After years of attention from educators but little measurable achievement growth, something more has to be done to address the instructional needs of Hispanic students. The opportunity gap between Hispanics and their more-advantaged peers is still too wide, and high-school graduation rates are still too low. What’s more, demographic trends indicate that there is no time to waste: the Hispanic population is not only the nation’s largest immigrant group, but has accounted for 56 percent of U.S. population growth in the past two decades. As a result, linguistic diversity is increasingly characteristic of today’s classrooms. Unless educators design instruction to match the demographics of today’s students, as the Hispanic population continues to grow and to grow up, so too will the number of students experiencing difficulties. With this knowledge, policymakers and practitioners alike are eager to determine how to bolster English-language literacy among the Hispanic population at scale.

Hispanic Students in Context

Focusing education reform plans more effectively requires an understanding of context, in this case, key characteristics of the Hispanic population and the schools they attend. For example, the majority of Hispanic students in today’s classrooms are not “newcomers,” enrolling as older children and adolescents, but instead are U.S.-born children of immigrants. These families often associate the U.S. with better opportunities and a better life for the next generation, based on education and schooling. They enroll their young children in early education and care settings and kindergarten classrooms and think favorably about the U.S. public education system (see “Reform Agenda Gains Strength,” features, Winter 2013).

Yet, whether Hispanic children receive English-as-a-second-language support or not, many of them are performing well below average by middle-school entry. At the same time, Hispanic students in the U.S. are overwhelmingly growing up in poverty and attending high-minority schools, in which many of their peers are also at-risk for school failure. The 2011 8th-grade National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) shows that only 18 percent of Hispanic students and 14 percent of black students read at or above proficiency levels. These populations also post higher rates of grade retention and lower rates of high-school graduation than their majority-culture peers. In the U.S., Hispanic and black students are attending increasingly segregated and underresourced schools. According to a 2012 report by the Civil Rights Project, 80 percent of Hispanic students and 74 percent of black students are enrolled in economically and racially segregated schools. Classrooms in these schools provide them with fewer opportunities to learn than their peers from higher-income backgrounds enjoy.

How does this inform my perspective on educating Hispanic and black students? On the one hand, it’s inappropriate to assume that similar performance patterns mean similar needs. There is no question that Spanish-speaking Hispanic students’ language-learning needs are somewhat different than their monolingual peers, particularly in the early years. For example, while many black children begin developing English oral-language skills years before formal schooling, many Hispanic children must develop English language proficiency as they are simultaneously learning academic content. Thus, although both groups may post lower rates of school readiness, Hispanic children from Spanish-speaking homes face the additional challenge of learning the language of the classroom, making them especially vulnerable to poor academic outcomes. To be competitive in this global economy, this population requires reform efforts that reflect their complex language-learning needs and builds on their strengths. On the other hand, there is reason to believe that the approach to bolstering students’ advanced literacy skills, and academic language skills in particular, need not be entirely different for different groups, particularly with increasing grade levels. This is especially the case when they are enrolled in the same schools in low-income neighborhoods, irrespective of language background or identification with a particular racial group. For example, a recent study conducted in urban middle schools found that there were more similarities than differences in the reading profiles of struggling students from non-English-speaking and English-speaking households, and that low academic vocabulary knowledge, a major component of advanced literacy skills, was a shared source of difficulty.

Seeking Advanced Literacy Skills

If we take seriously the ways in which literacy skills drive academic success, focusing immediate reform plans on bolstering these skills makes good sense, and that tack has been widespread. In this regard, current challenges to educating Hispanic students reflect a need we have recognized in public education for decades—not just to develop students’ literacy skills, but to develop their advanced literacy skills. Recent research, however, has shifted our thinking: It’s not reading per se that impedes Hispanic students’ advanced literacy skill development; it’s actually the language of print—in the newspaper, the textbook, the magazine article—that proves difficult and demands instructional emphasis. Our task, then, is to redesign our model for teaching literacy. We’ve gone about much literacy reform guided by the assumption that if we focus on the act of reading—putting the letters and sounds together to read words—then students will engage in deep comprehension. The flaws in this approach have proven particularly problematic for academically vulnerable populations, including many of our Hispanic students.

Why make this distinction between the act of reading and the language of print? Well, simply knowing how to read individual words is not enough to comprehend text. Students also need to understand the vocabulary used and the concepts the words describe. Otherwise, “reading” the printed page will not result in comprehension or learning. Schools have done a good job teaching most students the basic skills necessary to be proficient readers in the early grades, decoding and comprehending the conversational language that conveys ideas and topics in beginner books. Among those reaching this level of mastery are many Hispanic students and others who come from homes where the primary language is not English: they acquire early reading skills on par with their peers. Many of them surpass the “survival English” stage—they are conversant and comfortable speaking English—especially after many years in American schools. Still, with increasing grade levels, the language of print is beyond their reach; it is much less conversational and much more academic, making the texts far more difficult to comprehend.

The academic language of print is, at once, a gatekeeper and a gateway. When academic language is largely inaccessible, so too is the school curriculum; accessing the language, however, means having the opportunity to learn academic concepts and generate ideas and questions that contribute to academic conversations, and ultimately leads to school achievement. Beyond the language of the middle-school or high-school text, academic language is the language of the SAT, the college classroom, and the skilled labor force. It is a powerful tool for personal and professional success.

And yet we have never designed literacy instruction to support this language learning at scale. Instead, we’ve devoted most of our instructional resources and energy toward early literacy initiatives and supplemental interventions that have focused on reading print. In fact, without high-quality academic language learning and instruction, individual students’ literacy growth is impossible.

Implications for Education Policy and Practice

The school leader’s challenge, then, is to ensure that teachers have acquired the knowledge and the tools to create appropriate learning environments for student language development. This is especially the case in high-poverty settings with large numbers of Hispanic students. Today’s teachers report feeling underprepared to meet students’ language-learning needs effectively and typically have little to no training in how a student develops language. Professional development should outline strategies for integrating sophisticated, abstract vocabulary and language instruction into formal daily lessons, but also present ways to build language during informal interactions and thereby elevate overall language use in the classroom. In the end, unless a school, from the earliest grades to the latest, organizes around strengthening language and literacy for Hispanic students and all their classmates, we simply are never going to catch all of the students who may be struggling.

A larger challenge for policymakers and education leaders is to rethink the specialist model as the panacea for augmenting instruction for English language learners in today’s linguistically diverse schools, many with large concentrations of Hispanic students. It is neither feasible nor effective to rely solely on a model that serves only those learners who qualify because they have the lowest levels of English proficiency and who receive supports often only for a brief period of time, either in a classroom designed expressly for them or in a small group setting at particular times during the week. Instead, the academic growth of the entire population depends upon strong and supportive language- and content-rich classrooms day after day and year after year. It is only with this kind of time-intensive, high-quality effort in all classrooms that we will be able to support all Hispanic students—whether designated as “English proficient” or not—to develop the advanced literacy skills needed for high-school graduation and well beyond.

For academically at-risk students who have been enrolled in U.S. schools since kindergarten and who have experienced educational opportunities that are basically similar in design and practice, research suggests that a classroom-wide, universal approach focused on building up academic vocabulary and conceptual knowledge would be appropriate. The past decade has seen a relative surge in research conducted in urban, underperforming schools focused on doing exactly this— providing students with deep, language- and content-based instruction, with a focus on teaching both specialized vocabulary and the specialized structures of language in academic speech and text. Besides testing effective approaches to meeting student needs, this research helps keep pace with the standards-based accountability movement. Indeed, today’s Common Core standards mandate that instruction attend to the inherently complex challenge of building students’ background knowledge and academic language.

What, exactly, does effective, quality academic language instruction look like? Most often, it is text—the medium that is challenging for these learners—that is the best platform, anchoring the work in rich content. The instruction also maintains a sustained focus on producing oral and written language, such as generating extended research projects or essays, and engaging in academic discussion. Such practices are largely absent from elementary and secondary classrooms. In these purposeful language-rich environments, students have access not only to texts, but also to collaborative experiences, such as labs, demonstrations, and debates, which promote academic conversation and knowledge building. And although such an approach is promising, as with any instructional reform strategy designed to bolster at-risk students’ skills, the key in implementation will be accommodating differences, not only between linguistic and racial groups but also within them, while maintaining relentless attention to quality.

This article is part of a forum on how to best educate Hispanic students. For another take, please see “Emphasize Civic Responsibility and Good Citizenship,” by Juan Rangel.

Over the past quarter century, a wave of immigration from Latin America, legal and illegal, has caused a divisive political debate in the United States on how to address its various implications. As our nation wrestles with the immigration issue more broadly, a concern raised across the political spectrum is how the public schools can best educate immigrant students. The debate is further polarized by differing views on assimilation of Hispanic immigrants.

Some wonder whether these immigrants will ever learn English and assimilate into American society, as past immigrants have done. Others question whether pushing America’s newest arrivals toward assimilation is even a good thing.

Unlike the experience of past immigrants, for today’s millions of Hispanic children the public schools no longer serve as the mechanism for their assimilation as Americans. Never mind that immigrants continue to chase the classic American dream. Never mind our nation’s motto, E pluribus unum (of many, one). Assimilation, Americanization, and patriotism seem to have no place in the academic lexicon of our nation’s public schools.

This is bad for our country and worse for immigrants and their children, especially for the growing Hispanic community. Isolating people is never a good strategy for building communities, cities, or a country.

Schools Should Play a Key Role

As was the case with previous immigrant groups, Hispanic immigration carries a set of serious challenges that will test our community’s ability to prosper in the United States. Deep investments in family, civic involvement, and, especially, in the education of our youth will be the key to our success.

America offers its citizenry opportunities for success, not guarantees. No one understands this more than immigrants who seek those opportunities every day. But to have access to those opportunities, immigrants need to be well positioned through deliberate assimilation strategies, specifically, through attending great public schools. This means more than the usual “safety net” of specialized services and demands a fresh approach that rejects a “victim” mentality.

A successful assimilation school model does not have to be unique to immigrant children. A quality public school that emphasizes civic responsibility and good citizenship will suffice to transition immigrants successfully, challenging them and the rest of us on our joint commitment to the welfare of our nation.

Key to this model is understanding the role that public schools play, not only in educating our youth, but also in serving as the mediating institution to successfully transition immigrant families into the American way of life, into making American values, culture, norms, and language their own. All American public schools ought to serve such a purpose, as they once did. Public schools can serve as powerful anchors to local communities, instituting a cycle of achievement and self-development at the grassroots level and instructing immigrants on the expectations placed on them as participants in American society.

Focus on Citizenship

Some will argue for a highly specialized program, curriculum, and staffing to educate Hispanic immigrant children. I beg to differ. There is no better cure for the social ills of our community and no better process for the education of an immigrant class than providing a great teacher, a core curriculum, a disciplined school culture, and strong accountability. These are sorely missing in America’s public schools, hurting all children, especially immigrant students.

Hispanic immigrant children need better public schools built around a curriculum that emphasizes American civics and citizenship. If a civics program is important for our nation’s future leaders across the board and to our democracy, it is more so for an immigrant community that is in a state of transition and whose youth struggle with issues of identity and belonging.

Our nation needs to recommit to the idea of building “one-nation … indivisible,” and the public school system should be central to this strategy. Unfortunately, there is no national will to welcome and integrate immigrant families into the American mainstream. Our willingness to wave the white flag on the words “assimilation” and “Americanization” not only weakens our ability to build on the indomitable spirit of immigrants, but also gives a pass to a gang and high school–dropout subculture among our youth that frightens both immigrant families and middle-class Americans, who worry about the welfare and future of their nation. The gang violence that plagues many of our communities and its schools is not inherent to Hispanics; it is a downward spiral version of American assimilation taking hold.

I recognize that any intentional “Americanization” effort is perceived in some quarters as denying people the right to maintain their heritage. Let’s be clear: these concepts of “Americanization” and “assimilation” do not demand the sacrifice of immigrant culture, history, language, and tradition. Our society and its schools ought to celebrate the rich history of our communities and aim to build on immigrant experiences to produce the latest example of an American success story.

