Jon Marcus talks about Arne Duncan and higher-ed costs, accountability
Jon Marcus, who writes about higher education for The Hechinger Report, attended an event yesterday at Emerson College in Boston at which U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan and U.S. Senator John Kerry (D-Mass.) spoke about higher-education costs and accountability.
Marcus appeared on the public-television program Greater Boston on WGBH-TV, Boston, to discuss the issues.
Obama is “incentivizing”—not regulating—universities, ed secretary says
Boston Mayor Thomas Menino speaks with U.S. Department of Education Secretary Arne Duncan about the benefits of the Parent University program this morning at the JFK Elementary School in Jamaica Plain. February 6, 2012 (Photo Credit: Don Harney, Mayor's Office)
U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan said today that the Obama administration isn’t trying to regulate university tuition by linking federal funding to the rate at which college costs increase.
In his state-of-the-union address on January 24th, President Barack Obama proposed that federal financial aid be tied to the pace of tuition increases. Institutions whose tuition rises too quickly would risk losing their eligibility for essential federal financial aid. Obama said, “let me put colleges and universities on notice: If you can’t stop tuition from going up, the funding you get from taxpayers will go down.”
Universities have protested that this is a form of federal intrusion.
Asked after a meeting with a friendly audience of students in Boston whether the government should regulate such costs, Duncan responded, “I don’t think it’s our job to regulate tuition increases. Our job should be to incentivize good behavior.”
U.S. Senator John Kerry (D-Mass.), who also appeared at the event, said it was time for the United States to shake up its higher-education system in an increasingly competitive global economy.
What will happen with education in the 2012 presidential election?
As the Republican presidential primary rolls on to Nevada, many are already looking toward the general election, discussing what the candidates will have to do to win the White House. A panel held on Wednesday, February 1st, at the American Enterprise Institute, a right-leaning public-policy think tank in Washington, D.C., discussed what role education will likely play in politics during this election year. The full session can be viewed here. Some highlights included:
- Regardless of who wins the Republican presidential nomination, Joe Williams, executive director of Democrats for Education Reform, predicted that the nominee won’t attack President Barack Obama on education. “The mojo for education policy has strangely shifted back to governors around the country,” he said. “We’re going to start to see governors again be the drivers of most of what’s happening in education with a lot of focus led by the federal government for sure. But it’s going to become very difficult to argue that the Obama administration and [U.S. Education Secretary Arne] Duncan have been obnoxious with their use of the bully pulpit.”
- Education will be more important in this election than it has in the two previous ones, and a growing number of people think public education in the country isn’t on the right track, according to David Winston, president of The Winston Group, a D.C.-based strategy and message design firm. Education is seen as being closely linked to jobs and the economy, which are the most important issues for the majority of Americans. “What you’re going to watch is the candidates try to figure out this economic side in terms of this discussion. I think for virtually all them, it’s a new paradigm in terms of how to look at it,” he said. “You’re going to watch a lot of candidates sort of make it up as they go along … since there’s no clear track record.”
- The existence of the Tea Party has changed, and will continue to change, the way education is talked about on Capitol Hill. The group has vehemently opposed things like the Race to the Top competition—a federal grant initiative that rewarded states for making certain reforms—for taking too much power away from states. “The Tea Party has pushed the debate of the federal role and overreaching,” said Peter Cunningham, a spokesperson for the U.S. Department of Education. “The whole debate about what the federal government should do and shouldn’t do is an important one, but it’s not the most important one. The most important one is what’s happening to kids.”
Interview: Jon Marcus talks about free universities and their impact
Jon Marcus, a contributing editor at The Hechinger Report, recently had an article in The Washington Post about how a wave of free online universities could change the traditional U.S. higher education system.
Several new companies and organizations with impressive pedigrees are harnessing the Internet to provide college courses for free, or for next to nothing. And while many traditional universities are slowing this trend by refusing to give academic credit toward degrees to students who complete such programs, several no- and low-cost startups are doing an end-run around this monopoly by inventing new kinds of credentials that employers may consider just as good.
