Top Performers tag:blogs.edweek.org,2011-11-15:/edweek/top_performers//115 2013-05-18T15:50:49Z Marc Tucker is president of the National Center on Education and the Economy. For two decades, his research has focused on the policies and practices of the countries with the best education systems. His latest book is Surpassing Shanghai: An Agenda for American Education Built on the World's Leading Systems. Movable Type 5.13-en top_performershttp://feedburner.google.com The Common Core and Disadvantaged Students tag:blogs.edweek.org,2013:/edweek/top_performers//115.32525 2013-05-18T15:21:01Z 2013-05-18T15:50:49Z Marc Tucker addresses recent backlash against the Common Core State Standards and explains why they will benefit disadvantaged students. Marc Tucker http://blogs.edweek.org/edweek/top_performers/ Democratic state senators in Pennsylvania has now joined the revolt against the Common Core State Standards, saying "...we are opposed to common core state standards without adequate state financial resources for our schools so that all of our students have the opportunity to succeed under those standards, including those in financially distressed school districts."

Which leads me to ask the following question of these Democrats: How is it that countries that spend substantially less per student than the United States also produce student achievement way above ours?  Why do we need even more money to produce results like theirs?  How much is enough?

They will say that I am talking about averages while they are not talking about averages, but about poor districts.  And I will say, yes, I agree.  One of the things that the top-performers have done is redesign their school finance systems so that they provide more resources for hard-to-educate students than those who are easier to educate.  Which would cause me to ask the Pennsylvania Democrats why they are opposed to standards.  Why aren't they filing bills to start raising and spending all the money for their schools at the state level, with allocation formulas that would provide more money for the harder-to-educate than the easier-to-educate?  And they would say, why that's too hard.  I might lose my seat if I did that.  It is easier to oppose the implementation of the Common Core.

Do you know who that hurts most?  It hurts the poor most, the very people they say they are championing.  When Florida first proposed to raise its standards years ago, some people objected on the grounds that high standards would hurt the poor and minorities, who would not be able to meet them.  The standards were raised and the students whose scores improved the most were poor and minority students.  When Massachusetts set out to raise their standards, the liberals objected that the poor and minority students would be hurt, because they would not be able to meet the standards.  And--you guessed it--when the standards were raised anyway, the students who made the greatest gains were the poor and minority students.

Years ago, I was running a focus group in Rochester, New York.  I was asking parents how they felt about standards.  An African-American single mother living on welfare said, "My boy is in middle school in the city.  He is getting A's just for filling in the colors in a coloring book.  The kids in the suburbs have to work really hard for their A's.  When my child graduates, all he will be good for is working the checkout counter at the grocery store.  I want my child to have the same opportunities they have.  I want him to have to do as well in school as they have to do to earn an A."

She understood what standards are all about a lot better than the Pennsylvania Senators do.  She understood that the world is unforgiving.  Employers have standards.  Schools providing graduate education in the professions have standards.  If you cannot meet them, you do not get the job and you do not get a professional education.  The Common Core State Standards simply reflect reality.  They reflect what the world now demands.

I do not mean to imply that it will be easy to meet the new standards.  It will be hard, very hard, and it will be especially hard for schools serving poor and minority students to meet the standards.  But we will not be able to meet them simply by spending more money.  We already spend more money on average than every industrialized country except Luxembourg and Norway.  We will have to do what the top-performers everywhere have done: radically change our school finance systems, academic standards, curriculum, instructional practices and tests and exams.  Not least important, we will have to make big changes in teacher compensation, the way we structure teachers' careers, the standards for getting into teachers colleges, the curriculum in our teachers colleges, our teacher licensure standards and the way we support new teachers.

But the welfare mom in Rochester was dead right.  The Pennsylvania senators do not have the option of rejecting the standards.  The standards are there, in the behavior of employers and selective colleges who reject poor and minority kids whose education does not cut it every day.  The only option they have is to figure out how to embrace the standards and figure out how to use the money they are already appropriating to fix our bloated, ineffective system by taking cues from the countries that are beating the pants off of us.
]]> - Marc Tucker http://blogs.edweek.org/edweek/top_performers/2013/05/the_common_core_and_disadvantaged_students.html What Does it Really Mean to be College and Work Ready? tag:blogs.edweek.org,2013:/edweek/top_performers//115.32377 2013-05-10T15:23:21Z 2013-05-10T15:27:48Z Marc Tucker explains the findings of his organization's study on the English and mathematics requirements to be successful in the first year of community colleges. Marc Tucker http://blogs.edweek.org/edweek/top_performers/ released a study we have been working on for almost three years.  There has been a lot of talk in recent years about getting high school students ready for college and work.  But what does that really mean?  We decided to find out, to see what skills in mathematics, reading and writing were actually required to be successful in the first year of community colleges.  Why community colleges?  Because about half of the high school graduates who go to college go to these institutions and because, of those who do, close to half go into programs designed to prepare them for careers and the other half goes into a program designed to enable them to transfer to four year colleges after two years.  A College Board study shows that students who successfully complete the first year of community college are likely to complete a community college program with a two-year degree or certificate.  So we can reasonably say that, if you have the skills needed to succeed in the first year of a community college program, you have left high school ready for college and career.

We selected seven states reasonably representative of the United States as a whole, and then selected, at random, a community college in each of those states.  Then we selected eight of the most popular vocational programs in those colleges to study.  We also studied the program designed to prepare students to transfer to four-year colleges.  We collected the most popular textbooks in those programs and analyzed them for reading challenge and for mathematics content.  We collected graded writing assignments as well as tests given at the end of courses and the grades given on those tests.  From this information, we were able construct a detailed picture, program by program, of the content and challenge level of the reading, writing and mathematics required of the students.

Very little writing at all is required in most programs.  The writing that is required is of a very simply sort.  Students, for example, are rarely required to argue a position logically and marshal data on behalf of that argument.  The typical first year community college text is written at an 11th or 12th level (which one would think would be a year or two below the level of community college), but it turns out that most high school graduates cannot read with comprehension at that level, because the typical high school text is written at the 8th or 9th grade level.  So our community college instructors prepare Power Point presentations to make sure that the students get the main points in the text.  When it comes time to test the students at the end of the course, they are not tested on much of the material that was in the text, and what they are tested on is mostly recall of facts, which means that much of what the textbook author thought was important for a student to know to be competent in the career for which he or she is preparing is not taught or tested.

It turns out that College Math, which contains the most demanding mathematics that most community college students will face in their first year, is actually Algebra one-and-a-quarter.  That is, it contains the topics usually associated with Algebra I and a few topics in statistics and probability.  One does not need Algebra II to study Algebra I.  Indeed, it seems that what is normally taught in high school mathematics is not needed in community college.  What is needed is middle school mathematics, but it turns out that high school graduates have a very poor command of middle school mathematics.  And, we discovered that there are a number of very important topics in mathematics--like mathematics modeling, and the ability to read and interpret schematic diagrams and logic diagrams of the sort required for computer programming--that are needed in community college programs but are not taught at all in school. The typical textbook for the programs we looked at does require mathematics, but it seems that that mathematics is neither taught nor tested, presumably because the instructors do not think the students can do it.

Most of us take it more or less for granted that as a student progresses through the grades, that student does 8th grade work in 8th grade, 9th grade work in the 9th grade, and so on until, in the first year of community college, that student is doing 13th grade work.  But it seems that that is not the case at all.  A very large fraction of 12th graders leave the 12th grade to do 8th or 9th grade work in community college.  And that is not the end of it, because about a third of our high school graduates show up at the community college unable to do work at the 8th or 9th grade level.  Many of the rest, apparently, those who are admitted to credit-bearing courses at their community college, have only the shakiest command of 8th and 9th grade mathematics, reading and writing.

So whom should we hold accountable for this?  Community college standards are clearly in the basement.  They should be much higher.  But, if we were to talk to the community college instructors about this, they would undoubtedly say that they are doing the best they can, that we should go and talk to the high school people, who are responsible for sending them students who have been very badly educated.  But the high school faculty would, with reason, say that they are doing the best they can with what they get from the middle school.  And, you guessed it, the middle school faculty would point to the elementary school, saying they, too, are doing the best they can with what they get.  

All of the school managers, if pressed, would probably acknowledge that part of the problem is that they are getting teachers whose own command of mathematics is a bit shaky, and maybe their reading and writing skills are not what they should, be, not to mention their ability to teach these subjects.  So they would point to the schools of education that are responsible for sending them teachers whose command of the subjects they are supposed to teach is not what it ought to be.  But the school of education would be quick to point out that they are not responsible for teaching the subject matter.  That is the responsibility of the arts and sciences faculty.  But the arts and sciences faculty would say that we, too, are doing the best we can with what we get.  Just look at the poor skills and lack of knowledge of the young people we are getting from the high schools!  But that, of course, is where we began.  Everyone is doing the best they can with what they get and the result is appalling.

