s interactions with the consortia since. That is, have they been on their own, or has ED been providing technical assistance and advice along the way?

As with all grantees, the Department works to ensure that the grants are on track, that funds are spent appropriately, and that we have actively supported grantee success. See the RTTA Program Review Process for some additional details. In addition, because we recognize the complexity of the consortia’s work, we have held a series of public meetings over the past two years to address particular components of their system—state and local technology needs, automated scoring of assessments, and how to improve the accessibility of assessments for all students, particularly students with disabilities and English learners. While each consortium has created its own technical advisory group, the Department recently created the RTTA Technical Review to help analyze each consortium’s progress and identify areas where additional attention may be necessary.

There have been recent signs of trouble. Alabama just abandoned the consortia (after Utah did so last year). Florida’s chief Tony Bennett said he’s looking for a “Plan B.” A March survey revealed that 65 percent and 70 percent of “education insiders” thought that PARCC and Smarter Balanced, respectively, were on the wrong track. What’s ED’s reaction to these events?

The states are the vital decision-makers here. States have demonstrated remarkable leadership, first through developing and adopting new, higher standards, and then through design and development of the next generation of high-quality assessments. But this is hard work. We are asking an enormous amount of principals and teachers in the next several years. We fully expect that there will be states that choose not to stay on board, and in those that do, we must provide teachers and principals with the resources and professional development they need to make the transition. Further, even if a state opts out of a consortium now, they can re-enter at any time in the future.

Does ED have a message to states contemplating exiting the consortia?

States must make the right decisions for their students and communities. There’s overwhelming agreement that high standards and well-aligned assessments, emphasizing critical thinking and writing, are vital to serving students well. How states get there is entirely up to them.

It’s worth pointing out that when the states developed the Common Core State Standards, they provided some important distinctions from current standards and current state tests. For example, the Common Core emphasizes writing in the English language arts standards. Any assessment aligned to the Common Core needs to similarly emphasize writing, which is a skill children need to be ready for college and the workforce. These and other distinctions mean that assessments that truly measure the Common Core will likely look different from current state tests, necessary as we move from fill-in-the-bubble tests toward more engaging assessments that better mirror good instruction in the classroom.

It seems that ED has leverage because of promises states made when applying for NCLB waivers and accepting stimulus and Race to the Top funding. Would the Department exercise the authority it has in an effort to hold the consortia together, or would the Department stand down and allow each state to make the decision it deems best?

The Department is focused on states developing college- and career-ready standards and aligned high-quality assessments that provide a better, more accurate measure of what students know and can do and whether they graduate high school ready for college or the workforce. We don’t want to see any state go backward. We expect the consortia to develop assessment systems that are markedly better than current assessments and we expect them to be already considering how to continue innovating and improving the systems. We understand that states may choose a different way of measuring whether its students are ready for college and careers and we are working with states such as Minnesota, Virginia, and Utah on their approaches. Again, states need to individually make the best decision for them based on all the relevant facts.

Do you trust that states opting out of the consortia will pick assessments possessing the characteristics the Department wanted to be part of assessments in the Common Core era—e.g., tightly aligning with the new standards, moving beyond “bubble tests,” accurately measuring performance at the ends of the performance distribution, and producing final results quickly?

We expect that all states will continue to improve their assessment systems. This currently includes requirements that state tests are aligned to the standards chosen by the state, provide accurate, valid, and reliable data about student knowledge and skills, and measures higher-order thinking skills. In December 2012 the Department paused our peer review of state assessment systems in order to reconsider whether our criteria and process for evaluating assessments is sufficient to measure whether an assessment system is a high-quality measure of college and career readiness. We will be providing additional detail in the coming months about our process and our criteria. Once complete, all assessment systems, including PARCC, Smarter Balanced, and all other state assessment systems, will be required to demonstrate how they meet the requirements for technical quality, alignment, and other assessment best practices. It is vital students, parents and educators receive reliable and valid information on student achievement of standards, student growth, and whether students are on-track to being college and career ready regardless of what state they reside in.

If states splinter, going their own ways on test and, presumably, cut scores, haven’t we lost much of the rationale for states’ adopting Common Core? Won’t we be left unable to conduct cross-state comparisons, and won’t states still be able to lower the proficiency bar to improve their scores?

