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Archives for category: Research
Today the National Education Policy Center released its annual review of research on virtual charter schools. The bottom line was not good.
The title of the report is “Virtual Schools in the U.S. 2019.” It was double blind peer-reviewed.
The authors write:
The number of virtual schools in the
U.S. continues to grow.
In 2017-18, 501 full-time virtual schools enrolled 297,712 students, and 300 blended schools
enrolled 132,960. Enrollments in virtual schools increased by more than 2,000 students between
2016-17 and 2017-18, and enrollments in blended learning schools increased by over
16,000 during this same time period. Virtual schools enrolled substantially fewer minority
students and fewer low-income students compared to national public school enrollment.
Virtual schools operated by for-profit EMOs were more than four times as large as other virtual
schools, enrolling an average of 1,345 students. In contrast, those operated by nonprofit
EMOs enrolled an average of 344 students, and independent virtual schools (not affiliated
with an EMO) enrolled an average of 320 students.
Among virtual schools, far more district-operated schools achieved acceptable state school
performance ratings (56.7% acceptable) than charter-operated schools (40.8%). More
schools without EMO involvement (i.e., independent) performed well (59.3% acceptable ratings),
compared with 50% acceptable ratings for schools operated by nonprofit EMOs, and
only 29.8% acceptable ratings for schools operated by for-profit EMOs. The pattern among
blended learning schools was similar with highest performance by district schools and lowest
performance by the subgroup of schools operated by for-profit EMOs.
Given the overwhelming evidence of poor performance by full-time virtual and blended
learning schools it is recommended that policymakers:
• Slow or stop the growth in the number of virtual and blended schools and the size of
their enrollments until the reasons for their relatively poor performance have been
identified and addressed.
• Implement measures that require virtual and blended schools to reduce their student-
to-teacher ratios.
• Enforce sanctions for virtual and blended schools that perform inadequately.
• Sponsor research on virtual and blended learning “programs” and classroom innovations
within traditional public schools and districts.
There is much more in the report that deserves your attention, especially regarding the current infatuation with blended learning.
I suggest you read it for yourself.
Here is the citation:
Molnar, A. (Ed.), Miron, G., Elgeberi, N., Barbour, M.K., Huerta, L., Shafer,
S.R., Rice, J.K. (2019). Virtual Schools in the U.S. 2019. Boulder, CO: National Education Policy
Center. Retrieved [date] from http://nepc.colorado.edu/publication/virtual-schools-annual-2019 .
Jersey Jazzman, aka Mark Weber, is a teacher in New Jersey who took the time to earn a Ph.D. So he could decipher the studies and research usedto make decisions about schools.
In this post, he explains to the media how to cover charter schools.
He noticed that Senator Bernie Sanders’ proposal to ban for-profit charter schools unleashed a wave of commentary about charter schools. Many people have no idea what they are. They don’t know that they are privately managed but publicly funded and that most charter schools operate with little or no oversight. It’s a sweet deal to get public money with no one checking the books.
He writes:
I can’t say I’m surprised, but it looks like Bernie Sanders’ latest policy speech on education – where, among other things, he calls for a ban on for-profit charter schools and other charter school reforms — has generated a lot of fair to poor journalism that purports to explain what charters are and how they perform.
Predictably, the worst of the bunch is from Jon Chait, who cheerleads for charters often without adhering to basic standards of transparency. Chait’s latest piece is so overblown that even a casual reader with no background in charter schools will recognize it for the screed that it is, so I won’t waste time rebutting it.
There are, however, plenty of other pieces about Sanders’ proposals that take a much more measured tone… and yet still get some charter school basics wrong. I’m going to hold off on citing specific examples and instead hope (against hope) that maybe I can get through to some of the journalists who want to get the story of charters right.
The first warning is not to accept the claims that CREDO makes, especially not its assertion that it can measure “days of learning.” It can’t.
Second point, don’t accept the assertion that “charter schools are public schools.” They get public money but bot everything that gets public money is “public.” Like Harvard and Boeing.
Third point, do charter schools strip funding from public schools? JJ is not sure but Gordon Lafer is. See his study here on the fiscal drain that charters impose on public school.
4) The “best” charter sectors get their gains through increased resources, peer effects, and a test prep curriculum — and not through “charteriness.”
Read the rest for yourself. JJ is always worth reading.
Matt Barnum reports that new research from Louisiana shows that the negative effects of vouchers persist over time.