The UNO Model

The United Neighborhood Organization (UNO), the community group that I lead in Chicago, and its network of charter schools provide Hispanic immigrant families with access to a high-quality education, thereby challenging them to fulfill their great potential while promoting American values, ideals, and our collective successes. Ours are not Hispanic schools; they are classic American schools, which serve all its students, including Hispanic immigrant children.

Immigrants and native-born Americans alike recognize English as a unifying feature of American society and as a key to immigrant advancement. Poor English-language skills not only delay full assimilation for our community, but also deny Hispanics full access to American opportunity. UNO chose English-language immersion over the traditional bilingual transition program to teach English to its children and families.

Structured English-language immersion challenges the conventional approach to educating English language learners (ELL). Our students’ limited English-language skills could easily be used as an excuse for low performance or a need for unlimited resources, but we see it as a necessity for teachers to differentiate their instruction to reach all learners, including ELL students. Most pragmatically, English immersion is effective in closing the performance gap between ELLs and their peers nationwide, and is financially viable and scalable—unlike the many bilingual transition programs that require untenable complements of teachers and resources and produce mixed results at best.

I believe, and our schools’ performance bears this out, that a well-rounded, rigorous program with excellent teachers and leaders works with any population of students, and works especially well for Hispanic immigrant children. UNO’s approximately 6,500 students are 95 percent Hispanic, 93 percent low-income, and 38 percent ELL (far exceeding the Chicago school average of 16 percent).Yet our schools consistently outperform the Chicago Public Schools on state tests (see Figure 1).

Events such as Election Day mock voting, Veteran’s Day Memorial program, and our 9/11 Remembrance take place throughout the year and are integrated into our rich curriculum, which includes classes in physical education, music, Spanish, art, and technology in addition to the core subjects of reading, math, science, and social studies. Our high-school students are required to take four years of Mandarin language class. Successful outcomes for UNO’s 13 charter schools include high-school and college readiness, as well as critical-thinking skills.

UNO’s approach is rooted in our unwavering high expectations for everyone, and in commonsense decisions grounded in data. For example, we extended our school day to 7.5 hours and lengthened the school year to 191 instructional days to ensure that all students receive adequate and quality instructional time. Student data on our interim assessments  clearly showed a drastic annual “summer slide” that took until December to make up. To combat the slide, we serve as a model for districts across the country by employing a hybrid year-round calendar that shortens the summer to just five weeks. Our data suggest that after the first year on this new calendar, the slide has been eliminated in mathematics and drastically reduced in reading.

We believe in holding ourselves accountable. This year we are implementing a new performance-management framework for teachers that will provide them with comprehensive data on areas of strength and areas that need development, as well as reward high-performing teachers with bonuses as large as $14,000. This system combines important qualitative practice scores, quantitative growth and achievement data, school and network factors, as well as a community and parent engagement factor.

UNO’s success also depends on building a strong, stable relationship between home and school. Throughout our organization, from our teachers to me, we are responsible for partnering with parents to produce great outcomes for students. We expect much from our students’ parents. UNO teachers conduct two home visits each year to create the trust necessary for us to challenge families and be challenged in return. For immigrant parents who value the “Maestra” (Spanish for master or teacher), home visits reinforce the value of education.

Simply put, the facets of a quality school model with high expectations will work for all students, regardless of race, ethnicity, or immigrant or socioeconomic status. The absence of high-performing public schools, and the lack of emphasis on American civics or expectations for good citizenship, will hurt our nation’s youth and will certainly handicap our Hispanic immigrant students and their families most by impeding the assimilation process.

The good news is that we have seen this story before in our nation’s history with great outcomes. Hispanic immigrants are not unique to this narrative. It is, however, a uniquely American story being reenacted with new protagonists.

This article is part of a forum on how to best educate Hispanic students. For another take, please see “Focus on Higher Order Literacy Skills,” by Nonie Leseaux.

No Citizen Left Behind
by Meira Levinson
Harvard University Press, 2012, $29.95; 388 pages.

As reviewed by Nathan Glazer

Meira Levinson is not your run-of-the-mill or even your teach-for-democracy middle-school teacher. She taught in middle schools with minority and low-income children in Atlanta and Boston for eight years (she notes in passing that she was tenured in the Boston school system), after majoring in philosophy at Yale and receiving a doctorate from Oxford. (She is now associate professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Education.) She brings a new twist to the issue of the gap between American minority low-income children and middle-class children; what has engaged her passions and formidable abilities is not the academic gap, though of course she is fully aware of it, but the gap in the ability to participate effectively in the civic life, to influence political choices, the “Civic Empowerment” gap, as she labels it.

She begins with a telling story. She is coaching her Atlanta school’s National Academic League quiz bowl team, competing against a “white” school (in Atlanta, even a “white” school does not have many whites). Her team misidentifies Kurt Cobain, and the students on the other team laugh. On the way back from the event, reviewing how they did, the students wonder why the otherwise well-behaved opposing team laughed. Ms. Levinson asks, “‘How many of you have heard of Kurt Cobain?’” No one had. Levinson explains, “‘Probably 95 percent of White people under the age of thirty could tell you who Kurt Cobain is…. Your not knowing…seems as weird to them as it might seem to you to meet somebody who has never heard of Master P….’”

“‘Oh, but Dr. Levinson [one student replies]…. everybody has heard of Master P.’”

Two worlds, with scarcely a meeting point. The story could be used to insist that some minimal acquaintance with the other world is needed to be effective in it. Levinson would not disagree, I think, but this is not the point she wants to make: E. D. Hirsch’s many books arguing for such minimal common knowledge as essential for effective reading and schoolwork does not appear in her enormous bibliography (43 pages). Her argument is rather that her students are disempowered, and a key necessity of their education is to teach them how to increase their power, their effectiveness in the real world, beginning with their immediate environment: the world of school and neighborhood.

Perhaps if they were more effective academically they would be more effective civically, and again, I do not think Levinson would disagree, but the road to empowerment for which she argues is a more direct one: student involvement in the issues that concern them, and learning through that involvement. The aim is systemic change, and if learning is aided by it, good, but secondary to overcoming the gap in empowerment.

This is “Civics” of a sort, but of a sort I think many readers will find unfamiliar. “Struggle” is not the term we generally associate with civics or civic engagement, but it is one Levinson prefers. For her, whatever progress has been made in this nation in overcoming the disadvantages of our minorities is owing to their struggles, and there is still so much to do. “Action civics” is what is needed, and the range of activities that are now being promoted in many urban schools, though hardly any significant number of them yet, and that she retails, is astonishing. This activity is far beyond “service learning,” which is implemented in many schools, and for which students may receive credit: reading to the homebound, or collecting and turning in cans to aid the hungry, or the like. Rather, systemic change is required, and one can’t help being reminded of Marx’s disdain for the softer socialism of his time.

Levinson introduces the new (for me) and unwieldy term “Guided Experiental Civic Education” to describe the education for civic struggle she favors, and she goes far beyond education talk in showing how it has been worked into her own experience as a teacher, and how she hopes it will work in the future.

Having developed her ideas—perhaps in her earlier book, The Demands of Liberal Education (Oxford, 1999), perhaps in her work as a teacher in Atlanta—she had the rare opportunity, as a teacher in the Dorchester section of Boston in a very racially and ethnically mixed school, to put them into practice. Massachusetts had decided to reduce the inordinate amount of time devoted to testing (23 out of 180 school days!), dropping tests for history and social studies, and thus making it possible for a creative administrator to introduce a new course in 8th grade, “Civics in Action.”

Levinson takes us through the effort to define the course, in which she participated, but in the end she finds too many “key questions and concepts, more vocabulary words,…overall just more ‘stuff’ to cover.” This is also her complaint with the requirements in American history, which she formerly taught. She more or less goes her own way in teaching the course, but after the first year of “Civics in Action,” the Boston Public Schools introduce standardized, districtwide midterm and final exams for it, and Levinson worries how her students will do. “The materials that I developed to support my students’ citizenship projects are adopted for dissemination districtwide and even nationally…. But my students’ performance on the district midterms and finals is relatively mediocre because I skimp on the mandated curriculum—in Fall 2005, because we spend time on Hurricane Katrina instead, and in Spring 2006 because students want to investigate the increase in youth violence in their neighborhood.”

This leads her into a full and sophisticated analysis of the effect of the movement for standards, assessment, and accountability on this kind of civic action teaching, and it is clear there is a bad mismatch. Effective civic action has to be local, dynamic, connected to current realities and developments, and the usual static forms of assessment are unsuitable. It is, after all, a form of “authentic” education, and other kinds of assessment, such as portfolios, have to be developed. (Oddly, there are no references to the work of Howard Gardner, in her own Harvard Graduate School of Education, a leading exponent of authentic education.) And this leads her further into an equally sophisticated discussion of the relationship of what she is proposing and doing for democracy. On the one hand, action civics teaches students the ways of democratic activity and participation to effect change; on the other, it will run into conflict with the program and objectives that democratic control of the schools has implemented in many places, such as which heroes to place before the students for emulation. She sees no way of resolving this conflict: the two kinds of democracy, both valid, must remain in tension. This is Dewey updated, with education for democracy in conflict with democracy in action as it acts in the real world on education.

This is a strong book. The ideas that activate it are effectively presented, the detail of real school life (like how to fit action civics into a school structure of 45-minute classes—action civics demands much more) vividly brought to life. Ethnography is not so often successfully married to large ideas. In the end, though, it is hard to imagine many teachers performing at the level that Meira Levinson did, under any reforms envisaged for the school system. And one must remain skeptical whether any democratically controlled school system could accommodate the explosive potential of action civics as she describes it.

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

Born to Rise: A Story of Children and Teachers Reaching Their Highest Potential
by Deborah Kenny
Harper, 2012, $25.99; 256 pages.

Mission Possible: How the Secrets of the Success Academies Can Work in Any School
by Eva Moskowitz and Arin Lavinia
Jossey-Bass, 2012, $27.95; 176 pages.

As reviewed by David Steiner

On page 87 of Mission Possible, the account by Eva Moskowitz and Arin Lavinia of the work of their charter schools, the reader is invited to watch a video of a book discussion in 1st grade. A detour to the included DVD is instructive: in this Harlem-based, lottery-selected public charter school, we see a 1st-grade classroom that challenges any in the country for the intellectual engagement of its students without any reliance on the regimented, direct instruction that the clichéd objections imagine dominate all successful charter schools. Faced with such examples, and the academic record of Moskowitz’s Success Academies, one’s first reaction should simply be applause. Having served (briefly) as a board member for one of the Success Academies, I know that such video clips are not cherry-picked: teachers in every classroom in every Academy school are expected to create such spaces of intense and demanding thinking and learning.

A different but equally positive reaction is evoked by Deborah Kenny’s intensely personal account of the grit, resolve, and courage that led her to take the opportunity offered by the charter school movement and create a model school that her students were immensely lucky to attend. Her passion for bringing out the best in all who worked with her, her disarming throwaways (“it was the first five minutes of our first day, and already I’d made a mistake”), and her candid directness about necessary conditions for her work (“it is impossible to nurture a positive culture without the right to hire and fire at will”) make this an inspiring story.

Sharing boundless drive and self-discipline, and an equal commitment to proving that a child’s past is not her or his predetermined destination, Moskowitz and Kenny take justified pride in being mission-driven realists who, along with their handpicked colleagues, have radically recast the life chances of their students. But they have produced quite different books. Kenny’s more personal memoir does not reach her charter school until late in the narrative, and even then, the focus is squarely on forging a human culture, building a team whose members will go to the wall for their students, and for each other. For her, the disaster of American education is summed up by the line “we got here by disrespecting teachers.”

What Kenny means by respect is creating a culture of accountability for children’s learning that “enables freedom” and a freedom that “unleashes teacher passion.” Kenny explicitly eschews the cookbook vision of school reform: “Schools,” she writes, “are not products to be designed and replicated.” She goes on: “Every school in America has access to the same pedagogical ideas and methods we use. The problem is not lack of information but a lack of motivation engendered by the low accountability/low empowerment culture of our public schools.” Many of her sources of inspiration—Maxime Greene, Peter Drucker, Dennis Littky—are not your typical charter-school heroes. What connects them is not a method but a conviction that successful outcomes are all about people learning together, creating spaces of continual mutual feedback, encouragement, and empowerment. Kenny’s book is not and does not purport to be a how-to manual; it is a moving work about the power of well-placed determination matched to a political opportunity: the freedom through accountability that is the charter school.