Having multiple state assessment systems aligned to common content standards with different cut scores and proficiency standards would make comparison harder (though not impossible), which would be unfortunate. In addition, the public reporting and transparency required under ESEA would continue to be an avenue to identify schools and districts that are doing a good job and identify where states are lagging in what they expect of students. States that have college- and career-ready standards will continue to work with their institutions of higher education to identify what it means to measure college- and career-readiness on state tests. This is important work that PARCC and Smarter Balanced are actively engaged in and something that has been lacking in state assessment systems previously. For states not in either consortium in the future, the connection to higher education will help ensure that states set a rigorous bar for college and career readiness. In addition, the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) will continue to give the nation a “report card” on how students are doing across states.

A reasonable person might ask, “If the private market seems to be producing assessments that meet states’ needs, why did ED spend well more than $300 million to develop tests?” Could you please explain ED’s thinking behind these investments?

In 2010, in direct response to requests from governors and chief state school officers, the Department elected to use a portion of the Race to the Top funds from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) to support the next generation of assessment because the market was not meeting their needs. Current state tests were missing several important opportunities—they often did not measure the full range of what students should know, focusing on easier skills and ignoring hard-to-measure standards, and most states did not include writing in their assessment systems (to name just a few of the issues with the current market of tests).

We have already seen the Race to the Top Assessment program move the field of assessment. Forty-four states and DC, working in two consortia to develop assessments aligned to the Common Core, have pushed the field to react in ways they likely would not have reacted if each state were separately pursuing a new set of assessments. A 2012 study by the RAND Corporation, for example, indicated that most state tests do not assess “deeper learning skills” of cognitively complex tasks. By contrast, an initial study of the consortia by CRESST in 2013 shows promising results for the consortia’s ability to measure students’ ability “mastering and being able to apply core academic content and cognitive strategies related to complex thinking, communication, and problem solving.”

In recent months, concerns about cheating have skyrocketed as a number of cities and states have been forced to address serious allegations. Is ED concerned about test security given that numerous states will be giving the same exams during different test windows?

Yes, the Department is concerned about test security. We don’t think the concerns are any greater with PARCC and Smarter Balanced than with current state tests; though the challenges may change slightly due to the tests being primarily computer-based and the fact that a breach in security could have repercussions beyond a single state. The consortia need to establish security controls and procedures to address these issues, and we expect them to do so as they ramp up toward the field test in spring 2014 and the first operational assessment in the 2014-2015 school year.

It’s worth pointing out that in recent months, critics have claimed that high-stakes tests drive teachers and school administrators to cheat. But that argument confuses correlation with causation. And it also ignores history. There is no excuse for school administrators and teachers tampering with student tests to boost test scores. It is morally indefensible—and it is most damaging to the very students who most desperately need the help of their teachers and school leaders.

We reject the idea that the system makes people cheat. Millions of educators administer tests but very few chose to cheat. In all but a tiny minority of cases, teachers want their children to genuinely learn and grow—not achieve phony gains to make themselves or their schools look good. In places where a district’s culture is rotten, people must speak out. But the vast, vast majority of educators are committed to assessing their students’ progress with complete integrity.

For more, check out Andy Smarick's interviews with PARCC and Smarter Balanced.

After my ominous prediction about the consortia’s fates, Smarter Balanced quickly responded in private. Their counter was both courteous and forceful. I was impressed by the initial case they made, and I’m very glad that they swiftly agreed to participate in this public Q&A.

Could you please briefly describe the process (including the challenges) of creating “next-generation” assessments aligned with new standards via a multi-state consortium?

The process Smarter Balanced is using is very similar to the processes that states have been using for over a decade to create assessments for NCLB accountability. Using a widely regarded conceptual approach called Evidence-Centered Design, and working in partnership with an array of private sector companies, work groups comprising assessment leadership from Smarter Balanced states have developed the various components necessary for a next-generation assessment system. Among the major elements are:

• IT architecture and open-source software to deliver, score and report on assessments
• Content and item specifications and a test blueprint to govern the content and format of the assessment
• Accommodations and accessibility features and policies
• Achievement-level descriptors, college content-readiness policy and plans for standard-setting
• Reporting system design
• Validity testing and psychometric research

This work has benefited immensely from the pooled expertise of state assessment professionals; K12 teachers, higher education faculty and other academic content experts; and staff from a diverse array of private sector firms. While the process that is being used to develop the Smarter Balanced assessment system would be familiar to anyone who has ever built a test, what is unique about Smarter Balanced is the bringing together of a large and diverse array of talent committed to making each element of the system “best in breed.”