In my next few blogs, I will have something to say about how we might break this cycle.  If you suspect that I will say that each and every actor in this sad cycle is responsible for breaking it, you would be dead right. ]]> - Marc Tucker http://blogs.edweek.org/edweek/top_performers/2013/05/what_does_it_really_mean_to_be_college_and_work_ready.html China on the Charles tag:blogs.edweek.org,2013:/edweek/top_performers//115.32239 2013-05-03T19:21:32Z 2013-05-03T19:25:37Z Marc Tucker recaps a recent meeting with Chinese education officials where he learned more about the country's efforts to make teaching an attractive profession to promising high school graduates. Marc Tucker http://blogs.edweek.org/edweek/top_performers/
We in the United States are most concerned about the quality of teachers available to the poor and minority students in our inner cities.  But the Chinese are really focused on the quality of the teachers in what they call their "rural" schools but what are in fact the schools in where poverty has concentrated their most challenged students, many of which are in their metropolitan areas as well as in the country. In a sense, time is on their side, as rural incomes are rising (making it easier to attract teachers), metropolitan areas are taking more responsibility for educating the children of immigrants from rural areas and class sizes in rural schools have been declining with the migration to the cities, but the problems with teacher quality in these areas are still very daunting.

Policies and practices vary from province to province in China and within provinces, too.  But it is still possible to construct a composite picture of the policies the Chinese have evolved to deal with the issue of teacher quality in the Chinese hinterland.  Some of the pieces of this system are the result of funded national programs, others of national policy in the form of unfunded mandates that provinces and localities are expected to fund out of their own budgets and others have simply evolved as officials at many levels have come to grips with the problems they have been facing

Promising high school graduates are offered a free ride at China's teacher's colleges if they agree to serve in designated rural areas for five years.  But they do not get the money up front.  Instead they pay their own tuition and expenses for college and, then, after they show up for their jobs as teachers, they are reimbursed.  But the incentives do not end there.  Most teachers in China are paid by their local government by the month.  In some provinces, however, these highly qualified teachers are employed by the province and are paid by the year, so their compensation is much more secure than for the average teacher.  These teachers are often also offered free or subsidized housing and transportation to serve in rural schools.  Finally, the authorities have let it be known that, for highly qualified teachers, service in rural schools will provide an inside track to promotion up the career ladder later, which means more responsibility and authority and higher pay.

There are other reasons that teaching, especially in rural areas, is attractive right now in China.  The offer of job security as a teacher up front to young people making career decisions is particularly attractive right now in light of the glut of college graduates — China is now producing college grads faster than its economy can absorb them.  The widespread use of distance learning in rural schools means that rural teachers can spend time — up to six months at a time — away from their school taking courses.  The housing that these teachers get is not just subsidized but built to a higher standard than typical rural housing.  And, in some cases, young people who opt for teacher education programs in college get priority in college admissions.

No surprise, the Chinese reported that this powerful package of incentives and related measures is working.  The system is not perfect.  Because much of the funding for these measures is provided at the provincial and lower levels, implementation is uneven.  But I had the impression that the Americans present were very impressed with way the Chinese are dealing with the issues at the nexus of teacher quality and school quality.
]]> - Marc Tucker http://blogs.edweek.org/edweek/top_performers/2013/05/china_on_the_charles.html Testing, the Common Core, and Consumer Resistance tag:blogs.edweek.org,2013:/edweek/top_performers//115.32081 2013-04-26T14:10:49Z 2013-04-29T14:08:27Z Marc Tucker examines the meaning behind consumer resistance to mandated school testing. Marc Tucker http://blogs.edweek.org/edweek/top_performers/
I can think of no high-performing country we have studied in which we have seen this kind of resistance to the development of tests that we are now seeing in the United States.  Why here, and now and what does it mean?

The answer lies in the history of testing in the United States, and, especially recently, how we have used our tests.

Though almost all the top-performing countries have tests that match their standards (Finland being the exception), they are unlike the typical American tests in important ways.  First, they are designed to match the curriculum, to find out whether and to what degree students have mastered the curriculum the teacher has been teaching.  American tests, for many years, have been designed to be curriculum neutral, meaning unrelated to the curriculum.  So American teachers have seen the basic skills tests they are familiar with as their enemy, testing things that they did not necessarily teach, and often don't believe should be taught.  The Common Core State Standards were developed, in part, to fix this alignment problem, but the standards are not yet implemented and there is no official curriculum available to teachers that is based on the standards and on which the tests themselves are based, as there are in the top-performing countries.  So it will not be easy to overcome an image of testing among teachers that is based on a professional lifetime of experience.

Second, American tests have been designed to be, first and foremost, cheap.  A testing director for one of America's biggest cities once told me, with great pride, that his city had never spent more then $1 per test per student per year and never would.  They cost as little as they do because of the multiple-choice, computer scored method of test construction that is so prevalent.  American teachers figured out a long time ago that these tests are great at testing the rudiments of the basic skills and not very good at testing complex skills, deep understanding, critical thinking or creativity, the things teachers want most to teach, another reason for them to detest the typical test.  In the top-performing countries, there is very little use of multiple-choice, computer-based testing.  Most tests are essay-based.  They are scored by teachers trained to score them and teachers generally feel that these examinations are testing the things they think really matter.

Third, the frequency of testing is very different in the United States from our top competitors.  They typically do major statewide or nationwide testing only two or three times in a student's whole school career, usually just at the end of lower secondary school (tenth grade) and again at the end of high school.  Most of the other testing they do at the statewide or national levels is done to monitor the performance of the system and is done by sampling a few students in a few schools.  The testing program mandated by No Child Left Behind—calling for six grades of testing, including five consecutive grades in elementary and middle school, an enormous testing burden—has no counterpart in the top-performing countries.

Not one of the top-performing countries has an accountability system remotely like that of No Child Left Behind.  No one in those countries is insisting, as the U.S. Department of Education does in its Race to the Top Program, that student scores on mandated tests be used as a major—perhaps the single most important—input into personnel decisions made about teachers.

So American teachers' experience of testing is very different from that of their counterparts in the top-performing countries.  They see cheap tests, unrelated to what they teach and incapable of measuring the things they really care about, being used to determine their fate and that of their students.  What is ironic about this is that, because these other countries do much less accountability testing than we do, they can afford to spend much more on the tests they do use, and so are getting much better tests at costs that are probably no greater than what we are spending for our cheap tests.

We will have to wait and see what kind of tests will be produced by the two state testing consortia.  It is rumored that they have been struggling to produce high quality tests, because they, too, are working in an environment in which schools and legislatures are not used to paying very much for good tests.  We have to hope that the developers of these new tests will not fall short of the ambitions their designers had for them.  If they end up looking more like the tests teachers are familiar with than the examinations the top-performing countries use, then millions of American teachers may rebel.  The Congress could, of course, abandon the nation's unwise commitment to grade-by-grade testing, which would enable this country to produce and administer tests and examinations as good as any in the world, and, at the same time, greatly reduce the testing burden on our schools.  But that would mean that it would also have to abandon the current approach to school and teacher accountability in favor perhaps of accountability systems of the sort used by the top performers, but I have not yet detected any interest in doing so.

The fate of the Common Core State Standards may well depend on what this country does about testing and accountability.  Maybe we should be listening to the sounds of nascent rebellion a little more closely.    ]]> - Marc Tucker http://blogs.edweek.org/edweek/top_performers/2013/04/testing_the_common_core_and_consumer_resistance.html MOOCs: More Social Mobility or Less? tag:blogs.edweek.org,2013:/edweek/top_performers//115.31929 2013-04-18T21:44:28Z 2013-04-18T22:32:42Z Marc Tucker takes a look at the rise of MOOCs from the perspective of social mobility. Marc Tucker http://blogs.edweek.org/edweek/top_performers/  
What seems to be emerging is a four-class MOOC universe.  At the top are the elite universities that produce the courses.  They will provide a grade but not credit for the courses they offer.  Then come the second tier universities, which will provide credit to students who take the MOOC courses from the higher prestige institutions, provided that those students come to their campus and sign up as regular students at the regular price.  What they have to offer is the credit, the prestige that comes with their brand, and support services to the students.  And next down the pecking order are the institutions that will take the students' money in exchange for the credit and the degree, with no requirement that the student attend the institution and no serious offer of support services.
 
MOOCs have—quite reasonably—been promoted as a boon for social mobility.  After all, many students at the bottom of the social totem pole will get access to first rate professors, often bundled into courses with very high production values--students who might never have had access to high quality instruction before.
 
But there is another—darker—way to look at the rise of MOOCs from the perspective of social mobility.  The big benefit from MOOC courses will go to those students who are the most motivated, most disciplined and best prepared, all of which is more likely to be found among students from well-off families than students who come from less educated, poorer families.  But legislatures are now falling all over themselves to write legislation requiring higher education institutions to offer credit and degrees to students who will take MOOCs to get those degrees, and, sometimes, only MOOCs.  Legislatures have been massively defunding their higher education systems, driving the cost to the student up and the quality down.  Now they see MOOCs as a magical way to have their cake (provide higher education to their constituents) and eat it too (at very low cost).
 
But MOOCs are not a magical solution.  Many of the students who are most dependent on the public university system are those whom the MOOCS will benefit the least in educational terms, because they lack the motivation, the self-assurance, the preparation, the literacy skills, the prior knowledge, the vocabulary and the study skills needed to get what they need from a remote lecturer, without the kind of support they would get in a traditional university that might compensate for at least some of these challenges.  But the elephant in the room is the lack of access to the networks that resident college students get in their universities—networks of peers and professors—who can provide them with the connections to the people who can offer them the job opportunities and mentoring they need to really make it.  These two challenges, taken together, will constitute a mighty barrier to success.  And so the move to MOOCs, as I see it, may aggravate, not alleviate, the steadily widening disparity in incomes between our wealthiest and our poorest and, at the same time, make it ever more likely that the sons and daughters of the masters and mistresses of the universe will themselves become the next generation of masters and mistresses.  That would be a shame.

