Diane Ravitch -- Wrong on Charter Schools

Diane Ravitch has a new post full of criticisms of charter schools. Unfortunately, the arguments are unsupportable and contradictory.

1. Ravitch has gone to the NAEP website and downloaded snapshots of how students in public charter schools scored compared to students in other public schools. She then concludes, "Overall, public schools continue to outperform charter schools."

No, no, no. You cannot tell anything about how a given type of school is "performing" just by looking at a cross-section of its students' test scores -- without even attempting to take into account the students' backgrounds and previous test scores. And as I point out below, charter school students tend to arrive with somewhat lower test scores than average.

2. Immediately after having praised other public schools for supposedly outperforming charters in student test scores, Ravitch pivots 180 degrees and criticizes charter schools for drawing off the "most successful" students and "disabl[ing]" the public schools!

My beef with charter schools is that most skim the most motivated students out of the poorest communities, and many have disproportionately small numbers of children who need special education or who are English-language learners. The typical charter, operating in this way, increases the burden on the regular public schools, while privileging the lucky few. Continuing on this path will further disable public education in the cities and hand over the most successful students to private entrepreneurs.

It's just not convincing to say with one breath that public schools are "outperform[ing]" and in the next breath that they're being "disable[d]," or to criticize charter schools for serving the "most successful" students just after having claimed that charter students don't score well on national exams.

3. Besides being contradictory, Ravitch's argument is wrong. Charter school students may be "motivated" in some sense, but that certainly doesn't mean that they are all academically successful. Quite the contrary: parents whose children are doing well in the public schools often tend to stay put, while it is precisely the parents whose children are struggling who may tend to seek alternative schools (whether through vouchers or charters). Painting with a broad brush, many charter school and voucher parents have said, "Gee, little Johnny isn't doing so well, maybe I should check into a different school." Such "motivation" doesn't give rise to some sort of huge charter school advantage.

Some evidence for this point: Zimmer et al.'s October 2009 paper analyzing data from locations representing 45% of the charter schools in the nation. They find NO evidence that charter schools are cream-skimming. To the contrary, "in all but one case (Chicago reading scores, which are virtually identical to the district-wide average), students switching to charter schools have prior test scores that are BELOW district-wide or statewide averages."

For another example, take Texas, which is home to over 450 charter campuses, about 10% of all the charter campuses nationwide. In Texas, charter schools that serve predominantly students identified as “at risk” can be rated under an alternative accountability system. In 2007-08, 43.3% of charter schools in Texas qualified to be rated under that system, compared to a mere 3.3% of public school district campuses in Texas (see page 147 here). No doubt, most of the parents of these "at-risk" youth could be described as "motivated" -- motivated to find something, anything, that would help their children learn and stay in school. But this is not obviously an advantage for the charter schools' academic performance.

Incidentally, people often make the same accusation about private schools generally, i.e., that they just skim off all the best students. To the contrary, Derek Neal and Jeffrey Grogger found that “there is evidence of negative selection into Catholic schools. Relative to their public-school counterparts, urban whites who attend these schools appear to possess unmeasured traits that inhibit attainment.” They add this footnote: “Evidence of negative selection is common in this literature. Coleman and Hoffer (1987), Evans and Schwab (1995), and Neal (1997) all report evidence of negative selection into Catholic schools. A common hypothesis concerning this result is that some parents send their children to Catholic schools seeking a remedy for existing problems with discipline and motivation.”

Diane Ravitch on Mayoral Control

If Diane Ravitch insists that there's no evidence on a particular point, you can be almost certain that there is. Here's her piece on mayoral control, from a recent issue of Phi Delta Kappan:

Matt Miller of the Center for American Progress . . . argued that local control and local school boards are the basic cause of poor student performance. . . . In an ideal world, he wrote, we would scrap local boards and replace them with mayoral control, especially in urban districts. This one act of removing all democratic governance, he claimed, would lead to better education. . . . There is not a shred of evidence in Miller’s article or in the research literature that schools improve when democratic governance ends.

Once again, Ravitch misrepresents the literature. For example, there's Kenneth Wong's study of mayoral control, which found that "mayoral control has a statistically significant, positive effect on student achievement." Granted, Wong's study may be imperfect and it may be difficult to properly measure something as nebulous and potentially endogenous as mayoral control. But trying to refute Wong would be more defensible than claiming definitively that studies like his don't even exist.

P.S. If you're going to discuss scholarly literature with which you're not familiar, the wiser approach is to say, "I've never seen convincing evidence that such-and-such," which leaves you two easy outs: if anyone points out a study, all you have to do is note that you hadn't personally seen it, and/or that you don't find it convincing.

P.P.S. The Wong article above appeared in a book to which Ravitch herself contributed an article. So Ravitch had to know that her "not a shred of evidence" comment was false.

Why Does David Coleman Dislike Fiction?

The answer is: he doesn't, and to say so is a gross misrepresentation.

As background, David Coleman is the former Rhodes Scholar who has been deeply involved in drafting the Common Core standards, and who was recently announced as the new head of the College Board. Diane Ravitch, erstwhile historian and current twitterer and blogger against all things associated with any education reformer, recently accused Coleman of promulgating Common Core standards that basically eliminate fiction from school curricula:

I have been told by several people who attended David Coleman’s lectures that he speaks disparagingly of fiction. That’s why the Common Core standards permit 50% fiction in the early grades but only 25% fiction in high school. I don’t get it. 

First, because teachers should make that decision.

Second, because I can’t imagine a well-developed mind that has not read novels, poems and short stories. . . . [LEAVING OUT SEVERAL PARAGRAPHS ABOUT POETRY THAT RAVITCH LOVES AND THAT WOULD SUPPOSEDLY BE ELIMINATED BY COLEMAN]

Maybe David Coleman thinks that education is wasted on the young. But how sad it would be if future generations of young people never read the poems and stories and novels that teach them not only how to think but how to feel, how to dream, how to imagine worlds far beyond those they know.

To accuse Coleman, or the Common Core standards (little as I care to defend them), of eliminating all "poems and stories and novels" is simply wrong. The Common Core standards DO speak of having 50% of reading be non-fiction in early grades and 70% in high school, but those figures apply to the entire curriculum, not to English classes.

David Coleman himself made that clear in a comment on Ravitch's blog:

1) The 70/30 balance in grades 6-12 does not mean that students read mostly non-fiction in ELA classrooms. It applies to all student reading and explicitly includes the reading of content rich non-fiction in history, social studies, science and technical subjects. The majority of 6-12 ELA remains devoted to literature with some room for literary non-fiction.

2) The standards require the careful study of poems, novels, and drama in K-12. Such things as the study of Shakespeare is required, American literature and wonderful aspects of poetry. Let there please be no misunderstanding that literature in these standards does not remain a central part of student and teacher work.

But anyone who had looked at the Common Core standards would have known this already. To quote the Common Core website:

In K–5, the Standards 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. In accord with NAEP’s growing emphasis on informational texts in the higher grades, the Standards demand that a significant amount of reading of informational texts take place in and outside the ELA classroom. Fulfilling the Standards for 6–12 ELA requires much greater attention to a specific category of informational text—literary nonfiction—than has been traditional. Because the ELA classroom must focus on literature (stories, drama, and poetry) as well as literary nonfiction, a great deal of informational reading in grades 6–12 must take place in other classes if the NAEP assessment framework is to be matched instructionally.

Teachers of senior English classes, for example, are not required to devote 70 percent of reading to informational texts. Rather, 70 percent of student reading across the grade should be informational.

Maybe 70% shouldn't be set in stone, but if high school students read mostly novels, stories, and poetry in English class, and then read challenging non-fiction for their classes in history, science, the arts, etc., why wouldn't all that additional reading add up to about the 70/30 ratio that the Common Core standards suggest? In other words, Common Core gets to a 70/30 non-fiction-to-fiction ratio not by eliminating fiction but by adding more non-fiction. Is this a bad idea? Ravitch doesn't say, as she's too busy making the false claim that future students will "never read" fiction any more.

Moreover, look at one of the reasons Coleman offers for trying to emphasize non-fiction reading:

We in America in K-5 assessment and curriculum focus 80% of our time on stories, on literature. That is the dominant work that is done in the elementary school and that's what's tested on exams and that's what's in our textbooks. However, the research is overwhelmingly clear and actually Dr. Steiner has been an early proponent of this research at its earlier stages, that in kindergarten through 5th grade, the general knowledge that you develop in those years plays a crucial predictive role in not only your performance in those other disciplines, like science and history, but your ability to read more complex text itself. That is, the elementary school's a magnificent place for students to learn about the world through reading. Whoever thought otherwise?

So the core standards for the first time demand that 50% of the text students encounter in kindergarten through 5th grade is informational text, meaning primarily text about science and history, text about the arts, the text through which students learn about the world. That is a major shift and if you think about what's happening in this country unintentionally literature and stories dominated the elementary curriculum. And then we expanded the literacy block. So we made the literacy block 80% of the time.

Guess what that meant? We destroyed history and science in the elementary school. The core standards are a chance to regain the proper role of the elementary school teacher, to bring their students into the world, to spend equal time on informational and story, and in that way build a real foundation for literacy--that is the first major step. And the standards strongly encourage that the knowledge that's built through this reading and read alouds and then students reading themselves in history and science and the arts--it is coherent both within grades and across grades that students are building this foundation of knowledge.

Ravitch ought to love this. She claims all the time that schools spend too much time on reading and math to the exclusion of a rich curriculum in science, history, the arts, etc. She ought to be applauding Coleman and the Common Core standards for trying to require more challenging non-fiction reading across all subjects. Instead, she is demonizing Coleman by accusing him of disliking fiction.    

A Case Study in Bias

Two studies came out comparing the performance of schools or teachers. In the first case, Raj Chetty, John Friedman, and Jonah Rockoff came up with just about the most extensive and sophisticated study of teachers' value-added that I've ever seen. As highlighted in the New York Times, the study includes estimates for how much high-quality teachers improve their students' income years later, and also (see pp. 29 ff.) includes a new way to check for bias by looking at how cohorts of students change performance when a high or low value-added teacher arrives from somewhere else. Very cool.

But such a study, implying that some teachers are better than others, and that teacher quality can be revealed by how well their students do on tests (conditioning on prior achievement and student demographics), is disturbing to some people. Diane Ravitch tweeted at least 67 times the day the study came out, trying to undermine the study by questioning its lack of peer review (so far), the way in which it was conducted, and the very project of looking at test scores in the first place.

 In the second case, there's a group called Educate Now in Louisiana that released a PDF chart (available here) that merely lists the schools in New Orleans identified by whether they are Recovery School District schools or voucher-accepting private schools, and then listing what percentage of students score above basic on English and Math in grades 3-5. That's all. No attempt to control for the individual students' prior achievement, no attempt to control for any student demographic variables such as poverty, no attempt to control for the fact that students are eligible for vouchers only if they had been attending a failing public school, no statistical analysis whatsoever.

This is as primitive as it gets, and is a horrible way to judge the merit of voucher schools (as I explained here).

 Did Diane Ravitch tweet 67 times criticizing this purported attempt to compare voucher schools to public schools? No: right in the midst of her incessant criticism of an immeasurably superior study, she sent out one tweet that said, "How did voucher schools in New Orleans do?" followed by a link.

Ravitch here displays the worst sort of intellectual bias: when what looks like one of the best studies out there doesn't fit her ideology, she acts as if it is far more questionable than the baloney that she otherwise is happy to plug. To be sure, it's OK to ask questions about the new value-added study, what it means, how it was done, and whether it was oversold in the media. But it's not OK to pass along a worthless analysis of the merits of vouchers.

Anti-reformers need to think a bit more carefully about whether they want someone as their standard-bearer who doesn't know the difference between good and bad research (or, worse, who doesn't care).

Charter Schools and Merit Pay

In a new post, educational historian Diane Ravitch says, among other things:

As I predicted on this blog, President Obama and Education Secretary Arne Duncan are now the spear carriers for the GOP's education policies of choice and accountability. An odd development, don’t you think? The Department of Education dangles nearly $5 billion before the states, but only if they agree to remove the caps on charter schools and any restrictions on using student test scores to evaluate teachers.

What is extraordinary about these regulations is that they have no credible basis in research. They just happen to be the programs and approaches favored by the people in power.

* * *

There is also no research that justifies the Obama administration’s belief that tying teacher evaluations to student scores will improve schools.

No research?

Take the charter school point first. In a study that Ravitch herself cites, the Center for Research on Education Outcomes at Stanford University found that "states that have limits on the number of charter schools permitted to operate, known as caps, realize significantly lower academic growth than states without caps, around .03 standard deviations."

To be sure, .03 standard deviations isn't huge. But it's something. And it's a "credible basis" for the Obama administration to give states a financial incentive to eliminate charter school caps. I am aware of no studies finding any benefit whatsoever from state laws restricting the number of charter schools that can open. Incidentally, Arkansas currently restricts the number of charter schools statewide to 24. There is no basis for this limit.

Second, take the merit pay issue. No research? Consider David N. Figlio and Lawrence W. Kenny, "Individual Teacher Incentives and Student Performance," Journal of Public Economics 91 no. 5-6 (2007): 901-14. Looking at national data from the National Education Longitudinal Study, they find that "test scores are higher in schools that offer individual financial incentives for good performance." To be sure, Figlio and Kenny concede that their cross-sectional study can't tell definitively whether it was better schools that adopted performance pay, rather than vice versa.

But here are a few studies that weren't cross-sectional:

1) Gary Ritter and Josh Barnett, "When Merit Pay is Worth Pursuing," Educational Leadership 66 no. 2 (2008). Ritter and Barnett studied a Little Rock merit pay program. After two years, "schools implementing the program achieved average gains of approximately seven percentile points for students in mathematics and reading. Scores of students in the pilot schools improved, whereas those of students in comparison schools decreased."

2) Adele Atkinson, Simon Burgess, Bronwyn Croxson, Paul Gregg, Carol Propper, Helen Slater and Deborah Wilson, "Evaluating the impact of performance-related pay for teachers in England", Labour Economics 16 no. 3 (June 2009): 251-261 (a working version is available here). Atkinson et al. use a sophisticated methodology to evaluate a merit pay scheme in Englnad, controlling for pupil effects, school effects, and teacher effects. They find that "the scheme did improve test scores and value added increased on average by about 40% of a grade per pupil."

3) Victor Lavy, "Performance Pay and Teachers' Effort, Productivity, and Grading Ethics," NBER Working Paper 10622. Lavy evaluates a merit pay program in Israel that gave cash bonuses to teachers whose students earned more "credits" on national graduation exams. He used two sophisticated methods: regression discontinuity design and propensity score matching. His results are substantively significant: As to one estimation, he notes that "the effect of treatment on credits earned in math is 0.256, a 18 percent improvement relative to the mean of the control schools (1.46). The effect of treatment on awarded credits in English is 0.361, a 17 percent improvement relative to the mean of the control schools (2.11)."

These aren't the only studies, of course, and incentive schemes sometimes don't show much benefit. Still, to claim that there is no evidence in their favor isn't accurate. Once again, the position that lacks evidence here is the position that Obama and Duncan are trying to combat, i.e., that it should be illegal to use test score data to assess a teacher's performance (as is the case in several states). These states might as well have passed a law stating that because so much of a patient's health depends on factors outside a doctor's control, it should therefore be illegal to consider whether a doctor's patients were killed by incompetence.

On the bright side, I applaud Diane Ravitch's announcement of the Partnership for 19th Century Skills.

KIPP and Racial Assumptions

It has by now become fairly well-known that KIPP often has unprecedented success in teaching poor minority urban kids.

Critics are thereby aroused to argue that KIPP's success is explained by selection and attrition, rather than because KIPP is actually doing anything better.

One of Ravitch's correspondents says, "I am sick of hearing the same old KIPP talking points. The issue about KIPP, as well as other 'no excuses' charter schools, is that regardless of incoming scores, the kids with the toughest behaviors and often lowest scores are getting pushed out. . . . there is nothing miraculous about teaching an easier group of kids. Nothing."

Another correspondent says, "I do not think you cherry pick students, but the students who choose to go are different in motivation and peer effects do come in to play." Another (one-note) KIPP opponent says, "It’s not an inherently bad way to operate, providing a setting for motivated and compliant young people from supportive families without the pull of what sociologist Elijah Anderson calls 'the street.'" And in this interview, Ravitch herself is oddly resistant to admitting that KIPP's longer school day could possibly be making even the slightest difference; instead, she says the only lesson to be learned from KIPP is that they "take out the low-performing kids and get high scores."

Here's my counter-argument: It would be one thing to say that part of KIPP's success is due to selection and attrition, maybe even 30% or so. But to suggest that most or all of KIPP's success is due to those factors is actually one of the more racially insensitive things that anyone ever says in mainstream debate.  (Or at least it would be, if any of these critics ever had the clarity of thought to specify exactly what percentage of KIPP's success is due to selection/attrition.)

It's unwitting, to be sure; most of the critics haven't thought through the logical implications of what they're saying, and they would sincerely deny being racist in their thoughts or intentions. But even granting their personal good will, what they are saying is full of racially problematic implications. These KIPP critics are effectively saying that poor minority children are incapable of genuinely learning anything more than they already do. If poor minority children seem to be learning more, it can't really be true; there must be some more sinister explanation for what's going on.

To spell this argument out a bit more, one of the key factors behind KIPP's success (and that of some other charter schools) is that they spent substantially more time teaching kids. Angrist, Pathak, and Walters analyzed the success of Boston's urban charter schools in this paper, concluding that "urban charters push their students well beyond ambient non-charter achievement in central cities." They attribute this striking success partly to the extra time that "No Excuses" schools spend:

The average urban charter year lasts 189 days and has a school day of 464 minutes, compared to 183 days and 422 minutes at non-urban schools. The additional time appears to go to increased math and reading instruction; urban schools spend 35 extra minutes per day on math and 40 extra minutes per day on reading. Urban charter schools are also 38 percent more likely to have Saturday school.

Adding that up: (183 days times 42 extra minutes per day) plus (6 extra days times 464 minutes) = 10,470 minutes or 174.5 extra hours per year.

KIPP goes even further: while it's difficult to generalize, KIPP's longer school days, Saturday sessions, and summer sessions can end up spending 400 hours more per year than the other public schools.

Now, it's a paradox that only in education does one find the fundamentally anti-intellectual attitude that spending more time is a bad idea. In any other endeavor in life, everyone knows that practice makes perfect. If you practice the piano 3 hours a day, all else being equal, you'll be better than if you practice one hour a day. If you run 5 miles a day, you'll be a better runner than if you run 3 miles a day.

To be sure, there are obvious qualifications. If you're practicing sloppily and without thinking, extra piano practice might just cement the errors rather than improve your technique. Or if you're running at a snail's pace, you might do better with shorter but more intense runs. So the deliberateness and intensity of practice matters, not just the length.

There are points of diminishing returns as well: if you try to practice the piano 16 hours a day, or run 25 miles a day, you'll end up burned out and injured. But very few of us are in any danger of getting anywhere near those limits as to any activity.

For the vast majority of us, the following is true: as long as you are practicing a skill with a deliberate and thoughtful strategy in mind, more practice is better, with the limit being so much practice that you'll probably never approach it. 

Indeed, even KIPP's critics are aware of this principle when their own ox is gored. That is, if the question is the value of Teach for America, whose teachers tend to be fairly young, the same people who criticize KIPP wax eloquent about how much value is obtained by extra years of experience. In other words, KIPP's critics are well aware that more time doing something usually means getting better at it.

So here comes KIPP, saying that it is going to spend 400-600 more hours every year teaching kids, not by having them do inane projects, but by giving them creative and deliberate lessons aimed at getting them to improve at both basic skills and critical thinking. This allows KIPP students not only to spend extra time on reading and math, but to study all of the other subjects that Diane Ravitch says that she wants in a good curriculum. See what this KIPP teacher says (starting at 2:40 or so):

 

Transcript: "Our students go to school much more than their peers at traditional public schools. . . . So there's time for study of music, time for study of art, time for them to get extra help from their teachers during office hours."

Now here's the key point: If selection and attrition is what explains KIPP's good results, then that logically means that several hundred extra hours a year being instructed in reading, math, music, art, etc. do NOT explain KIPP's good results. But wait a minute: what does that really mean?

Nothing less than this: several hundred hours a years instructing kids doesn't actually make much difference. Recall that KIPP's critics say that if KIPP's students seem to be learning more, it must be an artifact of how KIPP selects kids and then pushes out the low-performers. In saying that, KIPP's critics are implying, however unwittingly, that no amount of effort or study could possibly get poor urban minorities to learn anything more. 

What a depressing and cynical thing to suggest.

So here's the message to KIPP critics: Criticize selection and attrition to the extent that they actually happen, if you like. Argue, if you want, that KIPP's model is so demanding that it's not scalable. But stop being so oblivious to the implications of what you're saying. If your anti-KIPP jealousy drives you to say that selection and attrition are the whole story, then you need to take a breath and rethink your argument. Perhaps you should even acknowledge that it might do some kids some good to spend more time learning.

Ravitch's math

In a recent post, Diane Ravitch decries the fact that Chicago charters expel a higher percentage of kids than do the other public schools:

The data reveal that during the last school year, 307 students were kicked out of charter schools, which have a total enrollment of about 50,000. In district-run schools, there were 182 kids expelled out of a student body of more than 353,000. That means charters expelled 61 of every 10,000 students while the district-run schools expelled just 5 of every 10,000 students.

She credits this pattern of expulsions with helping the charter schools have higher test scores:

It makes perfect sense. If a school can kick out the kids with low scores, the school will have higher scores and the public school that gets the low-scoring kids will have lower scores. How simple!

If you give all the Chicago kids a test on which public school students score an average of 70 and charter school kids score an average of 75, but then take 307 charter kids who score 50 (quite a bit lower than the overall average) and move them to the traditional public schools instead, what will happen to the overall test scores? Public schools will now have an average of 69.98 instead of 70, and charter schools will how have an average of 75.154 instead of 75.

This is a somewhat artificial example, of course, but the point remains that even if every single kid expelled from charter schools had substantially lower test scores than everyone else, charter expulsions probably don't explain very much about the overall test score patterns.

Charter School Achievement

Mike Petrilli makes a good point about charter school studies:

[C]harters serving lots of poor or low-performing kids made a significant positive impact on math achievement, while “middle class” charter schools had a negative effect on both math and reading. You could joke that this is evidence that charters are closing the achievement gap: they are helping low-performing poor kids make gains and affluent kids lose ground.

So what’s going on? If you know a little bit about the charter school movement, these findings make a ton of sense. While the media mostly pay attention to inner-city charter schools—think KIPP, Achievement First, Harlem Success, etc.—several of the early-adopter states (like Minnesota, California, and Colorado) are also home to suburban charter schools. And many of those schools were created by progressive educators or parents as an alternative to the traditional public schools nearby. Schools like Minnesota New Country School, whose mission is to “explore the world through project-based learning.”

As far as I can tell, lots of these uber-progressive schools are quite good, and achieve excellent results in terms of student success in college and beyond. There’s a strong argument to be made—and Education Evolving makes it here—that there should be room within public education for these kinds of schools and their innovative approaches. But these institutions sure aren’t focused on getting kids ready to pass the state standardized test. So, compared to their traditional school counterparts, their test scores suffer.

This is why Diane Ravitch's view of charter schools is so utterly incoherent -- she manages to criticize NCLB for making schools focus too much on test scores even while criticizing charters and vouchers for failing to produce high enough test scores. And it turns out that charter schools (on average) aren't producing high enough test scores in part because some charter schools are doing exactly what Ravitch purports to favor -- offering an interesting curriculum that isn't as focused on test scores.

It's hard to square that circle.

Common Core and Nonfiction, Again

Writing at "Parents Across America," Arkansas professor Sandra Stotsky waxes eloquent about the destruction David Coleman is supposedly wreaking via the Common Core standards:

Why did David Coleman mandate over 50% reading time on “informational” texts in K-5 and up to 70% thereafter in the form of ten grade-level informational reading standards and nine grade-level literature standards at every educational level in the Common Core standards in English Language Arts? . . . These already weakened middle or junior high school English classes are the classes Coleman wants to see teaching over 50% informational text (or “literary nonfiction.”). . . .

Coleman’s misunderstanding of how the structure of the secondary school alters the amount of time available for all genres of literary study, compared with the time available to elementary teachers in a self-contained classroom, was apparently responsible for his mandate that over 50% of the reading time in the ELA class be devoted to informational texts (or “literary nonfiction” in the high school) from K-12. While a self-contained elementary classroom enables the teacher to use a good part of the school day for expository reading and other language arts (like public speaking), the English teacher has only 45-60 minutes a day or the equivalent in 2 blocks a week to teach everything assigned to the English curriculum. These rigid prescriptions to require more informational text (even in the form of “literary nonfiction”) make no sense when applied to the daily 45-60 minute secondary English class.

Like Diane Ravitch, Stotsky is seems to believe that David Coleman and Common Core standards are trying to mandate that 50 or more percent of English classes be spent on non-fiction.

To quote the Common Core website:

Fulfilling the Standards for 6–12 ELA requires much greater attention to a specific category of informational text—literary nonfiction—than has been traditional. Because the ELA classroom must focus on literature (stories, drama, and poetry) as well as literary nonfiction, a great deal of informational reading in grades 6–12 must take place in other classes if the NAEP assessment framework is to be matched instructionally.

The Common Core website even adds a footnote to make clear that ELA teachers are not at issue:

The percentages on the table 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. Rather, 70 percent of student reading across the grade should be informational.

Drill and Kill

From John R. Anderson, Lynne M. Reder, and Herbert A. Simon, "Radical Constructivism and Cognitive Psychology," in Brookings Papers on Education Policy 1998, Diane Ravitch ed. (Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution Press, 1998):

An extension of this argument is that excessive practice will also drive out understanding. This criticism of practice (called "drill and kill," as if this pejorative slogan provided empirical evaluation) is prominent in radical constructivist writings. Nothing flies more in the face of the last twenty years of research than the assertion that practice is bad. All evidence, from the laboratory and from extensive case studies of professionals, indicates that real competence only comes with extensive practice. By denying the critical role of practice, one is denying children the very thing they need to achieve competence.

Charter Schools and Segregation

Charter schools are often accused of "segregation" merely for serving too many black kids. One recent example of this criticism comes from Zoe Burkholder of Montclair State University in New Jersey, who has an article in Teachers College Record lamenting the fact that DC Prep Charter School is 98% black.

She does concede that black parents have a good reason to choose DC Prep: "parents in D.C. can choose between a traditional public school racked with violence and high dropout rates, or a charter school that is safe and promises to teach at least two of the '3 Rs.'" She even admits that "maybe anyone would prefer a charter school like DC Prep under these conditions."

But she immediately backs away from agreeing that black parents ought to have the option of choosing such a school:

But that doesn’t make it okay, and here is why. When you step back from DC Prep, and successful charter schools like it, what you see is a public school that is racially and socio-economically segregated and inherently very different from the form and function of the majority of public schools in America. . . . Since Horace Mann first rode horseback through New England to sell the idea of tax-supported “common schools” for all children, Americans have dared to dream that public education will instill in our citizenry the many capacities necessary for self-government: critical thinking, civic engagement, tolerance for diversity, an appreciation for the arts and sciences, a knowledge of global affairs, a critical understanding of American history, and the capacity for civil debate.

I've said this about Diane Ravitch before: If you're going to oppose the so-called "segregation" of charter schools, even though it arises from the completely voluntary choices of black parents, you should think twice before waxing so eloquent about Horace Mann's day, when it was often illegal for black people to attend school anywhere. Nor is it historically correct that "Americans" wanted "tolerance of diversity" in public schools during the 100+ years of officially-mandated segregation.

In any event, Burkholder makes the same mistake that the highly publicized Civil Rights Project (headed by Gary Orfield) made: she compares DC Prep Charter School to "the majority of public schools in America."

That comparison is completely meaningless. We know that charter schools are much more likely to be located in inner-city neighborhoods where the demographics are much different from the national average. Indeed, if an inner-city DC or Atlanta charter school had demographics that resembled the broader United States, that school would instantly be accused of promoting segregation by gathering too many white students in one place.

What Burkholder should have done is compare DC Prep to nearby traditional public schools. On that ground, it turns out that a 98% black charter school in a heavily black area of northeastern D.C. isn't that unusual. The closest traditional public school to DC Prep is Noyes Elementary, which is 96% black, 3% Hispanic, and all of zero percent white.

Yes, racial imbalance still exists. But attacking charter schools does nothing to get rid of it.

Charter Schools and Averages

We often hear that something has no overall effect on something else -- education, health, whatever -- but it seems to me that in a world with widely varying individuals and situations, the overall mean effect isn't very interesting or useful. At least not as often as some people seem to think.

For example, we might hear that a certain kind of medicine has no overall survival benefit, which is the reason that the FDA moved to block to approval of Avastin to treat metastatic breast cancer. But even if there is little overall mean effect, Avastin could still cause a remission in a few people:

Christi Turnage of Madison, Miss., said her cancer has been undetectable for more than two years since starting therapy with Avastin. She was diagnosed with breast cancer in June 2006 and began taking the drug in 2008 after the tumors spread, or metastized, to her lungs. Breast cancer that spreads to other parts of the body is generally considered incurable.

If it turns out that you're one of the few people for whom the medicine works, it's no comfort to be told that you can't take it because not enough other people would benefit if they took the medicine.

The same is true for charter schools. We've heard about several studies indicating that charter schools don't have a higher average effect than regular public schools. Take, for example, this Mathematica study of charter schools in 15 different states. It found no overall impact on the students. But this masks an important variation in who benefited and who didn't:

We found that study charter schools serving more low income or low achieving students had statistically significant positive effects on math test scores, while charter schools serving more advantaged students—those with higher income and prior achievement—had significant negative effects on math test scores.

In other words, charter schools were doing very different things for different students — raising up low income and poor-scoring students while actually harming richer and higher-scoring students' test scores.

Average them all together, and you find no effect. But if you want to expand charter schools in impoverished urban areas, the “no overall average benefit” finding would be completely beside the point.

Consider as well this very recent study of charter schools in Milwaukee. The author (Hiren Nisar) says that "charter schools on average have no significant effect on student achievement." An opponent of charter schools (say, a Diane Ravitch) would cite that finding as if it represented the entirety of the study.

But Nisar goes on to find that the overall average is hiding a critically important distinction:

Charter schools with higher level of autonomy from the district in terms of financial budget, academic program, and hiring decisions, are effective. I show that students in these charter schools would read at a grade level higher than similar students who attend a traditional public school in three years. Irrespective of the type and the age of the charter school, race of the student, or grade level, attending a charter school has a positive effect on low achieving students. I show that these effects on low achieving students are substantial and are more than enough to eliminate the achievement gap in two years.

Once again, the overall average is completely meaningless if you are interested in expanding the very charter schools that are most likely to work, i.e., the ones that serve low-achieving students and that have more autonomy from their competition (the school district).

Worth Repeating

A comment from Diane Ravitch's blog:

Labor Lawyer January 20, 2013 at 8:36 pm Although “liberal” on most political issues, my personal experience strongly supports tracking — based on ability to do the work — as common sense and heterogenous classes as creating unnecessary obstacles to effective instruction. Common sense says that students in a class will learn much more if a teacher teaches a subject at a single level for 60 minutes rather than three similar subjects at three different levels for 20 minutes each.

If you’ll forgive a sports analogy, a basketball coach would accomplish much more in a 2-hour practice if all participating players were at roughly the same ability level — high, middle, or low — than if 1/3 were outstanding Division I college basketball players, 1/3 were barely competent high school players, and 1/3 were junior high computer nerds who neither played nor liked basketball.

I acknowledge research demonstrating that low-achieving students do better in heterogenous classes than in classes where everyone is low-achieving. My explanation for this result is that, in most public schools, a class where everyone is low-achieving will suffer from minor but endemic misbehavior that effectively prevents effective instruction and that generates strong peer pressure to join in the misbehavior. If this is so, the solution is to track by academic ability (to maximize teaching efficiency) while implementing classroom management reforms in the low-academic-ability classes (to eliminate the endemic misbehavior).

Heterogenous classes minimize the disruptive effects of the misbehaving students by limiting the number of such students in any given class. However, this approach to the problem (of high concentrations of misbehaving students disrupting classes) necessarily increases the number of misbehaving students in those classes that, if tracked based on academic ability, would have relatively few misbehaving students.

In the low-SES-area schools, particularly in the inner-city schools, there are so many potentially misbehaving students relative to the number of likely well-behaved students, that spreading the misbehaving students evenly among all classes has the effect of creating endemic misbehavior in all the classes. Hence the flight of concerned/functional parents from these schools to the charters (and the mediocre test scores in all the classes). 

Bottom line: Track by academic ability, but simultaneously implement reforms in the low-academic-ability classes to minimize misbehavior. (Probably, the best way to minimize misbehavior would be to implement reforms starting in pre-K that improved reading/vocabulary for students from low-SES families, so that school would not be so frustrating — but that’s another long comment.)

Testing is Bad Because People Cheat?

There's an . . . interesting argument being circulated in the education world, to the effect that because a handful of schools or teachers are motivated to cheat on standardized tests, the real blame should be laid on the fact that we have tests in the first place.

Here's Diane Ravitch (formerly a staunch defender of testing), speaking at the American Enterprise Institute on March 10:

There's a front page story in the Chicago Sun-Times Today about thousands of test scores being erased and altered to raise them. This is what the pressure for proficiency has created: institutionalized fraud.

Similarly, there's this from a March 5 article on possible cheating in Houston:

“Cheating on tests has been rampant,” said Tom Haladyna, professor emeritus in the College of Teacher Education and Leadership at Arizona State University. “Many of us think the culprit is tying accountability to a single test score. It is a bad policy. It motivates a few to cheat so they can look good.”