What is Smarter Balanced most proud of?

We are proud that we have simultaneously been able to meet three ambitious goals:

1.   We have hit all the major project milestones for delivering all three aspects of the assessment system—summative, interim and formative—on-time and on-budget for the 2014-15 academic year.

2.   We have done this through a state-led process featuring consensus-based decision-making and the hard work of dedicated K-12 and higher education educators and administrators.

3.   We have met our milestones without sacrificing our very high quality standards, and we continue to push the envelope of innovation in test design, including ground-breaking open-source software, innovative items and performance tasks, and new approaches to key processes such as developing achievement level descriptors and standard-setting.

What elements of this project proved more difficult than you expected?

Building an assessment system as large, multi-faceted, and sophisticated as the Smarter Balanced system is challenging, but the test-development process Smarter Balanced is using follows a sequence of steps that is familiar to all experienced assessment professionals. Given the extensive expertise of the Smarter Balanced state leadership and staff, the difficulties we have encountered in test development have not been unforeseen or unmanageable. The greater challenge is responding to the intense—and legitimate—interest of so many diverse parties in this work. State assessment directors expect scrutiny by policy makers, parents, interest groups, and others, but the number and diversity of the interested parties is much greater when working on the scale of a multi-state consortium. Keeping this diverse array of interested parties informed about the complex and often highly technical work of building an assessment system has been more challenging than we originally imagined.

Do states have the devices and bandwidth needed to deliver your online, adaptive assessments?

Some states are ready and are currently assessing students online. Other states are in the process of preparing for the assessments and will be ready when the assessments become operational in 2014-15. Recognizing the need for a transition period, for three years Smarter Balanced will support the use of a paper-and-pencil option for those schools not fully ready right away. Further, the minimum technology specifications that Smarter Balanced released last fall allow for very old operating systems and require only the minimum processors and memory required to run the operating system itself (for example, the summative assessment can be delivered using computers with 233 MHz processors and 128 MB RAM that run Windows XP). Likewise, the file size for individual assessment items will be very small to minimize the network bandwidth necessary to deliver the assessment online. Right now, Smarter Balanced provides a bandwidth checker to allow schools to determine the number of students that can simultaneously take tests and is hosting, in collaboration with PARCC, a “technology readiness tool” that allows schools and districts to assess and track their progress toward readiness.

Smarter Balanced has deployed small-scale trials and a pilot test to incrementally improve its technology system; these efforts have also helped districts better understand the technology and human resource requirements necessary to deploy the online assessments. The Smarter Balanced practice test to be released at the end of May and the Smarter Balanced field tests to be deployed in Spring 2014 will provide additional opportunities for schools to gain experience in deploying the assessments.

In recent months, concerns about cheating have skyrocketed. How can you guarantee test security given that numerous states will be giving the same exams during different test windows?

Actually, under the Smarter Balanced summative assessment design, states will be giving different tests during the same 12-week window at the end of each academic year. In a computer-adaptive assessment, each student’s test is customized based on his/her performance throughout the test. There will be no way for students to copy each other’s answers since each will be looking at a unique question. Further, since the results are captured electronically, it will not be possible for adults to tamper with results once the test administration is completed.

For schools using the paper-and-pencil option, the particular form students receive will depend on their responses to a short “locater test.” Since scoring standards will differ for the various forms, there will be no incentive for teachers to steer students to the less challenging forms.

Beyond elements of the test design that will militate against the risk of cheating, the Smarter Balanced test administration policies will call on states to conform to best practices with regard to independent monitoring and proctoring.

A defining moment on the horizon is when Smarter Balanced attempts to set cut scores and have all member states sign on. Can you help us understand the process you’ll use to reach consensus? How important is it that the cut scores are high and that members agree?

