Over the past 20 years, both charter schools and pre-kindergarten education have taken on increasingly prominent roles in the schooling of America’s children. Charter schools in 43 states now serve more than 2.6 million students—roughly six percent of all students attending public schools. And more than two-thirds of four-year-olds attend some form of public or privately funded preschool, with 1.4 million of them enrolled in state-funded pre-K programs.

This growth is far from accidental. Research shows that high-quality preschool education has a lasting impact on children’s school success, and in recent years, cities and states have moved to increase access to preschool programs. At the same time, demand for good charter schools has swelled, as the best of them have notched remarkable success on measures of student achievement. Moreover, it is low-income students who have reaped the greatest benefits from the growth of these two reforms: Most state pre-K programs target children in poverty, in hopes of narrowing the achievement gap, and research shows that charters produce the strongest results for disadvantaged youth. Yet recent research also suggests that neither high-quality charter schools nor pre-K alone may sufficiently level the playing field between children in poverty and their middle-class peers over the long term.

This point raises an intriguing question: What happens if we combine high-performing charter schools with high-quality pre-K education? Could the combination of these two reforms produce a result better than the sum of its parts? This is not an abstract question. In most of the 38 states that do have both charters and pre-K, there is at least one charter school serving preschoolers. Charter schools that offer preschool programs afford us the opportunity to examine the challenges they face, the aspirations they hold, and the ways in which they are serving young children.

To date, charter pre-K programs have received little attention. In 2015, we undertook the first national study of state policies related to pre-K and charter schools. We found that nine states prohibit charter schools from serving pre-K students. Even in states where charters can offer pre-K, they often face substantial barriers to doing so. Many of these barriers reflect specific variations in individual states’ pre-K or charter policies, but several recurring themes emerge across states: Charters must compete with long-standing community-based and district providers for scarce pre-K resources. Inadequate funding for public pre-K programs makes it challenging for charters to offer high-quality pre-K programming. Public programs must also adhere to “quality” standards that impose cumbersome input or process requirements that infringe on charter autonomy.

Over the past year, to better understand how these barriers play out on the ground and how charter schools serve preschoolers, we visited charter pre-K programs in several states.

We learned that policy barriers create real challenges, even when charter schools manage to overcome them. Charter schools in California and New York face funding challenges and intrusive quality standards that limit their autonomy. In contrast, Washington, D.C., where public policies and funding offer a much more supportive climate, illustrates the potential of charter schools to bring innovation to the pre-K sector.

Despite the challenges faced in most areas of the country, some charter schools offer high-quality pre-K programs that adapt the best assets of their distinctive models and cultures to meet the unique needs of young children and prepare them well for kindergarten. Their success stories offer lessons for both policymakers interested in expanding access to quality early learning, and for charter-school educators seeking to serve preschoolers.

Challenges in California

Richmond College Prep sits in a gritty postindustrial urban neighborhood in Oakland known as the Iron Triangle. The community has a legacy of early childhood innovation: Richmond College Prep’s kindergarten and 1st-grade students learn and play in a building that once provided federally funded round-the-clock care to children whose mothers labored in Richmond’s shipyards during World War II. The school itself grew out of a nonprofit preschool funded with proceeds from a $180 million settlement following a Chevron Oil refinery explosion in the late 1990s. When the preschool’s founders realized there were no good elementary schools for its graduates, they applied for a charter, and Richmond College Prep elementary school opened in 2006. Ten years later, it is one of the highest-performing charter schools in the city, serving 48 preschoolers and 291 students from transitional kindergarten through 6th grade.

Down the coast in Los Angeles, Camino Nuevo Charter Academy, a high-performing charter-management organization founded in 2000, serves 3,400 students on eight campuses, including 120 preschoolers in a state-of-the-art early-childhood campus. Camino Nuevo’s CEO Ana Ponce knew that achieving the network’s goal of educational equity for students who come from the poorest communities of Los Angeles required starting children early—but many of the school’s students were entering kindergarten with no prior preschool or early learning experiences. Thus, Camino Nuevo opened its early childhood center in 2004.

In theory, charter schools in California can get financial support for their early learning services through two funding streams: the California State Preschool Program (CSPP) for low-income three- and four-year-olds, and a state fund for transitional kindergarten for all four-year-olds born between September and December who miss the cutoff date for kindergarten. By law, charter schools that serve children eligible for transitional kindergarten must offer it: in 2015, 235 charter schools automatically received funds from the state to offer the program. But securing CSPP funding is more arduous. Charter schools must apply for it, and so far only four have successfully done so. Alternatively, a charter school can try to contract with a local education agency that receives CSPP funding, but doing that is difficult. Richmond Prep and Camino Nuevo are unique among charter schools in California in that they receive funding from both programs.

Both Camino Nuevo and Richmond College Prep are high-performing schools that don’t fit the stereotype of a “no excuses” charter school. Richmond emphasizes a nurturing, student-centered atmosphere; eschews strict disciplinary policies; and offers enrichment activities such as Mexican folk dancing, “mindful life,” and gospel choir. Camino Nuevo offers a bilingual English-Spanish program and a rich curriculum emphasizing the arts. These values also infuse the schools’ preschool programs.

Both schools have also dedicated effort to designing developmentally appropriate pre-K programs. Richmond Prep’s CEO Peppina Liano, a longtime Montessori educator, designed the preschool as a Montessori program. The Montessori model fosters children’s independence and emphasizes self-directed, hands-on learning, with highly trained teachers serving as “guides.” Montessori is implemented in thousands of schools internationally, including more than 450 public schools in the United States. Alicia Garcia, associate director of the Camino Nuevo Early Childhood Education Center, has a Head Start background that informs the preschool’s whole-child approach. Camino Nuevo’s preschool uses the evidence-based Tools of the Mind curriculum, which emphasizes development of executive function skills while also supporting children’s vocabulary, language, and social-emotional development. The school’s fifty-fifty bilingual approach, in which children and teachers alternate days using English and Spanish, aligns well with Tools of the Mind and prepares preschoolers for Camino Nuevo’s bilingual elementary school as well as for other elementary schools that provide instruction in English only.

Both preschool programs face hurdles, however. “Public funding is the biggest challenge,” says Camino Nuevo’s Ponce. Before they began receiving public funds, both schools’ preschool programs operated with private funding alone. But the current state funding—less than half of what charters receive for K–12 students—isn’t enough to cover the costs of a high-quality pre-K program. Richmond College Prep receives only 20 dollars a day for each pre-K student; to fill the gap, CEO Liano must raise significant funding each year from individual and foundation donors. Camino Nuevo has been fortunate to receive supplemental funds from the Los Angeles Universal Preschool (LAUP) program, which allows the school to enhance program quality. Even with these additional funds, however, Camino Nuevo struggles to retain high-quality staff, given the salary levels its restricted resources dictate. A recent decision by the Los Angeles First Five Commission (known as First 5 LA) to eliminate funding for preschool slots through LAUP means that Camino Nuevo will no longer receive supplemental LAUP funds—and will need to raise $150,000 annually to maintain its current preschool enrollment and level of quality.

Moving preschool students into kindergarten at the same school is another challenge. Because pre-K funding in California comes from a different funding stream than that of K–12, the state bureaucracy does not consider pre-K a part of the charter school, but a separate program. As a result, pre-K students cannot matriculate directly into kindergarten but must go through a lottery to enroll. This administrative issue can create very real logistical challenges for charter schools, parents, and students, such as difficulties with recruitment and children’s academic stability. Charters can offer a lottery preference to their pre-K students but must give higher priority to children with siblings enrolled in other grades of the school—whether or not they attended pre-K there. As a result, only about half of Camino Nuevo’s preschoolers are able to enroll in its kindergarten. Richmond Prep’s kindergarten does not have enough space to serve all children completing its preschool and transitional kindergarten programs, but staff report that most children who want to enroll are able to do so, because high mobility in the surrounding community leads to some natural attrition between grades each year.

Despite their challenges, both schools believe that pre-K is critical to their mission and are committed to continuing to offer it. “As we learn more about the brain and early development,” says Ponce, “it’s essential that we provide this.”

Universal Pre-K in New York

In 2014, New York City embarked on an ambitious effort to make full-day pre-K available to all four-year-olds in the city. In just two years, the number of children enrolled in New York City pre-K programs more than tripled—from 20,000 in 2013–14 to nearly 70,000 in the 2015–16 school year. The state legislation that funded New York’s pre-K expansion also opened the door for charter schools to operate pre-K programs. Previously, they had been barred from serving preschoolers.

The Renaissance Charter School, a high-performing school in Queens that had been serving grades K–12, was one of the first to seize the new opportunity. The school’s leaders had long wanted to offer pre-K, and had considered doing so through a separate nonprofit, as other New York charters did prior to 2014. But they rejected that approach because they wanted their pre-K students to be able to enroll directly in their kindergarten without going through another lottery. When the legislature allowed charters to offer pre-K, Renaissance moved quickly, opening a preschool program in the 2014–15 school year. To launch the pre-K program, Renaissance hired Nicole De Nino, an experienced pre-K and elementary teacher, and gave her authority to select curriculum, materials, and furnishings. Rather than adopting a specific pre-K model or philosophy, the school has taken an “eclectic” approach that draws on a variety of early childhood philosophies. Creative Curriculum, which is widely used in pre-K education, is the primary curriculum, supplemented by Handwriting Without Tears and Mathematics in the City. “We wanted to get children ready for kindergarten,” explains De Nino, “but we wanted to balance that with play and make sure that everything we do with children is developmentally appropriate.”

This philosophy aligns with Renaissance’s broader K–12 approach, which offers integrated, progressive education that incorporates a strong focus on music and the arts. Renaissance uses a “looping” model, in which most teachers remain with students for two years across all grades, including high school, so pre-K teachers generally follow their students into kindergarten. This practice helps teachers build strong relationships with students and families, and supports alignment between pre-K and the early elementary grades.

Renaissance has seen clear benefits to having pre-K in the school. Starting children early allows the school to build stronger relationships with families, and attending school with older siblings helps smooth preschoolers’ transitions to school. Being located in the Renaissance facility also enables pre-K children to benefit from “specials” that the school offers, including Spanish, dance, yoga, and gym.

Because the New York City Department of Education administers the citywide pre-K program, Renaissance is subject to the DOE’s pre-K standards and monitoring, even though it is a charter school. And although the school has a positive relationship with the Department of Education, these requirements at times overstep the lines of charter autonomy.

In general, charter schools are held accountable for results, and in return they are given greater autonomy than district schools. New York’s pre-K program, in contrast, holds pre-K providers accountable for a checklist of input requirements. Some of these requirements are necessary and reasonable to protect child health and safety, or ensure that programs have a sound curriculum and strategies for assessing children’s learning. Others, however, are prescriptive, burdensome, and not clearly linked to program quality. In New York, the state sends in program monitors to assess if a pre-K classroom has a “block building area with an adequate supply of blocks in varied sizes that is organized and labeled,” “a private space for each child’s possessions,” and a posted daily schedule that is “referenced daily, represented in pictures and words, and displayed at children’s eye level.”

This tension between charter autonomy and public pre-K standards is not unique to New York City; it occurs in many states. The founders of the charter movement envisaged that increased autonomy would remove the ceiling for high achievers. Unfortunately, pre-K standards are often designed to ensure that providers meet a minimum floor of quality, not to encourage them to pursue ever-higher levels of excellence. Moreover, because in most states a charter pre-K program is not considered an official part of the larger school but a separate program, the autonomies granted to charters often do not extend to their preschool classrooms.

Government requirements can sometimes discourage charter schools from offering pre-K. Success Academy, a high-performing New York City charter network, recently canceled its pre-K program after a long, public battle with the city’s DOE over pre-K autonomy. The department wouldn’t give Success Academy any pre-K funding until the network agreed to the city’s monitoring requirements, but Success Academy refused, claiming the DOE had no authority to oversee the network’s pre-K program. Although New York’s Pre-K for All legislation gives the authority to monitor pre-K programs to charter school authorizers, it also sets quality standards and monitoring requirements that differ from authorizers’ typical practices. The New York State Education Department eventually ruled in favor of the city, though Success Academy plans to appeal the state’s decision.

Pre-K Innovation in D.C.

If California and New York illustrate the challenges charter schools face in offering pre-K in many states, Washington, D.C., illustrates the possibilities. Unlike in most states, charter schools in the District of Columbia can enroll both three- and four-year-olds and receive roughly the same per-pupil funding for preschoolers as for K–12 students. As a result, nearly every charter elementary school in D.C. offers pre-K, serving an aggregate total of more than 12,000 preschoolers.

