Charter schools, once little more than glass miniatures, are proving to be the toughest, most enduring of all education reforms.

When Minnesota passed the first charter law in 1990, the innovation seemed precious, quaint, delicate, and certain to break. Most states told the new schools they would be subject to full-scale review every five years. Public funding provided only a fraction of the operating budget of district-operated schools. Start-up and building funds had to be secured elsewhere, and parents could walk away from a charter school at any time. Yet in 2011, nearly 6,000 charters were serving approximately 2 million students, about 4 percent of the U.S. public-school population. Many of these charter-school attendees from disadvantaged backgrounds are reaching high levels of academic proficiency, enabling them to make their way through college and beyond. If some charters produce an inferior product, the overall direction of change is steadily upward. Above all, parent demand outpaces charter supply.

Charters originally occupied only a small dwelling place within the school-reform village. While charter schools lacked clear theoretical justification, vouchers rested firmly on the impressive market-based intellectual foundation provided by Nobel laureate Milton Friedman. School accountability had widespread support among numerous governors and nearly every presidential candidate. A bipartisan Congress passed the federal accountability law, No Child Left Behind (NCLB), which required every school to release information on student performance in grades three through eight and again in high school. The tests proved that some teachers were decidedly better than others, which placed performance pay and tenure limitations on state and national agendas. Meanwhile, states enacted new programs that allowed for the alternative certification of teachers, opening the school door to talented college students not willing to suffer through the mindless education courses states had mandated.

Teachers unions and school districts and a variety of public intellectuals have counterattacked with a bitter “rain of terror,” inducing flash floods and mudslides that threaten to bury the reform village. The Obama administration is granting states waivers to NCLB that all but eliminate the school accountability provisions that law introduced. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan has said that much of the criticism about testing “is merited,” and he has agreed to wait until 2017 before using test information to evaluate teachers, putting accountability on hold until the next administration comes into office. Further, little is being done to ensure that the tests being devised for the new Common Core State Standards do not introduce a break in the continuous stream of accountability information essential for the evaluation of school and teacher performance (see this issue’s forum, “Examining High-Stakes Testing”). Even the long-term trend version of the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP)—the only reliable source on changes in student performance nationwide over time—has been put on hold, allegedly for fiscal reasons. Without test-score information, performance-based pay and teacher tenure reform will become next to impossible to execute. Meanwhile, alternatively certified teachers are still being asked to take state-mandated education courses, keeping discredited teacher-education programs in business. Finally, teachers unions and the Obama administration are waging, and often winning, antivoucher lawsuits on grounds so specious they raise suspicions that judges are substituting personal ideologies for reasoned analysis of constitutional constraints and federal requirements (see, for example, our latest check the facts, “The Louisiana Scholarship Program”).

Despite the drenching antireform downpour, charter schools are gaining in respect, numbers, and political adherents, mainly because they are digging deep roots in local communities. Three feature articles in this issue explore charter-school successes in such diverse places as Arizona, Boston, and Rhode Island and reveal the underlying strength of the movement. While other reforms have lost ground in the public eye, support for charters continues unabated (see “The 2013 Education Next Survey”). Unless Common Core fulfills its promise or digital learning makes a breakthrough, charters stand today as the reformers’ one best—perhaps their last best—hope.

—Paul E. Peterson

Standards, tests, and accountability policies are merely tools. They don’t make learning happen. Tests themselves don’t narrow the curriculum; they also can’t close achievement gaps. How educators use these tools is what is critical. Superintendent Starr argues that testing and accountability are important for “developing indicators that can inform an organization’s actions.” But his emphasis on assessment and accountability as tools for managing education bureaucracy is only part of the story—and cold comfort for families who want and need the information to access the best education for their children now.

The goal of No Child Left Behind (NCLB) has been to put the focus of education policy squarely on students. Most importantly, then, test results provide parents and teachers with vital information about student learning, and accountability policies challenge districts and schools to meet individual student needs with effective teachers, strong curricula, choices for families and students, and break-the-mold interventions for failing schools. For over a decade now, test-based accountability has acted as a sort of insurance policy to make sure disadvantaged and struggling students are not ignored. I take Superintendent Starr at his word that his proposed moratorium on testing and accountability would be temporary. But I am skeptical. After more than a decade of resistance to NCLB by the education establishment, I find something disingenuous about the argument that schools ought not to be held accountable to the standards states themselves set for grade-level student achievement. Helping all students read and cipher on grade level is a modest goal for our children and grandchildren. As long as a significant portion of students aren’t reaching these so-called “outdated” state standards, we must continue to assess the skills and hold schools accountable for the results. States’ efforts to ensure college and career readiness for all depend on it.

Testing Is Critically Important

Because of assessments, we can track the academic progress of American students. Recent results on our Nation’s Report Card (the National Assessment of Educational Progress, or NAEP), for example, tell us that during the NCLB era, student achievement in reading and math improved for African American, Hispanic, and white students alike, and achievement gaps among these groups narrowed. As Paul Peterson recently pointed out in the Wall Street Journal (August 7, 2013), between 1999 and 2008, on the NAEP, white nine-year-olds gained 11 points in math, African American students gained 13 points, and Hispanic student performance improved by 21 points. In reading, white nine-year-olds gained 7 points, black performance jumped by 18 points, and Hispanic scores climbed 14 points. (Importantly, Peterson also notes that gains have diminished since the Obama administration began to dismantle NCLB.)

Tests also identify where we are falling short. For example, despite significant progress, NAEP scores reveal that just 34 percent of our nation’s 8th graders are proficient in reading and 43 percent are proficient in math. The achievement of students in American high schools, where state testing is minimal (and accountability weakest), hasn’t budged in four decades.

Test-based accountability policies have demonstrated unequivocally that what gets measured matters. A recent report by Common Core, Inc., its title intended to demonstrate that students are “Learning Less” because of assessments, included some interesting findings: ninety percent of teachers say that when a subject is included in a state’s system of testing, it is taken more seriously. Eighty percent of teachers say that their schools have been offering more “extra help for students struggling in math and language arts” in recent years. This is good news. This is student assessment used to inform classroom practice, which is what it’s meant to do. The truly important questions we face in education reform aren’t about whether we should test students but rather about how schools will respond to what tests tell us about student needs, and what districts and schools will do differently to ensure that all students learn.

The Testing Critics

Resistance to assessment, accountability, and transparency remains fierce, and not at all temporary.

Critics attack testing from all possible angles, and frankly, the arguments are not particularly coherent. For example, Secretary of Education Arne Duncan claims that states have “dummied down” their standards yet at the same time, his department is giving states waivers to provide “relief” from the unrealistically ambitious expectations of NCLB.

Some argue that the real problem with annual state tests of grade-level reading and math skills is that they force teachers to narrow their focus, distracting teachers from other subjects and the more sophisticated academic skills they would otherwise engender in students.

But no one has ever demonstrated that mastering grade-level reading and math skills hurts students’ ability to acquire higher-order thinking skills. Nor has anyone shown that state standards in reading and math endanger students’ social and emotional well-being. While the narrowing curriculum rallying cry is popular in opinion surveys, assessments such as NAEP reveal no signs of declining achievement in science or history or any other supposedly “squeezed out” subject.

Annual state assessments in Maryland take six hours, the equivalent of just one school day. Yet testing critics would have us believe that the creativity of teachers is completely shackled for the other roughly 179 days of the school year. This argument remains popular, even as teachers report their preparation and ability to teach critical thinking and complex problem solving to be limited, and even while so many schools are achieving not-so-stellar results on what are dubbed as less-than-sophisticated current state tests.

Many critics argue that annual state tests in reading and mathematics are inappropriate because not everything students need to learn can be measured by standardized tests, downplaying what even our so-called “crude” tests reveal about serious gaps in the important skills students need. And it is still not uncommon to hear educators insist that assessing students in reading and math is unfair, especially to students likely not to perform well. You see, the schools are fine; it’s the students of color, students in poverty, special education students, and English language learners who are the problem.

The collection of objections is endless. But all of them evade a simple explanation for why education standards with regular assessments of student progress, transparency for results, consequences for school failure, and choices for families have always been under fire. They demand public accountability for education systems across the nation, and many, many public-school systems and educators in the United States simply reject the concept out of hand.

If one wants to understand the true interests of the education establishment when it comes to pausing test-based accountability, one only need take a close look at the NCLB waivers given by Secretary Duncan to about 40 states to date. The waivers have allowed states to set race- and income-based goals, that is, to lower expectations for student achievement by race and income. Most such student-achievement targets were established for “reporting purposes only” and are no longer used for any meaningful school accountability purposes. Most states now combine student subgroups, previously identified by race, ethnicity, economic disadvantage, special education, and English language learner status, into opaque “super-subgroups” that are very purposefully less transparent. We are turning back the clock to the days when expecting less from the kids who need our public schools the most was acceptable practice. It is the “soft bigotry of low expectations” President Bush so rightly decried.

The Legacy of NCLB

No Child Left Behind and its state testing mandates have always been maligned by protectors of the education status quo. But our memories are too short. Before NCLB, the education establishment thought it fine, even appropriate, to set different academic expectations for kids based on their ethnicity, zip code, or parents’ income. Overwhelmingly, poor and minority students were denied meaningful educational opportunities because of the abysmal quality of schools they attended. Parents had scant information to compare schools. Taxpayers got little more than an ever-increasing invoice for our schools.

