Evidence and the Civil Rights Group “Framework”

A couple of weeks ago various civil rights groups released a new education agenda, and in doing so provided a useful primer on the selective use of evidence.

The six-prong “framework” (more on that later) begins with “1. Equitable opportunities for all” (more on that later, too) before moving to “2. Utilization of systematically proven and effective educational methods.” By this, they mean:

Rather than addressing inequitable access to research-proven methodologies like high quality early childhood education and a stable supply of experienced, highly effective teachers, recent education reform proposals have favored “stop gap” quick fixes that may look new on the surface but offer no real long-term strategy for effective systemic change. The absence of these “stop gap” programs in affluent communities speaks to the marginal nature of this approach. We therefore urge an end to the federal push to encourage states to adopt federally prescribed methodologies that have little or no evidentiary support – for primary implementation only in low-income and high-minority communities.

Which is a long way of saying “Stop with all the charter schools.”  I can’t imagine why anyone thought it was useful or clever to not use the word “charter” here–people will either know what you’re talking about or they won’t, so this just annoys the former and confuses the latter.  Anyway, the framework continues as follows:

For this reason, we propose the following recommendations for federal action to ensure access to systematically proven and effective methods:

Recommendation 2A: Promote and Support Universal, High-Quality Early Childhood Education.

Data on the benefits of high-quality early childhood education are overwhelming, and yet millions of students across the country do not have this opportunity. The federal government must ensure that all students have high-quality early childhood education that ensures literacy by the third grade.

Here’s the problem: the contention that charters have “little or no evidentiary support” rests on studies finding that the average performance of all charters is generally indistinguishable from the average regular public school. At the same time, reasonable people acknowledge that the best charter schools–let’s call them “high-quality” charter schools–are really good, and there’s plenty of research to support this.

But the “overwhelming” data on the benefits of early childhood education cited by the civil rights groups isn’t based on the average performance of all early childhood programs. It’s based on studies of the best early childhood programs, i.e. “high quality” early childhood programs. There’s no more or less evidence that universal high-quality early childhood education will be a boon to a children than there is evidence that universal high-quality charter schools will do the same. They’re both supportable but largely theoretical propositions. And they both lead to the difficult question of how to promote and ensure high quality. On this the civil rights groups are silent, as if you can just assert high quality and make it so.

The first framework item, meanwhile, is to “Adopt Common Resource Opportunity Standards to Complement the Emerging Common Student Outcome Standards,” i.e. “spend a lot more money.” To be clear: there are plenty of states and school districts out there that absolutely need more money  and it’s perfectly reasonable to ask how children in the poorest districts are going to meet common standards with pennies on the dollars spent in the richest ones. However, the solution offered here has much to be desired: “As a condition for receiving federal funds under the ESEA, each state would be required to submit a plan for closing opportunity gaps in these areas and ensuring that all students have access to these core resources.” The “core resources” being high-quality early childhood education, good curricula, good teachers, and money.

Here’s something I’ve learned in my years as an education policy analyst: Anytime anyone’s solution for anything in education involves a subsidiary unit of government “submitting a plan” to a higher unit of government, that person or organization doesn’t know what they’re talking about. Call it Carey’s Law, if you like. You know how in the military they say “hope is not a plan”? Well, in education policy, a plan is not a plan. “Submit a plan” is the ultimate compliance-based non-policy. Make no mistake: plans will be submitted. People will fill out whatever form you want them to if the dollar amount involved is big enough. If you make them submit a plan to accomplish X, they will dutifully submit a spell-checked document that says, in roughly 20,000 words, “We plan to accomplish X.” Then they’ll cash your check and go back to doing whatever they were doing before they paused to write the plan.

If you want someone to accomplish X goal that they are unable or unwilling to accomplish on their own, you can pass a law requiring them to do X under the threat of some kind of legal sanction. You can hold a bag of money in front of them and only give it over after they’ve accomplished X. Or you can otherwise change the structure of incentives that surround the organization to give them newer, betters reasons to accomplish X. But mere plans will not do, not by a long shot.

Yet the civil rights groups actually want to take federal policy in the opposite direction, away from the “hold out a bag of money” approach that has worked so successfully under the Race to the Top and back to the formula grants that have been in place since 1965. This seems like a good moment to return to the subject of “systematically proven and effective” methods. Two things we know for certain: 1) The federal government has been distributing education money via formula for the last 45 years, and 2) “Today there is nothing short of a state of emergency in the delivery of education to our nation’s communities of color…As a nation, we are failing to provide the high quality educational opportunities that are critical for all students to succeed, thereby jeopardizing our nation’s ability to continue to be a world leader.” That second part is from the first paragraph of the civil rights group framework.

I know we can’t conclude that the formula grants caused the state of emergency for minority students. But we can say, with absolute certainty, that formula grants were an abject failure in preventing the state of emergency, because, there it is, a state of emergency! Yet the civil rights groups want to reinstate a policy for which 45 years of evidence show little success.

Finally, the word “framework.” It’s not quite up there with “plan,” but it’s important to understand that anyone who says they’re just providing a objective-sounding “framework” isn’t really being honest with you about their intentions. No policymaker in history ever wrote an important piece of legislation by sitting down with someone else’s framework and carefully working through the items one by one. The civil rights group “framework” is simply an argument, one explicitly designed to produce headlines like “Obama Defends Education Program,” and “Civil Rights Groups Skewer Obama Education Policy.” And there’s nothing wrong with that; it’s a free country and people should argue with the president if they think he’s wrong. But that’s all it is — not a document that provides any real substantive answers to the many education problems minority students face.