These charters are accountable to the District of Columbia Public Charter School Board (PCSB) for the quality and results of their pre-K programs—just as they are for grades K–12—but they are not subject to the kind of extensive, input-based quality requirements found in other pre-K programs. Instead, PCSB holds charter pre-K programs accountable for overall school quality and outcomes through an integrated Performance Management Framework for P–8 charter schools. The framework provides a holistic assessment of school performance based on student growth and achievement in grades 3–8; school climate measures, including attendance and re-enrollment; and preschool classroom quality. This approach reflects PCSB’s view that quality pre-K programs should ultimately lead to strong K–12 outcomes, while also ensuring attention to the quality of schools’ pre-K classrooms. To measure that quality, PCSB uses the Classroom Assessment Scoring System, or CLASS, an observational tool developed by researchers that focuses on the quality of adult–child interactions and has been shown to correlate with children’s learning in preschool. Charter schools are still required to set goals for and assess preschoolers’ learning, and PCSB publishes data from those assessments in annual school accountability reports, but it does not use child assessments in pre-K to grade or rank schools.

The combination of adequate funding and results-focused autonomy has fostered innovation. Briya Public Charter School, for example, offers a unique two-generation approach that combines pre-K with adult education programs for parents and early childhood educators. AppleTree Early Learning Public Charter School, a pre-K–only charter school that serves more than 800 students on eight campuses, has used its flexibility—as well as a federal Investing in Innovation grant—to develop an integrated model that combines evidence-based curriculum, early childhood assessments, and aligned professional development to help teachers deliver effective instruction focused on improving children’s language and social-emotional skills. An independent evaluation in 2014 found that AppleTree students make significant learning gains, and that the program is closing the achievement gap for high-need students upon entrance to kindergarten. Now AppleTree is working to help more pre-K programs—in both charter and other settings—replicate those results.

The thriving charter pre-K programs in D.C. demonstrate that the charter pre-K model offers an opportunity for states to better serve their neediest students, particularly because, in general, charter schools serve more disadvantaged populations. Charter schools contribute to the supply of pre-K seats in D.C.—something that New York City struggled with in its rollout of universal pre-K. Early childhood education has historically been delivered by a variety of different providers, including public and private schools, community-based childcare, and Head Start. As states continue to expand their pre-K programs, the charter model can offer another attractive option for parents in an emerging publicly funded early-childhood system, not only expanding choice and access but in many cases improving quality. Marrying pre-K with high-quality charter schools also increases the chances that children will receive a solid elementary education that sustains and builds on preschool learning gains. Some of the strongest research in education shows that high-quality charter schools and preschool, separately, foster student achievement. By combining the two, states can use the charter pre-K model to improve outcomes for the neediest students.

Ashley LiBetti Mitchel is a senior analyst at Bellwether Education Partners, a nonprofit working to help education institutions become more effective. Sara Mead is a partner at that organization.

Across the United States, black and Latino students are far more likely than their white classmates to be removed from school as punishment. These disparities have led to widespread concern about a potential “school-to-prison pipeline,” in which detentions, suspensions, and expulsions ultimately lead to the overrepresentation of people of color in the nation’s prisons.

Breaking the pipeline is an explicit federal priority, and on the campaign trail, Hillary Clinton pledged $2 billion to help schools add counselors and reduce suspensions. “This is not just an education issue, this is a civil rights issue, and we cannot ignore it any longer,” she told a Harlem audience in February 2016.

But while much has been said about the potential negative effects of exclusionary school punishment, little is known about what policymakers can do to address it. By contrast, researchers have devoted considerable attention to studying racial disparities in educational opportunities and outcomes—and there is compelling evidence that when students have a teacher of the same race, they tend to learn more at school (see “The Race Connection,” research, Spring 2004).

Those findings raise a parallel question: Does having a teacher of the same race make it more or less likely that students are subject to exclusionary school discipline?

In this study, we analyze a unique set of student and teacher demographic and discipline data from North Carolina elementary schools to examine whether being matched to a same-race teacher affects the rate at which students receive detentions, are suspended, or are expelled. The data follow individual students over several years, enabling us to compare the disciplinary outcomes of students in years when they had a same-race teacher and in years when they did not.

We find consistent evidence that North Carolina students are less likely to be removed from school as punishment when they and their teachers are the same race. This effect is driven almost entirely by black students, especially black boys, who are markedly less likely to be subjected to exclusionary discipline when taught by black teachers. There is little evidence of any benefit for white students of being matched with white teachers.

Although these results are based on a single state, they should encourage efforts to promote greater diversity in the teaching workforce, which remains overwhelmingly white. In addition to offering more diverse role models at the front of the class, our findings suggest that employing more teachers of color could help minimize the chances that students
of color, who trail their white peers in academic achievement, are also subjected to discipline that removes them from school.

A “Pipeline” Problem

The theory behind the “school-to-prison pipeline” concept is that black and Latino students experience harsher discipline in school than their white peers, and that these school-based experiences increase the likelihood of their eventual engagement with the criminal justice system. Indeed, a 2014 analysis of school discipline data by the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights found these students are overrepresented among students who experience exclusionary discipline across the country. Black children, for example, represented 16 percent of K‒12 enrollment nationwide but were 43 percent of students who received multiple out-of-school suspensions during the 2011‒12 school year (see “What Do We Know about School Discipline Reform?” features, Winter 2017).

Could the lack of diversity in the teaching force contribute to these disparities? In theory, teachers’ race could influence whether students experience exclusionary discipline in several ways. It could be preventative: students could have better rapport with same-race teachers, and be less likely to act up in their classes in the first place. Or, regardless of student behavior, teachers might be more inclined to be lenient to students of their same race.

In fact, a handful of studies have shown that black and Latino students are less likely to receive exclusionary discipline in schools with higher concentrations of black and Latino teachers. But these previous studies looked at aggregate relationships at the school level; therefore, we cannot rule out the possibility that schools with more teachers of color have different disciplinary practices for reasons unrelated to teacher demographics.

Separating out the effect of race matching from differences between schools requires individual-level data on students and teachers, including their race and exposure to school discipline measures over multiple years. Only with that information is it possible to examine whether discipline rates vary for individual students based on whether they are placed with a teacher of the same race.

North Carolina in Focus

The nation’s current teacher workforce is not representative of the majority non-white U.S. student population, and the mismatch has only increased in recent years (Figure 1). North Carolina reflects these national trends: from 2001 to 2013, the share of black or Latino teachers in North Carolina declined slightly from 16 to 15 percent, while the percentage of black or Latino students rose from 37 to 41 percent.

The state’s ongoing data-collection efforts have created a robust data set that allows us to study the effects of a student-teacher demographic match. Since 2008, North Carolina has collected detailed disciplinary records for all public school students, including the type of offense and disciplinary consequences. In addition, the state collects demographic data from both students and teachers, and provides identifiers that allow researchers to link students to their classroom teachers.

We focus on students in 1st through 5th grades. Since these elementary school students spend the bulk of their day in a single teacher’s classroom, this approach allows us to isolate whether a student was exposed to a same-race teacher. We also limited our sample to white students and black students, which are the two largest racial groups in North Carolina and account for 78 percent of the total observations in the data. Students of other racial and ethnic groups had insufficient exposure to same-race teachers for the purposes of our study. For example, while Latino students account for 16 percent of observations in the data, the state has too few Latino teachers to estimate precise race-match effects for this group.

The resulting sample includes roughly one million students and 50,000 teachers, from the years 2008 through 2013. In 2013, the most recent year of our data, one-third of students were black and two-thirds were white. Ten percent of these students were taught by a black teacher and 88 percent were taught by a white teacher.

Our primary outcome of interest is whether a student received an exclusionary disciplinary consequence—that is, one that removed him or her from the classroom as punishment, including detention, in-school suspension, out-of-school suspension, or expulsion. Overall, 7 percent of students in our data received an exclusionary disciplinary consequence.

Isolating Race-Match Effects

To isolate the effects of having a teacher of the same race, we examine whether individual students are more or less likely to face exclusionary disciplinary consequences in years when they are matched to a same-race teacher compared to years when they are assigned to a teacher of a different race. Comparing students to themselves over time effectively controls for all student characteristics that do not change over time and could lead to differences in disciplinary outcomes.

When making these comparisons, we also take into account student, teacher, and school characteristics that do change over time. These include students’ grade level, Limited English Proficiency status and eligibility for subsidized school meals, their teachers’ years of experience in North Carolina public schools, class size, school size, schools’ racial and socioeconomic makeup, and schools’ average math and reading scores on statewide tests.

Of course, race is not the only aspect of the match between students and teachers that could influence disciplinary outcomes; gender could also matter. And the benefits of having a demographically matched teacher could vary according to a student’s own race or gender. For example, other researchers have found that race-based disparities in discipline outcomes are especially pronounced for black boys. In addition to looking overall at all students in our sample, we therefore also look separately at race-gender groups: white males, white females, black males, and black females. We estimate the effect for each of these student groups of being assigned to demographically matched teachers.

The Benefits of a Match

We find clear evidence that elementary school students are less likely to be subjected to exclusionary discipline when their race matches that of their teacher. Overall, students matched to a same-race teacher are roughly 1 percentage point less likely to be placed in detention, suspended, or expelled than students assigned to a different-race teacher. To put the size of this effect in context, the overall share of students who received any exclusionary discipline consequences during the study period was 7 percent. Therefore, the effect of teacher-student race match represents a 12 percent decrease in the number of students experiencing exclusionary discipline.

The overall effect of race matching on discipline outcomes is largest for black male students (Figure 2). Sixteen percent of black male elementary school students in the classrooms of white female teachers received exclusionary discipline in North Carolina during our study period. But being assigned to a black female teacher reduces that rate by about 2 percentage points to approximately 14 percent, a 15 percent decrease. Similarly, being assigned to a black male teacher rather than a white male teacher reduces exclusionary discipline rates from 15 to 13 percent, a reduction of about 18 percent.

Black female students also experience lower rates of exclusionary consequences when exposed to same-race teachers, although the effect of 1 to 2 percentage points (15 to 25 percent) is only statistically significant when they are taught by black female teachers.

For both black boys and black girls, the effect of a same-race teacher (comparing teachers of the same gender) is larger than the effect of a same-gender teacher (comparing teachers of the same race). But for white students, neither teacher sex nor race has any consistent effect on exclusionary discipline rates. Figure 2 also shows the large differences in exclusionary discipline rates between black students and white students, a gap that remains substantial regardless of the race and gender of the teacher. Even for black boys, having a same-race teacher only closes about one-quarter of the race gap.

The impact of having a same-race teacher on black students’ discipline rates is consistently negative across all of the outcomes we examine, including detention, in-school suspension, out-of-school suspension, and the overall number of disciplinary incidents. For each outcome, the effect tends to be larger for black boys than for black girls.

These results hold up even as we perform a number of tests of their validity. For example, one could imagine that a principal may consciously assign a child who had several disciplinary incidents in his 1st-grade year to a demographically similar teacher for 2nd grade, in hopes of finding a better fit for the child. This type of behavior could exaggerate the race-matching effects we find. However, we find no evidence that students’ disciplinary outcomes are systematically related to whether they are assigned to a same-race teacher in future years. Additionally, we find a similar pattern of race-matching effects when we exclude students who received exclusionary discipline penalties in the prior year.

Do Matches Matter Everywhere?

We examine whether race-match effects vary based on a range of other student and school characteristics. We see no consistent evidence that benefits vary across grade levels, rural or urban school settings, or at magnet programs. At charter schools, however, race matching appears unrelated to student discipline across all groups, suggesting that discipline dynamics may have been different in charters than in traditional public schools during the period we studied.

We also divide up schools based on their proportion of black students to compare race-match benefits at schools where less than one-third, one- to two-thirds, or more than two-thirds of students were black. The benefits for black students are most pronounced at schools where at least one-third of students were black.

However, because schools with larger populations of black students have higher average exclusionary discipline rates overall, race-matched students at those schools are not necessarily less likely to experience such measures. On average, a black student with a black teacher in a school where more than two-thirds of the student-body is black is still more likely to experience exclusionary discipline, compared to a black student assigned to a white teacher in a school where black students accounted for less than a third of the student population.

Student economic status has varying relationships with race-match effects. Black students benefit from race-matched teachers regardless of whether they qualify for subsidized school meals, though the advantage is somewhat larger for less affluent students. Interestingly, low-income white boys have a higher rate of exclusionary discipline when matched to white teachers relative to non-white teachers. Although we cannot test specific mechanisms with our data, the reduced rates of exclusionary discipline with black teachers across the board may suggest that part of the same-race effect we have documented may stem from teachers and students being more likely to share the same socioeconomic background.

Our data also allow us to examine the impact of race matching on student performance on standardized math and reading tests. Earlier research suggests that same-race teachers are beneficial for student achievement. If the opposite pattern were to hold in North Carolina, however, it would suggest a tradeoff between improving disciplinary and academic outcomes.