By this logic, such as it is, we should abolish medical boards for potential doctors, tests for commercial pilots to get licensed, bar exams for attorneys, and tests to be licensed as a nuclear engineer, if it turns out that cheating ever occurs. After all, if any of these poor souls are so stressed out that they cheat on an important test, it's really our fault for asking them to meet performance standards in the first place.

Needless to say, this is one of the weaker arguments against testing.

Teachers Matter

Diane Ravitch is confused by something that Melinda Gates recently said about the potential of teachers:

When Melinda Gates was interviewed on the PBS Newshour on June 4, she said something that surprised me. I will give you the full quote, which I copied from the Newshour website. I was surprised because I never heard that claim, I don’t know whose research she was citing or if it even exists. I checked with Linda Darling-Hammond, who seems to have read every study of teacher effectiveness, and asked her if she knew the source; she said she had never heard this claim and had no idea where Melinda Gates got this information, if it exists.

So, I ask my readers, and I ask you to ask your friends in the academic world, do you have a citation for this statement?

MELINDA GATES: Well, we know from good research that the fundamental thing that makes a difference in the classroom is an effective teacher. An effective teacher in front of a student, that student will make three times the gains in a school year that another student will make.

This was fairly easy to find, as I'd read it before.  Melinda Gates is referring to a 2011 Eric Hanushek article, which said, "The magnitude of the differences is truly large, with some teachers producing 1.5 years of gain in achievement in an academic year while others with equivalent students produce only 1/2 year of gain."

The original source for the finding is Eric Hanushek, "The Trade-off between Child Quantity and Quality," Journal of Political Economy 100 no. 1 (1992): 84-117 (at p. 107). The article can be downloaded here. His dataset was from the Gary Income Maintenance Experiment, which took place between 1971 and 1975, and which involved exclusively low-income black children.

So it's not the most recent or externally valid finding one could wish for, that's certainly true. But is it so implausible that some teachers could produce 1.5 years of learning while others produce half a year? The real questions would be how many teachers are in each category and how we can identify them accurately, without crediting or blaming them for outside-school factors.

And an even bigger question would be whether we could design an educational system (other than homeschooling or private tutoring) that didn't force kids into the straitjacket of a single grade every year, but was instead so tailored to their individual needs that they could move 1.5 or more years ahead in one subject even if they were on or behind grade level in another subject.

Charter School Students

There are at least three types of people who choose charter schools:

1. Students who are motivated to seek academic success, but who aren't satisfied with the low quality of their traditional public school, and who seek out perceived better quality elsewhere.

2. Students who just want something different and more to their tastes -- an arts-based or science-based curriculum, or a smaller school, or joining a good friend, or any number of other things.

3. Students who just aren't doing very well or who are falling into the wrong crowd, and whose parents think that maybe their child will somehow improve somewhere else.

If the question is whether charter school performance is better than traditional public school performance, students from category 1 would be a charter school advantage, category 2 would probably be neutral, and category 3 would be a charter school DISadvantage.

I don't know why some people (such as Diane Ravitch) act as if all or most charter school students are in category 1. There's zero evidence for that. To the contrary, a RAND study last year found that in most locations nationwide, charter school students are entering with the same or lower test scores than their peers. This suggests to me that those students on average probably aren't coming from highly motivated successful families -- or if they are, the supposed benefits of motivation aren't that powerful after all (not powerful enough to make their test scores higher than their public school peers).

Some Teachers Like Testing

On the heels of the much-publicized change of heart by Diane Ravitch and the accompanying joyful outbursts by anti-testing and anti-accountability people everywhere, we can provide a bit of a reality check from right here in Arkansas.  Hot off the presses of the popular teacher magazine Phi Delta Kappan is an article by a few University of Arkansas colleagues and me. The article is available here.

We visited several schools last year to talk with teachers about standardized testing and the "teaching to the test" concept. The surprising results can be seen on page 51:

In the end, teachers said many good things about various aspects of the testing process and, overall, gave a very positive impression of the effects of the annual assessments on classroom teaching. After we sifted through all of the comments from all of the teachers at all of the school sites, five positive themes emerged. The consensus of teachers with whom we spoke was that the tests provide useful data, that the testing regime helps create a road map for the year’s instruction, that the standards and tests don’t sap creativity or hinder collaboration, and, perhaps most surprising, that the accountability imposed by the testing regime is useful.

Here's just one example of the pro-testing sentiments we uncovered:

Many teachers noted that before testing, it was easy to teach idiosyncratically — perhaps spending “six weeks on the dinosaur unit and just totally ignor[ing]” other topics. With increased focus on testing, however, teachers have focused on matching their instruction to a coherent set of standards. Thus, one math teacher said that while she had initially “hated” the Arkansas benchmark tests, she has since changed her mind: “I’m OK with it now, to be honest; I see where knowing the standards and knowing what’s going to be tested can help me plan the whole year and make sure I’ve covered everything.”