Monthly Archives: September 2015

Do Flat High School Scores = No Useful Learning Gains? I’m Not Sure.

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Both Kevin Drum and Rick Hess recently wrote about flat / declining high school learning gains.

Kevin argues that gain in K-8 are being washed out by poor high school performance, while Rick points to inconsistencies in those who are caught in trap of arguing both K-8 is awful (it washes out pre-k gains!) and K-8 is great (it’s the high schools that mess everything up!).

Kevin writes:

In the end, though, it doesn’t matter what the score is in the sixth inning if your bullpen consistently blows big leads. What we care about is how well educated our kids are when they leave school and enter the world. Until our high schools are able to build on the big gains they’re inheriting from middle schools, we’re not going to see any improvement on that score.

Rick writes:

In any event, I’m curious if those who are raising the “alarm” over high schools that are fumbling away our K-8 gains have now decided that Head Start’s initial results are what counts, and the actual problem is K-8 fumbling away our hard-earned pre-K gains.

But I think there might be a flaw in this line of thinking.

It seem plausible that learning how to read / do math at an 8th grade level is actually very useful in life (assuming this equates to a basic level of numeracy and literacy), regardless of whether or not one ever masters high school content.

The same is clearly not the same for pre-k learning, which doesn’t really give you a leg up in life if you don’t continue to learn.

In this sense, 8th grade achievement should be considered independently of high school failure; i.e., learning how to multiply is useful even if you never master Algebra II.

Following this logic, increasing 8th grade scores and flat high school scores could indicate real learning improvement that is not subject to washout.

In order to understand if this was true, we’d want to test high school students on 8th grade content to ensure the learning stuck, which I don’t know if we’re doing.

But the fact that high schoolers are not increasing their performance on high school content doesn’t seem to be evidence that they’ve lost their 8th grade knowledge.

Am I missing something?

Admittedly, I’m not an expert in NAEP methodology, so perhaps flat high school scores does indicate 8th grade wash out. I’d just to love see this case explicitly made.

Until then, I’ll sleep a little better knowing that 8th grade scores up.

The Hard Thing About Hard Things in Education Reform

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I’m rereading Ben Horowitz’s . If you haven’t read it, it’s well worth reading.

The book is an attempt to be brutally honest about how hard is to build a company, as well as give some advice on how to survive the hard times.

I learned a lot from reading about Ben’s experience.

So in case it’s of use to you, here’s some summaries / lessons from my very hard times in my own professional career.

Leading School Development Work Without Instructional Knowledge

NSNO had two experienced educators leading our new school creation work. It was very hard to find two top notch instructional people and we’d done a lot of recruiting to get these awesome folks and I thought we were in good shape staffing wise. I was wrong. They both had children at roughly the same time and I ended up leading our school support work while they were out.

Even writing this now, I feel some sense of embarrassment and guilt as I was 100% not ready for the job. I remember being very anxious and feeling dread going into the schools we working with. They were all start-up schools that needed excellent support and I knew that I personally could not give them the support that they needed.

There is really nothing more to say other than I showed up and did what I could and kept the work moving until our team was reassembled. The only thing I think I did well was stay calm and focused. I never freaked out publicly and I kept our support visible. We kept on showing up to schools. I’m not sure there is anything I could have done different. It was an external shock and sometimes when external shocks happen you just have to survive.

Failing in Raising a Major Fundraising Round

NSNO was trying to raise somewhere around $15 million for the city and we arranged a final pitch day for our biggest funders. They flew in from all over the country and for the day we put them in front of high status speakers and panels full of our best educators. Then, at the end of the day, they said they needed some time to debrief. So our leadership team, including our board chair, left the room for about an hour. Then we came back in. The funders proceeded to tell us that they weren’t ready to make another major investment; that they still had too many questions.

I was shocked. I thought we had everything lined up. I thought we put on an awesome day. And I felt passionately that the work had to continue; that we were on the cusp of something very very important and that they were going to abandon us. With as much calm as I could muster, I told them this; that they needed to invest. I was very young at the time and if my voice wasn’t shaking audibly my mind surely was shaking. They said they understood where we were coming from but that they weren’t ready to invest. The meeting ended. I went up home to my girlfriend and cursed loudly about how the funders were abandoning us. Then I drank a few bourbons and went to bed.

Shortly after, we told the staff that were unsuccessful in getting the commitments we needed. I forget what we said or how we said it. Mostly what I remember is creating a plan to go back to each of the funders individually and figure out what their concerns were and make sure we fixed it. This is what we did. Eventually we raised more than we had initially set out to raise.

The reason the day was a failure was all our fault. Instead of understanding our funders’ concerns and having deep discussions about these issues, we put on a dog and pony show for them. They were rightful frustrated, and, I think, felt like they had wasted much of the day. Putting on this dog and pony show both kept them from getting the information they needed and made us look like we did not have our shit together. The reason we were able to get through it is that we were very dogged; we did not hold grudges; and, ultimately, we put forth a realistic and compelling vision of what we could accomplish as a city.

Failing to Lead the NSNO Management Team

When I first became CEO everyone on our management team was much more experienced than I was. And while I was confident in my ability to develop our organizational strategy and communicate this vision to internal and external stakeholders, I was not confident in my ability to manage senior staff who had more content knowledge than I did. So instead of building a management team I simply met weekly with our senior staff to make sure the work was moving. I did not set high expectations for the work; I did not build trust amongst the team; I did not provide thoughtful feedback; I did not create an atmosphere of debate.