We find that black students in North Carolina do better on reading tests when matched with same-race teachers (by about 3 percent of a standard deviation), but there are no differences in their math performance. Conversely, white students do better on math tests when matched to a same-race teacher (by roughly 2 percent of a standard deviation), but do not perform better in reading. These patterns suggest that increasing exposure to black teachers is beneficial at best and neutral at worst for all students in terms of discipline, and that increasing teacher diversity while keeping teacher quality constant would have a modest positive effect on the reading achievement of black students while having an opposite effect on the math achievement of white students.

Implications

If reducing children’s exposure to school removal as punishment is a national priority, then our study points to one potentially effective strategy: increasing the number of teachers of color in public schools. We find clear evidence that exposure to black teachers can reduce the likelihood of black students being subject to exclusionary disciplinary consequences, and increase their reading achievement.

We do not observe any advantages of teacher-student race match for white children in terms of their discipline outcomes, although we do find a small positive impact on math achievement. This suggests that the recruitment and retention of a greater number of black teachers could support the positive development of black children. This goal is particularly pressing given the persistent race-based disparities not only in school discipline outcomes, but also in terms of academic achievement and measures of adult well-being and success.

We don’t yet know why black students are less likely to be suspended or expelled from school when they are taught by a black teacher. It is possible that biases based on assumptions about race influence teachers’ and students’ behavior. Black teachers may be more lenient toward same-race students, and white teachers might be less lenient toward students of a different race. Perhaps black students are inclined to behave better for black teachers.

It may also be that black teachers simply have more effective classroom-management practices than white teachers, on average, and are therefore better able to induce misbehaving students to exhibit better behavior. Further research on the differences between the classroom management strategies deployed by black teachers and by white teachers would shed light on these mechanisms, and might provide useful classroom management lessons for all teachers.

Regardless, our findings provide yet another compelling rationale to diversify the teaching workforce. Cultivating a teaching workforce that is reflective of an increasingly diverse student body reflects inclusive national values, and may serve as a critical tool to narrow the racial gap in discipline outcomes.

Constance A. Lindsay is currently a Professorial Lecturer in the School of Public Affairs at American University. Cassandra M. D. Hart is assistant professor of education policy at the University of California, Davis, School of Education.

When Lois Griffin runs for school board in the animated television comedy Family Guy, she stumps on a platform of “competent teachers, a better-funded music department, and updated textbooks that don’t refer to the Civil Rights Movement as ‘trouble ahead.’” Perpetually outdated, inordinately expensive, and a pain to lug around, textbooks have been the bête noire of educators and technologists for years. Replacing them with resources that are less costly and more flexible has been their cri de coeur.

While digital products have made significant inroads into the educational resources market, textbooks and other print materials still command about 60 percent of sales. But whether print or digital, all of these commercial offerings now face threats from a burgeoning effort to promote “open” resources for education—that is, materials that can be used and replicated free of charge because their copyright exists in the public domain.

Proponents of open resources have enlisted the help of the federal government, which has launched a multi-pronged initiative called #GoOpen. Through this project, the feds are promoting open resources both in classroom practice and by awarding grants for research projects focused on the development of open resources. While this effort seems laudable, it exposes many unanswered questions about the long-term viability of the open-resources movement.

What Are Open Educational Resources?

Open educational resources (OER), also known as openly licensed resources, can take numerous forms. At the simplest level, an open resource might be a picture of Abraham Lincoln that a teacher could use in the classroom for free without violating the copyright of the creator of that image. It could also be one of the 16,000 lessons that teachers have shared on the platform BetterLesson, licensed under an open copyright that allows for their use, for free, by other teachers. In their most robust form, open resources can comprise entire curricula, like those offered by the State of New York’s EngageNY project, which are made “open” for teachers to use and modify at their discretion. To give some sense of scale, EngageNY has been downloaded more than 45 million times.

Just how big is the market that this movement is looking to disrupt? The answer varies, depending on what is included in the definition of “educational resource.” The Learning Counsel research institute has analyzed various estimates and concludes that total annual K–12 spending on print resources (textbooks and other materials) in 2014 was $10.4 billion, while digital content and curriculum spending came to $1.8 billion at the district level and $4.8 billion at the school or teacher level. That amounts to a total of $17 billion annual spending on educational materials, or 2.8 percent of the overall public-education expenditures of $617 billion in the nation.

But here’s the rub: open resources are offered free to users, but they are not necessarily free to produce. Yes, volunteers have created many of the lessons on platforms such as Share My Lesson (which is sponsored by the American Federation of Teachers), but other resources that are free to users have been created by organizations that are paid for their work. The State of New York, for example, paid $36.6 million to a mix of nonprofit and for-profit providers to create the content and coursework for EngageNY.

This is a central tension that plagues the open-resources movement: teachers want free, high-quality resources, but the people who create them want to be paid for doing so. Creating high-quality educational content is not like editing a Wikipedia page. Yes, it requires expertise, but it also requires creativity and pedagogical smarts. Content must be sequenced and aligned with the learning goals articulated in state standards. It must be supported by activities, handouts, quizzes, PowerPoint slides, and so on. As any teacher will tell you, content development takes time. While people are willing to donate their time to a shared project such as Wikipedia, in almost all other domains where people produce intellectual property—from journalism to the music business to architecture to book publishing—they are not. It’s tough to envision an open-resources movement with great products that doesn’t compensate the content creators for their work.

A second tension besets this movement. Just how “open” can resources be if they operate within the strictures of government-regulated scope and sequences? That is, if the state sets the topics and the order in which they must be covered via prescribed standards and assessments, how much room is there for improvisation? When people hear the term “open resources,” they might think of Wikipedia, which is powered by a somewhat amorphous volunteer collective of do-gooders sharing knowledge and correcting inaccuracies. But schools need resources that are more focused and specialized: every year, schools have specific goals to meet, goals that are articulated in state standards and codified in curricula. The more directly and exhaustively those goals are spelled out, the less wiggle room schools have to choose open resources, at least on the level of complete learning units or curricula. OER might have great potential for homeschoolers, private schools, or parents who wish to supplement what their kids learn in school, but public-school educators will be hard-pressed to fit them into curricula that are driven by state standards and assessments.

Given these tensions, it is important to examine what productive role, if any, the federal government can play in the evolution of OER. Even if OER are worth supporting, it may be best for the feds to stay out of the movement. As is often the case, the federal government might play a constructive role as a convener and promoter, but it must guard against being overly prescriptive and putting its thumb too hard on the OER scale before the key questions have been addressed.

Origins of OER

In 2001, Harvard law professor Lawrence Lessig helped found Creative Commons, an organization that devised a form of copyright protection that allows for the sharing and free replication of works so long as they are used for noncommercial purposes. In books such as The Future of Ideas and Free Culture, Lessig argued that the scope and reach of copyright laws stifle innovation and the furtherance of knowledge. Knowledge perpetually builds on itself, and the definition of copyright-protected “derivative” works has grown to include too wide a variety of products, he maintained.

Over the past 15 years, the Creative Commons movement has slowly expanded to education, pushed forward by several forces. First and most visibly, states have made efforts to unify standards through such efforts as the Common Core State Standards Initiative and the Next Generation Science Standards. These projects have enabled teachers from across district and state lines to share materials with one another. As states moved toward more universal standards, many teachers, schools, and districts cried foul at the way established textbook companies responded (or failed to respond) to the changing norms. Teachers charged that the companies were simply slapping “Common Core–Aligned” stickers onto their old products. Many educators decided to strike out on their own to find materials to supplement standard textbooks, with some enterprising teachers even creating lessons, quizzes, and other instructional materials and allowing other teachers to use them for free. At the same time, public education saw a massive influx of new educational technology. More and more schools were beginning to assign a laptop or other device to every student. This new environment created a hefty appetite for new materials.

The evolving approach to finding relevant and useful educational materials on the part of teachers is reflected in a recent survey by the RAND Corporation, which found that 82 percent of elementary-school math teachers and 91 percent of high-school math teachers used materials that they created themselves or found on their own at least once a week. In English language arts, the figures were 89 percent of elementary-school teachers and 85 percent of secondary-school teachers. Self-reported claims about workload might be subject to question, but if they are anywhere close to accurate, there is a huge need here. Certainly, the demand is illustrated in the numbers reported by the platforms that share open resources. To date, BetterLesson has attracted more than 350,000 users, Share My Lesson boasts 900,000, and Teachers Pay Teachers (a variation on this model that enables teachers to pay each other for content) has more than 3.8 million users worldwide.

The theory of action for open-resources proponents is quite clear: Teachers know what is best for students. Teachers and other educators want to collaborate with one another. Technology and unified standards have made that collaboration easier than ever. Textbook companies are not meeting teachers’ needs, even though their products are incredibly expensive. So, creating platforms to allow teachers to share the resources they have designed should drive up the quality of instructional materials while also driving down their cost.

One player that was certainly persuaded by this logic was the federal government, which for just over a year now has been openly promoting the use of OER.

#GoOpen

In October 2015, the federal government launched the Go Open campaign (stylized as #GoOpen). The project is designed to promote both the creation and the adoption of OER. (Somewhat surprisingly, the Department of Education’s press office declined my request to interview anyone connected with #GoOpen for this article.) The initiative is threefold: First, the government is developing the Learning Registry, an online searchable repository of open resources. Second, it is working with a set of districts around the country to encourage them to adopt OER as course materials. Third, it is proposing a new regulation that would require any copyrightable intellectual property created with support of federal competitive grants to have an open license.

On the Learning Registry’s web site, one can enter key terms, and the search engine trawls its databases for resources. The web site itself does not house the resources but simply provides summaries plus links to the hosting sites.

As a former 9th-grade English teacher, I decided to search for Romeo and Juliet. The search engine churned out 232,949 results. Scrolling through the first 10 or 15 hits, I didn’t discern much rhyme or reason to them. The top result was a 1990s-looking webpage on “Shakespeare’s lingo,” with some links to other sites offering information on Shakespeare. Not particularly helpful. The second link took me to the National Endowment for the Humanities’ open-educational-resources page, which offered a two-class-period lesson on Romeo and Juliet, complete with worksheets, pictures, and links to an online “sonnet unscrambler” and other activities. The page also had comments from teachers and a crowdsourced rating system showing its perceived alignment to related Common Core English Language Arts Standards.

Although this repository might eventually be useful, it’s hard to see how it addresses the issues raised by many skeptics of open resources. If I were a teacher on my planning period (or worse, sitting at home on Sunday night, and trying to figure out what to do on Monday), I wouldn’t have the time to wade through the welter of materials, separate the wheat from the chaff, and try to sequence the new resources into my overall teaching plan. Interestingly, the #GoOpen repository is not targeting teachers as its main audience. If you click on the “educators” option, the text says, “The Learning Registry is not intended to be your portal into the world of digital resources but rather a conductor that developers can use to create the user-friendly and tailored tools you need.… The primary audiences for this site are publishers and developers.” Most likely, teachers will not be able to use this site to improve their classroom practice, at least not in the near future.

The Learning Registry project raises questions about the role of the federal government in creating such platforms. It is not clear, for example, why it is the government’s job to try to set up an end-run around the textbook industry. In fact, it isn’t clear that copyright protections are even the main barrier to getting quality resources into the classroom at a good price. The outdated procurement procedures and multi-year adoption cycles of states and districts are frequently named as primary barriers, but sending open resources to fix a procurement problem is not necessarily going to work. And if the #GoOpen initiative is successful, it could diminish or destroy textbook companies, which could put schools in a quandary should OER ultimately not pan out.

What’s more, states and private organizations are already working to create OER repositories, from EngageNY to Utah’s Open Textbook Project to Share My Lesson to BetterLesson and many others. Is the Learning Registry a solution in search of a problem? Does it undermine these other efforts? It would seem that the federal government is better positioned to help convene groups that are already working on OER, to disseminate what they are developing, and to give the federal imprimatur to these efforts so educators will feel more comfortable participating. The Department of Education could be a productive member of the supporting cast, but it shouldn’t be the star.

The second tranche of #GoOpen does focus on convening and supporting. Here, the federal government is collaborating with almost 40 school districts to promote the creation and adoption of openly licensed educational resources. Currently, 30 districts interested in starting to use OER are acting as “launch” districts, and 9 that have been working with OER for some time are acting as “ambassador” districts. A launch district must commit to replacing at least one textbook with open resources, and documenting how it did so, in order to enable sharing with others. Ambassador districts are tasked with sharing the materials they have created and giving assistance to launch districts.

Fourteen states have also committed to creating a statewide repository for openly licensed resources and working with districts to share those resources and tools to put them to use. As for the textbook industry, it appears to be watchfully waiting out these developments, not necessarily eager to act too quickly, but also recognizing that the industry might have to rethink its product lines should the preponderance of basic content become available for free.