It is essential that the scores accurately reflect student mastery of the Common Core State Standards and that they have a common meaning across Smarter Balanced states. Our member chief state school officers, who will ultimately vote on the cut scores, view rigorous common performance standards as an essential element of realizing the promise of the Common Core State Standards. From its beginning, Smarter Balanced has relied upon a consensus-based process for all its policy decisions. Our experience has been that our states have little difficulty in reaching consensus when we are deliberative and remain open and transparent as policy decisions develop. We don’t expect the standard setting process to be any different.

That said, we acknowledge the challenge in setting performance standards at the scale of a multi-state consortium. Relying entirely on the traditional workshop format typically used for standard setting would make it difficult for each state to feel adequately represented in the process. To address this challenge, we are planning an innovative approach to standard-setting that will take advantage of our online testing platform to allow the participation of as many constituents as interested to review exemplar test items and weigh in on where they think the “cut scores” should be set. This crowd-sourced data, parsed by state and by respondent role (teachers, higher education faculty, parents, etc.) can then inform the comparatively small number of individuals participating in the standard-setting workshop.

How important are the two testing consortia to Common Core? Is the fate of the standards tied to the fate of the consortia?

The Common Core will succeed or fail in the classroom. Effective instruction is at the heart of meeting the high expectations set by the standards. Smarter Balanced is grounded in the notion that putting good information about student performance in the hands of teachers can have a profound impact on instruction and—as a result—on student learning. By accurately assessing the deeper learning required by the standards, and by helping teachers sharpen their own skills in formative, classroom-based assessment through the Digital Library of Formative Tools and Practices, Smarter Balanced can make a positive contribution to the ultimate success of the Common Core.

Are you confident that Smarter Balanced will be able to deliver online, adaptive assessments on time, on budget, and in all promised grades/subjects to all member states in 2014–15?

We are on track to deliver each aspect of our assessment system on time and on budget in 2014-15. To date, our work has been supported through contracts with every one of the country’s large testing companies. We have successfully sought bids and procured multiple contracts consistent with our overall project plan, and we continue to be on schedule. This spring we are pilot testing the first 5,000 items and tasks we have developed with about a million students, engaging more than 5,200 schools drawn from all 21 of our governing states. The pilot test also serves as a beta test for our test delivery software. In addition to testing out our items, performance tasks, and software, the pilot test also gives us an opportunity to evaluate a variety of accessibility features for students with disabilities and English language learners.

How concerned are you by Alabama’s and Utah’s decisions to abandon the testing consortia and Florida chief Tony Bennett’s public statement that he’s looking for a “Plan B?” Are we about to see a mass exodus from the consortia?

We regret that Alabama and Utah chose to leave the consortium; each state did so for particular reasons unrelated to the progress of the Consortium or to design decisions that the member states had reached. While those states have chosen to leave the Consortium, Alaska and the U.S. Virgin Islands have recently joined Smarter Balanced, and many states that initially joined as advisory states have transitioned to governing status, reflecting their commitment to the Consortium.

About how many states do you expect to administer Smart Balanced assessments in all covered grades and subjects in 2014–15? How many states will be participating in Smarter Balanced and PARCC combined?

We have no reason to expect changes among our 21 governing states. Recently, our governing states completed a survey asking them to identify the Smarter Balanced assessments they are most likely to ultimately use. All but one state indicated plans to use the full suite of formative, interim, and summative assessments. The one remaining state plans to implement only the summative assessment.

We also currently have four advisory states; some of those states may choose to select different assessments while others may transition to governing status.

If a state chief called you tomorrow and said, “A trusted vendor is guaranteeing me high-quality, secure assessments below Smarter Balanced costs and without all of the hassles that come along with a 20-state consortium,” what would you tell him/her?

A primary benefit of the Smarter Balanced assessment system is that it is built by states, for states. States in the Consortium have a level of direct decision-making control that they could never hope to achieve with an “off-the-shelf” product. They also are assured of a level of multi-states comparability, both within the Consortium and across PARCC and Smarter Balanced, which is unlikely to be reached with a commercial test. Finally, the transparency of the Smarter Balanced system is antithetical to the competitive nature of commercial test publishing. Examples of that transparency include:

• Our open-source test delivery software
• Our open bank of interim items that are built to the same specifications as the item bank for the secure summative assessment
• The extent to which the documents that guide our work invite public review and are published online
• The full and open disclosure of our plans for research and validity and the results of those studies.

