School Leader

Reflections from the ECS National Policy Forum, Part I

I was greatly honored last year to be appointed by Kentucky Governor Matt Bevin as a commissioner to the Education Commission of the States. ECS is an interstate compact formed in the 1960s to serve as a policy and idea-sharing network. Among the many services it provides to education policy makers is its annual National Forum on Education Policy, which I've been delighted to attend this week. In a couple of posts I want to share some key ideas and reflections I'm taking home with me.

Open Enrollment. On Wednesday I had the chance to attend a concurrent session on expanding school choice through open enrollment policies. We've had some very preliminary conversations in Kentucky about the implications of such a policy, which would basically allow students to attend any public school in the state where there is an opening available, even if it is outside the district where the child's family resides, and state and federal education dollars would flow with them to their school of choice. Under current Kentucky law, districts may voluntarily enter into transfer agreements with one another and negotiate terms. Open enrollment would essentially require all districts to abide by a statewide inter-district transfer policy.

Instinctively I like this idea because I believe in expanding education options so that all families, regardless of their income or ZIP code, have a better chance of finding a school that meets their child's needs. I am uncomfortable with the idea that politicians or education bureaucrats could tell a family where their child has to attend school. But every policy comes with implementation challenges and unintended consequences, and it is important to consider these early in the conversation. In the ECS session I attended we learned about how open enrollment policies work in Arizona and Florida (according to a recent ECS report, 14 states have some form of "mandatory" open enrollment). Here are some key considerations I noted that would need to be thoughtfully addressed in any proposed open enrollment law:

• Will some students be given preference to exercise open enrollment? Some states stipulate that students who meet certain criteria be given priority for openly enrolling in another school, such as disability status, having a parent in the active-duty military, being in a failing school, etc. In some cases the children of employees at the school also have priority. Arizona stipulates that an open enrollee may never "bump" aside a student who actually resides in the school's catchment zone if space is limited.
• Will parents of open enrollees be provided transportation? Most states leave it to parents to arrange transportation for students who attend in another district, but this can mean that for some families, open enrollment is not a practical option. Dawn Wallace from the Arizona Governor's office reported that, in practice, schools work closely with parents to mitigate this challenge, providing transportation to students if the parent can at least get the child to a bus stop within district, or actually sending busses across district lines where there is sufficient demand from open enrollees.
• Will there be windows for open enrollment and when and how will education funds be transferred? In Kentucky, where we have many small districts, an abrupt loss of several students before the beginning of a school year could have negative affects on school funding when teachers are already under contract and school budgets are already established based on anticipated enrollment. And open enrollment policy would need to consider when to transfer education dollars for open enrollees and the potential impact on their "resides" school.
• What will we do about athletics? Will open enrollees be allowed to play sports in their new school? What will prevent schools from engaging in recruitment for athletic purposes? Arizona prohibits open enrollees from playing athletics at all. Florida, which has just adopted a more sweeping open enrollment process, has not addressed this issue, so only time will tell how this will play out. States might stipulate that an open enrollee is prohibited from participating in athletics during the first year of transfer. It's unfortunate that this may be one of the biggest areas of concern, but athletic passions are a reality that must be considered.
• Will students who have been expelled from one district be allowed to open enroll elsewhere? Existing state law may have some implications for this, but policymakers will need to consider when and under what circumstances a school might be allowed to refuse a student's open enrollment application, even if room is available for them.
• How will local taxpayers view this policy? Families of open enrollees don't normally pay school taxes in the district they now attend, which means that in effect, local taxpayers are more heavily subsidizing these students in comparison to students whose families reside there. It would be a good sign of a school's quality if many students from outside the district were clamoring to get in, but there's a point at which taxpayers may grow resistant, especially if district leaders want to increase tax rates.

These are complex issues and some people would look at this list and conclude that open enrollment just isn't worth the work it would take to address these risks and challenges. In fact, a participant sitting next to me threw up her hands at the end of the session and said, "All this just confirmed my worst fears about open enrollment!"