“If I were the universities, I might be a little nervous,” said Alana Harrington, director of Saylor.org, a Washington, D.C.-based nonprofit established by entrepreneur Michael Saylor that offers 200 free online college courses in 12 majors.
On Friday, January 27th, Marcus spoke on the Here and Now radio program, on Boston’s WBUR, about his story and what he learned.
WBUR also has an interview with Shai Reshef, founder of The University of the People.
New evidence that small schools work?
You might have forgotten about the small schools movement amid all the recent hubbub about overhauling teacher evaluations. But a study released on January 25th reminds us that only a few years ago, reducing the number of total students in a school was seen as a key weapon in the arsenal of urban school reform, and suggests that perhaps small schools shouldn’t have been so quickly abandoned as a reform strategy. 
In 2010, MDRC, a nonpartisan, New York-based research group, found that New York City students who attended small high schools were more likely to graduate than their counterparts who applied to but didn’t ultimately attend small schools. A new study confirms the previous findings. A second group of students who cycled through the city’s small schools also had a greater likelihood of graduating than students at other, comparable schools.
New York City’s small schools aren’t selective, but they do have lotteries because of space constraints. The latest MDRC study followed cohorts of students who either won or lost the lottery to ensure the two groups were comparable.
There are more than 100 small schools in the city, many of which opened in the last decade under the Bloomberg administration. And other cities also embraced downsized schools as a way to improve student achievement. But the concept seems to have fallen out of favor, in part because the billions of U.S. dollars that the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation was giving to the movement dried up due to “disappointing” results. (Disclosure: The Gates Foundation is among the funders of The Hechinger Report.)
Also, there was—and continues to be—quite a lot of conflict over the other side of the small schools movement: the closure of big schools. One report about New York City’s small schools said they had a domino effect on larger schools: As big schools were shut down to make way for smaller ones, many students—often those with lower test-scores and less wherewithal to find their way to small schools—were funneled into the remaining large schools, which struggled and were then also slated for closure and replacement by new small schools.
And while small schools, on average, appear to be doing better with the students they receive, quite a few have done badly enough to meet the same fate as many of their bigger counterparts.
Nevertheless, the study’s authors say their evidence suggests that small schools remain a good idea: The graduation rate for students in the study’s small schools was nearly 69 percent, compared to 62 percent of students in the study’s other schools. The overall graduation rate in New York City’s public high schools is 70 percent.
The battle over treating teachers as professionals
Should teachers be treated as professionals? The question may seem easy enough to answer—most people in education, whether they are union representatives or reformers advocating for more charter schools, say “yes.” Yet the question is in many ways at the heart of the raging debate–currently boiling over in New York–over how to improve struggling schools. How should the education field give power, respect and autonomy to teachers while also ensuring they are accountable for results?
Education reformers argue that teachers have not been seen as professionals in the past, pointing to union rules that limit how many hours a day they can work and other restrictions. The reformers have pushed against the work rules while advocating for a more rigorous evaluation process and tougher consequences for teachers.
Here’s U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan speaking on the topic last year: “Teachers today need to be treated more as professionals and knowledge workers, and less as interchangeable cogs in an educational factory line out of the last century.”
For the most part, teachers unions have supported reforms advocated by Duncan and others, but worry that taken too far, more intensive classroom evaluations based on detailed rubrics and the use of student test-scores to rate teachers may undermine the very efforts to increase professionalism by reducing educator autonomy and power. In New York City, for example, unions have refused to go along with a new teacher evaluation system that the state is advocating.
“Our schools and our kids deserve a highly trained and professional workforce. But rather than seeing the new system as a tool for professional growth, the city and Department of Education have insisted that it be used as a threat mechanism for both teachers and principals,” Michael Mulgrew, president of the New York City teachers union, the United Federation of Teachers, said in a press release last week.
