Epic Fail: The Student "Success" Act (H.R. 5)

I received a call from the AFT this afternoon asking me to contact my congressman to urge him not to support H.R. 5 The Student Success Act. I declined to be connected directly to my congressman's office, but decided to take a look to see what the fuss was about.

H.R. 5 is an attempt at a reauthorization and overhaul of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965 (more commonly known as the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001, NCLB), which has desperately been in need of attention for years. Section 1111 of the Act outlines the plans that States have to put together in order to receive Federal funds to support improving education for disadvantaged children. In NCLB, this included stipulations about Adequate Yearly Progress (AYP) and required sanctions for schools that failed to make AYP for a certain number of consequtive years. Certainly, the accountability portion of sec. 1111 is a big part of what has needed an extreme make-over, but I certainly wasn't expecting what H.R. 5 proposes.

The bill stipulates that States must come up with an accountability system "to ensure that all public school students graduate from high school prepared for postsecondary education or the workforce without the need for remediation." This accountability system must:

• identify the performance of every public school based on both individual student achievement and achievement gaps between groups of students; and
• include a system for school improvement for low-performing public schools that implements interventions designed to address the schools' weaknesses.

And that's about it.

No, really, that's pretty much it. In particular, there are no indications about:

• how rigorous the academic standards must be (other than the vague reference to college/career readiness, and I don't think anyone has agreed on what that means);
• how to identify low-performing schools;
• how to determine whether low-performing schools are improving satisfactorily;
• what to do with schools that are chronically failing to improve; or
• anything else of substance.

Moreover (and here's the kicker!), Sec. 1111(b)(3)(C) explicitly states:

Nothing in this section shall be construed to permit the Secretary to establish any criteria that specifies, defines, or prescribes any aspect of a State's accountability system developed and implemented in accordance with this paragraph.

In other words, States would have completely free reign to do whatever they want and call it "accountability," and the Secretary of Education can't do anything about it.

I suppose the Secretary of Education could simply start rejecting State plans under some vague notion about not ensuring that schools are graduating college/career ready students, but this would hardly be desirable, since the Secretary would be prohibited from providing any guidance to States about what kinds of plans would be accepted.

The short of it is that the AFT is right on this time about the abysmal state H.R. 5 (as reported to the House) would leave educational policy in. The Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) was supposed to bring us closer to equitable educational opportunity, but decades of pumping money through its programs to States did little to shift broad educational inequities. For the first time, NCLB gave ESEA teeth to require that States demonstrate that their use of the funds was getting results. Certainly, the accountability provisions in NCLB had a number of major flaws, but what was needed was some "orthodontics" (not a massive tooth extraction) to straighten out ill advised provisions while keeping a strong stance on demonstrating results.

For more information on the shortcomings of H.R. 5, see the minority committee report, starting on p. 949 of House Report 113-150.

H.R. 5 was debated on the floor of the House this afternoon, but they only got through 20 of the 26 proposed amendments. I presume they'll continue tomorrow. The last amendment, proposed by Rep. George Miller of California, is a complete replacement of the bill (starting on p. 62 of House Report 113-158). I haven't looked at it in detail, but surely it has more reasonable accountability provisions than the current bill.

Massachusetts Education Reform: Turnaround Plans

Last Monday Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick signed a new set of education reforms (SB 2247) into law. The three major portions of the law (1) expand powers of school district superintendents and the state commissioner of education for improving underachieving schools, (2) modify certain charter school provisions, and (3) establish brand new provisions for "innovation schools," which are something between traditional public schools and charter schools. A detailed list of what the law includes is available here. I'd like to focus for the moment on the new powers of the commissioner vis-a-vis underachieving schools, and will outline innovation schools in a subsequent post.

Since the Education Reform Act of 1993 (69 MGL 1J), the Board of Elementary and Secondary Education has carried the responsibility to establish regulations concerning the determination of schools and districts that have failed to improve the quality of the education they provide. When a school was determined to be under-performing, the commissioner of elementary and secondary education was to appoint an independent fact-finding team to determine the causes of persistent under-performance, and the district was required to submit a remedial plan with "specific goals" for improvement, means for achieving them, and a proposed time-line. The school then had two years in which to implement the plan, with technical assistance from the commissioner. If at the end of two years, the school failed to demonstrate significant improvement, the school might receive a new principal, be allocated additional funds, dismiss teachers for good cause, or undergo "such other actions determined by the board of education, to be reasonably calculated to increase the number of students attending the school who satisfy the student performance standards."

