Checking, SpaceX, and the Quest for Agreement

In a thought-provoking piece in the Hechinger Report a couple weeks ago, IES director Mark Schneider and Schmidt Futures honcho Kumar Garg made a compelling case for a revolution in education testing. The authors correctly explained that practically nobody likes today’s assessments, they’re expensive, and many people would like to do away with them altogether. Then they explained why abolishing testing would be a really bad idea, as it would deny valuable information to both educators and policymakers and would scrap a major tool for pursuing equity.

Rather than crusading against testing, say Schneider and Garg, we need the equivalent of a “SpaceX” for assessment—a reimagining, redesigning, and reconstructing of how this can and should be done in the mid-twenty-first century.

They’re right—right that this needs to happen, and right that “improvements are available now.” In particular, a suite of technologies that are already widely used in some private-sector testing can and should be embraced by state and national assessments, as well as the private tests that aren’t yet making maximum use of them. Artificial intelligence can generate test questions and evaluate student responses. “Natural language processing” illustrates the kind that can appraise essay-style responses, thus helping to liberate testing from multiple-choice items that can be fed through a scanner. Computer-adaptive testing (already a feature of the Smarter-Balanced coalition, though constrained by ESSA’s insistence on “grade-level” testing) saves time, reduces student frustration, and yields far more information on what kids do and don’t know, particularly at the high and low ends of the achievement distribution.

Schneider and Garg itemize several necessary elements of the paradigm shift they seek:

First, we should strive to set ambitious goals for where assessment innovation can go…. Second, government agencies and research funders should invest in advanced computational methods in operational assessments…. Third, fostering talent is critical. New testing designs will require new test researchers, developers, statisticians and AI experts who think outside the box…. But, most importantly, we must recognize that the status quo is broken. We need new thinking, new methods and new talent.

That’s not the whole story, of course. There are plenty of other needs, mostly involving the surmounting of present-day obstacles. Government bureaucracies are set in their ways. Procurement systems are ossified and formulaic. Digital divides are real. And the more tests rely on technology, the greater the risk that those divides will worsen the inequalities that the tests reveal.

Moreover, all sorts of state and federal laws and regulations are involved. The intersection of assessments with academic standards and ESSA-driven accountability regimes is genuinely complicated. And then there’s the matter of “trendlines,” the desire to know how next year’s assessment results compare with last year’s, so that we can calculate growth, operate our accountability system, know whether gaps are closing and reforms are working, etc.

Those aren’t trivial considerations, especially in long-running testing programs such as the National Assessment of Educational Progress. Big changes in how tests are constructed and conducted are certain to collide with the barriers noted above, but also run a high risk of forcing trend lines to start anew.

Schneider and Garg say these challenges are worth tackling. That it’s already a time of flux, and agitation in the testing realm may well mean they’re right and the time is at hand. On the other hand, as former Achieve major domo Michael Cohen says, the time may not be right “for a major effort to create better tests because nobody wants to talk about tests. People are tired of standards, tests, and accountability. They just don’t want to deal with it anymore.”

It surely won’t be easy to reach anything resembling consensus across the education field, not in these politically schismatic times when people want so many different things from tests, and want to deploy and restrict them in so many different ways—or abolish them altogether.

Dissensus is visible today among the twenty-six members of the National Assessment Governing Board (NAGB) as they struggle with replacement of the twelve-year-old framework that underlies NAEP’s reading tests. Intended to take effect with the 2026 assessment cycle, the proposed new framework that emerged from an extensive attempt to “vision” the future of reading has prompted much controversy. In a scathing review of last year’s draft, David Steiner of Johns Hopkins and Mark Bauerlein of Emory suggested that the new framework would, in effect, define deviancy down by masking the problem of weak background knowledge that compromises reading comprehension among many youngsters, particularly those from disadvantaged homes. They also spotlighted the great risk that the proposed new framework would break NAEP’s reading trendline, which extends all the way back to 1992.

Whether the changes subsequently made in the proposed framework are substantive or cosmetic remains a topic of intense debate within the governing board, which over the decades has been celebrated for its capacity to reach consensus on important decisions. Whether that can happen next month when NAGB is supposed to adopt the new reading framework remains to be seen.

The point here, however, is not about NAEP or NAGB. It’s about the difficulty of achieving consensus in today’s testing arguments—and the difficult trendline issue, which is a big deal not only for NAEP, but also for many state assessments, as well as private-sector testing efforts such as SAT, ACT, and NWEA.

Statistical and psychometric legerdemain sometimes makes it possible to “bridge” or “equate” scores across a major shift in testing methods, content, or scoring arrangements. That’s how the NAEP reading trendline, for example, survived the installation of a new assessment in 2009, and how the College Board has been able to publish equivalency tables each time it has “re-centered” the SAT.

Perhaps such bridges can span the divide between today’s testing systems and the “SpaceX” version that Schneider and Garg envision. Or perhaps we must steel ourselves to sacrificing trend data in pursuit of other benefits that the SpaceX version would bring. It’s a close call—and an issue that will make consensus-seeking even harder, particularly in governmental assessments, such as those that states are required by ESSA to conduct, as well as NAEP itself.

A revolution in testing is less fraught—at least less political—in privately-operated programs, especially the kind that are more commonly used for formative and diagnostic purposes rather than tied to school accountability. Reconceptualizing those tests and their uses might yield additional gains. If more schools deployed them regularly and painlessly, then used them both for instructional decisions by teachers and to keep parents posted on their children’s learning gains and gaps, perhaps there’d be less need for and pressure on end-of-year accountability testing. Maybe it could happen less frequently or, NAEP-style, involve just a sample of students and schools.