There used to be a belief that the negative effects were temporary, but apparently the voucher students do not bounce back, as voucher proponents hoped.
New research on a closely watched school voucher program finds that it hurts students’ math test scores — and that those scores don’t bounce back, even years later.
That’s the grim conclusion of the latest study, released Tuesday, looking at Louisiana students who used a voucher to attend a private school. It echoes research out of Indiana, Ohio, and Washington, D.C. showing that vouchers reduce students’ math test scores and keep them down for two years or more.
Together, they rebut some initial research suggesting that the declines in test scores would be short-lived, diminishing a common talking point for voucher proponents.
“While the early research was somewhat mixed … it is striking how consistent these recent results are,” said Joe Waddington, a University of Kentucky professor who has studied Indiana’s voucher program. “We’ve started to see persistent negative effects of receiving a voucher on student math achievement.”
The state’s voucher program also didn’t improve students’ chances of enrolling in college.
The results may influence local and national debates. Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos is working to drum up support for a proposed federal tax credit program that could help parents pay private-school tuition, and Tennessee lawmakers are debating whether to create a voucher-like program of their own.
If past history is a guide, Betsy DeVos will dismiss the research, as will Tennessee Governor Bill Lee. They want vouchers regardless of their impact on students.
Peter Greene writes here about an exceptionally silly “study” that Betsy DeVos is using to drum up fading public support for charter schools.
The study, by choice advocates Patrick Wolf and Corey DeAngelis, attempts to measure “success” by return on investment, converting taxpayer dollars into NAEP scores.
Sounds crazy, no?
Greene writes:
This particular paper comes out of something called the School Choice Demonstration Project, which studies the effects of school choice.
A Good Investment: The Updated Productivity of Public Charter Schools in Eight U.S. Cities pretends to measure school productivity, focusing on eight cities- Houston, San Antonio, New York City, Washington DC, Atlanta, Indianapolis, Boston, and Denver. In fact, the paper actually uses the corporate term ROI– return on investment.
We could dig down to the details here, look at details of methodology, break down the eight cities, examine the grade levels represented, consider their use of Investopedia for a definition of ROI. But that’s not really necessary, because they use two methods for computing ROI– one is rather ridiculous, and the other is exceptionally ridiculous.
The one thing you can say for this method of computing ROI is that it’s simple. Here’s the formula, plucked directly from their paper so that you won’t think I’m making up crazy shit:
Cost Effectiveness=Achievement Scores divided by Per-Pupil Revenue.
The achievement scores here are the results from the NAEP reading and math, and I suppose we could say that’s better than the PARCC or state-bought Big Standardized Test, but it really doesn’t matter because the whole idea is nuts.
It assumes that the only return we should look for on an investment in schools is an NAEP score. Is that a good assumption? When someone says, “I want my education tax dollars to be well spent,” do we understand them to mean that they want to see high standardized test scores– and nothing else?? Bot even a measure of students improving on that test. The paper literally breaks this down into NAEP points per $1,000. Is that the whole point of a school?
It gets worse, and Greene explains why.
I am reminded of a fad in the 1920s to compute the dollar value of different subjects. The curriculum experts of the day calculated that teaching Latin was a total waste of time because it was expensive and produced no return on investment.
The whole thing called “education” got left out of the calculus.
I recently posted Leonie Haimson’s critique of the program called “Teach to One.”
John Pane, one of the authors of the RAND evaluation, wrote to say that he did not agree with Leonie’s characterization. I told him that I would publish his letter and Leonie’s response.
He wrote this letter:
On March 4, 2018 you published this blog entry, “Leonie Haimson: Reality Vs. Hype in “Teach to One” Program,” excerpting from Leonie Haimson’s blog. Your excerpt included this paragraph about my own research (with colleagues) and my public statements:
“The most recent RAND analysis of schools that used personalized learning programs that received funding through the Next Generation Learning initiative, which have included both Summit and Teach to One, concluded there were small and mostly insignificant gains in achievement at these schools, and their students were more likely to feel alienated and unsafe compared to matched students at similar schools. The overall results caused John Pane, the lead RAND researcher, to say to Ed Week that ‘the evidence base [for these schools] is very weak at this point.’“
This paragraph by Haimson has numerous false and misleading statements. Here I summarize my critique, excerpting the original paragraph:
“The most recent RAND analysis of schools that used personalized learning programs that received funding through the Next Generation Learning initiative, which have included both Summit and Teach to One, …”
None of the schools in our sample reported using Teach to One (TtO) among the 194 education technology products they mentioned. Our sample includes schools in the Next Generation Learning Challenges (NGLC) wave IIIa and wave IV programs, a subset of all the NGLC initiatives. Haimson points to blog posts by NGLC about Summit and TtO, but that does not mean our study included them.