The new reform spells out in much greater detail how plans for improving under-performing schools, dubbed "turnaround plans," will be developed, as well as what they should contain. There are also new consequences if schools fail to demonstrate long-term improvement under their turnaround plans, and new options to facilitate integrating external assistance into school management.

Once the commissioner deems a school is under-performing based on a variety of student performance indicators, the school's district superintendent, in consultation with the commissioner, has almost six months to develop a turnaround plan for the school to "maximize the rapid academic achievement of students." The development of the plan follows a series of well-defined steps, most of which can take no longer than a month and which are designed to incorporate the needs, values, and expertise of a number of different local stakeholders. This is accomplished by forming a committee of no more than 13 people who represent:

• the state commissioner,
• the school committee (i.e. local school board),
• the teachers' union,
• the school administration,
• the school's teachers,
• parents,
• social services,
• workforce development agencies,
• early childhood (for primary) or higher education (for secondary schools), and
  
• the community.

(Unfortunately, it seems they left out the most vested stakeholders of all: the students.)

The stakeholder group submits recommendations to the superintendent, who then drafts a plan, giving "due consideration to [the stakeholder group's] recommendations." The plan is sent to the stakeholder group, the school committee, and the state superintendent for comment. After making receiving further recommendations and making any necessary modifications, the superintendent sends the final plan to the commissioner. The entire process, including stakeholder group meetings, recommendations, and plan drafts, will be open to the public.

The law specifies that the turnaround plan should include:

• steps to address social service and health needs of students and their families, to help students arrive and remain at school ready to learn;
• steps to improve child welfare services and, as appropriate, law enforcement services in the school community, in order to promote a safe and secure learning environment;
• steps to improve workforce development services provided to students and their families, to provide them with meaningful employment skills and opportunities;
• steps to address achievement gaps for limited English-proficient, special education, and low-income students;
  
• alternative English language learning programs;
  
• a financial plan; and
• an outline of measurable annual goals for improvement.

The legislation doesn't mandate any particular strategy for school improvement (since the particular strategies should be selected to suit the particular challenges the school faces), but it does provide a non-exhaustive list of potential strategies, including:

• adjusting the curriculum,
• reallocating or securing additional funds,
• increasing salaries "to attract or retain highly-qualified administrators, or teachers or to reward administrators, or teachers who work in under-performing schools that achieve the annual goals set forth,"
  
• expanding the school day or year,
• having the entire staff re-apply for their jobs,
• modifying district policies or collective bargaining agreements,
• supplying greater in-service professional development for teachers or administrators,
• increasing teacher planning and collaboration time, and
  
• searching for and studying best school and instructional practices.

The superintendent can choose to appoint an "external receiver" to operate the school and implement the plan, or to assist with its implementation. (But, the school committee can appeal this decision to the commissioner.) This external receiver is "a nonprofit entity or an individual with a demonstrated record of success in improving low-performing schools or the academic performance of disadvantaged students."

The turnaround plan is authorized for no more than three years, with annual review. If the school fails to meet the planned goals, the superintendent may modify the plan, or the commissioner may appoint an external examiner to evaluate the plan's implementation. If at the end of the plan the school has not significantly improved, the plan may be renewed for no more than three more years, or the commissioner may designate the school as "chronically under-performing," in which case the procedure is followed to develop a new turnaround plan under the direction of the state commissioner (instead of the local superintendent). The commissioner may have the superintendent implement the new plan, send a targeted assistance team to help the superintendent implement the plan, or select an external receiver. If after twelve years (two three-year periods under the superintendent and two three-year periods under the commissioner) the school still has not significantly improved, then heaven help us.

The turnaround-plan reform for under-performing schools makes great strides in:

• setting up a framework for developing plans for school improvement,
• incorporating more voices into plan development,
• increasing transparency and opportunities for public engagement,
• broadening the focus of improvement plans to include consider more than instruction, and
• increasing opportunity to bring in outside assistance in achieving goals.