The third component of #GoOpen is the government’s proposed rule. In October 2015, the Department of Education advanced a regulation that would, in its words, “require all copyrightable intellectual property created with Department discretionary competitive grant funds to have an open license.”

On one level, this makes perfect sense. If U.S. tax dollars are paying for the work that creates the intellectual property, that product should be made available for the use of U.S. taxpayers. That said, several big-name education researchers have pushed back on the proposed rule. A blistering letter cosigned by 15 researchers and funders (including Ann Arvin, vice provost for research at Stanford; Adam Gamoran, president of the W. T. Grant Foundation; and psychologists Angela Duckworth and Carol Dweck) laid out several problems with the rule.

Much of their complaint hinges on one of the very issues that motivated the initial work of Lessig and Creative Commons, that is, what counts as a “derivative work.” The letter cosigners fear that work created to make grant-funded research applicable or useful for schools and classrooms might be seen as “derivations” of the initial grant-funded work and thus might also fall under the rule. Many of the research centers that these cosigners represent rely on revenue generated by their projects and by the educational materials that derive from such activities. The proposed rule would effectively choke off that revenue stream, which is often reinvested in further research and development. At the same time, the letter writers contend, when they sell their products, they currently have some control over how they are used. The researchers worry that their products might be misused if they are simply out in the open, bearing the patina of being “research-” or “evidence-based.” If others are free to adapt the materials at will, they may well alter the integrity of any components that were validated by research or testing.

Is the Grass Greener?

The federal government should not throw its weight behind OER unless and until it knows that such resources are truly the wave of the future—and right now that is far from clear. Numerous unresolved issues pose serious concerns about the long-term viability of OER. By encouraging more states and districts to use these resources now, the federal government risks accelerating the demise of OER, not ensuring their survival.

According to some sources, there are more than one billion pieces of educational content available in the open-resources infrastructure. In addition to the 16,000 lessons on BetterLesson, Share My Lesson boasts more than 300,000. The problem is, teachers and district curriculum specialists can become overwhelmed by this torrent of materials. They might find 15 lessons on FDR’s first inaugural address. Which ones are the best? Are some more complete than others? Do they require specific technology or other resources that the school may or may not have? Hunting and digging through the options can be time-consuming and frustrating, even with the search tools that the platforms provide.

As noted earlier, even if one finds good materials, sequencing them into a lesson plan can be a challenge. Imagine that you are a teacher and you find a great video on the Lighthouse of Alexandria, or a terrific lesson on the Pythagorean theorem. Now you have to figure out how the material fits in with your overall teaching strategies and lesson content. By relying on open resources, teachers have to become curriculum designers as well, patching together resources, assessments, readings, and outside projects. Part of EngageNY’s raison d’être was to solve this very problem. Rather than simply posting isolated lessons, the site sequences them into an open curriculum. This curriculum has been wildly successful and shows the hunger that teachers have for more complete collections of ordered resources.

In addition to demand-side concerns, there are hurdles on the supply side. Creating high-quality educational materials is time-consuming. As more and more schools look for sophisticated digital resources, the technological skill necessary to create interactive or even computer-adaptive resources becomes more and more advanced. Only a tiny fraction of K–12 educators have the skills necessary to create materials in step with current developments in web design, interactivity, animation, and the like. That means that technical experts will probably have to create them, and these professionals will expect to be remunerated for their services.

For all of the bashing of textbook companies, they do have several distinct advantages in the marketplace. First, they have the technological infrastructure and expertise to create tools and resources that are visually appealing and computer adaptive. Second, they have the personnel and talent pool to research, write, fact check, and edit materials as well as ensure that these resources are aligned to relevant content standards. They also can sequence lessons, create units, produce wraparound professional development tools, and design assessments, presenting all of it in an integrated way that allows one-stop shopping for the customer. Can the OER movement accomplish these things today? Will it be able to in the near or medium-term future? Will individuals without a profit motive be willing to do the not-so-pleasant fact checking, coding, and other “administrivia” of creating integrated lessons, units, courses, and grade sequences? Will content producers be able to adapt their work for English language learners or students with special needs? All of that remains to be seen.

There are also important questions related to the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA) and other student-privacy issues that developers of open resources must wrestle with. For instance, if OER creators are going to collect any kind of student data (as computer-adaptive instructional tools must in order to adjust to how the student is progressing), who owns that data? What safeguards are in place to keep them secure? If there is a data breach, who is responsible?

Perhaps most important, we ask a lot from our teachers. Asking them to compile and use open-source materials to develop their own coherent lessons, units, or courses is requiring them to put in an enormous amount of extra time and energy. Asking them to create content (generally free of charge) that other teachers can use goes even further.

Where Do We Go from Here?

Educational resources have a long history, from Aelius Donatus’s fourth-century Ars grammatica to the McGuffey’s Readers to the Khan Academy. If we think about open educational resources as part of that timeline, they are the thinnest sliver at the very end. In the future, the movement will have to wrestle with several issues.

First, how can OER advocates maintain a steady stream of high-quality and relevant content? If they cannot keep pace with technology or pedagogical practice, they are going to be left behind.

Second, how do we avoid maxing out teachers? Yes, teachers want better content. They would also like to hold on to their nights and weekends. If open educational resources rely on teachers to spend lots of time sifting through materials or creating it themselves, that could send teachers back to textbooks posthaste.

Finally, is there a productive and appropriate role that the federal government can play? The federal government has extraordinary convening power and the infrastructure to collect and disseminate information about how schools and districts are solving problems. It also makes many large grants to education researchers, and requiring all of the products of their works to be openly licensed could spread what they have learned faster and more cheaply.

On the other hand, the federal government is putting its thumb on the scale for one particular type of content-creation mechanism, and that could disrupt the marketplace. If textbook companies do go out of business, what will happen 5 or 10 years hence? If open-content producers can’t keep up with the coding acumen necessary to make the adaptive technology that the federally funded research prescribes, schools will be in a serious bind. The very organizations that could fill that gap—the textbook companies—will be gone. And this scenario even assumes that the next administration or the next after that will still care about “going open.” It’s quite possible that they won’t. Will the private and nonprofit support be there to keep the movement going? Again, the answers are not clear.

It remains to be seen just how many states, districts, schools, and classrooms are going to #GoOpen. But given the unresolved questions that still surround their effort, open-resource proponents would be wise to heed these words of McGuffey’s Third Eclectic Reader:

“Shame and repentance are the sure consequences of rashness and want of thought.”

Michael Q. McShane is the director of education policy at the Show-Me Institute in Kansas City, Missouri.

It was at the fourth meeting about my son’s issues with pencils that I felt something snap in my soul. I was sitting with no fewer than six well-paid professionals in a windowless room at his school, along with my boy’s father and his special-education case manager. Adding up the wages we would all be paid in an hour, how many thousands of dollars had we spent discussing something that maybe cost a dime?

Corey has Asperger’s syndrome. Pencils challenge him for two reasons: He can’t tolerate the scratching noise they make on the paper. And his brain has a wrinkle called a processing speed lag; oversimplified, that means he thinks too fast for his hands to keep up. By the time the pencil’s in motion, he’s on to another thought.

Once, in 3rd grade, he flung his pencil across the classroom. The school social worker demanded I come get him—and have him evaluated for a behavioral disorder.

Math was the subject that set off the marathon of meetings with school specialists in 7th grade. Corey is very good at math, but it had become a tug of war. I pushed for him to be able to do his work using a keyboard, but his math teacher was holding out, insisting he use worksheets and show his work, in pencil.

The discussions were mind-numbing. We couldn’t get him an iPad, because that would be a shiny object no one else had. A Chromebook wouldn’t inspire envy, but where would it be kept? Should the school label it with his name, or would that imply it was his to keep?

As the questions persisted, my annoyance gave way to a much more fundamental concern. In Minneapolis, where I live, one in five students has a special education plan. Almost one-fourth of the students are learning English for the first time. Teachers struggle to reach every child, both those who enter their classrooms years behind and high achievers who need continual challenges. It’s a tall order.

This particular well-regarded middle school had rooms full of Apple computers that students mostly used to check their online grade trackers. And because math teachers are in perennially short supply, the school offered just one section of higher-level math. Kids had to earn their way into that class, and Corey, needing a different way to show his aptitude, would never manage it.

I asked myself: Why can’t we use the computers to differentiate instruction and also provide enrichment for students who need it? With too few excellent math instructors, why can’t we use technology to help close the teacher talent gap? The pencil wasn’t the problem, nor was Corey. The problem was the persistent belief that school must happen in a particular way: within four walls, with a single teacher presiding in front of the class.

Fast-forward a year to a very different special-ed planning meeting. Corey was finishing 8th grade at an innovative charter school where teachers coach students in creating individual road maps for meeting state academic standards. Technology, and creativity in using it, abound at Venture Academy. Students do math online, and Corey can use quizzes to puzzle through it.

Disagreements over Corey’s math instruction didn’t disappear this past year, but they were meaningful and productive. Instead of stubbornly battling over worksheets, my boy and his teacher interacted about his ability to regulate his anxiety when an equation or concept got hard. He’s learning to persist, discovering how good mastery feels, and—the brass ring for a young person with disabilities—figuring out how to advocate for himself.

Given the autonomy to tap into subjects in a way that ignites their passion, the kids at Corey’s school are soaring. Ninety-two percent qualify for free or reduced-price lunch, yet Venture’s students made bigger fall-to-spring gains than all but one of the city’s schools. And that one school has had its students since kindergarten.

Corey’s teachers spent last summer literally building the high school he’s now attending. There are conventional classrooms, but also breakout rooms where small groups can collaborate, a commons, and a quiet room for the many students who, like Corey, have sensory issues. Soon he’ll have internships two days a week and an occupational therapist to help him learn to manage new environments.

It’s a brave and hopeful thing. There will be joy and struggle and growth. And a few pencils, I imagine.

Based in Minneapolis, Beth Hawkins is an award-winning writer who covers K–12 education. She is the writer-in-residence at Education Post.

Strict attention to detail, long school days, and a singular focus on college are the hallmarks of “no excuses” charter schools. Families in cities across the United States have flocked to them as academic game changers, and research shows that many of their students beat the odds on standardized tests.

But critics allege that such gains are hollow. The “no excuses” approach, they say, amounts to a paternalistic culture of test preparation that detracts from real learning and comes at a steep cost to social and emotional health. Successfully navigating adult life, including the risks and rigors of college, will take much more.

Do “no excuses” charter high schools merely help students succeed on standardized tests? Or are their students more likely to succeed after they leave school behind? Is it test prep, or true learning? Little prior research is available on this question. And although there is a robust positive correlation between test performance and college enrollment, there is little existing evidence as to whether schools that increase test scores the most also help their students succeed at the next level.

To shed light on these questions, we studied Noble Street College Prep, a high-performing no-excuses charter high school in Chicago where admission is granted via randomized lottery. We analyzed student records to estimate the effect of attending Noble on college enrollment, persistence, and quality, using success in postsecondary studies as a proxy for success in young adulthood.

Overall, our results suggest that the benefits of attending a no-excuses charter high school extend beyond graduation and into early adulthood. Students who attended Noble Street College Prep were not only more likely to enroll in college, but also far more likely to enroll in a competitive four-year school. They were also more likely to persist in college, trends that continued for several years after high school graduation.

We were only able to obtain randomized lottery information from the College Prep campus, but data from a broader group of Noble high schools indicate they have higher college enrollment rates than other schools with similar student populations. This result suggests that the Noble Network of Charter Schools has continued to produce positive results as it has expanded.

These findings provide strong evidence that Noble measurably improves students’ preparation for college as opposed to just pushing marginal students into low-quality institutions. That is in keeping with its stated mission, “to prepare low-income students with the scholarship, dedication, and honor necessary to succeed in college and lead exemplary lives, and be a catalyst for education reform in Chicago.”

A College-Centered Culture

Noble Street College Prep was founded in 1999 as Noble Street Charter High School. In 2006, it was renamed and the network began to expand. The Noble Network currently includes 17 campuses with more than 11,000 students in the west and south sides of Chicago (Figure 1). The schools attract a predominantly poor, minority student body: 98 percent of students are black or Hispanic and 89 percent are eligible for free or reduced-price school meals.

Noble network schools follow key practices and principles typically associated with the no-excuses approach: frequent teacher feedback, data-driven instruction, high-dosage tutoring, increased instructional time, and high expectations. All students are expected to take college entrance exams and win acceptance to college. Acceptances are celebrated publicly, and counselors assist students in applying for grants and scholarships.

On average, students spent 7.5 hours per day and 185 days per year in school, compared to an average of 6.9 hours per day and 170 days per year in Chicago Public Schools (CPS) during the period this analysis covers. This implies that Noble students spent 18 percent more time in school than their peers in Chicago, on average, amounting to 858 hours over four years, or nearly three-quarters of a year of additional instruction.