Under NCLB, for the first time, schools were required to measure improvement in student achievement across all groups of students, and each state, district, and school was required to lay the results out on the table for parents and the public to see. Parents now know whether their children are meeting state standards in reading and math and which students are being educated, by whom, and in what schools. Taxpayers now know more about where their dollars are being invested and what the results are. We have sophisticated data that can be used to improve learning in classrooms in real time. We can do a better job evaluating teachers, informed at least in part by the performance of their students. We can tell how students are performing against a standard, and compare them to students in other schools, districts, and states. We can redirect our resources to where there is the greatest student need.

We’ve made significant improvements in student achievement but we are far from the finish line. State test data reveal significant achievement gaps yet to be addressed, even in high-spending, high-achieving Montgomery County, Maryland, considered by many to be one of the best school systems in the nation. In Montgomery County, 59 percent of white elementary-school students score at what the state defines as the “advanced” level on the Maryland State Assessment in reading, while only 26 percent of African American students can boast the same. On the state math test, 52 percent of white elementary-school students compared to 18 percent of African American students score at the top performance level.

These results don’t warrant any kind of hiatus from state testing. Kicking the can down the road on assessment and accountability, in Montgomery County and in school systems across the nation, will neither help close achievement gaps nor prepare students for the Common Core.

The current debate about student testing is misguided. Tests are measurement tools. When I step on my bathroom scale and am not happy with what it records as my weight, it isn’t the scale’s problem. I can boycott stepping on the scale, or I can decide to examine my lifestyle, determine whether I am exercising too little or eating too much, and come up with a game plan to reach an improvement goal.

Our annual state tests amount to stepping on a scale. If our test results are not what they should be, we need to ask: How are education systems radically reconsidering the way they use their resources to improve outcomes? How are they changing the ways they prepare teachers, pay teachers, organize the school day, use technology for learning, and get our neediest students access to our best and brightest teachers?

Common Core Is No Panacea

More than 12 years have passed since I worked with President George W. Bush, Senator Edward Kennedy, and other congressional leaders to pass No Child Left Behind. Despite the vastly improved information we now have, and that we could use more effectively to improve student outcomes, too many educators remain engaged in wearied debates about whether assessment is an important tool for measuring student learning.

This doesn’t bode well for implementation of the Common Core. While all variety of education pundits, reformers, and policymakers discuss the merits of upgrading our public education system to the Common Core and college and career readiness for all, the real battle on the ground is whether educators believe schools are capable of or should be expected to help students meet even basic academic standards.

The very same critics who claim teachers are prevented from teaching higher-order skills because of current testing and accountability policies also argue that we need to put a stop to testing and accountability because teachers aren’t prepared for the higher demands of the Common Core.

I support the Common Core standards. I believe our nation’s schools need a challenging and common set of academic expectations that is consistent with the demands of the knowledge economy and global competition. But let’s not kid ourselves. It is right to be concerned about whether enough of our nation’s teachers are ready for the Common Core. And the Common Core is pie in the sky unless students meet basic grade-level expectations in reading and math, a goal we have fallen woefully short of meeting to date.

This debate just brings out the skeptic in me. I am afraid that we aren’t serious. We aren’t serious in believing that all kids can learn. We aren’t serious about ensuring that poor and minority kids get the education they deserve.

Is learning more than a test score? Of course. Are reading and math all we care about when it comes to student achievement? No. Is there always the promise of better tests and better-prepared teachers down the road? Sure. But does any of this suggest we should we have a moratorium on testing or “hit pause” on school-based accountability? No way.

-Margaret Spellings

Margaret Spellings was U.S. secretary of education from 2005 to 2009 and is now president of the George W. Bush Presidential Center.

This article is part of a forum on high-stakes testing. For another take, please see “A Testing Moratorium Is Necessary,” by Joshua P. Starr.

More than 40 states plan to assess student performance with new tests tied to the Common Core State Standards. In summer 2013, results from Common Core–aligned tests in New York showed a steep decline in outcomes. Common Core advocates hailed the scores as an honest accounting of school and student performance, while others worried that they reflected problems with the tests, inadequate support for educators, or a lack of alignment between what schools are teaching and what’s being tested.

In this forum, Joshua Starr, superintendent of schools in high-performing Montgomery County, Maryland, makes the case for a three-year hiatus from high-stakes accountability testing while new standards and tests are implemented. Accountability proponent Margaret Spellings, U.S. secretary of education from 2005 to 2009 and now president of the George W. Bush Presidential Center, defends the testing regime as a critical source of information, for educators as well as the public, and argues for holding the line.

• Joshua P. Starr: A Testing Moratorium Is Necessary

• Margaret Spellings: Assessments Are Vital for Healthy Schools

Meaningful assessment data reveal what students know and are able to do, and provide teachers with the information they need to track student progress and to identify and support students who are struggling. Assessment data give central-office administrators and school boards the crucial information they need to allocate and evaluate resources effectively and to set policies.

So why do we need a three-year moratorium from accountability systems based on state tests? At this crucial time in American public education, when we are correctly focusing our attention on the rigorous Common Core State Standards (CCSS), we must organize for success in the future and not remain fixated on the past. Critics of a moratorium and defenders of the status quo say my approach jettisons accountability for schools. Nothing could be further from the truth. We must build systems of accountability and support that use the right assessments to measure the right things. Accountability and support can often be seen as competing demands, but comprehensive assessment data actually serve both functions.

I started my administrative career in 1998 as director of accountability for a small district, and later served as the director of school performance and accountability for New York City public schools. In Montgomery County, Maryland, where I am now superintendent, we are on our way to building an accountability system that uses student data in meaningful ways to measure progress and improve instruction at important checkpoints along a child’s educational journey. Having designed accountability systems for different types of districts, I recognize the importance of developing indicators that can inform an organization’s actions.

Current assessments, unfortunately, do not measure what our students need to know and be able to do in the 21st century. Basing decisions on these outdated state test-score data may lead to structural changes that seek to address the wrong problems.

The Legacy of NCLB

Public education is extremely complex. Multiple entities govern, drive, and constrain the work of educators, from federal and state laws and regulations to local political structures, funding authorities, and interest groups. Effective district and school leaders must mitigate the clamor of competing interests and demands, and focus on organizing teaching and learning systems around what really matters. State and federal accountability systems should provide and enhance that focus, not distract from it.

No Child Left Behind (NCLB) provided this focus for public schools over the past decade, whether we like to admit it or not. Regardless of lofty mission statements that spoke of meeting the needs of the whole child, cultivating artistic curiosity, and having high academic standards, every school in America has had one primary mission since 2001: to meet Adequate Yearly Progress (AYP). Curriculum was narrowed and aligned to tests; professional development centered on data-based decisionmaking; supports and funding were put in place to improve test scores; data systems provided information for school and district leaders to make decisions about policy and allocating resources; and political entities had evidence to celebrate or complain about the investment of tax revenue.

NCLB did a good job of making data an important part of the school improvement process and of exposing the persistent achievement gaps at even the most high-achieving schools. But these data are based on assessments that are very limited in what they measure and don’t reflect the skills and knowledge our students need to be successful. Moreover, the goal of 100 percent proficiency may properly reflect the desire to ensure all children achieve, but it’s not realistic. It’s akin to saying that a person is only physically fit if she can run a marathon. NCLB’s goal was “adequacy.” Now we need to develop measures that will tell us whether our children will thrive in a 21st-century economy and world.

NCLB is dying a slow death. We have entered a new era of American public-education reform, brought on by Race to the Top and the Common Core State Standards. In Montgomery County, we are creating new systems that holistically measure whether a school is supporting a student’s academic success, creative problem-solving abilities, and social and emotional well-being. This requires a different approach to teaching and learning, and to supporting and holding schools accountable.

New Tests for a New Standard

The major change happening in public education today is the democratization of information. As we all have greater access to information than ever before, educators must enable students to create knowledge and wisdom from the information surrounding them. We have to rethink what we’re asking teachers, support professionals, and leaders to do, and then build the organizational structures to support them.

This is a complex conversation. It will require an enormous amount of time and energy to engage adults in new learning about what students should know and be able to do when they graduate in 2025. Along the way, we must tackle some very important questions. What should the classroom look like? What materials and technologies are available to support instruction? What training should teachers undergo? What are the roles of the instructional leader and the central office? How are the community and families to be engaged? What are the right funding mechanisms? What policies and practices should be in place? These are questions that must be addressed at the school, central office, and board and community level, and the answers may very well be different among districts.

In organizing these new systems, we cannot have two areas of focus. State standardized tests—the foundation of NCLB—are not aligned to the CCSS, yet these tests are still being given and are now tied to revised accountability systems under the NCLB waiver program. For example, in math, state tests measure computation skills only, while under the CCSS, students need to show their reasoning ability in addition to computation skills. While we are in this transition, we are telling our teachers, leaders, and authorizing, funding, and governing agencies that we’ve got to prepare for a whole new standard that will make us more competitive internationally. So where should we focus our attention? How do I explain to my principals and teachers that the current state tests are meaningless because they assess an old standard, even though they are administered, used for accountability purposes, and reported in the media? How do you ask people to work harder than ever to learn new methods of teaching and learning, design new data systems, and invest in new technologies when their evaluations are being tied to the old measure under Race to the Top? How do we determine an appropriate rate of change, one of the most confounding leadership decisions, one that will enable us to switch, almost overnight, to new testing and accountability systems, while also giving people a chance to learn, grow, and adapt with these new systems? Teacher evaluation systems like the professional growth system in Montgomery County are excellent examples of assessing teachers’ skills and competencies without an overreliance on an annual state-administered test.