Yes, it’s time for some fresh thinking! Are you listening, Elon Musk?

Chester E. Finn, Jr., is a Distinguished Senior Fellow and President Emeritus at the Thomas B. Fordham Institute. He is also a Senior Fellow at Stanford’s Hoover Institution.

This post originally appeared on the Fordham Institute’s Flypaper blog.

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Congress must have the guts to handle the pharmaceutical industry.

Here’s the truth: the pharmaceutical industry in the United States has never lost a political struggle. They can charge the American people any price they want, any day of the week — that has got to end. Congress must finally have the guts to take on the pharmaceutical industry.

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Supreme Court Hears Argument in Student Speech Case

Brandi Levy, a former cheerleader at Mahanoy Area High School in Mahanoy City, Pennsylvania, was suspended for a year from her junior-varsity cheerleading squad for a vulgar image she sent via Snapchat.

On Wednesday, the Supreme Court heard what had a chance to be the most consequential student speech case since its 1969 ruling in Tinker v. Des Moines. Controversies over whether schools can punish off-campus speech have been simmering for years, going back deep into the mists of internet time and involving now-fossilized platforms like Myspace. Lower courts have split over the issue—precisely, whether Tinker’s rule that schools can regulate student speech that could substantially disrupt the educational process applies beyond the schoolhouse gate—and the Supreme Court has refused to address it. This case, Mahanoy Area School District v. B.L. could allow the Supreme Court to provide some clarity for both schools and students.

If oral argument is any indication, clarity might not be forthcoming. The justices did all seem concerned about allowing schools to regulate off-campus speech that would normally be protected by the First Amendment. The court seems unlikely to accept the school district’s arguments which, despite its claims to the contrary, would give educators broad latitude to regulate any speech “directed” at the school. However, several justices seemed to think that the facts of this case don’t lend themselves to the creation of a general rule. There did not seem to be a split along the conservative/liberal division often seen in contentious cases.

Previously, the court has ruled that schools can only punish student speech that violates the rights of others, disrupts the educational process, is lewd or lascivious, is school sponsored, or is pro-drug. But those rulings only applied to speech in school. The internet complicates the issue. Teenagers can now open their digital mouths and have a vast online audience, not just a few friends at a weekend party, hear what they have to say.

The controversy in Mahanoy emerged when high school sophomore Brandi Levy was suspended for a year from her junior-varsity cheerleading squad for a vulgar image she sent via Snapchat after being denied a chance to try out for the varsity squad. Snapchat is supposed to protect juveniles from thoughtless decisions by allowing the quick deletion of their photos and posts. As Levy learned, though, social media is forever, even with Snapchat. Someone took a screencap of Levy’s Snap of herself and a friend holding up their middle fingers, with the words “f— school f— softball f— cheer f— everything” superimposed on the image. The image inevitably made it to her coach, leading to her punishment. Levy challenged her suspension in federal court and won at both the district and appellate level.

At oral argument the rural Pennsylvania school district’s lawyer, Lisa Blatt, argued that Tinker’s holding that schools can regulate disruptive speech should be expanded to apply to off campus speech if the speech is “directed” at the school. In fact, she argued that this has been the operative rule ever since Tinker even though the court has never endorsed it. The location of student speech, Blatt argued, doesn’t matter because the internet is “ubiquitous.” This claim won’t succeed. Justice Breyer pointed out that the facts of this case seemed to show that Levy’s speech didn’t cause a substantial disruption in school. She used vulgar speech, but Breyer worried that, if vulgarity is the standard, schools would be punishing students all the time given the vocabulary choices of adolescents. Justice Alito was concerned by the idea that schools should be able to punish speech that “targets the school,” as Blatt contended. That would not provide a “clear rule” that could be implemented without being abused by schools. The district believed that everything should be context dependent, which would provide wide latitude for schools to decide what counted as school related. Justice Gorsuch pointed out that, while the school district said that it would not be able to punish political and religious speech, the district’s position would in fact allow educators to do just that if they decided that the speech would cause a substantial disruption.

While the district’s proposed standard seems unlikely to be accepted by the court, it’s not clear that Levy’s will be accepted either. Her lawyer, David Cole of the American Civil Liberties Union, argued that the standard should be whether the student is under the school’s supervision. Schools should not have the authority to intervene unless the speech falls into an already unprotected category such as a true threat. This line is clear, but some justices seemed unenthusiastic about drawing it. Justice Breyer, for instance, said “I’m frightened to death of writing a standard.” Justice Alito even floated the idea of dismissing the case as improvidently granted since the facts might not lend themselves to “address[ing] the broad issues” of student online speech, particularly since it involved an extracurricular activity and not the regular school environment.

The only certainty after oral argument is that the court will not rule in favor of the school district. Too many justices thought that the punishment was disproportionate to the offense or would allow schools to punish clearly protected speech. Justice Kavanaugh pointed out that Levy just blew off steam like millions of other kids who get cut from a team. However, the eventual decision, one fears, will be sufficiently opaque that it will fail to give much guidance to schools. Overall, this case will be a clear victory for Levy but perhaps not clear enough to prevent future litigation.