“…included both Summit and Teach to One, concluded there were small and mostly insignificant gains in achievement at these schools, …”
Our conclusions were about the whole sample of schools, and did not single out any particular schools as is implied by juxtaposing “Summit and Teach to One” with “these schools.” Our concluding remarks related to achievement did not say “small and mostly insignificant.” What we actually said was, “Students in NGLC schools experienced positive achievement effects in mathematics and reading, although the effects were only statistically significant in mathematics. On average, students overcame gaps relative to national norms after two years in NGLC schools. Students at all levels of achievement relative to grade-level norms appeared to benefit. Results varied widely across schools and appeared strongest in the middle grades.”
“… and their students were more likely to feel alienated and unsafe compared to matched students at similar schools”
This was not a conclusion of our report. In a supplemental appendix we did compare results from our sample (again, the whole sample of schools in the study, none of which reported using TtO) to a national sample. Our method did not use “matched students at similar schools.” Given data limitations, we were able to make the student samples similar (through weighting) only on grade level, gender, and broad classifications of geographic locale (e.g., urban vs. suburban). Even after weighting, we suspect the high-minority, high-poverty schools in the NGLC sample may be located in more distressed communities than the national survey counterparts, and that this could be related to feelings of safety. Indeed, fewer NGLC students (78 vs. 82 percent) agreed that “I feel safe in this school,” but this small difference cannot be attributed to personalized learning and has no direct relevance to TtO. None of our survey items or reports used the word “alienated.” Possibly related, 77 percent of NGLC students agreed that “at least one adult in this school knows me well” and “I feel good about being in this school,” 76 percent agreed that “I care about this school” and 72 percent agreed “I am an important part of my school community.”
The overall results caused John Pane, the lead RAND researcher, to say to Ed Week that ‘the evidence base [for these schools] is very weak at this point.’“
This EdWeek article clearly states that it is about “what K-12 educators and policymakers need to know about the research on personalized learning” broadly. Quoting accurately, “RAND has found some positive results, including modest achievement gains in some of the Gates-funded personalized-learning schools. But overall, ‘the evidence base is very weak at this point, Pane said.” There is no justification for Haimson to insert “[for these schools]” into my quoted remark. It appears as though Haimson is attempting to give a misleading impression that I was specifically talking about Summit and TtO rather than the entire body of personalized learning research.
I find it very unfortunate that you accepted Haimson’s claims without fact checking, and increased their visibility and attention through your own platform.
I am requesting that you please issue a correction in a way that previous readers of your March 4 post will likely notice. You may include this letter if you wish.
With regards,
John Pane
RAND Corporation
I forwarded John Pane’s letter to Leonie Haimson. She responded as follows:
Hi John – the Rand report was only a small part of my post on TTO which is here – I counted one short paragraph out of nearly one hundred.
Nevertheless, Diane: Please go ahead and print John’s letter in full and I will link to the letter in my blog. It is unfortunate that the specific online program names were left out of the RAND evaluation. I had wrongly assumed that TTO was included since it is one of the most heavily funded and promoted of the Next Generation Learning Challenge “personalized learning” programs, by Gates and others.
I would also like to point out that the following survey stats John includes from the NGLC schools omit the results from the comparison schools, as cited in the appendix of the Rand report:
Possibly related, 77 percent of NGLC students agreed that “at least one adult in this school knows me well” [compared to 86% of the national sample] and “I feel good about being in this school,” [vs. 89% of the national sample] 76 percent agreed that “I care about this school” [vs. 87% of the national sample] and 72 percent agreed “I am an important part of my school community.” [compared to 79% of the national sample.]
In addition, the students at the personalized learning schools were more likely to say that that “their classes do not keep their attention, and they get bored” compared to the national sample (30% to 23%). Only 35% of students at the NGLC schools said that “learning is enjoyable” compared to 45% of the national sample. With results like this it is very difficult to see support for the claim that students at personalized learning schools are more engaged in their coursework, feel more connected and have more agency, as is often claimed.