Managing the Transition

As a school superintendent, I have to balance the need for consistent standards for outcomes and processes with my belief in school-level innovation and creativity. I also have to help our organization transition from a bureaucracy that looks much like it did 25 or 50 years ago to one that performs with speed and flexibility. I have to communicate our progress and our needs to the community, the board of education, and the local elected bodies that provide funding. I need a starting point for determining how to allocate resources, invest additional time and energy, provide supports, and ensure accountability. It is essential, then, that I have a handful of clear indicators that provide starting points for further analysis.

When I go to the doctor I have my vital signs taken first. I believe we need similar vital signs for public education. In Montgomery County, we are organizing our efforts around five milestones:

1)  reading on grade level by 3rd grade

2)  completing 5th grade with the necessary math, literacy, and social-emotional skills to be successful in middle school

3)  completing 8th grade with the necessary math, literacy, and social-emotional skills to be successful in high school

4)  having a successful 9th-grade year, as measured by grade-point average, well-being, and eligibility to participate in extracurricular activities

5)  graduating high school ready for college and career, as measured by such existing indicators as performance on Advanced Placement and International Baccalaureate exams and SAT scores.

These are not the only indicators of an excellent, well-rounded education, but each is an important milestone in a child’s education and is a starting point for our team to focus attention. Data for each area need to be analyzed by school and by demographic, socioeconomic, and programmatic subgroup. Other data will also be needed to determine whether a school is on the right path.

By focusing on indicators at different stages, rather than every year, we are establishing a developmental approach to accountability. School improvement takes time, and students can blossom over the course of a few years. Schools need to be given the opportunity to grow and develop. But current state tests measure annual performance. School improvement could more effectively focus on the needs of individual students if the message to schools was that their accountability for student achievement was tied to the time they had to improve outcomes.

What happens between these milestones must be the focus of efforts to support a school, while the milestones become the focus of accountability. For example, if one subgroup of students isn’t successfully completing 9th grade at the same rates as others, then the school needs to drill down on what’s happening with that subgroup. If the school then needs additional resources and support from the district—or is unable to improve outcomes—my team and I would step in. If, over time, a school, with our help, has been unable to improve those outcomes, we would have to employ accountability mechanisms.

Building this type of system takes time, resources, and commitment. Montgomery County Public Schools started working on aligning curriculum to the CCSS four years ago. Even with all of the infrastructure and support in MCPS, it will still take more than two years to fully implement our new accountability system and even longer before all elements of it are effectively used in every school.

A moratorium from state standardized tests tied to NCLB is necessary to allow school districts the opportunity to organize their systems to what we’re being asked to do now and in the future: prepare adults to engage students in much deeper learning so they will be equipped not just with the academic skills but with the problem-solving skills necessary to be globally competitive. We have to organize our systems to achieve this goal, which is incredibly difficult when we’re still being measured by an outdated model. In the interim, we can continue to measure ourselves by standard indicators of college and career readiness, such as SAT, Advanced Placement, and ACT tests and graduation rates. We could also use a nationally accepted criterion-based reading test to determine our current status, but not for high-stakes accountability purposes.

Once the CCSS is fully implemented and the new assessments aligned to these standards have been completed, we can begin to construct a meaningful accountability system that truly supports teaching and learning.

-Joshua P. Starr

Joshua P. Starr is superintendent of schools in Montgomery County, Md.

This article is part of a forum on high-stakes testing. For another take, please see “Assessments Are Vital for Healthy Schools,” by Margaret Spellings.

On the bottom shelf of a corner table in Barbara Dreyer’s office sits a glossy paperback book with “Math 2, A & B” on its cover.

“We used to send out books that looked like this,” says Dreyer, as she holds the 500-page volume from one of the first-ever courses offered online by Connections Academy. “You could look at this information online, but, frankly, a lot of people were doing this,” she adds, thumbing through the book’s pages.

It’s been quite a journey from those early days of K–12 online learning, when students might still do much of their coursework by scribbling in those massive texts, to where the field is now. Dreyer, president and CEO at Connections Education, the nation’s second-largest for-profit online learning provider, has been at the helm of the Baltimore-based outfit for most of the way. Working alongside her have been Steven Guttentag and Mickey Revenaugh, now the respective president and executive vice president of the company’s Connections Learning division.

“Partly why we’re all still here is that we didn’t start out in the beginning and say we’re going to be here for 10 years,” says Dreyer, who came aboard in 2001, a year before Connections opened its first pair of virtual public schools in Colorado and Wisconsin. “I think what we said was, we’re going to be here as long as it’s interesting.”

Now, with online learning gaining more visibility, Dreyer and her colleagues may be embarking on their most important mission yet: to become an honest discussion leader about the strengths and weaknesses of online learning in the present, and the path of its future development.

“We need to talk about what’s not working; we can’t just say everything’s wonderful,” Dreyer says. “But it’s a little bit scary to talk about the fact that there are problems.”

Out in Front

The willingness to go into that uncomfortable territory has perhaps defined Dreyer and in turn Connections Education under her leadership.

Dreyer, whose mother taught in Baltimore’s industrial suburb of Dundalk, came to Connections from the technology start-up world of the 1990s, where she founded two separate companies. She also had professional connections to Sylvan Ventures, the investment group that funded the launch of Connections Education, and also gave rise to the Sylvan Learning tutoring and test preparation service.

And although Connections wasn’t the first organization to open virtual schools for K–12 students, like Dreyer the company has taken a different tack. Competitor K12 Inc., which launched in 1999, began by focusing mostly on providing services to already home-schooled students. Florida Virtual School (FLVS) initially only offered supplemental services to students who attended traditional brick-and-mortar high schools (see “Florida’s Online Option,” features, Summer 2009). Connections has targeted students currently enrolled in public schools, in the elementary and middle-school grades, yet who might for academic, behavioral, health, or other reasons desire an online alternative.

It was a risky strategy. Because most online learning of the era involved independent work and correspondence—think back to the “Math 2, A & B” manual—many believed younger students lacked the self-discipline needed to progress academically. To address that issue, Revenaugh created in Connections’ early education models the role of learning coach, usually parents or other relatives who would facilitate communications between teachers and students.

Further, Dreyer says she and Guttentag quickly identified the need to weave synchronous instruction—real-time communication between teachers and students—into all courses, long before it was a regular feature of online learning.

Similarly, the company took a bottom-up approach to constructing early versions of its education management system, or EMS. The initial version was hastily built and admittedly had limited functionality, Dreyer says, which turned out to be a blessing in disguise.

“We did not have many of the features that we have since found to be essential, such as a detailed student calendar, tools for reporting attendance, ways for teachers to ascertain student progress through a ‘dashboard,’ etc.,” Dreyer says. “However, we were quick to embrace any negative feedback and suggestions from our users. As a result, this limited first version actually turned out to be very beneficial.”

With its unique approach, Connections began to win respect and notoriety within the online learning community and the greater education world.

Educational accreditation, school improvement, and professional development company AdvancED certified Connections in the spring of 2005, just a year after the company topped 1,000 students in what were then six virtual public schools.

In 2008, Connections partnered with FLVS to help launch a full-time virtual program for Florida elementary- and middle-school students.

Crux Point

In terms of the emergence of Connections and K–12 online learning into the mainstream, however, none of those developments compares to Pearson’s purchase of the rapidly expanding company in September of 2011, for a reported $400 million.

The purchase, Dreyer says, developed from Connections’ history of utilizing Pearson-developed online course materials. Pearson, despite its reputation as one of the “Big Three” of the education-textbook publishing world, had shown a high level of sophistication in its digital offerings, she says. And as Connections had grown by then to more than 30,000 students across 22 virtual schools, expanding further was only possible under new ownership.

“Obviously, for Pearson to own a company in our space took a certain amount of bravery—to say, this is something that ultimately will benefit our school district customers,” notes Dreyer.

Dreyer says the arc of Connections’ growth, slow from 2001 to 2004 followed by accelerated expansion, followed a model perhaps more familiar in the start-up world than in education, in which the organization’s first schools were essentially testing grounds.

Connections compensated for unavoidable early missteps by heavily staffing their endeavors on the instruction side.

“With both Colorado and Wisconsin, we clearly made up for any shortfalls in the system by overemphasizing the role of the teacher,” says Dreyer.

That doesn’t mean, however, that the company had an abundance of employees when it convinced Sylvan Ventures and later the Apollo and Sterling investment groups to contribute resources for expansion.

“I believe that we were successful in making our case for support while we were scaling, and keeping our investors’ support for the team over time, because we were very careful to build our plans assuming that some things would go wrong and not overpromise,” she says. “This meant we were always running a leaner organization than we would have liked in order to control expenses.”

Connections’ ability to meet growth projections helped facilitate Pearson’s purchase, Dreyer says, as did its move earlier in 2011 to divide Connections Education into two departments: the familiar Connections Academy, which continued to run full-time virtual-school operations, and the new Connections Learning, built to offer blended-learning services to customer schools and districts.