Joshua Dunn is professor of political science and director of the Center for the Study of Government and the Individual at the University of Colorado Colorado Springs.

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We need to make public colleges

Some 50 or 60 years ago, you could attend major public colleges and universities in America virtually tuition-free. That was America back then. If we could do it 60 years ago, we can do it today.

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"Reopening Hesitancy" Threatens Fall 2021

Education Next’s senior editor, Paul Peterson, recently spoke with John Bailey, visiting fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and author of AEI’s extensive research review “Is It Safe to Reopen Schools?”

Paul Peterson: Is it safe to reopen U.S. schools?

John Bailey

John Bailey: Based on the research we summarized in our report, yes, it is possible to bring students back in for in-person learning in a way that’s safe and responsible. The body of research that’s been amassed over the last year has pointed us toward how to do it. There are schools that have safely reopened in Europe, in the United States, and all around the world, with very few cases of Covid-19 among teachers and students.

In your report, you note that between March and October of 2020, fewer than one child in a million died of Covid-19. Of course, any death is one too many, but by comparison, 15 kids out of a million died in a transport accident, nine out of a million died of suicide, and five out of a million died of homicide. So, why did we ever close schools in the first place?

It’s a great question. At this time last year, I was squarely in the camp that schools should close, partly because the pandemic playbooks say that when you have a novel virus, particularly a respiratory virus, you close schools early, for two reasons: one, because kids tend to transmit respiratory viruses much more efficiently than adults do, and two, because kids tend to be the most susceptible to severe disease and even death. But over the past year, we’ve gotten to know a lot about this virus, and that it doesn’t act like a typical respiratory illness—that children tend to be the least symptomatic, have the least disease severity, and have the lowest numbers of hospitalizations and fatalities. There’s even some open question as to whether they transmit the virus as efficiently as adults do.

So, it was right to close schools early, but it’s been absolutely wrong to keep schools closed, given the accumulating body of research that we have on the virus and on the various mitigation measures that can help keep teachers and kids safe in the classroom.

The further point is that even if children are spreading the disease, is anybody getting sick? Is anybody going to the hospital? What is the seriousness of the risk?

There are two ways to look at that: one, what’s the risk to the students, and two, what’s the risk to the teachers? Meaning, students may spread the virus to one another, but they’re largely asymptomatic and may not even know they’ve been infected, but teachers could be potentially infected with more serious consequences. And again, the research shows that kids under the age of 10 seem to be far less susceptible to severe disease than high-school students. And they seem far less likely even to transmit the virus. That’s not totally settled, but it’s mostly settled.

With that in mind, the bigger risks for kids are from being out of school. We tried to document some of that in our report. Kids have the least amount to gain from closed schools and the most to lose. They have lost academic progress, which translates into future earnings loss.

Many children are also facing mental-health challenges, which we’re only now beginning to get a clearer picture of. And then there are the incredible challenges we’ve created for parents, particularly working mothers. One study found that in cases where schools were online, mothers tended to be out of the workforce. The San Francisco Federal Reserve estimates that about 1.7 to 2 million working mothers left their
jobs because they needed to be at home with their kids.

These are huge costs that we’ve asked mothers and kids to bear for very little public-health benefit from having schools closed and very little protective benefit for the kids themselves.

The teachers unions are highly op-posed to reopening the schools now. Why are the unions coming up with every excuse they can dream of to keep the schools from opening up?

I wish I knew. What’s surprising is that the American Federation of Teachers is disagreeing with the scientific bodies and with a pretty robust set of research studies that show that safely reopening the schools is possible. It’s been very frustrating, because it feels like it’s a never-ending set of moving goalposts. And teachers are essential workers, but they have been given many more protections than a lot of other essential workers.

This doesn’t mean that every single teacher should come back into the classroom. Some who have preexisting health conditions should absolutely stay home, but we have learned a lot, and we can do a lot to make classrooms very safe for teachers.

Do you think the schools will be universally open this coming fall? Or will the closings go into another academic year?

It’s my hope that most schools will be open. I was feeling hopeful until I saw the AFT, again, disagree with the CDC and the vast majority of scientific bodies out there. It’s hard to anticipate what the unions’ disagreements will be in a couple of months. So maybe that ends up disrupting the reopening of schools for the coming year.

The wild card we need to watch is that with these new variants of the virus, there’s the risk that at least one or two of them will evade the efficacy of the vaccines. One could imagine a worst-case scenario where a wave of such a variant hits, and that could end up closing some communities and schools.

Another challenge right now is that the fear mongering that’s been taking place for the better part of a year has paralyzed a lot of families. Many parents don’t know who to believe. They hear from the superintendent that it’s safe to reopen.
They hear from the unions that it’s not. So in some instances, schools are open, but a sizable number of parents have kept their kids in remote learning.

And the same way that we have vaccine hesitancy, we have “reopening hesitancy.” Some people are waiting for something to make them feel a bit more confident that it’s safe to send their kids back. That is a population we need to listen to and better understand, because I could imagine scenarios this fall where some parents want to keep their kids home until there’s a vaccine available for the kids. What we know is that a vaccine won’t be available for younger children until 2022. And for older children, probably not until the late summer or early fall of 2021.

If you go by the vaccine rule, you’re going to have another year with schools closed. That would be absurdly costly to an entire generation of students.

That’s right.

This is an edited excerpt from an Education Exchange podcast, which can be heard at educationnext.org.