Increasingly, the question of professionalism is also being raised in the early education field, where educators have often complained about a lack of respect for the work they do, but where quality has varied as much or more than in K-12 schools.
I recently discussed the implications of the professionalism debate for teachers of younger students in a conversation with Dr. Stephanie Feeney, Dr. Sue Martin, and Rae Pica of BAM! Radio. Will the field of early education experience the same rifts that have cut through K-12? Are autonomy and respect compatible with intense, top-down accountability? Does including teachers as decision-makers in evaluation systems undermine efforts to create tough consequences for poor performance? Click here to listen.
Report cards for teachers: Are they fair?
A new study underwritten by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation (which is among the funders of The Hechinger Report) tackles the question of whether the new teacher evaluation systems going into effect in school districts across the country are accurate and reliable in identifying which teachers are good and which are not. The researchers found that the new evaluation systems are likely to be more reliable than the methods used in the past. But they are not perfect.
The study argues that current teacher evaluation systems are broken, suggesting, as many critics have in the past, that the problem with the old approach was its failure to distinguish among the great, the mediocre and the bad: More than 90 percent of teachers were labeled as satisfactory, even in school districts where student achievement and graduation rates were abysmal. Under the old system, principals usually conducted one classroom observation per teacher every few years, marking off things on a checklist, like whether students were behaving and goals were displayed on the chalkboard.
Advocates for a new system of measuring teachers—with usually more than one classroom observation a year, plus standardized test scores that measure how much a teacher’s students improve academically, plus other measures like student survey results—say it is more consistent and precise. This new system is being promoted as more dependable in telling districts which teachers are great, which need help to get better, and, most controversially, which need to be let go.
The new method of grading teachers is still nascent, but it’s spreading rapidly, and the Gates study adds to a growing collection of data (in addition to anecdotal evidence we’ve been amassing during an ongoing reporting project here at Hechinger—stay tuned this month for the latest installment from Memphis, Tenn.) hinting at whether it will live up to its billing as a better way of measuring a teacher’s effectiveness.
That is, can we know for sure that a teacher who receives a top grade on one of the more rigorous and frequent classroom observations is also going to have a classroom of students who get top grades on achievement tests at the end of the year and on other important measures, like interest and happiness in school? (In response to criticisms of previous studies, the researchers expanded their study to look at indicators of success beyond test scores.) And are the evaluation measures, whether they are qualitative observations or quantitative test scores, accurate in labeling teachers great, ordinary, or bad?
In short, the researchers found that scores on observations did indeed tend to correlate with results on a variety of achievement tests. The correlations weren’t perfect, but researchers and proponents of the new evaluation systems say that’s because the two are not measuring the same thing: “There may be some teaching competencies that affect students in ways we are not measuring,” the study’s authors wrote.
In math, the correlation between what teachers did in their classrooms and how students performed at the end of the year on state tests was twice as strong as it was in reading, which researchers said could be a result of the tests, not the teachers. (And which could raise questions about the appropriateness of certain tests as tools to rate teachers, something critics of the new methods are already concerned about.)
The question of reliability, or whether we can count on ratings by different observers to be similar, is also central in the Gates report—part of an ongoing series looking at how new evaluation systems are working in a large sample of schools around the country.
“Reliability is important because without it classroom observations will paint an inaccurate portrait of teachers’ practice,” the report’s authors say. And an inaccurate portrait could lead to firing above-average teachers (or keeping on underperformers).
The study’s authors trained hundreds of evaluators to score videos of teachers teaching, and then compared them to see if the scores were consistent among the different raters. Here’s what they found:
“Even with systematic training and certification of observers, the MET project needed to combine scores from multiple raters and multiple lessons to achieve high levels of reliability. A teacher’s score varied considerably from lesson to lesson, as well as from observer to observer.”