The school day is structured to ensure that all students receive differentiated instruction in smaller-group settings, organized by performance on interim assessments. During morning and afternoon meetings, teachers track individual academic progress, mark behavioral infractions, and hold students accountable as a group for maintaining academic and behavioral standards. Each afternoon, teachers maintain office hours for optional academic support, which becomes mandatory if a student’s performance falls below a certain threshold. Most campuses also feature some form of afterschool tutoring provided by outside organizations.

Noble aggressively recruits teachers with a demonstrated track record of success and rewards teachers whose students demonstrate above-average academic growth with performance bonuses. Teachers receive regular feedback on their performance and attend campuswide professional development sessions each Friday. They meet regularly to analyze student data and collaboratively plan how to use it to drive instruction.

Looking at a Lottery

We used lottery data to compare Noble students to a comparison group of their peers throughout Chicago in order to estimate the effect of attending Noble on college enrollment and persistence. Our analysis focuses on the three cohorts of Noble students who enrolled between 2003 and 2005, as those were the only years in which students were enrolled via randomized lottery and for which school records were complete.

Our lottery-based results are only for Noble Street College Prep. However, we also report nonexperimental results on a wider group of schools in the Noble network based on school-average data from later years, through 2013.

We gathered data on student characteristics from Noble’s lottery and enrollment files. A typical lottery file included a student’s name, gender, date of birth, address, 8th-grade school, sibling indicators, lottery result (accepted or waitlist), and waitlist position. We reviewed records for both lottery losers and winners, which we defined as students immediately accepted at Noble or offered one of the first 10 waitlist positions.

Noble also provided us with enrollment records, which we merged with the lottery data to identify which students eventually enrolled. To ensure that all students in our analysis had an equal chance of being accepted, we exclude students who were automatically accepted because they had an older sibling enrolled in a Noble school. If students entered multiple lotteries over a series of years, we only included the first entry.

We linked the lottery data to information on college enrollment and persistence from the National Student Clearinghouse (NSC), a nonprofit organization that maintains a database of students’ college enrollment and graduation records. The link was made using each student’s name, date of birth, and expected high-school graduation date. At the time of our submission, the NSC database included enrollment records at more than 90 percent of colleges and universities in the United States. By necessity, we assumed that students who did not match any records in the NSC database never enrolled in college.

Noble also provided us with internally collected data on college enrollment of their graduating seniors, which were consistent with the NSC match for 93 percent of students. We use the NSC data throughout our analysis because they are available for both lottery winners and losers.

We also linked the lottery data to publicly available CPS data on students’ middle schools, including the percentage of 8th graders who scored proficient or better on the math section of the Illinois Standards Achievement Test (ISAT), the percentage scoring proficient or better on the reading section, and the percentage of black or Hispanic students. In total, we were able to match 72 percent of our sample of lottery applicants to their 8th-grade school’s CPS summary records.

Like students in most Chicago schools during the period studied, students who won the lottery and enrolled at Noble were roughly 90 percent black or Hispanic, though the school enrolled a much larger share of Hispanic students than the average charter or traditional public school at that time. In more recent years, the network’s collective student body has been quite similar to the rest of the district on nonracial dimensions. Noble students are marginally less likely to qualify for special education, but slightly more likely to be eligible for a free or subsidized lunch.

Summary data also show that Noble students perform extremely well on standardized tests. More precisely, Noble students enter high school with slightly lower test performance than the average public school student, though significantly higher than the average student at a Chicago charter school. However, by 11th grade, Noble students score markedly higher than the CPS average and the charter average on all sections of the ACT. In the 2013–14 school year, all 10 Noble campuses with enrolled 11th graders ranked in the top quarter of all Chicago high schools for overall ACT performance, scoring in the top 33 out of 156 schools with reported results. In addition, Noble students were also more likely to earn a high school diploma. Students entering 9th grade at a Noble campus were 21 percentage points more likely to graduate within five years of enrollment than their peers in traditional public schools, and 20 percentage points less likely to drop out within five years of enrollment.

The crux of our analysis is a comparison of lottery winners and losers, so it is crucial that the process used to determine who was offered a seat at Noble was truly random. A comparison of students’ data from before the lottery confirms that the two groups are similar with respect to all characteristics we can observe. We found no significant differences between lottery winners and losers on characteristics, including gender, age at high school entry, and the math and reading scores and racial composition of their middle schools.

Effect on College Enrollment

We found that students who won the Noble lottery were far more likely to enroll and persist in college than their peers who lost the lottery and thus attended high school elsewhere. Lottery winners were 10 percentage points more likely to enroll in college than students who did not win the lottery, a 17 percent increase compared to the losers’ college enrollment rate of 59 percent. When we adjusted the results for the fact that not all lottery winners attended Noble, we find that actually enrolling in Noble for any length of time increased college enrollment by 13 percentage points, or 22 percent (Figure 2). Our main analyses control for students’ age, gender, and the average test scores at their middle schools, but we obtain similar results from a simple comparison of lottery winners and losers, as we would expect given the use of the lottery.

A natural concern is that the increase in college enrollment might come at the expense of quality. What if Noble merely pushes students who are on the fence about whether or not to attend college into lower-quality schools? We found that this was not the case by examining the type of degrees offered at the schools students attended, as well as the test scores of incoming students, as a proxy for rigor and quality.

Noble students were 15 percentage points more likely to attend a four-year school and 14 percentage points more likely to attend a college where the median two-subject SAT score was above 1000—increases of 50 and 78 percent, respectively. By comparison, they were 5 percentage points more likely to attend a two-year school after graduation, a difference that was not statistically significant.

Enrolling in school is one thing. But did Noble students stick with their studies? We found that Noble students were 17 percentage points more likely to persist for two semesters or more, and 12 percentage points more likely to persist for four semesters or more. These differences in persistence were driven mainly by students enrolled at four-year colleges.

We reviewed the data to determine if the impacts of attending Noble varied based on students’ gender, middle school quality, and neighborhood poverty rate. We found few consistent patterns in the results to suggest that Noble was most effective for specific groups of students. We also investigated whether college enrollment patterns shifted over time, given the network’s rapid expansion while the students in our sample were enrolled, and found no evidence that Noble’s effectiveness declined appreciably over this period.

Success at Scale?

The experimental results clearly demonstrate that early cohorts attending Noble Street College Prep were more likely to enroll in college, enroll in selective four-year institutions, and remain enrolled for at least four semesters. But those results are for just one school. Can we interpret them to mean that the academic practices and policies implemented throughout the Noble network lead to improved college outcomes? What about at other no-excuses charter high schools with similar practices? Or was there something unique about the original campus that accounts for its students’ success?

To provide evidence on the generalizability of our main results, we carried out a secondary, nonexperimental analysis using school-average data reported by CPS to compare a broader group of Noble high schools to other Chicago high schools in later years. We examined average college enrollment rates for the graduating class of 2013 at 104 schools, seven of which were part of the Noble network. Our analysis takes into account the scores of incoming students on the ACT Explore exam administered to Chicago students in the fall of 9th grade, as well as the racial composition and percentage of students eligible for a subsidized lunch or for special education.

We found that, at the seven Noble high schools with graduating seniors in 2013, students were 19 percentage points more likely to enroll in college than one would predict based on their incoming ability (Figure 3). Noble’s college enrollment rates were among the best in the district, and rates at all seven schools surpassed expectations by a wide margin. Comparing Noble high schools only to other charter schools and adjusting for other differences in students’ background produces an estimated Noble effect of 13 percentage points on college enrollment—a large, significant difference. While complete data were not available for any other year, we repeated this analysis with the Class of 2012 using 10th-grade test scores to control for differences in student ability and found, reassuringly, a similar pattern.

We should be careful when interpreting these nonexperimental results. The research design does not benefit from the random variation used in our earlier analysis, so we cannot rule out the possibility that the students who enrolled in Noble network schools, despite their below-average test scores, would have been more likely to attend college anyway. Nevertheless, we find it reassuring that the best evidence we can muster indicates that Noble students continue to outperform expectations even during the network’s rapid expansion.

Implications

As no-excuses charter schools continue to expand, it is critical to understand whether the short-term academic gains they typically produce translate into long-term improvements in their students’ quality of life. We believe that our findings present the strongest evidence to date of long-lasting academic benefits, and should be a cause for cautious optimism. We see three elements of this analysis that should be of particular interest.

First, Noble’s educational model is broadly consistent with the practices of high-performing charter schools, and our secondary analysis suggests that scaling and reproducing these results is feasible. The effects we estimate are large, persistent, and not driven by any particular subgroup of students. While evidence is strongest in the lottery-based randomized analysis, our estimates for a larger group of students reaffirm those initial estimates.

Second, to our knowledge, our results are the first to demonstrate conclusively that a high school intervention can simultaneously improve overall college enrollment, persistence, and quality. Other studies linking high school quality to college, including evaluations of a public school-choice program in Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools in North Carolina and of Harlem Children’s Zone Promise Academy in New York City have found impacts that are either transitory or not statistically significant.

Finally, we demonstrate the effectiveness of an intervention that occurs relatively late in students’ academic lives. Much of the public conversation around school improvement focuses on early childhood and the elementary years, in an effort to prevent or lessen inequitable outcomes for poor children. Yet Noble’s intensive academic program does not start until 9th grade, after many of its students have spent their formative years in low-performing schools. Relatively soon after, they are prepared to enroll and succeed in college, a critical step to success in adulthood. It is clear from their experience that such efforts are never too late.

Matthew Davis is a doctoral student in Applied Economics at the University of Pennsylvania. Blake Heller is a doctoral student in Public Policy at Harvard University.

“What’s the matter with Newton?” That’s the question Richard Whitmire posed about my Massachusetts hometown in early October on the education-focused website The 74. His query was provoked by reports of rising opposition in Newton and other affluent Boston suburbs to Question 2, a ballot measure to lift the cap on the number of charter-school seats in many of the state’s urban centers.

With K–12 education policy barely registering as an issue at the presidential level this election cycle, Question 2 has given Massachusetts voters a unique chance to weigh in on the future of school choice in their state. Approval of the measure would allow up to 12 new charter schools to open in Massachusetts each year and would eliminate the state’s cap on the share of each district’s revenue that can be sent to charters. With tens of thousands of students on charter waiting lists and multiple high-quality operators poised to expand, opponents and proponents of Question 2 agree that the stakes are high.

The contest, which has attracted tens of millions of dollars in outside spending on both sides, marks an important moment for the charter movement nationally. Results from the 2016 Education Next survey, reported in this issue, show that support for the creation of charter schools has remained steady, with 58 percent of respondents in favor and only 28 percent opposed. But there are also signs of a growing partisan divide on the issue, with Republicans 15 percentage points more likely than Democrats to express support.

Question 2 offers the clearest test to date of whether it is possible to build popular support for robust charter-school growth in a deeply blue state. In Massachusetts, strong authorizing policies and a healthy supply of teacher talent have combined to produce a set of urban charter schools with stellar track records. If support for expansion cannot be won here, it seems hard to imagine success elsewhere.

Whitmire’s concern about skepticism toward Question 2 in the Boston suburbs appears to be well-founded. Polls continue to suggest a close contest on the measure, but opposition has grown in recent weeks. Thanks to the efforts of the Massachusetts Teachers Association, yard signs urging a “No on 2” vote far outnumber those in favor in my neighborhood. Days after Whitmire’s article appeared, the Newton School Committee added its voice to the more than 150 school committees statewide that have voted to officially oppose Question 2.

One wonders whether the committee members have fully thought through what is at stake. The current cap on charter schools in Massachusetts is binding only in urban districts like Boston, Holyoke, Chelsea, and Lawrence, where a sizable fraction of students already attend charters. The limit has no implications for well-heeled communities like Newton, which, 23 years after the state first permitted the creation of charter schools, has exactly none. Clearly, the charter growth that would result from a “yes” vote would be concentrated in the cities where the charter presence is already strong. In fact, the measure requires that the state board of education give preference to charter applications in districts where student performance falls in the bottom quartile in the state and where parental demand is greatest.

If the urban cap remains in place, however, just where does the committee think the state’s ever-ambitious charter-school operators will turn next? Faced with few prospects for expanding in the cities, some of them will probably look elsewhere. They might even consider a place like Newton, where, despite the school district’s vaunted reputation, tutoring centers like the Russian School of Mathematics, Kumon Learning, and a growing number of science-focused afterschool programs do a thriving business catering to competitive parents disappointed with the district’s offerings in math and science.

Could a charter middle school with high academic expectations and an emphasis on project-based STEM learning find footing in the district? The thought is almost enough to make this Newton resident—the father of two children in its elementary schools—rethink his support for Question 2.