Moskowitz and Lavinia set themselves a different task. Theirs is a self-proclaimed “how-to book.” As a result, the bar is in some sense higher: we expect to learn what the secrets are and how they can work. The answers in the book will enlighten readers who have heard about charter schools on the news but want to learn more. Moskowitz and Lavinia write at a relatively high level about effective techniques like the push to challenge students with the most rigorous and demanding material and instruction; the immediacy and constancy of granular feedback; the sharing of best practices; the focus on literacy instruction; the long school day and school year, including summer professional development for teachers; the constant coaching; and the agonizing care taken to choose each teacher from a vast pool of applicants. Each of these practices is standard at high-performing charters including KIPP, Uncommon Schools, and Achievement First, to take just three networks of such schools with which I am somewhat familiar.

What well-read educators and policymakers will want to know, and will not find in this book, is how it is that in New York City, in multiple instances, Success Academies, despite its astonishingly rapid growth as a school network, gets stronger academic results than even the top next-rung charter schools. Is it just that Moskowitz pushes even harder with even more rigor with even better-selected teachers on the good practices that the other charters are engaged in? If there are true secrets to the results from Success Academies, they are not on show here. A useful contrast in this respect is Paul Bambrik-Santoyo’s recently published Leverage Leadership: A Practical Guide to Building Exceptional Schools. The tools he lays out may or may not produce results at the level of the Success Academies, but those tools are in plain sight, in such unsecret forms as his “Observation Tracker.”

At the same time, these books will do nothing to silence the critics. There are, for example, no statistics on the percentage of ELL students in the schools, no numbers on the privately raised funds the schools put to use, and only cursory gestures, in Kenny’s book, to the controversy over students counseled out of or removed from these charter-school classrooms and to their teacher turnover rate.

In the end, the real contribution of these books lies neither in their appeals to the heart nor in the practices they catalogue, but in the moral condemnation each makes of our current education system. When Moskowitz argues that her practices can be adopted in any school, we are immediately tempted to say, Come on! Nine-hour days? Weeks of summer professional development? Responsiveness 24/7 to breakdowns in the classrooms, be it from noisy pipes or a single underwhelming lesson? Show me a public school system that could get there anytime soon.

But then we have to ask, why not? We have seen urban public schools successfully adopt many charter school “secrets,” including the nine-hour school day (e.g., United for Success Academies in Oakland); a rigorous, standard curriculum (e.g., the more than a dozen Chicago public schools that offer the International Baccalaureate); merit pay (e.g., the Washington, D.C., system); and the regular use of teacher video in professional development and evaluation (e.g., the Houston system, which was using video in this way as early as the 1980s).

Why have the results of the best-performing charter schools consistently eluded public school systems? The answer, unsurprisingly, has to do with the structures underlying public K–12 education. To bring to regular public schools the full panoply of successful charter-school practices we would need to rethink our labor practices, funding structures, reluctance to embrace a rigorous and specific curriculum, and all the other bêtes noires the national education conversation avoids or reduces to partisan caricatures.

If, rightly, we want to reject a zero-sum trade-off between our values, if what we need are a highly attractive long-term profession for successful teachers, accountability for student results, and a far more rigorous curriculum driving far higher learning outcomes for our students, are we willing to rethink the system from scratch and put everything on the table? If we cannot build a public school system on heroic individuals (and we surely cannot), how do we remake our school systems to make the standards Kenny and Moskowitz demand, and have largely achieved, the baseline of our public education? These books do not tackle these hard questions.

But no matter. One is left with the indictment and an urgent call to action, captured on page 136 of Kenny’s book: “‘This school’s a blessing!,’ exclaimed Jasmine’s grandmother when she found out they’d won the lottery. We hadn’t even opened our doors yet.”

David Steiner is dean of the School of Education at Hunter College and former commissioner of education for the State of New York.

Over the past two decades, gains of 1.6 percent of a standard deviation have been garnered annually by 4th- and 8th-grade students on the math, science, and reading tests administered by the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), known as the nation’s report card. An upward trajectory of 1.6 standard deviations cumulates over 20 years to 32 percent of a standard deviation, well over a year’s worth of learning. That striking result is given in a recent report in this journal by Eric Hanushek, Ludger Woessmann, and me (see “Is the U.S. Catching Up?” features, Fall 2012).

Half those gains are probably an illusion, however. The latest results from the math and science tests administered by the Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS), the respected international testing agency, show gains of only 0.8 percent of a standard deviation yearly between 1995 and 2011. Further, another respected international assessment of student performance, the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA), found gains of only 0.5 percent of a standard deviation annually for U.S. students over roughly the same time period. (For specifics, see page 19 of our full report, Achievement Growth: International and U.S. State Trends in Student Performance [PEPG, 2012].)

In other words, NAEP has been identifying gains that are somewhere between two and three times as large as those recorded by two respected international testing agencies that do not have a political stake in showing rising levels of student achievement in any particular country.

For some time, analysts have been wondering whether NAEP tests have become easier. Those who construct the main tests that NAEP administers frankly admit that they have adapted questions over time to meet the changing curricula offered by contemporary schools. NAEP has also introduced special accommodations for those who say they are in some way disabled and need additional time or other modifications of the standard testing protocol. Have testing changes and administrative innovations softened tests so that they now indicate higher levels of student achievement than would be the case if older practices had been retained?

It is well known that when measuring economic change it is critical to adjust for inflation so that real growth is not confused with nominal growth in prices. An entire bureau within the U.S. Department of Labor is devoted to measuring the extent to which prices for the same commodities are rising or falling. With that information ready at hand, economists can ascertain whether the economy is actually moving forward or whether nominal growth in the GDP is simply the result of inflation.

Nothing similar exists in education. The U.S. Department of Education does not have an agency that inspects NAEP tests or state tests to ascertain whether questions on the tests have been eased with the passage of time.

It is remotely possible that TIMSS and PISA have revised their tests so that they have become more difficult over time, thereby underestimating U.S. student gains. But few believe that any testing organization in the late 20th and early 21st centuries has actually made its tests more challenging over time. All the social and political pressures operate in the opposite direction.

We do know one thing for certain: U.S. students are not closing the international achievement gap. Our study shows that even when measured by NAEP criteria, the United States stands at the 25th rank among 49 countries in achievement growth. Similarly, the recent TIMSS data show the United States to be the middle-ranked country among the 11 for which the organization could fully track student performance since 1995. U.S. students are making middling gains that are keeping them on par with students in other countries. In comparative terms, the United States is not making any progress at all.

— Paul E. Peterson

The C in linguistics proved to Rebecca Mercado that college was going to be different.

“It was the first time I had ever received a grade lower than a B, and it was upsetting,” admits Mercado, a biochemistry and cell biology major at the University of California, San Diego. The first in her family to attend a four-year college, Mercado was a strong student dating all the way back to her days in middle school at San Diego’s KIPP Adelante Preparatory Academy. Perhaps as a result, she was “a little more cocky than I should have been” when arriving on campus for freshman year. Like many freshmen, Mercado experienced the distraction of being on her own for the first time, which took a toll on her grades. Holding down a job while taking more classes than she could handle didn’t help. “It all came crashing down on top of me,” Mercado says. Freshman year was “a big dose of reality,” she says.

Here’s another one: statistically speaking, Mercado might have been voted “Least Likely to Succeed” at birth. Low-income black and Hispanic students are by far the least likely U.S. students to graduate from high school and attend a four-year college. Those who are accepted to college are least likely to stick around and earn a degree. For each one who earns a bachelor’s degree, 11 fall short somewhere along the line, giving students like Mercado a mere 8 percent chance of graduating from college.

Mercado persists. Reenergized after a summer internship with the KIPP Foundation in Chicago, she is back on campus for the fall semester of 2012. She credits the habits of mind and encouragement she received in middle school, and the contacts she maintains five years later with KIPP teachers and administrators, for propelling her forward. “This year I’m coming in with a clear head. I’m more focused on my classes and what I want to accomplish. I’m going to do better,” she says. Her delivery communicates not hope or aspiration but conviction. “Nothing is going to keep me from graduating,” she insists, adding for emphasis, “nothing.”

Mercado’s story—both her struggle and her determination— will be repeated over the next several years on college campuses across the U.S. At one level, she’s just one more kid trying to pass biology, graduate, and make something of herself. But as the product of a KIPP school, Mercado is at the vanguard of a rapidly growing class of students whose success or failure could make or break the reputation of a closely watched group of charter schools and the sometimes-controversial, muscular brand of education they have pioneered. In 2015, more than 10,000 students from KIPP and other major charter-school highfliers will be on college campuses across the United States.

The Coming KIPP Bubble

You can’t play the ingenue forever.

For much of its brief history, there has been something of a halo over the Knowledge Is Power Program (KIPP). Founded in Houston in 1994 by Mike Feinberg and Dave Levin, a pair of Teach For America corps members, KIPP now has more than 100 schools in 20 states and Washington, D.C. It is the largest and best known of a class of charter-management organizations (CMOs) that includes Achievement First, YES Prep, Uncommon Schools, Mastery, Aspire, and others. This group shares a set of familiar characteristics: more and longer school days, with a college preparatory curriculum for all students; strict behavioral and disciplinary codes; and a strong focus on building a common, high-intensity school culture. Classrooms and halls are awash in motivational quotations and college banners, typically from the alma maters of the inevitably young, hard-charging teachers who staff the schools. The signature feature is high behavioral and academic expectations for all students, the vast majority of whom are low-income, urban black and Hispanic kids. It’s this last feature that led KIPP and the others to be branded “No Excuses” schools, a label not universally embraced within the category.

The reputation of the No Excuses model is complicated and often divisive among professional educators. Outside the education bubble in the broader public mind, however, these high-flying charters are much-adored, attractive young upstarts, and the antidote to the dark, dispiriting “dropout factories” of media caricature. For years, a central motif of the feel-good narrative surrounding No Excuses charter schools has been their college acceptance rates. Houston-based YES Prep, for example, has made much of the fact that 100 percent of their graduating seniors have been accepted to college; more than 90 percent are the first in their family to attend a four-year college. The original cohort of KIPP students attended college at more than double the rate of their demographic peers: bracing, affirming, “It’s Being Done” data points to warm the gap-closing hearts of ed reform hawks.

The April 2011 release of KIPP’s College Completion Report changed the No Excuses narrative almost instantly from “college acceptance” to “college completion.” A bold and laudable exercise in transparency, the report gave ammunition to KIPP’s boosters and critics alike. Thirty-three percent of the earliest cohorts of KIPP middle-school students were found to have graduated college within six years, four times the average rate of students from underserved communities and slightly higher than the figure (31 percent) for all U.S. students. It was a clear and unambiguous accomplishment. Yet two out of three former KIPP students were failing to reach the bar, however audacious, that KIPP itself had established as “the essential stepping stone to rewarding work, a steady income, self-sufficiency and success.” The affirming image of smiling, cap-and-gown–bedecked ghetto kids graduating high school and heading off to college and bright horizons beyond lost a bit of its luster.

KIPP has held fast to the idea that college is indispensable. The goal remains to see 75 percent of graduates earn a four-year college degree, comparable to the rate at which top-income-quartile students graduate. The bar has been set not by its critics but by KIPP itself: if KIPP and other No Excuses schools are to fulfill their promise as game changers in American education, and rewrite the script on reaching and teaching underserved kids, their graduates must not merely be accepted to college; they must demonstrate success once they get there.

KIPP has identified a number of factors it believes are critical to raising its students’ college-completion rates, including enhanced academic preparedness; a set of “character strengths,” like “grit,” self-control, and optimism; matching each student with the right college; social and academic integration once they arrive on campus; and college affordability. The organization is making an increasingly aggressive effort to exercise some measure of control over each of these factors through partnerships with at least 20 colleges nationwide designed to create a pipeline to four-year colleges able to offer the greatest possible commitment and support to KIPP alumni.

While there is broad general agreement on what makes “first-generation” college-goers stay in school and take a degree, less clear is what it takes to create those characteristics and conditions in the first place, and how much accountability for college completion should be attributed to a student’s K–12 education, his or her college, and the students themselves. KIPP’s rapidly growing “KIPP Through College” program offers support programs and services stretching from middle school through college and beyond, including high school and college placement, financial literacy, mentorships, college and career advisement, and one-to-one support from some of the 100 full-time KIPP staff doing college counseling and support work throughout its network.