In particular, a single observation by a single observer was more volatile and less reliable than multiple observations by different people.
Statistical measures using student test-score growth tend to be more reliable than observations, but the study and other research suggest that they are still wrong about a quarter of the time.
The good news is that the test-score measures and the observation scores seem to be more accurate and reliable when added together.
What does this mean for the real world?
Many teachers will be rated by one person, their principal. Some will receive classroom visits by two people, a principal and an assistant principal. In a few places, like D.C., the district has brought in outside evaluators to increase reliability. The new evaluations tend to include several observations over the course of a year, especially for new teachers. But in Tennessee, which is at the forefront of the new evaluation push, the number of times evaluators must be in classrooms each year has been reduced in response to complaints from districts and principals.
In most places that are adopting new evaluation systems, test scores, observations, survey results and other measures are all being combined, which the Gates study suggests will make the systems more trustworthy. Yet the vast majority of teachers do not teach in subjects or grades that are tested, meaning they will not receive value-added scores on their students’ growth.
So are the new evaluations likely to be ironclad? The report’s findings suggest not. Are they better than what existed before? The authors say yes: “Combining new approaches to measuring effective teaching—while not perfect—significantly outperforms traditional measures.”
For more reporting on the study, see Education Week’s take here, and the Los Angeles Times story here. American Federation of Teachers president Randi Weingarten also commented on the results. She was pleased that the report validated the union’s position that multiple measures should be used to evaluate teachers, but disappointed “that after all of the Gates Foundation’s research, the focus is still on measuring performance, not about improving performance.”
Oklahoma considers dropping high-school exit exams
Oklahoma’s landmark 2005 legislation, which mandated that all high-school students pass exams to be eligible for graduation, may be killed off before it even takes effect. The law, Achieving Classroom Excellence, requires seniors to pass sophomore-level tests in English, algebra and two other subjects—biology, algebra II, geometry, U.S. history or junior-level English—starting with the Class of 2012.
Legislators are now backtracking because of the high number of students the law would likely leave without a diploma—some 6,000 in the Tulsa area alone. Even the co-author of the original legislation, Representative Jeannie McDaniel (D-Tulsa), has withdrawn her support for it.
“I think when it was originally passed, we anticipated some remedial work, maybe mentoring,” she told Tulsa World last week, noting that budget cuts may have prevented schools from providing enough of this remedial support. “If we’ve fallen short in that area, then I think we need to stand behind the kids and do what’s right.”
New legislation, introduced by Representative Jerry McPeak (D-Warner), would eliminate the testing requirement. “If it hits the floor, I bet this bill will pass by 80 percent,” he said. “This isn’t Democrat or Republican; it’s about just treating people right.”
School districts and states across the country have been under pressure in recent years to increase the number of high-school graduates. Nationally, somewhere between 25 and 30 percent of high-school students fail to graduate.
Oklahoma wouldn’t be the first state to shelve graduation tests in hopes of boosting graduation rates. In April 2011, Georgia eased its requirements by cutting the number of exams from four to just one.
At the same time, however, other states are increasing standards and creating more challenging standardized tests.
New York has vowed to make its high-school graduation exams tougher after a study last year showed that even students who pass the math test may be placed in remedial math classes in college. Florida recently raised its cut-off scores on all standardized exams, including those in high school, and is developing additional end-of-course assessments.
Statistics showing that large numbers of high-school graduates are unprepared for college coursework have fueled the push to make tests more difficult. Right now, many of those who do earn a diploma must enroll in at least one remedial course in college.
McPeak defended his proposal to Tulsa World as a necessity for students who want to go into the military, which requires a high-school diploma. “If this kid doesn’t get his diploma and can’t get into the military, what do you think he’s going to do?” he said.
But a high-school diploma does not guarantee entry into the military. The military has its own entrance exam, which tests nine subjects, such as word knowledge, paragraph comprehension, arithmetic reasoning and general science. Nearly a quarter of those who take the test don’t pass it, according to a 2010 study.