During our first 360 performance review, I received brutal feedback. The management team made it very clear that I was failing to lead them. It was extremely, extremely difficult to hear. I was emotionally hurt and for about a day couldn’t even really deal with it. Then I got my act together and met with each of them to figure out how I could get better. I built a plan to become a true leader of the management team and mentally committed myself to deliberately managing the team. Soon after, we did an off site retreat and got much more vulnerable with each other; we began to push each other; and I began to internalize the fact that perhaps the most important role I had was leading the management team. Overtime, the management team became, in my opinion, very high-performing and all members stayed with me through my tenure.

Not leading the management team was 100% my fault. I was unprepared to be an effective CEO and if I had prepared more fully I could have avoided some early mistakes. The only reason I survived is that I think every member of the team knew two things: (1) I was passionate about NSNO and (2) I was an extremely committed constant learner.

If people believe you care and they know you want to get better and they trust that you can get better they will forgive you when you fuck up.

Anyways, those were some hard things. I’m sure I got some of the details wrong. But, at the very least, that’s how they felt.

I’m Very Skeptical About That Yale Law School Study

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If you want to understand people’s policy views, here’s three ways you could get this information:

You could conduct an experiment in a controlled setting that is somewhat related to the policy issue at hand.
You could ask people their policy views.
You could look at their voting records.

Ray Fishman, Daniel Markovitz, Pamela Jakiela and Shachar Kariv chose the first route, conducting a study that ran a redistribution experiment on average Americans (from a Rand data set), somewhat elite Americans (Berkeley students), and very elite Americans (Yale Law Students).

They then extrapolated their findings, which showed Yale Law students preference efficiency over redistribution in the experiment, and wrote in article in Slate with the byline:

Rich elites—even rich liberal elites—don’t believe in redistributing wealth.

I’ll assume they didn’t write that over exaggerated headline, but they did write this:

Yale Law students’ overwhelming, indeed almost eccentric, commitment to efficiency over equality is all the more astonishing given that the students self-identified as Democrats rather than Republicans …. Our results thus shine a revealing light on American politics and policy. They suggest that the policy response to rising economic inequality lags so far behind the preferences of ordinary Americans for the simple reason that the elites who make policy—regardless of political party—just don’t care much about equality. [emphasis mine]

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I attended Yale Law School from 2003 to 2007 (I took a semester off to work in Sierra Leone so I graduated in January of 2007).

At least back then, Yale Law School was a very, very, very liberal place. I’m a Democrat, and I remember feeling, at times, feeling very conservative in some of my views.

So I was surprised to see these results (note: I read the Slate article and the article abstract, but didn’t have access to the full study).

The students I knew at Yale Law School, myself included, were generally very in favor of redistributing income.

My experiences aside, what makes me skeptical of the author’s claims is that the Democratic Party is currently pursuing very redistribute policies: health insurance paid for by taxing the rich, a $15 minimum wage, universal pre-k paid for by taxing the rich, etc.

This seems like an odd thing to do if you don’t care about redistribution.

If elite liberals were able to enact their policy preferences, we would likely see a significant shift towards equity and away from efficiency.

Now, who is voting for these Democratic elites, it’s Yale Law students! And who is not voting for these Democratic elites, average Americans living in red states!

To say, because of the results of artificial experiment, that the average American favors redistribution more than Yale Law students seems somewhat odd given that Yale Law students (I’m fairly confident) are much more likely to vote people who support significant redistribution efforts.

When it comes to policy preference, voting patterns are much better evidence than artificial experiments.

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One other point: there seems to be a big difference between valuing efficiency when the person you’re sharing with is anonymous and valuing efficiency when the person you’re sharing with is in major need of medical, educational, or other necessary services.

It was unclear to me that the study replicated the wealth differences we consider in real life tax transfers.

In a world of generally equal wealth, efficiency (increasing the size of the pie) is much more important than equality (redistributing wealth). Of course, one could argue that this is always the case, but it seems especially true when equality is already at reasonable levels.

My guess is that the study results would have been different if there had been a narrative revealing that the person the YLS student was sharing money with was in great need.

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Even if the authors draw weak conclusions from their data, the data does raise an interesting question: why is there an inverse correlation between private (charity / sharing) and public (voting / policy preference) redistributive actions?

I don’t know the answer, but, in practice, it seem unimportant.

If you want to understand who wants to redistribute the most resources, find the people who are willing to support the greatest amount of resource redistribution.

Given that charity and sharing, right now at least, are dwarfed in total amount by tax redistribution, it’s tax policy that really matters.

What people do in experiments (or in their private lives) is interesting, but in many ways it’s irrelevant.

Who they vote for is not.

A Book Well Worth Reading

Why Doesn’t Every City Do This?

Corporate Reformers Make Their Demands: Integration, Wrap Around Services, Career Training

Joe Nocera Has Not Learned the Lesson

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Joe Nocera just wrote a column.

It’s called Zuckerberg’s Expensive Lesson.

He writes:

It’s great for the 30 percent who are learning from charter school teachers. But as Russakoff puts it in the most poignant line in her book, “What would become of the children left behind in district schools?”

If this is the most poignant line in Russakoff’s book, I feel no real urge to read it.

The answer to Russakoff’s question is very clear: the children left behind in district schools could also attend charter schools if these charter schools were given all they needed to expand.

If the original reform plan had been to make Newark an all charter school district, 100% of Newark students would likely be attending a charter schools within the next year or two. Russakoff’s question would be moot.

So what’s the lesson?

Here is the wrong answer:

If X works and Y doesn’t work, the solution is to keep on trying to fix Y.

Here is the right answer:

If X works and Y doesn’t work, the solution is to expand X and reduce Y until all you have is X.

This may sound callous, but it’s not.

The callous thing is to force kids to keep on attending awful schools because the solution that would get them into good schools doesn’t make you feel good.

relinquishment

writing about handing power back to educators and families – and other thoughts