Now we know that TTO students aren’t included in these surveys but there is no reason to assume that the responses would be significantly different until and unless New Classrooms releases their own survey results. And we do have the results from Mountain View school, which showed a 413% increase in the number of students who said they hated math as a result.
Nor does John’s response relate to the larger question of how difficult it is to use MAP scores to evaluate these programs, especially ones that aren’t disaggregated by race or economic status, which also calls into question the conclusions of the MarGready report. One might expect that with all the data that NWEA has by now they would have done that by now; any thoughts on that, John?
Finally, it is extremely unfortunate that Gates, Zuckerberg etc. haven’t bothered to commission any truly randomized small-scale evaluation of Summit, TTO or any of the other PL programs they have so heavily funded and promoted before expanding their reach and subjecting hundreds of thousands of students to them. Summit has rejected any independent evaluation of its results. One can only speculate why.
Thanks,
Leonie Haimson
Paul Thomas of Furman University in South Carolina reminds us that “the crisis in reading” is a staple of American educational history. Every generation complains that young kids are not learning to read.it began long before Rudolf Flesch’s best seller “Why Johnny Can’t Read” in the 1950s.
Jeanne Chall, Reading specialist at Harvard and experienced kindergarten teacher, explored the mystery of reading in her book “Learning to Read: The Great Debate,” 1967, where she recommended early use of phonics, them a transition to engaging reading.
The National Reading Panel (1997) popularized the idea of a “science of reading,” and the myth refuses to die.NCLB codified it into law, but the “crisis” persisted.
Thomas exposes The Big Lie.
Mississippi is the latest example of a state falsely claiming that it has used the “science of reading” to raise scores.
Mississippi hasn’t broken the code. Neither has Florida.
Thomas writes:
“The “science of reading” mantra is a Big Lie, but it is also a huge and costly distraction from some real problems.
“Relatively affluent states still tend to score above average or average on reading tests; relatively poor states tend to score below average on reading tests.
“Some states that historically scored low, under the weight of poverty and the consequences of conservative political ideology that refuses to address that poverty, have begun to implement harmful policies to raise test scores (see the magenta highlighting) in the short-term for political points.
“It is 2019. There is no reading crisis in the way the “science of reading” advocates are claiming.
“It is 2019. Balanced literacy is the science of reading, but it is not the most common way teachers are teaching reading because schools are almost exclusively trying to raise scores, not students who are eager, joyful, and critical readers.
“It is 2019. Political and public efforts to do anything—often the wrong thing—so no one addresses poverty remain the American Way.
“It is 2019. It is still mostly about poverty when people insist it is about reading and reading policy.”
In this post from the National Education Policy Center, you can see a long list of recent articles about the “reading wars,” which was spurred by a broadcast and article by Emily Hanford, complaining that students can’t read because teachers fail to teach phonics, which she says, is based on science.
When I saw Hanford’s article in the New York Times, making that claim, I reacted with a big “Ho hum, here we go again.” I wrote about the reading wars in my book “Left Back” in 2000. I thought that Jeanne Chall’s classic “Learning to Read: The Great Debate” (1967) had settled the matter. Yet here we are in 2018, Long after Rudolf Flesch’s “Why Johnny Can’t Read,” debating the same issues that gripped education researchers 70 years ago.
NEPC posts an interview with Elizabeth Moje, dean of the University of Michigan Education School, that has one stellar feature. Whenever she is asked to examine a claim about what “most teachers” are doing, she stops the conversation to say that no she ne knows what “most teachers” are doing.
I appreciate her care.
We have known for a long time that phonics must be a part of early instruction in reading. We also know that phonics only is not sufficient.
At a time when awareness is breaking through that our schools are underfunded, we have serious teacher shortages due to low pay, and class sizes in the Neediest districts are ballooning, let’s not get distracted by a phony war.
Here is the video of the first session of the just-concluded annual conference of the Network for Public Education in Indianapolis.
You will hear opening remarks by our executive director Carol Burris. She introduces Phyllis Bush, who gives a witty summary of what has happened to Indiana and how she and her friends built one of the nation’s first activist organizations to oppose destructive “reforms.”
Phyllis introduces me, and I describe my new book, which is about the slow but sure collapse of corporate reform. I bring hope.
