1. Some Good Common Sense: If you wait 11 years (and counting) between reauthorization, there are going to be some common sense fixes that nearly everyone agrees with. This version includes things like closing the comparability loophole so low-income schools get more federal dollars, increasing the set-aside for state departments of education to handle additional responsibilities, and limiting class-size dollars to focus only on areas where [...]]]> You can read summaries of the latest No Child Left Behind (NCLB) reauthorization attempt, Sen. Tom Harkin’s Strengthening America’s Schools Act at Politics K-12 or New America, but here are 11 key takeaways from the bill:

1. Some Good Common Sense: If you wait 11 years (and counting) between reauthorization, there are going to be some common sense fixes that nearly everyone agrees with. This version includes things like closing the comparability loophole so low-income schools get more federal dollars, increasing the set-aside for state departments of education to handle additional responsibilities, and limiting class-size dollars to focus only on areas where research shows it works. (This bill would limit class-size funds to early grades but does not emphasize reducing class sizes under 17 students.)

2. Mandate School Growth for Accountability Decisions: The federal growth model pilot opened for the first two states eight years ago in 2005-06. When the Bush administration left office, 15 states had been approved to use growth calculations. Again, this is what happens when we don’t have reauthorization on a regular basis: How crazy is it that not all states are using growth measures yet? More on this point later.

3. No Push for the Common Core: The bill does not require or even provide incentives for common standards or assessments. Even under the portion devoted to federal grants that support state assessments, it does not mandate or encourage states to be part of consortia.

4. Delay Implementation: The current assessment consortia and the 37 states granted comprehensive waivers from NCLB are all shooting for new assessments in 2014-15. This bill takes a stance on the question of whether we should delay that implementation and would not require states to have new assessments online until one year later, the 2015-16 school year.

5. Weakest Goals Imaginable: During the last attempt at reauthorization, there was a lot of debate about whether states should be required to set proficiency goals for students and schools. This bill does include performance goals, but they are pretty much the weakest requirement you could imagine. It doesn’t specify a time period or the required rate of student progress on those goals, other than making some annual progress over a “reasonable time period.”

6. Weakest Interventions Imaginable: The bill preserves the concepts of “priority schools,” the bottom 5 percent of schools in the state, and “focus schools,” the 10 percent of schools with the largest achievement gaps, first introduced in the Obama administration’s waivers to the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA). The interventions in those schools are weaker but generally in line with what were required under the waiver initiative.

But what about other schools? Michael Petrilli tweeted that the provision known as Adequate Yearly Progress (AYP) is alive and well. But read the proposed replacement yourself:

Beginning in the 2015–2016 school year, each local educational agency…shall (A) identify each school that, after 2 consecutive years, has not met the same performance target…for the same subgroup.… and (B) ensure that such school, in collaboration with the local educational agency, develops and implements a locally designed intervention to improve student achievement in each such subgroup.

District-designed interventions after two years? This is the tough “federal micromanagement” that Petrilli is worried about? If schools still fail to improve, they must “work with the State educational agency to implement a State-approved intervention based on established best practices within State.” Comparing this provision to AYP is laughable.

7. A “Plan” Is Not a Plan: To paraphrase Kevin Carey, making states write long, detailed narrative plans is not a credible policy solution. And as a new Education Sector report points out, when left to their own devices, states produce wildly different results. Unfortunately, that’s exactly what the Harkin bill relies on, requiring lengthy state plans that must include, among other things, a description of “how the State educational agency will plan for pregnant and parenting students to be enrolled, attend, and succeed in school.”

Similarly, the bill would require detailed report cards that include some good things (like college-going and college remediation rates) and some less useful things (like graduation rates for pregnant and parenting students). I’m all for more data collection and disaggregation, but there’s no enforcement mechanism here; and do we really want a state government identifying which women are pregnant in order to determine their graduation rates? What would someone do with that information?

8. Teacher and Principal Evaluations: Even though it doesn’t use the word “evaluation,” the bill would require state and districts to develop teacher and principal “professional growth and development systems” that would require “meaningful differentiation” on “multiple” performance levels and that must be based, in significant part, on evidence of improved student academic achievement. Those systems would not have to be in place until 2015-16, and the bill does not require districts to make any personnel decisions based on the results other than professional development.