But I don't see it this way. I wrote recently about Andy Smarick's analysis of education policy through the prism of paradigms. If you accept that "differentiation and choice" is a superior model for education delivery, as opposed to the traditional "territorial exclusive franchise model," then you also understand that such a paradigm shift presents a totally different set of policy challenges. And you accept these challenges as the price of prioritizing parent choice and a pluralism of educational options over a system that prioritizes standardization and district control.

I think the potential positive impacts of open enrollment are worth taking on these new challenges, but I do urge us to pay close attention to these and other risks and unintended consequences as we're crafting a new policy. And I'm very grateful to ECS for the chance to learn from other states.

Equity and state autonomy. There was good discussion in a plenary session yesterday morning about the equity implications of the federal Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) in that states now have considerably more leeway in how to hold schools accountable for closing achievement gaps. Will states really do so without federal pressure? One panelist even went so far as to evoke the ugly history of using "states' rights" to justify discriminatory practices to express his concern about this.

I can only speak for Kentucky, but I know the Kentucky Department of Education and the Kentucky Board of Education have made addressing achievement gaps and raising achievement overall the highest concern in development of our ESSA plan. In our draft plan no school can achieve the top two performance levels if it has serious achievement gaps, regardless of how it is doing on other measures. And we are having hard conversations about how to set improvement targets that convey our sense of urgency on this matter.

I don't often directly invoke my religious views on education policy topics, but here I think Catholic Christian social teaching has a useful lens to offer and one that might appeal to non-Catholics and non-Christians as well. Tomes have been written on this by people far more expert than me, but in brief, Catholic social teaching rests on two equal pillars: subsidiarity and solidarity.

Subsidiarity is the principle that decision-making power should rest at the most local level possible and practical. This doesn't exclude making decisions at higher levels of authority, including in some cases a national level, but that generally we should prioritize the authority of the individuals, groups, and other entities closest to the problems we're trying to address. Solidarity, however, compels all decisions, regardless of who is making them, to prioritize concerns of equity, justice, and the dignity of individuals. Every policy should be questioned as to its implications for "the least of these." 

Of course policy makers can easily disregard these principles, but for me this framework of subsidiarity and solidarity helps affirm the value of states as the key level of authority over education, while compelling an urgent focus on issues of equity and justice. Furthermore, I would just point out that the federal mandates under the old No Child Left Behind Act did not, in fact, bring greater equity or close achievement gaps, even if they did encourage a greater (and long overdue) focus on these issues. It's time, in my opinion, to once again let states take the lead in this regard (subsidiarity), with stakeholders holding state leaders accountable for ensuring every student has the chance to achieve (solidarity).

In my next post I'll reflect on some other important themes of the ECS National Forum, including career and technical education and school funding.

Usual disclaimer: All opinions expressed on this website are mine alone and do not reflect the perspectives of Western Kentucky University (where I am associate professor of educational administration, leadership, and research) or the Kentucky Board of Education (where I serve as a member).

Related posts:

• A School Choice Primer, Part I, Part II, and Part III
• Why the education establishment feels so threatened by school choice
• What education accountability can (and cannot) do, Part I and Part II

What education accountability can (and cannot) do, Part II

In my last post, I reflected on the work (and worry) going into revising Kentucky's education accountability system. I argued that such systems really do two things: 1) they  convey vital information to help educators and the public know how schools are doing well and where they need to improve, and 2) they encourage schools to make those improvements. But I concluded my post by emphasizing that the accountability system cannot - in itself - actually make schools improve.

At best, the accountability system sends signals indicating where there is a problem. At the local level, it then falls to parents, educators, and the broader school community to take action in response to specific school performance issues. At the state level, legislators, the Kentucky Board of Education, and  other officials might develop strategies to address patterns and trends in statewide school performance.

Local strategies for school improvement might include changing local leadership, the adoption of new curricular or instructional strategies, new tax levies, etc. At the state level, improvement strategies might include changes in education standards, school governance structures, improvements in financing, and state-funded initiatives to support local efforts. But I contend that whatever the state does to create the capacity for education improvement - and I do believe the state can do a lot - little of it has to do with the school accountability system, and results will depend almost entirely on decisions at the local level.