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Advice and Caution on Purchasing a College Education

Making College Pay: An Economist Explains How to Make a Smart Bet on Higher Education
by Beth Akers
Crown, 2021, $25; 176 pages.

The Price You Pay for College: An Entirely New Road Map for the Biggest Financial Decision Your Family Will Ever Make
by Ron Lieber
HarperCollins, 2021, $27.99; 368 pages.

As reviewed by Christopher Avery

In a typical year, more than 2 million recent U.S. high-school graduates begin college in the fall. Students and families, in taking the huge financial leap into the college market, face both uncertainty and risk. Since the vast majority of students receive at least some merit- or need-based aid, it isn’t possible to identify the actual price for a given four-year college without gaining admission to that institution and completing an arduous financial-aid process. Further, while decades of evidence demonstrate that, in general, a college degree increases an individual’s earning power, the choice to go to college still involves financial risk. That’s because many people enroll but do not complete a degree and because one’s future wages are highly uncertain in any case.

Two new books, Making College Pay by Beth Akers and The Price You Pay for College by Ron Lieber, aim to orient families to a view of college as a financial investment and to help them make better decisions as a result. Both authors have been studying this subject for years, and their expertise shines through in the information and insights they present.

Beth Akers

The strength of Making College Pay is its concise focus. The text is short, and Akers explicitly notes in her conclusion that she has not taken on the questions of “where to go, what to study, how much to pay.” Instead, she provides a framework based on specific principles: know what you want from college, consider cost-benefit tradeoffs, and account for risk. She also identifies several best practices in paying for college. Akers counsels that borrowing for college can be prudent, especially at the below-market rates offered by government loans, and that students should be realistic about the likely future earnings corresponding to each college and choice of major. The author does readers a great service by clearly highlighting and explaining these fundamental points.

The last third of Making College Pay shifts abruptly away from this straightforward approach to argue that further investing precepts should apply to higher education. One chapter directs families to consider novel loan arrangements to manage the risk of borrowing for college—not only income-based repayment, which is now available to all borrowers taking federal loans, but also insurance policies that would offer payouts for students who do not complete a college degree in a certain amount of time. She also describes income-based repayment plans offered by colleges. The following chapter argues for unbundling college services in the way one might choose to pay à la carte for individual television channels rather than purchasing a standard cable service package, so that students could, for example, choose to live on campus, paying full price for housing, yet take courses remotely, at a reduced price.

These suggestions are largely fantastical. Private insurance policies related to degree completion are rarely, if ever, available, and few colleges offer the conditional loan-repayment programs that Akers espouses. Similarly, while Akers is enamored of à la carte or “pay-as-you-go” college pricing, she is only able to reference a single entrepreneurial effort (which failed) in this direction.

The Price You Pay for College is decidedly more ambitious in scope. As a longtime personal-finance columnist, Lieber is perplexed by the failure of high-priced colleges to clearly communicate their value proposition. “In all of my attempts at information gathering on campuses or on college websites,” he writes, “not once did I find a pamphlet that read ‘This is why this place is worth $50,000 extra each year.’ Trust me, I looked far and wide. Most colleges and universities, no matter the type, don’t seem to want to address this in a qualitative way, let alone a quantitative one.” The book addresses this concern, in part, by attempting a comprehensive introduction to the college experience. Each of the 35 entertaining chapters introduces a fundamental topic, complete with references to and sophisticated interpretation of cutting-edge academic research. I found the chapters on the importance of faculty mentorship and independent study projects and the discussion of the growing need for on-campus mental-health services especially useful. Readers who aren’t drawn to these topics will undoubtedly find value in other chapters.

Ron Lieber

One organizing principle of The Price You Pay for College is that it empowers parents to gather information by asking incisive questions. “The thing that families need in this process and that all too many lack is a reportorial mindset and a consumerist approach,” Lieber writes. “Where is the information that I need that may not be easy to find?” Many chapters provide detailed lists of questions to ask colleges that one’s child is considering. Some of the questions are unusually specific (for example, queries about the details of the tenure process or the percentage of alumni couples among graduates), and some are quite confrontational. Lieber writes: “It’s worth asking any school that demands random assignment [of freshman roommates] why it puts some students into that spot. Cite the studies and ask them to defend their oppositional approach. It’s also worth asking schools that allow roommate requests just how little diversity exists within those pairings and how it defends that result.”

Lieber seems to believe wholeheartedly that gathering this information will bring peace of mind. “Hope comes from knowing what to ask,” he writes, but I doubt that his approach is a panacea. Taking the book’s prescriptions seriously would leave me as a parent feeling irresponsible for not having the energy and wherewithal to ask all these questions, as well as stressed and bewildered by the prospect of having to make sense of the responses.

On two fronts, Lieber’s book falls short of its stated goal of providing an “entirely new road map” for choosing and paying for college. First, it neglects to situate saving for college in the broader context of saving for retirement. In his New York Times guide “How to Win at Retirement Savings,” Lieber argues forcefully for the power of compound interest and the importance of saving from an early age, but he makes little attempt to cover that ground in this book. Similarly, his 2015 article “Why It Makes Good Sense to Save for College Now” provides the crystalline insight that “not saving also puts your family at risk of picking the college that is the best financial choice and not the one that has the best shot at helping your child thrive,” yet his presentation of “The Big Financial Plan” in The Price You Pay for College is much less decisive.