KIPP’s recipe for getting students “to and through college” is about to be put to the test, if not quite at scale then in unprecedented numbers. In the 2012–13 school year, just over 1,000 former KIPP students are in college. Three years from now that figure will explode, with 10,000 KIPP alumni on America’s campuses. KIPP chief executive officer Richard Barth takes care to manage expectations for how this “KIPP bubble” cohort will perform. The 75 percent figure is a “long-term play” and does not apply yet. Fifty percent is “an aspiration.” Regardless, by staking their reputations on college completion, KIPP and other No Excuses schools are rapidly approaching something of a “put up or shut up” moment. The attempt to write the playbook on what it takes to get first-generation low-income black and Hispanic kids into the world with college degrees in hand will offer something of a referendum on KIPP and the No Excuses model.

“All Hands on Deck”

To see KIPP’s effort to steer its alumni to “right match” colleges, visit Pennsylvania’s Franklin & Marshall College (F&M). A private liberal arts college with 2,200 undergraduate students, F&M was the first college to enter into a formal partnership with KIPP aimed at improving college persistence and graduation rates of KIPP alumni. In 2011, the school launched “F&M College Prep” and welcomed 23 KIPP students to the precollege summer-immersion program. The following year, the program tripled in size, adding students from Uncommon Schools, Mastery Charter Schools, Achievement First, and others. The three-week program is intended to give rising seniors from these schools their first taste of college life. Students take two classes a day taught by F&M professors, and attend workshops on college admissions, financial aid, and other topics—all intended to demystify college life.

The students from KIPP and the other schools “leave F&M and go into their senior year thinking, ‘I can go to college. It’s gonna be tough, but it’ll be fine. I know what my resources are. I know how to talk to professors and upperclassmen. I know how to navigate the system,’” says Shawn Jenkins, who runs F&M College Prep as special assistant to the dean of the college for strategic projects.

F&M’s approach to retaining and graduating minority students is modeled directly on the work of the Posse Foundation, a New York City–based nonprofit that sends group of students, a posse, to college together to act as a support system for one another. According to the Education Trust, F&M graduates more than 87 percent of its students within six years, but only 70 percent of its black and Hispanic undergraduates. F&M staff had long observed that students who came to the Lancaster campus through Posse tended to graduate at a much higher rate than other minority students. Jenkins states the challenge succinctly: “How do we create a support structure that can mimic the same outcomes for KIPP students, for Mastery students, for Cristo Rey students?”

Once admitted to F&M, students from KIPP and other “first gens” are placed into a newly created mentoring program, based on the Posse approach. Students meet in groups of 8 to 10 with a campus-based mentor one to two hours each week. The mentor, who is the students’ academic advisor, also meets one-on-one with each student at least every other week.

It is not an easy or natural transition to college for the students urban charters serve. Feeling comfortable enough to go to professors’ office hours and not feeling out of place among other students are challenges to be overcome. “If students become academically integrated and socially integrated, their probabilities of being retained and graduated go up enormously,” observes Kent Trachte, dean of the college.

Jenkins, himself an F&M alum (Class of 2010) and former Posse Scholar, describes the college’s approach as “all hands on deck.” But when it works, it is nearly invisible to the students. Indeed, Jenkins only recently came to see and appreciate “the intentionality” that made possible his own journey from a Harlem public school to a top liberal arts college and a career as a young college administrator. “I had no idea. I didn’t know that when the doors were closed, people were sitting around talking about strategies to engage me to do better. That’s what we’re doing. There are certain students who need a little more attention,” he says.

KIPP’s partnership with Franklin & Marshall has clear benefits to all parties. A high percentage of F&M College Prep participants apply to the school, thus creating a pipeline of highly qualified, diverse students. KIPP sends its graduates to the kind of small private college that is statistically most likely to be successful with first-generation students. The students themselves get a “high-touch” approach from professors and advisors, keeping them in place and on track. F&M president Dan Porterfield knows them by name.

The 20 partnerships KIPP has entered into with colleges, including the University of Houston, Tulane, Morehouse, Spelman, Syracuse, Duke, and New York City’s Hunter College, will improve KIPP’s graduation rates by 7 to 8 percent “even if we did nothing else,” says Barth. In a parallel effort, F&M convened a group of a dozen liberal arts colleges and CMOs that will form “the nucleus for a larger effort to connect some of the leading high performing charters to some of the leading liberal arts colleges,” promises Trachte. Founding members of the coalition include Dickinson, Gettysburg, Bard, and Trinity.

No Excuses 2.0

No Excuses schools as a class have advanced our understanding of what it takes to get kids to college. The unresolved question is whether the students have what it takes to thrive once they get there. That question has some within charter networks openly questioning elements of the No Excuses orthodoxy.

At KIPP, at least part of the answer is more KIPP. “We’ve made a commitment to start earlier with our kids and stay longer,” says Barth. As KIPP has expanded from 2 schools to more than 100, it has broadened its focus to include elementary and high schools. “Fifth to eighth grade, it’s amazing what we’ve done,” he says, “but we see the impact of being able to have them starting in kindergarten.”

As of 2011, KIPP students’ average SAT score was 1426; the average ACT score was 20. For the colleges KIPP is targeting for its alumni, “a 20 ACT ain’t gonna cut it,” Barth candidly admits. Increasing a student’s odds of admission inevitably leads to a hard look at “backward mapping” curriculum and formative experiences from the earliest moment. “This is high stakes,” says Barth. “As a 2nd-grade teacher, you are making this happen. What happens in your year ties to where they’re going to be [in college]…everyone owns this chain. Everyone has a link.”

Within the No Excuses world, a strong case can be made that YES Prep graduates are as academically ready for college as anybody. In 2011, the average SAT combined score for YES Prep African American students in reading, writing, and mathematics was 1556, far above the national average of 1273 for African Americans, and significantly higher than the 1500 national average for all students. Every student is required to take and pass at least one AP class in high school; most take two or more. Less than 5 percent of YES Prep grads require remediation in college. Getting admitted to a four-year college is a graduation requirement at YES Prep, which, like KIPP, has been admirably transparent about its college-completion rate, currently at 41 percent within six years.

“It wasn’t the academic piece that was holding our kids back,” notes senior director of college initiatives at YES Prep Donald Kamentz. “What we found hands down was it was the noncognitive piece—that tenacity, that grit—that allowed kids to harness those skills and persist when they faced difficulty.” Kamentz and Laura Keane of Mastery Charter Schools have been at the center of an effort, along with Angela Duckworth of the University of Pennsylvania, to design and test interventions aimed at enhancing student perseverance and improving college enrollment and graduation outcomes. Kamentz cites the work of Stanford University’s Carol Dweck as a key: students must be able to develop a “growth mindset” that creates motivation and productivity rather than seeing intelligence as fixed and immutable. “If they can work through that, their persistence through and graduation from college is off the charts,” he observes.

This is not an entirely new development at No Excuses schools. Nearly fetishized, “grit” is as much a part of the culture of KIPP, Achievement First, Uncommon Schools, and the rest as the college banners and teachers reminding students to “correct your SLANT” (Sit up straight, Listen, Ask and answer questions, Nod if you understand, and Track the teacher). The idea that character traits like perseverance, zest, and optimism have more to do with long-term success than even academics gained mainstream traction with the recent publication of Paul Tough’s book How Children Succeed. Within No Excuses schools, some are starting to question some of their fundamental assumptions about what makes kids successful. When asked, Barth does not disagree with the observation that KIPP is “doubling down on grit.”

“What we’ve found with the ‘whatever it takes’ or ‘no excuses’ mentality is that it was very teacher-driven and less student-driven,” says Kametz, acknowledging this is a controversial line of thought in his own halls. A typical No Excuses approach might involve giving demerits or detention for missed assignments or turning in work that’s not “neat and complete.” Kamentz questions whether this tough-love approach helps create the self-advocacy in students they will need to be successful in college. “It’s the largest gaping hole with our kids in college,” he says. “They will constantly say, ‘You structured my life so much that I had to do very little thinking and structuring myself.’”

“Academic preparation is absolutely foundational,” says Jeremy Chiappetta, executive director of Blackstone Valley Prep in Cumberland, Rhode Island. “But what education looks like, to be truly prepared for college, probably is not the routinized learning that makes many of these schools, including us, really successful on standardized tests. I don’t think that’s the academic rigor that any of us want for college prep. I think it’s much deeper, much bigger,” he says.

Kamentz concedes that much more is known about what successful college students should look like than how to create them. “It’s the inevitable practitioner question,” he says. “I know all this stuff. Now what do I do?” Michael Goldstein, founder of Boston’s Match School agrees. “We don’t really know of many interventions that change grit significantly. It may be harder to change grit than other things like knowledge,” he observes.

In Loco Helicopter Parentis

Not every college is prepared, interested, or has the resources to go the extra mile for low-income kids of color. The idea that once you arrive at college that you’re here and should make your own way and figure it out “is still the dominant culture,” says Barth, who compares colleges to joining a gym: “You get the money, and if the kids leave, they don’t take the money with them.” At present, he believes, the U.S. higher-education system simply isn’t designed for the kinds of students KIPP and other No Excuses charters serve.

There is also at least a bit of cognitive dissonance that must be acknowledged: if KIPP and others are successful in turning out academically prepared, resilient, and optimistic graduates, shouldn’t they need less support, not more, on college campuses? If students need an army of college advisors and KIPP staff to act in loco helicopter parentis, just how gritty can they be?

Barth sees no disconnect. If KIPP kids get “X” support on their journeys to and through college, he says, “middle-class kids get 50X,” much of it simply baked into their lives in the form of educated parents who are not intimidated by college and financial aid applications. College tours, SAT test-prep help, and tutors? Been there, done that. There are siblings, relatives, and even consultants to advise kids on where to apply and what classes to take. The safety net is deep and broad. Perhaps most importantly, there is a baseline expectation among the children of the well-off and well-educated: they grew up simply assuming they would go to college. Middle-class kids, says Barth, get all this “without consciousness of it. It just gets done.”

Back at UC San Diego, Rebecca Mercado acknowledges she was embarrassed to tell anyone she was struggling in school. “I felt that my teachers and even people from KIPP might be disappointed that I had allowed my grades to slip as much as they had.” So just how hard has college been? After some mild prodding, Mercado sheepishly confesses her freshman-year GPA: 2.4. But this year it will be a 3.5 she insists. It’s hard not to be convinced by the self-assured, confident-sounding college sophomore. Her commitment is admirable, earnest, and understandable. Gritty.

And if she struggles, there are any number of people who will be there to lend an ear, give advice, or point to resources. And why not? A lot of people, many of whom she’s never met, have as much riding on Mercado’s success as she does.

Maybe even more.

 

Robert Pondiscio is a former South Bronx 5th-grade teacher and executive director of CitizenshipFirst.

My son had a new degree and a nine-month unpaid gap in his training as a Marine Corps lieutenant. Please don’t fill it with a job at a liquor warehouse, I asked.

Instead, he became a substitute teacher.

In the college town where he was living, an astonishing 47 percent of the school district’s 721 teachers were absent more than 10 days during the school year, according to data the district reported to the U.S. Department of Education for a 2009–10 study. That number rose to 61 percent in an elementary school with one of the district’s highest percentages of black, Hispanic, and low-income children.

Even at that, the district’s absences don’t appear to be record setting. U.S. teachers take off an average of 9.4 days (roughly 1 day per month) each during a typical 180-day school year. By that estimate, the average child has substitute teachers for more than six months of his school career.

Those absences provided full-time employment for my son. With a month-old bachelor’s degree, he taught history and Spanish, his majors; calculus and literature; 2nd and 4th grades (after his second day on the job, the district asked him to take the 2nd-grade class for the rest of the year); tennis (no, he doesn’t play); and gym to a class of severely disabled high schoolers. Once, he worked as a secretary at the alternative school; none of the four teachers assigned to the school showed up that day.