Dreyer says the potential reach for blended learning, which combines instructional methods from online and face-to-face teaching, is much greater than fully virtual instruction. Currently, blended methods are used to help add personalized features to courses, expand offerings without having to expand teaching force size or class space, aid students with credit recovery, and serve students who might not be able to attend classes on campus five days a week.

“We said, ‘We have something for the 1 or 2 percent, let’s have something for the 98 percent,’” Dreyer explains.

The sale to Pearson allowed Connections to pursue its goals without making a public offering on the stock market, Dreyer says. By contrast, K12 Inc. went public in 2007. By early 2012, it was facing a lawsuit from shareholders claiming that the Herndon, Virginia–based company had exaggerated claims about its students’ academic success.

“We saw the challenges K12 faced as a public company and still faces as a public company,” Dreyer says. “That was not necessarily the most attractive option, or what we felt would help us move our mission forward.”

Critics Abound

While the suit against K12 Inc. reached a settlement in March 2013, the episode underscores the scrutiny that has come to the field. Since 2011 especially, online learning has been the subject of critical, and sometimes pointedly unfavorable, reports from national media outlets and education policy organizations.

The National Education Policy Center, or NEPC, an organization based at the University of Colorado in Boulder, has focused several of its recent publications on the practices of full-time virtual schools (see “Questioning the Quality of Virtual Schools,” check the facts, Spring 2013). A report published in October 2011 called for curbing the growth of full-time virtual schools until more was understood about how to make them more effective, and the following January the same group issued a report that suggested student achievement at virtual charter schools lagged behind brick-and-mortar charter schools.

Dreyer acknowledges that, like it or not, virtual schools’ exponential growth is a legitimate reason for increased oversight. The flow of students to online providers means more public dollars being directed to companies like Connections and K12 Inc. Connections’ continued expansion, to an estimated 50,000 students in 2013 (including those enrolled in blended programs served by Connections Learning), is more norm than exception. One-semester course completions at FLVS increased 30-fold during the last decade, numbering 300,000 in 2011–12.

To be fair, not all publicity has been negative. The bipartisan Digital Learning Now initiative, which has welcomed Dreyer to its advisory council, has pushed reforms aimed at increasing the online learning options available to students across the United States. And a series of working papers from the Thomas B. Fordham Institute published around the same time as the NEPC’s explorations of virtual schooling showed the practice in a more favorable light.

The Long View

While Dreyer admits the scrutiny has been deflating at times, she also says it shouldn’t be ignored. Some virtual programs don’t have the robustness of instruction or content and deserve to be questioned.

“We do think this emphasis on performance is really important,” Dreyer says. “What we don’t want to see happen is students’ choosing what’s easiest or what’s going to give them the best grade.… That’s a very short-term strategy and, frankly, it’s a strategy that we as a country maybe have had for too long. We’ve got to up our game, and we’ve got to up our game in online learning, too.”

Dreyer has launched a Connections initiative to redesign academic support systems for students who may be at risk given the point at which they enter an online program or their socioeconomic background, as she wrote in the spring 2013 issue of AdvancED’s quarterly newsletter on digital learning.

The brief argues that students often turn to online learning as a last resort. The achievement of virtual-school students should be measured against that of students from similar population groups, since a student’s income level, for example, can more closely correlate with student achievement than whether that student is studying traditionally or virtually.

And although Dreyer hopes the new support systems are effective, she says it’s more important that the initiative helps reshape public discussion, and helps unearth what exactly contributes to the quality of a given virtual school.

“This isn’t just about us,” Dreyer says. “This is about what is going to help the greatest number of kids and assuring that they have lots of choices. Families need to look at what’s right for them. And you have to accept that it might not be you.”

Ian Quillen is a Baltimore-based freelance journalist who has spent the last decade covering sports, education, and technology.

When I first met Nasir he was finishing up kindergarten in a traditional classroom. He was preparing to spend the summer studying at a chess camp, and at home, before entering a 1st-grade classroom for gifted students. Nasir’s chess teachers told me that they saw something very special in him and predicted he could make a splash on the national chess scene.

Less than a year later he did just that, winning the national chess championship for all kindergartners and 1st graders with a perfect score. He helped lead his school’s team to a top-10 finish, celebrating with three other classmates. The following year, Nasir’s parents moved him to a private school with a strong chess team.

What motivates young children and their parents to devote time and resources to competitive activities? While conducting research for a book, Playing to Win: Raising Children in a Competitive Culture, I spent time with about 95 families with elementary-school-age children who are involved in competitive chess, dance, or soccer.

Even though all of the Playing to Win kids are in elementary school, much of the focus of their young lives is on a goal as much as a decade into the future: college admissions. One father, who did not attend college himself, told me about his motivation for his 3rd-grade daughter’s participation in competitive chess: “Well, if this helps her get into Harvard…”

Another mother said that her son’s achievements “might help him stand out and get into a good school.”

When I asked her to define a “good school,” she replied, “Ivy League or equivalent, like Stanford”—though she had not attended any of those colleges.

When it comes to college admissions, families know that grades and test scores are important. The families I studied, however, seemed to focus at least as much effort on extracurricular achievement as on academics. Among the 95 families, there were some whose children had stopped competing, although only one family had an older child who had stopped because of a negative impact on her grades. Even though the connection between pursuits like travel soccer and Little League and admission at an elite school is far from guaranteed, many parents are willing to hedge their bets. They are savvier than ever, investing both time and money so that their children get specialized instruction.

For many kids, extracurricular life is focused on athletics. A 2005 New York Times article on the growing popularity of lacrosse explained, “Families see lacrosse as an opportunity for their sons and daughters to shine in the equally competitive arenas of college admissions and athletic scholarships.” One parent is quoted in the article as saying, “From what I hear on the coaches’ side in Division III [lacrosse participation is] worth a couple hundred points on the SAT.”

All of the Playing to Win parents were realistic about their children’s very slim chances of earning a scholarship to a top school. They are looking for what lacrosse is thought to provide: an admissions boost. Athletic promise can confer an admissions advantage or scholarship money, and high-level participation in activities like chess and dance can also provide a leg up. The impact of accomplishments in sports is thought strongest at Ivy League schools, which don’t award athletic scholarships, and at small liberal arts colleges, where sometimes more than half of the students are collegiate athletes.

While it’s unclear how much competitive activity while kids are very young matters, parents believe participation is crucial to future success and act accordingly. And it is entirely possible that kids who are competitively involved while still in grade school may develop the skills and the mentality to achieve at a high level as they age (I call this Competitive Kid Capital).

It would be a mistake to imagine that parents of young kids fixate on college admissions offices every Saturday out on the soccer field. But they do seem to expect that early grooming in the tournaments of sports or dance or chess will produce in their child the track record of success they need to ensure that thick admissions envelope when the time comes.

Hilary Levey Friedman is a sociologist who studies childhood, competition, and beauty. Playing to Win: Raising Children in a Competitive Culture is her first book.

The quality of the teacher workforce in the United States is of considerable concern to education stakeholders and policymakers. Numerous studies show that student academic success depends in no small part on access to high-quality teachers. Many pundits point to the fact that in the United States, teachers tend not to be drawn from the top of the academic-performance distribution, as is the case in countries with higher student achievement, such as Finland, Korea, and Singapore. And the evidence on the importance of teacher academic proficiency generally suggests that effectiveness in raising student test scores is associated with strong cognitive skills as measured by SAT or licensure test scores, or the competitiveness of the college from which teachers graduate.

If teacher academic proficiency matters, then the long-term trends in the makeup of the teacher workforce present a troubling portrait. Teaching is a female-dominated occupation, and prior to notable gender desegregation in the labor force beginning in the 1960s, the most academically capable female college graduates tended to become teachers. Over the course of the next 35 years, women still made up the vast majority of the teacher workforce, but their academic credentials began to decline. Research by Sean Corcoran, William Evans, and Robert Schwab indicates that the likelihood of a female teacher having been among the highest-scoring 10 percent of high school students on standardized achievement tests fell sharply between 1971 and 2000, from 24 to 11 percent.

Over the past 20 years, there has been a strong policy push toward getting smarter people into the teacher workforce. Enacted in 2001, No Child Left Behind (NCLB), for instance, emphasized academic competence by requiring that prospective teachers either graduate with a major in the subject they are teaching, have credits equivalent to a major, or pass a qualifying test showing competence in the subject. Newly created alternative pathways to certification have sought to bring more academically accomplished individuals into the profession. More recently, the Council for the Accreditation of Educator Preparation (CAEP) released new standards for teacher training programs: among them, each cohort of entrants should have a collective grade-point average (GPA) of 3.0 and college admission test scores above the national average by 2017 and in the top one-third by 2020.

Absent persuasive evidence on the impact of efforts to raise the bar, some people have speculated that the rise of test-based accountability associated with NCLB and the ongoing push to establish more-rigorous teacher evaluation systems have made teaching less attractive and thereby contributed to further decline in the quality of the teaching corps. Prominent education historian Diane Ravitch, for example, has gone so far as to allege that reformers are waging a “war on teachers” that threatens to undermine, rather than improve, teacher quality.

So how has the academic caliber of new teachers changed over the last two decades? Has the policy emphasis on teacher quality led more academically talented people into the teacher workforce, or have accountability reforms driven talent away?