A second and more essential problem with this book is that it overemphasizes the perspective of parents. College embodies an important transition in adolescent development. Parents take responsibility for educational choices for their small children, but when those children become adults, they are expected to make their own decisions, such as where to live and which jobs to pursue. Lieber’s anecdotes are most compelling when they describe collaboration between children and parents, balancing students’ college preferences against the limited finances of the family. But by explicitly orienting the book to parents and framing the central question as “how can you be sure that you’re picking the right school and spending the right amount?” Lieber presumes that the power of the checkbook is paramount and misses the opportunity to offer a vision in which high-school students and their parents work together to navigate the college landscape.

I suggest an alternate approach centered in the interests and goals of applicants rather than the financial concerns of parents. Lieber laments the lack of an “algorithm to measure value,” but his quest for a “clear formula for what to pay” is misguided. Because each person has unique characteristics, the value of attending a particular college necessarily differs from one student to the next. This realization suggests that prospective students rather than their parents should take the lead in researching colleges, comparing their strengths and weaknesses based on the students’ own interests and character traits. Lieber wisely advises that students sit in on classes as part of a college visit and stay overnight if possible. Students could build on these suggestions at home, first by cooperating with parents to make a list of colleges that are both appealing and within financial reach. They could then use the colleges’ websites to craft scenarios for course sequences and find clubs and activities of interest, and then ask current students about the robustness of those activities on their campus. The more concrete the picture of one’s likely daily experience—and how that experience might differ across colleges—the easier it should be for students and parents to assess the virtues of more- and less-expensive college options.

Despite the angst inherent in the college-application process, from worries about getting admitted to concerns about how much to pay, most college graduates report happiness with their college experience and with their lives more generally. With these happy facts in mind, I recommend that applicants and their families aim for Lieber’s attitude of hope about one’s college prospects while being mindful of the risks Akers emphasizes in her book.

Christopher Avery is the Roy E. Larsen Professor of Public Policy at the Harvard Kennedy School.

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The Education Exchange: Why Have Not the Schools in Massachusetts Opened?

A senior fellow at the Pioneer Institute, Charles D. Chieppo, join’s Paul E. Peterson to discuss Pioneer’s latest poll, which finds mixed views on Massachusetts schools’ response to the pandemic, including opinions on individual teachers, school districts and teachers unions.

The full poll, “Massachusetts Residents’ Perceptions of K-12 Education During the Covid-19 Pandemic,” is available now from Pioneer.

Follow The Education Exchange on Soundcloud, Apple Podcasts, Google Play, Stitcher or here on Education Next.

— Education Next

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Title: The Education Exchange: Why Haven’t the Schools in Massachusetts Opened?
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Published Date: Mon, 26 Apr 2021 10:00:33 +0000

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We must cut military costs.

The U.S. already spends more on the military than the next 12 nations combined. Instead of increasing the bloated Pentagon budget, we must invest invest in jobs, education, housing and health care.

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The Tarnished Guard of Qualified Immunity

In this image from video, former Minneapolis police Officer Derek Chauvin, center, is taken into custody as his attorney, Eric Nelson, left, looks on, after the verdicts were read at Chauvin’s trial for the 2020 death of George Floyd, Tuesday, April 20, 2021, at the Hennepin County Courthouse in Minneapolis, Minn.

The tragic killing of Daunte Wright at the hands of a Brooklyn Center, Minnesota, police officer, even as former Minneapolis officer Derek Chauvin stood trial nearby for the murder of George Floyd, has led to renewed calls for federal legislation aimed at reducing police violence. Efforts to enact such legislation stalled in Congress during the waning months of the Trump administration last year. Among activists’ top priorities at that time, however, was the elimination of “qualified immunity,” the legal doctrine that often shields police officers and other government officials—including educators—from financial liability for violating citizens’ civil rights.

In this issue’s cover story, Yale law professor Justin Driver examines the origins of qualified immunity and the case for reform, with special attention to the implications for K–12 education (see “Schooling Qualified Immunity,” features). Readers may be surprised to learn that cases involving teachers, principals, and school board members have been central to the doctrine’s evolution. Most notable was a 1975 Supreme Court case involving the suspension of three Arkansas students for spiking the punch at a high school social. It was in that case that the court first articulated the standard that plaintiffs cannot overcome the shield of qualified immunity unless they demonstrate that the government official in question violated “clearly established constitutional rights.”

As Driver reports, this narrow standard has transformed qualified immunity from a sensible protection for officials carrying out their public duties in good faith into something approaching blanket immunity from legal accountability. If plaintiffs cannot identify a binding precedent involving a government official who violated the Constitution in a nearly identical manner to their own circumstances, they are doomed to lose. This standard has shielded educators who have engaged in “heinous conduct that, properly understood, contravenes clearly established law,” Driver writes. Courts have even granted immunity to educators who have strip-searched students to look for minor contraband, simply because there was no previous case in which someone had infringed on a student’s rights in precisely the same way.

In June 2020, in the aftermath of George Floyd’s killing, the National Education Association and the American Federation of Teachers both signed onto a letter calling on Congress to enact police reform. Among their demands was to “end the qualified immunity doctrine which prevents police from being held legally accountable when they break the law.” A bill that passed the House of Representatives last summer, the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act, would have done just that by eliminating qualified immunity as a defense from liability for police officers only. A second bill introduced in both chambers, the Ending Qualified Immunity Act, would have curbed the defense for all government officials, including educators.