A “no” vote on Question 2 would clearly be a setback for education reform in Massachusetts and fuel for charter opponents in other states. It is unfortunate that voters who have exercised school choice through the housing market are in a position to deny new options to families of lesser means.

— Martin R. West

Martin R. West is an associate professor of education at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, deputy director of Harvard’s Program on Education Policy and Governance, and editor-in-chief of Education Next.

The U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights announced this spring that the number of suspensions and expulsions in the nation’s public schools had dropped 20 percent between 2012 and 2014.

The news was welcomed by those who oppose the frequent use of suspensions and expulsions, known as exclusionary discipline. In recent years, many policymakers and educators have called for the adoption of alternative disciplinary strategies that allow students to stay in school and not miss valuable learning time. Advocates for discipline reform contend that suspensions are meted out in a biased way, because minority students and those with disabilities receive a disproportionate share of them. Some also assert that reducing suspensions would improve school climate for all students.

Government leaders have taken steps to encourage school discipline reform. The Obama administration has embarked on several initiatives to encourage schools to move away from suspensions and toward alternative strategies. In 2011, the Department of Education (DOE) and the Department of Justice (DOJ) launched the Supportive School Discipline Initiative to coordinate federal efforts in this area. In January 2014, the DOE released a resource package with a variety of informational materials designed to support state and local efforts to improve school climate and discipline. The package included a “Dear Colleague” letter, issued jointly by DOE and DOJ, warning against intentional racial discrimination but also stating that schools unlawfully discriminate even “if a policy is neutral on its face—meaning that the policy itself does not mention race—and is administered in an evenhanded manner but has a disparate impact, i.e., a disproportionate and unjustified effect on students of a particular race.”

Discipline reform efforts are also underway at the state and school-district levels. As of May 2015, 22 states and the District of Columbia had revised their laws in order to require or encourage schools to: limit the use of exclusionary discipline practices; implement supportive (that is, nonpunitive) discipline strategies that rely on behavioral interventions; and provide support services such as counseling, dropout prevention, and guidance services for at-risk students. And as of the 2015–16 school year, 23 of the 100 largest school districts nationwide had implemented policy reforms requiring nonpunitive discipline strategies and/or limits to the use of suspensions. In an April 2014 survey of 500 district superintendents conducted by the School Superintendents Association (AASA), 84 percent of respondents reported that their districts had updated their code of conduct within the previous three years.

What evidence supports the call for discipline reform? How might alternative strategies affect students and schools? In this article, we describe the critiques of exclusionary discipline and then examine the research base on which discipline policy reform rests. We also describe the alternative approaches that are gaining traction in America’s schools and present the evidence on their efficacy. Throughout, we consider what we know (and don’t yet know) about the effect of reducing suspensions on a variety of important outcomes, such as school safety, school climate, and student achievement.

In general, we find that the evidence for critiques of exclusionary discipline and in support of alternative strategies is relatively thin. In part, this is because many discipline reforms at the state and local levels have only been implemented in the last few years. While disparities in school discipline by race and disability status have been well documented, the evidence is inconclusive as to whether or not these disparate practices involve racial bias and discrimination. Further, the evidence on alternative strategies is mainly correlational, suggesting that more research is necessary to uncover how alternative approaches to suspensions affect school safety and student outcomes.

Addressing such questions is vitally important, because a safe school climate is essential for student success. A recent National Center for Education Statistics report documented downward trends in suspensions, student victimization, and reports of bullying. Since 2006, out-of-school suspensions have declined, with more recent declines in expulsions (see Figure 1). Still, more than one-third of teachers in 2012 reported that student behavior problems and tardiness interfered with their teaching. Regardless of the kind of discipline districts choose to employ, policymakers and school leaders must recognize that school disorder and violence have adverse effects on all students. For example, students who were exposed to Hurricane Katrina evacuees with significant behavior problems experienced short-term increases in school absences and discipline problems themselves. Recent evidence also shows that exposure to disruptive peers during elementary school worsens student achievement and later life outcomes, including high school achievement, college enrollment, and earnings (see “Domino Effect,” research, Summer 2009). These findings highlight the importance of closely monitoring the effects of discipline reform on all students.

Critiques of Exclusionary Discipline

Disproportionate suspension rates. There is little doubt that students of color and those with disabilities face exclusionary discipline much more often than their peers do. Racial disparities in suspensions begin as early as preschool, with black children comprising 18 percent of enrollment in preschools but 48 percent of preschool children experiencing one or more suspensions, according to the federal Office for Civil Rights. These disparities extend through primary, middle, and high school, where black students comprise 16 percent of all enrolled students but 34 percent of students suspended once (and 43 percent of students receiving multiple out-of-school suspensions) (see Figure 2). Furthermore, gaps in suspension rates between black students and white students have grown over time, doubling between 1989 and 2010. Youth enrolled in special education also experience higher rates of suspension: in 2011, students with disabilities were suspended at twice the rate of nondisabled students.

What accounts for these disparities? Do they stem from discrimination and racial bias? The possibility of such bias is one justification for the Office of Civil Rights’ involvement in the issue of school discipline. However, it could be that special-education and minority students are disciplined more often because they commit more infractions than their peers. If that is so, the greater frequency of violations among minority students could be caused by factors outside of the school’s purview, such as more exposure to poverty, crime, and life trauma resulting from residential and economic inequality. Many disabled students also face heightened life stresses that could contribute to misbehavior.

Some evidence does suggest that students with disabilities and racial minorities tend to be punished more severely than their peers for the same offenses. In 2011, Russell Skiba and colleagues analyzed school-level data on disciplinary referrals in 364 schools and found that black and Hispanic students were more likely than white students to receive suspensions or expulsions for “minor misbehavior,” such as inappropriate verbal language, minor physical contact, disruption, and defiance. Unfortunately, the study was unable to control for students’ prior infractions in school, a factor that may influence the severity of the response to a given offense. In a separate study, Russell Skiba and Natasha Williams further revealed that black students in the same schools or districts were not engaged in levels of disruptive behavior that would warrant higher rates of exclusionary discipline than white peers.

Recent evidence from Arkansas confirms that black students attending public schools there are punished more harshly than their white peers, but also suggests that most of the difference is attributable to the schools that students attend. Researchers found that, over the course of three school years, black students received, on average, 0.5 more days of punishment (including in-school and out-of-school suspension and expulsion days), even when controlling for special-education status and comparing students at the same grade level. However, they showed that cross-school differences explained most of this aggregate difference; that is, when the researchers looked only at students attending the same school, the racial differences became much more modest, with black students receiving only about 0.07 more days of punishment than whites. Within schools, the authors also found a statistically significant, though modest, difference in the length of punishment for special-education students, approximately 0.10 days more per suspension.

One recent study using nationally representative longitudinal survey data considered the role of prior problem behavior in disparate suspension rates. When the study authors controlled for whether these students exhibited prior behavioral problems (in kindergarten, 1st, and 3rd grades), they found that the racial gap in 8th-grade suspension rates disappeared, leading them to conclude that the disproportionate use of suspensions was probably not the result of racial bias. This conclusion is subject to question, however, since the authors compared results from statistical models that relied on different underlying samples, owing to student attrition within the study. Further, the study was unable to address any biases implicit in the measure of prior behavioral problems; nor did it consider that a child might be labeled as a “troublemaker” early on, which might predispose authorities to mete out harsher consequences.

One of us (Steinberg) has shown that schools in Chicago serving students from communities with lower poverty and crime rates tend to be safer schools, especially where there are social resources available in the community. Furthermore, schools serving students from neighborhoods with the highest crime rates and the fewest social resources predominantly serve African American students; thus, most of the schools in Chicago where students and teachers report the lowest levels of safety serve a majority African American student population. These findings suggest the need for increased attention to how neighborhood disadvantage influences student conduct, and for policymakers and school leaders to consider the kinds of school resources that could support students facing adverse home and community circumstances.

Overuse of suspensions for minor offenses. Critics also say that exclusionary discipline is used too frequently in response to lower-level, nonviolent student behavior. For example, nearly half of all suspensions issued in California public schools during the 2011–12 school year were for “willful defiance,” a category of student misconduct that includes refusing to remove a hat or turn off a cell phone, or school uniform violations. Nationwide, insubordination has accounted for an increasing share of all serious disciplinary actions—that is, suspensions for five or more days, transfers to specialized schools, and expulsion—from 22 percent during the 1999–2000 school year to 43 percent in 2007–08 (see Figure 3). Over the same period, the proportion of serious disciplinary actions for more serious student misconduct (such as possession of alcohol, drugs, or a weapon) declined from 50 to
22 percent.

Negative effects on school climate. Advo-cates of discipline reform contend that exclusionary discipline may have adverse consequences for school climate. While zero-tolerance policies aim to improve school climate and safety by removing disruptive students, research evidence finds that teachers and students in schools with high suspension rates report feeling less safe than their counterparts in schools serving similar students that have lower suspension rates. Schools with higher suspension rates also have greater teacher attrition and turnover. According to the American Psychological Association’s Zero Tolerance Task Force, there is no hard evidence that exclusionary policies reduce school violence.

While the evidence does suggest that school climate is worse when exclusionary discipline practices are more widespread, this evidence is not causal. We don’t know whether the use of exclusionary discipline causes school climates to deteriorate, or if administrators respond to unruly climates by clamping down on school discipline. Therefore, policymakers and practitioners must remain cautious about the potential effects that newly implemented reforms may have on school climate and student safety. And even if schools reduce their use of exclusionary practices, it doesn’t necessarily follow that they will cease to mete out these punishments disproportionately by race.

Negative effects on student outcomes. Critics also contend that exclusionary discipline can trigger a downward spiral in students’ lives inside and outside of school, leading to the so-called school-to-prison pipeline. Unfortunately, research on the causal effect of suspensions on academic achievement and other student outcomes is limited. Students who are removed from school do tend to have lower achievement on standardized exams; are less likely to pass state assessments; and are more likely to repeat a grade, drop out of school, and become involved in the juvenile justice system. The AASA’s 2014 survey found that 92 percent of superintendents believe that out-of-school suspensions are associated with negative student outcomes, including lost instructional time and increased disengagement, absenteeism, truancy, and dropout rates. These correlations, however, do not tell us whether suspended students would have experienced these adverse outcomes even if they hadn’t received suspensions.

Alternative Practices

What are the alternative approaches to exclusionary discipline that are currently being implemented? And what is the evidence that they “work”—that is, do they reduce suspensions and expulsions without leading to increased disorder or violence?

Discipline reforms fall into two main categories: programs and policies. Some reforms are implemented at the district or state level, some at the school level, and some are targeted directly toward specific individuals or groups of students. Table 1 provides an overview of reforms by type and level of implementation.

Which of these alternatives are most effective at reducing suspensions and improving student outcomes? Some of the approaches are “evidence-based,” meaning they have been the subject of evaluation research that can support causal conclusions about their effectiveness. However, many have yet to be rigorously evaluated. As reform efforts quickly outpace research evidence, many administrators, teachers, and policymakers are left to wonder: Are the new approaches having the intended effect? And what unintended effects might they have on students?

Program-Based Interventions

Targeted programs. Programs that use the Response to Intervention (RTI) model provide services to specific youth, with the goal of preventing further behavioral problems by responding to behavioral issues as they arise. A key goal of the approach is to tailor the intervention to the student: if a student does not appear to respond to a given approach, a more intensive intervention is applied. While one case study by Sarah Fairbanks and colleagues in 2007 suggests that office referrals decreased following implementation of RTI, and teachers rated student misbehavior to be less intense and less frequent, few rigorous evaluations of RTI have been conducted.

Another targeted program, restorative justice, uses peaceful and nonpunitive approaches to address misbehavior and solve problems in school. While rigorous evidence on the causal impact of restorative justice on student outcomes is scarce, Trevor Fronius and colleagues reviewed the descriptive literature and found that all studies documented decreases in the use of suspensions, expulsions, or violent student behavior, as the program was implemented.

Some programs combine multiple approaches, such as the Preventing Recidivism through Opportunities, Mentoring, Interventions, Supports, and Education (PROMISE) program in Broward County, Florida. PROMISE employs both restorative justice principles and an RTI approach to promote conflict resolution and prevent gang involvement, drug use, and violence among students. Qualitative research by Joan Collins-Ricketts and Anne Rambo suggests that PROMISE is associated with lower suspension rates. However, given the lack of empirical evidence on the program, we cannot discern whether such outcomes result from PROMISE or from other, independent factors. Nor do we know about the impact of the program on school climate, order, and safety—or outcomes for students in general.

Not all studies of targeted programs show promise. The Reconnecting Youth program provided classroom-based instruction for high school students at risk of dropping out or who exhibited problematic behavior. Hyunsan Cho and colleagues conducted an experimental study of the program’s impact and found no significant effect on delinquency immediately following the intervention or at the six-month follow-up.