There are no silver bullets for school improvement

Some educators believe very strongly that the achievement gap is a function of poor school funding overall and inequities of funding across districts. I'm skeptical, because per pupil education spending has skyrocketed over the last four decades (only recently leveling off and declining since the 2008 recession), while achievement has remained stubbornly stagnant and achievement gaps have actually worsened a bit.

I must concede that, during that same time period, the entire mission of education changed. In the 1970's we did not expect schools to educate every child to proficiency, and the economy continued to have a place for low-skilled workers. Now we face the unprecedented challenge of educating every child to high levels, and the economy has no place for the ones we fail. We might very well need more resources to meet our new mission, but I don't believe for a second that if the state legislature handed educators billions more dollars that we'd know precisely how to use those funds to rapidly accelerate student learning.

Which is not to say we have no ideas; we just lack a consensus on which of those ideas are most appropriate for closing the achievement gap, and no single strategy has promise for rapidly boosting and sustaining high levels of student achievement by itself. I have to admit this applies to some of my own favorite strategies for education improvement, including school choice, redesigning curriculum, and creating mastery-based learning systems that are more responsive to individual student needs. Let me discuss each of these in turn.

First, I am a long-time and vocal advocate for expanding school choice, including Kentucky's recent adoption of charter school legislation and the proposed concept of a tax credit that would encourage private donations to fund scholarships for low-income students who want to attend tuition-based schools. I also favor open district enrollment, whereby students would be able to attend public schools of their choice outside the school districts where they reside. I think these strategies have promise for addressing achievement gaps among at-risk student populations. Urban charters have a good track record in this regard, as do private schools in general, and new research from Ohio suggests positive impacts from open districts enrollment as well. Furthermore, research suggests that when choice is introduced in a community, competitive effects yield a significant, if small, increase in student performance in traditional district schools, though I suspect the benefits of choice result more from each family being able to find a school that best fits their child's needs than from competition forcing low-performing schools to get better.

I also think that school choice is fundamental to making many other education improvement initiatives work by encouraging innovations that would attract and retain new students and diminishing some of the bureaucratic and anti-democratic features of school governance that often function to prop up the status quo.

I don't think, however, there's much evidence that school choice in itself will lead to enormous boosts in overall student achievement. What we've learned from other states is that the vast majority of students are still going to be educated in traditional public schools and that schools of choice are going to vary widely in their quality and performance (just like traditional public schools). So as much as I support choice, it's not a singular solution; just creating choice does not, in itself, work an education miracle. The accountability system can help us track the impact such policies are making, but cannot make the change happen.

Likewise, I've written a lot lately about how we've experienced a great hollowing out of the curriculum, especially at the elementary level, and the possible impact the draining of content from our schools has had on students of poverty. At the state level we might address this issue through improvements in our learning standards, but for a number of reasons curricular decisions (curricula are different than standards, a distinction even educators struggle to recognize sometimes) are best handled at a local level (and especially with a heightened level of school choice that helps each family find schools with the curricular approach that best suits their needs and interests). Again, accountability and state policy can nudge schools in a particular curricular direction that we hypothesize may boost improvement, but that is all.

Finally, I've written extensively on this blog arguing that our model of instructional delivery, which is rooted in a 19th-century industrial design and treats the education of students a bit like products on an assembly line, is probably incapable of ramping up student achievement to the level our educational mission and economy now demand. While I've grown a bit troubled by the looseness of the term "personalized learning," I do believe that schools must become much more focused on individual student progress toward the mastery of specific learning targets, which means instructing students at their readiness level rather than arbitrarily throwing tasks at them because of their birth year or grade level. It also means using ongoing formative assessment strategies to ensure that students have ample opportunity to actually master content and skills before they are pushed on to new material.

We've seen a widespread dabbling with mastery learning in schools across the state, especially at the elementary level. Are there state-level policies that would encourage the scaling up of such strategies? Possibly there are, but they exist outside the structures of the accountability system. And they would require much greater clarity about what "personalized learning" really is, and which elements actually work to improve student achievement.