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]]> - Marc Tucker http://blogs.edweek.org/edweek/top_performers/2013/04/moocs_more_social_mobility_or_less.html The Myth of Education as the 'Great Equalizer' tag:blogs.edweek.org,2013:/edweek/top_performers//115.31777 2013-04-12T14:15:10Z 2013-04-12T13:52:44Z Marc Tucker explains why our education system fails to offset social inequities. Marc Tucker http://blogs.edweek.org/edweek/top_performers/
In the mid-60s, James Coleman, in an iconic U.S. Government report, Equality of Educational Opportunity, said that the biggest influence on student achievement was not anything having to do with the schools they attended, but rather the socio-economic status of their parents.  No doubt this is partly because wealthy communities can easily raise enough money for their public schools to buy the best teachers, facilities, materials and school administrators.

But that may leave out the most important variable, the socio-economic status of the other students in the school.  Take for example, the conditions in a typical low-income, mostly minority community: expectations for all students are low, students get As for doing mediocre work, the curriculum is not challenging, classrooms are constantly disrupted, teachers have a hard time maintaining order, students who strive for academic excellence are ostracized by their peers and few go to college.  In a wealthy school district serving mostly students from well-to-do families, all is reversed: expectations are high, classroom discipline is not a problem, students are paying attention in class; they have to work for their As and are not ostracized by their peers for doing well in their classes.  The curriculum is challenging and designed to put all students on a track that will get a great majority of them into selective colleges. 

In a process brilliantly described by Richard Florida, the "creatives" the professionals most in demand in the new economy, are concentrating in a relatively small number of cities where they are most likely to get the environment they are seeking, while the people who used to work at the factories whose owners moved the business offshore are increasing concentrated, losing their homes and working, if they can get any work at all, at the local convenience store.  An article in last week's New York Times tells us that these trends feed on themselves, as rising real estate values in the favored communities are matched by falling real estate values in the others, driving the fortunes of these two types of communities steadily farther apart.

All over the United States, the professionals and managers in our society who can afford to do so are seeking every possible advantage for their children and, as income disparities increase, they are succeeding to an ever-increasing degree.  Their aim is to get their children into the most selective colleges in the nation, because they see those institutions as the keyhole their children must go through to get the best jobs and the highest status that society has to offer.

What is it about this vanishingly small number of elite institutions that makes them the gateway to success for the children of the new elite?  Is it the quality of education they will get there?  Not so much.  The answer lies just where it lay in the schools.  It is mainly the community to which they gain access, their classmates.

In another very insightful article in the New York Times, Ross Douthat points out that, whereas elite families used to send their daughters to the Ivy league colleges to get married to the future masters of the universe, now the top professionals and managers are sending both their sons and daughters to those institutions so they can meet and marry the future masters and mistresses of the universe and build social networks with their classmates and their professors that will give them privileged access to the best jobs and highest status the society has to offer.  Those social networks will pay off for the rest of their lives.  From the time they are born until they enter the job market, the sons and daughters of our top professionals and managers have incomparably better access to the resources they will need to reach the pinnacles of success.  With each successive year the chances that our professional and managerial elite will be able to pass their status along to their progeny improves and the likelihood that the sons and daughters of the less fortunate will inherit the status of their parents also improves.  Education policy, as I see it, does not offset this trend.  It actually aids and abets it.  In my next blog, I will explain how the growth of massive open online courses could exacerbate this trend.   

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]]> - Marc Tucker http://blogs.edweek.org/edweek/top_performers/2013/04/the_myth_of_education_as_the_great_equalizer.html David Kirp on Education Reform tag:blogs.edweek.org,2013:/edweek/top_performers//115.31618 2013-04-04T13:25:40Z 2013-04-04T14:13:33Z Marc Tucker finds parallels between the education reform strategies used in the U.S. school districts featured in David Kirp's new book, "Improbable Scholars", and the strategies used in the top-performing education systems. He also explains why American education policy is at war with itself. Marc Tucker http://blogs.edweek.org/edweek/top_performers/ Improbable Scholars: The Rebirth of a Great American School System and a Strategy for America's Schools, Kirp's newest book, shows that he has lost none of his magic.

At one level, the book tells the story of the Union City school district in New Jersey.  Union City, right across the Hudson from Manhattan, is a gritty low-income community whose schools enroll mostly Hispanic kids.  But, after years of patient effort by the leaders of the city and the district, those low-income, minority students are now achieving at the same levels as their much more fortunate suburban counterparts statewide, a stunning achievement.  Ninety percent graduate and 60 percent go on to college.  In the last chapter of the book, Kirp described two other school districts, very different from Union City, in which poor and minority students are also performing at comparable levels.

The question, of course, is how they did it.  Those of you who have read Surpassing Shanghai will recall that, at the end of that book, I listed the principles that typically underlie the policies and practices of the countries with the most successful education systems.  Among those principles are the following: putting more financial resources behind students who are harder to educate than students from more fortunate backgrounds, creating a strong system of early childhood education that assures that students begin formal schooling ready for the program offered in the first grade, doing whatever is necessary to raise expectations for student achievement to high levels, developing instructional systems that include curriculum frameworks that prescribe what topics will be studied in all the core subjects in the curriculum--grade by grade--from kindergarten through high school, making sure that school faculty have the training and support they need to provide the instruction needed by the students to progress at the rate called for by curriculum framework., creating an environment in which teachers are treated like professionals and are expected to collaborate with one another to continually improve the outcomes for students, and, finally, working over time to weld all the elements of the system into a coherent whole.  

You guessed it. I just took this seemingly unrelated detour from my account of Kirp's book because, as Kirp looks across the three American districts whose students are doing so well, the strategies he identifies as the key to their success turn out to map in detail to the policies and practices that explain the success of the countries with the highest achievement and the greatest equity in the world.

Here is something to think about, though. Closing the gap between the bottom students and average students in the United States is a remarkable achievement.  But it is important to remember that America's average students are performing well below the average students in a growing number of countries.

To find out why, we need to go to some of the policies and practices that are common in the top-performing countries but are not among those used by the three districts Kirp studied.

They are not on Kirp's list because they have to do with things that school districts have no control over.  Most important among them is teacher quality: the standards for getting into teachers' colleges, for licensing teachers, for the programs of study in teachers colleges and so on.  Districts must recruit from the pool that results from state policy and university practice, and districts whose student body consists largely of poor and minority students usually get the least capable teachers from this not very capable pool.  Kirp points out that coherent policies are very important to success, but, school districts control only their own policies, not those of the state or federal governments, putting them at a great disadvantage relative to systems in other countries in which the design of the system is controlled by a ministry of education which sees its role as producing highly coherent systems.  

Apart from policies that affect teacher quality, this point can be illustrated in countless ways, but among the most important are those that Kirp himself points to at the end of his book.  As he says, American education policy almost everywhere is at war with itself, a constant tug of war between those who, as he puts it, would "lead by intimidation" and "exalt choice" and markets and those who take the path these districts and the top-performing countries have taken.  It is not possible to collaborate with your teachers unions and bring them into the decision-making process, as Montgomery County has done with great success, and at the same time, do everything you can to weaken or destroy the unions, as a number of governors and chief state school officers have tried to do.  It is not possible to professionalize teaching while at the same time supporting alternative routes for the preparation of teachers that are founded on the premise that anyone can become a great teacher if they know their subject.  It is very unlikely that our best young people will go into teaching if school districts or the federal government believes that firing teachers is the shortest route to improving student performance.  

The districts Kirp studied have been doing their level best to develop and then implement coherent approaches to improving school performance, but they live within larger systems at the state and federal levels that have embraced theories of school improvement often antithetical to their own.  It is hardly surprising that they have not been able to match the performance of the world best school systems.  Kirp has shown that American school districts can close the gap that has separated the performance of our poor and minority students from our average middle class and white students, a very important achievement.  What remains is to close the gap between average American performance and average performance in the top-performing countries.  Kirp's work also shows that the lessons that have been learned by the top-performing countries are the very lessons we have to learn to close the gap these three districts have closed.  But we still won't close the gap between the United States and top performers until we have much better alignment among our policies at the national, state and local levels.

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]]> - Marc Tucker http://blogs.edweek.org/edweek/top_performers/2013/04/david_kirp_weighs-in_on.html Ravitch and Krashen: Last Round in Common-Core Debate tag:blogs.edweek.org,2013:/edweek/top_performers//115.31459 2013-03-28T16:45:34Z 2013-03-28T18:09:01Z Marc Tucker argues that in order to greatly improve U.S. student achievement we need to do more than reducing the levels of student poverty and also focus on instituting a fairer finance system and improving teacher quality. Marc Tucker http://blogs.edweek.org/edweek/top_performers/ some comments posted on my blog from Stephen Krashen, Professor Emeritus at the University of California. Krashen is a literacy expert.  For the views of another highly regarded expert in this field, I suggest you look at a piece by David Pearson.  Pearson, a member of the Validation Committee for the standards, provides what seems to me a very balanced and thoughtful defense of the Common Core.

But Krashen does not actually attack the Common Core standards per se.  The "content of the standards is not the real issue", he says.  "The real issue is whether we should have standards and tests based on standards." He describes the construction of the standards, the development of the new tests and the purchase of equipment to install this new system as one of the "greatest boondoggles of all time."  The real problem, he says, is "our high level of poverty."  He wants all the money invested in this new system invested instead in food programs, school nurses and school libraries.