However, the long-term success or failure of the reform will crucially depend on whether superintendents (and the commissioner) can indeed identify (and implement) effective solutions to the problems undergirding low achievement. If the strategies they select are inadequate, no plan, however beautifully constructed, will lead to sufficient improvement. Thus, the next step in complete education reform will be to study schools that are achieving significant gains and open channels for their stories to reach struggling schools, in Massachusetts and across the nation.

Freedom and Accountability, Hand in Hand

According to an interview with the Boston Globe, Matthew King, superintendent of schools in Wellesley, Massachusetts, has decided to leave public education to lead a small Jewish day school:

I would say that I’ve grown tired of the direction public education is going, with more and more controls from the state and federal government and less and less autonomy for individual schools and school systems. There’s no question I’ve had a very, very satisfying career. But right now, just the whole accountability movement, I guess you would say, has made working in schools not as satisfying as it used to be.

If public education isn't as satisfying as it used to be, autocratic, micromanaging administrators may more likely be the cause than the accountability movement. Rightly implemented, the new reporting requirements of the accountability movement, which are beginning to reveal exactly how well schools are achieving their educational mandate, should provide schools with more freedom and autonomy, since quality may be assured through the "fruits of schools' labors," as opposed to detailed regulation. As UK Education Secretary Alan Johnson has noted in response to criticisms by the independent General Testing Council, assessment data provide schools with transparency and openness: "Parents don't want to go back to a world where schools were closed institutions, no-one knew what was going on in them" (BBC). This transparency can give parents and societal leaders the confidence to allow schools to function independently without the fear that rogue administrators or teachers would be permitted to abuse school resources without detection for long.

But, giving up the regulatory control they've held for so long can be difficult for administrators in the public sector as well as the private; and yet when smaller working units are provided with less regulation in exchange for accountability for their results, workers on the ground have made wonderful progress where higher-level administrators failed. Keith Sawyer, professor of psychology at Washington University in St. Louis and author of Group Genius: The Creative Power of Collaboration, tells the story of the Brazilian manufacturer Semco that made an impressive recovery from near-bankruptcy when Ricardo Semler took over and radically altered the company's organizational structure:

Semler tossed the binders, fired most of his senior managers, and handed the reins to the company's employees. "It was like taking an improvisational jazz ensemble and ramping it up to the organizational level," Sawyer says. Small groups now run the company with near-total autonomy. Large, 300-worker factories have been split into smaller, 100-worker units. The move initially caused inefficiencies and higher costs but eventually allowed low-level innovation to flourish. Empowered factory-line workers, it turns out, really do know how to do their jobs better. Inventory backlogs have eased, product lines have expanded, and sales have jumped. "That's not a lack of structure; that's just a lack of structure imposed from above," Semler has said. After the company's reorganization, revenues climbed from $4 million to $212 million. (US News and World Report)

If empowered factory-line workers can revive a manufacturing company from bankruptcy, perhaps empowered teachers and principals can reform a failing school system. But, this empowerment can only take place if parents and administrators can see that local schools are making use of their freedom responsibly. Accountability provides the transparency to assure constituents that schools are doing their job; freedom provides schools with the room to implement successful practices and respond nimbly to local challenges. Freedom requires accountability, and accountability enables freedom. They go hand in hand.

Peeling the Onion

A couple of weeks ago, Margaret Spellings, U.S. Secretary of Education, appeared on The Daily Show. In the interview, Spellings gave a great snapshot of the purpose of the accountability provisions of the No Child Left Behind Act:

Here's the deal. These are local decisions. I'm not hiring teachers at the Department of Education, obviously. But, what we've done with this law is peel the onion and bring to bear information about how well are we serving every single kind. And the answer is not well enough--by far, these days. And so what we're causing is anxiety with grown-ups on behalf of kids.

NCLB is merely the 2001 reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA), whose goal in 1965 was to encourage states to improve educational quality for poor and disenfranchised students by providing financial incentives for categorical programs. For years, the Federal government has required testing (mainly through NAEP) in exchange for the carrot to monitor the effectiveness of the funds and gauge progress in the improvement of education.

In the 2001 iteration, Congress went a step further in "peeling the onion" by requiring states who accept Federal funds to do their own measuring and reporting of progress, and attempted to kindle the flame after decades of smoldering educational reform by forcing action in schools that states identify as not making progress toward providing an "adequate" education for all students. Many schools have gone along for years without providing a basic education to all students--NCLB's assessment and reporting provisions attempt to expose this reality and mobilize people for change.