In this article we use a variety of datasets to analyze trends in the academic proficiency of individuals at various points in the teacher pipeline over the last two decades. Our conclusions are generally encouraging, although they come with caveats and an acknowledgment that there is room for improvement when it comes to drawing more talent into teaching. Focusing on the start of the teacher pipeline, i.e., on those who report applying for a teaching job or teachers who begin classroom positions in the year immediately after receiving an undergraduate degree, we find that teacher applicants and new teachers in recent years have significantly higher SAT scores than their counterparts in the mid-1990s. Contrary to earlier cohorts of college graduates from the mid-1990s and early 2000s, graduates entering the teaching profession in the 2008–09 school year had average SAT scores that slightly exceeded average scores of their peers entering other occupations. What is less clear is whether this improvement reflects a temporary response to the economic downturn or a more permanent shift.

The Teacher Workforce

We begin by using the Schools and Staffing Survey (SASS) data (see sidebar for a description of the datasets on which we rely) to provide an overview of demographic changes to the teacher workforce since the late 1980s. Teaching positions have traditionally been held primarily by white females, and despite some minor shifts over time, that remains overwhelmingly true today. A recent uptick in the proportion of teachers who are female, from about 71 percent in 1987–88 to about 76 percent in 2007–08, reflects growth in the number of female science and math teachers. In 1987‒88 only about 38 percent of science teachers and 48 percent of math teachers were female, while in 2007‒08 these figures rose to about 61 percent in science and 64 percent in math. We also find that the teachers in the workforce in 2007–08 had completed somewhat more schooling than their predecessors; approximately 51 percent held a master’s degree or higher compared to 47 percent in 1987–88. But, as numerous studies have shown, having a master’s degree is generally not correlated with measures of teacher effectiveness, based on student test scores.

The aging of the teacher workforce and the possibility of an impending teacher retirement “crisis” are recurring topics in the media. A 2009 New York Times article, for instance, noted that “Over the next four years, more than a third of the nation’s 3.2 million teachers could retire, depriving classrooms of experienced instructors and straining taxpayer-financed retirement systems.” The SASS data do show that the number of teachers eligible for full or partial retirement has increased dramatically. While the average age of teachers changed relatively little during this period, the percentage over age 55 increased from 9 to 16 percent. The pace at which the workforce is aging into retirement eligibility is also quickening: most of the increase in the proportion of retirement-eligible teachers occurred in the mid-2000s, and today the nation’s classrooms are staffed predominantly by relatively junior (under age 30) and senior teachers (over age 55). Although the demand for teachers also depends on policies such as class size and the use of technology, this increase in retirement-eligible teachers may well portend the need to hire more teachers in upcoming years.

Prospective Teachers

To get a picture of changes to the pool of potential teachers, we merge institutional selectivity measures from the College Board with the Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System (IPEDS) data on yearly changes over time in the college majors of graduates.

As one’s college major is a leading indicator of occupational intention, we explore trends in the average selectivity of colleges (measured based on the average SAT score for incoming freshmen) of those receiving a bachelor’s degree with an education or a noneducation major. We find that prospective teachers are graduating from less-selective colleges than noneducation majors, and that in the last 20 years the gap in institutional selectivity between education and noneducation majors has widened. For instance, a comparison of the institution-level average SAT scores of incoming freshmen, weighted by the number of graduates with education and noneducation majors, shows a difference of about 10 points on both the SAT math and verbal test in 1990 and 20 points in 2010. Similar trends for education and noneducation majors are evident for other measures of college selectivity, such as the percentage of incoming freshmen ranking near the top of their high-school class.

In support of one explanation for this shift, Randall Reback has shown that more-selective colleges and universities have become less likely to offer undergraduate programs that allow students to earn teacher certification in four years. This is consistent with another interesting finding from the IPEDS data, which show a shift in the way teachers are being prepared. The percentage of all bachelor’s degrees that are in education dropped from about 10 percent in 1990 to about 6 percent in 2010, while the percentage of master’s degrees that are in education stayed around 27 percent. Not surprisingly, given these figures, the share of prospective teachers gaining formal teacher preparation (i.e., a degree in education) through a graduate rather than undergraduate program has risen sharply over time, from about 45 percent in 1990 to about 63 percent in 2010. The SASS data confirm that there has been an increase in the number of master’s credentials among newly hired teachers. Of teachers who report having one year or less of teaching experience, approximately 26 percent entered teaching with a master’s degree in 2007–08 compared to 17 percent in 1987–88. This creates a dilemma when it comes to gaining a full understanding of how the teaching profession might be changing because, to our knowledge, there is no nationally representative dataset with information on the academic caliber of teachers who come into the profession with a master’s degree, an increasingly important pathway into the teaching profession.

New Teachers

The Baccalaureate and Beyond Longitudinal Study (B&B) data, however, give us a sense of which bachelor’s degree recipients are actually entering teaching (as opposed to training to enter the profession) and other occupations by looking at cohorts that received their degrees in 1993, 2000, and 2008. We can compare the distributions of percentile ranks of SAT scores over time for new teachers entering the workforce the year after receiving their bachelor’s degree (beginning teaching in the 1993–94, 2000–01, and 2008–09 school years) to those of other college graduates in the same cohort working full time the year following graduation. We find that more academically competent individuals are being drawn into the teaching profession. There is a small drop in average SAT percentile rankings for teachers between 1993 and 2000, from 45 to 42 (the raw SAT scores are similar for teachers in the 1993 and 2000 cohorts, but scores for nonteachers were higher for the 2000 cohort, resulting in a decrease in the average percentile rank for teachers). There is a sizable jump up in teachers’ average percentile rank to 50 for the 2008 cohort (see Figure 1), driven mainly by the proportion of teachers with SAT scores that fall in the top quartile of the distribution. This finding of increasing academic competence for newer entrants to the teacher labor market also shows up when we use undergraduate GPA as our indicator of academic competency, though research by Cory Koedel indicates that inconsistent grading standards across academic majors may render this measure less meaningful.

Next we examine the academic competence of teachers and nonteachers by college major. Examining the data at this level of detail is worthwhile for three reasons. First, an individual’s college major has important implications for compensation. Because teacher salaries are typically not differentiated by area of training, and the economic returns to math and science degrees have increased over time, it is more likely that graduates trained in those high-demand fields have opportunities for higher pay in other careers. Second, and consistent with the first point, there is considerable evidence that school systems find it more challenging to hire and retain teachers in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) areas. Third, teacher majors tend to be related to the courses they are teaching, which is consistent with the notion that strong content knowledge is one of the attributes of teacher success. In fact, the overwhelming majority (about 95 percent) of the newly minted STEM majors in each cohort who enter the teaching profession teach in math or science classrooms (i.e., nonelementary and including math, biology/life science, chemistry, geology/earth/space science, physics, computer science, or general science). Despite this, when we look at either new teachers (using the B&B) or all teachers (using the SASS), we find that many of these classrooms are not staffed by teachers with a STEM major. Among new teachers leading math or science classes in 1993-94, 31 percent had STEM degrees, 20 percent did in 2000-01, and in 2008-09, 30 percent had majored in one of those subjects.

It is not surprising that the academic caliber of teachers varies a good deal by subject area, given that STEM majors tend to have higher SAT scores than non-STEM majors. For all three cohorts, STEM majors’ SAT score average is about 100 points higher in each year than that of non-STEM majors, and a far higher proportion come from the top 20 percent of the distribution. For both the 1993 and 2000 cohorts, teachers score lower on average than nonteachers among both STEM majors and non-STEM majors, in some cases by as much as 7 SAT percentile rank points (see Figure 2). However, in the case of the 2008 cohort, scores for teachers were slightly higher for both STEM majors (by about 3 percentile rank points) and non-STEM majors (by about 2 percentile rank points) than for nonteachers. In other words, we find that high-scoring STEM majors are relatively more likely to become teachers in 2008 than they were in earlier cohorts. There is still considerable overlap in the distributions of scores for teachers and nonteachers in both groups, but the gap in the academic proficiency of teachers and graduates entering other professions had clearly narrowed a great deal—and even reversed—by 2008. Particularly notable is the fact that there has been a sharp decline in the share of STEM majors entering teaching from the bottom 20 percent of the SAT distribution, which fell from 13 percent in 1993 to less than 2 percent in 2008.

What explains the seeming dichotomy between what we see when we look at trends for prospective teachers (based on college major) and trends for those who actually enter the teacher workforce? One possibility is that there are within-college shifts in who opts to teach; these would not be captured by the college selectivity measures but would show up in the individual-level analysis. Another possibility is that many individuals who graduate from college with an education major do not actually end up teaching, and it may be that the more academically competent among those trained to teach actually become teachers, either because of application or hiring decisions. To shed light on these issues, we take a more detailed look at who progresses through college into the teaching profession.

Applying and Getting Hired to Teach

Our final analysis uses data from the B&B to examine whether measures of individuals’ academic competence and college training are predictive of whether they 1) apply for a teaching position, and 2) end up in the teacher workforce in the year following graduation. To keep things simple, we focus on the decisions of female graduates who are employed full time in the year following graduation. We do this because men and women exhibit different labor-market behavior and because women make up approximately three-quarters of the teacher workforce.