"Tucker's position," he says, "is that tough standards, [and] tough-minded accountability will finally get educators moving, and force them to teach effectively." [That is not true, but we will let that pass] But he says, "When we control for poverty, our students do very well.  Middle class students in well-funded schools score at or near the top of the world....The problem is not teacher quality (or schools of education, or unions)....there is no crisis.  The problem is poverty."

I've quoted Krashen at length because I believe that he really does speak on this point for Diane Ravitch and for a great many professional educators in the United States.

Diane Ravitch did this country a signal service with the publication of her book, The Death and Life of the Great American School System: How Testing and Choice are Undermining Education.  Ravitch's attack on those who have embraced education reform agendas based on tough accountability and market theory was a real breath of fresh air.  If that was all that Diane Ravitch had ever done for American education—and it is not—she would deserve an honored place in the history of education in this country.

But—and it is a big but—Ravitch has done a lot to leave the country with the impression that, if those who are pressing this agenda of tough accountability and market strategies of reform would just go away, and we fixed our poverty problem, all would be well. 

Distribution-of-2009-PISA-reading-scores.jpg

And that is simply not true.  When OECD-PISA analyzes national education performance, they show how each country's student population is distributed among six performance levels.  It turns out that a smaller proportion of American students is found in the top levels of PISA and a larger proportion in the bottom levels than is the case for students in the top performing countries. Another part of the OECD-PISA analysis shows that a student's socio-economic status is a much better predictor of that student's educational achievement in the United States than in the top performing countries.  We are less successful at educating students in poverty than these other countries are.

Variation-by-school-PISA-2009-Reading-Chart.jpg
But this need not be an argument based simply on statistics.  Other nations are recruiting their teachers from much higher segments of their high school graduating classes.  They are insisting that not only their secondary teachers but also their elementary school teachers really know the subjects they are teaching.  Because they believe that teachers need to know their craft, they insist that they spend at least a year learning that craft before they can begin teaching, with no "alternative routes" into teaching to circumvent that requirement.  Because they believe that great teachers are the secret sauce for great education systems, they are offering them compensation comparable to the compensation offered to people going into high status occupations.  Because they really mean it when they say they want all students to achieve at internationally benchmarked levels, they put more money behind their hardest-to-educate students than their easiest-to-educate students.  We don't do any of these things.

In saying that our students would perform at levels rivaling the best in the world, if only we fixed our student poverty problem, Ravitch and Krashen would have you believe that we can get results just as good as the top-performers are getting without instituting a fairer financing system, without recruiting our teachers from among the best of our high school graduates, without insisting that all our teachers master the subjects they teach, without compensating our teachers at a level comparable to the levels at which high-status professional are compensated—without, in short, doing any of the things the top-performing countries have been doing to improve the quality of their education systems.

If you believe that the only difference between the United States and the top-performing countries is the level of poverty among our children, think again.  The level of poverty among our children is a disgrace and we must do everything we can to greatly reduce it.  But, make no mistake, if we succeeded in that quest, we would still be far behind, and will remain so until we get serious about making the kinds of changes I have just described. 

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]]> - Marc Tucker http://blogs.edweek.org/edweek/top_performers/2013/03/ravitch_and_krashen_last_round_in_common_core_debate.html Further Response to Diane Ravitch on Common Core tag:blogs.edweek.org,2013:/edweek/top_performers//115.31338 2013-03-20T19:50:45Z 2013-03-27T21:08:48Z In response to a commentary to Diane Ravitch, Marc Tucker explores the debate around whether or not the common core state standards are developmentally appropriate for the early grades. Marc Tucker http://blogs.edweek.org/edweek/top_performers/ She responded by wondering why I am not worried, as she is, that the standards are developmentally inappropriate for the early grades.

I assume that Ravitch's question was prompted by the well-publicized disagreement within the English literacy community on this point, articulated most prominently by Elfrieda Hiebert then a professor at the University of California, Santa Cruz.  Hiebert agrees—rather forcefully—with the contention of the authors of the Common Core State Standards for English literacy that the text difficulty of middle school and high school texts has slipped badly over the past 50 years and need to be raised.  Her challenge to the standards is only to the CCSS panel's decision to propose a fairly steep gradient for vocabulary acquisition and text complexity in the elementary school years.  She suggests that standards for literacy have already been rising in the elementary schools and should not be made more stringent.

But Hiebert does not speak for all experts in the field.  I asked Catherine Snow, Henry Lee Shattuck Professor of Education at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, one of the world's leading literacy scholars and a member of the Validation Committee for the Common Core State Standards (which also included, among others, David Pearson, Andreas Schleicher, Arthur Applebee, David Conley, Linda Darling-Hammond and Lauren Resnick) for her response to Ravitch's claim, voiced also by Hiebert, that the standards' writers had gotten the elementary standards wrong and new research was needed to get them right.  While acknowledging that Hiebert and others had challenged the elementary school standards, Snow pointed out that the standards "were discussed, adapted, modified, commented on and ultimately approved by a large and varied group that included experts in literacy and language development."  So there is a difference of opinion with respect to the appropriateness of the steepness of the challenge levels of the elementary school literacy standards as they proceed from grade to grade with respect to vocabulary and text complexity among the experts.

The education world is rife with such disagreements.  They are rarely definitively settled by individual research studies.  Ravitch did not suggest that all of the Common Core Standards save for the elementary literacy standards should be approved; she implied that she thinks all of the standards should be put on hold pending the results of validation research studies that could easily take years and would almost certainly result in findings that the experts would continue to debate.  First, it makes no sense to me to delay implementation of all the standards if only one part of them is in serious dispute, and second, I do not think it makes sense to delay implementation of that part of the standards that is in dispute, given the strong support they have received from an international panel of leading experts in the relevant fields.  Other countries view their standards as appropriately in a continual state of development and revision, as more information is gained about changing demands on students and on the way both teachers and students respond to them over time.  It is important, as I said in my last blog, to remember that standards are a judgment call, not a research finding, and we should not allow ourselves to get tied up in knots when people deeply invested in the field differ on their judgments.

Ravitch is also concerned that the rigor that is demanded by the standards "might widen the achievement gap and discourage struggling students."  Both Snow and I are in strong agreement with Ravitch that the standards, across the board, demand a good deal more of students than they are currently achieving.  And we agree that that is especially true of our most vulnerable students, who are achieving the least.  And this is cause for concern.  But, if the authors of the standards are correct in saying that students need to achieve these standards in order to stand a good chance of being successful in college and work, then we would do our most vulnerable students no favors by setting the standards aside or by delaying their implementation indefinitely.  When I shared Ravitch's concerns with Mitch Chester, Commissioner of Education in Massachusetts, home to what may be the most admired state standards in the United States, Chester reminded me that, "when Massachusetts initially adopted its content standards, the state did not conduct a field test of the standards prior to adoption."  There was great concern in some quarters that the standards would prove too demanding for poor and minority students.  In the event, however, the effect of adoption of the standards by the state was to greatly improve the education of poor and minority students.

Finally, Ravitch is worried that "reactionary groups and entrepreneurs are excited about the prospect that the Common Core will cause test scores to plummet in every state."  One has to read between the lines here, but I take it that Ravitch thinks that some groups on the political right are for the standards because they think the public will rise up in arms when the dominant education system fails to educate students to the new standards and that will create a big opening for vouchers and for education delivered by businesses in a newly energized education market economy.  One has to have a well-developed penchant for conspiracy theories to be kept awake at night by this vision, and I do not have such an imaginative flair.  The people who wrote the Common Core State Standards tell us they were paying attention to the standards in the top-performing countries when they wrote these standards.  They did not tell us that they set out to top the countries with the most demanding standards.  If other countries can redesign their education systems so that the vast majority of their students can achieve standards comparable to the Common Core State Standards, then our professional educators ought to be able to do so, too.  If they can't, then they should step aside, but I do not for one minute believe that that will prove necessary.

]]> - Marc Tucker http://blogs.edweek.org/edweek/top_performers/2013/03/further_response_to_diane_ravitch_on_common_core.html Diane Ravitch: Wrong on the Common Core tag:blogs.edweek.org,2013:/edweek/top_performers//115.31228 2013-03-14T18:45:56Z 2013-03-27T21:07:59Z In response to Diane Ravitch coming out against the Common Core State Standards, Marc Tucker argues that the Common Core is needed in order to establish clear expectations of what our children need to know and be able to do when they graduate from high school and at key points along the way. Marc Tucker http://blogs.edweek.org/edweek/top_performers/ Diane Ravitch came out against the Common Core State Standards, saying that they "...have been adopted in 46 states and the District of Columbia without any field test. They are being imposed on the children of this nation despite the fact that no one has any idea how they will affect students, teachers, or schools. We are a nation of guinea pigs, almost all trying an unknown new program at the same time."

But the Common Core State Standards are not a program, like a new drug, to be field-tested.  They are a statement of what we want our children to know and be able to do when they graduate from high school and what they ought to know and be able to do at key points along the way to graduation.  Our parents and students and teachers need to know what is expected.  I can understand why we would want to know how well a strategy for helping students reach our aspirations worked before we asked all our teachers to use it, but don't understand why we would field test our aspirations.

It is actually not possible to field test the standards.  What we can field test is the way the standards are implemented.  But how do we judge whether the implementation is successful?  Presumably by asking whether the students achieved the standards.  Suppose they don't.  Did the standards fail?  Or was their implementation faulty?  Hard to know, because the standard by which we are measuring success or failure is the standard being tested.  That makes no sense to me.