The district didn’t pay much: $60 a day. But it also didn’t ask much in the way of credentials: no teaching certification, teacher education classes, or training beyond a three-hour orientation that focused mainly on administrative details like time sheets. That isn’t unusual either: in some of the country’s larger school districts—including Maryland’s Baltimore County, Florida’s Hillsborough County, Georgia’s Cobb County, and Colorado’s Jefferson County—substitutes need only a high-school GED.

My son taught a high-school unit on World War II, his intellectual passion. But most often, teachers left behind worksheets, quizzes, and videos for him to monitor, amounting to what University of Washington professor Marguerite Roza calls “a lost day for most kids, regardless of the qualifications of the sub.” Indeed, many schools are looking for someone just to keep order rather than to teach differential equations.

“A lot of times, principals are just praying for basic safety,” said Raegen T. Miller, who has studied teacher absenteeism as associate director of education research at the Center for American Progress and as part of a Harvard University team.

No problem there: my son is, after all, a Marine.

Counting the Days

The education department reported after the 2003–04 school year that 5.3 percent of U.S. teachers are absent on any given day, and that’s still the number most researchers use. But districts account for absences differently: some would count the tennis coach absent if he left his gym classes in the hands of a sub to attend an out-of-town tournament with his team; others wouldn’t. Some count professional development days when subs are hired to take the class; others don’t.

The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics employs a weekly absence measure and reports that in 2011, nationwide, 3 percent of the workforce worked less than a 35-hour workweek because of absences. Among public-sector workers, rates were 3.9 for federal workers, 4.2 for state, and 3.6 for employees of local governments.

Geoffrey Smith, who studies substitute-teacher management and founded the Substitute Teaching Institute at Utah State University, says, “A lot doesn’t get called in.” Each of Utah’s 42 school districts counts teacher absences differently, he told me, which means there’s little consistency in the data. Still, he said his surveys suggest that between 8 and 10 percent of teachers are absent on any given day, and there’s some anecdotal evidence on his side.

Last summer, for example, the Camden, New Jersey, school board outsourced its substitute hiring to a private vendor because the job was so onerous: between teachers calling in sick or on leave, the district needed to find subs for up to 40 percent of its teachers each day, it told the local newspaper. In a 2011 report for the Providence, Rhode Island, school board, researchers at Brown University’s Urban Education and Policy program found that the district’s 1,321 teachers took off an average of 21 days each per school year.

In the education department’s 2009–10 report—assembled by its Office for Civil Rights from surveys of 57,000 schools—on average, half the teachers in the 208 Rhode Island schools surveyed were absent more than 10 days during the year, surpassing teacher absences in Hawaii, Arkansas, Oregon, and New Mexico by only a whisker. Nationally, 36 percent of teachers were absent that often. And even in Utah, which reported the lowest absence rates to the department, 20 percent of teachers took off more than 10 days each school year.

Who are those teachers? Harvard researchers Raegen Miller, Richard Murnane, and John Willett studied a district they identified only as large, urban, and northern. Duke University researchers Charles Clotfelter, Helen Ladd, and Jacob Vigdor analyzed data from North Carolina schools. Both studies concluded that teachers in bigger schools were absent more often than those in smaller schools. Elementary-school teachers took off more time than did those in high school. Tenured teachers took off 3.7 more days than did those without tenure.

Teachers in traditional districts seem to take off more than those in charters. Using the education department’s Office for Civil Rights data, Miller estimates that about 37 percent of teachers are absent more than 10 days at district elementary and middle schools compared to 22 percent at charters.

Female teachers under age 35 averaged 3.2 more absences each school year than did men. Teachers who had a master’s degree or graduated from a competitive college took less time than those who didn’t. And teachers in low-income schools were absent more often than those serving higher-income families. One in 4 middle schools in the Duke study were among those with the highest absence rates, but that dropped to 1 in 12 among middle schools serving the district’s most affluent students.

Teachers argue that they’re absent as often as they are because they’re subject to all kinds of infections from sniffly-nosed youngsters and to intense stress in tough schools. Teaching—and particularly elementary-school teaching—is still a majority-female occupation, and child care still falls overwhelmingly on mothers, they add. When a teacher’s child is out with the flu, she may have little choice but to stay home, too.

But other research contends that teachers’ frequent absences are driven by generous leave provisions in their contracts, which typically include time off for illness and personal choice and, in many cases, family deaths, voting, religious observation, union business, conferences, cancer screening, even driver’s license renewal. The National Council on Teacher Quality (NCTQ), which maintains a database on collective-bargaining agreements in 113 large school districts, reports that the contracts give their teachers, on average, 13.5 days of sick and personal leave per school year.

In Columbus, Ohio, the contract allows teachers 20 paid days off, in addition to school holidays and summer breaks. Teachers have 21 days in Boston, 25 days in Hartford, and up to 28 days in Newark, according to NCTQ. By contrast, only 73 percent of private-sector employers provide any sick leave in addition to paid vacation, according to the U.S. Labor Department, and they offer an average of eight sick-leave days during a 12-month work year. In New York City, even substitutes qualify for sick days, one per month.

Teachers certainly are exposed to all manner of classroom germs, but there’s also evidence that a lot of absences are discretionary. The Harvard study found that the highest percentage of absences at that northern, urban district were on Fridays, when 6.6 percent of teachers took off, providing themselves a three-day weekend. Only 4.9 percent took off Tuesdays. More than half the absences that the study examined were for “personal illness,” and more than half of those were for only a day or two. Perhaps coincidentally, the district required a doctor’s excuse for an absence of three days or more.

Substitutes typically earn less than $100 a day. But even at that, Raegen Miller puts the cost of substitute teachers at $4 billion a year, or about 1 percent of total K–12 spending. In Fairfax County, Virginia, whose 13,000 teachers are offered 11 days off a year, the district budgeted $19 million for substitutes in 2012. Cleveland, Ohio, whose teachers may take 18 days off, is budgeting $10.8 million for substitutes this year.

University of Washington’s Marguerite Roza calculated what districts would save yearly on substitute pay if teachers took leave at the same rate as other professionals, that is, 3 days during a comparable 180-day year. Her conclusion: $43 per pupil in savings, or about one-half percent of school budgets.

Cost to Learning

The costs are far more than just financial, of course. The Duke researchers found that being taught by a sub for 10 days a year has a larger effect on a child’s math score than if he’d changed schools, and about half the size of the effect of poverty. Columbia researchers Mariesa Herrmann and Jonah Rockoff concluded that the effect on learning of using a substitute for even a day is greater than the effect of replacing an average teacher with a terrible one, that is, a teacher in the 10th percentile for math instruction and the 20th percentile in English instruction.

There’s no research on how long that effect lasts. But because learning is cumulative, “you would expect that the effect would aggregate to a larger loss of achievement over an entire school career,” Mariesa Herrmann told me. In other words, “A teacher not in a classroom is a missed opportunity for learning,” says Kate Walsh, president of NCTQ.

Some of that learning loss comes from disruption to the classroom: subs don’t know the kids, the classroom routine, the school culture. They have no skin in the game, nothing to win or lose if no one learns Chaucer. Classroom management breaks down. Miller told me that even janitors know when there’s been a sub: “There’s more crap on the floor.”

Teachers often leave busywork behind, or no work at all. In math, particularly—where the roiling debate over how to teach basic computation continues—subs often are cautioned not to teach anything at all for fear of setting the class back. Given testing pressures and school-wide lesson planning, there’s little time to reteach a lesson.

Then, too, districts set fairly low standards for their subs, although the weak economy and teacher layoffs seem to be bringing more certified teachers into the sub pool. Of the 113 large districts in the NCTQ’s database, less than one-quarter require that subs hold any teaching credentials. Only 37 districts require a college degree; 1 in 11 asks for only a high-school diploma or GED.

Out of curiosity, I perused the Denver Public Schools “Substitute Teacher Handbook.” It told me subs can’t wear bedroom slippers to work, that they’re paid $90.40 a day, and that they can ask for, but shouldn’t expect, an evaluation. It didn’t say anything about their qualifications to teach.

Carrots and Sticks

With school budgets strained and learning loss evident, I wondered why districts didn’t try to claw back some of the days they’ve granted their teachers for illness and personal leave. Miller has calculated the learning loss attributable to teacher absences to be equal to about 5 percent of the achievement gap between black and white students. “If you had an intervention that would close the gap that much, it would be worth doing, wouldn’t it?” he asked.

The problem, NCTQ’s Kate Walsh told me, is that teacher quality has been ignored as a reform issue until fairly recently. Now that the focus has shifted, superintendents have so many bigger issues to confront—teacher-evaluation systems, tenure, differential pay—that “you can understand why they don’t go after this benefit,” she said.

“This is small change” to most districts, Miller added—they’re facing budget gaps way larger than that. And the issue touches such a nerve with teacher groups that “there’s profound reluctance to get into it at the bargaining table,” he said. “It’s an entitlement.”

“You should have seen the hate mail I got” after publishing a recent report on teacher absences, Roza told me.

Instead, districts have been turning to incentives to keep teachers at their desks. Almost all districts allow teachers to accumulate unused sick and personal days, and to cash them out when they retire or leave the district. The Detroit schools paid out $12.5 million for unused sick days in 2010–11, which was twice what it spent on subs. New York City employs hundreds of full-time subs who report daily to a “home” school and fill in where they’re needed. They provide some continuity for the school and soak up teachers who have been laid off by budget cuts or enrollment declines. Even so, says Columbia’s Herrmann, these “absent teacher reserves” account for only 10 to 15 percent of the teachers that New York needs every day.

But some districts, facing such huge eventual payouts, have begun capping the number of sick days teachers can accumulate, posing a use-’em-or-lose-’em dilemma for teachers. And for younger teachers, “in deciding whether to be absent, are you really thinking of your retirement?” Columbia’s Herrmann asked.

Researchers have proposed that districts pay teachers a bonus for the days they don’t take off, or give their schools the money that would have been spent on subs as a collective incentive, or set up a reward system for teachers with good attendance (the Columbia study found that only 3 percent of teachers had perfect attendance). The Duke researchers proposed increasing teacher salaries by $400 a year and then charging teachers $50 for each day they take off. They estimated that the scheme would reduce absences by about one day per teacher and largely pay for itself. (Among the arguments raised against the proposal: it would hit female teachers with children harder than it would hit men.)

Many private schools and some charters simply don’t hire subs. Colleagues fill in for absent teachers during their own nonteaching hours. That keeps the class on pace when, say, one 4th-grade social-studies teacher can fill in for another, especially since they’re likely to have drafted the lesson plan together. It also means that one teacher is imposing on another, which creates some accountability, or at least discomfort for the teacher calling in repeated excuses.

But union contracts often limit how many hours a public-school teacher must be in the classroom: that’s why a school may hire a substitute librarian rather than send everyone back to their homerooms when the full-time librarian is out. And some contracts require districts to pay their teachers to sub, usually at rates higher than they would pay a substitute. The Wichita district pays its own teachers $20 an hour; a full-day sub earns $99.

Research also shows that absences increase where districts install automated absence-management systems instead of leaving the job to school secretaries. Teachers log onto the system’s website to report they will be absent. Subs log onto the same site to choose the class they’ll teach.

But districts are adopting the systems anyway, as school support staffs are slashed and technology becomes cheaper. Among the largest of the systems, privately owned Aesop is in 3,000 districts. Aesop claims on its website that it saves districts money: its “fill rate”—that is, the number of classrooms it fills with a sub—is so high that schools don’t need to use more costly downtime teachers. The company adds that its data reports enable principals to track who’s frequently absent and “to work with teachers” who are.

But the automated systems mean that teachers no longer have to talk to the principal, and perhaps explain that they’re taking a day off for a wedding-gown fitting or an auto tune-up. The automated systems also give schools less control over who will fill their classrooms: schools still can call favorite subs, but when those aren’t available, an opening is listed on the website and anyone on an approved list, including the GED holder, can claim chemistry class.

Researchers have found that teachers are absent more often when their fellow teachers are, too. That can suggest there’s an “absence culture” in the school, as in “heck, everyone else is doing it.” It also suggests a struggling school, where teacher absences and student absences feed off one another until neither group shows up. Or it may suggest weak management and unhappy workers. “If you’ve worked in an effective organization, people show up. If you’ve worked in a dysfunctional organization, they take off,” NCTQ’s Walsh observed.