For each cohort, STEM majors are about 4 to 8 percentage points less likely to apply for a teaching job than non-STEM majors. In the first two cohorts, we find that graduates with higher SAT scores are generally less likely to pursue a teaching career, but this is not the case in 2008. Specifically, in 1993, the probability of applying for a teaching job decreases as SAT score increases, with a difference of about 10 percentage points between a teacher at the 20th percentile and a teacher at the 80th percentile on the SAT distribution. A similar pattern exists in 2000, but the negative relationship between SAT scores and the propensity to apply for a teaching job is not as strong. By 2008, there is no relationship between college graduates’ SAT scores and their likelihood of applying to teach, when controlling for the other variables in the model (college major, undergraduate GPA, college selectivity, parents’ occupation, parental income, and race/ethnicity). Put another way: individuals with high SAT scores from earlier cohorts were less likely to pursue a teaching position than their lower-scoring counterparts, but for the 2008 cohort, high- and low-scoring individuals were about equally likely to pursue a teaching job.

We also investigate whether there have been changes over time in both the relative probability for STEM and non-STEM majors to enter the teaching profession and the relationship between SAT scores and the likelihood of employment. To illustrate this, Figure 3 reports the probability of being employed as a teacher in the year following graduation for a “typical” white, female STEM graduate and a similar non-STEM graduate with SAT scores at the 10th, 50th, and 90th percentiles. Because entering the teacher workforce is a function of whether an individual applies for a position and the hiring decisions of districts, these results show the effect of academic competency on the likelihood of applying and getting hired contingent on applying. In all years, STEM majors are less likely than non-STEM majors to enter teaching, although this difference is statistically significant only in 2000. In 1993 and 2000, the likelihood of entering teaching decreases as SAT scores increase, while in 2008 there is no relationship between SAT scores and the propensity to become a teacher.

And what of the concern that test-based accountability policies are making teaching less attractive to talented individuals? To evaluate this claim, we compare the SAT percentile ranks across the three B&B cohorts of new teachers entering classrooms that typically face pressure to achieve high test scores (grade 4–8 reading and math) and classrooms that do not involve high-stakes testing. We find that new teachers in high-stakes classrooms tend to have higher SAT scores than those in other classrooms, and that the differential in teachers’ SAT scores between the two classroom types grew by about 6 SAT percentile points between 1993 and 2008. Test-based accountability greatly increased after the 2001 passage of NCLB, but we see no evidence that more academically proficient teachers entering the workforce in the year immediately following graduation are shying away from (or at least are not being assigned to) high-stakes classrooms.

Conclusions

In summary, although teachers in the U.S. are more likely to be drawn from the lower end of the academic achievement distribution than are teachers in selected high-performing countries, the picture is a bit more nuanced than the rhetoric suggests, and as we illustrate, it has in fact changed over time in an encouraging direction. There was an upward shift in achievement for 2008 college graduates entering the teacher workforce the following school year. In fact, 2008 graduates both with and without STEM majors who entered the teacher workforce had higher average SAT scores than their peers who entered other occupations.

What explains the apparent rise in academic competency among new teachers? As we show, the SAT scores of those seeking and finding employment in a teaching job differ in different years. It is possible that alternative pathways into the teaching profession have become an important source of academic talent for the profession. Unfortunately, we cannot explore this issue in any depth because the way in which teachers were asked about their preparation has varied over time. Regardless, alternative routes are unlikely to be the primary explanation for the changing SAT trends given that, with a few high-profile exceptions like Teach for America, alternative certification programs are not highly selective.

Differences in the labor market context across years may help explain the rise in SAT scores. According to data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the average unemployment rate in 2009 was about 9 percent to about 6 and 5 percent in 1994 and 2001, respectively. The high unemployment rate in 2009 may have led more high-scoring graduates to choose to pursue comparatively stable and secure teaching jobs rather than occupations that were viewed as riskier in the economic downturn. By contrast, those graduating in 2000 were entering the labor market during the tech boom, when there was a good deal of competition for the labor of prospective teachers. Regardless of the reason for the changes in academic proficiency that we observe, however, the data are encouraging and may represent the reversal of the long-term trend of declining academic talent entering teaching.

Finally, we see little change across years in the relative propensity of STEM and non-STEM majors to become teachers. There has been a gradual increase over the past decade in the percentage of districts offering pay incentives for shortage areas (see Figure 4), but recent evidence (see work by Katharine Strunk with Jason Grissom, Tammy Kolbe, and Dara Zeehandelaar) shows that few districts are truly strategic in matching incentives to staffing needs, and as a consequence, school systems continue to struggle to fill teaching slots in math and science. It appears that education policies related to both compensation and working conditions must evolve further if school systems are to address the challenge of staffing math and science classrooms with teachers of strong academic caliber.

Dan Goldhaber is director of the Center for Education Data & Research (CEDR) at the University of Washington, where Joe Walch is research consultant. An unabridged version of this article is available at www.CEDR.us.

Inside the Black Box of Classroom Practice: Change Without Reform in American Education
By Larry Cuban

Harvard Education Press, 2013, $29.95; 243 pages.

Reviewed by Mark Bauerlein

One of the abiding features of education reform in the United States, including the continuing saga of Common Core, is an unfortunate reality Larry Cuban addresses in his latest book (his sixth since 2009). It is the vast, multilayered distance from one end of a reform effort to the other. At the beginning, we find governors and mayors, foundations and advocacy groups that propose changes in funding, governance, and curriculum. At the end lies what actually transpires in classrooms: the things students study, the assignments they complete, where they sit and the teacher stands, and other factors that make up on-the-ground instruction. In between, a complex and unreliable process of policy formulation, adoption, and implementation unfolds. An idea arises, say, digital learning, that attracts researchers and educators, then thrills a politician and a donor, which then yields a 1:1 laptop program, which calls for the purchase of hardware, software, and curricular materials, which requires training for teachers and a support team of tech experts…before the crucial engagement of teacher, student, and laptop happens in class.

Cuban monitored one such initiative in a Bay Area high school during 1998–99 and 2008–10. Charting the history of the school, conducting interviews, and observing classes, Cuban found that

• in both periods, student and faculty populations changed significantly, drawing energy away from technology matters

• test scores fell below state and national averages, pressuring staff to orient instruction to test-taking skills (California put the school on probation in 2004.)

• the 1990s principal spearheading the initiative left just as it was blossoming (The school had four different principals from 1998 to 2010.)

• teachers themselves varied in their commitment, some using technology all the time, others sparingly

• every year, costs of maintaining equipment went up, while funding was inconsistent.

The fits and starts explain one conclusion Cuban submitted to the school: “Connections between student achievement and teacher and student use of laptops are, at best, indirect and, at worst, nonexistent.” The idea was sound (digital technology can enhance learning), initial funding was generous (federal and state grants, Silicon Valley donors), and school leaders were enthusiastic. But when the technology finally made it to the classroom, integration was an inconsistent activity. Even when teachers adopted the tools, they largely maintained customary pedagogical styles.

The case illustrates Cuban’s subtitle, “Change Without Reform.” Big ideas and well-backed programs end up affecting instruction barely at all, particularly the teacher-centered approach, which Cuban singles out as especially hard to dislodge (though he holds back from insisting on child-centered tactics as clearly superior). Reforms are debated in public and argued at length by researchers, commentators, and stakeholders, but those that win adoption run through so many distorting and deflecting circumstances that the critical party and setting, teachers in classrooms, may or may not embrace the changes. Not only that, but we don’t even know whether they do or not. As Cuban remarks of recent changes in science curricula, “these curricular frameworks will have only a passing similarity to the science content and skills that teachers will teach once they close their classroom doors.”

Several reforms have tried to get inside the “black box” of the classroom and influence teaching practices, for instance, tying teacher evaluations to test scores as a way to weed out the least-able educators. But, Cuban recalls, since the 1920s researchers have attempted to make teaching “rational and predictable,” enumerating behaviors and objectives with the goal of grounding pedagogy in hard science. One vision from 1920 identified 160 attributes. Unsurprisingly, most efforts collapsed precisely because of all the irregular factors of each classroom (course content, student demographics, teacher beliefs, etc.), not to mention the general “unpredictability of classroom life.” In each case, teachers largely ignored those initiatives, with the exception of standardized test-score accountability, which tended only to intensify existing teaching practices, not transform them.

If teaching practice is so resistant to reform, then “What Should Be Done?” That is the question, but Cuban doesn’t pose it until announcing it in a subheading on page 178, nine pages before the end of the book. After clarifying the black-box problem, the book meanders through changes in physicians’ practice, various failed 20th-century teaching proposals, and 21st-century distance learning, most of which one way or another demonstrate the impenetrability of the classroom. But all we end up with as an answer is a few pages on approaches that might do better: one, parent groups compelling decisionmakers to ease up on test-based accountability for teachers and students; and two, teachers “working collectively…to improve their content knowledge and teaching skills.” The first might slow an accountability process that just doesn’t work very well, Cuban maintains, while the second might break up the isolation of teachers, which is the root condition of the black-box classroom. Cuban cites some cases of collaborative professional development that produced gains in scattered schools, but acknowledges that sustained evidence “has yet to emerge clearly.” He replies candidly to the question of whether the creation of team-oriented “cultures of learning” will advance academic outcomes with, “I hope so—but in all honesty, I do not know.”