Additionally, Smarter Balanced is developing a distributed, multi-actor system of test delivery, with the Consortium maintaining responsibility only for those aspects that are essential for ensuring continued comparability of results, quality improvements, and state-led governance. Under this system, many of the services that states need to administer the tests and deliver results will come from the vendor community. This system allows states to maintain control over content and quality while outsourcing to the private sector those elements of test delivery system that these companies have mastered.

Finally, the estimated total cost for the Smarter Balanced assessments ($22.50 per student for the summative assessment in both English language arts and math, or $27.30 per student for the full system of formative, interim and summative assessments) is less than the amount that about two-thirds of our member states currently pay for their state assessments. These costs encompass both the services provided by Smarter Balanced in common to all member states and the services that states will either provide directly or procure from vendors in the private sector.

One element dominates the cost: approximately 70 percent of the vendor cost for summative assessments is tied to hand-scoring. Measuring the deeper learning required by the Common Core requires that students write extensively and much of that writing cannot yet be scored by technology. Paying teachers, faculty, and other content experts to score student responses is costly, but it is currently the only effective way to measure important elements of the Common Core. Until automated scoring of writing improves, reducing the cost would require reducing the amount of writing—a step that cannot be taken without compromising fidelity to the standards. Smarter Balanced can include extensive writing and maintain a reasonable cost because our size allows us to take advantage of economies of scale. Off-the-shelf tests that cost substantially less than Smarter Balanced assessments almost certainly will not include as many items and tasks that require students to produce a response rather than simply find a correct answer. We believe this is a significant quality benefit of Smarter Balanced.

Could you please describe Smarter Balanced’s relationship with the U.S. Department of Education? For example, how often do you meet with them, what kinds of technical assistance do they provide, how much do they direct your work, etc.?

Smarter Balanced is funded under a cooperative agreement with the U.S. Department of Education that extends through September 2014. The fiscal agent for the federal grant is the state of Washington. The Department of Education has responsibility for fiduciary and programmatic oversight of the grant. In essence, they need to track that we are doing the things we promised to do and spending funds in accordance with our approved budget. Like any federal grantee, Smarter Balanced must operate within the requirements of its federal grant; however, there is a great deal of latitude built into the grant for state decision-making. For example, the grant stipulates that Smarter Balanced must build an assessment of the Common Core State Standards, but the test blueprint specifying the proportion of test material on various topics is something the states in the Consortium decide.

We meet with program officers at the Department monthly and provide them with quarterly financial and programmatic reports. In addition, once a year we undergo a thorough program review, not unlike the program review that states have always gone through for their Title I grants.

Since the inception of No Child Left Behind, the Department of Education has used a process called “Peer Review” to ensure that all state testing programs adhere to the AERA/NCME/APA Joint Standards for Educational and Psychological Testing. The consortia assessments will be no different with regard to this Peer Review, and we have already been preparing and submitting materials to the Department of Education for that purpose. This level of review is no greater nor less than the technical scrutiny the Department of Education requires of all state tests designed to meet the requirements of federal accountability.

At the conclusion of the federal grant, Smarter Balanced will transition to being an operational assessment system supported by its member states. The consortium does not plan to seek additional funds from the U.S. Department of Education.

Why do you think 70 percent of “education insiders” say Smarter Balanced is on the wrong track?

Smarter Balanced was created by assessment professionals in state education agencies who determined that by pooling their experience and expertise—and by taking advantage of the federal funds offered by the Department of Education and working in partnership with private sector firms—they could build more sophisticated and accurate assessments of student learning than any individual state could offer on its own. For the last two and a half years, this group of technical experts has been busily doing its work, and the result is that Smarter Balanced is on track and on budget.

Assessment experts around the country have expressed nothing but admiration for the work that Smarter Balanced has done (for example, see http://www.cse.ucla.edu/products/reports/R823.pdf). The education insiders who responded to the survey referenced in this question likely aren’t experts in assessment and—because Smarter Balanced is not a Washington, DC-based organization and its leaders are not well known “inside the beltway”—they are not as familiar with the work the Consortium has done. Smarter Balanced is committed to doing more outreach and communication work to better inform all our stakeholders about the progress we have made and the challenges ahead.