Driver points out that there are good reasons to think separately about police officers and educators when it comes to qualified immunity. Unlike the daily work of police officers, teachers’ responsibilities are not “inherently imbued with legality and constitutionality.” A teacher’s infringement of her student’s rights is far less likely to lead to the loss of life. Finally, the constitutional case law that applies to police is well developed, while the law pertaining to teachers is sparse—and riddled with thorny questions about, for example, the precise scope of students’ free-speech rights both within and beyond school settings (see “What Teachers Spy in Homes over Zoom Winds Up in Court,” legal beat).

With Congress so far failing to act on calls to overhaul qualified immunity, some states are taking matters into their own hands. In April 2021, for example, the New Mexico legislature passed a law authorizing citizens to sue government employers under their state constitution if a state or local worker violates their rights. The measure applies equally to police departments and school districts, and it bans the use of qualified immunity as a defense. Nick Sibilla of the Institute for Justice, a libertarian law firm that testified in favor of the law, notes that the legislation’s supporters spanned the ideological spectrum, from the liberal American Civil Liberties Union to the conservative Americans for Prosperity.

The impulse for sweeping reform is understandable, but there may be some benefit to delaying at the federal level to observe the effects, if any, of the state legal changes. Will these laws translate into measurably improved police or teacher behavior? Or will they just mean more expensive insurance premiums for local governments (that is, the taxpayers) and larger paydays for plaintiffs’ lawyers? Like so many matters related to education policy, these are empirical questions to which experience will provide better answers.

Martin West

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A terrific nation is evaluated by how it deals with the vulnerable.

A great country is judged by how it treats the vulnerable. We must expand Medicare to cover eyeglasses, dental care and hearing aids.

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The Education Exchange: Skerry-- Why "Black Lives Matter" Matters

A professor of political science at Boston College, Peter Skerry, joins Paul E. Peterson to discuss Skerry’s latest piece in National Affairs, which looks at the Black Lives Matter movement, and how the Black experience in America differs from the immigrant experience of those groups originating from Latin America.

“Why ‘Black Lives Matter’ Matters” is available now at National Affairs.

Follow The Education Exchange on Soundcloud, Apple Podcasts, Google Play, Stitcher or here on Education Next.

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The post The Education Exchange: Skerry – Why “Black Lives Matter” Matters appeared first on Education Next.

By: Education Next
Title: The Education Exchange: Skerry – Why “Black Lives Matter” Matters
Sourced From: www.educationnext.org/the-education-exchange-skerry-why-black-lives-matter-matters/
Published Date: Mon, 19 Apr 2021 10:00:59 +0000

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Can Teaching Be Improved by Law?

North Carolina Gov. Roy Cooper, center, and lawmakers gather Wednesday, March 10, 2021, for a news conference to announce that leaders of the state legislature and the governor have reached an agreement to reopen the state’s K-12 public schools to full-time daily instruction in Raleigh. Gov. Cooper recently signed the “Excellent Public Schools Act” into law.

If there’s one lesson education policymakers might have learned in the last twenty-five years, it’s that it’s not hard to make schools and districts do something, but it’s extremely hard to make them do it well. There has always been at least a tacit assumption among policy wonks that schools and teachers are sitting on vast reserves of untapped potential that must either to be set free from bureaucratic constraints or shaken out of its complacency. Those of us who have spent lots of time in classrooms watching teachers trying their best and failing (or trying hard and failing ourselves) often find those assumptions curious. Compliance is easy. It’s competence that’s the rub.

Last week, North Carolina’s Democratic governor signed into law a bill that mandates, among other things, that schools in the state use a phonics-based approach to reading instruction. Dubbed the “Excellent Public Schools Act,” the law, which enjoyed strong bipartisan support, requires teachers to be trained in the “science of reading” and to base their reading instruction on it. Despite my inherent skepticism that policy alone can move classroom practice in the right direction, I’m having a hard time finding fault with what North Carolina has done.

I’m generally not keen to impose my preferred flavors of curriculum and instruction on schools, despite some well-defined opinions on such matters. But if there’s an exception, it’s early childhood literacy with curriculum and instruction grounded in the science of reading. The foundational role of proficient decoding and comprehension in academic success suggests that, while it might make sense to let a thousand flowers bloom in curriculum, instruction, and school models—vive la différence!—we have no more important shared task than getting kids to the starting line of basic literacy from the first days of school. So if I have any lingering technocratic impulses left, they’re limited to early childhood literacy and the “science of reading.” But the open question is whether literacy laws—from mandating phonics to third grade retention policies—can have a beneficial effect on classroom practice.

The kinds of measure that North Carolina has adopted are becoming increasingly common. My Fordham colleague Melissa Gutwein has identified at least twenty states (see Table 1) that have passed or are considering measures related to the science of reading. Some, like the new North Carolina law, require teachers to use instruction grounded in the science of reading, or require districts to use science-of-reading-based curricula. Others require teacher prep programs to teach the science of reading. The National Council on Teacher Quality recently reported that more than half of the elementary teacher prep programs it monitors and evaluates now embrace reading science, up from 35 percent just seven years ago. It’s taken at least a half century of advocacy against stiff resistance from the education establishment, the progressive left, and others, but without question, the “science of reading” is on the march, including through statehouses.