Rochester NY’s Coalition for Public Education, in collaboration with the University of Rochester, Writers & Books and the Rochester Teachers Association recently began a “community read” project using Daniel Koretz’s book, “The Testing Charade: Pretending to Make Schools Better.” The project involves having as many community members as possible read the book and/or attending a presentation by Dan Koretz, and attending one or more of several discussion/problem-solving/action meetings to generate alternatives to high-stakes standardized testing to education policy-makers.
These are the key points that organizers of the Rochester Coalition for Public Education circulated to readers of the Koretz book:
FIVE CRITICAL POINTS FROM DANIEL KORETZ’S BOOK: “THE TESTING CHARADE: PRETENDING TO MAKE SCHOOLS BETTER”
- Education policy makers have created and implemented many non-research-based and harmful practices in the name of accountability, including the following:
- Basing teacher evaluation scores, to a significant degree, on test scores of students who have significant variables in their lives that negatively impact their growth and development.
- Holding English as Second Language students, who have little or no English language experience, accountable for passing standardized English exams, after only one year of learning English.
- Using unreliable, invalid, non-field-tested standardized tests to hold students accountable,
- Holding all students accountable for meeting grade-level expectations, when some students may not be developmentally ready or may be deprived of the resource help they need.
- Punishing students, teachers & school communities, by labeling them as failures.
- High-stakes standardized test scores are often inflated for some of the following reasons:
- Teachers focusing on “teaching-to-the-test,” rather than student interests and areas not often tested, like citizenship, music and current social problems,
- Some students and/or teachers “cheat,”
- Middle & upper class students may receive “paid” extra tutoring,
- Some students are taught skills for more accurately guessing correctly.
- Standardized tests can have a useful role, if the following criteria were used more often:
- Used for diagnostic vs. “high-stakes purposes,”
- Test student sample populations vs. every student,
- Set realistic, appropriate test score goals for individual students,
- Use “performance-based” vs. memorize and regurgitate tasks,
- Piloted for validity and reliability, before implemented,
- Test what is important, and
- Use human judgment as part of the process.
Koretz states: “ The problem is not tests. The problem is the misuse of tests. Tests can be a useful tool, but policymakers have demanded far more of them than is reasonable, and this has backfired. Used appropriately, standardized tests are a valuable source of information, sometimes an irreplaceable one. For example, how do we know that the achievement gap between minority and majority students has been slowly narrowing, while the gap between rich and poor students has been growing?”
- “Campbell’s Law,” generally states that whenever a socio-economic goal is reduced to a number, corruption and perversion of the process to attain that goal is inevitable. This phenomena is demonstrated in a number of ways, including: cheating, teaching to the test, ignoring student needs and interests, and creating invalid teacher evaluation systems that devalue the role of teacher judgment.
- The high-stakes standardized exam-driven, approach to school reform has been a huge failure. Koretz
states: “If you line up the effects of this approach, the answer is clear: It has been a failure. The improvements it has produced have been limited, and these are greatly outweighed by the serious damage it has done. Of course, in many places, improvements appeared to be big, but most often, this was just inflated test scores.”
HIGH-STAKES STANDARDIZED TESTING
DISCUSSION/PROBLEM-SOLVING/ACTION GROUP MEETINGS
- October 11th, Thursday, 4:00-6:00 pm at Nazareth College, Golisano Academic Complex, Room 211, led by Professor Shawgi Tell
- October 15th, Monday, 7:00-9:00 pm at St. John Fisher College, Mid-level Gateway Room, Basil Hall, led by Professor Jeffrey Liles
- October 18th, Thursday, 7:00-9:00 pm at Writers & Books, 740 University Avenue, led by Rochester Coalition for Public Education Coordinator, Dan Drmacich
- October 29th, Monday, 7:00-9:00 pm, at Pittsford Barnes & Noble, led by Howard Maffucci, former East Rochester Superintendent & current Monroe County Legislator
- November 8th, Thursday, 3:45-4:45, LaChase Hall, Margaret Warner Graduate School of Education, University of Rochester, led by Professor David Hursh
Please go to our website www.roccoalitionforpubliceducation.com, to register to attend any of these discussion/problem-solving/action meetings. Our objective is to submit well thought-out proposals to our educational policy-makers for meaningful change in our current public school tests. Please get involved and bring your ideas and colleagues. You need not have read Koretz’s book to be involved, but we do encourage reading the first two and the last chapter of his book: The Testing Charade: Pretending to Make Schools Better.
Diane Ravitch's blog 