Would you please explain your plans for Smarter Balanced’s future governance, leadership, and funding?

In March 2013, the governing states of Smarter Balanced endorsed a sustainability plan that included instructions for the Smarter Balanced executive director to enter into negotiations with the National Center for Research on Evaluation, Standards, and Student Testing (CRESST) at UCLA to serve as a partner and host for the Smarter Balanced Consortium after the completion of the federal grant in September 2014. These negotiations are moving toward an agreement by UCLA to recognize the shared state ownership of the assessment system content and an independent governance structure much like the one that the consortium currently employs. Smarter Balanced will continue to be governed by its member states, with K-12 and higher education representatives and a small executive committee providing day-to-day oversight. Operations will be managed by a small staff under the leadership of an executive director and two deputies. Funding will come primarily from fees paid by states for packages of assessment services, with UCLA/CRESST providing office space and key administrative support in areas such as finance, human resources, legal advice, etc.

What else would you like people to know about Smarter Balanced?

As part of our commitment to transparency—and in order to help teachers, teacher educators, and other interested parties learn about and prepare for the assessments—Smarter Balanced will be releasing a complete set of practice tests for each subject and grade level at the end of May. These practice tests will be freely available on the Smarter Balanced web site (www.SmarterBalanced.org); they will utilize the same software system that is being used for the operational test and will feature many of the tools, accommodations and accessibility features that will be included in the final software package. Everyone interested in seeing first-hand what the assessments will look like is encouraged to visit our web site and challenge themselves by answering the questions in these practice tests.

This report is based on the responses to an online survey conducted in Spring 2013 with 344 school district superintendents (an impressive 56 percent) in Ohio. The survey covered seven education policies, specifically: Common Core State Standards, teacher evaluations, the Third Grade Reading Guarantee, open enrollment, A-to-F ratings for schools and districts, individualized learning (blended learning and credit flexibility), and school choice (charter schools and vouchers). It also included several questions on general attitudes towards school reform in Ohio and two trend items. Download today to discover the key findings and also view a PowerPoint by researcher Steve Farkas of FDR Group.

The Reynoldsburg City School District, just east of Columbus, is far down the “portfolio management” path – further than probably any suburban school district of its size. This feature article discusses portfolio management and takes readers behind the scenes in Reynoldsburg.

Adapted from the Foreword

by Chester E. Finn, Jr. and Amber M. Winkler

As the challenges of education governance loom ever larger and the dysfunction and incapacity of the traditional K–12 system reveal themselves as major roadblocks to urgently needed reforms across that system, many have asked, “What’s the alternative?”

Part of the answer is the Recovery School District, a new state-created entity that that has the potential to turn around schools that have—often for decades—produced dreadful results under district control.

This is both a governance innovation and an imaginative response to pressure (from No Child Left Behind, from Secretary Arne Duncan, and from many other sources) to transform the nation’s most egregious “dropout factories” into providers of quality education and sources of worthy school choices for children who urgently need them.

Redefining the School District in Tennessee, by Nelson Smith, examines the progress of the Tennessee Achievement School District (ASD), a statewide model for school turnarounds based on Louisiana’s pioneering Recovery School District.

The ASD is now leading the charge in developing talented building and classroom leaders, luring high-quality charter-management organizations to The Volunteer State, and incubating new school-choice networks. It runs some schools directly and entrusts others to external charter operators. But the goal remains the same: turn the bottom 5 percent of schools into high-achieving ones (top 25 percent) within five years.

Will this happen? ASD is too new to have produced definitive evidence. But its forerunner in New Orleans, where the percentage of students performing on grade level continues to rise, demonstrates what’s possible. 

This is the first of a three-part series focused on recovery school districts. The second will target similar efforts in Michigan and Virginia; the third will review and distill national lessons from all of these endeavors.

Download Redefining the School District in Tennessee to learn more.

When charter schools first emerged more than two decades ago, they presented an innovation in public school governance. No longer would school districts enjoy the “exclusive franchise” to own and operate public schools, as chartering pioneer and advocate Ted Kolderie explained. Charters wouldn’t gain all of the independence of private schools—they would still report to a publicly accountable body, or authorizer—but they would be largely freed from the micromanagement of school boards, district bureaucracies, and union contracts. Autonomy, in exchange for accountability, would reign supreme.

Over the course of its twenty-year history, however, American education and its charter school sector have evolved in important ways. One of the significant ways is school governance—not a topic that gets a lot of attention but, as it turns out, a crucial one that is overdue for an overhaul (and not just in the charter sector).

The growth of nonprofit charter networks (CMOs), the ubiquity of for-profit school-management companies (EMOs), and the emergence of “virtual” charter schools have all upended the notion that charters would mostly be freestanding “community-based” schools of the “one-off” variety. Yet the public policies and practices that characterize charter governance haven’t kept pace with these real-world changes.

To examine this mismatch more closely and consider how it might be set right, we interviewed nearly two dozen analysts, authorizers, board members, and practitioners with interest in and knowledge of charter schools. Not one of them felt that the inherited assumptions and regulations about governance in the charter sector are truly well suited to present-day realities. This brief explores several ways that charter governance might be rebooted.

In just two decades, charter schools have grown from a boutique school reform strategy to an alternative public school system serving a significant percentage of the nation’s K-12 students. In 1996, just 19 states had charter legislation in place, and there were only about 250 charters serving some 20,000 pupils. Fast forward to 2013: 41 states and the District of Columbia now have charter laws on the books, and there are more than 2 million students enrolled in 5,600 charter schools.

Many students attending charters are in high-need, high-poverty neighborhoods; in Cleveland for example—in Fordham’s home state Ohio—nearly 15,000 students (25 percent of Cleveland’s public school students) attended a charter school during the 2011-12 school year. This begs the question: how are these schools doing in comparison to their district peers and in comparison to their wealthier peers across the state? And how might we structure closure and new school policies to increase the number of high-flying charters while reducing the number of academic laggards?

Conducted jointly by the Thomas B. Fordham Institute and Public Impact, the new research study Searching for Excellence: A Five-City, Cross-State Comparison of Charter School Quality sheds light on charter performance — in Albany, Chicago, Cleveland, Denver, and Indianapolis. These cities were highlighted because they have relatively large numbers of charter schools and charter school students. These are cities where charters have been part of the educational landscape for a decade or more.

Searching for Excellence analyzes the 2010-11 standardized test results for 108 elementary and middle schools in these five cities. Charter school quality is assessed by comparing charter school test results to those of the home school district and to all public schools statewide. Results are reported for both individual charters and as a citywide cohort.

Download the report today!  

How does Governor Kasich’s school funding plan stack up, according to one of the nation’s foremost experts in school finance and reform?  Find out in our latest publication, Steps in the Right Direction: Assessing “Ohio Achievement Everywhere” – the Kasich Plan.

In 2009, Fordham's Ohio team engaged Professor Paul Hill to to provide an analysis of then-Governor Strickland's school funding plan. We couldn’t think of anyone better to do the work than Hill—he is founder and recently retired director of the University of Washington’s Center on Reinventing Public Education, and a former Senior Fellow at Brookings and RAND. He was also the lead researcher on Facing the Future: Financing Productive Schools, a six-year effort, funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, which concluded that America’s public-school finance systems are burdened by rules and narrow policies that hold local officials accountable for compliance but not for results.
 
Fast forward to 2013, and another Ohio governor is proposing a school funding reform plan. We once again asked Professor Hill if he would provide a review of the governor’s plan. As the title notes, Professor Hill observes that Governor Kasich’s reform plan will advance Ohio and it schools, but it could be better and bolder. Download the short report to learn more about Professor Hill’s take on Kasich’s school funding plan.

In an era of budgetary belt tightening, state and local policy makers are finally awakening to the impact of teacher pension costs on their bottom lines. Recent reports demonstrate that such pension programs across the United States are burdened by almost $390 billion in unfunded liabilities. Yet, most states and municipalities have been taking the road of least resistance, tinkering around the edges rather than tackling systemic (but painful) pension reform.

Is the solution to the pension crisis to offer teachers the option of a 401(k)-style plan (also known as a "defined contribution" or DC plan) instead of a traditional pension plan? Would this alternative appeal to teachers?

When Teachers Choose Pension Plans: The Florida Story sets out to answer these questions.

The Thomas B. Fordham Institute has provided big-picture feedback and detailed, standard-specific commentary for the second draft of the Next Generation Science Standards—standards that done right, set a firm foundation upon which the rest of science education across the states will be constructed. In our comments on the first draft, we concluded that “the NGSS authors have much to do to ensure that the final draft is a true leap forward in science education.”  In comments on Draft II, we address to what extent NGSS writers have moved closer to a set of K–12 science standards that even states with strong standards of their own would do well to adopt.

Many proponents of private school choice take for granted that schools won’t participate if government asks too much of them, especially if it demands that they be publicly accountable for student achievement. Were such school refusals to be widespread, the programs themselves could not serve many kids. But is this assumption justified?

A new Fordham Institute study provides empirical answers. Do regulations and accountability requirements deter private schools from participating in choice programs? How important are such requirements compared to other factors, such as voucher amounts? Are certain types of regulations stronger deterrents than others? Do certain types schools shy away from regulation more than others?

Among the study’s major findings:

• Regulations that restrict student admissions and schools’ religious practices are more likely to deter school participation than are requirements pertaining to academic standards, testing, and public disclosure of achievement results;
• Curriculum and testing requirements ranked among the least important considerations for school leaders, with just 25 percent citing state assessment rules as very important in their decision to participate or not;
• Only 3 percent of non-participating schools cited governmental regulations as the most important reason to opt out;
• The reasons most cited by school principals for participating in voucher programs were expanding their mission in the community (87 percent), helping voucher-eligible families already enrolled in their schools (75 percent), and aiding needy children in the community (72 percent);
• About one-third of non-participating private schools cited a lack of eligible families in their vicinity as key to their decision to shun the program; and
• Catholic schools are most likely to participate in choice programs, regardless of the regulatory environment.

Watch the replay of the event based on the report:

America’s fragmented, decentralized, politicized, and bureaucratic system of education governance is a major impediment to school reform. In Education Governance for the Twenty-First Century: Overcoming the Structural Barriers to School Reform, a number of leading education scholars, analysts, and practitioners show that understanding the impact of specific policy changes in areas such as standards, testing, teachers, or school choice requires careful analysis of the broader governing arrangements that influence their content, implementation, and impact.

Education Governance for the Twenty-First Century comprehensively assesses the strengths and weaknesses of what remains of the old in education governance, scrutinizes how traditional governance forms are changing, and suggests how governing arrangements might be further altered to produce better educational outcomes for children.

Paul Manna, Patrick McGuinn, and their colleagues provide the analysis and alternatives that will inform attempts to adapt nineteenth and twentieth century governance structures to the new demands and opportunities of today.

*Copublished with the Brookings Institution and the Center for American Progress

Table of Contents

1. Education Governance in America: Who Leads When Everyone is in Charge?, Patrick McGuinn and Paul Manna

Part I.  The Problem
2. The Failures of U.S. Education Governance Today, Chester E. Finn Jr. and Michael J. Petrilli
3. How Current Education Governance Distorts Financial Decisionmaking, Marguerite Roza
4. Governance Challenges to Innovators within the System, Michelle R. Davis
5. Governance Challenges to Innovators outside the System, Steven F. Wilson

Part II.  Traditional Institutions in Flux
6. Rethinking District Governance, Frederick M. Hess and Olivia M. Meeks
7. Interstate Governance of Standards and Testing, Kathryn A. McDermott
8. Education Governance in Performance-Based Federalism, Kenneth K. Wong
9. The Rise of Education Executives in the White House, State House, and Mayor's Office, Jeffrey R. Henig

Part III.  Lessons from Other Nations and Sectors
10. English Perspectives on Education Governance and Delivery, Michael Barber
11. Education Governance in Canada and the United States, Sandra Vergari
12. Education Governance in Comparative Perspective, Michael Mintrom and Richard Walley
13. Governance Lessons from the Health Care and Environment Sectors, Barry G. Rabe
 
Part IV.  Paths Forward
14. Toward a Coherent and Fair Funding System, Cynthia G. Brown
15. Picturing a Different Governance Structure for Public Education, Paul T. Hill
16. From Theory to Results in Governance Reform, Kenneth J. Meier
17. The Tall Task of Education Governance Reform, Paul Manna and Patrick McGuinn