 

Table 1. States that have passed or are considering measures related to the science of reading

 

Still, not every literacy expert is convinced that we can legislate our way to reading proficiency. Among the skeptics is Tim Shanahan, the highly regarded emeritus professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago, who once was in charge of reading for the Chicago Public Schools. He notes that “there are only three things that improve reading achievement,” as far as he can tell: increasing the amount of productive reading instruction provided, ensuring that key elements of curriculum (phonemic awareness, phonies, fluency, etc.) are taught sufficiently, and improving the quality of instruction. “There are a handful of buttons that can be pushed policy-wise to try to get those three things to happen,” Shanahan tells me via email. But states that have adopted third grade retention policies and other literacy-focused measures have seen no improvement in reading achievement.

The current wave of “science of reading” laws is reminiscent of states that emulated Florida’s policy, nearly twenty years ago, to retain kids in third grade who weren’t reading proficiently. “Florida mandated that kids get taught what would today be referred to as the elements of the ‘science of reading,’” Shanahan points out. If your theory of change was that third grade retention policies would prompt schools and districts to provide more effective learning supports for teachers and students, that mostly hasn’t happened. States that jumped on the third grade retention bandwagon “adopted the retention part of the policy, but left out the curriculum, professional development, leadership guidance, etc. that had bolstered achievement in Florida,” he explains.

Yesterday it was Florida, today it’s Mississippi that is the apple of various state lawmakers’ eyes. But here, too, Shanahan notes the state has been chipping away at its low literacy levels for years, using federal, state, and private funding to ensure that Mississippi teachers were addressing the problems effectively.

Kymyona Burk echoes many of Shanahan’s points about effective literacy instruction and interventions, but is more sanguine about the role of state policy. And she had a front-row seat as Mississippi transformed itself into the literacy “it” state and one of the only bright spots in NAEP in recent years. Burk was the state literacy director at the Mississippi Department of Education, where she led the implementation of its heralded Literacy-Based Promotion Act. She now advises states on their literacy practices as Policy Director for Early Education at ExcelinEd, where she advocates for a comprehensive K–3 reading policy that “establishes supports and intensive reading interventions” in early elementary school to ensure grade-level reading by third grade. That playbook includes science of reading training for teachers, ongoing professional learning and literacy coaching, and strong assessment and parent notification provisions.

Burk, who is working with a network of sixteen states in her current role, gives the North Carolina law high marks for adhering to most of the “fundamental principles” that ExcelInEd sees as critical to effective K–3 reading policy. “The only component I did not see in their legislation deals with literacy coaches,” she tells me. According to Burk, “deploying boots on the ground” was a key component of the state’s success. “Once the teachers go to their training, and they’re back in the classrooms with their own students, who is there to really assist them in transferring what they learned that from the theory to practice?” she explains. Coaches, particularly in the lowest-performing schools, have been essential to Mississippi’s results.

Mississippi, not incidentally, was very much on the minds of North Carolina legislators in passing the Excellent Public Schools Act, according to Terry Stoops, who directs the Center for Effective Education at Raleigh’s John Locke Foundation. “There was some mounting pressure on legislators to try to replicate what Mississippi is doing,” he says. Lawmakers were “thinking that if Mississippi can move the needle on literacy instruction and literacy proficiency, then why can’t North Carolina? There’s an interesting state by state competitiveness going on.” That impulse, too, can only help efforts to improve reading outcomes.

Laws are a blunt instrument and not likely to improve classroom practice from afar. But for now, I choose to be guardedly optimistic that there is a productive role for policymakers, if not in mandating specific curricula, training, and support, then at least in establishing something of a market-making expectation that what schools do in the early grades must be grounded in the “science of reading,” and that every other impulse and interest—from ed schools to professional learning organizations to curriculum developers and publishers—should be singing from that same hymnal. Policymakers can build and sustain the conditions necessary, most particularly patience, for sound early reading practice to put down deeper roots and become the default setting in public education. Skepticism remains a virtue. But if the last few years’ worth of momentum leads to a broad and well-informed consensus about what effective reading instruction looks like—and builds the political will to stick with it for the long haul—it might yet be a winning formula.

With reporting by Melissa Gutwein.

Robert Pondiscio is senior fellow and vice president for external affairs at the Thomas B. Fordham Institute.

This post originally appeared on the Fordham Institute’s Flypaper blog.

The post Can Teaching Be Improved by Law? appeared first on Education Next.

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An Ode to Elementary Schools

If I had to name the most important institution in American life, and the one with the most potential for changing the course of our country, it would be the humble elementary school. Especially the 20,000 or so high-poverty elementary schools in the nation’s cities and inner-ring suburbs, educating millions of kids growing up in poor or working-class families.

Yes, of course, we also need to dramatically improve the other parts of our education system if we’re to help all young Americans fulfill their God-given potential. That includes making high-quality pre-K more widely accessible to those who need it most, upping the quality of our middle schools, and rethinking and improving our high schools. Not to mention revamping our post-secondary education system and overhauling our workforce training programs.

Still, if I were king for a day, or even just superintendent of a large district, I would spend at least twenty-three of my twenty-four hours in charge obsessing about elementary schools. And that’s for four big reasons.

First, these schools have the greatest potential impact on kids’ academic, social, and emotional progress. Partly that’s just basic math: Most children spend almost half of their K–12 time in elementary schools, usually six out of thirteen years. And those also happen to be the six years when kids tend to learn the most. To wit, the average student achievement gains during elementary school far outpace those seen before or after.