School-based programs. Schoolwide Positive Behavioral Interventions and Supports (SWPBIS) takes a “systems approach,” targeting a school’s overall social culture and providing intensive behavior supports, such as functional behavioral assessments, identifying contexts where behaviors occur, and teaching communication, social, and self-management skills, as needed. The approach aims to change school culture by setting clear behavioral expectations, designing a continuum of consequences for infractions, and reinforcing positive behavior. SWPBIS is one of the only interventions supported by strong evaluation research. Multiple experimental studies, including those by Catherine Bradshaw and Robert Horner and their colleagues, find that SWPBIS decreases school suspensions and improves student perceptions of school safety.

While SWPBIS focuses primarily on building social and emotional skills, the Safe and Responsive Schools (SRS) project aims to reduce school violence and improve student behavior. SRS focuses on preventative efforts, such as conflict resolution and crafting a civility code, and on developing specific responses to disruptive behaviors, such as behavior-support classrooms as an alternative to office referrals. A descriptive analysis of four schools using SRS conducted by Russell Skiba and colleagues in 2006 found overall decreases in suspensions from the first year of SRS implementation to the end of the fourth year, with larger decreases in suspensions for students with disabilities.

District-level programs. Programs at the district level often involve redefining how teachers and school resource officers (SROs) interact with students. (An SRO is a law enforcement or security officer assigned to a school who has the ability to make arrests and respond to calls for service.) Teacher training programs, such as the My Teacher Partner Program (MTP), provide support for teachers to reflect on interactions with students and develop strategies to address behavior issues to achieve positive outcomes. One experimental study in 2014 by Anne Gregory and colleagues found that teachers in the MTP program suspended students less often than teachers in the control group, and when suspensions did occur, MTP teachers had equal suspension rates for African American and white students.

Another district-level approach involves working with SROs to improve interactions with students and prevent the escalation of school-based incidents that are referred to juvenile court. SRO programs can provide training for SROs in cultural competence and teen psychology; forge agreements between districts, family courts, and police departments to resolve discipline issues using alternative strategies; and limit the ability of SROs to arrest students. Some school districts have reported decreases in court referrals after implementation of SRO programs, especially for minority students, but there is little rigorous evidence on the efficacy of this approach.

Policy-Based Interventions

In contrast to programmatic approaches, some reforms involve changing the policies that guide districts, schools, and teachers as they respond to student misbehavior.

Targeted policies, such as early-warning indicator systems, use large administrative databases to systematically predict which students will struggle with academics or behavioral problems, with the intention of targeting those students early, before problems escalate. While little impact-evaluation research exists on the efficacy of early-warning indicator systems in reducing the use of exclusionary discipline, implementation research suggests that if early-warning systems are not paired with a behavioral-support approach, they are unlikely to be effective.

School-level policies. Schoolwide disciplinary codes, such as the “no excuses” policies employed in KIPP schools, aim to set high behavioral expectations for all students. Under such a policy, students often receive detentions for minor infractions (such as uniform violations) and automatic suspensions for other offenses. While this approach would seem to resemble an exclusionary policy, it aims to remove a sense of unfairness from the disciplinary scheme by holding all students to uniformly high standards. Evidence on the impact of no-excuses discipline on student behavior and suspensions is rigorous, but results are mixed. Two recent studies, one by Joshua Angrist and colleagues and another by Matthew Johnson and colleagues, found that attendance at urban charter middle schools with high behavioral expectations is associated with a higher number of days suspended relative to attendance at traditional schools in the same districts. Another study by Philip Gleason and colleagues found no difference in suspensions between charter school attendees and students who did not win the admissions lottery. A fourth study by Christina Tuttle and colleagues found no difference in student perceptions of the disciplinary environment among middle school KIPP lottery winners relative to lottery losers.

District-level policies. Changes to district policies guiding school discipline and student conduct constitute a direct approach to reducing exclusionary discipline. Many states and districts across the country have revised their student codes of conduct in recent years to remove harsh responses to minor disciplinary infractions and shorten the length of suspensions. Revising student codes of conduct to reduce the use of suspensions, particularly for lower-level offenses, shows promise as a strategy to reduce suspension usage (as in a study we conducted in Philadelphia). Notably, new evidence from Nick Mader and colleagues in Chicago finds that there may be few (if any) costs to school climate associated with reducing the length of out-of-school suspensions for more serious student misconduct. Ninth-grade students there reported neither increases in bullying behavior nor a worsening of peer relationships in the year the code of conduct reform was implemented. In fact, students reported that student-teacher trust improved by the second post-reform year.

Looking Ahead

Across the country, disciplinary programs and policies are trending away from exclusionary practices and toward a variety of alternatives, with the endorsement of federal and state governments. Yet the evidence base about the harm caused by suspensions, and the potential benefits of other approaches, is surprisingly thin. Clearly, there is a great need for rigorous evaluation research, which should focus both on the impact of school discipline reforms and on their potential unintended consequences.

Future research should address some key questions. First, is the reform an effective approach to reducing suspensions? Has it been implemented with fidelity? Second, even if reforms succeed in decreasing the number of suspensions, do they also succeed in reducing disproportionate suspension rates by race and disability? Descriptive evidence from Buffalo, New York, suggests that they may not. A report by Citizen Action of New York in 2015 found that after the district reformed its code of conduct to limit suspensions for nonviolent and minor misbehavior, the use of short-term suspensions decreased in 60 percent of Buffalo’s public schools, and long-term suspensions dropped in half of them. Yet black and Hispanic students continued to receive 80 percent of all suspensions, and were 6.5 and 3.7 times more likely to be suspended than white students, respectively.

Third, what are the impacts of discipline policy reforms on students who are disciplined, and do reforms have “spillover” effects on their peers? Making significant changes to codes of conduct or implementing programs to shift the culture of a school may cause difficulties for teachers and students, at least in the short term. Evidence from Chicago indicates that, following a district reform aimed at reducing the length of suspensions for more serious offenses, school attendance increased among disciplined students with no adverse effect on the attendance of their peers. Though the increase in school attendance among disciplined students led to only very modest improvements in their academic performance on state reading exams, it did not have a substantively negative effect on their peers’ academic performance.

With further research focused on these key questions, we may come to better understand the implications of discipline policy reforms—how they affect suspension use, and also how they change school climate; interactions among students, peers, and teachers; and the academic performance of all students. Children need a safe, secure learning environment if they are to thrive in school. Until we fully understand the benefits and costs of the various approaches to discipline, both exclusionary and alternative, we will fall short of providing that supportive climate.

Matthew P. Steinberg is assistant professor at the University of Pennsylvania’s Graduate School of Education. Johanna Lacoe is a researcher at Mathematica Policy Research.

Download a version of this piece with full citations here.

The No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) was a comprehensive, bipartisan response to a failing and inequitable public-education system, a system that held no one accountable for student learning, and as a result, consistently failed its most vulnerable charges. States were required to measure the academic achievement of all children, with schools accountable for results. Outcomes improved, particularly among minority and low-income students, according to data from the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP). But progress has not come fast enough, in part because NCLB came with an unintended consequence. The law’s overly prescriptive approach created a perverse incentive for states to lower academic expectations in order to avoid federal sanctions.

Its successor, the similarly bipartisan Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA), moves to correct some of those flaws by giving states more autonomy to fashion their own accountability systems and intervention policies. As states navigate implementation, I encourage them to use their expanded authority to strengthen accountability rather than retreat from it. This is in their students’ interest, and their own self-interest. Look no further than research from Eric Hanushek, Jens Ruhose, and Ludger Woessmann about the strong correlation between achievement in a state’s classrooms and growth in a state’s economy to understand some of the compelling reasons to improve education (see “It Pays to Improve School Quality,” features, Summer 2016).

A successful school-accountability system contains three basic elements: It gauges education quality and progress by measuring data that accurately reflect student achievement; it disseminates the results to parents and the public in a simple and transparent manner; and it rewards and incentivizes success and provides interventions to support low-performing schools and reverse failure. It is informative and focused on criteria that clearly support student success.

Lessons from Florida

Make no mistake: retreating from accountability is the easier path. In Florida, where I served as governor from 1999 to 2007, we know this from experience. Dating back to the 1970s, our state leaders attempted a series of ineffective initiatives to turn around one of the worst public-education systems in the country. At one time, almost half our 4th graders did not qualify as even basic readers on NAEP.

A bold, new direction was required. And so in 1999, we overhauled our school system through accountability legislation that made student learning the focus of education. We adopted an accountability formula based on students’ academic performance, requiring schools to focus resources on elevating achievement. Our letter-grade system gave parents a ready tool to assess school quality and make informed choices for their children. And even as the statewide Florida Education Association vehemently opposed these reforms, our students went on to become national leaders in making progress on NAEP (see Figure 1).

That experience taught us that an accountability formula should reflect only objective measures of academic achievement. The focus should be on student performance on grade-level assessments in core subjects, and student growth on those assessments from year to year. At the high school level, other indicators such as four-year graduation rates and success in college- and career-ready coursework, including Advanced Placement, IB, or industry certification classes, should be added.

Data on inputs such as teacher training, disciplinary policies, attendance policies, and school resources may suggest important school-improvement strategies and should also be made available to parents. I don’t disagree with a “dashboard” approach—it can provide important information to parents and inform intervention strategies.

But such data should not be included in an accountability formula. The bottom line must be student achievement. Standardizing inputs into an accountability formula diverts attention from student achievement, by micromanaging how districts, principals, and teachers run their classrooms. It bogs them down and reduces their flexibility in developing strategies that might work best for their individual situations.

As such, an effective accountability system requires rigorous assessments that accurately measure students’ knowledge of state standards and preparedness for college or a career. Expectations for students and schools should be continuously evaluated and upgraded, with a realistic but constant raising of the bar.

In addition, teachers need to fully understand the goals and what is expected of them. This means state accountability systems must also be aligned to individual teacher’s classroom goals: Help all students meet proficient or higher performance; help all students make significant progress from wherever they were performing in the prior year; and pay laser-like attention to ensuring struggling students are on track to reach proficiency.

An effective formula includes both achievement and growth. This creates positive pressure for improvement, even in high-performing schools, and it recognizes the efforts of the extraordinary schools that have a disproportionate number of low-performing students but are making strong gains. The progress of the lowest-performing students should be included as well, regardless of what “subgroup” they’re in, or the size of that subgroup. This ensures they receive the support they need to bring them up to grade level.

Simple and Transparent Reporting

An effective accountability system also requires that parents have a clear and concise measure of school performance. They should not have to struggle through confusing mazes of charts and spreadsheets to find out if their children are in a good learning environment. To get there, we begin with a simple, comprehensive, actionable score that captures the overall success of a school in advancing academic achievement. The most intuitive approach for parents is grading schools on an A‒F scale.

School letter grades have a distinct advantage for educators as well: they are very effective at focusing educators on the goal of maximizing academic achievement. After the implementation of Florida’s letter-grade system, decades of failure were quickly reversed and our state became a national leader in advancing student achievement. Other states took notice and began implementing similar reforms, and today, there are currently 17 states using an A‒F grading scale.

An analysis of the eight states with multiple years of implementation of the A‒F grading system found they were making faster improvements on NAEP 4th- and 8th-grade reading and math tests than the nation as a whole. The analysis, by the Foundation for Excellence in Education (ExcelinEd), included Arizona, Florida, Indiana, Louisiana, Mississippi, New Mexico, Oklahoma, and Utah.

Letter grades are especially helpful in identifying schools that are struggling. Failure is perpetuated when it is hidden. But you can’t hide from an “F.”

An “F” is not a punishment. It is a distress signal. States and districts can respond with any number of strategies, including more resources, instructional coaches, a change in leadership, and more effective teachers. And in Florida, those that received such a signal changed their school policies and practices in meaningful ways and made long-term improvements, according to an exhaustive five-year study by Cecilia Elena Rouse, Jane Hannaway, Dan Goldhaber, and David Figlio.

Schools that received a grade of “F” not only improved test scores the following year, but those improvements “remained for the longer term,” researchers wrote. “We also find that ‘F’-graded schools engaged in systematically different changes in instructional policies and practices as a consequence of school accountability pressure, and that these policy changes may explain a significant share of the test score improvements (in some subject areas) associated with ‘F’-grade receipt.”

Concerns about California

A grade is a snapshot of school effectiveness designed to encourage parents to learn more. This is where states can do much better than they are doing now, by making relevant information accessible through a well-designed school report card that clearly and concisely lays out the calculations used to arrive at the school’s letter grade.

ESSA calls on states to provide annual reports, which must include information such as disciplinary data, absenteeism, per-pupil spending, teacher evaluation results, or school surveys. Such a dashboard gives a more complete picture of a school, better preparing parents to ask questions of their child’s principal, teachers, or school board members. It also may encourage more parental involvement, and can help them identify schools that best meet their children’s needs. The challenge is to create accountability formulas and report cards that communicate these many data points clearly.

