Monthly Archives: July 2015

The Not So Scary Lessons of Recovery and Achievement School Districts

3 Replies

Around ten years ago, the Recovery School District (RSD) assumed governance over all of the failing schools in New Orleans.

Around four years ago, the Achievement School District (ASD) assumed governance over many of the failing schools in Memphis.

Recovery School District 

Here is the official presentation that the RSD just made to the state school board. Note that the data is presented as a RSD pre / post comparison, not city as a whole. Some highlights:

First, lest you think it’s because student body changed dramatically:

Screen Shot 2015-07-29 at 7.52.18 PM

Proficiency:

Screen Shot 2015-07-29 at 7.53.01 PM

ACT:

Screen Shot 2015-07-29 at 7.53.43 PM

State based college scholarship eligibility:

Screen Shot 2015-07-29 at 7.54.49 PM

Lastly: none of the above qualify as rigorous research results (though I still think they are very useful, illustrative, and paint an accurate picture). But, as readers of this blog will know, next month Doug Harris is going to release a study that shows that NOLA reforms achieved .2-.4 effects at an ROI that surpasses that of pre-k and class size reduction.

The RSD worked.

Much still to be done, of course.

Achievement School District

See here for a deck on the ASD’s results.

Unlike Louisiana, Tennessee actually has a statistically rigorous state based measurement: TVAAS (a growth measure).

School can achieve a TVAAS rating of 1-5, with 5 being the highest.

If all ASD schools in their second and third years were considered districts, they would each receive a 5, the highest TVAAS score.

Screen Shot 2015-07-29 at 8.00.44 PM

Note that first year schools scored a 1 on TVAAS.

The ASD has a hashtag for this phenomenon: #MoreTimeMoreGrowth.

Read the whole deck for the rest of the data. There a lot of bright spots, as well as a few worrisome trends (reading scores).

Looking Ahead 

The RSD worked, though under unique circumstances.

The ASD is on the right track, though it’s still early.

The Education Achievement Authority (EAA) of Michigan, continues to struggle.

Why?

Because the RSD and ASD are building great ecosystems of high-peforming operators (though, to it credit the ASD direct schools are doing great, a testament to Chris Barbic’s ability to get 10,000 things done at once). But the long-run ASD game is still in non-profit operator management.

The EAA attempted to direct run all it schools.

Directing running all your schools runs afoul of this data on the performance of urban charter schools.

Screen Shot 2015-07-27 at 4.31.22 PM

Currently, Nevada and Georgia are in the midst of enacting RSD / ASD models.

I hope they will learn from the above lessons. In Georgia, this will be easier to do, as there is already a base of decent charter operators. Nevada, unfortunately, has one of the worst performing charter sectors in the country. Perhaps they can use this opportunity to grow a higher-quality supply as well close some of their low performers.

Don’t Be Scared

Over the past week, I’ve been harping (I hope not trolling!) on Libby Nelson’s piece on the scary lesson of No Child Left Behind:

Screen Shot 2015-07-29 at 8.14.29 PM

As I mentioned before, I think Libby is a good reporter.

The only reason I’m hammering this point is because I believe it’s so important to the future education of millions of low-income children.

We do have very good ideas about how to fix failing schools. And when reporters cover this issue, they should point to the effectiveness and scale of urban charter schools.

Urban charter schools are working. Governance interventions such as the RSD and ASD have enabled high-performing charters to grow.

Scaling these reforms will continue to be a difficult path.

But it’s not a scary path.

It’s a hopeful one.

This entry was posted in Achievement School District, Recovery School District and tagged Not So Scary Lessons, Results on by .

The Scariest Lesson of….

Leave a reply

Vox’s Libby Nelson just posted a piece entitled The scariest lesson of No Child Left Behind.

I find Libby’s national policy writing to be well done. I thought her piece on the allegiance between Republicans and unions was spot on.

However, I thought this NCLB piece fell short in that it correctly identified a problem (most NCLB turnaround efforts didn’t really work), while not fully covering the research behind potential solutions.