A disappointing recommendation, but we should interpret that admission generously. The argument of Inside the Black Box suggests that any stronger demand for causal evidence overlooks the complex, variable nature of teaching. After all, Cuban concludes, changes in governance, school size, curriculum, and organization “have had few effects on classroom practices and, consequently, students’ academic outcomes.” If an activity involves “unrationalizable” ingredients—hard-to-control components such as teacher personality and parental influence—changes in elements outside it will have precisely the impact we’ve seen so many times: progress in some places, decline in others; enthusiasm among these teachers, no reaction among those; and unintended consequences. Of course, that conclusion doesn’t satisfy education leaders and problem-solving politicians, but it may be that trying to objectify, predict, and control teaching too much, to make instruction “teacher-proof,” is but a lesser form of social engineering, a costly but futile, or at least ineffective, effort to eliminate the capricious human element from an all-too-human and often mysterious encounter.

Mark Bauerlein is professor of English at Emory University.

Since their start in Houston in 1994, KIPP (Knowledge Is Power Program) charter schools have been the most celebrated of the No Excuses schools. Employing strict discipline, an extended school day and year, and carefully selected teachers, No Excuses schools move disadvantaged students who start behind their peers academically up to and above grade level in reading and math, and on the path to success in college. Studies conducted by Mathematica Policy Research show that KIPP schools achieve significantly greater gains in student achievement than do traditional public schools teaching similar students. Recent large-scale research at Stanford University’s Center for Research on Education Outcomes (CREDO) also finds that KIPP teaching is highly effective, with individual students learning far more than their statistical “twins” at traditional public schools. KIPP’s own studies find that the schools substantially increase the odds that a disadvantaged student will enter and graduate from college. Not surprisingly, the 144 KIPP charter schools across the nation have no shortage of fans, including President Barack Obama, Microsoft founder Bill Gates, and Secretary of Education Arne Duncan.

Also not surprisingly, KIPP and other No Excuses schools have no shortage of critics. Furman University education professor P. L. Thomas, who admitted in a recent speech at the University of Arkansas to never having been in a No Excuses charter school, complains in a widely referenced 2012 Daily Kos post that in such schools, “Students are required to use complete sentences at all times, and call female teachers ‘Miss’—with the threat of disciplinary action taken if students fail to comply.” Regarding KIPP in particular, Cambridge College professor and blogger Jim Horn, who admits to having never been inside a KIPP school, nonetheless has referred to KIPP as a “New Age eugenics intervention at best,” destroying students’ cultures, and a “concentration camp” at worst.

Such criticisms could be dismissed if held on the margins of American public education. Unfortunately, within many education schools and teachers unions, KIPP detractors are more prevalent than KIPP backers. All too many professors and education administrators think that KIPP, and schools like it, succeed by working their students like dogs. Like all charter schools, KIPP schools are chosen by parents, but critics fear that disadvantaged parents do not know enough to choose wisely, or else do not have their children’s best interest at heart. Leaving aside whether the critics patronize the people of color KIPP schools serve, we propose that KIPP and similar schools are not nearly as militaristic as critics, who may have never been inside them, fear.

Inside a KIPP School

We have done hundreds of hours of fieldwork over the past eight years in 12 KIPP schools in five states, interviewing scores of teachers, students, and administrators. It is true that an atmosphere of order generally prevails. We found that schools that begin by establishing a culture of strict discipline, in neighborhoods where violence and disorder are widespread, ease off once a safe, tolerant learning environment is secured. “KIPPsters” and their teachers live up to the Work Hard, Be Nice motto but also play hard when the work is done. A schoolwide focus on academics is palpable. The schools nonetheless make time for band, basketball, chess, prom, and any number of clubs.

Student interactions are atypical. The KIPP schools we observed emphasize teamwork and assuring success for all (“team beats individual”; “all will learn“), encouraging more-advanced students to help their peers rather than just fend for themselves, in contrast to more individualistic traditional public schools.

Teachers in KIPP schools have to be willing to go the extra mile. We demonstrate in a forthcoming Social Science Quarterly article that in advertisements for teaching positions, KIPP schools consistently emphasize public service incentives, serving kids, while nearby traditional public schools emphasize private incentives, namely salary and benefits. One principal explained that KIPP’s New Orleans region hires teachers, in part, for “the J factor—Joy—enthusiasm and joy in learning, how to make learning fun; you were just in that classroom and could see that teacher had joy in the way he was leading the class.” If teachers don’t have it, then they probably can’t succeed at KIPP.

At KIPP McDonogh 15, a combined elementary and middle-school building in New Orleans’s French Quarter, the middle-school principal played music, and students and staff danced down the hallways as they moved from one class session to another. In the elementary school a floor below, some teachers took this concept a step further, using a lively musical transition from one lesson to another. Like most KIPP teachers elsewhere, teachers here constantly judge students, but their pronouncements are more positive than negative, as in, “I like how you stopped working as soon as I asked you,” and “I’ll shout out to you for helping your neighbor with that problem.”

Out of earshot of teachers, we talked with five elementary students. Though one boy said, “I liked my old school better; it was easier,” his peers preferred KIPP. Another boy said of his old school, “I was learning badly. Now I’m learning better.” One boy, who had been afraid in his old school, said, “I didn’t have any friends, and now I have lots of friends.” All the students we spoke to liked their KIPP teachers, teachers like Garrett Dorfman, a bespectacled 20-something in a #9 Drew Brees jersey, who looks older than his years but really comes alive in front of his 3rd graders. Although he originally planned to teach for just a few years, Dorfman is now hooked for life on New Orleans and on teaching at KIPP.

After finishing an engaging lesson in which students competed to see who could answer math questions the fastest, Dorfman called on one of us to answer his students’ questions about college, where they would all be in just 10 years. The students asked good questions about how to choose a college, how to pick a major, and the advantages of commuting as opposed to living on campus, until one student asked if most colleges did “celebration.” When asked what celebration is, the 3rd grader said we would have to stay after lunch, and then we could see. Dorfman ended class with a pep talk about the upcoming standardized tests:

I have this tough homework for you. Play with your friends. Get a good night’s sleep. I do have these 450 homework problems for you. [Class answers NO!]

Would you believe 450 pages’ worth? [Class answers NO!]

OK, the main thing is to come here next week on time at 7:40 sharp, because they won’t let you start the test late, with your game face on. Let’s see your game face. [They roar and he roars back.]

Remember that you can call me over the weekend if you need to. Now four shoutouts and go downstairs to celebration!

School Spirit, KIPP-Style

At celebration, held at McDonogh 15 most Friday afternoons, students played games devised by staff for a half hour, after which students who had no behavioral issues and who had won the lottery could hit any teacher or leader they chose with a pie. (Not coincidentally, Friday is casual-dress day at the school.) One mile away and four days later, a professor at the AERA (American Educational Research Association) annual conference denounced KIPP as a “concentration camp,” but to those of us who have been there, KIPP McDonogh 15 is about as far from a concentration camp as you can get.

Not all KIPP schools manage the school day in exactly the same way. On a day-to-day basis, the KIPP Delta schools in Arkansas are a little stricter than the KIPP schools in New Orleans: the network varies across communities more than critics or supporters realize. But even at KIPP Delta, teachers may not survive the day without getting a pie to the face. We spent two days observing at KIPP Blytheville College Preparatory School (BCPS) in Blytheville, Arkansas, in March 2013 during Geek Week. Each March at KIPP BCPS, students participate in a week of activities similar to Spirit Week in traditional public schools. Geek Week included Pattern Day, where students mismatched different patterns on their clothing; Superhero Day, where students dressed as their favorite superhero; and Geriatric Day, where students dressed like the elderly. The festivities culminated with Pi Day, on March 14 (3.14). On Pi Day, students were given an information sheet about the number pi, noting its history and function in mathematics. The sheet included a mirror image of the number 3.14, which looked like the letters P, I, and E.

A general air of excitement preceded the Pi Challenge, in which students competed to see who could recite the most digits of pi, followed by the chance to hit a teacher with a pie. Student surveys picked the three “meanest” teachers in the school to “pie,” along with school director Maisie Wright, and they in turn got to honor, or dishonor, three students with pies in the face, perhaps students who had overcome great challenges, or who gave them the most grief. Prior to the main event of pies to the face, the assembled KIPPsters cheered on their classmates in the Pi Challenge. The cafeteria-turned-temporary-auditorium was hushed as one student after another recited the digits and Ms. Wright checked the numbers. One student in the audience looked on with baited breath, a 7th grader who held the school pi record at 186. This young woman had moved out of state, returning to KIPP Blytheville during her spring break to see if her record would indeed be broken. A valiant effort was made by all competitors, but in the end, a girl in 6th grade won the crown for the day by reciting 158 digits of pi without tripping up. After the Pi Challenge, one by one, starting with a countdown from 5…4…3…2…1, the participating teachers and students smashed pie plates of whipped cream into each other’s faces. The student assembly, which had remained seated and mostly quiet, was now in an uproar, with high-fives, hooting, hollering, cheering, even jumping up and down, as they watched their teachers and KIPP “teammates” getting pied.

Prior to Geek Week at BCPS, we observed a lock-in event cleverly named Benchmark Madness, after the Arkansas Benchmark tests to be administered in a month’s time. We were surprised when a teacher rolled into a cafeteria full of quietly seated students on a scooter, in his pajamas, complete with matching bathrobe and house shoes, spraying students with Silly String and Nerf gun darts.