9. Hypocrisy on Parent Right-To-Know: This would be funny if it wasn’t so hypocritical. One portion of the bill prohibits states and districts from releasing any information that would personally identify a teacher or principal, such as their evaluation results. In another section, it mandates that districts inform parents on things like “the baccalaureate degree major of the teacher and any other graduate certification or degree held by the teacher, and the field of discipline of the certification or degree.” In other words, parents can find out their child’s teacher’s college major, but they can’t find out anything about how well they actually teach. This is exactly the wrong balance, giving out private information that is mostly irrelevant to how well the teacher can do her job while simultaneously trying to block actual results.

10. Reauthorization Auto-Pilot: This is the best piece of the bill. As I’ve written before, and as the above points make clear, 11 years is too long to go between reauthorization. Congress should look for solutions that automatically help deal with some of the small, important issues that will inevitably develop over time. They’ve included a version of my proposal that would require states to re-submit accountability plans every four years. State plans would be peer-reviewed initially, but they could update their plans whenever they chose and be required to re-submit at least every four years. Those renewals would only need the secretary’s approval but would build a continuous improvement expectation into federal law.

11. Who Wants This Bill?: Other than Sen. Harkin, who really loves this bill and wants to see it pass? It’s good that all of the other Democrats on the Senate HELP Committee signed on to the bill, but are any of them actually passionate about it? The Obama education agenda is fragile and he would prefer to have some of his policies enshrined in law. This bill is closer to the Obama Blueprint than the 2011 version, but it’s unclear if it is strong enough to get the president’s full backing. Civil rights groups and the teachers unions issued tepid statements, and the state chiefs would prefer it didn’t force teacher evaluations onto states, but again, no one seems to be ready to fight for it. There’s broad consensus on the need for reauthorization—and eventually ESEA will be renewed—but there’s quite a bit of divergence about what that bill should look like.

Photo Credit: Politico

In another irony—really, you [...]]]> The National Conference on Public Employee Retirement Systems is concerned that public sector pensions are the “whipping-boy for state budget ills across the country,” which they tackled by hosting “1,000 trustees, administrators, state and local officials, investment, financial and union officers, pension staff and regulators” at a six-day conference at the Hilton Hawaiian Village on beautiful Waikiki Beach. While the city of Detroit struggles under a $15-billion debt burden, four of its public pension trustees spent $22,000 to attend the conference with sessions on things like reframing the pension funding debate and justifying the plans’ financial assumptions.

In another irony—really, you just can’t make these things up–Reuters reports that, “one well-attended session covered how to avoid front-page scandals.” Here’s a free tip: To avoid front-page scandals, don’t go to a Hawaii resort with “[a] five-acre salt-water lagoon, five swimming pools, and flamingos, penguins and turtles” on the public dime!

Photo Credit: Hilton Hawaiian Village

The table below uses 19 years of [...]]]> The big news out of the latest Public Education Finances Report is official confirmation that school districts spent less money per student in 2010-11 than they had the year before, the first one-year decline in nearly four decades. It’s worth taking some time to reflect on that fact, but the full report is also a valuable source of data on state and district revenues and expenditures and the entirety of the $600 billion public K-12 education industry. One key takeaway is that employee benefits continue to take on a rising share of district expenditures.

The table below uses 19 years of data (all years that are available online) to show total current expenditures (i.e. it excludes capital costs and debt), expenditures on base salaries and wages, and expenditures on benefits like retirement coverage, health insurance, tuition reimbursements, and unemployment compensation. Although it would be interesting to sort out which of these benefits have increased the most, the data don’t allow us to draw those granular conclusions. But they do tell us that teachers and district employees are forgoing wage increases on behalf of benefit enhancements.

From 2001 to 2011 alone, public education spending increased 49 percent, but, while salaries and wages increased 37 percent, employee benefits increased 88 percent. Twenty years ago, districts spent more than four dollars in wages to every one dollar they spent on benefits. Now that ratio has dropped under three-to-one.  Benefits now eat up more than 20 percent of district budgets, or $2,262 per student, and those numbers are climbing.

This trend coincided roughly with a teacher hiring boom here in the United States, meaning these changes happened despite districts’ employing more teachers, and it’s likely to continue as states and districts continue to feel the pressure from unfunded pension and health care promises, which totaled $1.38 trillion at last count. This is not a good trend. Instead of hiring even more teachers or paying them more money, districts are devoting an increasing share of finite resources to employee benefits. Workers value compensation that shows up in their paychecks more than they do hidden benefits, and districts should make conscious efforts to slow this change and put more money directly into teachers’ pockets.

Photo Credit: 360 Education Solutions

For some context, when No Child Left Behind required every state to adopt standards, create assessments aligned to those assessments, and build an accountability and reporting system, it gave states 44 months to do all of those things (from [...]]]> American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten made a big announcement today by calling for a moratorium on all stakes associated with the Common Core State Standards until students and teachers have been given ample training and time to “master this new approach to teaching and learning.” This is a reasonable statement on its face, but what does it mean in practice?