I wondered about that when I looked at the education department’s 2009 report on absenteeism and paged to high-performing Montgomery County, Maryland. The district reported that only 6.8 percent of teachers were absent 10 or more days per year at one school with a high percentage of black, Hispanic, and low-income children. But at two other schools with similar demographics, 42 percent and 19.6 percent of teachers took off that much time.

I asked the district about that. Then I asked again. As in every district I asked about teacher absenteeism, no one answered.

June Kronholz is a former Wall Street Journal reporter and a regular contributor to Education Next. Her son has resumed active duty with the U.S. Marine Corps.

Immigration reform and controversial efforts such as the DREAM Act have long been at the forefront of the nation’s political conversation. Today nearly one-quarter of K‒12 students in the United States hail from Spanish-speaking families or communities, and their needs have taken on a prominent place in our schools. In this forum, two experts argue that getting smarter about literacy and charter schooling offers big opportunities to address the challenges facing Hispanic youth. Juan Rangel is CEO of United Neighborhood Organization (UNO) and president of the UNO Charter School Network. Nonie Lesaux is professor of education at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, where she conducts research on language interventions for students with diverse linguistic and cultural backgrounds.

• Nonie Lesaux: Focus on Higher-Order Literacy Skills

• Juan Rangel: Emphasize Civic Responsibility and Good Citizenship

Higher education in the United States, especially the public sector, is increasingly short of resources. States continue to cut appropriations in response to fiscal constraints and pressures to spend more on other things, such as health care and retirement expenses. Higher tuition revenues might be an escape valve, but there is great concern about tuition levels increasing resentment among students and their families and the attendant political reverberations. President Obama has decried rising tuitions, called on colleges and universities to control costs, and proposed to withhold access to some federal programs for colleges and universities that do not address “affordability” issues.

Costs are no less a concern in K–12 education. Until the 2008 financial crisis and the subsequent slowdown in U.S. economic growth, per-pupil expenditures on elementary and secondary education had been steadily rising. The number of school personnel hired for every 100 students more than doubled between 1960 and the first decade of the 21st century. But in the past few years, local property values have stagnated and states have faced intensifying fiscal pressure. As a result, per-pupil expenditures have for the first time in decades shown a noticeable decline, and pupil-teacher ratios have begun to shift upward (see “Public Schools and Money,” features, Fall 2012). With the rising cost of teacher and administrator pensions, the squeeze on school districts is expected to continue.

A subject of intense discussion is whether advances in information technology will, under the right circumstances, permit increases in productivity and thereby reduce the cost of instruction. Greater, and smarter, use of technology in teaching is widely seen as a promising way of controlling costs while reducing achievement gaps and improving access. The exploding growth in online learning, especially in higher education, is often cited as evidence that, at last, technology may offer pathways to progress (see Figure 1).

However, there is concern that at least some kinds of online learning are of low quality and that online learning in general depersonalizes education. It is important to recognize that “online learning” comes in a dizzying variety of flavors, ranging from simply videotaping lectures and posting them online for anytime access, to uploading materials such as syllabi, homework assignments, and tests to the Internet, all the way to highly sophisticated interactive learning systems that use cognitive tutors and take advantage of multiple feedback loops. Online learning can be used to teach many kinds of subjects to different populations in diverse institutional settings.

Despite the apparent potential of online learning to deliver high-quality instruction at reduced costs, there is very little rigorous evidence on learning outcomes for students receiving instruction online. Very few studies look at the use of online learning for large introductory courses at major public universities, for example, where the great majority of undergraduate students pursue either associate or baccalaureate degrees. Even fewer use random assignment to create a true experiment that isolates the effect of learning online from other factors.

Our study overcomes many of the limitations of prior studies by using the gold standard research design, a randomized trial, to measure the effect on learning outcomes of a prototypical, interactive online college statistics course. Specifically, we randomly assigned students at six public university campuses to take the course in a hybrid format, with computer-guided instruction accompanied by one hour of face-to-face instruction each week, or a traditional format, with three to four hours of face-to-face instruction each week. We find that learning outcomes are essentially the same: students in the hybrid format pay no “price” for this mode of instruction in terms of pass rates, final-exam scores, or performance on a standardized assessment of statistical literacy. Cost simulations, although speculative, indicate that adopting hybrid models of instruction in large introductory courses has the potential to reduce instructor compensation costs quite substantially.

Research Design

Our study assesses the educational outcomes generated by what we term interactive learning online (ILO), highly sophisticated, web-based courses in which computer-guided instruction can substitute for some (though usually not all) traditional, face-to-face instruction. Course systems of this type take advantage of data collected from large numbers of students in order to offer each student customized instruction, as well as to enable instructors to track students’ progress in detail so that they can provide more targeted and effective guidance.

We worked with seven instances of a prototype ILO statistics course at six public university campuses (including two separate courses in separate departments on one campus). The individual campuses include, from the State University of New York (SUNY): the University at Albany and SUNY Institute of Technology; from the University of Maryland: the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, and Towson University; and from the City University of New York (CUNY): Baruch College and City College.

We examine the learning effectiveness of a particular interactive statistics course developed at Carnegie Mellon University (CMU), considered a prototype for ILO courses. Although the CMU course can be delivered in a fully online environment, in this study most of the instruction was delivered through interactive online materials, but the online instruction was supplemented by a one-hour-per-week face-to-face session in which students could ask questions or obtain targeted assistance.

The exact research protocol varied by campus in accordance with local policies, practices, and preferences, but the general procedure followed was 1) at or before the beginning of the semester, students registered for the introductory statistics course were asked to participate in our study and offered modest incentives for doing so; 2) students who consented to participate filled out a baseline survey; 3) study participants were randomly assigned to take the class in a traditional or hybrid format; 4) study participants were asked to take a standardized test of statistical literacy at the beginning of the semester; and 5) at the end of the semester, study participants were asked to take the standardized test of statistical literacy again, as well as to complete another questionnaire.

Of the 3,046 students enrolled in these statistics courses in the fall 2011 semester, 605 agreed to participate in the study and to be randomized into either a hybrid- or traditional-format section. An even larger sample size would have been desirable, but the logistical challenges of scheduling at least two sections (one hybrid section and one traditional section) at the same time, to enable students in the study to attend the statistics course regardless of their (randomized) format assignment, restricted our prospective participant pool to the limited number of “paired” time slots available. Also, student consent was required in order for researchers to randomly assign them to the traditional or hybrid format. Not surprisingly, some students who were able to make the paired time slots elected not to participate in the study. All of these complications notwithstanding, our final sample of 605 students is in fact quite large in the context of this type of research.

The baseline survey administered to students included questions on students’ background characteristics, such as socioeconomic status, as well as their prior exposure to statistics and the reason for their interest in possibly taking the statistics course in a hybrid format. The end-of-semester survey asked questions about their experiences in the statistics course. Students in study-affiliated sections of the statistics course took a final exam that included a set of items that was identical across all the participating sections at that campus. The scores of study participants on this common portion of the exam were provided to the research team, along with background administrative data and final course grades of all students (both participants and, for comparison purposes, nonparticipants) enrolled in the course.

The participants in our study are a diverse group. Half come from families with incomes less than $50,000 and half are first-generation college students. Less than half are white, and the group is about evenly divided between students with college GPAs above and below 3.0. Most students are of traditional college-going age (younger than 24), enrolled full-time, and in their sophomore or junior year.

The data indicate that the randomization worked properly in that traditional- and hybrid-format students in fact have very similar characteristics overall. The 605 students who chose to participate in the study also have broadly similar characteristics to the other students registered for introductory statistics. The differences that do exist are quite small. For example, participants are more likely to be enrolled full-time but only by a margin of 90 versus 86 percent. Their outcomes in the statistics course are also comparable, with participants earning similar grades and being only slightly less likely to complete and pass the course than nonparticipants.

An important limitation of our study is that while we were successful in randomizing students between treatment and control groups, we could not randomize instructors in either group and thus could not control for differences in teacher quality. Instructor surveys reveal that, on average, the instructors in traditional-format sections were much more experienced than their counterparts teaching hybrid-format sections (median years of teaching experience was 20 and 5, respectively). Moreover, almost all of the instructors in the hybrid-format sections were using the CMU online course for either the first or second time, whereas many of the instructors in the traditional-format sections had taught in this mode for years.

The “experience advantage,” therefore, is clearly in favor of the teachers of the traditional-format sections. The questionnaires also reveal that a number of the instructors in hybrid-format sections began with negative perceptions of online learning, which may have depressed the performance of the hybrid sections. The hybrid-format sections were somewhat smaller than the traditional-format sections, however, which may have conferred some advantage on the students randomly assigned to the hybrid format.

Learning Outcomes

Our analysis of the experimental data is straightforward. We compare the outcomes for students randomly assigned to the traditional format to the outcomes for students randomly assigned to the hybrid format. In a small number of cases—4 percent of the 605 students in the study—participants attended a different format section than the one to which they were randomly assigned. In order to preserve the randomization procedure, we associated students with the section type to which they were randomly assigned. This is sometimes called an “intent to treat” analysis, but in this case it makes little practical difference because the vast majority of students complied with their initial assignment.

Our analysis controls for student characteristics, including race/ethnicity, gender, age, full-time versus part-time enrollment status, class year in college, parental education, language spoken at home, and family income. These controls are not strictly necessary, since students were randomly assigned to a course format. We obtain nearly identical results when we do not include these control variables, just as we would expect given the apparent success of our random assignment procedure.

We first examine the impact of assignment to the hybrid format, relative to the traditional format, on students’ probability of passing the course, their performance on a standardized test of statistics, and their score on a set of final-exam questions that were the same in the two formats. We find no clear differences in learning outcomes between students in the traditional- and hybrid-format sections. Hybrid-format students did perform slightly better than traditional-format students on the three outcomes, achieving pass rates that were about 3 percentage points higher, standardized-test scores about 1 percentage point higher, and final-exam scores 2 percentage points higher, but none of these differences is statistically significant (see Figure 2).

It is important to note that these non-effects are fairly precisely estimated. This precision implies that if there had been pronounced differences in outcomes between traditional-format and hybrid-format groups, it is highly likely that we would have found them. In other words, we can be quite confident that the actual effects were in fact close to zero, and therefore differ from a hypothetical finding of “no significant difference” that may result from excessively noisy data or an insufficiently large sample.

We also calculate results separately for subgroups of students defined in terms of various characteristics, including race/ethnicity, gender, parental education, primary language spoken, score on the standardized pretest, hours worked for pay, and college GPA. We do not find any consistent evidence that the hybrid-format effect varies by any of these characteristics. There are no groups of students that benefited from or were harmed by the hybrid format consistently across multiple learning outcomes.

In addition, we examine how much students liked the hybrid format of the course, and find that students gave the hybrid format a modestly lower overall rating than their counterparts gave the traditional-format course (the rating was about 11 percent lower). By similar margins, hybrid students report feeling that they learned less and that they found the course more difficult. But there were no notable differences in students’ reports of how much the course raised their interest in the subject matter.

We also asked students how many hours per week they spent outside of class working on the statistics class. Hybrid-format students report spending 0.3 hours more each week, on average, than traditional-format students. This difference implies that in a course where a traditional section meets for three hours each week and a hybrid section meets for one hour, the average hybrid-format student would spend 1.7 fewer hours each week in total time devoted to the course, a difference of about 25 percent. This result is consistent with nonexperimental evidence that ILO-type formats can achieve the same learning outcomes as traditional-format instruction in less time, which has potentially important implications for scheduling and the rate of course completion.

Potential Savings

In other sectors of the economy, the use of technology has increased productivity, measured as outputs divided by inputs, and often increased output as well. Our study shows that a leading prototype hybrid-learning system did not increase outputs (student learning) but could potentially increase productivity by using fewer inputs.

It would seem to be straightforward to compare the side-by-side costs of the hybrid version of the statistics course and the traditional version. The problem, however, is that contemporaneous comparisons can be nearly useless in projecting long-term costs, because the costs of doing almost anything for the first time are very different from the costs of doing the same thing numerous times. This is especially true in the case of online learning, where there are substantial start-up costs that have to be considered in the short run but are likely to decrease over time. For example, the development of sophisticated hybrid courses will be a costly effort that would only be a sensible investment if the start-up costs were either paid for by others (foundations and governments) or shared by many institutions.