When it comes to highlighting whole school reform efforts that work, Libby calls out the following:

Screen Shot 2015-07-27 at 4.05.41 PM

As Libby notes, not one of these models has actually been proven to work at scale across grade levels. Looking at these models alone paints a grim picture. Hence the “scariest lesson” title of her original piece.

Libby ends her piece with this:

Screen Shot 2015-07-27 at 4.25.20 PM

I don’t think this is true.

We have rigorous evidence on what type of whole school reforms works for poor and minority students: charter schools, particularly those that adopt the No Excuses model.

CREDO studied charter school performance across 41 cities in 22 states. This is an extremely large sample size that exceeds the research on the aforementioned four reform models.

Here’s what the study found:

Screen Shot 2015-07-27 at 4.31.22 PM

Urban charters are delivering strong results: a .08 effect size in math and a .06 in reading. Moreover, these effects take place over a three year period, so the cumulative effect on students is likely larger over the course of their full education.

Of course, these results are the aggregate effects of 41 markets, some of which are seeing incredible result (.2-.3 effect size), while others are seeing poor results (negative effects on student learning).

And, of course, these market results are the aggregate effects of individual schools, some of which are seeing incredible results (very often No Excuses or some version of the model), while others are seeing poor results.

Which leads to the final point: the entire project of looking to whole school reform as an overall reform strategy is missing the forest for the trees.

The forest is governance: letting great educators open new schools and holding them accountable.

Understanding why any individual school is great is a worthy endeavor, but it is a limited endeavor.

To put it another way: evaluating the research of what is effective within a poorly constructed system will not tell you that it is the system itself that needs to be changed.

It would be akin to trying to understand the American economy by looking at the practices of great corporations. Useful, for sure, but it won’t tell you why the system itself delivers constantly strong performance.

Research being done by CREDO and others is demonstrating that it is the system itself that is broken, and that by fixing governance we can empower educators to achieve great results.

What’s the scariest lesson of No Child Left Behind?

The scariest lesson is that the data from No Child Left Behind is increasingly providing us with  answers on how to turnaround failing school systems and yet we continue to ignore this data.

The lesson that we have very little idea what works is a scary thought, it’s just not true.

On the problem of not being able to short sell non-profits

4 Replies

Robert Shiller had an interesting article in the NYT on why housing markets are not always efficient.

More pertinent to this blog:

Screen Shot 2015-07-26 at 10.19.29 PM

I wish it were possible to short non-profits. I don’t really know how it would work / it’s probably not possible, but not having this type of function harms people in need.

Over time, short selling would reallocate resources to organizations that could provide much better outcomes if those in need.

Everywhere I look, I see non-profit “bubbles,” especially in education reform.

But funders have weak information, or misaligned incentives with those they are serving, so money keeps on flowing.

Short selling, or some version of it, could prevent money from going to organizations that have little to no chance of achieving their aims, as well meaning as they might be. And it could drive funding to organizations that could do amazing things.

If I was going to short non-profit education activity, it would be in these areas:

1) Efforts that mistake coordination for strategy.

2) Efforts that do not affect, or do not tightly align themselves, with what happens between 8AM-3PM.

Of course, the short selling analogy is flawed. The non-profit sector is a different animal than the for-profit sector.I get it.

The main point here is that it is important for there to be a public, meaningful signal against efforts that are likely to fail.

Without that, we all risk walking aimlessly in the dark.

Bill Gates on the Gates Foundation

Leave a reply

Screen Shot 2015-07-24 at 4.25.40 PM

Nicolas Kristoff just wrote an op-ed on Bill and Melinda Gates.

Kristoff quotes Bill Gates on their education efforts:

Screen Shot 2015-07-24 at 4.26.26 PM

I appreciate this honesty. Making things better is difficult, and as I enter the philanthropy world I’m trying to learn from what has worked and what hasn’t. And it’s easier to learn when people are honest about their mistakes, especially people like Bill and Melinda Gates, who have done so much good in the world through their philanthropic investments.