I do not mean to convey a sense of pessimism about our chances to improve student learning in Kentucky. I am passionate about pursuing and encouraging some combination of the strategies described above, among others, including improving teacher and administrator training and development, reforming School-Based Decision-Making Councils, and taking a hard look at school funding. As I said, I'm not optimistic that blanket spending increases would yield any measurable gain in learning, but every initiative I've proposed could benefit from a much more generous dose of resources, if we have the collective commitment to do so and a clear action plan. I am open to other ideas and approaches, and to critical discussion about my own proposals.

Subsidiarity and school improvement

I've written all this to make three key points. First, that no one has a silver bullet for rapidly and substantially boosting student achievement, and certainly not a way to do it through the accountability system, which is but one feature among many of a comprehensive education policy. Second, that the real work of teaching kids, and therefore making sure they've learned a lot, always happens at the local level. There's no policy substitute for high-quality teachers and school administrators and engaged parents and community leaders. This is a point American Enterprise Institute education scholar Rick Hess has been making for years, and does so especially forcefully in his new book, Letters to Young Education Reformer. We should be passionate and persistent in our education reform efforts, but we should be humble enough to recognize that the people who will actually cause kids to learn are the parents and educators in our neighborhood public, charter, private schools, and homeschools. 

Which brings me to my third and final point. Politically and philosophically, I am a conservative. This means I have a deep skepticism for top-down, technocratic fixes to social and economic problems, and that definitely includes education. Andy Smarick, also from AEI, has pointed out the irony of "conservative" reformers who want to promote command-and-control types of reforms that will "force" schools to improve. Writing in 2014, Smarick essentially predicted the shift back toward a more genuine conservative education policy which we now see in the federal Every Student Succeeds Act and Kentucky's Senate Bill 1 (nicknamed "The Let Teachers Teach Act"), which re-emphasize the importance of subsidiarity in education policy.

Such a conservative approach to education reform involves a blend of strong, transparent accountability measures but also policies that empower parents and teachers to creatively solve the most local problem of all: how to help an individual child learn at the highest levels possible, and to do that over and over again for every child.

Related posts:

• What education accountability can (and cannot) do, Part I
• Feedback sought on Kentucky's proposed accountability system
• The promise - and limitations - of education policy

Usual disclaimer: All views expressed on this website are mine alone and do not reflect the opinions of the Kentucky Board of Education (where I serve as a member) or Western Kentucky University (where I am associate professor of Educational Administration, Leadership, and Research).

 

What education accountability can (and cannot) do, Part I

Though the work goes largely unnoticed by the vast majority of parents and taxpayers, Kentucky's education leaders have been hard at work redesigning the accountability system that dictates what data points will be collected about the performance of the state's P-12 schools and what must happen as a result of those data. This work, carried out by the Kentucky Department of Education and involving several thousand education stakeholders, is the result of changes in federal education law (which gives states more leeway in how they design such systems), changes in state education law under 2o17's Senate Bill 1, and a widespread agreement that Kentucky's previous accountability system could be improved.

The new system will ultimately be approved by the Kentucky Board of Education (where I serve as a member; note that what I write here represents my views only), and eventually ratified by the General Assembly. The KBE is striving to give approval to the system by August so it can go out for a period of public review as required by law. As we get closer to a final version, some of the discussion among state board members and in the education community at large has become more heated; we know the stakes are high and everyone wants to get it right.

I've previously written describing details of the proposed accountability system, how it might improve the transparency of what is really happening in schools, and where my key concerns lie. In this two-part series of posts, however, I want to reflect on what the education accountability system actually does - and why it can't do everything we might want it to do [see the second part here].

The accountability system can convey information

Why do we have a state/federal education accountability system in the first place? Because results matter. Our education system plays a key role in the success of our democracy, the efficiency of our economy, and above all the happiness, virtue, and well-being of future generations. We'd like to know if students are learning, how much they are learning, whether inequities among racial, economic, and other groups are being remedied through the education system or made worse, and if schools are generally getting better at these goals.