One way to impede and prevent accountability is to dilute the importance of academic achievement and cloud the data provided to parents. This is the path that California appears to be taking with its new accountability formula, which abandons a comprehensive, summative performance score in favor of ratings on nine different elements, many of which may or may not have much impact on student success. These include inputs such as parental involvement, school climate, whether instructional materials and school facilities are considered sufficient, and implementation of academic standards. A draft report card under consideration would use colored boxes to indicate school performance on these elements, an approach deemed “practically impossible” to understand by the Los Angeles Times in July 2016. “If you’re a parent trying to figure out whether one school in your district is better than another, well, there’s no clear way to do it.”

This is not transparency. It is a fog machine. Parents will be confronted with a mishmash of confusing and unprioritized data that lead to no conclusion. Principals will spend valuable time trying to comply with criteria that may have little bearing on how their students perform, and may or may not boost student achievement. Hamstringing them with state-dictated criteria distracts them from what should be their primary focus.

One also wonders how California plans to comprehensively identify its lowest-performing schools, as is required by the new federal law. The school grading systems identify schools with grades of “F” for comprehensive support. While these very low-performing schools may not have every indicator in the bottom 5 percent, it is obvious when looking at their data that these are the schools in need of the highest level of support.

Those supporting California’s approach mistakenly argue that using only academic indicators puts too much emphasis on test results. But whether a student will succeed after high school and move on to a meaningful career depends primarily on one thing: Is he or she academically prepared for college and a good career?

We still have far to go when it comes to transforming education in our country. But there is much to be learned from the student-centered systems enacted by Florida and similarly minded states. Strengthening and improving accountability systems have proven effective in achieving the results our students, parents, educators, and taxpayers deserve.

Jeb Bush is the 43rd governor of the state of Florida, serving from 1999 through 2007.

This is part of a forum on state accountability systems. For an alternate perspective, see “California’s Dashboard Data Will Guide Improvement,” by Heather J. Hough and Michael W. Kirst.

After more than a decade of strict federal mandates and measures of school success, a new education law is inviting policymakers across the country to rethink “accountability.” The Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) takes a more comprehensive approach to assessing school quality than the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB), moving beyond NCLB’s focus on annual test performance to also consider factors like student academic growth, graduation rates, and rates of proficiency for English language learners. The law also requires at least one additional measure of “School Quality or Student Success” (SQSS), such as student engagement, college readiness, or school climate. And it empowers states to design their own accountability systems, leaving behind the one-size-fits-all mandates of NCLB.

In California, we’ve moved beyond assigning schools a single number score each year and are implementing a “dashboard” accountability system, to better capture and communicate multiple dimensions of school performance. Such a dashboard can provide rich information and support the many functions that accountability systems serve: providing guidance to parents and educators on district and school strengths and weaknesses; identifying struggling schools; and supporting the design and implementation of assistance strategies.

Yet, while ESSA requires states to consider multiple measures, current draft regulations then call on us to crunch them into a single, summative rating to identify struggling schools. This practice not only runs counter to the spirit of multiple measures, it is bound to create inaccurate ratings and should not be part of the final regulations adopted by the U.S. Department of Education later this year. While it may be true that moving to multiple measures will pose a new challenge for education stakeholders at all levels, trying to summarize all of these dimensions into a single number score or A‒F letter grade will have misleading and negative consequences.

Simplicity, but at What Cost?

Single, summative ratings were in vogue over the past decade. The approach was pioneered in Florida, which began using letter grades for all its schools in 1999 under Governor Jeb Bush. Governor Bush played a role in spreading this idea to other states, and eventually 16 other states began to use the A‒F grading system, with many others using something similar. The simplicity of such ratings meant it was easy for parents and the public to sort and rank schools by the supposed strength of their performance.

California embraced this approach as well. For more than a decade, we used the Academic Performance Index (API), which was based solely on test scores and established 800 as proficient on a scale of 200 to 1000. It is not clear why 800 was the magic number for a school to be judged doing well, but API became the coin of the realm. The scores, along with an accompanying number ranking schools across the state from 1‒10, were promoted by web sites like GreatSchools.org, and became a marketing tool for real estate agents to sell houses in neighborhoods with “good” schools. Over time, it became clear that this kind of rating method punishes schools that serve disadvantaged communities; indeed, in California, the single score was so highly correlated with student demographics that it was sometimes referred to as the “Affluent Parent Index.”

California relied on the overly simplistic API until 2013. While the public accepted it, a school’s API only told parents, educators, and policymakers how students performed on English and math tests—an absurdly narrow view of school performance. Indeed, a primary impetus for the expanded measurement under ESSA was to move away from NCLB’s narrow view of student success: by establishing test scores as the “bottom line,” NCLB led many schools to focus exclusively on improving scores in tested subjects, which does not adequately prepare students to thrive in a competitive and complex global economy.

New research shows that summative scores like API are not only uninformative, they are inaccurate when it comes to identifying low-performing schools. It’s an important distinction, because ESSA requires that states designate their lowest-performing 5 percent of schools receiving Title I funds as in need of Comprehensive Support and Improvement (CSI), which triggers additional support and intervention. To determine which schools need CSI the most, it’s important to understand which schools are struggling the most. And now with multiple measures, understanding which schools have low performance is not as straightforward as when we were only measuring test scores, as uninformative as they may have been.

The study, by Policy Analysis for California Education (PACE), examines the potential effects of using single measures in California’s CORE districts, where multiple measures of school performance are included in annual accountability reports. The six CORE districts, which received a waiver under NCLB to develop their innovative, multiple-measures system, serve nearly one million students, nearly three-quarters of whom come from low-income families. The unique, locally driven accountability system focuses on academic outcomes alongside nonacademic indicators, including rates of chronic absenteeism, suspensions, and expulsions, and measures of school climate, culture, and students’ social-emotional skills.

The PACE report demonstrates that used independently, different academic measures would identify different schools as the lowest performers. For all but the lowest-performing 1 percent of schools (which struggle across the board), a single number will inevitably produce arbitrary judgments about which schools are “better” and “worse,” concealing the specific strengths and weaknesses of specific schools and depriving educators of the information that they need to improve.

The authors investigated the extent to which different academic measures—academic performance, academic growth, graduation, and English language proficiency—would identify similar schools if used independently. They found that schools in the bottom 5 percent on any given indicator differed dramatically from measure to measure. In elementary and middle schools, for example, many schools with low academic performance also demonstrate high growth relative to similar schools (Figure 1). Just 13 percent of those schools are identified among the bottom 5 percent by both measures. Given how differently these measures distinguish among schools, summing them up in a single number or grade is a serious error.

Most schools earn high scores in some areas and low scores in others, which means that a summative score, by definition, averages out this variation. PACE shows that an equally weighted summative score will identify schools that are low on all indicators, but will not identify many schools that are low on specific indicators. Among the studied schools, 2 percent are in the bottom 10 percent on all indicators, and all of them are identified using the summative measure. However, only 40 percent of schools in the bottom 5 percent for academic performance are identified for CSI using the summative measure (Figure 2). Similarly, only 45 percent of schools in the bottom 5 percent for academic growth are identified by the summative measure. For English language proficiency, it was 22 percent, and for graduation rates, it was 38 percent. By aggregating across measures that represent very different dimensions of performance, the summative score may not identify schools as low-performing if they are very low on just one measure, even if they are merely average, or even moderately low, on others.

Many Dimensions of Success

In addition to the academic indicators, ESSA specifies that states must include at least one indicator of “School Quality or Student Success” (SQSS). The CORE districts have already begun collecting a wide range of such indicators locally, and there is much to be learned from their experience about how such measures can be integrated into state systems. As with the four academic measures, schools do not often demonstrate low performance on multiple measures simultaneously, and there is a wide range in how the measures identify schools in the bottom 5 percent compared to one another and compared to the summative academic score. For example, in looking at rates of chronic absenteeism vs. rates of suspensions and expulsions, 90 schools identified as being in the bottom 5 percent of all schools by either measure, yet only 16 percent of those schools are similarly identified by both measures.

ESSA regulations specify that nonacademic measures cannot prevent a school from receiving a CSI designation that would otherwise have been identified using the academic measures. Given the difference between the nonacademic and the academic measures, this effectively forces states to assign SQSS indicators very little weight in a summative score, such that they do not change the identification of schools using the academic measures. We found that an SQSS measure would have to account for less than 1 percent of the summative measure to ensure it did not change which schools are identified for CSI. If the SQSS indicators are important signs of school performance, as the law suggests they are, they should be accorded a meaningful weight in the process of identifying schools for support and improvement. This suggests that a summative score is particularly problematic when considering the inclusion of SQSS measures in states’ accountability systems.

As an alternative, the PACE report shows how states can identify schools for CSI using a method that considers each indicator rather than aggregating the indicators into a summative score. Using a dashboard of measures, states could use a tiered approach to make a series of decisions about school performance on particular indicators. This would enable states to make judgments about whether or not schools need CSI based on a comprehensive evaluation of all the data. For example, instead of averaging or differently weighting scores on academic performance and academic growth, a state could decide to identify for CSI only schools that have low academic outcomes and are not demonstrating growth. Similarly, of two schools with similar academic achievement, a state could choose to focus limited resources for CSI on a school with poor SQSS outcomes rather than a school with positive SQSS outcomes, since the latter school may be on a road to improvement while the former is not.

It is much like a school counselor trying to decide which students to support with limited resources. Should she focus intensive support to a student with all Ds, or to a student with mostly Cs and Ds, and one F? Her decision reflects a value judgment, and may depend on other characteristics of the student. By the same token, the full information in the multiple measures is more informative than a single number.

The Strength of a Dashboard

There is growing agreement among policymakers, school and district leaders, and researchers that the most important use of school effectiveness measures should be in driving continuous improvement at both the local and state levels. To this end, California is developing a multiple measure, dashboard-style accountability system that is focused on providing schools and districts with a variety of data, for a more comprehensive picture of a school’s successes and challenges. Such detail captures multiple dimensions of school and district performance and can drive local improvement efforts tailored to each unique context. It can also help school and district officials better inform themselves and their communities about how specific programs and services are working to improve student outcomes. Sharing data in this way can simultaneously present a holistic view of how a school is doing and—with thoughtful visualization—highlight a limited number of metrics to focus attention and not be overwhelming to consumers.

In California, we believe parents, as educated consumers and advocates for their children, want to know more about how public schools are performing, and that policymakers should ensure the public has the necessary tools to make good use of multiple measures. Already, many parents intuitively understand that holding schools accountable for performance cannot be reduced to a single number, in the same way that they appreciate that their own students may be doing well in one subject but not another. Parents are familiar with multiple measures when they read their child’s report card, and certainly do not want their child’s school performance reduced to a single number.

In our view, a dashboard will give parents the information they need to make wise choices about the schools their children attend, rather than misleading them with arbitrary judgments about whether schools are “good” or “bad.” Focusing the accountability system on practical and actionable tools for continuous improvement comes with trade-offs in the ability to rank schools, but the benefits more than justify the costs.

Heather J. Hough is executive director of the research partnership between the CORE Districts and Policy Analysis for California Education (PACE). Michael W. Kirst is president of the California State Board of Education and professor emeritus of education and business administration at Stanford University.

This is part of a forum on state accountability systems. For an alternate perspective, see “Florida’s Intuitive Letter Grades Produce Results,” by Jeb Bush.

With the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) replacing No Child Left Behind (NCLB) legislation, states have gained substantial new freedom to reshape their school accountability systems, including criteria for how to measure and communicate school performance to the public. One dominant model is the streamlined letter-grade system first adopted by Florida, which focuses on student achievement on annual statewide tests. By contrast, California is developing a dashboard-style system, which encompasses multiple measures, such as student attendance and school climate.

Below are two views on the merits of each model. Former Florida governor Jeb Bush, who pioneered education reforms in that state, including the A‒F system, presents the case for summative ratings. From California, we hear from Heather J. Hough, executive director of the research partnership between the CORE Districts and Policy Analysis for California Education (PACE), and Michael W. Kirst, president of the California State Board of Education and professor emeritus of education and business administration at Stanford University, on the importance of multiple measures.

Florida’s Intuitive Letter Grades Produce Results
By Jeb Bush
In Florida, where I served as governor from 1999 to 2007, a bold, new direction was required. And so in 1999, we overhauled our school system through accountability legislation that made student learning the focus of education.

 

California’s Dashboard Data Will Guide Improvement
By Heather J. Hough and Michael W. Kirst
In California, we’ve moved beyond assigning schools a single number score each year and are implementing a “dashboard” accountability system, to better capture and communicate multiple dimensions of school performance.