There are also transition costs entailed in moving from the traditional, mostly face-to-face model to a hybrid model that takes advantage of more sophisticated ILO systems employing computer-guided instruction, cognitive tutors, embedded feedback loops, and some forms of automated grading. Instructors need to be trained to take full advantage of such systems. On unionized campuses, there may also be contractual limits on section size that were designed with the traditional model in mind but that do not make sense for a hybrid model. It is possible that these constraints would be changed in future contract negotiations, but that too will take time.

We address these issues by conducting cost simulations based on data from three of the campuses in our study. Our basic approach is to start by looking, in as much detail as possible, at the actual costs of teaching a basic course in traditional format (usually, but not always, the statistics course) in a base year. Then, we simulate the prospective, steady-state costs of a hybrid version of the same course. These exploratory simulations are based on explicit assumptions, especially about staffing, which allow us to see how sensitive our results are to variations in key assumptions.

We did exploratory simulations for two types of traditional teaching models: 1) students taught in sections of roughly 40 students per section, and 2) students attending a common lecture and assigned to small discussion sections led by teaching assistants. We focus on instructor compensation because these costs comprise a substantial portion of the recurring cost of teaching and are the most straightforward to measure. We compare the current compensation costs of each of the two traditional teaching models to simulated costs of a hybrid model in which most instruction is delivered online, students attend weekly face-to-face sessions with part-time instructors, and the course is overseen by a tenure-track professor.

These simulations are admittedly speculative and subject to considerable variation depending on how a particular campus organizes its teaching, but they suggest that significant cost savings are possible. In particular, we estimate savings in compensation costs for the hybrid model ranging from 36 percent to 57 percent compared to the all-section traditional model, and 19 percent compared to the lecture-section model.

These simulations confirm that hybrid learning offers opportunities for significant savings, but that the degree of cost reduction depends (of course) on exactly how hybrid learning is implemented, especially the rate at which instructors are compensated and section size. A large share of cost savings is derived from shifting away from time spent by expensive professors toward both computer-guided instruction that saves on staffing costs overall and time spent by less-expensive staff in Q and A sessions.

Our simulations substantially underestimate the savings from moving toward a hybrid model in many settings because we do not account for space costs. It is difficult to put a dollar figure on space costs because capital costs are difficult to apportion accurately to specific courses, but the difference in face-to-face meeting time implies that the hybrid course requires 67 to 75 percent less classroom use than the traditional course.

In the short run, institutions cannot lay off tenured faculty or sell or demolish their buildings. In the long run, however, using hybrid models for some large introductory courses would allow institutions to expand enrollment without a commensurate increase in space costs, a major savings relative to what institutions would have to spend to serve the same number of students with a traditional model of instruction. In other words, the hybrid model need not just “save money”; it can also support an increase in access to higher education. It serves the access goal both by making it more affordable for the institution to enroll more students and by accommodating more students because of greater scheduling flexibility. This flexibility may be especially important for students who have to balance family and work responsibilities with course completion, as well as for students who live far from campus.

Conclusions

In the case of online learning, where millions of dollars are being invested by a wide variety of entities, we should perhaps expect that there will be inflated claims of spectacular successes. The findings in this study warn against too much hype. To the best of our knowledge, there is no compelling evidence that online learning systems available today—not even highly interactive systems, which are very few in number—can in fact deliver improved educational outcomes across the board, at scale, on campuses other than the one where the system was born, and on a sustainable basis.

This is not to deny, however, that these systems have great potential. Our study demonstrates the potential of truly interactive learning systems that use technology to provide some forms of instruction, in properly chosen courses, in appropriate settings. We find that such an approach need not affect learning outcomes negatively and conceivably could, in the future, improve them, as these systems become ever more sophisticated and user-friendly. It is also entirely possible that by reducing instructor compensation costs for large introductory courses, such systems could lead to more, not less, opportunity for students to benefit from exposure to modes of instruction such as independent study with professors, if scarce faculty time can be beneficially redeployed.

What would be required to overcome the barriers to adoption of even simple online learning systems—let alone more sophisticated systems that are truly interactive? First, a system-wide approach will be needed for a sophisticated customizable platform to be developed, made widely available, maintained, and sustained in a cost-effective manner. It is unrealistic to expect individual institutions to make the up-front investments needed, and collaborative efforts among institutions are difficult to organize, especially when nimbleness is needed. In all likelihood, major foundation, government, or private-sector investments will be required to launch such a project.

Second, as ILO courses are developed in different fields, it will be important to test them rigorously to see how cost-effective they are in at least sustaining and possibly improving learning outcomes for various student populations in a variety of settings. Such rigorous testing should be carried out in large public university systems, which may be willing to pilot such courses. Hard evidence will be needed to persuade other institutions, and especially leading institutions, to try out such approaches.

Finally, it is hard to exaggerate the importance of confronting the cost problems facing American public education at all levels. The public is losing confidence in the ability of the higher-education sector in particular to control costs. All of higher education has a stake in addressing this problem, including the elite institutions that are under less immediate pressure than others to alter their teaching methods. ILO systems can be helpful not only in curbing cost increases (including the costs of building new space), but also in improving retention rates, educating students who are place-bound, and increasing the throughput of higher education in cost-effective ways.

We do not mean to suggest that ILO systems are a panacea for this country’s deep-seated education problems. Many claims about “online learning” (especially about simpler variants in their present state of development) are likely to be exaggerated. But it is important not to go to the other extreme and accept equally unfounded assertions that adoption of online systems invariably leads to inferior learning outcomes and puts students at risk. We are persuaded that well-designed interactive systems in higher education have the potential to achieve at least equivalent educational outcomes while opening up the possibility of freeing up significant resources that could be redeployed more productively.

Extrapolating the results of our study to K–12 education is hardly straightforward. College students are expected to have a degree of self-motivation and self-discipline that younger students may not yet have achieved. But the variation among students within any given age cohort is probably much greater than the differences from one age group to the next. At the very least, one could expect that online learning for students planning to enter the higher-education system would be an appropriate experience, especially if colleges and universities continue to expand their online offerings. It is not too soon to seek ways to test experimentally the potential of online learning in secondary schools as well.

William G. Bowen is senior advisor to Ithaka S+R (the strategy and research arm of ITHAKA). Matthew M. Chingos is senior research consultant at Ithaka S+R and a fellow at the Brookings Institution’s Brown Center on Education Policy. Kelly A. Lack is a research analyst at Ithaka S+R, where Thomas I. Nygren is a former business analyst.

In June 2012, a California judge ruled that the way the Los Angeles Unified School District evaluates its teachers violates state law because it does not factor in student achievement. He ordered the district and the local teachers union to come up with a reasonable way of doing just that. A few days later, Educators 4 Excellence, a group unaffiliated with the local teachers union, released a plan that called for student achievement to count for 40 percent of a teacher’s score. The group then held a dinner, not a formal bargaining session, for teachers to discuss the issue directly with Los Angeles superintendent John Deasy. Writing on Twitter, Deasy described it as “one of the most thoughtful models that has been worked out.”

Around the same time, Boston teachers packed into their union hall to vote on a procedural change that would allow them to cast ballots by mail in biennial elections of officers. At the time, the Boston Teachers Union required its members to show up in person on a school day to vote at the South Boston union hall, which had the effect of ensuring a low turnout. Only 13 percent of the union’s members, including retirees, had voted in the previous election. The proposal to change that practice fell five votes short of the two-thirds majority it needed to pass. “Teachers’ voices matter,” a Boston teacher who supported the change wrote on his blog. “We can, and must, do better in our own union to make our professional organization accessible to, and responsive to, ALL of us.”

That same month, Orchard Gardens, a historically low-performing K–8 school in Roxbury, Massachusetts, wrapped up its second year operating with a Teacher Turnaround Team. The team is made up of top teachers recruited with a promise that they could lead the school’s improvement effort while earning a $6,000-per-year stipend. “As long as we get the ends, we have a lot of flexibility to decide on the means,” said Lynni Nordheim, 30, a 4th-grade teacher who came to the school after teaching six years in Las Vegas. T3, as the turnaround strategy is known, was developed by teachers Boston-based Teach Plus selected for its first 18-month education-policy fellowship in 2007. Teach Plus continues to recruit, develop, and support teacher leaders through partnerships with 13 schools in three districts, including Boston (see sidebar).

Each of these anecdotes represents a facet of a small but rapidly growing national movement to give classroom teachers opportunities to make a mark on their profession and on public education. Several new groups work to amplify the voices of top classroom teachers as they weigh in on controversial policy issues, as with the evaluations in Los Angeles. The Hope Street Group National Teacher Fellows, the New Millennium Initiative, and the Viva Project, a digital platform for crowdsourcing teachers’ ideas, all fall into this category.

The aim of another set of programs is to keep successful teachers in the profession by giving them opportunities to assume leadership roles, as with Teach Plus and its T3 project. A fellowship program launched in 2008 by Leading Educators, which began in New Orleans and is now operating in Kansas City and will soon  expand into Detroit and the District of Columbia, for example, provides a select group of teachers with training in education issues, management, leadership, and problem solving.

A third front in the so-called “teacher voice” movement pushes local unions to become more democratic. The move in Boston to change the voting rules began with a small group of union members, and in less than a month more than 1,200 teachers had signed a petition in support of the change. The issue was brought up for another vote last September, and it passed. Another such effort, NewTLA in Los Angeles, operates as a caucus within the union there.

Regardless of the approach, all of the groups unabashedly acknowledge that some teachers are more effective than others and that even the best teachers want to keep improving their practice. Rather than seeing themselves as adversaries to either unions or school districts, teachers who get involved in these groups tend to think of themselves as problem solvers. As a result, many district, state, and national education policymakers view them as more authentic classroom voices than union activists.

Union Limits

“We as teachers have this wealth of knowledge and expertise that oftentimes goes unrecognized in our profession,” said Geneviève DeBose, a 5th-grade teacher at the Bronx Charter School for the Arts. Last year, DeBose took a leave from her classroom to serve as a Teacher Ambassador fellow in the U.S. Department of Education, which is also working to amplify the voices of teachers. She and 15 others chosen for the honor organized more than 200 roundtable discussions attended by more than 3,000 teachers across the country, seeking their views on an Obama administration proposal to change how teachers are recruited, prepared, licensed, supported, promoted, and compensated. The conversations gave “teachers the opportunity to put their stamp on something before it becomes policy, which is usually not the case,” DeBose said. Last September, DeBose, a board-certified teacher, decided to continue her national leadership work by joining the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards as director of Educator Engagement.

In his 1975 book Schoolteacher, sociologist Dan Lortie explained that teachers have had little say over policy because, as a group, they do not believe they possess specialized technical knowledge out of the reach of nonexperts. Instead, they tend to think of what they do as a matter of personal style and preference. That makes teachers “less ready to assert their authority on educational matters and less able to respond to demands from society,” he wrote. Given teachers’ lack of confidence in their expertise outside the classroom, many legislators, school boards, and administrators “do not believe they require teacher participation” in important decisions.

The unions representing teachers emerged in the 1960s to make sure the interests of teachers were protected in those decisions, using such tactics as collective bargaining, legislative lobbying, and support of candidates friendly to their cause. Modeling themselves on industrial unions, they fought successfully for better and more equitable salaries, job security, and improved working conditions, such as limits on class size.

The unions did not, however, seek to gain influence over teaching itself. In part, that was because of the individualistic perspective on what it means to be a good teacher noted by Lortie. A bigger reason was that union leaders (an exception was, in his later years, Albert Shanker of the American Federation of Teachers) believed that supervision and quality control was a management responsibility. The union’s role was to enforce fairness, through rigid salary schedules, a fetish-like attachment to seniority policies, and aggressive enforcement of due process rules.

That has left unions ill-prepared to respond to current demands on teachers and schools to boost test scores, increase graduation rates, and better prepare students for success in college or on the job. They’ve been unable to block the rapid spread of policies that seek to link tenure decisions, the order of layoffs, job security, and even compensation to performance. And, in a dozen states, including Wisconsin, Ohio, and Idaho, the unions have found themselves fighting just to maintain collective bargaining rights. Meanwhile, union membership is falling.