There’s no doubt that the zero-to-five period is also important, but most of that time is outside the control of any education system, including preschools. And no matter how great a preschool is, there’s only so much a three- or four-year-old can learn. There’s a reason that few tiny tots are doing fractions. Most young brains just aren’t ready for it. And sadly, we simply don’t see much progress in student achievement once students get to middle school and especially high school. That’s not to say that kids cannot learn more at those upper levels; more on that in a bit. But the potential is just not as great as it is for elementary schools.

The second reason to focus on elementary schools is that that’s where we have the best research evidence about what works.

This is most clearly the case when it comes to reading, where we have decades of settled science that systemically teaching students phonics and phonemic awareness is an essential step in early literacy development. We are also building a strong evidence base that content knowledge, in subjects like history, science, geography, and the arts, allows children to develop strong reading comprehension abilities.

But it’s not just in reading. In math, too, we now understand the importance of mastering basic math facts to automaticity, as well as the imperative of developing computational, conceptual, and problem-solving skills as students progress through the elementary grades.

And of course, elementary school is where we set a strong foundation for children’s social and emotional development, helping them develop a healthy attachment to schools, communities, their teachers, and peers—or not.

Again, that’s not to say we know nothing about evidence-based practices in preschool or in middle and high school. But that research base is thinner. The Acceleration Imperative—the crowd-sourced, evidenced-based recovery plan for elementary schools that Fordham recently helped to birth—is more than 120 pages long. It’s hard to imagine filling even half as many pages with solid evidence for middle or high schools.

The third reason to obsess about elementary schools is because of the broad consensus we enjoy in this country when it comes to these institutions, a consensus that’s missing when it comes to high school. As kids approach adulthood, we have to face difficult questions about what they should learn and how they should spend their time, depending on what they might want to do after graduation. Do we really need everyone to take a traditional college prep course of study? When should kids be able to start doing something more career and technically oriented? What about kids who are not likely to go to post-secondary education at all?

These are difficult questions with no easy answers. But not so at the elementary level. Almost everyone would agree that it’s critical for kids to learn to read, write, and do arithmetic at that age, plus get a basic grounding in the nation’s history and its civics institutions, as well as an introduction to science, music, and the arts. Of course there will be some parents who want something outside of the norm. But as we learned when we surveyed parents many years ago about their educational preferences, the vast majority just want a quality school for their kids that teaches them the basics.

Fourth and finally, if we could dramatically improve our elementary schools, it would transform our middle schools and high schools. That’s because the greatest challenges in secondary education relate to the problems of children entering not ready for the material that is presented there. It’s hard to build a sturdy secondary education on the wobbly foundation of an inadequate elementary education.

As I’ve been arguing in the context of making the case for an extra year of elementary school for most kids, even our very best elementary schools don’t get all of their students to grade level by the end of the fifth grade. Few even come close. Which is why most middle schools have to cope with kids coming in two or three grade levels behind. Marc Tucker reports that this just doesn’t happen in other put-together countries, and I have little reason to believe that he is wrong. Imagine what it would mean if it didn’t happen here either.

—

So that’s the case for focusing on elementary schools. What would that actually look like? We can return to our model recovery plan for many of the answers, which in reality is as much a vision for a high-performing elementary school as a blueprint for helping kids recover from the pandemic.

The steps aren’t easy but they are pretty obvious. It starts with the adoption of a high-quality curriculum, one that has received all greens from EdReports.org or been favorably vetted by the What Works Clearinghouse. That’s because high-quality instructional materials are the bridge between our aspirational standards and daily classroom practice. That’s a bridge too far for individual teachers to build themselves.

But as my colleague Robert Pondiscio argued recently, a great curriculum can’t teach itself. So the next step is to invest in steady, high-quality professional learning opportunities for teachers tied directly to the curriculum. Here, too, there is an organization available to vet providers: Rivet Education. And given the avalanche of federal cash coming to schools, there’s no excuse for them not to invest some serious resources into both the implementation of high-quality instructional materials and the improvement of teacher practice.

Next up is getting the school culture right. It’s hard to do without a great principal, but there are resources available to help here, too, including excellent surveys from Johns Hopkins and the University of Chicago that can help leaders gauge whether their culture is where it needs to be, especially as it pertains to setting and communicating high expectations for all students.

Put these pieces together in a coherent way, with vigorous leadership and inspired teachers, and the results for kids can be transformative. Just ask the high-performing, high-poverty charter schools that can be found in almost every large American city, and which embody these practices and are helping their students make dramatically more academic progress every year than their less effective counterparts.

—

At a time when there’s a lot of discussion in this country about infrastructure, both physical and human, let’s make sure we pay enough attention to the institutions that are most critical to America’s future. And that’s the 20,000 high-poverty elementary schools that can make or break a child’s opportunity to fulfill their potential—and might make or break our hopes of rebooting the American Dream, as well.

Michael J. Petrilli is president of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, visiting fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution, and an executive editor of Education Next.

This post originally appeared on the Fordham Institute’s Flypaper blog.

The post An Ode to Elementary Schools appeared first on Education Next.

By: Michael J. Petrilli
Title: An Ode to Elementary Schools
Sourced From: www.educationnext.org/ode-to-elementary-schools-greatest-potential-impact-academic-social-emotional-progress/
Published Date: Thu, 15 Apr 2021 14:25:40 +0000

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End endless wars.

20 years of war is enough. 2,500 brave men and women losing their lives is enough. The expenditure of $2 trillion is enough. I applaud what President Biden has done in ending our nation’s longest war.

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