While I appreciate Bill’s openness, I do think the Gates Foundation has made some incredible educational investments.

Consider their direct and indirect investments (thought intermediaries) in the Denver School of Science and Technology [DSST].

In the 2013-14 school year, DSST schools held five of the top six spots in the district’s performance rankings.

Screen Shot 2015-07-24 at 4.33.49 PM

Currently, DSST is planning a significant expansion:

Screen Shot 2015-07-24 at 4.31.44 PM

If DSST is successful in expansion (which will undoubtedly be difficult), it will forever have changed the landscape of Denver, its public schools, and the lives of tens of thousands of children.

This is transformational philanthropy. Replicate it in a hundred cities, and our country is forever changed for the better.

I’m not sure how much the Gates Foundation gave to DSST. But whatever it was, it seems to have paid off.

It’s one great investment, amongst many, that I hope to learn from.

Lastly, I’m glad Bill and Melinda are still committed to education. There is a lot of work to be done, and having them in the game is a good thing.

What Will Matter 50 Years From Now?

3 Replies

Screen Shot 2015-07-23 at 5.41.51 PM

Matt Barnum, who has been doing a good job over at The Seventy Four, just wrote a thoughtful piece on Arne Duncan’s legacy.

Matt argues that Duncan should have stuck to pushing for test based teacher evals for only those teachers covered by preexisitng annual tests. I’m sympathetic to Matt’s argument, but I also haven’t spent much time thinking about this specific issue.

What I do sometimes think about this: what policies will matter 50 years from now?

This is not to say that we should only focus on policies that will have 50 year staying power, but, in expending political capital, reform longevity should be a part of the calculation.

I am skeptical that government mandated teacher evaluations will still be a major issue in 50 years. My guess is that a combination of deregulation (charters not being a part of state evaluation systems) and technological advancement (less reliance on annual tests for measuring teacher performance) will render the issue mostly moot.

If I had created Race to the Top, I probably would have focused on the following:

1. Governance: incentivizing alternative forms of governance (RSDs, alternative authorizers, etc.).

2. School Operators: increasing supply of high-quality charters, contract, and vouchers schools.

3. Teacher pipelines: creating new pipelines and reforming existing institutions.

4. Standards and Assessments: incentivizing the raising of standards and the adoption of rigorous assessments.

I think the aforementioned initiatives would all have increased the probability of increasing student achievement. I also think these initiatives would have had some staying power.

I have no idea if they would have been politically feasible to push from the federal level in 2009.

Lastly, for whatever it’s worth, I have a lot of respect for Arne Duncan. Being a cabinet secretary for eight years takes a lot of grit and passion.

Scream It From the Rooftops: Autonomy Does Not Equal Entrepreneurship!!!!!

4 Replies

I’ve been on the road for the past two weeks and have been spending time with great city based education leaders from across the country.

A common struggle they face, and a common issue I see everywhere, is the confusion between autonomy and entrepreneurship.

To be very specific:

1) Autonomy is the granting of freedoms.

2) Entrepreneurship is the creation of new self governed organizations.

Autonomy is a management strategy. When it comes to serving disadvantaged families, management strategies have limited upside and a lot of downside in terms of the opportunity cost of not pursuing entrepreneurship.

We need structural strategies that grant true freedoms.

The magical moment is when you give an educator the opportunity to create the school of her dreams.

The magical moment is not when you give an educator the chance to pick her math curriculum.

The future is in handing power back to educators so they can create schools that you would want to send your children to.

The future is not in letting an educator opt-out of centralized staffing ratios.

To be blunt: an educator who is playing the autonomy game is still sitting at the children’s table.

The future is not autonomy. The future is trust, risk, freedom, and accountability.

I don’t think I’ve used five exclamation points in my life, but, people, if we don’t get this right, we’re going to stay stuck in cages of our own creation.

And children everywhere are going to suffer.