For some context, when No Child Left Behind required every state to adopt standards, create assessments aligned to those assessments, and build an accountability and reporting system, it gave states 44 months to do all of those things (from January 2002 to September 2005). Half the states already had standards and testing systems up and running, but many were starting basically from scratch, and the rest needed to make revisions. For comparison, the Common Core standards are new and more rigorous than existing standards, but they’re only one component of the full accountability apparatus, and all the states that have adopted the standards are relying on either one of the two assessment consortia or ACT to create assessments for them.

The Common Core standards were released in final form in June 2010. It is now almost May 2013, so states, districts, teachers, preparation programs, parents, unions, and students have had about 35 months with the final standards. The new standards won’t actually have consequences for schools and teachers in most states until 2014-15. If we assume the school year starts in September 2014, that will have been 51 months since the standards were adopted. Again, NCLB left 44 months to do everything; the Common Core allows 51 months to implement standards alone. If this isn’t enough time, what would be?

Weingarten also said that the federal government has not provided funds “specifically targeted to prepare teachers” for the Common Core. This is really just a sly way of saying Congress hasn’t dedicated a specific funding stream to support the implementation of the Common Core. Meanwhile, it provides $2.5 billion to support professional development that can be used to “improve the knowledge of teachers and principals and, in appropriate cases, paraprofessionals, concerning effective instructional strategies, methods, and skills, and use of challenging State academic content standards and student academic achievement standards, and State assessments, to improve teaching practices and student academic achievement.” In other words, Congress has provided, and continues to provide, districts with money to support the implementation of state standards such as the Common Core.

None of this mentions the work of the AFT, National Education Association, national foundations, teacher preparation institutions, assessment consortia (Smarter Balanced and PARCC), or other groups with a stake in the successful implementation of the Common Core. The next time you read a proposal about halting the Common Core, keep in mind all the time and money that’s already been spent.

Photo Credit: Andrew Councill for Education Week

The rankings don’t tell us how students do once they leave a high-scoring high school – for example, what percentage of them go on to postsecondary success. Is that something U.S. News might try and tackle?

I’m not sure how we would get the data to track college students back to their high schools. The next step [...]]]> Someone needs to tell U.S. News & World Report‘s Robert Morse that data he says he wants to include in his magazine’s high school rankings are already available. In a short interview with the Education Writers Association’s Emily Richmond, Morse said:

The rankings don’t tell us how students do once they leave a high-scoring high school – for example, what percentage of them go on to postsecondary success. Is that something U.S. News might try and tackle?

I’m not sure how we would get the data to track college students back to their high schools. The next step for us will be when there’s real cohort graduation rates to factor into our analysis, and that’s coming. I’m not saying it’s not important to figure out if students are succeeding in college, it obviously is. The question is how would we do it? That would require a big jump analytically and would take a lot of contemplation.

On the college enrollment data, Morse may want to talk to the National Student Clearinghouse about their 4-year-old StudentTracker service, which can link every high school in the country to the 3,300 colleges and universities in its database (which enroll 96 percent of all college students nationwide). Individual high schools can get eight years of data on college enrollment, persistence, and completion rates of their former students. The sticker price is $425 per high school, but many states and organizations have negotiated steep discounts. In 2010, the American Association of School Administrators (total annual revenue of $9-$13 million) negotiated a deal with the Clearinghouse to give StudentTrack access to their 13,000 members. Surely U.S. News and the Clearinghouse could benefit from a similar partnership.

It’s good that Morse is aware of the new adjusted cohort graduation rate calculations for high schools, but he seems not to have noticed that they became public last November. If he’s thinking about adding new elements to his rankings, he may also want to consider FAFSA completion rates.

Photo Credit: Dan Williams/Basis Scottsdale

William and Mary is not the first institution to try this model. In 2004, [...]]]> As a graduate of The College of William and Mary (master’s of public policy, 2008), I was disappointed to read about the school’s adoption of the so-called “high-tuition, high-aid” financial model. Proponents claim that this model helps institutions target resources to low-income students, but that goal fails when low-income students are scared off by high sticker prices and when institutions re-direct the higher tuition revenue to purposes other than low-income students. William and Mary is likely to fail the first test and already has failed the second.