In this sense, the accountability system is all about gathering and conveying information needed by parents, policy-makers, and especially educators who want to know how they are doing and where they should focus their improvement efforts. Here are some of the specific kinds of information the proposed accountability system is designed to provide:

• What percent of students at various grade levels are proficient in reading, math, science, social studies, and writing.
• The extent to which schools are moving children toward proficiency (or beyond it), regardless of whether they have reached proficiency already or not.
• The extent to which students of color, students of poverty, students with disabilities, and English language learners are performing at similar levels to students overall, and whether schools are making progress at closing those gaps.
• Whether students are finishing their P-12 education experience prepared to attend post-secondary education, or prepared to enter a technical field or the military.
• Whether schools are offering students rich learning experiences in areas that are harder to test, like the arts, and in all subjects during years during which state tests are not required, and whether schools are trying to address the needs of the whole child (not just their academic achievement).

Additionally, we want to be able to summarize all this information in some way that gives educators and the public a general sense of how a school is doing overall, without glossing over areas where the school is doing especially well or struggling a lot.

It is not an easy task to design a coherent system that conveys all these kinds of data in a transparent way. Tentatively, the Kentucky Department of Education hopes to launch a kind of performance dashboard to replace the old School Report Card system that will let the public know at a glance how the school is doing in key areas, as well as overall. The trick is to have enough "gauges" on the dashboard to communicate everything important, but to also make things easy to find. What's even harder is to design a system that encourages educators and the public to use this information to improve.

Accountability can encourage certain kinds of improvement

For whatever progress Kentucky has made in the quality of its educational system, no one is satisfied with the results. As the Secretary of Education and Workforce Development pointed out in his recent report to KBE, nearly half of all Kentucky students are below proficiency in key academic areas. Achievement for at-risk student populations is embarrassingly low. We have a moral and economic imperative to do better.

The accountability system encourages schools to improve in two ways. First, it can tie the school's overall performance rating to its progress (or lack thereof) in key areas. So, for example, in the proposed system, no school will be able to achieve the two highest performance ratings if it has persistent achievement gaps (by a measure we still have to define as of this writing). Schools with a combination of problems will find themselves consistently in the lowest performance categories even if achievement gap isn't a big issue. 

Along with the dashboard that further highlights these specific areas of low performance, we hope this signals to the parents, taxpayers, and educators that action needs to be taken. How we set improvement targets and their relative weights in overall accountability have important effects on how much schools pay attention to these goals.

The second way  the accountability system encourages improvement is by dictating consequences for persistently low results like forcing the school to receive supports and oversight from state education officials, usually teams of educators from the Kentucky Department of Education, though under Senate Bill 1 schools will have a bit more flexibility in selecting who provides this kind of support. A new report from researchers at Stanford University highlights the success Kentucky has experienced with this turnaround model, but it's important to emphasize that when this mechanism of the accountability system works, it is because there are dramatic changes at the local level also.

In pondering these purposes of the accountability system, there are two hard truths we have to face. First, while accountability can convey information and incentivize certain kinds of improvement, it cannot make schools improve. That task must fall to other areas of the education system, including through state policy, but above all through local efforts.

The second hard truth is that no one knows exactly how to fix what's wrong with the education system - or even what is precisely wrong with it. It's not like we know what to do and are just too lazy or recalcitrant to do it. Rather, the challenges are extremely complex and while we may have many different ideas and theories about what might work, no one has yet found a single policy solution - or combination of solutions - that will rapidly skyrocket student learning and keep it up over long periods of time. This should leave all of us in education with a hair-on-fire sense of urgency, but also a deep humility about our own pet policy prescriptions.

And that will be the focus of my next post.

Related posts:

• What education accountability can (and cannot) do, Part II
• Feedback sought on Kentucky's proposed accountability system
• The promise - and limitations - of education policy

Usual disclaimer: All views expressed on this website are mine alone and do not reflect the opinions of the Kentucky Board of Education (where I serve as a member) or Western Kentucky University (where I serve as associate professor in the Department of Educational Administration, Leadership, and Research).