Diane Ravitch has played a very important role in recent years as an apostate from the camp that has devoted itself to market-driven education reform and the use of tough-minded accountability systems inimical to teacher professionalism.  But her reference in her blog on this subject to her opponents makes me wonder whether she is opposed to the Common Core State Standards because her opponents are for them.

One last point.  Among her reasons for opposing the standards is what Ravitch refers to as their "disparate impact" on poor and minority students. "Disparate impact" is a technical term in civil rights law referring to situations in which policies negatively affect minority and poor students relative to majority students.  The courts can throw out such policies on findings of disparate impact.  As I read that phrase in Ravitch's piece, a chill went down my back.  It came across as a threat.  

Let's be clear here.  Poor and minority students in the United States will score lower on assessments based on any internationally benchmarked standards than majority students, because we do not educate poor and minority students to the same standards as majority students in this country.  So this blast from Ravitch is not a criticism of the Common Core standards.  It is a blast against any serious standards.  And that is very disappointing, coming from a former Assistant Secretary of Education responsible for starting the development of academic standards for the schools in the United States.  We will not improve the performance of poor and minority students by suppressing standards.  It will only improve when we make the implicit standards explicit, which will then ratchet up the pressure to do something about the "disparate impact" of the kind of education those students now get.

The United States has been far behind the other industrialized countries in developing serious standards for student achievement.  The attempt to develop state-by-state standards failed ignominiously.  What we most need now is not cold feet, but high quality examinations, first-rate curriculum and instructional resources and high quality training for our teachers in the use of those standards, instructional resources and assessment systems.  It will take years of determined effort to develop all that infrastructure and years more to implement it effectively.  And there is no time to waste.  ]]> - Marc Tucker http://blogs.edweek.org/edweek/top_performers/2013/03/diane_ravitch_wrong_on_the_common_core.html Teacher Quality: Three Views of How to Get It tag:blogs.edweek.org,2013:/edweek/top_performers//115.30707 2013-02-14T22:06:19Z 2013-02-14T22:22:00Z Marc Tucker explores three leading strategies to improve teacher quality in the United States. Marc Tucker http://blogs.edweek.org/edweek/top_performers/
Fire the worst.  First, there is the strategy offered by Eric Hanushek.  In a 2009 essay, "Teacher Deselection," Hanushek presents what might almost be described as a surgical strike on the problem.  Identify and then fire the worst five percent of our teachers.  Do it often enough, he says, and those who remain will enable our students to perform at world-class levels.

Radically improve the quality of new teachers.  Second, there is the strategy offered by my own organization, Vivien Stewart of the Asia Society and others.  Observe the strategies already employed by the countries whose students are among the world's top performers and adapt them for use in the United States, the strategies they point to in accounting for their own success.  These strategies concentrate on changing the pool from which we select our teachers, setting much higher standards for their initial education, training, induction and licensure and compensating them at levels comparable to the compensation offered to high status professionals.

Invest in those you already have.  Third, there is the strategy suggested by Dylan Wiliam, which is focusing, not on new teachers entering the teaching force, but on those already in it.  At the heart of this strategy is the finding of psychologists who study professional competence and expertise that the effect of selection strategies based, in effect, on IQ (see the second strategy above) washes out after a few years and that what really matters is the steady, disciplined improvement of professional skill.  This finding, Wiliam says, points to a major effort to support the disciplined development of employed teachers' expertise as the core strategy for improving the quality of the teaching force.

It is too bad that we are not having a debate among the advocates of these radically different views, so that policy makers and practitioners can evaluate their claims, challenge their logic and make an informed decision based on a reasoned discussion.  That debate is long overdue. In the next few paragraphs, I will offer a rapid-fire simulation of what such a debate might look like and then present my own conclusion about the direction the United States should pursue.

In his essay, Hanushek points to the failure of countless strategies for improving student performance and then suggests a different logic for strategy development.  Why not, he asks, start at the end?  If what we want is a powerful means of improving student performance, why don't we start with what we know about the variations in school practice that make the biggest difference in student performance?  The answer, he says, hands down, is teachers. When we look at variations in student performance, nothing moves the needle more than the differences in teacher competence, as measured by the value they add to student learning.  The rest is simple logic and statistical analysis, he says.  So let's construct a dimension line of teacher competence, array teachers along that dimension line, identify the worst five percent of our teachers (those on the left tail of the distribution), and then look at the achievement levels of the students of the teachers who are left.  We will find that, if we do this repeatedly, the teachers who are left will equal in quality the teachers in the countries with the best student performance. Problem solved.  All we have to do to achieve world-class student performance in the United States is fire the worst 5 percent of our teachers each year, for as long as it takes to reach our objective.

Hanushek gets to this conclusion in the following way.  He looks at the statistical distance between American students' performance on the OECD-PISA surveys and the performance of Canadian students (Canada is among the top 10 and we are not).  Then he looks at the difference for the average American students having the average American teacher, as opposed to having an average teacher selected from among the top 95 percent of American teachers. Then he uses this technique to estimate how many years we would have to do this to reach Canada's level of student performance.

Now let me now go into a little more detail on the second analysis and prescription.  It is the product of close examination of the strategies used by the countries that top the international rankings of student achievement.  We note that they did not get there by firing their worst teachers but rather by greatly increasing the supply of superior teachers.  This was done in the first instance by greatly increasing the appeal of teaching as a career to young people who could have their choice among the high status professions, partly by raising teacher compensation, partly by changing the conditions of work for teachers to make them comparable to the conditions of work in high status professions, not least by awarding these highly competent people the kind of professional autonomy that they would normally have in the high status professions.  After radically altering the pool from which teachers are selected in this way, they then employ a much more demanding selection process for young people entering their teachers colleges, producing ratios of applicants to acceptances on the order of 6 to 1, 8 to 1, and in at least one country, 10 to 1.  They also insist that their teachers really master the subjects they will take, majoring in those subjects in college if they are going to be secondary school teachers, and at least minoring in them if they are going to be elementary school teachers.  And they typically insist that their teachers spend at least a year mastering the craft of teaching, over and above the time they spend on learning the subjects they will teach. Many are moving teacher education out of their third tier universities and into their top ranked research universities.  Many are heavily subsidizing young people who choose to go into teaching.  Virtually all insist on a period of apprenticeship for new teachers under the close supervision of master teachers for the first year or two after they have first been hired as teachers.

Now lets look at the third proposition.  This one comes from Dylan Wiliam, interviewed for the most recent version of our Center for International Education Benchmarking newsletter.  Wiliam has been doing a lot of research on the determinants of teachers' expertise.  IQ, he says, is an important, perhaps even dominant, factor in determining teachers' expertise, but only during the first three years of practice.  After that, he says, what counts most is disciplined practice.  Disciplined practice is not the same as experience.  One can teach year after year without getting any better at teaching.  Disciplined practice is an activity that is always tough, no matter how good you are.  It is what the best violinists and swimmers and, yes, researchers do.  They are pushing themselves all the time to do better than their previous best, to improve their practice through constant learning and constantly applying what they learn.  Much of the learning they do has to do with studying what other superb practitioners do, analyzing it keenly and then practicing what is learned in this way, but the best practitioners will take full advantage of every source of available knowledge that might contribute to the improvement of their own practice, often with the aid of a coach. To make Wiliam's approach to raising teacher quality work at scale, a state or nation would have to develop a set of incentives to induce the current teaching force to want to steadily improve its expertise and it would also have to put in place a set of institutional supports that would enable them to do so.

The cheapest of these strategies is Hanushek's.  But it is not without its challenges.  To announce that one's strategy for improving teachers is to embark on a campaign to fire them is a surefire way to alarm the existing teaching force and to make capable young people choosing a career think twice about choosing teaching.  And, sure enough, applications for slots in our schools of education are way down, partly, I have no doubt, because of the widespread impression that the dominant education reform strategies are essentially anti-teacher and anti-teacher union.  If your aim is to strengthen the union and soften their union resistance to modern accountability systems, it would be hard to find a more ineffective strategy than firing teachers to improve teacher quality.  So it is entirely possible that, by frightening away the most capable young college students, Hanushek's policy is in practice leading to a lowering of teacher quality.  

But, stand back from Hanushek's analysis and prescription for a moment and compare it to the second prescription.  Do you really believe that we can get to a world-class teaching force while we do exactly nothing on the list of initiatives taken on by the top-performing countries to improve their own teaching forces?  Do you believe that we can radically improve our teaching force without recruiting our teachers from a higher strata of high school graduates, without paying our teachers at levels comparable to at least some of the high status professions, without insisting that our teachers actually know a lot about the subjects they are teaching, without requiring them to master their craft, without raising the licensure standards to levels comparable to the bars that have to be surmounted to becoming a teacher in the high-performing countries, and so on?  Is there anyone out there who really believes that we can have a world-class teaching force without addressing these factors?  Is there anyone who believes they are irrelevant?  Another very simple way of asking this question is to ask where the replacements for the worst teachers are going to come from when we fire them?  If they are no better than what we had before, then Hanushek's scheme will not work at scale.  If other countries are working hard to replace their current teaching force over time with a very highly qualified teaching force, and we are not, then we will never have a teaching force that equals theirs.