Both Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers (AFT), and Dennis Van Roekel, president of the larger National Education Association (NEA), recognize the threat. In his keynote speech to NEA’s Representative Assembly in July 2012, Van Roekel said teaching is “OUR work…OUR profession.” But, he said, “that sure doesn’t stop everyone from having an opinion on how to do our work, does it?” Van Roekel said that “teachers are willing to take responsibility for student success—and they want and deserve a voice in how they’re trained, supported, and evaluated.”

In 2010, Van Roekel appointed a commission to make recommendations on the role the NEA should play in improving teacher effectiveness. Led by Maddie Fennell, Nebraska’s 2007 State Teacher of the Year, the commission issued a report in 2011 that sketched out a vision of the profession in which teachers have a say in decisions about hiring, evaluating, promoting, and dismissing their fellow teachers. Fennell said the union “has to grapple with the fact that not all teachers are equally effective and some are not cut out to be teachers.” But, she said, even that obvious truth is controversial among union stalwarts. According to Fennell, the recommendations were embraced by NEA leadership but have met resistance from middle managers within the union.

Since then, Fennell has worked to increase the influence over education policies of the National Network of State Teachers of the Year, whose membership comprises current and former honorees.

A national survey conducted in the fall of 2011 for the Washington-based think tank Education Sector found that more than 40 percent of teachers want their unions to focus more on teacher performance and student achievement than they currently do. The same survey found that less than half of teachers consider unions to be absolutely essential. Another survey, conducted by Harvard’s Program on Education Policy and Governance on behalf of Education Next, found that only 43 percent of teachers have a positive view of unions, while the percentage of teachers holding negative views doubled from 2011 to 2012 to 32 percent (see complete results for 2011 and 2012 Education Next-PEPG surveys at www.educationnext.org). Of course, the latter survey doesn’t indicate whether teachers are ambivalent because the unions aren’t fighting hard enough against policy changes affecting job security or because they’re fighting too hard to defend poor performers.

Educators for Excellence

Among those who think that unions need to better represent the diverse views of their members are Evan Stone and Sydney Morris, former Teach For America corps members who worked for several years at the 2,000-student P.S. 86 in the Bronx, New York’s largest elementary school. They were in their third year on the job when they began to get frustrated. “We realized there was this weird juxtaposition,” Stone said. “Inside our classrooms we had so much autonomy and control, and outside we had no control or influence in the school, the district, or beyond.”

Initially, the pair thought that the United Federation of Teachers (UFT), in New York City, would provide them with the platform they needed to make their views known to district leaders. But they were disappointed. “We went to meetings and realized that much of the dialogue was one way,” said the 27-year-old Stone, a Yale graduate. “We were being told what to do, or what to think, rather than being asked what we thought.”

In March 2010, at a meeting of like-minded teachers in a coffee shop on Avenue B in the East Village, they decided upon a particularly American course of action: they would form an advocacy group with the audacious aim of transforming the profession that many of them had so recently joined. Soon after, the group, known as E4E (Educators 4 Excellence), issued a statement of “principles and beliefs,” most of which just happened to run counter to union orthodoxies. Teachers who want to join are expected to pledge to support using value-added test-score data in evaluations, higher hurdles to achieving tenure, the elimination of seniority-driven layoffs, school choice, and merit pay.

Stone said the manifesto is “somewhat of a line in the sand” but also an organizing tool to “bring together solutions-oriented teachers around a common set of beliefs” about issues relevant to their profession.

Since then, nearly 8,000 teachers have signed the manifesto; E4E has chapters in New York City, Los Angeles, and Minnesota; and Stone and Morris have left their teaching jobs to work full-time to expand the group nationally. In an e-mail, Morris, 27, a Tulane graduate, explained the group’s appeal by saying teachers “are tired of being treated as subjects of change, instead of as partners in transforming the education system.” She said E4E gives teachers an outlet for those impulses through its online and in-person community of like-minded teachers, events at which education officials such as New York state education commissioner John King hear from them directly and seek their advice, and opportunities to participate on committees that write specific policy recommendations.

In New York, recommendations by a group of E4E teachers on how appeals of low performance ratings should be handled were incorporated in the teacher-evaluation policy Governor Andrew Cuomo announced last year. Before that, a group of 11 teachers affiliated with E4E developed a proposal for an alternative to seniority in determining who would be let go in the event of layoffs. The group recommended that teachers who were frequently absent, those who had been judged unsatisfactory by their principals, and those who did not have a permanent job assignment should be the first to go.

Those ideas were welcomed by New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg at a time when he was very much at odds with the UFT. Critics responded with scorn and hostility, calling E4E members “anti-union scum” and “union-busting plants” in online forums. One comment on a GothamSchools blog post complained that “in the past all young teachers paid their dues, and didn’t complain about being low man on the totem pole” in the union. Morris said E4E is not anti-union. “We’re trying to strengthen the union in the long run by having it become more representative of its members,” Morris said.

Susan Keyock is “school captain” for E4E at Metropolitan High School in the South Bronx. She became a special education teacher in Denver after several noneducation jobs and became involved there explaining to her peers the benefits of the performance pay program called ProComp. She wanted to push for similar ideas in New York but did not find the UFT to be receptive. Her affiliation with E4E has given her a chance to engage her fellow teachers in discussions about policies. “Teachers want a fair and transparent evaluation system so we can all become better teachers,” she remarked. She said teachers new to the field “want the union to be student-focused, achievement-focused, and data-focused and want their union to be perceived positively by the public.”

Grass Roots or Astroturf?

Leo Casey, a UFT vice president, said he doubted that E4E has as many supporters among New York teachers as it claims. Most teachers, he said, are opposed to being judged based on student test scores and believe that the current seniority system is fair and necessary. He said that E4E is seen by many in the union as too close to Bloomberg. “The issue of being hand in glove with the mayor’s campaign on seniority raises real questions about the group’s independence,” Casey said. “The perceptions of them are pretty strongly fixed at this point.” In January, the UFT and the school district ended negotiations over a new evaluation system in the city, which could lead to the loss of $450 million in state and federal aid.

Some opponents of unions have indeed applauded the emergence of alternatives. But Brad Jupp, a former teachers union leader who is an advisor to U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, said, “We have to resist turning these teacher voice groups into foils for the union or seeing them as flanking operations.

“What they want is personal efficacy, and they look at unions and districts alike as organizations that do not nurture personal efficacy,” he said. “Policy influence can give them that.”

AFT president Weingarten said E4E “tends to be a wedge against the union” and that “people are really skeptical about groups formed with other people’s money.”

These groups do face the challenge of proving that they represent the grassroots views of teachers and are not part of a foundation-funded “Astroturf” campaign to discredit unions. The groups do not charge dues and so are completely dependent on grants. Funders include the Ford Foundation, the Chicago-based Joyce Foundation, the Stuart Foundation in California, the Laura and John Arnold Foundation of Houston, the Hewlett Foundation, and Bloomberg Philanthropies, the foundation created by New York’s mayor. The largest source of funding is the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, which currently has $13.5 million invested in nine teacher-advocacy groups, including $975,000 over two years going to E4E. But the foundation has also given $4 million to the AFT and $500,000 to the NEA to fund similar projects.

Gates is a major supporter of the Hope Street Group, a national think tank and consulting firm that formulated the language for the Obama administration’s Race to the Top grant program, which is opposed by many teachers and union leaders. Founded in Los Angeles in 2003 by “pro-market” business executives and professionals who believed in the power of incentives to affect behavior, the group’s consultants are now helping five states develop teacher-evaluation systems. The group believes teachers should earn higher salaries and be “rewarded for what matters most: good classroom outcomes.” The Hope Street Group’s teaching fellows program was created to help spread that message. Seventy teachers applied for 50 slots for this school year. Those chosen received a $5,000 stipend and, in return, are expected to help states implement the new teacher evaluations, using a “playbook” created by Hope Street.

Another nonprofit organization that offers fellowships is America Achieves, founded in September 2010 in New York City by a group that includes Jon Schnur, who has been an advisor to President Obama and Secretary of Education Arne Duncan. The organization’s goal is to give educators greater influence over policies, promote “evidence-based” reforms, and raise student achievement, principally through the Common Core State Standards. Fellows are chosen based on their track record for improving student achievement, and are given opportunities to advise local, state, and national policymakers at convenings, as well as informally. As of spring 2012, 50 educators, including eight principals, were participating.

The New Millennium Initiative (NMI), another “teacher voice” fellowship, was launched in 2009 by the North Carolina–based Center for Teaching Quality. Teachers selected for the fellowship want to be the “chief agents of change” in their local communities, according to the organization. Jessica Keigan is a fellow based in Denver, one of five locales with an active NMI group. A high-school English teacher in her ninth year, Keigan and other fellows have been involved in shaping the details of SB 191, the Colorado reform bill that made major changes to teacher-related policies, including evaluations and tenure.

Keigan said the Colorado Department of Education invited the NMI fellows to participate in the process after they wrote a paper about it. “While most of us have concerns … we’re trying to make sure the implementation is the best it can be,” she said.

All of these groups make heavy use of social media for connecting participants and sharing their views. None more so than the Viva Project, which stands for Vision, Idea, Voice, Action, and was started by a Chicago-based community organizer and policy activist involved in promoting the spread of charter schools in the state. The organization’s motto is “classroom teachers should be the defining voice in education policy.” The project creates virtual “idea exchanges” and invites teachers in a given district or state to contribute video or written commentaries. Those who are most active are asked to join a “Writing Collaborative.” The collaboratives produce reports, which are put in the hands of policymakers. Viva teachers have influenced policies related to extending teaching time in Chicago, principal evaluations in Minnesota, teacher evaluations in New York, the implementation of Common Core standards in Arizona charter schools, and the U.S. Department of Education’s efforts to increase teacher professionalism.

A New Unionism?

Randi Weingarten said she is open to working with groups that don’t share the union’s point of view and that Teach Plus has been an ally in some instances. But, she said, “it’s the union that can bring long-term, systemic changes to the system” through collective bargaining. She said such groups should “work with the union and try to advocate for changes within the union” rather than going it on their own.

Julia Koppich, a policy analyst who has studied unions and union-district relationships and has consulted with Teach Plus, agreed with Weingarten. She said such groups are naive if they think policy changes occur based on the power of a report. Of the Teach Plus group in Memphis she said, “They were disappointed because they went to the school board and got lip service and nothing happened. I told them you have to organize. It’s really hard work and maybe these groups will grow into it.”

But, she said, “the new generation of teachers aren’t collectivists, they’re pretty much individualists. They don’t understand unions. And the unions don’t understand them.”

In November of 2011, the NewTLA caucus got 85 of its members elected to the 350-member union House of Representatives and helped elect a candidate for president of the union who was thought to be more amenable to reforms. Soon after, the union agreed to grant individual schools flexibility over the school calendar, hiring, and assignment of teachers. Then, last February, the caucus supported asking UTLA’s membership to direct the union to negotiate with the district on the creation of a new teacher-evaluation system. The measure won easily. “We’re seeing that teachers are rejecting this false dichotomy between traditional unionism and some of the transformational changes that are needed in education,” said Michael Stryer, who had a career in international sales and marketing before becoming a high-school social studies teacher in Los Angeles eight years ago. He joined as one of the organizers of NewTLA because he believed the union had to become more focused on student achievement and the professional growth of teachers if it were to continue to protect members’ interests.

“In urban areas, we need to get really, really good teachers involved in the union,” he says. Stryer has taken a leave from teaching to promote that idea around the country as director of new unionism for Future Is Now Schools, formerly Green Dot America.

Stryer is optimistic about the future because of the sustained focus on student achievement and accountability, and also because of the “changing face of education and the possibility that the traditional interests are perhaps not going to be the prevailing ones in the future.”

Even so, despite the urgings of the caucus and the local chapters of E4E and Teach Plus, UTLA refused to endorse the Los Angeles district’s application for a $40 million Race to the Top grant, because it required the adoption of a teacher-evaluation system based in part on student achievement. In January, however, the district and UTLA agreed on a plan to do just that and it won the approval of two-thirds of the teachers who voted.

Longtime education journalist Richard Lee Colvin is an independent writer, editor, and strategic communications consultant based in Washington, D.C. He also is a visiting fellow at the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation.