Remember merit badges? The reward for kids who master new skills has been rebooted—for their teachers.

So-called “micro-credentials” work a lot like scouting badges. Teachers complete a specific activity to develop a critical competency for their role, and earn a micro-credential based on showing mastery of the skill. They can collect micro-credentials to document growing expertise and share their accomplishments in the classroom.

This targeted training is in stark contrast to traditional, strikingly ineffective teacher professional development (PD). With its focus on seat time—awarding credit for showing up to workshops, conferences, or classes—formal PD has ignored whether teachers actually learn new skills, apply them, and improve student outcomes. And with its reliance on generalized, off-the-shelf programs, most formal PD does not target the specific skills or expertise an individual teacher may need to improve her practice.

Proponents of teacher micro-credentials hope to move beyond this model. They aim to shift teacher PD to a competency-based system with personalized development opportunities that match teachers’ and schools’ specific needs. Such a system could allow teachers to drive their own development, signal their true areas of expertise to school and district administrators, and advance in their careers according to their skills.

If it gains traction, micro-credentialing could help transform how K–12 teachers are prepared, hired, developed, and assigned teaching responsibilities. But there are some hurdles ahead.

Making credentials valuable

Micro-credentials have to be worth something to the people who earn them. In the current education ecosystem, policy drives much of the demand for PD. While teachers may be independently interested in bettering their practices, many participate in training programs because they are either required or rewarded for doing so. For micro-credentials to get a foot in the door, they will need states and districts to start counting them toward licensure renewal, continuing education requirements, and pay-scale bumps.

At this early stage in the game, the path to formal recognition under state and district policies looks promising. Six states now allow teachers to count micro-credentials toward their continuing education requirements, according to Digital Promise, a Washington, D.C., nonprofit authorized by Congress that is focused on educational innovation, and BloomBoard, a teacher PD education technology start-up in Silicon Valley.

The path to regulatory legitimacy varies from state to state, however. Some states regulate PD directly through statewide PD requirements, whereas others regulate it through their teacher licensure and licensure renewal requirements. Still others leave PD policies to local districts.

Most jurisdictions, though, have fairly loose requirements regarding what can count toward PD, which suggests gaining approval may not be hard for micro-credential programs. That also bodes well in terms of innovation—if states or districts had more stringent rules, they would likely kill much of the transformational potential of micro-credentials by forcing them to resemble traditional PD.

Solving for supply and demand

Although the path to policy approval doesn’t seem too steep, merely allowing room for micro-credentials in state and district requirements doesn’t necessarily guarantee that a micro-credential ecosystem will arise to fill the space.

On the supply side, any ecosystem will need organizations to step up as gatekeepers, to review teachers’ applications for micro-credentials and award those credentials to worthy applicants. Additionally, universities, professional organizations, and other PD providers will need to create resources aligned with micro-credentials.

Digital Promise and BloomBoard have made notable progress in planting seeds that could grow into a new micro-credential ecosystem. A handful of reputable organizations have partnered with Digital Promise to issue micro-credentials that teachers can collect on BloomBoard’s online platform, such as the Relay Graduate School of Education, Hope Street Group, Learning Forward, the Friday Institute at North Carolina State University, the Center for Teaching Quality, Teaching Matters, KQED, TNTP (The New Teacher Project), the New Teacher Center, and Arizona State University. Many of these organizations also offer learning resource collections through the BloomBoard platform to help teachers master what they need in order to earn micro-credentials.

On the demand side, distribution channels must arise to inform teachers of micro-credential options. Platforms must also emerge for teachers to share the micro-credentials they’ve earned.

Just 15 percent of teachers are aware of micro-credentials, but once they see a description, more than 70 percent are at least somewhat interested in them, and 31 percent are “extremely” or “very” likely to try them when they are available, according to a report last year by Digital Promise. Since the beginning of this year, more than 13,800 educators in 400 districts have either earned or are working on completing micro-credentials through BloomBoard’s platform, including in Tennessee, Michigan, and Ohio.

Ensuring quality

Even if a host of organizations start offering micro-credentials and teachers begin pursuing them by the thousand, widespread adoption is not necessarily a win for the K–12 education system. In the current PD landscape, states and districts spend more than $18 billion annually on teacher development, but very little of that PD actually improves teachers’ practices. If micro-credentials end up just modularizing and digitizing current approaches to PD—or, worse yet, focus on practices unlikely to boost student outcomes—then they will miss the ultimate mark of improving teacher effectiveness and student outcomes.

The content and format of micro-credentials will be critical. In the current system, teachers often earn PD credit through coursework, not classroom practice. Sitting through lectures and workshops, watching online videos, writing reflections, preparing sample lesson plans, and passing written exams may all be valuable learning experiences, but teaching skills are honed through purposeful practice in either real or simulated classroom settings. Focusing on coursework completion emphasizes the inputs into teachers’ learning experiences, without actually guaranteeing the desired outcomes of those learning experiences.

It’s important to establish and hold programs to a high bar for quality, rooted in competency. Done right, micro-credentials can help make PD more meaningful for teachers by focusing on skill mastery instead of coursework completion. But if such programs catch on, we may see existing PD providers just repackage their traditional, seat-time-based continuing-education training as micro-credentials.

How can we ensure high-quality programs? States and districts could adopt quality standards for micro-credential issuers, or an organization such as Digital Promise could vet micro-credentials before they are available to teachers. Conversely, we could eschew such standards and allow for a variety of credentials of varying quality, and leave teachers and school leaders to rely on the brands of particular micro-credential issuers to determine the quality of a given program—or to create their own personal improvement plans, with the quality ultimately based on school improvement.

That raises another concern: how to ensure a clear connection between micro-credentials and improved student outcomes. Micro-credential issuers may scour the research literature to design programs that are aligned with research-based best practices, just as the developers of professional standards for educators have done for decades. But until micro-credentials are road-tested for student-learning gains, they will remain a hyped-up experimental vehicle for improving education. The micro-credential ecosystem needs to ensure that research and development and quality assurance testing go hand in hand with the creation and proliferation of micro-credentials.

Hurdles aside, micro-credentials appear to be a promising innovation, with the potential to help transform PD for K–12 teachers. Time will tell if proponents can create a robust ecosystem and cross the chasm that lies beyond early adopters to involve a substantial portion of the nation’s 3.1 million teachers. It is also yet to be seen whether micro-credentials will serve as just a personalized means of better teacher development, or if they are another catalyst in the movement to personalize learning for students as well.

Michael B. Horn is co-founder and distinguished fellow at the Clayton Christensen Institute, a principal consultant at Entangled Solutions, and executive editor at Education Next. Thomas Arnett is senior research fellow at the Clayton Christensen Institute.

Does the U.S. Constitution guarantee a right to education? It does not, the Supreme Court declared in San Antonio Independent School District v. Rodriguez, a 1973 case alleging that disparities in spending levels among Texas school districts violated students’ constitutional rights.

In this issue’s forum, Charles Ogletree, Harvard Law School professor, and Kimberly Robinson, professor at the University of Richmond School of Law, assert that the court should overturn the Rodriguez decision, thus opening the door to federal remedies to public-education inequality.

On the other side, Alfred A. Lindseth, Rocco E. Testani, and Lee A. Peifer, attorneys at the law firm Eversheds Sutherland (US), contend that a reversal of Rodriguez would lead not to educational parity but to endless litigation.

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Inequitable Schools Demand a Federal Remedy 
by Charles J. Ogletree Jr. and  Kimberly Jenkins Robinson

 

 

 

Federal Courts Can’t Solve Our Education Ills
by Alfred A. Lindseth, Rocco E. Testani, and Lee A. Peifer

It is not often that the U.S. Supreme Court admits that one of its previous decisions, especially one that shaped the fabric of our nation, was fundamentally wrong. One such instance occurred in 1954, when the court famously declared, in Brown v. Board of Education, that the doctrine of “separate but equal” public schools for black children and white children was unconstitutional. In Brown, the court overturned, for public schools, its approval of this doctrine in Plessy v. Ferguson (1896) and established that segregated schools violated the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. The court also proclaimed that educational “opportunity, where the state has undertaken to provide it, is a right which must be made available to all on equal terms.”

Less than two decades later, however, the court turned its back on protecting a right to equal educational opportunity. In San Antonio Independent School District v. Rodriguez (1973), the court held that the Constitution does not protect a right to education. This decision foreclosed a federal judicial remedy for disparities in funding that had relegated Mexican American children in the predominantly low-income Edgewood Independent School District of San Antonio, Texas, to an education that was inferior to that of students in the city’s affluent, mostly white Alamo Heights district. The two districts differed in their ability to raise property taxes because of significant disparities in property values in the two communities. Edgewood adopted the highest tax rate in the area but yielded the least funding for its schools, while Alamo Heights adopted a substantially lower tax rate that yielded considerably more per-pupil funding. Plaintiffs alleged, in part, that these funding disparities denied them their constitutional right to education. All children must be guaranteed that right, they argued, because education equips citizens to fully enjoy their free speech and voting rights.

In a 5–4 decision, the court disagreed. Rodriguez held that the Constitution does not explicitly or implicitly guarantee a right to education. The court denied that it had the authority or the ability to guarantee people “the most effective speech or the most informed electoral choice.” It said further that affirming a constitutional right to education would greatly disturb the balance of education federalism that embraced primary state and local control for education—an important means for encouraging innovation, experimentation, and competition between states. The court also claimed that it was not qualified to address difficult empirical questions such as whether money influenced educational quality. And since the plaintiffs had not alleged that they were denied the “basic minimal skills” required to enjoy the right to free speech and to vote, the court said it did not need to determine if the Constitution guaranteed a right to an education that provides such skills.

Parallels to Plessy

Rodriguez will one day be considered as erroneous as the court’s approval of the “separate but equal” doctrine in Plessy v. Ferguson, for three reasons.

First, just as the states refused to make good on the “equal” part of “separate but equal” after Plessy, for more than 40 years states have failed to provide equal access to the funding needed to achieve excellent schools for all children, largely because of a lack of federal accountability for equitable school funding. The Rodriguez court acknowledged the need for state tax reform related to school funding and for “innovative thinking as to public education, its methods, and its funding.” However, the court was unwilling to order states to engage in this reform. Instead, the court explained that any solutions to these challenges must be determined by state lawmakers and those who elect them. Although some states have undertaken school funding reform since Rodriguez, too many do not provide the funding systems that excellent and equitable schools demand.

Evidence abounds regarding the harmful nature of funding disparities. For example, the U.S. Department of Education’s Equity and Excellence Commission found in its 2013 report that “students, families and communities are burdened by the broken system of education funding in America.” State funding systems are not closely linked to desired educational outcomes: despite the fact that all states have adopted educational standards, the commission found that only a few states have developed funding systems that enable schools to teach all students the content of state standards.

Although scholars do not agree on what constitutes an appropriate minimum funding level, studies that attempt to determine such sums find that many states fund schools below those levels. Nor do states provide effective oversight of funding to ensure that it is used efficiently to meet student needs. Equality eluded generations of African Americans in part because of Plessy. Similarly, many schoolchildren today attend schools that lack sufficient and equitable funding in part because of Rodriguez, which foreclosed the federal judicial accountability that could require states to remedy their inequitable funding disparities.

Second, just as Plessy relegated African Americans to second-class status, Rodriguez relegates many students to second-class status. It is beyond dispute that, because disadvantaged children come to their classrooms with an array of educational and personal challenges, they need additional resources to compete successfully with their more-affluent peers. Therefore, even when states provide equal per-pupil funding for all students, low-income children and communities remain disadvantaged. A recent Education Law Center report found that in 2013, 18 states provided essentially the same funding to districts with high and low concentrations of disadvantaged students. Only 16 states provided additional funding to districts with greater numbers of disadvantaged students, and 14 states provided less funding to such districts. In short, a sizable majority of states have failed to provide equitable funding. These funding inequities provide second-rate educational opportunities to many low-income children that adversely affect their life chances.

Third, just as Plessy resulted in depriving African Americans of access to the schools, jobs, ballots, and opportunities they needed to fully and equally participate in American life, the disparities that Rodriguez tolerates leave many students without the education they need to so participate. Rodriguez effectively foreclosed federal litigation as a mechanism for addressing inequitable disparities in school funding, and Congress has been unwilling to demand that states remedy such disparities. The individual and societal toll is clear: Those who attend inadequate schools are hampered in becoming fully engaged citizens. Workers who are less educated are less productive. Lower educational attainment increases criminal activity. In contrast, effective education significantly increases voting and civic engagement. Because education serves as the gateway to full participation and success in American society, Rodriguez contributes to many students being shut out.

Although the Rodriguez court trusted states to ensure equal educational opportunity, this trust has proven misplaced. Even when students and their families have been successful in school funding litigation based on state constitutions, many state lawmakers have resisted and evaded court mandates to provide equitable or adequate funding. Until we change this reality, students at all income levels will continue to perform poorly in comparison to their international peers.

Constitutional Claims

The Supreme Court could rely on a variety of constitutional protections in affirming a constitutional right to education. It could find that the equal protection clause prohibits wide within-state disparities in educational opportunity that disadvantage some students because they live in a property-poor district, as Justice Thurgood Marshall argued in his Rodriguez dissent. Given the Constitution’s protection of the right to vote, the equal protection clause also would support a federal right to an education that prepares students to be competent voters and civic participants—enabling them, for instance, to comprehend complex ballot initiatives and serve competently on a jury, as education law scholar and litigator Michael Rebell has contended. The court might also invoke the citizenship clause, asserting that all children need an education sufficient to ensure equal citizenship, which entails political, civil, and social equality, as California Supreme Court Justice Goodwin Liu has argued.

The court could emphasize that in a number of past decisions it has recognized “unenumerated” rights, that is, rights that are not explicitly included in the Constitution. For instance, before Rodriguez, the court recognized the right to interstate travel; the right of a parent to control a child’s education; the right to marry a person of a different race; and a woman’s right to terminate a pregnancy. Since Rodriguez, the court has continued to demonstrate a willingness to recognize and expand unenumerated rights—implying a right to consensual same-sex relationships; implying a parent’s right to the care, custody, and control of their child; and extending the right to reproductive privacy to minors. Most recently, the court held in Obergefell v. Hodges that same-sex couples enjoy a constitutionally protected right to marry within the Fourteenth Amendment’s equal protection and due process clauses. These cases confirm the insights of leading constitutional law scholar Akhil Amar, who has stated that various implicit rights, though unenumerated, “are nonetheless full-fledged constitutional entitlements on any sensible reading of the document.”

Enforcing the Right

Once the court recognizes a federal constitutional right to education, families, advocates, and attorneys must begin the hard work of challenging state systems of education as unlawful under the U.S. Constitution. Federal courts should insist that states design their education systems to accomplish the aims of the right to education—be they ending inequitable disparities in educational opportunity, preparing students to be competent voters and civic participants, or ensuring that students are equal citizens. State-level funding litigation has often revealed that education systems are based upon the bargains struck by politicians that are divorced from a rigorous analysis of the aims of education and the best means to achieve them. In designing remedies, the federal courts could draw critical lessons from successful state cases such as Abbott v. Burke (New Jersey) and Campaign for Fiscal Equity v. State of New York. Both cases provide examples of state courts that have insisted that states design funding systems to accomplish specified aims.

Cases alleging a federal constitutional right to education need not center on the illegality of funding disparities. Such cases can cause courts to lose their focus on the underlying disparities in educational opportunity that prevent children from becoming engaged citizens and productive members of society. When cases do implicate funding disparities, the federal courts can build upon the consensus that has emerged from the overwhelming majority of state courts that have concluded, after a review of the relevant social science research, that money does matter for the quality of educational opportunity. Recent research by C. Kirabo Jackson and colleagues confirms that spending increases can improve both educational and adult outcomes for low-income children (see “Boosting Educational Attainment and Adult Earnings,” research, Fall 2015). Therefore, although the Rodriguez court noted that it was unable to address complex policy questions such as this, the Supreme Court would not be stymied by this question in future cases.

When enforcing a constitutional right to education, federal courts should establish clear guidance about what that right requires, while also allowing for flexibility in how states implement it. State funding and governance mechanisms vary. Therefore, federal courts should eschew simple one-size-fits-all remedies such as mandating equal per-pupil funding. States should be able to continue to serve as laboratories of experimentation and innovation that decide how best to provide the right to education. However, these laboratories should operate within federal limits that protect the national interest in a well-educated populace. This approach would provide federal accountability while retaining the beneficial aspects of state and local control.

Ultimately, what we are calling for is a long-overdue restructuring of education federalism to establish an effective partnership of the federal, state, and local governments to advance equal access to an excellent education. Education federalism has served as a consistent roadblock to federal efforts to remove barriers to equal educational opportunities for low-income and minority students. The oft-praised benefits of state and local control—experimentation, innovation, and competition for excellence—have failed to eliminate the substandard schools that many children attend. Instead, trumpeting the importance of state and local control has too often served as a vehicle for those privileged by the current education system to maintain their advantage and avoid accountability for effectively educating all children.

Education federalism has already undergone a tremendous evolution since the Brown decision and its progeny and passage of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965 (ESEA). Successive reauthorizations of ESEA have revealed the need for federal accountability to incentivize states and localities to enact K–12 education reforms. Even the Every Student Succeeds Act, the law’s 2015 iteration, which reduces the federal role in school accountability, still insists that state and local governments focus attention on the lowest-performing schools. This demonstrates Congress’s continuing concern that states and localities often do not intervene in ways that can break long-standing cycles of low graduation rates and lagging achievement.

Undoubtedly, the litigation we envision will impose costs on the federal, state, and local governments. Yet the United States already bears costs from our broken education system, including higher crime rates, additional expenses for health-care and public-assistance programs, and lost tax revenue as well as the untold costs of telling generations of children in chronically under-resourced, low-performing schools: “You don’t matter!” As states receive the message that they must provide equal access to an excellent education, the litigation costs will subside while the benefits to our nation will continue to accrue and multiply for generations.

Recognition of a federal constitutional right to education will provide us with a clear path to excellent and equitable schools. Just as the court declared an end to separate but equal in Brown v. Board of Education, the court must also declare an end to a third-world education for some and a world-class education for others by overturning Rodriguez. Our national commitment to equal opportunity and a just society demands no less.

This is part of a forum on the San Antonio Independent School District v. Rodriguez. For an alternate view, see “Federal Courts Can’t Solve Our Education Ills,” by Alfred A. Lindseth, Rocco E. Testani, and Lee A. Peifer.

In 1973, the U.S. Supreme Court held that the federal Constitution does not establish a fundamental right to education or to “equal” school funding. In so doing, the court rejected the argument that funding disparities across local school districts should be “strictly scrutinized” under the Fourteenth Amendment’s equal protection clause. That decision, in San Antonio Independent School District v. Rodriguez, has been good law for more than 40 years.

Various commentators and two new lawsuits, however, argue that Rodriguez should be reconsidered. These advocates urge the courts to create a federal constitutional right to education. Although the word “education” appears nowhere in the federal Constitution, advocates for recognizing that such a right is implied typically argue that it would ensure “equal educational opportunity” and foster more effective participation in civil society. These advocates may be well-intentioned, but their arguments rest on shaky legal reasoning and would translate into bad policy.

First, as a matter of constitutional law, Rodriguez was correctly decided. With a nod to Brown v. Board of Education, the Supreme Court’s 1954 decision banning state-imposed racial segregation in schools, the Rodriguez court recognized “the vital role of education in a free society.” But the court also emphasized the restraint inherent in our federal constitutional scheme: “The importance of a service performed by the State does not determine whether it must be regarded as fundamental for purposes of examination under the Equal Protection Clause,” the court wrote in its opinion, and “education, of course, is not among the rights afforded explicit protection under our Federal Constitution. Nor do we find any basis for saying it is implicitly so protected.” And finally, the court noted, “it is not the province of this Court to create substantive constitutional rights in the name of guaranteeing equal protection of the laws.”

This analysis reflects the fact that the federal Constitution protects us from certain kinds of governmental action—such as state-imposed segregation, prohibitions on free speech, or invasions of personal privacy—but does not create expansive positive rights or guarantee governmental assistance. Federal courts typically refuse to create new substantive rights, and in a 1989 case, DeShaney v. Winnebago County Department of Social Services, the Supreme Court “recognized that the [Constitution’s] Due Process Clauses generally confer no affirmative right to governmental aid, even where such aid may be necessary to secure life, liberty, or property interests.” Declaring education to be an implicit fundamental right would raise difficult constitutional questions about essentials such as food, shelter, and health care—none of which are mentioned in the federal Constitution.

More broadly, the federal government was designed to have limited, enumerated powers, as reflected in the Tenth Amendment: “The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.” Regardless of the incentives contained in federal laws like the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, the Supreme Court has repeatedly held that the federal government may encourage but may not simply “commandeer” state governments to implement or enforce federal policies.

These constitutional principles are especially important in the context of education. Historically, responsibility for designing and reforming systems of public education has rested with the states. Unlike the federal Constitution, all 50 state constitutions have provisions that explicitly address education. Many of these provisions speak merely in broad terms, but they still serve as points of reference for state and local governments charged with establishing and maintaining public schools. Legal challenges to a state’s legislative and executive policies on public education necessarily implicate separation-of-powers concerns about the courts’ abilities to answer political questions and resolve policy debates. But at least state courts have an education clause to begin their analysis of any right to education.

By contrast, given the lack of an education clause in the U.S. Constitution, federal courts attempting to define an implicit right to education would need to start from scratch. Without the benefit of any constitutional text or interpretive history to lend meaning to the term “education,” federal courts would be fabricating a new substantive right out of whole cloth.

Misguided Efforts

Yet advocates of a federal right to education continue their efforts to overturn or reinterpret Rodriguez. Within the past year, plaintiffs in Connecticut and Michigan have filed new lawsuits imploring federal courts to recognize a federal constitutional right to education. The Connecticut plaintiffs, in Martinez v. Malloy, hope to expand school-choice options and invoke a “fundamental right to a minimally adequate education.” The Michigan plaintiffs, in Gary B. v. Snyder, challenge alleged deficiencies in the Detroit public schools and contend that “literacy is a fundamental right.”

These attempts to revisit Rodriguez are misguided. For one thing, the Michigan plaintiffs rely on arguments that the Supreme Court has already rejected. Regardless of their contention that literacy is “uniquely significant to American civil life” because of its role in a “well-functioning democracy,” the Rodriguez court held that “the key to discovering whether education is ‘fundamental’ is not to be found in comparisons of the relative societal significance of education”; the question is “whether there is a right to education explicitly or implicitly guaranteed by the Constitution.”

Creating a federal right to education would also force federal courts to take on issues they are not well-equipped to address. School funding cases are complicated enough for state courts, even with state constitutional education clauses to interpret. Indeed, because of differing language in the various state constitutions, state courts have reached a variety of conclusions about their ability to adjudicate claims involving the “equity” or “adequacy” of public school systems. If federal courts undertook a similar journey unmoored from any constitutional text, “it would be difficult,” as the Supreme Court cautioned in Rodriguez, “to imagine a case having a greater potential impact on our federal system.”

The Rodriguez court further recognized that efforts to make education a federal right overlook “persistent and difficult questions of educational policy, another area in which [the federal courts’] lack of
specialized knowledge and experience counsels against premature interference with the informed judgments made at the state and local levels.” And despite 40 years of intervening social-science research, the academic and policy debates described in Rodriguez continue today. Compare the Rodriguez court’s references to a questionable “correlation between educational expenditures and the quality of education” with the following discussion by the Supreme Court of Texas in a 2016 adequacy decision:

Some amici curiae have filed Brandeis briefs citing recent studies going both ways on the issue of whether more spending means a better education. . . . Courts should not sit as a super-legislature. Nor should they assume the role of super-laboratory. They are not equipped to resolve intractable disagreements on fundamental questions in the social sciences. Arthur Miller may have referred to a trial as the crucible, but we doubt he saw it as the best place for reducing scientific truth when the scientific community itself has reached an impasse.

The Rodriguez court anticipated this problem when it held that federal judges should “refrain from imposing on the States inflexible constitutional restraints that could circumscribe or handicap the continued research and experimentation so vital to finding even partial solutions to educational problems and to keeping abreast of ever-changing conditions.” Rodriguez thus belongs to a long line of federal cases emphasizing the value of state and local control over public education. Even in the desegregation context—where state actions are subject to strict scrutiny under the Fourteenth Amendment—the Supreme Court held in Freeman v. Pitts that “returning schools to the control of local authorities at the earliest practicable date is essential to restore their true accountability in our governmental system.”

Hence, the lack of supporting constitutional text, principles of federalism, and the doctrine of stare decisis (which lends stability to the law by encouraging courts to stand by their prior decisions) all militate against the creation of a federal constitutional right to education or to supposedly equal school funding. Plaintiffs who are unable to achieve their policy goals through state and local political processes should not be allowed to impose their preferences by federal judicial fiat.

Unanswered Questions

But even if Rodriguez had been wrongly decided, defining a federal right to education in a way that guarantees “equal educational opportunity” would be no easy task and would raise more questions than it answered.

For example, should equality be gauged by the financial resources made available to public schools? How far would states have to go to equalize these educational inputs? Would providing greater base funding suffice, or would states have to go further to prohibit additional “unequal” spending by local school districts? Would the federal government have its own affirmative duty to provide additional federal funds—which currently make up less than 10 percent of all nationwide funding for K–12 education? And would Congress need to equalize spending across states?

Arguments to equalize funding ignore the reality that in many places, schools with concentrations of poor or academically struggling students already receive at least as much funding per pupil as other schools. Even the Education Law Center, an advocacy organization that supports plaintiffs seeking “fair” (that is, more) public-education funding, recently reported that two-thirds of the states provide equal or “progressive” funding for high-poverty school districts. Particularly in large urban districts, funding levels for disadvantaged or struggling students are often more than equal. Should those targeted funding differences be held unconstitutional? Or would “equal educational opportunity” require even more unequal spending, as Professors Ogletree and Robinson argue in their companion essay?

If equalized funding is not the answer, should states instead be forced to equalize student outcomes? Setting aside practical and policy questions about how to accomplish that goal, serious questions about the proper “aims of education” cited by Ogletree and Robinson remain unsettled. Which outcomes should be measured, and how “equal” must they be? Should courts consider test scores, classroom grades, or graduation rates? If the stubborn achievement gaps that exist in every state could prove a violation of federal equal-protection rights, would federal courts have to monitor every state’s education policies and spending decisions?

Asking federal courts to wade into these thickets is a mistake. State officials and courts have already grappled with many of these issues, and creating a federal right to education would destabilize policies and decisions that have shaped local school systems for generations. On this point, the Rodriguez court observed that the school-funding systems in Texas and “virtually every other state [would] not pass muster” under strict federal judicial scrutiny. “Nor indeed,” the court explained, “in view of the infinite variables affecting the educational process, can any system assure equal quality of education except in the most relative sense.”

Proponents of a federal right to education presume that federal judges would succeed where local policymakers have supposedly failed. But the federal judiciary lacks the capacity and expertise to solve entrenched problems like the achievement gap from the bench. Federal judges are not school superintendents, education experts, or central planners. What evidence shows that federal courts would produce better results than the state and local governments that have been designing and experimenting with education policy for years? And what benchmarks would allow the federal courts to decide when they had achieved the amorphous goal of “equal educational opportunity”? Numerous racial-desegregation cases, in which the goal of integration to remedy intentional discrimination is relatively clear, have lasted for decades. Adding constitutional equity and adequacy claims to the federal dockets, in the service of an implicit right to education, could lead to an era of federal judicial supervision with no end in sight.

It may well be the case that additional funds devoted to particular policies could improve certain facets of American public education. But the Rodriguez court correctly held that because “the Constitution does not provide judicial remedies for every social and economic ill,” broad educational goals are “not values to be implemented by judicial intrusion into otherwise legitimate state activities.” Given the substantial risks (and uncertain rewards) of federal judicial intervention, any acknowledgment of constitutional rights to education should be left to the states.

This is part of a forum on the San Antonio Independent School District v. Rodriguez. For an alternate view, see “Inequitable Schools Demand a Federal Remedy,” by Charles J. Ogletree Jr. and  Kimberly Jenkins Robinson.

In recent years, some states have shown an increased interest in reforming tenure practices to make it easier to fire bad teachers in public schools. North Carolina and Colorado illustrate two different approaches to such reform. In both states, unions have sued, claiming that tenure, once granted, is constitutionally protected. The outcomes of these cases are likely to shape reform efforts across the country.

In 2013, North Carolina decided to completely revoke teacher tenure. The state’s new standards stipulated that, instead of tenure, probationary teachers would be eligible for multi-year contracts. For those who already had tenure, such protection would be eliminated in July 2018 and replaced with the same system of multi-year contracts. In response, the North Carolina Association of Educators (NCAE) sued in NCAE v. State, claiming that the new law violated both the North Carolina Constitution’s prohibition on taking property without just compensation and the U.S. Constitution’s prohibition on state laws “impairing the Obligation of Contracts.” In 2014, a trial court agreed that the law violated the property and contractual rights of already tenured teachers but not the rights of those yet to receive tenure. An appellate court upheld the decision, setting up a 2016 showdown before the state supreme court.

The court unanimously sided with the tenured teachers. However, it grounded its decision solely on the U.S. Constitution’s contract clause and did not address the unions’ property-rights claims. The court held that teachers’ right to tenure “vested” once they signed a contract with their local school district at the end of their probationary period. Once that occurred, teachers had “reliance interests” that implicated the contract clause. Dismissing ineffective tenured teachers, the court held, was a legitimate state interest that could overcome tenured teachers’ contractual rights; however, the state had not proven that the existing employment policies were inadequate for carrying out such dismissals. Content with eliminating tenure for future teachers, North Carolina declined to appeal in federal court.

The Colorado Supreme Court will hear a similar case involving a small subset of teachers. In 2010, the state legislature passed the Great Teachers and Leaders Act, which, unlike North Carolina’s measure, had bipartisan support. Its lead author was Democratic state senator Michael Johnston, and it was signed by Governor Bill Ritter, also a Democrat. One part of the law was designed to eliminate the so-called Dance of the Lemons. Previously, tenured teachers who lost their positions because of school changes, such as declining enrollment or program elimination, were guaranteed another position at another school in their district. This “forced placement” of teachers led to bad teachers being passed from school to school, and the ones on the receiving end—most often, schools serving underprivileged students—had no choice but to accept these “lemons.” The new law replaced this practice with a “mutual consent” system under which a receiving school’s administration and teacher representatives had to approve any new placements. Displaced teachers who could not find a school willing to accept them were put on paid leave for 12 months, after which time they were placed on unpaid leave.

With the support of the Colorado Education Association, the Denver Classroom Teachers Association, along with five teachers, sued the Denver Public Schools, claiming that the mutual-consent provision violated the teachers’ contract clause and property rights under the Colorado Constitution. In 2014, a trial court rejected the union arguments, since displacement is not the same thing as dismissal. But in 2015 that ruling was overturned by an appellate court. The state supreme court agreed to review the ruling and will decide the case in 2017.

Colorado’s law appears to have a better chance of surviving than North Carolina’s. Instead of eliminating tenure for all teachers, regardless of performance, Colorado’s focused on the teachers’ fitness. To nullify the law, the court would have to say that the few teachers unable to find a placement should be entitled to a job even if they are not qualified for any existing positions. Colorado’s law provides for a just-cause displacement of poorly performing teachers rather than a blanket removal of tenure.

For other states, the implications are clear. Wholesale elimination of tenure for those who already have it will face difficult legal challenges, while narrower reforms are more likely to survive. But for long-term insurance against litigation, states should eliminate tenure only for future teachers. Those who have never received a benefit cannot claim that they are legally entitled to it.

Joshua Dunn is professor of political science at the University of Colorado–Colorado Springs.

The new federal education law, the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA), envisions a powerful role for states in managing the evidence base behind school improvement efforts. Not only must they certify that interventions meet the “evidence-based” requirements spelled out in the law, they also must monitor and evaluate federally funded school-improvement efforts going forward. There’s only one problem: states have never played such a role before.

In order to fulfill this obligation, states will need a scalable model of impact evaluation which could operate at the local level, where decisions are being made. States should adopt a simple goal: any major initiative involving more than 100 classrooms should be subject to a local pilot test before being rolled out. In other words, districts should be running their own small-scale impact studies, implementing interventions in a subset of their classrooms, establishing comparison groups, tracking and comparing results, and acting on the evidence. That’s been the path to improvement in a variety of fields, from pharmaceuticals to retail sales. Given our incomplete understanding of the way students learn and teachers change their teaching, it is the only path to sustained improvement in U.S. education.

After a decade of investing in state and local data systems, many of the components of such a system—like longitudinal data on individual students and indicators matching students to teachers—have already been built. But some key pieces are still missing. We need a way to pool data among school districts, most of which are too small to assemble sufficient comparison groups on their own. We need a quicker and less expensive route to launch impact evaluation studies rather than the current costly and time-consuming practice of designing each new study from scratch. And local education agencies need an ongoing analytic partner that can standardize key parts of research analysis, such as how comparison groups are identified. Finally, local leaders need new venues for synthesizing results, comparing notes, and choosing which interventions to test next.

The Every Student Succeeds Act provides an opportunity to put these final pieces in place and spread such an approach nationally. In this essay, I describe how a state could use the authority and resources provided by ESSA to launch a system of “efficacy networks,” or collections of local agencies committed to measuring the impact of the interventions they’re using. An overlapping system of efficacy networks working with local agencies would create a mechanism for continuous testing and improvement in U.S. education. More than any single policy initiative or program, such a system would be a worthwhile legacy for any state leader.

An organizational mismatch

The United States spends about $620 billion per year on K–12 education nationwide. Only about $770 million of that goes to education research, through the federal Institute of Education Sciences (IES) and the National Science Foundation (NSF)(see Figure 1). There is no estimate of state and local spending on education research because it is nearly nonexistent. Across the economy, our nation spends 2.8 percent of gross domestic product on research and development overall. If we invested a similar percentage of the K–12 education budget on research and development, we would be spending $17 billion per year rather than $770 million. We are clearly under-invested.

Still, education research has yielded some important successes in recent years. Perhaps the most valuable byproduct of the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) has been the resurgence of research on the effects of teachers on student achievement, which has informed the redesign of teacher evaluation systems. Moreover, although many have lamented the shortage of interventions with positive results in the What Works Clearinghouse, even null results represent progress. For example, the failure to find positive student-achievement impacts in a series of IES-funded studies of professional development programs has produced a broader appreciation of the difficulty of adult behavior change and more healthy skepticism about the traditional approach to teacher training. A search for more effective models is underway, involving more intensive coaching and feedback, buttressed by strong curricular materials. More recently (some five decades after the Coleman Report told us that schools would be unable to close the black-white achievement gap alone), research has identified charter school models sufficiently powerful to close the gap.

Despite that progress, we have a long way to go to build an evidence-based culture in the state and local agencies, where most decisions are made. In a 2016 survey on research use by state and district decisionmakers by the National Center for Research in Policy and Practice, more than half reported that they “never” or “rarely” used the federally funded What Works Clearinghouse, the National Center for Education Statistics, and the Regional Educational Laboratories (RELs). Only 1 to 4 percent reported that they used these sources “all the time.” Even the most popular source of research, professional associations, was described as being used “all the time” by just 14 percent of respondents. In my work, I have studied school-board minutes in 17 of the 20 largest U.S. school districts between 2010 and 2016, and found that the term “What Works Clearinghouse” appeared only once. The term “Institute of Education Sciences” appeared 15 times in total, but did not appear at all in 11 of the 17 districts.

It would be natural to continue tweaking the parameters of the existing research model: the IES budget, the process for soliciting and evaluating proposals, the process for reviewing and releasing results. However, the sizable gap between evidence and local decisionmaking calls for a more profound shift in strategy. Rather than finding ways to generate more research of the same type, we need to ensure that our evidence making is better integrated with the way decisions are reached. And that requires a different model.

Previously, I have argued that the centralized approach to efficacy measurement used by the IES is insufficient, given the dispersed nature of decisionmaking in U.S. education (see “Connecting to Practice,” features, Spring 2016). In other fields, such as pharmaceuticals, where supply decisions are federally regulated, such a centralized system of evidence gathering makes sense. However, federal regulators do not choose educational products and strategies—and they never will. Local leaders do. While a federal regulator will care about the average impact of an intervention across a range of sites and subgroups, a local bureaucrat needs evidence to help persuade local interests to invest in a given intervention.

Moreover, when making decisions about the federal programs it controls, the federal government can invest in the knowledge and expertise of a small group of experts to keep itself informed. But a small group of experts cannot possibly advise the thousands of local actors working in school districts, nor give them the evidence they will need to persuade their colleagues.

Following the tradition of James Q. Wilson, we need to understand the system of rewards and constraints within which local decisionmakers work. Especially in an age of outcomes-based accountability, district leaders cannot ignore student achievement. Even where there is limited school choice, school boards and superintendents feel the pressure when outcomes lag. Nevertheless, such pressure is counterbalanced by other, more parochial concerns, such as the preferences of the local school board, superintendent, principals, department chairs, and parents. No chief academic officer ever got fired for choosing an intervention deemed ineffective by the What Works Clearinghouse, but plenty have lost their jobs after a dispute with a school board member or after a committee of department chairs complained.

In addition, while regulators care about average effect sizes, practitioners want to know whether a given intervention will work in their own classrooms. Although researchers have historically interpreted such a posture as being parochial and unscientific, it has some justification. We are learning that the answer to a seemingly simple question, “Does a program work or not?” often varies. As discussed by researchers Michael Weiss, Howard Bloom, and Thomas Brock, the impact of a given program could vary for four reasons: variation in the quality or dosage of the intervention being evaluated (for example, due to the skills of the local teachers); variation in the quality or dosage of the services available to the control group; variation in the impact of the treatment for different subgroups of teachers or students; and variations in the context of the intervention.

It turns out that local leaders are correct to wonder whether the national studies apply to them. In a review led by Weiss of 11 multi-site studies involving elementary or secondary students and two postsecondary studies in which treatments were randomly assigned, 9 out of 13 studies had statistically significant differences in impact by site for at least one of the outcomes measured.

If we want local leaders to make decisions on the basis of evidence—and be rewarded for it—we need to provide them with evidence denominated in their local currency—their own students’ achievement.

Under ESSA, let a thousand pilots fly

If such evidence would be so valuable, why don’t more leaders seek evidence now? There are two primary reasons: First, such pilots are currently not feasible for most districts. Few agencies have the technical staff to create treatment and comparison groups, pull together the data, and analyze the results. And, second, smaller districts—where most Americans attend school—do not have a sufficient sample size within their own data to detect the hoped-for effects. They need an intermediate organizational player to pool their data with other agencies to help them learn.

We should recognize the progress that’s been made. The data infrastructure for measuring student achievement over time and linking students to schools and teachers has improved dramatically over the past decade. Prior to 2002, few states had unique student identifiers to track students across time and across school districts, and annual testing in consecutive grades, which shows how student achievement changes over the course of a year, was not mandated. Moreover, before 2009, it was rare for school districts and states to link student data to specific classrooms and teachers. Since many interventions are targeted at or carried out by teachers, we need to know which teachers are working with which students, and we need to identify comparison groups of students to assess different types of interventions. Much of that information is now available.

The term “evidence-based” appears 63 times across the various titles and programs of ESSA. Although an analogous term, “scientifically based research,” appeared in the preceding NCLB, it was never effectively defined. In contrast, ESSA defines four levels of “evidence-based” practices: “strong,” with at least one well-designed and well-implemented experimental study with a statistically significant, positive effect; “moderate,” with at least one well-designed and well-implemented quasi-experimental study such as a matched-comparison group; “promising,” with at least one well-designed and well-implemented correlational study with statistical controls for selection bias.

Crucially, the law also establishes an “under evaluation” category, to describe interventions that do not yet meet the more stringent standards but have either some research-based rationale or are subject to ongoing evaluations. Evidence-based interventions in the “under evaluation” category may be implemented in all but the lowest-performing schools under Title I—either those in the bottom 5 percent of all schools, or those slated for “targeted assistance” after at least one subgroup of students falls short of state benchmarks. At those schools, interventions must meet the criteria in the other three categories, a requirement that will inevitably drive traffic toward the federal What Works Clearinghouse.

However, the evidence requirements will amount to nothing without state leadership. The law leaves it to the states to decide how much they want to build an evidence base and nudge districts toward choosing more effective strategies. No doubt, many states will turn the “evidence-based” requirement into an empty compliance exercise, describing evidence-based requirements so broadly that districts will find it easy to fit any intervention plan within them. But state leaders who want to do more could do so in two ways.

First, ESSA leaves it up to state agencies to determine which interventions meet the “strong,” “moderate,” or “promising” evidence standards, as well as what constitutes a “well-designed and well-implemented” study. By controlling evidence requirements, states have an opportunity to filter how federal funds can be used. To bolster the legitimacy of those decisions, they could impanel external experts to sift through the evidence and identify school turnaround models, professional development programs, and high school–dropout prevention strategies with the strongest evidence of impact.

Second, and more important over the long term, states could encourage or even require local agencies applying for competitive funds (such as school improvement funds, teacher and school leader incentive funds, and early-childhood literacy programs under Title II) to participate in an “efficacy network.” An efficacy network would be a collection of local agencies committed to measuring the impact of interventions they’re using. Independent organizations such as universities, research firms, or other nonprofits would apply to the state to organize and support a network, which could be organized by region, outcome, or type of intervention. In joining a network, an agency would agree to pool its data, collect common outcomes such as a common interim assessment or teacher surveys, and work with the network organizer to establish a comparison group for each major intervention it implements. Finally, it would agree to share its findings and compare notes with others in the network.

States could pay for efficacy networks with the 5 percent of school improvement funds expressly set aside for evaluation and dissemination, or other administrative set-asides. Moreover, they could provide regulatory guidance allowing districts to use a portion of their share of federal dollars to pay the cost of participation.

Even with an enhanced state and local role, there is also a role for federal research programs to play. IES could support states by offering guidance on how they might review and approve interventions meeting the top-three evidence categories. Through its state and local partnership grant program, IES also could support researchers working with a state to review current interventions or evaluate future ones. Most importantly, the federally managed Regional Educational Laboratories could support states to assess existing evidence and evaluate ongoing school improvement efforts.

Local but not anecdotal

The primary audience for the efficacy networks must be district or charter-network leadership, not schools or teachers. I say that not due to any preference for a hierarchical approach to school administration, but in recognition of the need for aggregation in identifying effective interventions. There is an inherent tradeoff in conducting research on a scale small enough to identify local impact and large enough to discern a true impact from statistical noise. In striking the necessary balance, there is no avoiding a level of aggregation above the school and classroom level, because the impact of most education interventions is small relative to the variation in student achievement at any point in time.

For instance, detecting a math achievement impact equivalent to being assigned an experienced teacher as opposed to a novice teacher—typically .08 standard deviations—requires compiling the results of roughly 200 classrooms: 100 in an intervention group and 100 in a comparison group. With such a snapshot, an evaluator would have an 80 percent chance of detecting such an effect, assuming that one could control for students’ baseline achievement. Because such sample sizes are critical, a key role of the networks would be to pool together the minimum number of classrooms to reliably discern reasonably sized impacts and to coordinate the choices of schools to form an intervention group, while remaining small enough to provide results that are authentically local.

I’ve seen the potential for districts to gather local evidence on the efficacy of their programs in this way through the Proving Ground project at the Center for Education Policy Research (CEPR) at Harvard University, where I am director. In 2015, CEPR began working with 13 school agencies to develop a model to easily conduct low-cost, local pilots. By pooling data across a network of agencies, we help smaller districts and charter organizations meet the 200-classroom target sample size, with 100 classrooms each in the treatment and control groups. That enables them to evaluate interventions aimed at increasing student achievement by 2 percentile points, or .08 standard deviations. We also provide a network for sharing lessons and facilitating discussions about what districts might try next, based on the evidence they have collected.

From an initial assessment of their data, district leaders develop hypotheses about interventions they wish to try. CEPR helps them decide how many classrooms to include in a pilot. If the district is willing to use random assignment, we provide them with the software tools to select treatment and control groups. If not, we use algorithms to identify comparison students, employing a standard approach to matching on prior test scores and achievement.

Despite its attractiveness, the idea that small groups of teachers working together will deliver improvements over time is an illusion. Of course, some will correctly identify effective interventions by chance. But many more will draw the wrong conclusion and implement strategies that do harm. Indeed, we have ample evidence of the limits of such school and classroom-level trial and error, given the historical record of American education. We need new organizational structures such as the efficacy networks to provide some level of aggregation, while preserving the local context.

Conclusion

In the next phase of U.S. education reform, we need to integrate evidence making with decisionmaking. Local bureaucracies administer our school systems, and local bureaucracies need locally generated evidence in order to make the case for change. Our current research infrastructure is not providing the type of evidence that persuades at the local level.

By necessity, the superintendency is, in part, a political job—and no politicians are eager to see an initiative in which they have invested their political capital fail. Participation in an efficacy network would reduce risk and increase the appetite for reform. If we make it possible for local leaders to pilot their initiatives on a limited scale first—say, by launching an intervention in 100 treatment classrooms and tracking results relative to a set of 100 comparison classrooms—we would provide both more upside potential and less downside risk. When an intervention is shown to be effective, local leaders would be in a better position to plausibly claim credit. And when an intervention fails, a leader may even be able to claim credit for stopping the process before rolling it out more broadly.

Education research can no longer be seen as solely a federal responsibility. Nevertheless, as noted above, there will still be an important role for the federal government to play. One will be to support states as they seek to implement ESSA. In addition, the type of careful, long-term intervention studies managed by IES could be used to validate the most promising forces bubbling up from the state and local learning networks.

The evidence requirements in ESSA provide state leaders with a powerful lever. To use it, they simply need to recognize that a system for testing ideas is more valuable than any single idea they might champion. There is no initiative that would have a similar effect 20 years from now, nor is there any worthwhile policy proposal—such as preschool education—that would not be enhanced if such a system were in place. The only thing required is longer-term vision, and faith in the desire of local actors to improve.

Thomas J. Kane is professor of education and economics at the Harvard Graduate School of Education and faculty director of the Center for Education Policy Research. Mallory Perry played the lead role in analyzing school committee records for discussions of research.

Imagine this: You pass your high-school classes, graduate, and enroll in college. When you get to campus, you’re told to take placement tests in English and math. The questions range from basic grammar to advanced algebra, drawing on lessons from years ago. You don’t pass, and are suddenly shunted into an expensive academic purgatory: remedial classes. The required courses take time and tuition dollars but don’t count toward graduation.

It’s a widespread problem. Across the United States, more than half of entering freshmen discover they are ineligible for college-level coursework each year, most commonly in math. The readiness gap is widest when considering students at nonselective two-year colleges, and students who are black, Hispanic, or from low-income families. And it often spells disaster for students looking to earn a degree: among community college students needing remediation, an estimated 30 percent don’t ever enroll in required remedial courses, most don’t pass the courses they do take, and just 1 in 10 graduates within three years.

How can colleges and policymakers better support students assigned to remediation and improve their rates of college completion? One way would be to boost pass rates in remedial math courses, which may be the single largest academic barrier to college success. Colleges across the country are also experimenting with interventions such as mainstreaming, whereby students assessed as needing remediation are placed directly into a college-level course, sometimes with additional academic support. Although prior studies of mainstreaming have produced mixed results, none have used experimental methods to gain a clear picture of its effectiveness.

Here we present new results from a randomized controlled trial of mainstreaming at three community colleges at the City University of New York (CUNY). Some entering students who ordinarily would have been assigned to a remedial elementary-algebra class were placed instead in a college-level statistics course and provided with extra academic support. We find that the students placed directly in college-level statistics did far better than their counterparts in remedial classes, even when students in remedial classes were also given extra support. They were more likely to pass their initial math course and, three semesters after the experiment, had completed more college credits overall. In short, our study suggests that many students consigned to remediation can pass credit-bearing quantitative courses right away.

The CUNY Experiment

CUNY’s challenges with remedial education mirror national patterns: 76 percent of new community-college freshmen were assessed as needing remediation in the fall of 2014, based largely on college-administered placement tests. Many students assigned to remedial courses delay or simply never complete them, and the pass rate among those who do complete is only 38 percent in the highest-level remedial mathematics course. Among such students entering CUNY in 2011, just 7 percent graduated within three years, compared to 28 percent of other students.

In the fall of 2013, we conducted a randomized controlled trial at three CUNY community colleges aimed at assessing the effects of the mainstreaming approach to remediation, in which students are placed directly into college-level courses. Incoming students assessed as needing remediation were randomly assigned to one of three course types: traditional remedial elementary algebra; the same algebra course with an additional two-hour weekly workshop; or a college-level statistics class with an additional two-hour weekly workshop. Only students enrolled in the college-level statistics class would earn college credit if they passed.

We limited our sample to freshmen intending to major in disciplines not requiring college-level algebra, and to students who were assessed as needing mathematics remediation (based primarily on their performance on the college-placement COMPASS exam). Across the three colleges, 2,860 eligible students were identified and invited to sign up at new-student orientation sessions, and 907 agreed to participate. Research personnel randomly assigned these students to one of the three course types and informed students of their assignments. Two weeks after the start of the semester, at the end of the colleges’ course drop period, 717 of these consenting students were enrolled in their assigned sections.

Attrition rates before the end of the drop period differed somewhat across groups: 18 percent in remedial elementary algebra without workshops, 28 percent in algebra with workshops, and 17 percent in statistics. There were no statistically significant differences among the three groups in attrition once the census date had passed. For simplicity, we report results based on the 717 students who enrolled in their assigned sections. However, we obtain the same pattern of findings when we conduct “intent to treat” analyses that examine data on all 907 students, regardless of whether they attended the course to which they were assigned.

The participants in our experiment are broadly representative of all students assessed as needing remedial elementary algebra. We compared our participants with students who did not consent to participate in the experiment but who had been assessed as needing remediation and who enrolled in other sections of remedial elementary algebra during the same semester as the experiment. We found no significant differences, though participants had a larger share of minority students than nonparticipants, with both groups being majority-minority. Of course we cannot rule out the possibility that the two groups differed on other, unmeasured variables, given that participating students consented to be in our experiment, which involved attending a class taught during the day, and the other group of students did not opt to take part.

We also ensured that instructor quality did not vary across treatment groups. Each of the study’s 12 full-time instructors (four at each campus) taught one section of each of the three course types, following a common syllabus for the course (common across each college for statistics, and across CUNY for remedial elementary algebra). Faculty were not given the experiment’s research hypothesis and were never told that the researchers hoped that students in statistics would have at least the same pass rate as those in remedial elementary algebra. They were instructed to teach and grade the research sections as they ordinarily would.

Students in each of the courses were asked to complete a mathematics attitude survey at the semester’s start and end, and a student satisfaction survey at the semester’s end. The mathematics attitude survey consisted of 17 questions covering four domains: perceived mathematical ability and confidence; interest in and enjoyment of mathematics; the belief that mathematics contributes to personal growth; and the belief that mathematics contributes to career success and utility. The student satisfaction survey asked about a student’s activities during the semester, such as whether he or she had participated in a student-initiated study group or gone for tutoring (which was available to all students independent of the experiment), and about the student’s satisfaction with those activities.

We reviewed data on student performance in the algebra and statistics courses. At the end of the semester, students enrolled in remedial elementary algebra, with or without weekly workshops, took the required CUNY-wide elementary algebra final examination and received a final grade based on a CUNY-wide rubric. Students enrolled in the statistics class with workshops were graded by their instructors using the common syllabus for their college. All outcomes other than a passing grade, including any type of withdrawal or a grade of incomplete, were categorized as not passing.

We also gathered data on students’ future course taking and completion. All participants who passed their math classes were exempt from any further remedial mathematics courses and were eligible to enroll in introductory college-level (i.e., credit-bearing) quantitative courses. Statistics students who passed earned college credit, satisfied the quantitative requirement of the CUNY general-education curriculum, and were qualified to enroll in courses for which introductory statistics was the prerequisite. Any participant who did not pass his or her class had to re-enroll in traditional remedial elementary algebra and pass it before taking any college-level quantitative courses.

Higher Pass Rates

Students who were placed directly in college-level statistics did far better than their counterparts in remedial classes, regardless of their score on the placement test. In fact, the statistics class with weekly workshops was the only course in which a majority of students passed (Figure 1). Fifty-six percent of students in statistics with weekly workshops passed, compared to 45 percent of students in the remedial elementary algebra course with weekly workshops and 39 percent of remedial elementary algebra students who did not have extra workshops. The 17-percentage-point difference between algebra without workshops and statistics was statistically significant, as was the 11-percentage-point difference between algebra with workshops and statistics with workshops.

The positive effect of taking statistics (relative to remedial elementary algebra without workshops) was similar across students with a wide range of placement test scores (Figure 2). Most notably, students with the lowest scores on the placement test benefited just as much from taking statistics as students with higher scores. We also found a similar pattern of results after controlling for a variety of student characteristics, including gender, high school GPA, and number of days to consent to participate in the study.

We also compared the overall pass rates for each of the three groups of participants to the historical pass rates for the courses in fall 2012. Pass rates for remedial elementary algebra without workshops were similar during the study period and during the year before: 39 percent of study participants passed, compared to 37 percent of students in fall 2012.

Students assessed as needing remediation who were placed directly into the college-level statistics class passed at a lower rate than nonremedial students the year before: 56 percent of study participants passed, compared to 69 percent of nonremedial students in fall 2012. This is not surprising given their difference in preparation. Participants who had earned relatively high—though still not passing—scores on the placement test passed at a mean rate of 68 percent, similar to students who were not assessed as needing remediation and who took the statistics class the year before. This suggests that colleges can place students into credit-bearing statistics classes even if their placement-test performance is just below the cut score without any diminution in the typical statistics pass rate—at least if those students can draw on the kind of support the weekly workshops provided to students in our experiment.

Lasting Effects

The statistics students’ enhanced academic success lasted well beyond the end of the experiment. One year later, statistics students were slightly more likely to persist in college: 66 percent were still enrolled in fall 2014 versus 62 percent of students in remedial elementary algebra without workshops, though this difference was not statistically significant.

Not surprisingly, students placed directly into statistics were also significantly more likely to have passed a college-level quantitative course. After four semesters in college, 60 percent had, compared to 37 percent of students placed in the remedial elementary algebra class and 33 percent of students who took remedial elementary algebra with workshops (Figure 3). More than one-third of students placed in remedial elementary algebra—with or without workshops—still had not passed that class by the end of their second year of college.

In addition, statistics students were no less likely to have passed classes in other general-education course categories, such as STEM, English, and other disciplines, compared to students in the remedial algebra groups. This suggests that the completion of remedial algebra is not necessary to ensure successful completion of other college courses.

Statistics students also completed more credits during their first two years of college. By the end of the spring 2015 semester, three semesters after the experiment’s end, they had accumulated four to five more college credits than students in the remedial elementary algebra course without workshops. This gap has grown larger after each semester, indicating that it was not just the one statistics course that put students ahead of their peers.

Statistics students expressed more positive attitudes about math, as well. Our survey data should be interpreted with caution given response rates of around 50 percent, but the data suggest that statistics students showed significant increases on the Interest, Growth, and Utility domains. By contrast, students in both remedial algebra courses showed increases only in the Interest domain.

The surveys also revealed that students in different classes behaved somewhat differently. Students reported higher levels of engagement with the college-level statistics class, establishing more self-initiated study groups than students in the remedial algebra classes. In addition, statistics students were significantly more likely to attend their workshops than remedial algebra students: 72 percent versus 65 percent.

These differences in behavior may be course effects, indicating the positive motivational effects of being assigned to a college-level course. It is also possible that, due to the random assignment methods, statistics students may have felt that they won a lottery and therefore were more motivated to succeed. However, any such effect, if it existed, would have had to have continued into the year after the experiment was over, when the credit gap between the statistics and remedial algebra students widened.

Could there be other explanations for the differences observed among our three groups? The 12 classes in our study were taught by four different instructors at three different colleges. Could their actions have influenced these different outcomes?

Remedial elementary algebra and introductory statistics are qualitatively different classes, so it is not possible to compare their grading or difficulty directly. However, several pieces of evidence suggest that students’ varying results were due to group assignment, not their instructor. We found no significant relationships between the percentage of students passing each section and instructors’ tenure status, total years of experience, or experience teaching statistics. In addition, all remedial elementary algebra classes in the experiment covered standard topics and used a common final exam and final grade rubric. The introductory statistics courses at each of the three colleges followed a college-wide common syllabus.

Implications

Remedial education is estimated to cost states and students at least $1.3 billion annually. The requirements most affect student groups least likely to graduate from college overall: students of color, students from low-income families, and students at less-selective academic institutions. Although remedial classes are intended to help students prepare for college-level coursework, they often have precisely the opposite effect—trapping students in developmental coursework sequences that do not earn college credit.

Colleges and policymakers should consider whether students need to pass remedial classes in order to progress to credit-bearing courses. While there are several possible strategies to help students who cannot demonstrate college readiness at the outset of their studies, mainstreaming is an efficient approach with the potential to transform the college experience.

Our study indicates that remedial courses may not be needed in many cases. Regardless of their race or ethnicity, students with a wide range of incoming placement test scores did better in statistics with weekly workshops than their counterparts in noncredit remedial elementary algebra, with or without weekly workshops. In addition, those early benefits persisted: students in our study continued to advance more quickly in college than other students, even though they did not enjoy the supposed benefits of having passed the remedial class. Views can differ as to which quantitative subjects a college graduate should know, but passing remedial elementary algebra does not seem necessary in order to pass introductory statistics.

Requiring all students to pass remedial classes before they can earn the credits needed for their degrees imposes extra costs on students, colleges, and taxpayers—funds that could be spent on other college courses and programs. That cost, as well as our overall educational goals, should be taken into account when setting higher-education policies. College communities, and our society, must decide whether the investment is worth the results.

A shift in college requirements away from remediation could positively affect the academic progress of hundreds of thousands of college students each year. Although nationwide figures are hard to come by, in part because states count college enrollment, persistence, and remediation rates differently, a single example can make the potential clear.

Let’s focus just on math, just at CUNY community colleges, for just one semester. In fall 2012, 7,675 new students were initially assessed as needing remedial elementary algebra. For those students to complete statistics within two semesters, they would have to pass remedial algebra in the fall, return to college in the spring, and then pass statistics.

The chances of that happening? At best, one in four. The remedial algebra pass rate is 37 percent. The retention rate from fall to spring is 84 percent. The pass rate in statistics for students who have taken remedial algebra is 68 percent. Even if we were to assume that all fall students who pass elementary algebra are retained for the spring, and that all such students take statistics that spring, the probability of completing statistics within two semesters is still only 25 percent. Compare that to students in our study who took statistics right away, 56 percent of whom passed. In our example, fast-tracking students assessed as needing remediation into statistics would result in at least 2,379 additional students passing statistics by the end of their second semester—out of one semester’s incoming class at one university.

The benefits of a college degree are considerable and wide-ranging, and go beyond enhanced lifetime earnings. Graduates may also enjoy lower rates of poverty, better health outcomes, be less likely to engage with the criminal justice system, and report higher levels of personal happiness. If closing persistent gaps in degree attainment is a critical value, policies allowing new students to directly enroll in credit-bearing quantitative college classes deserve serious consideration.

Alexandra W. Logue is former university provost and executive vice chancellor of the City University of New York (CUNY) system, and a current research professor at CUNY’s Center for Advanced Study in Education (CASE). Mari Watanabe-Rose is director of undergraduate education initiatives and research at CUNY. Daniel Douglas is a senior researcher at Rutgers University’s School of Management and Labor Relations.

More detailed information about the authors’ research can be found in the September 2016 issue of Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis.

Paying the Price: College Costs, Financial Aid, and the Betrayal of the American Dream
by Sara Goldrick-Rab
University of Chicago Press, 2016,
$27.50; 368 pages.

Game of Loans: The Rhetoric and Reality of Student Debt
by Beth Akers and
Matthew M. Chingos
Princeton University Press, 2016,
$26.95; 192 pages.

As reviewed by Jason Delisle

Two new books offer opposing views on college affordability and the student debt crisis. In Paying the Price, Temple University sociologist Sara Goldrick-Rab concludes that “the lesson from today’s student debt crisis … is that college is unaffordable.” Beth Akers and Matthew Chingos disagree, contending that there is no student loan crisis. The two D.C. researchers pore over the data and find, in Game of Loans, that college prices and student debt loads are more affordable than the dominant political narrative would have us believe.

Some readers might be tempted to read only one of these books—whichever one aligns with their prior beliefs. But those who read both volumes will be rewarded. Game of Loans and Paying the Price take different approaches to their subjects. In the former, the authors use high-level statistics and careful logic to defuse the rhetoric surrounding student debt; in the latter, the author argues that the rhetoric is justified as she documents students’ personal struggles to pay for college. Despite the contrasting styles and perspectives, there’s some common ground between the two that could inform future financial-aid reform.

* * *

Years ago, Goldrick-Rab seized on a unique research opportunity when a philanthropic foundation offered to supplement the financial aid of thousands of lower-income college students in Wisconsin. She conducted extensive interviews with these students to learn about their experiences paying for and attending college. Goldrick-Rab uses their stories to argue that financial aid falls far short of what students need and recommends that lawmakers spend at least $70 to $100 billion more per year to fully cover tuition at public colleges. In her view, that is probably just a start, because the inadequate funding of other social programs—Medicaid, childcare support, food stamps, housing assistance—compounds the college affordability problem for low-income families.

“Inadequate funding” telegraphs Goldrick-Rab’s main message. But in highlighting the inflexibility and unpredictability of student aid programs, she hints at a solution less ambitious and less controversial than $100 billion in additional spending. The lack of sufficient financial aid may be one reason students drop out, but how the available aid is rationed—a little at a time, based on complicated rules, and fluctuating from one semester to the next—is also to blame. Goldrick-Rab does not explicitly say it, but her book shows that if grant and loan programs were more flexible and the rules simpler, more students might complete their degrees and see a greater return on their investments.

Consider Chloe, an under-prepared student in Paying the Price who wants to lighten her course load to focus on improving her grades so she doesn’t become ineligible for student aid. Chloe learns, however, that taking fewer courses reduces the grants that help cover her living expenses, meaning she’d have to work longer hours to make up for the lost funds and never gain additional study time. Worse still, the additional classes available that semester don’t count toward her degree requirements. Imagine if Chloe instead had a student-aid account with a set balance that she could draw upon as needed. Such a system would add simplicity, predictability, and flexibility in one fell swoop. Chloe’s odds of success would certainly improve. And she wouldn’t have to take superfluous courses just to qualify for the aid she needs.

Reading Game of Loans might prompt readers to consider another solution for the students in Paying the Price. Like Chloe, many students have no choice but to work long hours to pay for school, which prevents them from fully engaging in their studies and probably contributes to the high dropout rate among low-income students. What if these students were allowed and even encouraged to borrow more upfront, so that they could make fewer sacrifices, such as working those long hours, attending school part-time, or scrimping on basic necessities? Would more low-income students complete their degrees? Akers and Chingos illustrate that borrowing more money is far from a catastrophe; in fact, it’s correlated with higher incomes after graduation. The authors acknowledge that students are borrowing more than ever before—average education debt grew by $23,000 between 1992 and 2013, adjusted for inflation—but they argue that a college education is a wise investment. Such an increase in debt, they note, “can be paid off with just a few years of the additional wage income ($7,000) that the average household is collecting each year” relative to 1992. Furthermore, the monthly student-loan burden relative to income has not increased for the typical borrower over the past 20 years.

In contrast, Goldrick-Rab engages in dubious financial reasoning when gauging the affordability of college loans. Using the example of a $16,500 loan for a student whose parents earn less than $30,000, she concludes, “if the family stopped all other spending … it would still take all their income for more than six months to repay the loan.”

By that logic, nearly every home mortgage is unaffordable. Akers and Chingos cut through this faulty reasoning with simple explanations of how student loans can be affordable—and worth it—even if it doesn’t look that way based on half a year’s income.

Akers and Chingos recognize that not all spending on college pays off, and they hold students responsible for making bad investments. But they add that the federal government enables such bad investments by making “no-questions-asked” loans. Meanwhile, the government provides too little information about the likely payoff from attending a particular school—information it collects through agencies such as the Social Security Administration.

The two authors recommend an automatic repayment program for federal loans under which payments would be based on a percentage of the individual’s monthly income. The program would be universal, and payments would be collected through the federal income-tax system. With payments pegged to income from day one, “borrowers would be unable to default on their loans,” they write. Limits on the amount students could borrow and a sufficiently long repayment horizon would prevent gaming of the system and overly generous benefits.

This idea has been around for decades and is plagued with design problems that Akers and Chingos ignore. The income tax system works off household income, and disentangling one member’s income from another’s loan payments is messy. And our tax system matches payments to earners annually, making it a poor fit for tracking interest that accrues daily and loan payments that are owed monthly. A withholding system would also require the government to notify every employer of each employee who has a student loan; otherwise, borrowers would have to elect to have loan payments withheld from their paychecks, undermining the “automatic” promise and reopening the door to default.

Further, such a repayment system might not be well suited for those whose college education doesn’t pay off. According to economic dictum, bad debt should be written off quickly lest it drag down growth. Yet Akers and Chingos do not support loan forgiveness, so they would have borrowers with bad investments repay loans for what might be decades. Why not propose a way to clear bad debts faster?

Both Game of Loans and Paying the Price will fuel the debate about college affordability and student debt. But they offer more than that. Paying the Price is a crash course on how the amalgam of financial aid programs and rules fit together (or don’t), told through the experiences of real people. Game of Loans includes a clear and concise analysis of college prices and student borrowing patterns over time, filling in holes in a debate often bereft of relevant and reliable data.

Jason Delisle is a resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI).

I was a sophomore in high school when my dad told me about an up-and-coming public charter school called Design Tech High in Burlingame, California, about 30 miles north of my hometown in Silicon Valley.

From the age of five I had attended my small-town public schools. I was comfortable there, but the only approach to learning I’d ever known was pretty dull: read the textbook, do the homework, take the test. No questions asked. For me, it was a monotonous routine with little personal meaning.

I wanted to know more about this school centered around “design thinking,” so I went to shadow a student for a day. The school was located in a warehouse filled with student work—woodworking projects, paintings, and expressive collages. The use of design thinking was evident in every corner: ideas jotted on sticky notes and posted everywhere, and whiteboards covered with words and sketches. I was excited about the prospect of taking their one-of-a kind Design Lab class—where I would learn and apply the design thinking process—along with more standard courses like language arts and U.S. history.

I wanted to do work I was passionate about, so I decided to venture into the unknown and unorthodox style of learning at Design Tech: I became a “d.tech dragon.” The concept of design thinking felt foreign to me at first. I was now being asked to think practically, looking at the world through the eyes of an innovator. That meant making use of both creativity and analysis, and following sequential steps: empathizing, defining, ideating, prototyping, and testing.

I got to try out the new thinking skills I was developing in my first intersession, a two-week period in which students put aside their usual academics and take classes focusing on extracurricular activities, design thinking, and real-world skill building. I took “Data Visualization,” a class hosted by the Oracle Education Foundation. Every morning I would go to sleek, tall glass buildings to learn about big data and what it takes to make a powerful data visualization. On the first few days we watched TED Talks and heard an in-person lecture by Cole Nussbaumer Knaflic, a data visualizer and author of Storytelling with Data, who taught us about the difference between pretty visualizations and meaningful ones. We also participated in a video chat with the CEO of the Dian Fossey organization. I was surprised to learn that, although their research takes place in the natural world, the scientists often make use of sophisticated technology—for example, to track gorilla types, counts, and habitats. It made me realize that data truly are everywhere.

Then we began our own projects, splitting into groups and brainstorming topics. I suggested that we research Alzheimer’s disease, having seen a family member experience it. My group was intrigued, and we decided to research emotional states of Alzheimer’s patients to help caregivers with their challenging work.

We divided up the tasks of collecting data, visualizing it, and creating a presentation. I worked on the visualization, using a software program called Tableau. I would import files and play around with colors, shapes, and design to create a visualization. The task proved challenging. I would make one visualization and realize that a different type of chart might be easier to read, or that the style I chose was impractical.

After trying many prototypes, we settled on a visualization that wasn’t very intricate or pretty but was simple and easy to understand: an animation and line graph showing changes in emotional states of Alzheimer’s patients over time. Our presentation at the end of the workshop also incorporated storytelling through poems that expressed the feelings of Alzheimer’s patients. One of the poems read, “I am sad and sick and lost. All I know is that I need you.” Looking into the audience of students, instructors, and family members, I felt they were genuinely moved by our presentation.

By the time I finished my first intersession, I had gained both confidence and a passion for technology. Later, my confidence blossomed further when I was chosen to be a TA for the data visualization class and learned how to be an effective leader among my peers. Through my experiences at Design Tech, I have had the chance to harness the power of design thinking not only to help solve problems in the real world but also to grow as an individual.

Meghna Gaddam is a junior at Design Tech High School whose interests include journalism, neuroscience, and advocating for more girls to enter the tech field. She hopes to go into medicine and work on health issues in impoverished communities abroad.

An admission: This issue of Education Next differs markedly from what our editorial team had envisioned in the early fall. The events of November 8, 2016, took many by surprise, including us.

Notably absent here is a profile of Hillary Clinton’s record as an advocate for children and analysis of what we could have expected on education policy from the nation’s first female president. We had not commissioned a parallel piece on Donald Trump.

Projecting the future under Secretary Clinton, who had taken nuanced positions on key issues such as charter schools and testing over the course of her long political career, was hardly straightforward. But that task paled in comparison to the challenge of anticipating what’s next under President Trump, who promises big changes to education but faces uncertain legislative backing for his top priority: expanding school choice.

By tapping philanthropist and school-choice advocate Betsy DeVos for education secretary, Trump has signaled that he intends to make good on his pledge to use $20 billion in federal funds to give students from poor families more options. That proposal may face tough sledding in Congress, however. Legislators there recently rejected proposals that would merely have allowed states to use federal aid for disadvantaged students to help them attend private schools, and deficit hawks are likely to resist what would amount to a 40 percent increase in congressional spending on K–12 education.

The president and his team may instead seek to amend the tax code to encourage donations to organizations that grant scholarships to low-income students, an approach 16 states use as an alternative to school voucher programs. Congress can make such changes to tax policy through “reconciliation,” a procedure that avoids up-or-down votes on each proposal and the threat of a Democratic filibuster in the Senate.

In weighing their options, members of the new administration would do well to read Chad Aldeman’s reflections on their predecessors’ efforts to overhaul how American teachers are evaluated, an agenda the Obama team pursued through a series of incentives for states devised within the executive branch (see “The Teacher Evaluation Revamp, in Hindsight,” features). Aldeman, who was a policy adviser at the Department of Education under President Obama, credits his former colleagues for tackling a pressing problem and stimulating positive changes in some locales.

But he argues that the Obama administration erred by adopting a narrow definition of reform and by seeking to implement that definition universally, even where local support was lacking. Aiming to spread its ideas as far and fast as possible, the education department eventually required all states seeking much-needed waivers from No Child Left Behind to adopt test-based evaluation systems. The result was lackluster implementation, backlash from educators, and a broad perception that the policies had failed.

A comparably ambitious federal school-choice agenda would face similar challenges. Even if the Trump administration gets its $20 billion, it will need to rely on states and school districts to implement policies that give families new options. Three decades of experimentation with school choice demonstrate that making it work requires careful attention to such tasks as ensuring that parents have good information about school quality and suitable transportation—responsibilities that skeptical local bureaucrats may dodge. Nor are there one-size-fits-all strategies that will work everywhere. School vouchers, for example, are unlikely to solve the problems facing students in the vast swaths of rural America where voters went heavily for Donald Trump.

The best solution may be to offer federal support for programs that the states themselves design, advancing the cause of school choice while respecting the principle of local control that Trump has also championed. Beyond that, the administration can use the bully pulpit to promote state-level reform. It can offer guidance on how states can take advantage of certain features of the Every Student Succeeds Act to give students new options, such as the funding states may set aside to provide “direct student services” in struggling districts. It can work with Congress to offer additional grants for charter school start-ups and perhaps create a similar funding program to encourage innovation in the private sector. Above all, it can ensure that federal regulations don’t interfere with local efforts to experiment with new school-governance arrangements.

Such efforts may feel like small ball to a president for whom “huge” denotes high praise, but over the long haul they are likely to accomplish more than any attempts at sweeping measures. And after two decades of presidential activism in K–12 education, seeing an administration respect the limits on federal capacity would be a welcome surprise.

— Martin R. West