But what about Wiliam's proposal to invest in the current teaching force, creating a system for supporting teachers' continued growth and development that will incent them to constantly improve their practice while at the same time providing the infrastructure to enable them to do it?  This makes perfect sense to me.  But nothing about it is easy.  We don't have much experience in creating incentives for our teachers to constantly improve their practice.  Nor do we have much experience in creating the kind of infrastructure in schools needed to support teachers who are determined to improve their practice.  Both require a culture in the school that is sadly missing in most American schools.  In my mind, what is really being talked about here is a transformation in school culture that goes way beyond any specific techniques or content of teacher professional development to embrace a very different outlook on what schools are for and what it means to be a professional teacher.  Schools full of teachers who never give up on trying to improve their skills and knowledge as teachers are teachers who not only believe that they, no matter how good they are, can get better, they believe the same thing about their students and their school, and they are prepared to do whatever is necessary to achieve the progress they think possible.  

From my perspective, there is merit in all three positions.  Who could object to getting rid of our worst teachers?  If we can find a way to do it that is fair and politically feasible, we should do it.  We owe that to our students, their parents and the taxpayers.  But no profession ever fired its way to excellence.  The research my organization did years ago showed conclusively that most of the high status professions have very poor procedures for getting rid of their worst performers.  They handle the problem of quality at the front end, by restricting admission to their professional schools to top high school graduates, having very high licensing standards and providing very high quality professional education and training, often accompanied by strong mentoring from top professionals once the new recruit is on the job, the same measures that the top-performing countries are now using to produce a superior teaching workforce.  My objection to Hanushek's analysis and prescription is not to the idea that we should get rid of our worst teachers, it is to the idea that doing so is the key to a first class teaching force.  It is not.  Pursued as if it were, it will simply make bad matters worse.

What about the other options, one concentrating on the incoming work force and the other on the current workforce?  The obvious answer is that we need to do both.  When you look closely, you will find that the top performers are in fact doing both.  Singapore, for example, is not only a world leader in the selection and initial preparation of professional teachers, but it is also putting a lot of money and institutional resources into the constant professional development of its current teacher workforce.

I have often said that the United States was for a long time lucky to have a teaching workforce largely composed of college-educated women who had few careers open to them other than teaching.  Their loss was the gain of the students they taught.  Many are still in our schools, nearing retirement.  But their successors are going to law schools, business schools, engineering schools and schools offering entre to other high status professions.  It would, in my view, do us little good if we concentrated entirely on providing a very different kind of professional development to our existing workforce if we neglected what I see as a growing emergency caused by the drying-up of the pool from which we have been selecting our best teachers.  And, for all the reasons that Wiliam suggests, it makes no sense to me to concentrate exclusively on the incoming teachers when it will take a very long time for them to make a difference in our schools and there is growing evidence that disciplined learning, combined with experience, could vastly improve the skills of our current teaching force.  If we were to put our backs into both of these strategies, and thereby steadily expand our supply of first rate teachers, then it would make sense to get rid of our worst teachers, because we would have a growing supply of great teachers to replace them with, and, no less important, we would have demonstrated to young people making career decisions and good teachers now in our workforce, that we respect teachers and want to support them.

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]]> - Marc Tucker http://blogs.edweek.org/edweek/top_performers/2013/02/teacher_quality_three_views_of_how_to_get_it.html The Federal Role in Education Today: How We Got Here and Where We Need to Go tag:blogs.edweek.org,2013:/edweek/top_performers//115.30289 2013-01-24T20:55:30Z 2013-01-24T21:11:43Z Marc Tucker looks at how the federal role in education has changed over the past few decades and suggests that before the federal role grows even larger, the nation should have a major conversation about the direction of education reform. Marc Tucker http://blogs.edweek.org/edweek/top_performers/ recent blog, I pointed out that the nation is now behaving as if the states and federal government have much the same roles in education, creating conflicts which, left unresolved, are likely to get worse, with unforeseeable consequences for our schools.  But it has not always been this way.  In this blog, I will trace some of the recent history that has led to current confusion about the roles of different levels of government in education system, in the hope that understanding how we got here will provide helpful as we try to get ourselves out of this mess.  

The process began in the Clinton Administration, had an assist from the George H. W. Bush Administration, was given a powerful push forward by the George W. Bush Administration and then was given a big push over the fence by the Obama Administration.  The result was a transformation in the federal role in education.  Prior to the Clinton administration, the federal government's role had been to aid, assist, prod and push the schools, districts and states.  But the key word was always "aid."  There was no question about who was in charge and it was never, in that whole period, the federal government.  By which I mean that it was up to the government to offer financial aid to assist disadvantaged students, to help others develop curriculum that schools were genuinely free to use or not as they chose, to aid in the development of stronger vocational programs, but always of the schools' design, and so on.  In that entire period, from the 1950s to the 1990s, the federal government did not interfere in any important way with the design of the larger system and the way it worked, except with respect to school desegregation, which was the result of decisions made by the courts and not primarily the result of executive or legislative branch decisions.

That can hardly be said of what followed.  The Clinton administration, building on the work of the first Bush administration, started the states on the road to what would ultimately become the adoption of national standards for student academic performance, a radical departure from the status quo ante.  There is a direct line between that development and the creation in the Obama Administration of national tests to meet the standards.  The primary source of curriculum direction for American schools, rhetoric to the contrary notwithstanding, has been the nation's textbook publishers, which are now in a race to produce curriculum and tests matched to the standards, thus putting in place the key elements of a national instructional system.

Tests have the most effect when there are consequences for the students taking them or for the teachers educating them before they take the tests.  In this case, fueled by bipartisan frustration with the apparent willingness of the education establishment to take federal funds in ever-increasing amounts over a long period of time without any apparent feeling of responsibility on the part of the establishment to use those funds to improve student performance, a bipartisan coalition in the Congress retaliated by imposing the rather draconian accountability scheme to be found in No Child Left Behind.  As the new design for American education emerged, it became clear that the institutional reforms just described could be made to fit together.  That is, the standards could be used as the driver of the accountability system and the tests developed to match the standards could be used to calibrate student progress, on the basis of which schools would be rewarded or punished, as required.  In the next logical step, the accountability system, in the first stage focused on schools, was essentially redesigned by the Obama administration to focus not on the schools, as had been the case under NCLB, but largely on teachers, providing the country with a national system for improving teacher quality, or so it was said.

But all these measures related to what the reformers saw as the established education system, a system the reformers saw as hugely expensive, but performing poorly for the students and, in any case, very hard to redirect—captured, in effect, by the people providing the services.  So the reformers decided that the best response would be to challenge the system by giving it direct competition, even as they were trying to reform the established system from the inside through the measures I've just described.  That impulse became the voucher and charter movements.

What I have just described constitutes a fundamental redesign of the American institutional system for elementary and secondary education.  In some cases, it was accomplished with the enthusiastic participation of the states, but, in other cases, it was done despite strong resistance from states that disagreed with both the premises and the policies.  Some parts of this agenda are supported by research.  There is no evidence at all, as I have pointed out in my previous blog, to support other key components of the design.  Some parts of this agenda have had, at least at some time, the enthusiastic backing of a significant—and bipartisan—majority of the members of Congress.  But, at the moment, as I also pointed out, very significant items are being added to this agenda in a process in which the Congress has played no part.

How can it be said, I wonder, that the United States has a constitution that assigns responsibility for policy on public education to the states, when, without deciding that such delegation was a bad idea, the nation one day decides that it is going to create a national system of academic standards, curriculum and testing, a national system for school accountability and a national system for assuring teacher quality, without ever saying that the states would no longer be responsible for such vital matters of education policy?  And how did it come to pass that we said that education policy was for the states to decide and in the very same breath say that the federal government would require the states to institute and expand a system of schools that would compete directly for students and funds with the regular public schools, whether the states wanted to do that or not?

The consequence of enabling the federal government to assume jurisdiction over such fundamental matters without ever deciding to withdraw the jurisdiction of the states on those matters is that both levels of government now have effective jurisdiction over most of the important issues relating to the design of the institutional structure of American elementary and secondary education.

This is no way to run a railroad.  It is absurd.  And it will, I strongly believe, prove dysfunctional.  No nation that has reached the top ranks of education performance has a system of governance that makes as little sense as our does now.  The process has gotten this far because, in a time of acute financial distress, the states will put up with almost anything to keep their budgets from completely disintegrating.  So the federal government, in this case meaning almost exclusively the executive branch of the federal government, has managed to get a phenomenal amount of leverage for the amount of money it has had to spend.

Is that how we want these decisions made?  Do we really want the executive branch of the federal government to decide, pretty much by itself, what the aims of American education should be and how they should be achieved?  Do we want the executive branch of the federal government to decide, pretty much by itself, what the new institutional structure of American education is going to be for decades to come?  Are we content to have the states and the federal government claim jurisdictions in education policy that overlap almost completely?

None of this is to suggest that there are obvious answers to the question as to how the American education system should be governed.  It is only to suggest that we ought to have a conversation about it before we wake up one day to find we have been overtaken by events.  That conversation ought to be framed by an assumption that we want a division of responsibility among the schools, districts, states and federal government that makes at least a modicum of sense, producing a set of roles for each level of government that are complementary and not in conflict, and which, taken together, reflect a national consensus on the right balance between national, state and local imperatives.