William and Mary is not the first institution to try this model. In 2004, Harvard announced a generous new financial aid policy which would allow low-income students from families earning less than $40,000 to attend the prestigious institution at no cost. (William and Mary is the second-oldest college in the United States, second only to Harvard, so it likes comparing itself to the school in Cambridge.) Harvard received a huge amount of attention from national newspapers and trade publications, but what about the low-income students it targeted? Well, a Harvard student did some clever research and found that it may have increased low-income enrollment at Harvard by 36 students in the first year.

Reflect on that number for a second. Harvard is the most famous higher education institution in the world. It has 10,000 undergraduates. It announced to the world that it would give a free ride to any poor student who got in, and it managed to attract only 36 more low-income students. (The same study found that low-income student enrollment at Harvard fell back in line with historical averages in subsequent years.)

Other institutions have tried this “high-tuition, high-aid” model as well, and it turns out that they’re not doing much better. Highly selective institutions with highly generous financial aid policies are all struggling to recruit and enroll talented low-income students. William and Mary needs to come up with a specific, compelling rationale for why its plan is different, because aid alone won’t change the situation.

The second part of this model relies on actually spending the increased tuition revenue on financial aid for low-income students. As Andrew Gillen has documented at the macro level, most institutions are using increased revenue for something other than aid to low-income students. William and Mary’s plan is all out in the open. The chart at the bottom of the Inside Higher Ed story shows pretty clearly that they plan to raise $6.2 million from tuition increases and spend $2.2 million, or 35 percent, of it on financial aid. The school doesn’t mention what percentage of that money would actually go to low-income students, but it’s clear that the majority of the increased revenue will not be going to increased financial aid.

The most disappointing thing is how William and Mary President Taylor Reveley sees his own institution. In making the announcement, Reveley decried the fact that the college is ranked 33rd in the U.S. News & World Report but comes in 112th in financial resources. Reveley sees this as a problem that needs to be fixed with higher salaries and more faculty and staff (indeed, they’re planning a nearly $7 million increase in faculty and staff salaries and benefits). But another way to look at this is that William and Mary appears to be thriving as it spends fewer resources than its competitors. It should be touting this as a success in efficiency, not trying to outspend its competitors.

Photo Credit: William and Mary Society of the Alumni 

We’ve been tracking this data all spring waiting for these critical months when FAFSA application deadlines start arriving. We’re now up to 1,486 out of 3,500 D.C. public high school seniors who have completed their FAFSA. This is a 22.2 [...]]]> More than 1.3 million high school seniors have already completed a Free Application for Federal Student Aid (FAFSA) this year, up 2.4 percent from the same time period last year. In D.C. public schools, however, the percentage of students completing a FAFSA is down 6.9 percent from a year ago. (You can download the data for your local high schools here.)

We’ve been tracking this data all spring waiting for these critical months when FAFSA application deadlines start arriving. We’re now up to 1,486 out of 3,500 D.C. public high school seniors who have completed their FAFSA. This is a 22.2 percentage point increase from last month, and it means that 42.5 percent of D.C. public high school seniors* have now completed the application they’ll need to receive federal financial aid. But, while D.C. students are progressing, this year’s senior class appears to be well behind last year’s pace.

The chart below, an update to February’s data, shows the progress for every D.C. public high school. Each vertical bar (or a space where a bar should be) represents one D.C. public school. The blue bars represent their completion rates as of January 25^th, the red bars indicate the additional students completing the FAFSA by February 11^th, and the green bars represent students who finished their FAFSA by March 15^th. The dotted vertical line separates traditional public schools from public charter schools. Charter schools have increased their edge since February and now have 49 percent completion rates compared to 39.7 percent in the traditional public schools. For some context, the final districtwide average at the end of last year was 63 percent.

Individual school rates vary widely. Banneker High School, a magnet school in Ward 1, continues to lead the pack, as 84.4 percent of its students have already completed the FAFSA. School Without Walls now has an 82 percent rate. Two charter schools—SEED and Washington Latin—have more than seven in 10 seniors with completed forms. On the other end, Ballou, Washington Metropolitan, Moore, Perry Street Prep, and Next Step all have less than 20 percent of their classes completing the FAFSA thus far. Their students still have some time, but it’s troubling that these schools still have so far to go. Most colleges and universities have February or March deadlines for completing the FAFSA and filing for financial aid; those windows are about to close.

The really concerning news is that D.C. high school seniors appear to be behind the pace of where they were last year. Ten schools are now more than 10 percentage points behind their 2012 figures. Those ten schools— Washington Mathematics Science Technology, McKinley, Ballou, Moore, Anacostia, Dunbar, Thurgood Marshall, Coolidge, Roosevelt, and Perry Street Prep—all have significant work to do. (Two charter schools, KIPP and National Collegiate, did not enroll senior students last year, so they do not show any March 2012 bars. A third, Next Step, has not had any FAFSA data for last year or this year.)