Winners of the Early Learning Race to the Top competition
—UPDATED—
The announcement of nine winners in the Obama administration’s latest version of its “Race to the Top” education competition will push forward reforms that early learning advocates have lobbied heavily for over the past several years.
Children read at a preschool in Carpinteria, Calif. (Photo by Sarah Garland)
The winners of the “Early Learning Challenge,” as the grant competition was called, are California, Delaware, Maryland, Massachusetts, Minnesota, North Carolina, Ohio, Rhode Island and Washington state. To win, they promised to increase accountability, raise the quality of preschool teachers and improve coordination between the various private and public agencies that provide early education.
“We are so incredibly excited,” Deborah Gist, the Rhode Island education commissioner, said during a conference at the White House this morning. “This acknowledgement by the administration to the importance of early education is encouraging.”
The announcement foiled predictions: The New America Foundation guessed only three of the eventual nine winners, based on how states have done so far in terms of coordinating and improving their preschool systems. Instead of Pennsylvania, which has been recognized as an early education leader, “the winners included North Carolina, a state suffering big cuts in early childhood funding this year,” Lisa Guernsey, director of the organization’s early childhood initiative, wrote in a blog post.
In a call with reporters, Obama administrations officials said some winning states were “well on their way,” while others are just beginning to develop their early learning systems.
“Many states we would have loved to have funded, but we didn’t have enough resources,” said U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan. “We took them in rank order.”
There was some overlap between this round of the competition, which was funded with money from the 2009 economic stimulus act, and the first Race to the Top grant competition, which called for reforms in K-12 education. Delaware, Maryland, Massachusetts, North Carolina, Ohio and Rhode Island also won in the earlier “race,” which had two rounds and a total of 12 winners.
California, which has not been as enthusiastic about embracing the K-12 reforms favored by the Obama administration, has been more active in pushing early learning reforms. It has increased spending on preschool access in recent years, and the state is launching a quality rating scale for preschools based on a program run by Los Angeles Universal Preschool. But Jon Schnur, co-founder of the advocacy group New Leaders for New Schools and current chairman of America Achieves, said that he was “personally surprised to see California as a winner.”
The state of Washington has also been lauded for its work linking preschool with older grades to prevent learning loss as children move from preschool to the elementary grades. (Seven of the winners included plans to improve alignment between preschool and the early grades in their applications.)
Some advocates were excited about the results, saying it was a watershed moment that would bring together what has been a scattered field.
“It’s been the most exciting time in the past four decades for young children in our country,” said Sharon Lynn Kagan, co-director of the National Center for Children and Families at Teachers College, Columbia University, in a call with reporters hosted by the Education Writers Association. “It has both symbolic and substantive value … It says to America that early learning matters.”
There’s less money to go around this time: $500 million, compared to about $4 billion for the K-12 grants. But the requirements are not as controversial as the requirements for K-12 schools. In the earlier competition, many states set out to create systems that evaluate teachers using test-scores and to open more privately-run public charter schools—reforms that have met with opposition from teachers unions and others.
In the early learning competition, states were encouraged to create kindergarten readiness tests, however, which has raised concerns about standardized testing of young children. But Dana Goldstein, an education writer and fellow at the New America Foundation, has written that “the model the administration has in mind for pre-school assessment is low-stakes for individual teachers and students and measures not only academic performance but also children’s social, emotional, physical and artistic readiness for kindergarten.”
“This is partly about academic outcomes, but it’s partly about other outcomes … that make a difference” like self-control, persistence and social skills, said Schnur. Kagan said that while there have been concerns about an increasing of testing that could be “injurious to young children,” she was “very enthusiastic” about the sorts of tests being planned by the winning states.
For a breakdown of what the winning states will likely be doing, see this post at the New America Foundation’s Early Ed Watch. For individual state applications, see here.