I was asked a while back by the Center for American Progress and the Fordham Institute to write a paper on education governance from a global perspective.  It will be released in the spring.  In that paper I will try to illuminate the options by describing and analyzing the way some of the top-performing countries in the world have chosen to organize their own governance systems for education.  There are surprises here.  And conundrums.  In the meantime, I urge you to think about the fact that our education system is being reshaped, before our eyes, in a very fundamental way, with hardly any debate.
]]> - Marc Tucker http://blogs.edweek.org/edweek/top_performers/2013/01/the_federal_role_in_education_today_how_we_got_here_and_where_we_need_to_go.html The Common Core Standards: Arguments Against and For tag:blogs.edweek.org,2013:/edweek/top_performers//115.30168 2013-01-16T22:49:26Z 2013-01-16T23:09:37Z In response to Yong Zhao's arguments against the Common Core State Standards, Marc Tucker explains that far from diminishing students' creativity and entrepreneurial spirit, well developed and internationally benchmarked standards can and should foster the critical thinking and analytical skills our students will find vital to competing in an increasingly global market. Marc Tucker http://blogs.edweek.org/edweek/top_performers/ came across a piece on the subject the other day by Yong Zhao that is rather thoughtful.  Zhao is presidential chair and associate dean for global education at the University of Oregon's College of Education, where he also serves as director of the Center for Advanced Technology in Education.  He grew up in China.  When my organization organized a research trip to China to try to understand its rapidly changing education system, we engaged Zhao as our guide.  In the course of that trip, I came to respect Zhao and his views.  His piece appeared in Valerie Strauss' The Answer Sheet on washingtonpost.com.

In his piece, Zhao argues, as I and many others have, that labor markets are increasingly global, so that people at any given skill level are competing with others, all over the globe, with similar skills.  The result, is that those with a given set of skills who are willing to work for less than others with the same set of skills will typically be hired to do it, leaving those charging more without work.  And he then asks, how then can workers in high wage countries compete without substantially lowering their wages, and therefore their standard of living?

He also notes, as others have, that more jobs are being automated out of existence than are being exported to low cost countries.  It is the jobs that mostly require routine skills that are first to be automated.

Clearly, the workers in high labor cost countries will be able to hold on to their standard of living only if they can add some value that their competitors cannot.  Zhao agrees that the thing they must be able to add is the capacity to create the future, the capacity for creativity and innovation, as well as a related set of skills in the arena of empathy and play.  He also agrees that, in the world our children are likely to become adults in, they will need to be much more familiar with the way people far from the United States live and think.

So far, we are in agreement.

But Zhao then takes an interesting leap.  He points out that we do not—indeed cannot—know what work will be available when today's infants leave college and enter the workforce.  And he points out that, in global markets, small niches in percentage terms will still generate very large markets in absolute terms, and he concludes from this that that the future will belong to those who can invent new solutions for niche markets, people with great creative and entrepreneurial abilities who do not need to know a little about a lot, but rather a lot about a little.  The implication we are apparently meant to draw from these statements is that the Common Core is too narrow and rigid for the future our children will face, that we need a non-standard education for a non-standard, creative, unknowable future where little niches, not mass markets and mass market thinking, will reign.

This kind of thinking, is to my mind, seductive, but I cannot agree.  It is now more important than ever to figure out what all young people need to know and be able to do.  The literature is clear.  Truly creative people know a lot and they have worked hard at learning it.  They typically know a lot about unrelated things and their creativity comes from putting those unrelated things together in unusual ways.  Learning almost anything really well depends on mastering the conceptual structure of the underlying disciplines, because, without that scaffolding, we are not able to put new information and skills to work.  Zhao says that we will not be competitive simply by producing a nation of good test takers.  That is, of course, true.  Leading Asian educators are very much afraid that they have succeeded in producing good test takers who are not going to be very good at inventing the future.  But that does not absolve us of the responsibility for figuring out what all students will need to know to be competitive in a highly competitive global labor market, nor does it absolve us of the responsibility to figure out how to assess the skills we think are most important.

It is true that the future will be full of jobs that do not exist now and challenges we cannot even imagine yet, never mind anticipate accurately.  But, whatever those challenges turn out to be, I can guarantee you that they will not be met by people without strong quantitative skills, people who cannot construct a sound argument, people who know little of history or geography or economics, people who cannot write well.

Zhao grew up in a country in which the aim was not learning but success on the test.  There was wide agreement that the tests were deeply flawed, emphasizing what Mao called "stuffing the duck"—shoving facts and procedures into students—in lieu of analysis, synthesis and creativity.  But few wanted to change the system, because the tests were one of the few incorruptible parts of a deeply corrupt system.  So Zhao is very much aware of the consequences of a rigid system set to outdated standards.  But that is not the problem in the United States.  We don't suffer from ancient standards wildly out of tune with the times, enforced by tests that are no better.  We suffer from lack of agreement on any standards that could define what all students must know and be able to do before they go their separate ways.  We suffer in a great many schools from implicit standards that translate into abysmally low expectations for far too many students.

Without broad agreement on a well-designed and internationally benchmarked system of standards, we have no hope of producing a nation of students who have the kind of skills, knowledge and creative capacities the nation so desperately needs.  There is no substitute for spelling out what we think students everywhere should know and be able to do.  Spelling it out is no guarantee that it will happen, but failing to spell it out is a guarantee that we will not get a nation of young people capable of meeting the challenges ahead.

Zhao apparently believes that standards mean standardization and standardization would inevitably lead to an inability to produce creative solutions to the problems the workforce will face in the years ahead.  That could certainly happen.  But it need not happen.

Taking a page from my friend Will Fitzhugh, if it were up to me, every high school student would have to produce a fifteen to twenty page history research paper in order to graduate, a research paper that demonstrated a reasonable command of the relevant historical facts, the ability to organize the material in a logical and compelling way, the ability to make and to critique a compelling argument, the ability to synthesize material from multiple sources in an original way and the ability to analyze the forces at work in the historical arena being described.

What I just described is a standard.  But it need not—indeed should not—lead to standardized, cookie-cutter research papers.  Nor will it ever go out of fashion.  Students ought to be able to demonstrate the kinds of skills and knowledge I just described no matter which new jobs spring up out of nowhere twenty years from now.  Being able to do what I just described will diminish no one's creativity.  Nor will it dim their entrepreneurial spirit.  

It is simply not true that our inability to predict the jobs people will have to do in the future and the demand of creative, entrepreneurial young people relieves us of the obligation to figure out what skills and knowledge all young people need to have before they go their separate ways, or the obligation to translate that list of skills and knowledge into standards and assessments that can drive instruction in our schools.

This piece originally appeared in Valerie Strauss' The Answer Sheet on washingtonpost.com.

]]> - Marc Tucker http://blogs.edweek.org/edweek/top_performers/2013/01/the_common_core_standards_arguments_against_and_for.html The Federal Role in Education Today: Why It Makes No Sense At All tag:blogs.edweek.org,2013:/edweek/top_performers//115.30014 2013-01-08T21:58:49Z 2013-01-09T17:14:46Z Marc Tucker examines the federal role in education today and argues, that in principal, there is very little distinguishing it from the state role in education. Marc Tucker http://blogs.edweek.org/edweek/top_performers/
California, in explaining its omissions, said that it would have cost the state $2 billion to implement these unwanted features and that no one had presented any evidence that they would be effective.  In so doing it directly challenged the federal government's reform agenda and got its hand slapped.  So who is in charge here?

Well, you might say, it is unfortunate that there is no research backing up these reforms that the United States Department of Education is insisting on, but the Founding Fathers, in their wisdom, did not require the Congress to legislate only those social reforms for which there is convincing research evidence.

And you would be right, but your observation would be irrelevant, because there is no Federal legislation that requires states, districts or schools to implement these reforms.  None.

But how could that be, you ask?  How can the United States Department of Education insist on the implementation of certain reforms, as the price for relieving a state of the obligation to implement an unproven and much disliked Federal program under which enormous sums of federal money are made available to the state?  Under whose authority is the Department setting such rules?

The answer is the Secretary of Education.  But he actually has no such authority.  Yes, NCLB grants the Secretary the authority to make certain waivers, but, at the time that authority was granted, no one in the national legislature contemplated waivers of the sweep that are now being granted to states.  In effect, the Secretary simply announced that he was going to tell states that they no longer had to abide by the most important provisions of the most important education law Congress has passed in decades if they would only sign on to a "reform" agenda that the Secretary had himself come up with.

The Secretary first advanced that agenda as federal policy when the national economy tanked in the onset of the full flush of the fiscal crisis and he made it stick when he framed his priorities for the Race to the Top program in terms of his own reform agenda.  The Congress, pressed to respond to a national fiscal and economic emergency, gave the Secretary unprecedented powers in the field of education and the Secretary took full advantage of them.  There was little debate in the Congress at the time on the Secretary's education reform agenda and certainly no vote to replace the structure set forth by No Child Left Behind with another, quite different, agenda.

The Congress is in a bind.  There is almost universal agreement that No Child Left Behind needs to be greatly altered, perhaps completely replaced, by another structure.  But there is no agreement on what ought to replace it.  The Secretary recognized the political opportunity by offering waivers for the states to hated NCLB provisions.  Many of the states did not like the Secretary's agenda, but they preferred it to the strictures of NCLB and, in any case, did not have the option of refusing new Federal money in the face of what now seems to be an unending budget crisis.  So they just held their noses.  But not California.  At least, not yet.  

The Secretary has announced that rewriting the basic federal education law is not a major priority for him.  The Congress is not likely to increase the national education budget anyway, so the Secretary is in an enviable position.  He already has control of the reform agenda, so he has no incentive to seek new legislation.

The biggest sticking point here is the Secretary's insistence that states build their accountability systems around so-called value-added measurement technologies that ties rewards and punishments for teachers to measures of the progress that their students make on tests of basic skills.