Inside and outside the classroom, students are encouraged to work together. That evening, students enjoyed numerous team-building events uniting students, faculty, staff, and parent volunteers. Students participated in a variety of activities. Walking from room to room, students could be seen tie-dyeing shirts, building clay sculptures, singing karaoke, building forts, and attempting to best each other in word games. These activities mostly took place in classrooms or at stations outside, through which small groups of students would rotate. Once students had made complete rotations through the teacher-led activities, the students would return to the cafeteria for an Hour of Power.

The first Hour of Power consisted of students learning song parodies that were focused on strategies and motivation to do well in school and on the upcoming Benchmarks. Students belted out the lyrics of a song titled “Beat That Benchmark Test.” A nonstop dance party held from midnight to 1 a.m. was the second Hour of Power. The final Hour of Power took place at 5 a.m. Using the light of the rising sun, the students followed a few teachers on a morning jog around campus. At the end, other teachers positioned on top of the school buildings bombarded students with water balloons.

While none of these activities seemed to be related to the specific items that students would soon face on the benchmark exam, it was obvious that teamwork and leadership were being developed. Students relied on and supported one another as they traveled from one activity to the next with a great deal of autonomy from their teachers and responsibility for keeping up with all of their group members. In the end, the purposes of Benchmark Madness were to have fun and to motivate students in their battle to dominate standardized tests.

As KIPP Delta director Scott Shirey put it, the state benchmark exam is the enemy that unites students and faculty: “If it didn’t exist, we would have to create it.”

The Takeaways

Of course, these are just a few days in the life of these KIPP schools. Typical times are more mundane. Even so, from what we have seen, KIPP schools are successful high-poverty schools. Teachers and kids have good days and bad days. Many kids have troubled home lives, which make schooling more challenging and require that school staff be flexible and accommodate changing student needs. The toughest times in KIPP schools are when the schools are new and the Work Hard, Be Nice culture is being established. Principals and teachers have to set up the goals of the school clearly and gain student buy-in through constant feedback, both positive and negative. Once basic safety and a college-bound culture are established, KIPPsters and their teachers get down to the daily tasks of teaching and learning. But they can also have fun. There may be more opportunity for fun than at most schools, since KIPP schools seem to have less bullying, no competition over clothes, and students who share the goals of getting ahead academically and helping their peers do the same.

Our extensive fieldwork shows that in contrast to the claims of some KIPP backers, there is no magic. In contrast to the claims of KIPP detractors, there is no ill treatment of children. There is lots of hard work and hard play, led by teachers and administrators who, at most KIPP schools, know every kid and every family. Traditional public schools can copy nearly all of the KIPP playbook, if they wish to try. If doing so establishes a culture of cooperation and academic success among students, teachers, and parents, would that be such a bad thing?

 

Alexandra M. Boyd is doctoral academy fellow in the department of education reform at the University of Arkansas, where Robert Maranto is professor of education reform. Caleb Rose teaches in a dropout recovery charter school in Little Rock.

Tilting at Windmills:
School Reform, San Diego,
and America’s Race to Renew Public Education
By Richard Lee Colvin

Harvard Education Press, 2013, $29.95; 296 pages.

As reviewed by Nathan Glazer

Reading this account of Alan Bersin’s successful, by the test scores, but highly contentious time as school superintendent in San Diego, 1998–2005, I could not help but think back to an account of another successful superintendency, that of Pat Forgione in the Austin, Texas, public schools, related in Larry Cuban’s book As Good As it Gets (see “Lessons from a Reformer,” book reviews, Fall 2010). The challenges were similar: substantial gaps between black and Latino and white and Asian schoolchildren, school systems in disarray, and school boards looking for strong leadership. The remedies that the new leaders proposed and implemented were also similar: bringing in the best consultants, introducing new curricula, removing and replacing the principals of poorly performing schools, adding math and reading coaches, requiring summer staff training, bringing in charter school organizers to manage the worst-performing schools. Yet San Diego became notorious for the fierce resistance of its teachers union, abetted by school board members, to any and all efforts at change, whereas there is hardly any reference to the role of the unions in Cuban’s account of Austin. Cuban, writing in 2010 of Forgione’s success there, notes, “his performance matched that of big-city superintendents…such as Carl Cohn of Long Beach, California, Beverly Hall in Atlanta, and Tom Payzant in Boston.” Bersin is striking for his absence from this list: Carl Cohn, who succeeded him in San Diego, did not last two years, apparently driven out by the atmosphere of incessant and poisonous conflict that prevailed even after Bersin left.

Bersin was one of that group of reforming superintendents who were being brought in at the time from outside the world of education to manage big-city school systems, the most prominent being Joel Klein in New York City. School boards and mayors thought these leaders could do what those professionalized in the world of education could not. Bersin, Colvin tells us, the son of “Russian immigrants” (better described as Eastern European Jews) in Brooklyn, had “benefited from a rigorous public school education” (though there is no mention of his attending one of New York City’s examination high schools); gone on to Harvard, Oxford (as a Rhodes Scholar, in the same class as Bill Clinton), and Yale Law School; and enjoyed a successful legal career culminating in service as the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of California. Clearly, only his desire for further challenging and serious public service could have led him to consider the superintendency of the troubled San Diego public schools, the eighth-largest school district in the United States. Two members of the five-member school board, strong supporters of the teachers union, were doubtful about him, though Bersin was a Democrat and should have been considered sympathetic to unions.

Bersin jumped into the job with remarkable vigor. Months before taking office, he engaged in an extended effort to educate himself on the problems and prospects of urban–school district management. He “brought in a consultant to map out the various district offices and what they did…. To counter the instinctive wariness [that accompanied his appointment] Bersin did all he could to assure everyone that student achievement, good teaching and equity were his primary concern…. [He] formed a transition committee that included the head of the teachers union, the nonteaching employee unions…administrators…and representatives of parent and ethnic communities.” The main interest of the transition committee seemed to be to voice complaints, and it met only once. He interviewed 20 of the district’s top leaders, received many solicited and unsolicited messages, reflecting what he called “a deep sadness, a disturbing fatalism at the root.”

He flew to Cambridge, Massachusetts, to consult with faculty at the Harvard Graduate School of Education and learned of Tony Alvarado, the former New York City schools chancellor and head of District 4 on the East Side of Manhattan, where he had had remarkable success in raising achievement in a district dominated by minority students. Alvarado was planning to take another job, but Bersin, with the energy that characterized all his actions, persuaded Alvarado to head instead to San Diego and become his director of instruction.

Changes were introduced immediately, and the battles with the union began. Improving literacy was the central target, and Alvarado believed in trained literacy coaches to help teachers. “There was already a provision in the contract under which the district was to set up a system of peer coaches that would largely be controlled by the union…. The union leadership insisted that all teachers were essentially the same and that any credentialed teacher, by definition, was qualified for the role of coaching his or her fellow teachers.”

Alvarado insisted that the literacy coaches be expert in the methods that he had found most effective. The union believed that they should help teachers in whatever methods they used. The union would not accept changes on which it was not consulted. The matter went into negotiations that lasted eight months. Bersin realized that “if we negotiated everything we’d never get anything done.” And he and Alvarado would not accept the status quo as defined by the contract.

Alvarado believed principals should be focused on instruction and should be regularly observing classes. The union thought that teachers should be informed in advance before principals came to their classes; unannounced visits made them nervous. Principals were also made nervous by the new demands. At the end of Bersin’s first year, 13 principals and two vice principals were placed on administrative leave, and the manner in which this was done raised a storm: each was summoned to the district office and given 30 minutes to remove personal belongings from the building, while a school district police officer watched. This may have comported with corporate practice, but it was unheard of in the world of education.

Thus the battle lines were set in the first year. But the school board majority (three to two) steadily supported Bersin. A “blueprint” he proposed in year two, as achievement lagged, increased the hours of literacy training, with additional time and summer school for those falling behind, and added more programs for the same purpose, to be paid for by centralizing control of Title I funds and eliminating other programs (such as some magnet schools). Union opposition intensified. Teachers jammed into school board and community meetings, disrupting the proceedings, and denounced Bersin as a dictator. After six years of intense effort, when Bersin proposed under the No Child Left Behind law that charter school organizers be asked to make proposals for some of the worst-performing schools, a school board member called him a “Gauleiter,” which she “(inaccurately) said were ‘Jews who worked for the Nazis [to shepherd] their own people into the trains’ to the concentration camps.”

Bersin persisted for six years, in time gaining the support of some teachers and principals. A 2005 study by the Public Policy Institute of California found the improvement in reading “so definitive that San Diego’s efforts are well worth a look by other school districts in California and the nation.” Achievement gaps were narrowed significantly. But this was for elementary schools: similar efforts in high schools did not show the same results.

Colvin worked closely with Bersin in writing this book, becoming a friend of the family, as Bersin says frequently. Other treatments of Bersin’s time as superintendent are more critical, in particular one by Diane Ravitch in The Death and Life of the Great American School System. But her major sources were the union officials. More neutrally, Larry Cuban and Michael Usdan, in Powerful Reforms with Shallow Roots, noted that “continual conflicts made reforms slower and smaller bore than they could have been and had to be.” At times, Bersin acted peremptorily and roughly, as in the case of the principal dismissals.

But reading this account one wonders how the intense conflict could have been avoided. And if this is what it takes to make modest improvements in achievement levels and reduce achievement gaps, how often can we expect it to happen?

Nathan Glazer is professor emeritus of education and sociology at Harvard University.