I usually end the blogs in this series with a reminder of how important the FAFSA is for all students. This month you don’t have to take my word for it. I sat down with Greg Darnieder, a senior adviser to U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan and the former director of the department of college and career preparation at Chicago Public Schools, to talk about his work in expanding FAFSA completions. You can watch it here.

Check back later this month for another update on how D.C. students and schools are doing.

*For details on the FAFSA completion numbers, see here. To calculate the FAFSA completion rate by high school, I used the number of 11^th grade students enrolled in D.C. public high schools in 2011-12 (link: http://osse.dc.gov/service/data) as the denominator. This is the most recent, publicly available data on D.C. student enrollment, but because it assumes last year’s 11^th-graders become this year’s 12^th-graders, it means that any enrollment changes (such as students dropping out between 11^th and 12^th grade) will affect the calculations used here. The charts also exclude very small schools with fewer than 10 students.  

1) I introduce my piece with an example of five low-performing schools from the Pasco School District, a high-poverty, high-minority school system in the southern [...]]]> The blog Stories from School, where National Board Certified teachers in Washington state engage in policy discussions, has posted a couple responses to my piece on evaluation systems in Washington school districts. First, I want to say thanks to Maren Johnson and Tom White, and their commenters, for reading and engaging with my work. I’ve already responded to some of the points that they have made, but I also want to address a couple specific points:

1) I introduce my piece with an example of five low-performing schools from the Pasco School District, a high-poverty, high-minority school system in the southern part of the state. These particular schools have not met the state’s academic standards for five consecutive years, they haven’t made much progress on that metric, and they have high rates of teacher absenteeism. Yet, nearly all of its teachers and all of its principals receive satisfactory ratings (I have two years of data on this, so I’m not cherry-picking one unrepresentative year).

Several commenters have pointed out that Pasco faces a particularly challenging student body and has one of the highest Hispanic enrollment rates in the state. But what they neglect to mention is that every group of students (that meets the state’s minimum group size) does poorly in Pasco, including white students, who tend to score higher statewide.

What’s more, Pasco is just an illustrative example meant to catch the reader’s eye. Since 1,905 out of Washington’s 2,251 schools failed to identify a single low-performing teacher, I could have chosen any number of examples.

2) Several commenters have pointed out that my use of the verb “tweak” under-sells all the changes that Washington has and is continuing to make to its evaluation systems. One commenter pointed out that they are going from a seven-point bulleted list to a 47-page description of performance levels─and this is by no means a “tweak.” I did my best to give Washington credit for its ongoing evaluation work, but I do apologize if my word choice diminished those efforts. In my defense, I was trying to caution Washington (and others) that early adopter states like Florida and Tennessee have undergone dramatic changes to their evaluation systems, including by incorporating student growth as up to 50 percent of a teacher’s evaluation, but have not seen similarly dramatic changes in overall results. Culture is much harder to change than policy.

3) Since these are blogs written and read by practicing teachers, I get a sense that they feel like I was attacking their work. On the contrary, I think my piece shows that the problem of failing to acknowledge and act on differences in performance is not a teacher’s fault. Districts also give uniformly high evaluation ratings to principals, superintendents, and school support staff like janitors and librarians. This suggests this is a school system problem, not a teacher problem. In addition, I am as concerned with how districts identify and support high performers (this category presumably includes the authors of these posts, who are Nationally Board Certified teachers) as low performers. If 98 or 99 percent of employees earn the highest rating, it’s very difficult for a district to make smart retention, promotion, and compensation decisions.

4) Tom White asks a valid question about being held accountable for outcomes as opposed to his practice in the classroom. He asks, “After all, if I’m teaching, what else do I have control over? The only way I can influence student outcomes is by my practice.” One way to answer this is to point out that we don’t evaluate other professions based on how they do something; we evaluate them on whether they were successful. If a writer meets a deadline and produces a good piece of work, we’d call her successful no matter how she went about writing it. If an athlete uses unorthodox form, we might not recommend that method to a beginner but we won’t argue with his results. (This is one of the funkiest swings in golf, but it belongs to the 26th ranked golfer in the world).

If that argument is too theoretical, the recent MET study results also show that a teacher’s practice score is not a very good predictor of how much their students will grow academically. There are plenty of reasons to include professional practice as part of a well-rounded evaluation system, but it isn’t an adequate replacement for student outcomes.