The National Academy of Sciences has produced a paper that exposed a large set of problems that, in their opinion, make it very unwise to try to use these technologies for the purposes that the Administration is requiring states to use them for.  Many of the members of the National Academy of Education have written individual papers to the same effect.  To my knowledge, none of the leading researchers who are the members of the Academy has supported the policies of the Administration in this regard.  Though some scholars in the field of education support the use of value-added methods for rewarding and punishing teachers, the vast majority does not.  Any disinterested observer would have to say that the evidence supporting the Administration's policies on this matter are at least controversial in the research community, if not widely condemned.

I have come to the conclusion that the current prevailing practice if not theory of the federal role in education is nothing short of bizarre.  

Many of us who care about this rather abstruse topic can agree that the federal government ought to be collecting, storing, organizing, reporting and analyzing a wide range of comparable education data collected by the states.  Almost everyone seems to agree that the federal government has an obligation to vigorously support research on education designed to improve the performance of American students.  Most apparently agree that the federal government should monitor the progress of American students of educational accomplishment over time, using a common and consistent set of indicators, and report on that progress to the American public.  Many would argue that the federal government should be on the lookout for systematic discrimination in the schools against identifiable groups of vulnerable students and should try to address the discrimination it finds in reasonable ways.  Some would agree that the federal government should raise an alarm when the schools are not meeting the needs of the national economy, but not everyone would agree that the federal government should step in to make sure that the schools meet those needs.

But No Child Left Behind went much farther than that.  And the legislation passed to provide a stimulus to the American economy during the fiscal crisis set up the conditions that enabled the Administration to go far beyond the consensus position I have just described.

There is very little, I submit, which, at least in principle, now distinguishes the federal role in education from the state role in education.  Not only is that true, but, at least for the moment, the United States Department of Education has arrogated to itself the role of both legislator and administrator of the national education agenda.  In my opinion, the first of these realities is not a good thing for the United States.  And the second is a disaster.

In my next blog, I will continue on this theme.  My aim here is not to proselytize for a particular conception of the federal role in education, but to make a case that the country needs a national discussion on this issue and needs it now. ]]> - Marc Tucker http://blogs.edweek.org/edweek/top_performers/2013/01/the_federal_role_in_education_today_why_it_makes_no_sense_at_all.html The Chief State School Officers Weigh In on Teacher Quality tag:blogs.edweek.org,2012:/edweek/top_performers//115.29732 2012-12-19T14:30:36Z 2012-12-20T14:24:54Z Marc Tucker responds to the Council of Chief State School Officers' call to action on teacher quality and argues that, while the proposal is a step in the right direction, the chief state school officers need to take a more systematic view of creating a world-class teaching force. Marc Tucker http://blogs.edweek.org/edweek/top_performers/ Our Responsibility, Our Promise: Transforming Educator Preparation and Entry into the Profession.  So it was, to my relief, not another jeremiad bout measuring the quality of serving teachers; it was about what states need to do to raise the quality of new teachers.

The CCSSO's outgoing Executive Director, Gene Wilhoit, made it clear that the report was focused on those things related to teacher quality that the states are directly responsible for: licensure, 'program quality' in their schools of education, and the data collected by the state that can be used to improve both.  And Wilhoit expressed a strong determination on the part of the chiefs to do whatever is necessary to make sure that teacher education programs reflect the spirit of the Common Core State Standards and raise the quality of incoming teachers even if that means closing down significant numbers of education schools or alternative programs that train our new teachers.  

Twenty-five states have signed up to implement this agenda, and Minnich said others are about to do so.  And they are not alone.  In a very canny move, the chiefs invited others to join their task force, organizations representing institutions whose collaboration would be necessary to get the job done, including state boards, schools of education, accreditation agencies, and so on, and their representatives were on hand to make their support for the recommendations explicit.

I walked out of the meeting announcing this effort very encouraged but a little ambivalent.  On the one hand, I firmly believe that this agenda is on the right track, a welcome antidote to what has been the dominant teacher quality agenda focusing on measuring the quality of individual teachers with a view to firing those who don't measure up, a failed agenda with a rationale representing the antithesis of everything the modern movement for quality in business stands for.  The record established by the nations with highest teacher quality shows unequivocally that the way to raise teacher quality is not to fire your worst teachers but to increase the supply of great teachers, and that is what this initiative is all about.  That record also shows that the prize goes to those countries whose teacher education programs demonstrate a strong commitment to the agreed student achievement standards, which is to say that they expect their schools of education to prepare their teachers to teach what the state expects the students to learn.

The commitment of the CCSSO task force to learning from other countries was reflected in the examples the authors picked to illustrate what they think the states' goals should be. The report features the teacher quality reforms of Singapore and Finland.  They are in fact the examples I would have chosen, each quite different from the other in important respects, yet very much alike in the principles that underlie the strategies they embody.  This is the first time in my memory that a body of important actors in the American education system has issued a report featuring examples from outside the United States of the kind of policies they think the United States should be pursuing.  Until recently, Americans have largely ignored the experience of other countries in the realm of education.  This recognition of the achievements of our competitors is a welcome turn in the search for solutions to the problems faced by our education system.

So why was I ambivalent about the report?  Precisely because it focused entirely on what the chief state school officers are responsible for.  Jason Glass, the chief state school officer in Iowa, hinted at the problem in his remarks at the event.  Glass pointed out that the measures recommended in this report are only part of a larger framework for action on this problem.  He implied, though did not say, that these actions are likely to fail if not accompanied by others not mentioned.  He was pointing to a point I made in this space a couple of weeks ago.  If a state dramatically raises the entrance requirements for its teacher colleges, one of the recommendations made in this report, and fails to make teaching a more attractive career choice for the people who could meet those higher standards, then it will choke off the supply of teachers and be forced to lower its admissions' standards simply to fill its available teacher positions in its schools.

But school superintendents and local boards were not among the groups invited to participate in this effort.  And the terms of employment for teachers are in their hands unless the states choose to make teachers compensation and career structure matters of state policy.

The most delicate point in this dance the nation is about to undertake is how to balance raising the standards of entrance into our schools of education with the improvements we need to make in teachers' compensation and working conditions.  It is a waste of money to improve compensation without getting improved quality in exchange and it is just as fruitless to raise standards for admission without improving compensation, career structure and working conditions, because few candidates will sign up at the schools of education.  There was no recognition in this report of this balancing act.

Here's another example along the same lines.  One of the most important measures taken by many top-performing nations to improve teacher quality in their elementary (they call them "primary") schools has to do with job and structure, the requirement that these teachers specialize in either their native language and social studies or mathematics and science.  That requirement makes it possible for those countries to require that their teachers-in-training minor in either mathematics and science or their native language and social studies.  I firmly believe that the superior student performance of many of these countries in mathematics and science is a function of this system.  But, here again, the schools would have to agree to such changes in structure in coordination with agreements on the part of the schools of education and universities to institute the appropriate changes in the structure of their preparation programs.  Unless, of course, the states choose to legislate this aspect of job structure in our elementary schools, in which case state education leaders would have to lay the political groundwork for such a change as an integral part of their teacher quality program.

A third example has to do with career structure at all school levels.  The report cites the career ladder system in Singapore, arguably the best such system in the world.  It provides three separate career structures for teachers, one into school and district administration, one into research and policy, and another into teaching roles of increasing responsibility and authority.  All involve higher compensation as one ascends the ladder.  This is a form of merit pay to which our teachers unions do not object, because the basis for ascending these ladders is objective and fair and the idea of such ladders contributes to teacher professionalism rather than detracting from it.  Here again, the creation of such career ladders ought to be viewed as an integral part of a state policy for making teaching more attractive as a career to highly capable and ambitious youngsters choosing their careers, as a key part of a system that balances higher standards for becoming a teacher with greater rewards for choosing teaching as a career.  Right now, as things stand, it is the districts that are responsible for structuring teachers' careers.  But, if the new licensing standards are going to include provisions for licenses at different points along a career ladder, then the state is going to have to play the lead role here and, once the state structures the form of the career ladders, stipulates the standards that teachers will have to meet to get a license to assume these new roles in the schools and tells the schools of education what kinds of programs designed to what standards will be required to educate and train teachers to assume these new roles, then the state role in matters formerly reserved for school districts will be transformed.

I use these examples to make a simple point, which is that the chief state school officers need to see their role not just as making changes in the things for which they are currently responsible, but in envisioning how a whole new system might work, and as providing the leadership in their state for bringing all the parties to the table who are needed to make that new system work.  

The Chief's report nicely captures the reality that our state departments of education have not, until now, been seen as responsible for the whole education system, but only for certain limited functions within that system.  That leaves no one in charge.  I've tried to make the point that making major strides in teacher quality will require a new system, and someone has to take the lead in building that system.  The only possible candidate is the state department of education and the state board, working under the direction and with the leadership of the chief state school officer.

My purpose here is not to fault this report—it is a good beginning—but to call for the chiefs to see their role in larger terms, because that is the only way they can succeed in this most important of all the tasks they face.  I might say that I worried, too, about the lack of specificity in the report about what the standards should be for teachers' mastery of subject matter and for mastery of craft.  But, speaking as a veteran of commission management, I can well imagine that the managers of this commission felt that the agreements they were able to get were impressive enough for the first round on this topic, and decided to leave issues like this for another day.  To which I would say—fair enough. ]]> - Marc Tucker http://blogs.edweek.org/edweek/top_performers/2012/12/the_chief_state_school_officers_weigh_in_on_teacher_quality.html